Sitting Duck
Lulu’s nose starts bleeding the moment the other car t-bones us on the driver’s side, on my side. I look back at her, her blonde hair sticking to her forehead because it’s summer in Atlanta and I had parked outside her house earlier in the morning and now it is afternoon, the car a chamber of packed heat. The blood is just dripping towards her upper lip when I realize that she is screaming and I am screaming and that I need to get her out of this car as soon as possible.
I don’t look at the car, which is my dad’s, I know it’s fucked and he will disown me or at least call me a cunt once and not speak to me for two weeks. I pick Lulu up and place her on the curb, away from the vehicle, which now has steam or vapor coming from the hood–I’m not sure which one, I know nothing about cars. I kneel in front of her and ask her if she is okay, wiping up the blood with the bottom of my t-shirt that I then tuck into my pants. She says yes, but through giant sobs, which reinforces the fact that I never want to be a mother. Even being a surrogate mother to her is too much sometimes with her endless energy, her only-child syndrome, the way she gets bored after doing an activity for thirty seconds. I ask her if her body hurts anywhere, if she feels ouchy on a knee or an elbow. She nods no and I notice that a child’s crying face is so obviously sad. She hides nothing, like we do as adults; her frown is the saddest frown I’ve ever seen.
The owner of the other car, a shitty Honda gets out and he is Civil War ancient. He might have been going thirty-five, but the impact felt like it was a hundred. I turn back to Lulu and hear a siren in the distance, and I panic. I don’t know what it means for me to have potentially caused harm to someone else’s child. Will I be arrested? Is there a possibility of jail time? A law against near-involuntary manslaughter? There will be police reports. And if she gets taken in the ambulance, there will be medical reports and she will be traumatized at least until she’s ten years old and starts creating new formative memories. She’ll be pricked and prodded by nurses, tubes may be attached to her and she is too young to have an experience that needs to be unraveled in therapy. If she gets sent to the hospital, then the mother’s ex-husband will have to fly in from New York, and though I’ve never met him, he sounds like the type of guy who would come back only to seem like he’s saving the day. The car being totaled is enough; I also don’t want to tell my dad that I’m being convicted of a felony or that someone’s dad is suing me for causing trauma.
I would try to pass for Lulu’s young mother, but my skin is two shades darker than hers, singed by my mother’s Mexicanness. The old man hasn’t seen Lulu yet and I know it looks bad to have this bleeding blonde child with PTSD forming in real time sitting on a curb, so I tell Lulu that she is going to hide.
“Where?” She asks. “When?”
I tell her right now and point her towards a small dilapidated shed in a small field next to us. There is a patch of kudzu creeping up the broken fence around it and I push her towards it, telling her to stay low as if she is in the army, fighting for her life. The old man is on the driver’s side of my car, crouching down to survey the damage that he caused but that I enabled by turning too early onto a two-way, being in a fucking rush.
“This is really no good,” he says, shaking his head, judgmentally like old men do, rubbing his lips with his fingers. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay, he focuses on the cars. I assume he is the type of man to make some non-politically correct statement about how all Mexicans are illegal or that they all ride in the backs of trucks.
“What were you thinking?” He asks, his eyes dead set on mine in the condescending way a parent looks at you. I see flashes of my father, like they share the same kind of heart.
“I wasn’t,” I respond, my voice edgy, “clearly.” My arms are crossed but I release one hand to gesture at the heap of crushed metal. I stare at the detached bumper that sits on the gravel like an appendage. I want him to respond to me in a way that I think I deserve, how my dad would respond to me. I want him to treat me poorly, tell me I’m a fuck-up and that I don’t deserve autonomy or that he wants to see me in front of a judge for endangering the “community.” But he doesn’t. He asks for my insurance card and goes back to sit in his car.
I call my sister because I don’t want to call my dad yet and tell her she needs to come get me. I wait for her while the police arrive, these squat men who stopped working out years ago. I’m unsure if they have to be athletic when they are trying to become cops and then once they do, they resort back to caring less or what. They ask me if I’m okay, if anyone else was in the car with me. I say no, and they point to Lulu’s car seat, and I tell them that I’m a nanny. I’m ashamed that nanny, in this context, encompasses me as a whole person, as if I was born one, enjoyed caring for people I didn’t give birth to. The cops talk to the grandpa-man and come to the conclusion that the wreck is my fault, which is true, but I want them to tell me that because I’m young, nothing is going to happen to me.
I peer over to the kudzu. Lulu is so good when she needs to be and this is the first time I feel a sense of pride.
