Page 31 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Tammy shakes her head. “He’s a good one. Ain’t gonna hurt you.And look. Look at him. He got himself pregnant, too.Breathe, baby. See? Look at his belly.”
Crane grits his teeth—silver lining, he passes for male to a terrified little girl—and ducks back out to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water before returning. Bottles of water are apparently how the hive shows affection, or care, or worry. Crane prefers it to speaking. Her hands shake when she tries to drink, so Crane holds it to her lips.
She has faint freckles across her nose. She’s striking. So tiny too. He’s never been to McDowell, but he thinks he would’ve heard of her at some point, the distant murmuring of a dozen hive workers about a beautiful thing hiding in a West Virginia impound lot. Or maybe he doesn’t pay attention and nobody tells him anything.
She coughs, swallows.
Reaches for his belly.
Says, “Wait.” Says, “Crane?”
Crane blinks.
“Levi told me about you.” Her voice cracks. The pads of her fingers press against his stomach, right where his shirt goes taut. “You look—just like he said you do.”
Levi talks about him?
That can’t be right. There’s nothing to talk about. Their relationship barely counted as a relationship, even before all this. The sex was good, the rent is halved, there’s always someone to leave dinner on the stove or help pull a body out of the trunk. Levi made Crane feel like a man and Crane made Levi feel like aman.That doesn’t count as anything to talk about, to him.
Crane catches Tammy’s attention and pulls a face. A request for context, and a change of subject, if she doesn’t mind.
“This is Hannah. Showed up a few hours ago,” Tammy says.She picks up a notepad by the side of the bed, checks her watch, jots down the time. “Stole a car from the impound lot and drove up herself. In labor the whole time. Figured I was her best bet.” She glances over. “You said nobody at McDowell knew? Not even the hive?”
Hannah whispers, “I thought Beth’d be mad.”
Beth. The old bitch who runs the impound lot. Hannah must’ve been layering on the sweatshirts and sucking in her stomach hard to get through it. And if even the McDowell hive had no idea? Jesus.
“You probably thought right,” Tammy mutters. “Given she called me a minute ago to ask if I’d seen hide or hair of you.”
Hannah looks up in a panic.
“I didn’t tell her. You got enough to deal with right now.” Tammy kneels with a groan, carefully wiping down the girl’s shaking thighs with a warm washcloth. “Though now that I’m thinking about it. Who was it? Was it Billy?”
Hannah moans a weak “No,” and thank god. Crane’s never met Billy, but from Levi’s stories, the guy’s a piece of work. A retired hunter pushing fifty, the kind of man Levi keeps having to push around. He sounds like the type.
“Then who’s the daddy?”
No response. Hannah squeezes her eyes shut, blows out hard through her teeth.
“Because if you didn’t want this, we can tell Levi. You give us a name, we’ll see if we can’t get his man”—Tammy nods to Crane—“to take care of the bastard.”
“No,” Hannah says. “No.”
Tammy stays there for a moment in silence, then says, “You change your mind, you tell us. We’ll handle it.”
According to Tammy, Hannah is approximately twenty weeks pregnant; if they go with that number, she’s a single week further along than Crane is. Also according to Tammy, being born at twenty weeks is a death sentence. It barely counts as a stillborn at this point.Late-term miscarriage, that’s what she says.
Crane has never been more jealous in his life.
Jess returns with fresh towels and takes to braiding Hannah’s hair while Tammy checks dilation, dictating her notes to Crane. But that doesn’t last forever. Labor takes a long time. It’s a slow, painful slog. Most of the time there’s nothing to do except be there with her, and Crane is bad at that.
That’s how he ends up on the back porch with a peanut butter sandwich, while Stagger busies himself breaking down a pallet for firewood. There are a few big wooden pallets in Tammy’s shed, for some reason—old people just find themselves in possession of random shit. Nobody will need firewood for a moment, but it stores easier broken down, so Stagger is ripping apart the pallet with his hands and stacking the pieces neatly.
Sometimes, Stagger stops for a moment and watches the window to the guest bedroom. The curtains are drawn and there’s nothing to see, but he’s fixed on it.
Crane snorts at him. Gotta feel weird knowing there’s a baby on the way and it’s not even his.
“Little one,”Stagger says.
