"I don't know," she said. "I wanted it to be a surprise." In truth, she didn't care if it was a boy or a girl. All she cared about was the shade of the baby's skin. She caught herself looking at Daniel's skin at odd moments— his exposed back as he turned away from her to put on a clean t-shirt, his hand holding a spoon, the side of his face as he spoke on the phone to his parents— and whispering the same silent prayer over and over again: Please, please, please let the baby be black. She whispered the prayer to herself when she first felt the baby kick, when the first pain shuddered through her on a late afternoon in the doughnut shop four and a half months later, when she sat holding herself in the passenger seat of Paul's car as he sped toward the hospital with Daniel on his cell phone, while she lay on her back on the bed looking up at the lights with strangers shouting at her to push, please, please, please. But even before she had a good look at the baby she saw the way the nurse looked from the child to Daniel and then to Anna, the way Daniel's eyes filled with tears as he turned away from the bed. He left the room then and she was alone with the nurses, with the machines, with the baby who cried out and clung blindly to the soft blanket with hands that were very small and very pink.
Twenty
You still with me, Gavin?" Daniel asked softly. The air singing with electric blue stars.
T h e r e w a s something wrong with the ceiling. It was mostly white, but the texture of the tiles made constellations of gray that swarmed and changed shape the longer Gavin looked at them. His arm was a frozen, inert thing, pain seeping through the drugs. He was aware of sound: a nurse pulling the curtain around the bed, metal rings jangling; a beeping machine; soft footsteps.
The room was flickering. He kept falling in and out of sleep, if sleep was what this was. It felt lighter than unconsciousness. Intervals of twilight. Vertigo, a terrible shifting movement, the bed's a boat on rough water, I am going to drown.
"W a s I really shot?" Gavin murmured. "Was that really what happened to my arm?"
"He panicked," Daniel said. Daniel was an unsteady silhouette beside the bed, a blurred figure wavering. How long had he been there? "He thought you were someone else."
Gavin's ears were ringing. He closed his eyes again.
"I' m n o t someone else," Gavin said. He was confused and his voice was a mumble. He wasn't sure how long he'd been talking to Daniel, how long he'd been awake. His throat was dry. The texture of the ceiling above the hospital bed. Dizzy.
"He thought you were after Anna."
"I am after Anna. I've been looking for her." The drugs were a weight in his bloodstream, a fog behind his eyes. Antibiotics, the remnants of general anesthesia, whatever they were giving him for his arm. Was this how Jack felt through all the days of his life? He remembered being wheeled into surgery, flashes of sound and light.
"If you care about her," Daniel said, "I'd suggest you stay away from Deval." Was Gavin dreaming? He had the impression of swimming. Daniel's face wasn't entirely in focus.
"Or he'll shoot me again?" Gavin murmured. Talking nauseated him. He closed his eyes.
"Li s t e n, " D a n i e l said, "I'm here in my official capacity."
Gavin was awake again. Had he been awake the whole time? Nothing was certain. He'd been dreaming of a trumpet.
"I don't understand," he said.
"I'm a detective on the Sebastian police force, and I'm here interviewing the victim of a crime." Daniel was speaking very quietly. "This is what my report will say: you were visiting a friend in the mo tel, but you got the wrong room and the drug fiend on the other side of the door shot you and fled. Do you understand why I'm going to write that?"
"Not really," Gavin said. "I don't really understand any of it." He hazarded opening his eyes again. The ceiling was still moving so he looked down at the blanket and sheet instead, but the texture of the blanket had a way of telescoping in on itself. He wanted to put his hand over his eyes, to block the light and the queasy motion of everything around him, but his left arm seemed unmovable and the IV was in his right. "To protect Liam Deval?"
"Not Deval. Anna."
"Can you please just tell me what happened to her after high school? I know you know, and I'm so goddamned tired of asking." Gavin closed his eyes. "I am so dizzy," he said, to no one in particular.
"You lost a lot of blood," Daniel said. He was quiet for a few minutes, and Gavin had almost slipped back into sleep before he spoke again. "How did you know he was in the Draker Motel?"
"I used to be a reporter," Gavin said. "I can follow a story. Do I have to ask the question again?"
Daniel sighed. "Look, she was pregnant," he said. "Sixteen years old."
"Yes, I figured that part out already. She was pregnant and sixteen, and then what?"
"This isn't something I'm proud of. You do stupid things in high school. I made a mistake. But listen, she was pregnant, and she told me the kid was mine."
Gavin opened his eyes. Daniel's face was dim, hard to make out in the swarm of stars. "So what did you do?" he asked.
"I drove her to Utah. We were going to live with my aunt until we could get our own place."
"Why would she go with you? What did you offer her?"
"What do you think I offered her? A getaway car," Daniel said. "If you'd had a car and a place to take her, she'd have said the kid was yours."
"I didn't think she was. " He couldn't focus his thoughts. "I thought she was different than that."
"She was desperate. People are capable of anything when they're desperate. Look, I don't flatter myself. She wasn't in love with me. But you must have known what her family was like. I offered her a lifeline and she took it."
"She never wanted a lifeline," Gavin said. "I was always offering—"
"No, you were always threatening," Daniel said. "You were always threatening to call the authorities, every time she showed up at school with a bruise. That was your idea of helping her? Calling Family Services? They knew all about that household. She spent a year in foster care when she was a little kid. They were at that house all the time."
"She never told me that."
"They could easily have taken her child away from her. She was afraid of being separated from the baby."
"But she always said she didn't want any help." The whole thing was too much for him. The room was tilting, so he closed his eyes again. His throat was dry.
"If someone's drowning in front of you and they say they don't want to be saved, do you take them at their word or do you pull them out of the water? The way you stood by and did nothing."
"I didn't know—"
"You weren't paying attention."
"I need some water," Gavin whispered. "My throat. "
There was a plastic cup of water by the bed. Daniel lifted the cup and guided the straw to Gavin's lips. The water was warm.