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backdrifterRespa never did call the number. He saw Horace at a distance when he sought his customers at that particular bar—and sometimes other bars—but he never said anything. Horace would look at him sadly, and Respa would bite the inside of his cheek, or his lip, and get back to business. He saw his two lesbian friends, as well, but they didn’t approach him. He wondered what Horace had told them, and he resented that they might know anything about him.
When Tanya was asleep he still pretended, sometimes, that Ryan was still with him. He would hug his flat pillow to his flat body and whisper sweet nothings to it, and the phrase “sweet nothings” had never meant more to him, because without the real Ryan there, they were nothing. If he felt Tanya shifting beside him, he would pause, and when her breathing stabilized he would hug the sack of compressed feathers to his cheek.
Tanya guessed her due date was sometime in August or early September. She was huge now; everything she did was physically taxing, and when she waddled around Respa stifled his laughter. On the other hand, everything made her angry. A single unwashed dish made her fling it across the apartment and kick the trash over; one of her own hairs in her canned soup made her bend her spoon until it was useless.
“You never say anything sweet to me,” she complained one day, lying in bed and drumming her fingers on her massive belly. Sometimes she tapped her popped-out belly button, too.
“What’s there to say?” he grumbled, folding his clothes. There was only so long one could go commando before things had to be washed.
“Tell me you love me.”
“That would be lying,” he replied, and she threw something hard and painful at his back. Upon inspection, it was the spoon she’d rendered useless, a little acute angle of metal.
“Well, say something.”
“I don’t want to.” He sighed at how the Daisy Dukes shorts were starting to outnumber his actual jeans. He missed wearing the jeans. He missed being able to pick which nights he wanted to make money. He missed his independence, no matter how unbearable it had seemed before.
“Don’t you care that I’m having your baby?”
“There’s no proof it’s even mine.”
“Stop saying that!” she shrieked. “Stop it, it’s like you’re calling me a slut!”
“I didn’t say that, I didn’t say anything like that.”
“Ughhh!” she groaned into a pillow she put over her face briefly. “Talking to you is like talking to the Cheshire cat.”
“I hope the baby has your eyes,” he said, and for a moment Tanya paused in her fidgeting, staring at the ceiling. Then she smiled, and turned over to sleep some more.
It was late August when Tanya woke him with a violent kick in his side. He rolled off the mattress, bleary and in pain, but Tanya had more pressing issues. She was saying something he couldn’t quite make out.
“What?” he said, rubbing at his eyes. “No, what? I can’t—”
“I said my water broke, you dick!” she hissed. “We have to get to the hospital or something!”
“N-no,” he said, sitting up slowly. “No hospitals.”
“Fuck you, you can’t tell me how to give birth to my baby. Unghh—” Her angry face melted into pain and heavy, fast breathing. “—Get a cab, downstairs—”
“Hospitals are expensive—”
Tanya grabbed the collar of his tatty shirt in both fists. “If I don’t get to a fucking hospital,” she ground out, spitting from between her teeth, “then me and this baby are both going to die, because neither of us know what to do, and this place is probably rife with bacteria a newborn would pick up immediately. Do you even know what to do with an umbilical cord?”
“An umbiwhat?” he gasped, and Tanya dropped him as she wheezed and held her belly.
“Get a cab, you motherfucker, before I—oogh!—tear your face off! You’ll be so fucking sorry if you don’t get a cab right now!”
With that, Respa snapped fully awake, yanking on jeans and pushing his feet into sneakers as quick as he could manage without slowing himself down. He helped Tanya into the only shoes that fit her swollen feet—ballet flats a size larger than her other shoes—and then half-pulled her along to the door and into the hallway. He mashed the elevator button madly; watching Tanya huff and puff and stifle her shrieks into deep animal noises made him nervous. She kept glaring at him, pinning the blame for this whole sorry morning on him with her eyes.
Outside, it didn’t take them long to get a cab. They were scruffy, but Tanya was pregnant, and the second cab they saw pulled over for them. “Brooklyn Hospital Center,” Respa said before he was even all the way inside the cab, Tanya loaded in ahead of him.