My sister comes with Lulu’s mother, Crystal. I should have expected it–they are friends, Crystal being an artist who only paints naked female bodies on linen canvases, and my sister, who likes being around interesting people but never does anything interesting herself. I let my sister exist like this, mooching off her boyfriends, who tend to be music managers or bar owners or other types that have cocaine addictions. We aren’t close, but she buys me nice gifts for Christmas with the money that is not hers, and I think of her as a whole person.
*
Here’s a fact: Crystal never wanted to be a mother. She told me this one night after she came home from another failed date and forced me to split a cigarette. She only smoked Capris, which I enjoyed more than I thought–the smoke never got trapped in my hair follicles or the threads of my shirt. French doors opened to a terrace off her bedroom and we sat in her uncomfortable chairs.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said on the inhale, “Lulu is great, but if I could go back,” she held in the smoke, “I’d make a different decision,” on the exhale. Crystal wore her hair long and dyed it a specific kind of auburn.
She passed the cigarette to me. I said nothing.
“It’s like,” she said, “and this is going to be fucked up but like, if she died in some tragic accident or if there was an incurable sickness, I would be sad, of course, but I would also be–I dont know,” she paused, looking onto her lawn, like she was briefly living alone in this life. I turned to her and unintentionally blew smoke in her face, out of the corner of my mouth.
“Relieved.”
*
The cops are leaving after having called a tow truck to move my car since it won’t turn on anymore. They confirm it is totaled even though no assessor has seen it. They write me a ticket that they say “will require my presence in court.” Crystal emerges from the driver’s side of her Range Rover, and despite hating parenting, she seems distressed. I tell her Lulu is okay, she is hiding in a bush because her nose was bleeding, and I didn’t want her to go to the hospital because other than the bleeding, she was fine. I wave towards Lulu and motion for her to come back to me. She starts skipping when she’s halfway. My sister stays in the passenger seat.
“Who says you can make that decision?” She snaps at me and is right to. I forgot that there are maternal instincts that sit in the ground of her body. She did birth the child, there are tethers. The botox she gets in her face has made it impossible for her eyebrows to lower so they sit, arched and lifted, in a state of perpetual surprise.
Lulu runs to me first and hugs my leg before I put my hands on her shoulders and push her a little towards her mother. “Crystal, really, she is totally fine, not even a bruise and no broken bones–”
“You could have killed her! I pay you to take care of her, not put her into situations where her life is at fucking risk!” When she says “you” the second time, she points her manicured almond-shaped nail at me, the shade of eggshell. Lulu’s hand is in her mouth and instinctually, I want to move it away, thinking about the things she could have touched in the field. Worms, poison ivy, an animal with rabies. I look back at Crystal. She is reminding me of the transactional nature of our relationship. We aren’t friends.
I want to remind her that motherhood is a full-time thing. I want to tell her that I’ve spent more time with Lulu in the past week than she’s spent with her in a month, and that I know her better. I love her more.
“You’re right,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
*
My car is towed into some population desert in south Atlanta and Crystal drives everyone back to her house calmly, realizing that Lulu was, in fact, fine, already distracted in the backseat by these L.O.L Dolls which are supposed to look like babies but wear colored eyeliner and have pursed lips that are oddly sexual.
The week before, while I let Lulu watch the live-action Beauty and the Beast for the second time that day, I scrolled through my phone and skimmed an article about people who kill other people in accidents–like when someone is jay-walking and the sun is too bright to see shapes and shadows. The article’s main thesis was about guilt. How changed these people became after the accident, seeking out counseling, slipping into depressions, committing suicide. I liked the article.
It forced me to think about people I never thought about–the innocent killers. The ones who were untouched humans before, and now they were not. People who underwent accidental transformation.
My sister’s boyfriend comes to the apartment. He is an emergency room doctor and likes my sister more than she likes him, so he does whatever she wants. He taps Lulu’s knees, flashes lights in her eyes, asks her if her body hurts anywhere, if her head hurts, if she feels dizzy, and I’m praying she says no to everything so I can add to my evidence of innocence, and she does. My adrenaline levels have plateaued, and without the heightened cortisol, I am unable to pinpoint my emotions. I can’t tell if I am unfeeling or if it’s lingering shock, if I am stagnant because in some other parallel universe, Lulu decided to sit behind me without a seatbelt and the driver was actually going a hundred, not thirty-five and she would be dead and there would be that innocent killer guilt that I would live with until I died or killed myself. I think that’s what I feel. The closeness, the fingertip distance between today and an alternative reality that simultaneously exists somewhere else.
Crystal pours my sister and me wine after she puts Lulu to sleep, and she leans over several times to tell me she forgives me. Crystal goes to her bedroom for a while to talk on the phone with one of the younger men she keeps dating and breaking up with. My sister and I make eye contact when we hear Crystal slip into baby voice through her plaster walls.
