Page 72 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Jess whispers, “Oh god.” He can barely hear her over the wind, the muffling of the falling snow.
Then she steels herself.
“Okay,” she says. “California.”
Crane should reach for her. Should cram his nose against her temple to wish her farewell the only way he knows how, beg her silently to speed and avoid the cops and pick a new name and get the fuck out. But of course his body won’t let him. He feels the contraction tighten before it actually hits, and he grabs the bed of the truck, leans against it. They’re so much harder than they were this morning. Lower in the body. The baby’s head is a plug jammed into his cunt and it fuckinghurtsand he can’t even be embarrassed when that long, low moan crawls up his throat. He drops his cigarette in the snow. He’s barely even aware he’s doing it.
He’s getting closer. It’s almost done.
Jess puts a hand on Crane’s back. “You need to get inside.”
No. She has to leave first. He tries to push away from the truck but only manages to double himself over, gasping for air hard enough it’s ripping up his throat. The cold burns. He’s convinced the baby has tiny claws and teeth and it’s chewing through the organs holding it in place. There’s no other reason for it to feel like this.
Jess says, “Shit.”
Crane looks up, and.
Through the blur of pain and the snow-glare, he can’t quite make out the details of the woman walking up to them. There’s a car parked haphazardly by the shut-down pumps, a man peering in confusion at theOUT OF ORDERsign.
He can hear what she says, though. With her unmistakable northern Virginia accent.
“Excuse me? Excuse me! I’m so sorry, but the pumps are down, and I can’t get service. Do you know where the nearest—”
She stops a few yards from them. The wind whips up her graying hair. Snow sticks to her thick-rimmed glasses.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
For the first time in years, Crane is looking at the soft, kind face of his mother.
Thirty
Crane’s mother does not recognize him. She drags her heavy boots through the snowfall toward them and takes a baffled glance from Crane’s belly to his face, trying to make sense of it, before Crane’s next pathetic sound of pain knocks her out of her confusion.
Her hair has gone gray. That’s what Crane focuses on. She finally allowed her hair to go gray. She’d been dyeing her hair since he was in middle school, and he remembers the distinct, thick smell of the chemicals permeating the entire upstairs. He remembers her pinning up her waves in the bathroom mirror to swipe the brush acrossher temples, the stained towel thrown around her shoulders, the old blanket draped across the couch as she watched the Saturday morning news and let the color take. He remembers being fifteen and admitting over breakfast that she looked good gray. It made her look regal. She should keep it. She’d laughed and said that HR professionals don’t need to lookregal.
Crane remembers a lot of things. Sitting on the edge of the tub while Mom explained how makeup worked, how she always put on her foundation with her fingers and never used black eyeliner because it was too bold—“we don’t have bold faces,” she’d say, and Crane thought about it every time he picked up the black tube from the drug store. Then there was the time they went to the Humane Society to pick up a cat, and how Sophie probably wouldn’t have agreed to follow the swarm if Cici hadn’t died the year before. Mom would always insist on splitting a donut when she took Sophie to the grocery store, and Sophie crawled into bed with her when he had a nightmare until she was twelve, and god, Crane remembers his mother beaming during high school graduation, so happy and so proud, with no idea her daughter was planning to set herself on fire that night.
There’s no way to sum up nearly eighteen years of closeness like that. Annual shopping sprees the week before school started, reading quietly beside Mom’s desk at city hall, scoffing at newspaper articles together, always forcing a smile when Mom asked if Sophie was okay.
Mom turns to the man by the pumps. Crane’s father. Crane tries to make out the details: the tight haircut and well-worn clothes, doing that thing where he sticks out his lip in annoyance.
Whatever emotions Crane’s feeling about this haven’t hit yet. He’s not sure what they are. It’s like dumping a dozen different paints into a pan and watching it turn into a muddy, thick color, impossible to name.
“Dear!” Mom hisses across the lot. Both Jess and Crane wince inunison. Jess’s attention snaps nervously to the back door of the gas station. “Get the blanket out of the trunk.”
“What?” Dad says.
“Just do it.” Mom turns back to Crane and Jess, her soft face gone tense. “Is everything alright?”
“We’re going to the hospital,” Jess says. She shows Levi’s key. Her smile has too many teeth, warning this strange woman away. “Just trying to wait everything out. The longer you’re there, the more expensive it is, you know? We’re fine.”
“I’m sorry,” Mom says to Jess, “do I know you? It’s just. You look so familiar—my daughter would have been your age.”
As the contraction shows mercy, disappears again like the tide, Crane realizes that above everything, above the confusion of seeing them again and the flood of memories and the pain, he does not want his parents to recognize him.
He can’t do that to them. It’d be just one more awful thing he’s done, one more knife in the back, for them to see him like this. They deserve to remember Sophie as she left them. Smart and witty and ambitious. The deadpan-funny overachiever who slept on the bathroom floor to comfort foster kittens and designed Easter egg hunts for city hall. He built that mask for his parents and gave them something to be proud of. It wasn’t him, but they were good parents. It’s what they deserved.
Fuck. Crane never believed in God. Not for a moment. But yeah, he used to pray that his parents would wake up one day and see right through it all. He would get out of bed in the middle of the night and stand outside their bedroom door in tears, trying to work up the courage to tell them but never able to get it past the tongue. Maybe if they noticed the shadow of his feet under the door, they’d gather him up and ask him what was wrong and he would shatter and everything would spill out at once.