“She’s not gonna give birth in my backseat, is she?” the cabbie asked as he began to drive, looking at them both in his mirror.
“Drive fast and maybe I won’t!” Tanya shrilled. The cabbie rolled his eyes and sped up a bit, though if Tanya had her way they would be zooming past everybody at ninety miles per hour, thrice the city street speed limit.
The rest of the night was something of a stressful blur. He tried to explain to someone that they couldn’t pay, but his anxieties were waved away, and then Tanya was snatched away from him. As the official father of the baby, he was allowed into the room they’d set her up in, and there she crushed his right hand until he thought it might be as useless as his left. The doctor tried to give him a blow by blow of the action happening under the little tent they had over Tanya’s lower half, but Respa wanted none of it.
It was only when the baby, wiped of uterine muck and clipped of its umbilical cord, was placed still wailing in Tanya’s arms that Tanya smiled. For the first time since he couldn’t remember when, the smile was genuine and soft. She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear, and she cooed to the wet chicken she held.
“It’s a girl,” the doctor informed him, since Tanya was wrapped up in the newborn.
“Katherine,” Tanya said, and Respa was about to ask if he got to suggest any names, when Tanya looked up at him. “Katherine Julia Wilkins.”
The doctor suggested that Katherine get bloodwork done, but Tanya’s hackles shot up, shouting that how dare he insinuate that she’d give birth to anything but a perfectly healthy child. The doctor put his hands up in defeat.
They went back to the studio later that same day, Tanya cradling the tiny baby to her chest and cooing nonstop. The baby squalled most of the time; other passengers on the train looked uncomfortable, but of course nobody ever tells a woman with a newborn to quiet her kid down. When they got home, Tanya swaddled her in blanket upon blanket.
“It’s August,” Respa pointed out.
“So?” She wrapped the baby up like a burrito with only her head and hands visible, and peeled her tank top up to expose one breast. Respa looked away.
“Oh, like you’ve never seen a tit before,” she snapped. “Especially mine.”
“If someone takes their cock out unexpectedly, it’s not like I want to stare, and I’ve seen plenty of those,” he replied. “It’s August, take her out of all those blankets. She’s got to be boiling!”
“You don’t know the first thing about babies!” she said. “You’ve got to keep newborns warm, they don’t feel temperature like we do.”
“Says who?”
“Says everybody!”
“That is the stupidest—!”
But Tanya never listened to him. When it came time to make or spend money, she would stress his role in Kathy’s creation and existence, but when it came to actually caring for Kathy, she kept him at arm’s length. He could pay for her diapers, but he couldn’t actually change her (not that he was dying to). He could be the one to fork over cash for Kathy’s baby clothes, but he was allowed no part in actually choosing them or dressing her in them.
“I want to hold her,” Respa said sometimes, and Tanya would snip that men didn’t know how to hold babies, and he’d only drop her on her head, and then they’d have a retarded baby.
“No, what would make her retarded is the fact,” he would said angrily, “that you still haven’t come off the junk when you’re breastfeeding her, and you spent your entire pregnancy shooting up.”
“Shut up!” she screeched every time, and then if Kathy was asleep she would wake up bawling, and then she’d blame him for that and tend to the baby.
It was true that she still did her shots of heroin from time to time. The only times Respa was able to actually get a good look at his own daughter was when Tanya was asleep in the middle of the day, and when he did look, Kathy looked sickly to him. He bought her formula that he would sneak her during Tanya’s naps, and he came to regard those naps as the highlight of his days. It was only then that he could hold Kathy and smell her milky baby breath, could stroke her tummy and smile at her strangely iron grip on his index finger. He could marvel at her inky black eyes and black tufty hair, the little gurgling noises she made as she kicked her tiny feet in jerky motions.
And then he went to work at night.
