He moved his hand down and slipped it inside my panties, but he didn’t go as low as I expected he would go. Instead, he caressed the stretched skin of my belly. “I hope she gets your eyes.”
“She?” It was the first time we’d really talked about the baby since the doctor’s office. “Are you hoping for a girl?”
“A girl is just the easiest thing for me to picture. A miniature version of you.”
My throat tightened. Because in my mind, I saw a miniature JC. And the accuracy of my picture was questionable.
“I hope she has your sense of humor,” I said when I could speak, turning into him. Even if it wasn’t JC’s biologically, I would make sure that he was very much a part of our child.
***
I woke up that afternoon, my hands clammy and my heart racing. JC was still sleeping next to me. Careful not to wake him, I sat up and tried to calm myself while I attempted to remember what I’d dreamed about. It had been vivid only a moment before and now was already fading, but I could recall part of it still. I’d been in a rocking chair, singing some sort of lullaby, a baby nestled in the crook of my arm. While I’d cooed and smiled down at the infant, JC had come up behind me. “She glows,” he’d said.
“She looks like you.” I’d glanced up at him only to find it wasn’t JC after all, but Chandler.
He kissed my temple. “She does look like me, doesn’t she? Pierce through and through.”
I’d panicked for a moment about the change of leading man, but as often happens in dreams, I adjusted quickly. I gazed back down at the baby. “We make beautiful offspring.”
“Beautiful and ungrateful offspring.” This time when I looked up, it was my father standing there, his face cruel and menacing. The baby and the rocking chair vanished, and I was cowering under my father’s raised hand. “Don’t tell me you don’t have any money. Your fancy clothes and fancy apartment say different. You should have given me what I asked for. Ungrateful bitch.” He’d raised his arm to hit me right before I woke up.
Gentle pressure on my thigh startled me from the memory. “What’s wrong?” JC asked, bleary-eyed.
“Bad dream.” I shuddered at the lingering image of my father.
JC sat up next to me and stroked his hand up and down my back. “Anything I can do?”
I started to shake my head then stopped. For the first time in days, I realized that there was one aspect of my out-of-control life that I could do something about—with JC’s help, anyway.
“Yeah,” I said, snuggling into his arms. “You can take me to see my father.”
***
Two days later, we stood on the step of a Staten Island condo. No one answered when we rang the bell the first time, nor the second. JC rapped his knuckles on the wood, and then cupped his hands to peer inside the window at the top of the door.
I’d been nervous on the drive out, as scared at the prospect of seeing my father as I was of seeing the place he’d been living for most of the past year. Stereotypically, I’d expected JC to lead me to an abandoned building in the Bronx or to some makeshift housing under a bridge. I hadn’t expected to be taken here.
“Are you sure we’re at the right address?” I stepped back to look again at the strip of condos that lined the street. They looked like any other middle-income housing, not the drug den for heroin addicts that JC had described. The yard was well-groomed, and the cars parked in front seemed to be maintained. There was a golf course and country club only a block away.
“This is definitely it,” JC said, knocking again.
A shot sounded, and I jumped.
“It was just a car backfiring,” he assured me. “But we can still go back and get the bulletproof vests if you want.”
I shook my head. “He’s not going to shoot me. It just startled me. That’s all.”
A door opened at the end unit, and a mother walked out with two small children in tow. She threw a suspicious glance as she walked past us, clutching tighter to the small hands.
“They’re at the bad place,” I heard the little boy say before he was shushed and ushered along.
Maybe we were at the right address.
Cigarette butts littered the porch, but other than that, this unit appeared like any other. I looked over the stoop into the bushes and saw the first indicator that my father might be inside after all—a pair of used needles sticking out of the greenery.
I shivered. All this time, I’d imagined my father withdrawn from society while he fed his addictions. Instead he was hidden in plain sight, in the middle of suburbia.
With still no answer at the door, JC tried the knob. It turned. He shot me a glance.