Daddy's Read Free Page B

file charges. I say Maybe? Later a nurse comes in and wakes me up, leaning so close I can smell the hazelnut coffee on her breath. You’re preggy preg pregs, she says, rubbing my arm. Did you know that? About eight weeks along. I wonder if it was the time my boyfriend pretended he was an HIV-positive man going around and infecting people or the time he pretended he was Jack the Ripper and I was a good-hearted prostitute.
     
    I tell my boyfriend the news and his eyes light up. What if, he says, what if someone kidnapped the baby? For ransom, or to sell it on the black market? What if you tripped and fell and landed on your stomach?
     
    I don’t know, I tell him. He turns on the news, says, Come on, get to the terrorist stuff.
     
    When he leaves to get coffee I imagine him spilling the coffee on himself, getting third-degree burns that fuse his fingers together. I imagine him getting stuck in the elevator, the cables breaking and the elevator plummeting him to his death, though the hospital is only three floors high. I wonder if it’s possible that an air bubble got injected into his bloodstream in the crash somehow, that it will reach his heart and he’ll go down, his heart exploding like a firecracker in an apple.
     

    After a few minutes he comes back, watching the coffee in his cup, trying not to spill. The colors on his face have deepened, purple around the eyes fading out into green and yellow. A bit of blood in his nostrils, black and dried. I am so disappointed to see him unharmed that I start crying. The tears come hot and fast; I cry so hard my neck sings with pain. Hey, hey, he says, coming over and taking my hand. Hey there, I know. I know how you feel. It was fucking awesome, right? Dropping my hand, he reaches over me for the remote.
     
    The nurse comes back in, tightens my sheets, checks the IV bag, says cheerfully, Yep, still alive.
     

THAT BABY
     

    The baby was normal when it came out. Daddy snipped the cord like nothing, the baby screaming silently till the nurse sucked out whatever bloodsnot was stuck in his throat, then there was no turning back, it was there, his voice, his mouth wide and wider, that baby was all mouth, his cries like a nail being driven into rotten wood. Normal.
     
    Daddy said, Let’s name him Levis, we always liked Vs in names, and I’d heard the name Levis before but couldn’t place it, and besides, that baby was a Levis, it was obvious.
     

    We took Levis home and he sucked me dry within an hour. Daddy went to the store for some formula and Levis ate that up too. I made a pot of mashed potatoes for me and Daddy and the baby did his best to stick his face into it, his neck nothing more than a taffy pull, his big head hanging so I could see the three curls he’d already grown at the base of his neck, sweaty, looking for all the world like pubes lathered with baby oil, and I shuddered looking at them and chalked that feeling up to postpartum.
     
    Levis wouldn’t let Daddy sleep in bed with us, he was clever that way, soon as Daddy slid under the bedcovers Levis would start screaming, that nail torturing that rotted wood, that endless nail, then when Daddy would get up for a glass of something the baby would quiet down, and Daddy and I aren’t stupid so soon we figured Daddy could get familiar with the couch for a while if it ensured Levis acted peaceful, and I gave Daddy permission to tend to himself in that way as much as he needed to since I was busy with Levis and couldn’t do my wifelies.
     

    Levis grew at night and plenty of mornings I’d wake up to see him lying there with his diaper busted open. Other ladies I’ve known who have given birth had always chittered on about their babies’ growth spurts, but here Levis was 40 pounds within a week and 60 midway through the next, hair on his knuckles and three block teeth scattered amongst his jaws, then when he was one month old he called me Honey, his first word, fisted my breast, his nails leaving little