He felt like he was working double time most nights, now; with Tanya’s style of mothering Kathy wasn’t that expensive to care for, but Tanya made other financial demands that had to be met, or else. Or else what, he wasn’t sure, but he was in no mood to find out, ever. He worked the clubs and bars earlier at night, and when people at those places started to couple off for real, he took off to his old haunts near Hell’s Kitchen to wait for men in cars, and for men who wanted quickies in doorwells.
Some nights Tanya would ask him if he ever picked up women at work, and usually she wouldn’t wait for his answer and ask if he was as mean to them as he was to her. She was usually high when these questions came.
The thing about picking up women was that they tended not to want a scruffy, underweight street thing like him. They had standards, unlike the male customers who just wanted to get off and get going. Many didn’t even understand what he was aiming for when he tried to make eye contact with them across the street, and sped up while staring instead at the wall or sidewalk. So he stuck to men.
He came home one night to find that Tanya had again passed out on the mattress, and Kathy smelled rank. The baby was crying in the sort of tired way that suggested she’d been at it for some time, pumping her tiny fists up and down with no particular rhythm.
He scooped her up, pausing to reel from her stench, and repositioned her to change her. It was ten minutes later when he was screwing a cap on the baby bottle he’d bought Kathy, filled with formula, that Tanya woke up, and froze at the sight of him holding their baby girl.
“Give her here,” Tanya demanded, standing.
“I’m feeding her,” he said, staring her down. He hefted Kathy gently, and put the bottle to her lips. “It’s formula.”
“The only thing Kathy should have is her mother’s breast milk,” Tanya replied, her voice low and deadly. “Now give her here.”
“No.” He looked now at Kathy, instead, who suckled on the rubber nipple of the bottle with satisfied murmurs.
“You don’t know what you’re doing! Hand her over, right now!” Tanya screeched, stomping her foot. “You know what—” She stomped over, reaching over with pasty arms to try to wrest the baby away from him. “Give me—”
He shoved her violently, and she toppled back onto the mattress, the back of her head hitting the plaster wall with a thunk. He cradled Kathy closer for a scant few seconds, and then he laid her on the mattress, at the other end where Tanya hadn’t fallen.
“Bitch,” he spat.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” she said angrily, rising again.
He gripped her arm tightly, and she made noises of protest that he ignored as he dragged her over to the worn couch on the opposite wall. He flung her onto the cushions, the corners of his mouth curling down bitterly.
“First you ask me to take responsibility for this kid,” he said, breathing deeply to keep himself from losing control too fast. “Then you tell me that I have to support it, but you won’t.” She raised her hand and opened her mouth to interrupt him, but he slapped the hand away and spoke over her. “And once it’s born, you give her my family’s name, but you won’t ever let me hold her.”
“You’d drop her,” she muttered, hugging herself and staring at her knees.
“You don’t know that I have any more chance than dropping her than you do, for one thing. For two, you’re killing her.”
At that, her head whipped back up, and her fingers dug into the flesh of her arms. “Killing—?! You presumptuous son of a bitch! You asshole!”
“Well, aren’t you?” he shouted, shoving her back against the couch. “You tell me all these things you read about in baby books at the bookstore, but isn’t it common fucking knowledge that you don’t shoot up while you’re breastfeeding?!”
“My baby—!”
“It’s my fucking baby, too!” he yelled, and this time he slapped her full across the face, which swept her off balance and onto her side, holding her cheek.
She barely had time to recover and retaliate before he was on the couch, too, and he pinned her to the cushions when he sat on her waist and held her wrists down in one hand.
“You fuck!” she shrieked, writhing beneath him. “Get off me, you worthless motherfucker!”
“I make all the money!” he shrieked right back, and he socked her in the jaw. Her jawbone was hard against his knuckles, the impact reverberating through the bones of his hand, but the blow shut her up. She looked more stunned than anything else; she swallowed, staring at the wall with big eyes.
