Tara Quinn - Street Smart

Setting the glass on the table, Luke stood, frowning as he stared down at her. She wasn’t going to take skydiving from him, too. Anxiety disorders or not, she just wasn’t.

“Mom.” He tried again, squatting down, meeting her at eye level. He lifted a hand to her face, drying the tears, cupping her cheek. “It’s okay. Shh, it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay, Luke,” she said, her voice trembling with emotions he would never, in a million lifetimes, understand. “It’s not okay. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

With a heavy sigh he dropped his hand. Straightened. “I’m here, aren’t I?” Shame warmed his skin as he heard the resentment he spent his life trying not to feel. Or at least to hide.

“It’s not okay!” she screamed, rocking, crying, this small pitiful creature who’d borne him.

“I’ll stay home today.” He heard the words, uttered a thousand times before, as if from a distance. Mostly he felt the familiar and deadening weight of obligation and debilitating resentment. Only thoughts of the life that was coming, the son he’d soon have, kept him calm.

“No!” she screamed again. “Tell me, Luke! Promise me!” Head raised, exposing a neck that was so thin, so frail-looking, he could hardly believe it. “You won’t ever jump again!”

Staring at her, Luke couldn’t make the words come. It had been this way for as long as he could remember. It had started with birthday parties. If his father was home he’d been able to go, but as an executive with Biamonte Industries—a position he’d needed to hold to pay his wife’s medical expenses and to keep her world contained enough to allow her to live outside a professional facility—Marshall Everson had had to put in ungodly hours, which also included a fair amount of travel. In later years there’d been dates, games, even a senior trip that Luke had to give up. He’d never been able to sustain membership on a team, be on student council, run for class president, join a club. He’d skydived. It was something he could do privately. On his own time or, rather, the time his father arranged for him.

“Mom…”

It was going to be different with his son. He was going to hire a nanny, ten nannies if he had to, to ensure that his son had all the opportunities he had not.

“Say it, Luke!” Falling forward with the force of the sob that followed, she lay there, chest to her knees, moaning. “Oh, God. I’m going to be…”

Luke grabbed the kitchen trash, put it in front of her and turned his back. When she was finished he handed her a wet cloth, wordlessly waiting while she wiped her face.

She’d be calmer now, at least for a while. She’d be able to swallow her medication and give it time to work.

But this wasn’t the end of it. He knew that.

Just as he knew the woman was slowly sucking the life out of him.

He needed his son, a boy to teach all the things he loved, to play ball with, explore with, watch horror movies with. A boy to bring vibrancy and enthusiasm and messy science experiments into his home.

A son to carry on the Everson name.

A child to give hope and purpose to his future.

A reason to live.

On Thursday evening, just before dusk, Francesca was sitting on her corner, dressed like a teenage homeless person, holding a battered McDonald’s cup out to passersby with a hand that was gloved—even in the July heat—although her glove was fingerless. She’d been observing others for five days and, if nothing else, had a pretty clear idea how to portray any number of characters. For some reason, a lot of the homeless folks covered their hands in some fashion.

Perhaps for trash-digging?

It was a story she’d have wanted to do were she living in another lifetime. With another heart.

She wasn’t showing around the picture as much, though it was always close at hand, securely tucked into the waistband of her torn-and-dirty pair of too-tight jeans. A lot of the same people were coming by. And were starting to notice her.

So she was now permanently homeless—at least in the role she played. It was the only reason she could think of that would allow her to hang out continuously at the same corner. Homeless people seemed to pick a place and stake it out as their own personal property. Probably some kind of homing instinct.

A cop stopped at the corner. She and her mother were in contact with the Las Vegas police and she knew her presence could be explained in a sixty-second phone call if necessary. Still, she’d noticed that a lot of homeless people tended to avoid the eye of anyone in authority. Francesca studied the once-white tennis shoes on her feet.

Did they avoid those glances out of shame? Or fear of punishment? She shrugged the thought away. Everyone had problems. Heartaches. Hard lives. Some were just more obvious than others.

The job she’d done on those shoes wasn’t half bad. She’d had to rub them against the cement in the parking lot outside the Lucky Seven for more than an hour to get that ragged hole in the toe. She’d thrown away the laces and then she’d tossed the shoes around in a big bag with dinner leftovers, shaken them off and left them outside to dry.

For all that, they were the most comfortable pair of shoes she’d had on all week.

The door of the phone booth creaked. Forcing herself to stay in character, to appear disinterested, Francesca slowly turned her gaze toward it. She felt as if she now knew that small booth more intimately than she knew her own body. After five days, she really didn’t expect much. She just didn’t have anything else to do. Anywhere else to go, to look.

She had nowhere to be. Not that week. Not for the rest of her life. Until she ran out of money and needed to eat. But with the savings she’d amassed, that wouldn’t be for a long time. And it wasn’t something she particularly cared about one way or the other, anyway.

A woman stood in the booth, her back to Francesca, dialing quickly.

Francesca had no idea how she was going to earn money when she needed it again. She had no desire to pick up a camera. No inner voice guiding her to the perfect picture. Though she had a few of her cameras in her bag at the Lucky Seven, she hadn’t touched them since that first day in town.

She watched the short brunette, of indeterminate age, as she talked. And then the woman turned.

She couldn’t be more than twenty. If that.

And she was pregnant.

That made the seventh pregnant woman this week. Seven times she’d lost her breath as the sight slammed into her. With practice it was supposed to get easier.

It didn’t.

And this one was so young, barely a child herself. How could she possibly cope? Birth was hard.

And mothering so much harder. What would she do if she went to her baby’s crib one afternoon, reached for him, expecting to pull that tiny warm body into her arms and found it limp and—

No. Forget it. Just forget.

Professional detachment was slow in descending, but as it came Francesca was reminded of the pregnant girl she’d seen in that same phone booth a couple of days before. The girl who’d inadvertently turned up in Francesca’s dream last night.

In the old days that had meant a story for sure.

Today, Francesca was only irritated by the distraction from what mattered. There was no anticipation, no “aha” moment, no real vision of what would be. Just a nagging idea that if she’d had anything left in her, she could have done something. Taken photographs. Told a story…

Still, as the girl finished her conversation, Francesca approached her, holding Autumn’s picture. Her gaze remained at eye level.

“Excuse me,” she said, “I’m looking for my friend. She told me to look her up when I got to town but she moved. The last address I had for her was in those apartments.” She nodded toward the rent-by-the-month place next door. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen her, would you?”