Page 226 of Fury

“When Motormouth found me he ransacked my place, stole from me, broke your compass, tried to rape me. He was going to bring me back to Med and get a reward for it or kill me, because Med had gotten rid of his girlfriend and he was angry and upset. I was almost three months pregnant with Zoë at the time. I’d just found out that day, in fact. There was no way I was ever going back,” she said. “Especially not with our baby inside me.

“When Motor found the pictures of us, he told me he and Scrib had always suspected you of getting me out but they’d never told Med. Now, he was going to tell him. I couldn’t let that happen.” Her eyes were that cool blue now, her tone even. She regretted nothing. “I had our baby inside me. Ours. And she deserved to live a beautiful life. And I would do whatever it took to protect our child and protect you. But if I’d contacted you in jail and told you the truth, you would’ve suffered there trying to get to us somehow, and they would’ve come after us and gotten to you. I couldn’t take that chance.”

She was right.

Motionless, I stared at her, listening, not listening, raging, burning, the compass pieces heavy in my hand.

“I couldn’t wait to tell you about the baby on your next visit, but you got arrested. Sometime before that, Boner had shown up at Tania’s apartment looking for Grace, screaming about Dig getting killed, Grace losing her baby and disappearing. I listened to him rant and yell and cry. He was devastated. Shit, I thought, that could be me and Finger, but not some random kill blowing us up like them, but Med and Scrib doing the honors, punishing us. I wasn’t going to let that happen.

“I had to give our baby away. It was the only thing I could do. It was the last time I asked Tania for help. She arranged a place for me to stay in Pine Needle. She has a cousin there, Sarah, who’s a nurse who helped me get some odd jobs and find an adoption agency. They found a couple right away. When the baby was born with Down Syndrome, I was in shock. The adoptive parents were in shock. They freaked out. I’d never had the amnio the doctor had wanted me to have after a sonogram showed a possible heart issue. All the other tests were perfect, and I was in my early twenties, I figured…but it turns out, age doesn’t matter.”

“How? Why?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know of any DS in my family. The doctor told me that it could have been just a clash that happened when the egg and sperm got together.” Her face clouded, she murmured, “A clash that made a mistake.”

“Mistake.” The word felt foul on my tongue.

“But she’s not a mistake. Not to me. Not to Gail and Steve. Fuck the world that says she is. They told me to have the amnio to be prepared. Prepared for what? The worst? I should get rid of her because she’d be a burden? Because she’s wouldn’t be acceptable in normal society? Am I acceptable? Are you?”

“No,” I breathed.

Lenore’s eyes filled with water. “She just has an extra chromosome. Just one more.”

Like I had one less finger on each hand.

She took in a breath of air. “But that couple didn’t want her anymore. It got ugly, and I panicked. I thought that’s it, everything’s over, what was I going to do? I was so scared for the baby. How was I going to protect her now? But I’d come this far, I couldn’t give up.

“Sarah knew this older couple in Pine Needle who’d never been able to have kids. They’d been through lots of miscarriages, lots of expensive fertility treatments they just couldn’t afford. They also couldn’t afford that disappointment anymore, and they’d given up. She asked them, and they said yes right away. They were thrilled.”

“Gail and Steve.”

“Yes, Gail and Steve.” Her tone was flat. “I had two days alone with my baby. Two days in that bright and noisy Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, her in my arms while I held her feeding tube because she couldn’t feed otherwise. I sang to her. Rocked her. Told her about you and me, about my grandma. Those were the best days.”

“Lenore—”

“She ended up staying in that NICU for three weeks until she could use her mouth to suck on a bottle. Lots of Early Intervention therapies were mapped out for her, she saw a variety of specialists for a variety of tests. I didn’t have health insurance or money for any of that. I had breast milk, though. I pumped every day so she could eat, handed it over, and left the hospital without seeing her. Every day.”

She wiped at her wet eyes. “She needed a stable home, a steady income, and some kind of impenetrable cloak to hide her existence from Med and whoever the hell else was on my ass and yours for whatever reason. Even Turo. I couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t show up one day asking for something else.”

She drained the liquor from the glass. “They named her Zoë,” she whispered. “It’s a Greek word. It means—”

“Life.” My heavy eyes slid to hers.

“Yes. Life.” Our gazes held tight, the silence around us vibrating with a thorny joy, a murky sorrow.

“I took off for LA to keep a solid distance between me and Zoë and you. A fresh start. Clean slate,” she said. “I met Eric, and when he told me he was originally from Rapid City, it was a sign to me, a good sign that maybe I would one day see our daughter in some way. Once he and I got married, we ended up splitting our time between Rapid and LA. After the divorce all I wanted was the house in Rapid. Eric thought I was crazy. Give up everything we had going on in LA for South Dakota?”

“It was your chance to be near her.” I took in a breath, braced to say her name, for my lips to form the sounds, now, now that I knew. “Near Zoë.”

“Yes. After the divorce, I wanted to be here.”

“Did you tell Eric about her?”

“No, never. Then when Beck decided he wanted to be in LA for high school, I moved to a smaller house in Meager, figuring, that was as close as I could get, and anyway, Meager was familiar to me after hearing so much about it from Tania. Just knowing Zoë was nearby was so good. Knowing she was thriving, safe, doing so well, being loved the way she should. That was good. That was enough.”

“Enough? She’s our daughter.”

“I couldn’t have kept her, Finger. I could barely support myself. Always looking over my shoulder as it was. You were in jail, and I didn’t know for how long. We always said leave no clues behind. The one time I did, I almost paid for it in the worst way. Don’t you see? Our baby was a clue, just like those photos I’d hung onto and Motor found. Holding onto those was a mistake. Huge mistake. What if I’d kept the baby and they’d found me and taken me back and left her alone? Or killed her? Or taken her too, and fuck knows how she would’ve ended up. It was a good, clean thing to do. Like cutting off contact with Tania. I had to do it.”

---