After a few minutes of utter silence, he let her up, still staring at her coldly. She glanced at him nervously, and walked over to the mattress, where she sat down slowly. Still watching her, he retrieved the baby, bouncing her in light movements before he picked the bottle back up and set it to her mouth again. “I’m going to spend time with my daughter, now,” he told her, and he ignored her for Kathy for the next hour.
When Tanya was asleep he still pretended, sometimes, that Ryan was still with him. He would hug his flat pillow to his flat body and whisper sweet nothings to it, and the phrase “sweet nothings” had never meant more to him, because without the real Ryan there, they were nothing. If he felt Tanya shifting beside him, he would pause, and when her breathing stabilized he would hug the sack of compressed feathers to his cheek.
Tanya guessed her due date was sometime in August or early September. She was huge now; everything she did was physically taxing, and when she waddled around Respa stifled his laughter. On the other hand, everything made her angry. A single unwashed dish made her fling it across the apartment and kick the trash over; one of her own hairs in her canned soup made her bend her spoon until it was useless.
“You never say anything sweet to me,” she complained one day, lying in bed and drumming her fingers on her massive belly. Sometimes she tapped her popped-out belly button, too.
“What’s there to say?” he grumbled, folding his clothes. There was only so long one could go commando before things had to be washed.
“Tell me you love me.”
“That would be lying,” he replied, and she threw something hard and painful at his back. Upon inspection, it was the spoon she’d rendered useless, a little acute angle of metal.
“Well, say something.”
“I don’t want to.” He sighed at how the Daisy Dukes shorts were starting to outnumber his actual jeans. He missed wearing the jeans. He missed being able to pick which nights he wanted to make money. He missed his independence, no matter how unbearable it had seemed before.
“Don’t you care that I’m having your baby?”
“There’s no proof it’s even mine.”
“Stop saying that!” she shrieked. “Stop it, it’s like you’re calling me a slut!”
“I didn’t say that, I didn’t say anything like that.”
“Ughhh!” she groaned into a pillow she put over her face briefly. “Talking to you is like talking to the Cheshire cat.”
“I hope the baby has your eyes,” he said, and for a moment Tanya paused in her fidgeting, staring at the ceiling. Then she smiled, and turned over to sleep some more.
It was late August when Tanya woke him with a violent kick in his side. He rolled off the mattress, bleary and in pain, but Tanya had more pressing issues. She was saying something he couldn’t quite make out.
“What?” he said, rubbing at his eyes. “No, what? I can’t—”
“I said my water broke, you dick!” she hissed. “We have to get to the hospital or something!”
“N-no,” he said, sitting up slowly. “No hospitals.”
“Fuck you, you can’t tell me how to give birth to my baby. Unghh—” Her angry face melted into pain and heavy, fast breathing. “—Get a cab, downstairs—”
“Hospitals are expensive—”
Tanya grabbed the collar of his tatty shirt in both fists. “If I don’t get to a fucking hospital,” she ground out, spitting from between her teeth, “then me and this baby are both going to die, because neither of us know what to do, and this place is probably rife with bacteria a newborn would pick up immediately. Do you even know what to do with an umbilical cord?”
“An umbiwhat?” he gasped, and Tanya dropped him as she wheezed and held her belly.
“Get a cab, you motherfucker, before I—oogh!—tear your face off! You’ll be so fucking sorry if you don’t get a cab right now!”
With that, Respa snapped fully awake, yanking on jeans and pushing his feet into sneakers as quick as he could manage without slowing himself down. He helped Tanya into the only shoes that fit her swollen feet—ballet flats a size larger than her other shoes—and then half-pulled her along to the door and into the hallway. He mashed the elevator button madly; watching Tanya huff and puff and stifle her shrieks into deep animal noises made him nervous. She kept glaring at him, pinning the blame for this whole sorry morning on him with her eyes.
Outside, it didn’t take them long to get a cab. They were scruffy, but Tanya was pregnant, and the second cab they saw pulled over for them. “Brooklyn Hospital Center,” Respa said before he was even all the way inside the cab, Tanya loaded in ahead of him.
“She’s not gonna give birth in my backseat, is she?” the cabbie asked as he began to drive, looking at them both in his mirror.
