Wendy Hornsby - Midnight Baby

I couldn’t see Mike’s face, but I could hear him. And I could feel the car’s movement. I think we made a couple of unplanned lane changes, accompanied by irate horn honking. The horns lent appropriate background for Mike’s version of “Yeeha.” Then we rolled over a lot of lane-divider turtles, swerved sharply right, and the car began to slow.

“Maggie,” Mike moaned hoarsely. He grabbed my collar and tugged me up. I thought he was just being fastidious. But when I raised my head I found we were on an off ramp, on a direct collision course with the stop sign at the bottom. When the front bumper met the stop-sign post we were hardly moving. Still, there was a bump.

I looked up at Mike’s face. His teeth were clenched, but he was smiling. I started to laugh.

Mike began to tuck himself in one-handed. I reached into his pocket, found his key ring, and unlocked his handcuff. “What do you think?” I asked.

“It’s a good way to die.” He wrapped me in his arms and gave me a lovely long, deep kiss. When he finally looked up again, he said, “Do you have any idea where we are?”

“Not a clue,” I said, as he bumped down off the curb and accelerated into traffic.

Sunday morning, the doorbell rang while Mike was in the shower. I pulled on one of the sweatshirts from the assortment of clothes littering his floor and answered the door.

A courier handed me a large package addressed to Mike in Lyle’s extravagant scrawl. I forged Mike’s name on the delivery register, shut the door, and opened the package as I walked toward the kitchen. Inside the box I found the videotape we needed. Lyle had also tucked in my vitamins and a dozen of his homemade bran muffins. He is such a fuss.

I poured two mugs of coffee from the Mr. Espresso on the kitchen counter and carried them with two muffins and the tape back to the bedroom. I turned on the TV, slipped the tape into the VCR, and sat down on the end of the bed to watch it.

Mike came out of the bathroom, all fresh and smooth-faced, smelling of baby powder. His blue boxer shorts complemented his eyes.

“What are you watching?” he asked. “Debbie Does Reseda?”

I paused the VCR. “The Pisces tape arrived.”

“Good. I want to see it.”

Mike brushed bran-muffin crumbs off the spread and reclined on the bed beside me with his chin resting on my knee. He was as close to me physically as it is possible to be, but as soon as he restarted the tape, I lost him to the image moving across the screen.

Concentration drew his face into a deep frown as he listened to Pisces run through her line. He watched the entire tape through once, then rewound it and started it again. At the point when Pisces invited me to a motel, Mike picked up the remote, pushed the slow-motion function, and went over to the TV. Pointing to a red smear on the right edge of the frame, he said, “See the Corvette here?”

“Yes.”

He fast-forwarded, hit play, and pointed as the Corvette cruised up to us a second time.

“How many passes did he make?” Mike asked.

“I don’t know. I was concentrating on her. Whenever I bring out a camera, an audience gathers. Bunch of jerks trying to get famous. You know, they wave, mouth ‘Hi, Mom.’ I don’t pay any attention to them unless they screw up my scene. So when I first noticed the car, my only worry was what he was doing to my sound levels, not what the driver was up to.”

He nodded thoughtfully. We watched the entire tape in slow motion, tracking the red car, which was for the most part a glossy blur at the edge of the frame. Now and then I had caught some of the windshield. I strained to see the driver’s face. Because the streetlights reflected against the tinted glass, the driver was nothing more than a stationary pale spot behind moving reflections.

At one point I had turned the camera full on the driver. I remembered having felt annoyed at him because the man was a pest.

Now and then in filming there is a serendipitous moment, like Mr. Zapruder’s moment in Dallas in November 1963. My moment was certainly on a lower rung, but it made my palms sweat and my heart pound. I couldn’t see it except in slow motion: at the instant the driver was in the center of my viewfinder, the car passed into the gulf of darkness between two streetlights. For a fraction of that instant, the windshield was black. Behind it I could discern features on the driver’s face.

“I think I got the bastard, Mike. Did you see that?”

“Yeah, but it goes by so fast. Will the lab be able to make a decent still from that short bit?”

“You mean the police lab?”

“Any lab.”

“If you’re asking my professional advice, I’ll tell you to take the tape to Guido. A, he’s a genius. And B, he has access to the right equipment.”

“The tape is evidence, Maggie. We have to be careful with it. I’m real damn sure that Guido can do better things with it than our guys, but I’ll still have to get authority to release it to him.”

“I haven’t been served with anything like a subpoena,” I said, trying to remember what I had done with the wrappings addressed to Mike. “Until I release the tape to you, sweetcakes, it’s still my tape. Right?”

He laughed. “I really love the way your mind works, Maggie. What do you want to do?”

“Take this to Guido, get him to dub a copy for us to play with. Then you can have the original back.”

“Not strictly kosher. But expedient.” He kissed my knee and got up. “When are you going to do it?”

“If Guido’s home, as soon as I get a shower and get dressed. His house is only fifteen minutes from here. I’ll show you how to dub.”

“The thing is,” Mike said, “it’s Sunday. I always spend Sunday with my son. I was thinking maybe the three of us could go to breakfast together. It’s about time you met him.”

“Mikey Junior?” I said, feeling my palms start to sweat again.

“It’s Michael. When you’re seventeen, it’s Michael.”

“You two go ahead with whatever you had planned, Mike,” I said. “I don’t want to interfere. Besides, I have a lot of work to do.”

“Maggie,” he said with sudden heat, “what’s the big deal? Just meet him. He’s a great kid. You’ll like him. He’ll like you.”

“Later,” I said. “Okay?”

“If you say so.” He slid a pair of Dockers off a hanger and put them on. I could see that he had something more to say. But he just sighed.

I walked over and put my arms around him. He resisted me for a moment before he put his arms around me, too.

“Mike,” I said, “we’ve been over all of this. I know I’ll love Michael; he’s your son. So, what if he and I get to be really close? And Casey develops something with the two of you? Then you and I don’t work out in the end? What happens to the kids?”

“Maggie…

“Or you and I do work out, but Michael hates me? What do you do then? Casey can’t stand her father’s new wife. We can’t expect the kids to turn their feelings on and off to suit us. They can be so easily hurt.”

“Dinner,” he said with some force, holding me away by the shoulders. “Just dinner. Could you commit to dinner?”

It was my turn to sigh. “If it’s that important to you.”

“Meet you back here around six?”

“Fine.”

He smiled. “Fine, then.”

I watched him as he walked over to his closet, pulled out a shirt. I thought he looked terrific without one. That was in large measure where the problem lay. The physical thing between us had been atomic from the beginning. But beyond that, the gap between what either of us was ready for was enormous. In some ways, my divorce was still a bleeding wound. Mike didn’t want to live alone anymore.