Chapter Twenty-One

In Which Even Temporary Parenting is A Lot

I ’ve never met Norm’s wife in person, but for some reason, it doesn’t surprise me that this totally hot woman is married to a beast of a man. I’m tempted to ask her what her name is, but decide that silence is probably golden at this point. Her name plate only has their last name–Moreau–written on it, so I address her as Deputy Moreau and leave it at that.

“And so you don’t know who the mother of the child could be?” Deputy Moreau asks Marcus and I after pulling us from the group.

I shake my head. “My sister-in-law is pregnant, but she’s only five months in. That baby has definitely been fully cooked.”

Two EMTs enter the bar and head toward the fae ladies holding the baby, Randy Lamar trailing behind. He stops short when he sees where the bar used to be, then begins to look around. From the corner of my eye, I watch as Zach calls him over to where another deputy is questioning Zander. Norm stands nearby, but says nothing as he listens to whatever Zander is telling the officer.

“It’s a shitty weekend for this to happen,” Deputy Moreau tells Marcus as I focus back on their conversation. “Not that there’s any good weekend, but I know for a fact all of our foster parents in the county are at max capacity and our caseworkers are both out of office. One just had a c-section two days ago, the other had to travel for a funeral, and it’s a three-day weekend. Family court won’t be back in session until Tuesday morning.”

“You only have two caseworkers for the entire area?”

She nods.

Marcus looks at me and then back at the deputy. “I hate to say this aloud, but I am still certified as a foster parent in this state. My recertification actually is due around Thanksgiving. If it was just for the weekend, I could probably take her in.”

Marcus is nuts, but I keep my thoughts to myself. I have yet to find out if I’ll be charged with anything regarding the destroyed bar. Best not to draw attention to myself anymore than I already have. She nods and stands up from the table. “I’ll keep that in mind. We may have to, if you can swing it. Stay right here. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”

She moves across the room toward the group of men, conferring with the deputy for a little while before returning to us. “Because magic was involved, this entire matter is being referred over to an arbitrator who specializes in magical and creature-related issues. The Lamar pack is going to seek custody on Tuesday morning as soon as they can get in to see the arbitrator, but considering the fit their Beta threw tonight, we’d rather have the child with a certified provider. Would you be willing to take her on for the next three days?”

Marcus looks at me, and I shrug. “We can always call Jacqueline and Lugh if we get too lost. Do some internet searches.”

Marcus nods, and that’s how we end up with a baby in our possession for seventy-two hours. Technically, it’s Marcus’s possession, but it feels disloyal to take off on him in his time of need, so I follow him home. It gives me a good excuse to ignore the Lamar pack and something else to focus on other than how I’m going to pay my bills if I decide to not go back, or, more likely, Randy decides to let me go.

What I’m doing after stripping seems to be more of an issue than it was just a few weeks ago.I may not have a job anymore, and honestly, that may not be a bad thing. It feels more and more like the universe is throwing down all kinds of red flags, signaling it might be time to move on.

We have nothing for a baby, and seeing as she came with nothing other than the onesie she’s in and the crazy yellow blanket, we do the only thing we can do. I borrow a car seat from one of the girls with kids and head over to Jacqueline and Lugh’s.

“I thought you two were just dating,” Jacqueline jokes as she lets us and the baby inside. “If you know a way to speed up pregnancy, then I want in on the secret.”

We give the condensed version of Baby Jane’s arrival and Jacqueline and Lugh get to digging through their old baby stuff for us. They find a moses basket, some diapers baby Jack used for a week before jumping two sizes, tons of burp rags, and some swaddling blankets with velcro to make turning the baby into a burrito easier. They throw in wipes and a carseat with a base to make it easier to carry her around, and all we have to pick up on the way home is formula and bottles.

Back at the fire station, I take the baby out of her carrier-car seat while Marcus follows slowly behind. “What do we do with her now?” I ask as Marcus takes a break at the kitchen table.

He laughs. “I’m not sure. You’re the one with nieces and nephews.”

“Yeah, but when Jack was born, Lugh and Jacqueline were on baby detail…I just took care of Wendy by keeping her out of their hair for a few days.”

“I was the only guy in my office, so I wasn’t usually put in charge of babies. Hmmm. Does she need to be fed yet?” he asks. I turn her so I can see her little face. She sucks on the pacifier really hard for a few seconds.

“Probably?”

We spend the next ten minutes fighting with the bottle and trying to read the tiny print directions on the formula canister. Baby Jane is in fact very pissed off about something because seven minutes in, she begins to wail.

“How does she have enough lung capacity to cry like that?” I ask him as he finishes up and hands me the bottle.

He just shakes his head. I insist on switching off jobs–I give him the baby to feed so he can sit while I unload baby supplies from the truck and get things set up. He moves into the bedroom to be closer to me. I work in silence mostly, save for the sound of Baby Jane greedily sucking down her meal.

“Just because I volunteered myself doesn’t mean you have to stick around for this adventure,” he says as I finish up and flop down next to him.

“What are friends for?”

“Friends? Did you just call me a friend?”

“Well, you are, aren’t you?” I look down at the baby, trying not to let him see my red face. This is not how I wanted this conversation to go.

“So that’s all I am to you…a friend?” The hurt in his voice is unmistakable.

“I shake my head. No. It’s just. I didn’t want to push, if you didn’t want to–”

“What did I tell you during our first night together?”

I shake my head, not sure what he’s looking for.