“Drive fast and maybe I won’t!” Tanya shrilled. The cabbie rolled his eyes and sped up a bit, though if Tanya had her way they would be zooming past everybody at ninety miles per hour, thrice the city street speed limit.
The rest of the night was something of a stressful blur. He tried to explain to someone that they couldn’t pay, but his anxieties were waved away, and then Tanya was snatched away from him. As the official father of the baby, he was allowed into the room they’d set her up in, and there she crushed his right hand until he thought it might be as useless as his left. The doctor tried to give him a blow by blow of the action happening under the little tent they had over Tanya’s lower half, but Respa wanted none of it.
It was only when the baby, wiped of uterine muck and clipped of its umbilical cord, was placed still wailing in Tanya’s arms that Tanya smiled. For the first time since he couldn’t remember when, the smile was genuine and soft. She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear, and she cooed to the wet chicken she held.
“It’s a girl,” the doctor informed him, since Tanya was wrapped up in the newborn.
“Katherine,” Tanya said, and Respa was about to ask if he got to suggest any names, when Tanya looked up at him. “Katherine Julia Wilkins.”
The doctor suggested that Katherine get bloodwork done, but Tanya’s hackles shot up, shouting that how dare he insinuate that she’d give birth to anything but a perfectly healthy child. The doctor put his hands up in defeat.
They went back to the studio later that same day, Tanya cradling the tiny baby to her chest and cooing nonstop. The baby squalled most of the time; other passengers on the train looked uncomfortable, but of course nobody ever tells a woman with a newborn to quiet her kid down. When they got home, Tanya swaddled her in blanket upon blanket.
“It’s August,” Respa pointed out.
“So?” She wrapped the baby up like a burrito with only her head and hands visible, and peeled her tank top up to expose one breast. Respa looked away.
“Oh, like you’ve never seen a tit before,” she snapped. “Especially mine.”
“If someone takes their cock out unexpectedly, it’s not like I want to stare, and I’ve seen plenty of those,” he replied. “It’s August, take her out of all those blankets. She’s got to be boiling!”
“You don’t know the first thing about babies!” she said. “You’ve got to keep newborns warm, they don’t feel temperature like we do.”
“Says who?”
“Says everybody!”
“That is the stupidest—!”
But Tanya never listened to him. When it came time to make or spend money, she would stress his role in Kathy’s creation and existence, but when it came to actually caring for Kathy, she kept him at arm’s length. He could pay for her diapers, but he couldn’t actually change her (not that he was dying to). He could be the one to fork over cash for Kathy’s baby clothes, but he was allowed no part in actually choosing them or dressing her in them.
“I want to hold her,” Respa said sometimes, and Tanya would snip that men didn’t know how to hold babies, and he’d only drop her on her head, and then they’d have a retarded baby.
“No, what would make her retarded is the fact,” he would said angrily, “that you still haven’t come off the junk when you’re breastfeeding her, and you spent your entire pregnancy shooting up.”
“Shut up!” she screeched every time, and then if Kathy was asleep she would wake up bawling, and then she’d blame him for that and tend to the baby.
It was true that she still did her shots of heroin from time to time. The only times Respa was able to actually get a good look at his own daughter was when Tanya was asleep in the middle of the day, and when he did look, Kathy looked sickly to him. He bought her formula that he would sneak her during Tanya’s naps, and he came to regard those naps as the highlight of his days. It was only then that he could hold Kathy and smell her milky baby breath, could stroke her tummy and smile at her strangely iron grip on his index finger. He could marvel at her inky black eyes and black tufty hair, the little gurgling noises she made as she kicked her tiny feet in jerky motions.
And then he went to work at night.
He felt like he was working double time most nights, now; with Tanya’s style of mothering Kathy wasn’t that expensive to care for, but Tanya made other financial demands that had to be met, or else. Or else what, he wasn’t sure, but he was in no mood to find out, ever. He worked the clubs and bars earlier at night, and when people at those places started to couple off for real, he took off to his old haunts near Hell’s Kitchen to wait for men in cars, and for men who wanted quickies in doorwells.