“I hope he pays her to do that,” my sister says, taking a sip from the glass, her whole hand wrapped around the orb, warming up the already room-temperature wine. This is what we do as sisters. We don’t talk about anything important. I don’t ask her why she didn’t come out of the car earlier, or why she didn’t even ask me if I was okay.
“He has a trust fund, of course he’s paying her,” I swirl the wine in my glass like I know what I’m doing, “otherwise, why else would they be together?”
“For love,” she says with her Scorpio sarcasm, “true love.” I lower my glass and look at her face and our shared eyebrows. There is silence before we both start laughing in the way siblings do, despite their emotional and psychological distance as individuals. Her nostrils flare and my chin tilts up towards the ceiling.
“What’s that?” I say and we both cackle so hard we clutch our stomachs.
Crystal comes back in the room and asks us what’s so funny. We tell her she wouldn’t get it, and it’s nice to have my sister on my side.
When my sister is in the bathroom, Crystal leans over, lays a hand on my thigh and tells me with tears that if Lulu was supposed to die in that car accident, she would have eventually come to the understanding that it was meant to be. I am unsure if she is crying over her daughter’s life or if she is crying over her own life, the closeness of a reality she secretly wants. I tell her I am happy that Lulu is alive which feels truthful and is another way of saying I am happy I didn’t kill her.
My phone buzzes and it’s Jackson, but he’s in my phone as Cowboy Jackson because the first time I met him, he wore jade jewelry and a cowboy hat which he kept on while I blew him in a bar bathroom. He is at least twenty years older than me but I’ve always loved wrinkles on men. He asks me what I’m up to tonight, if I’m lonely. Only old men ask young women if they’re lonely. I ask him for his address.
Crystal and my sister are opening up a second bottle when I say goodbye to them. I surprise myself by energetically sending little love brain waves to Lulu, something we would do together while sitting on the couch. I’d tickle my head then transfer the tickles onto her head. Little love brain waves.
This is my first time in Cowboy Jackson’s apartment. The Uber costs thirty dollars which makes me hope the sex will be worth it, but when I pull up to the apartment complex, I’m less sure. I like old men because they often have nice things, but these apartments are beige and boxy, cookie-cutter style with several Toyotas without license plates parked in the residential area. Cowboy Jackson lets me in to his all-carpeted apartment, and the first thing I notice are the ducks.
“They are mallards,” he corrects me. There are at least fifty in the dark living room. Legitimately sitting ducks. Ducks in a row on the mantle. Ducks in between both brown recliners. Ducks lining the Ikea bookshelves. Big ones, small ones, all with the yellow beak and green head. Lulu would hate these fucking ducks because even though she’s five, she has good taste. He pours me a cheap red and I down it. He pours me another. Cowboy Jackson is less good-looking than I remember, but a slight haze forms around him like a halo, and I can sense he likes me more and will do stuff like worship my ass which is what I want at this time.
He leads me to the bedroom and though it seems like the ducks don’t extend out of the living room radius, it is somehow worse in here. To the right of his queen-sized bed, there are stacks and stacks and rows and rows of plastic boxes, extending all the way up the ceiling. They are filled with shoes. Cowboy boots. On the other wall is a clothes rack lined with fringe jackets. Everything in here is too big for the space–the side tables are three-feet deep and his sheets have sailboats on them which I peep quickly and try not to look at again. I touch a fringe jacket and he removes my hand and brings it to his crotch which is my least favorite way to be introduced to a penis but I go along with it anyway. I unzip him and get on my knees like I’m Pavlov’s dog and close my eyes to remove the ducks and plastic and suede from my brain, and he strokes my hair and pushes my head closer to his balls which smell gamey, and then he pulls me up to my feet and pushes me onto my stomach, onto his childish sheets and takes my pants and underwear off while I take my shirt and bra off, and I was right that he would worship my ass because he does with his mouth, and I see Lulu’s bloody nose in a burgundy cowboy hat placed on top of his lamp shade and I shut my eyes tighter and think of something sweet like Krispy Kreme donuts, my hands are gripping the sheets as he presses himself inside me, I am lubricated by his saliva and it feels nice and dirty, like he only washes his sheets once every two months and then he turns me over and he is close to my face now, his beard is trimmed but smells feral and I think about another article I skimmed that said that yes, beards are covered with fecal bacteria, but so is almost everything which made me feel better, made the pleasure a little easier to experience, and then he grunts a few times and his body is pressing so hard on mine that I can’t even move my hand to get to my clit and on the final grunt, he is so dramatic about his orgasm that I immediately start laughing. I am laughing so hard, my stomach hurts. And when he rolls off me, I am still laughing, but I’ve turned to the side, into a fetal position and I’m crying. Crying from laughing. Laughing from crying, facing the wall.
