Chapter 5: Go find Alex Christopher

ROSE 𓆩♡𓆪

I don’t know how long I walked.

Long enough for my feet to register it. Long enough for the evening to finish becoming night and the streets to empty out to the particular sparse population of very late hours a cab rolling past without stopping, a man sitting in a doorway with his eyes fixed on nothing, someone’s music drifting from an upper window and gone before I could name the song.

My bag was heavy on my shoulder. My phone was dead. Demian’s words sat in my chest with the specific, settled weight of something that has found exactly the right place to cause damage.

“Don’t call me again.”

I kept walking.

There was nowhere to walk to. I understood that. But walking was doing something the standing still wouldn’t have done  keeping my body occupied so my brain could not fully arrive at the reality of my situation all at once. You can only absorb so much if you’re in motion. Standing still lets everything catch up.

I walked until my feet made the decision for me.

The bridge was not what I would have chosen.

But it was what was available  covered, set back from the main road, with a ledge wide enough to sit on and an angle that blocked most of the wind. I had passed it on the way to work for two years without once looking at it the way I was looking at it now.

I sat down on the ledge with my bag between my feet and my back against the concrete and looked at the strip of dark water below and thought:

 this is what all of it added up to.

The good grades my parents were proud of before they died. The careful behavior my uncle demanded and I provided. The years of being quiet and grateful and taking up as little space as possible. The love I gave Demian without measuring it or asking for an accounting.

This is what it added up to.

A bridge at midnight with fifty cents in my pocket and nowhere to be in the morning.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and held them there until the pressure became its own kind of sensation and the rest of it receded slightly.

I did not sleep that night. I sat on that ledge and watched the city’s distant glow and waited for morning the way you wait for something you’re not sure you want but have no way of stopping.

Three days.

Three nights on that ledge, or near it. Moving when I had to, sitting when I could, spending the small coins I gathered from day work that lasted hours and paid almost nothing on soup and bread and the specific calculating hunger of someone learning how far a small amount of food can stretch if you are deliberate about it.

My body was doing something I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe yet. Not just hunger but something else. A new kind of tiredness that sleep didn’t touch. A nausea that arrived without warning and left without apology, usually in the morning, sometimes at midday, occasionally just because.

I ignored it.

I had a list of things I was allowing myself to think about and that was not on the list.

On the third evening he appeared.

I registered him first as someone who was slowing down on the walkway above and then not passing, which was unusual, because people passed. That was what they did. They moved around the obstacle of someone sitting where they shouldn’t be and kept moving and did not look back.

He stopped.

An old man. Small, slightly bent, with a worn wooden cane and the careful gait of someone who had learned to negotiate the world at a different pace. He looked down at me from the walkway with eyes that were sharp in a way that age hadn’t touched.

I waited for the look. The one that meant move along or what’s wrong with you or the particular blank-faced discomfort of someone who has decided not to get involved.

He came down the embankment steps instead.

Slowly. Carefully. And then he was level with me, lowering himself with the patience of a man at peace with the time things take, and setting a small paper bag near my knee without speaking first.

The smell reached me before I could decide whether to refuse it. Bread. Something sweet underneath. My stomach made a sound I was glad the traffic noise covered it.

“Eat,” he said. “You shouldn’t go hungry like this.”

I looked at him for a moment. At the bag. At him again.

I opened the bag.

We sat in silence while I ate  not the uncomfortable silence of strangers but something quieter and less demanding than that. He looked at the water. I looked at the bread in my hands. The city hummed its indifferent hum around us.

“You’ve been out here for a while,” he said eventually. Not a question.

“A few days,” I said.

He nodded. Like this was information he was filing rather than judging.

“Don’t let the world make you small,” he said. “I'll try. That’s what it does. But trying isn’t the same as succeeding.”

I swallowed.

Didn’t trust my voice enough to use it.

He didn’t push. Just sat for a while longer, then got up with the same careful patience he had come down with, and walked back up the embankment steps, and was gone.

I sat with the empty paper bag in my hands and thought about what he had said.

Then I curled up on the ledge with my bag as a pillow and slept for the first time in three days.

He found me again the next morning.

His name was Mr. Adler and he were seventy-one years old and had lived in the same apartment four streets away for thirty years and had opinions about everything and stated them without softening, which I found, unexpectedly, easier than kindness.

He offered me a small back room. A cot, a window that faced a wall, a single shelf. In exchange I helped with errands, washed dishes, organized the chaos of a life that had been accumulating without a system for decades.

It wasn’t home. But it was a door with a lock and a ceiling and I understood now, in a way I hadn’t before, exactly how much those two things were worth.

Two weeks in, my body stopped allowing me to ignore it.

The nausea had graduated from occasional to constant, a low persistent tide that rose sharply in the mornings and never fully retreated. 

I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the cot or the hours I was keeping. Food that should have been neutral turned my stomach. My sense of smell had developed opinions it hadn’t previously had.

I sat on the edge of the cot one morning with my hands pressed flat on my knees and looked at the wall and let myself think the thought I had been carefully not thinking for two weeks.

“When did I last…”

I stopped.

Counted back.

The number I arrived at sat in my chest like a stone.

Mr. Adler had a donation bag in the bathroom cabinet, the kind that accumulates in houses that have been lived in long enough, items from various sources that arrived and were stored without particular purpose. I found it without asking. I opened it without ceremony.

The test was there. Cheap, generic, the kind with the two windows and the single or double line.

I sat on the cold bathroom floor with it in my hands and looked at the water stain on the opposite wall and thought about everything I had been certain of a month ago. The things I thought I knew about my life and where it was going and who was going to be in it.

I thought about one night in a hotel room that smelled like cedar and expensive cologne and a man who had said I’ve got you in a voice I had tried very hard to forget.

I pressed the test against my chest.

Waited.

Turned it over.

Positive.

I put it face down on the floor.

Picked it up again.

Positive.

I sat very still on the cold tile and felt the word arrive in every part of me, not all at once but in sequence, working its way through each layer of understanding until it reached somewhere deep enough that I couldn’t rationalize around it or reframe it or talk myself into a different interpretation.

Pregnant.

By a man who didn’t know my last name.

In a borrowed bathroom in an old man’s apartment with fourteen dollars to my name and no job, no home, no family who wanted me and no boyfriend who was still speaking to me.

My hand moved without instruction and pressed flat against my stomach low, instinctive, the gesture arriving before the thought behind it had fully formed.

I sat there on the floor for a long time.

Outside the small frosted window, the city made its noise. Traffic. Someone’s radio. A child’s voice briefly and then gone. The ordinary, continuous machinery of a world that was proceeding completely without reference to what was happening on this bathroom floor.

What am I going to do?

The question filled the room.

I didn’t have an answer.

But I sat there until I stopped shaking, and then I got up, and washed my face, and went to find Mr. Adler,  because there was a conversation I needed to have and he was the only person I had left to have it with.

He listened without interrupting.

All of it, the hotel room, the money, Demian, Sandra, the job, the bridge, the test this morning. He sat across from me at his small kitchen table with his hands folded around his mug and his eyes on my face and he listened the way very few people actually listen  fully, without preparing his response while I was still talking.

When I finished, the kitchen was quiet.

He looked at his mug for a moment.

Then he looked at me.

“There is only one thing that makes sense,” he said. “Go find Alex Christopher. Whatever happened between you,  that child is his. And he has the resources to make sure you and that child are safe. Everything else can be figured out from there, but that is where you start.”

I looked at the table.

“He won’t believe me,” I said.

“Maybe,” Mr. Adler said. “Go anyway.”

The Christopher estate was a different category of place.