Some nights Tanya would ask him if he ever picked up women at work, and usually she wouldn’t wait for his answer and ask if he was as mean to them as he was to her. She was usually high when these questions came.
The thing about picking up women was that they tended not to want a scruffy, underweight street thing like him. They had standards, unlike the male customers who just wanted to get off and get going. Many didn’t even understand what he was aiming for when he tried to make eye contact with them across the street, and sped up while staring instead at the wall or sidewalk. So he stuck to men.
He came home one night to find that Tanya had again passed out on the mattress, and Kathy smelled rank. The baby was crying in the sort of tired way that suggested she’d been at it for some time, pumping her tiny fists up and down with no particular rhythm.
He scooped her up, pausing to reel from her stench, and repositioned her to change her. It was ten minutes later when he was screwing a cap on the baby bottle he’d bought Kathy, filled with formula, that Tanya woke up, and froze at the sight of him holding their baby girl.
“Give her here,” Tanya demanded, standing.
“I’m feeding her,” he said, staring her down. He hefted Kathy gently, and put the bottle to her lips. “It’s formula.”
“The only thing Kathy should have is her mother’s breast milk,” Tanya replied, her voice low and deadly. “Now give her here.”
“No.” He looked now at Kathy, instead, who suckled on the rubber nipple of the bottle with satisfied murmurs.
“You don’t know what you’re doing! Hand her over, right now!” Tanya screeched, stomping her foot. “You know what—” She stomped over, reaching over with pasty arms to try to wrest the baby away from him. “Give me—”
He shoved her violently, and she toppled back onto the mattress, the back of her head hitting the plaster wall with a thunk. He cradled Kathy closer for a scant few seconds, and then he laid her on the mattress, at the other end where Tanya hadn’t fallen.
“Bitch,” he spat.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” she said angrily, rising again.
He gripped her arm tightly, and she made noises of protest that he ignored as he dragged her over to the worn couch on the opposite wall. He flung her onto the cushions, the corners of his mouth curling down bitterly.
“First you ask me to take responsibility for this kid,” he said, breathing deeply to keep himself from losing control too fast. “Then you tell me that I have to support it, but you won’t.” She raised her hand and opened her mouth to interrupt him, but he slapped the hand away and spoke over her. “And once it’s born, you give her my family’s name, but you won’t ever let me hold her.”
“You’d drop her,” she muttered, hugging herself and staring at her knees.
“You don’t know that I have any more chance than dropping her than you do, for one thing. For two, you’re killing her.”
At that, her head whipped back up, and her fingers dug into the flesh of her arms. “Killing—?! You presumptuous son of a bitch! You asshole!”
“Well, aren’t you?” he shouted, shoving her back against the couch. “You tell me all these things you read about in baby books at the bookstore, but isn’t it common fucking knowledge that you don’t shoot up while you’re breastfeeding?!”
“My baby—!”
“It’s my fucking baby, too!” he yelled, and this time he slapped her full across the face, which swept her off balance and onto her side, holding her cheek.
She barely had time to recover and retaliate before he was on the couch, too, and he pinned her to the cushions when he sat on her waist and held her wrists down in one hand.
“You fuck!” she shrieked, writhing beneath him. “Get off me, you worthless motherfucker!”
“I make all the money!” he shrieked right back, and he socked her in the jaw. Her jawbone was hard against his knuckles, the impact reverberating through the bones of his hand, but the blow shut her up. She looked more stunned than anything else; she swallowed, staring at the wall with big eyes.
After a few minutes of utter silence, he let her up, still staring at her coldly. She glanced at him nervously, and walked over to the mattress, where she sat down slowly. Still watching her, he retrieved the baby, bouncing her in light movements before he picked the bottle back up and set it to her mouth again. “I’m going to spend time with my daughter, now,” he told her, and he ignored her for Kathy for the next hour.