“I told you I wanted to date you, to see if we could be more. I’m looking for someone serious, someone who wants to stick around for the long haul.”

I sigh. “But I wasn’t going to hold you to words you said in horniness.”

He smirks. “I was definitely horny, but that’s not why I said that. I’ve been calling you my girlfriend for weeks, if that’s not–”

I roll my eyes. Men. “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m sorry. I just assumed after all the dinners, all the sleepovers, all the orgasms, you’d just realized I liked having you around.”

“You know what they say about assumptions,” I say, repeating Darla’s words.

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Why didn’t you?”

He looks frustrated. “But if you were worried–”

“But if you were older and had already expressed extreme displeasure at my job...”

He presses his lips together. “I’m sorry.”

I shrug. We fall into silence for a long while, the only sound in the room is the baby gulping down her bottle. “So, you really tell people I’m your girlfriend?”

He offers me a half smile. “I do. I hope that’s okay.”

“Does that mean that this is an exclusive thing? Just you and me? Just us?”

“That’s how I’ve been operating. I don’t know if Willow’s okay with sharing you. It may take some convincing. And Freddie K., we can’t forget him.”

I huff a laugh. “You, me, Freddie K., and Willow then?”

The baby finishes her bottle so he shifts her and a kitchen towel to his shoulder to burp. Marcus takes my free hand and kisses my knuckles. “You, me, Freddie K., and Willow,” he repeats.

I’m not sure when it happens but sometime over the course of the next few days we start to call the baby Jada. It’s so much better sounding than Jane which makes me think of Victorian ladies or Jane Doe which conjures up true crime documentaries–it feels way less legal and more like a name. There isn’t much to do with a baby around. I take her outside with us in her carrier-car seat contraption and set her up out of the way while I help Marcus clean the backyard. It feels strangely like that week in Home Ec, where we all had to carry flour sacks around. Except this one cries and eats and then cries some more.

Marcus and I are quickly thrown into a much more domestic relationship than we have had up until this point, during which I discover that he doesn’t sleep. Like ever. And when he does, he’s the lightest sleeper on the planet. He’s up changing a diaper or fixing a bottle before my brain even registers her cries.

I ask him about it after the second day and he just shrugs.

“I haven’t slept in years, honestly.”

“Years?”

“Yeah. After my first rotation to Afghanistan. We were in this little COP.”

“COP?”

He nods as I take the baby and bottle from him. “It was this tiny little post out in the middle of nowhere, so we could be close to a village–you know, winning hearts and minds. Those hearts and minds weren’t our biggest fans. We’d have to just keep our boots on because you’d never know when you needed to get up and man a weapon. You spend weeks, months like that, and you come back…” he pauses for a minute. “Rewired. Your whole brain is constantly on, constantly ready for an attack. When you do sleep, you wake up reaching for your weapon.”

“Did you ever talk to anyone about it?”

“Like therapy?” He shakes his head and smiles ruefully. “I did after I got out. But while I was in… no. You didn’t admit to that kind of stuff back then. You’d get kicked out. And then after people started dropping like flies because they couldn’t handle it on their own, they’d say you could get help and it wouldn’t affect your career, but we all knew that wasn’t true, so we just kept going with it. Everything affects your career in the Army.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head. “What can you do?”

“Get a girlfriend who can give you something productive to do with all that time you’re up at night?”

He laughs. “Productive…is that what we’re calling it?” He leans over to kiss me and Jada starts to cry.

“I thought they only cockblocked their actual parents.”

I laugh. “Maybe it’s a general cockblock instinct… got to keep the resources available all for themselves.”

With nothing else to do, we take Jada outside for some fresh air and Ramona-mandated horse time. Ramona is there, in our faces almost immediately.

Of all the creatures on Marcus’s little farm, she’s the one who has become the most interested in Jada, to the point where we give up working together to clean up the yard and instead take turns standing nearby to keep the horse from getting too close. Ramona has quickly become Jada’s Willow–appearing out of nowhere the minute we try to bring her outside, and even neighing at us until we do.

It makes no sense, but then what does these days? Just add it to the list of “wild world of witching.”

It’s only three days, but the endless cycle of diapers, formula, and baths makes it feel twice as long. Marcus takes it all in stride. Despite his claim that they never gave him babies during his time at CPS, he handles Jada like an expert, talking to her in soothing tones as he pisses her off by daring to bathe or change her.

Watching him with Jada makes me think back to our conversation back at Soojin’s. He said he and his ex could never get on the same page about babies. What page exactly was that? And what page was he on?

I love Wendy and Jack, and any other crotch goblin Lugh and Jacqueline decide to bring into this world, but parenting on a full-time basis isn’t something I see myself doing, ever. I can’t say that I’ve ever had a relationship that ended because I didn’t want kids, but I’m sure it’s added to the list of nos in a few exes’ minds.

Half a dozen times over the three days we have Jada. It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask, but it feels like something I should already know…like asking that neighbor two doors down what their name is when you’ve already been neighbors for years.

Monday night, we wash Jada, dress her in the last outfit we have that is still clean and put her to bed.

“It's insane, isn’t it…ten months ago she was nothing more than a bit of protein, and now she’s this.”

“A poop machine?” I ask, teasing.

“A whole ass person. Completely from a mixture of protein.”

He could just be making conversation. He could just be marveling at the miracle of life, while wanting to appreciate it from a distance. But his excitement makes me nervous, and I promise myself I’ll ask him just as soon as we finish up all of this legal stuff with Jada.