The Loyalty of Elephants

Jennifer peels off her dress.  Her new Victoria’s Secret lingerie—blue with lace trim—shows off her breasts, although nothing can hide the rolling hills across her stomach that have stubbornly remained since the creature was born.  Feeling shy, she slides under the covers next to André.

“What’s the rush?”  The whites of his eyes shimmer.  “Let me see you.”

She loves when he sounds desperate, like his desire for her is an electric current coursing through his blood, but still, she’s self-conscious.  Before he can pull back the blankets, she takes his hand.  “I’m cold.”

“Why’d you buy them if you’re going to hide under there?”

He can talk her into practically anything.  “You’re right,” she says sheepishly and then watches as he draws back the sheets; she feels a twinge of guilt as she realizes the down comforter was a wedding gift.  “André,” she whispers.

“You look amazing.”

“No.”

His breathing is shallow.  “You know you do.”  He wraps one hand around her waist, pulls her closer and kisses her left breast.

She grips his shoulders.  “Yes.”

Afterwards, she rests her head on his chest, cooing, grinning up at him.  “I love the way you touch me.”  Everything André does in bed—his frantic clutching, his quiet moans—reminds her what it feels like to be wanted.

“I love touching you.”

She reaches down and entwines her fingers in his.  “I wish we could stay this way forever.  Shut out the rest of the world and stop time.”

“That would be nice.”  For an aspiring novelist, he has a limited vocabulary.

Jen coils her hair around her finger.  “Life is so complicated.  They don’t tell you it’s going to be like that when you’re a kid.”

“Does it get any easier?” he asks.  She’s annoyed but tries not to show it.  She’s only six years older than him so why does he talk like she’s part of a different generation?

“Thirty-one is not so different from twenty-five,” she says, trying to be playful.  “It’s just, once you have a kid, your life is cooked.”

He looks up at the ceiling; it’s something he does when he talks about the future.  “I’m not going to have kids.  My career is too important.”

“I don’t blame you.  It’s good to have dreams.  You should definitely keep writing.”

For a moment, neither of them speaks.  “I thought you liked having a kid,” he says softly.

Jen wishes she could package her daughter in a box, tie a ribbon on it, and mail the whole bundle to Alaska so she could be raised by wolves.  “Oh, I love having a child.  It’s the most important thing I’ll ever do.  But it’s a lot of work.”  This is her standard answer.  She’s repeated these three sentences so many times she isn’t sure if she’s already said them to André.

“That’s really cool.  You should be proud, you know?  I can’t imagine being a father.  Raising a kid is the hardest thing in the world.”

She rolls over so she can see his face:  deep-set brown eyes, a square jaw peppered with stubble, and a nose so perfectly straight that she has to resist the urge to bite it.  “Let’s not talk about all that right now.  Remember, we’re in our space capsule.  The world has vanished below us.”

“Right.  Bye-bye world.”

“Bye-bye responsibilities.”

She squeezes his hand.  “Tell me more about your novel.”

“Really?”

“We have eternity together.  You may as well.”

He looks around the room to gather his thoughts.  “I don’t want this book to be just about the words in it, you know?”

She does not know, but she nods encouragingly.

“I plan to subvert plot conventions.”  He sits up, gathering steam.  “Do something new.”  He then rambles for a few minutes.  Finally, he says, “When it’s published, I’ll get a job teaching somewhere on the West Coast.”

She doesn’t want to think about him moving away.  “It’ll be hard to commute there from space.”

“I can handle the long commute if I have someone nice to come home to.”

She closes her eyes and lets herself be carried away by the fantasy.  “I’m going to be a supermodel on some faraway planet.”  She had done a little modeling in her early twenties—even some work in New York City—but that all changed when she and Jack had gotten serious.

“You’ll specialize in space bras.”  He grabs clumsily at her breasts.  “And make millions of dollars.”

“Space dollars.”

“Those are worth twice as much!”

She pictures herself floating in a capsule circling the earth wearing nothing but a pointy metallic bra and underwear; her body sinks deeper into the mattress and suddenly she wants to sleep.

“Hey.”  He caresses her arm with his fingertips.  “Don’t doze off there.  What time does Jack get home?”

“Not until late.  There’s so much to do before the murder trial starts next week.”  It would be a relief if he were out late because he was also having an affair, but he would never cheat; she’s the one with regrets.

“We shouldn’t push our luck, though.”  He kisses her on the forehead and hops out of bed.

She lies back and watches him pull on his jeans.  His legs are impossibly long.  “When will I see you again?” she asks.

“I’m free next Friday.”

“A whole week?”  She pouts.  “That’s so far away.”

“I know.  I’m sorry.  I have to study for my test, though.  I’ll be burning the midnight oil pretty much every night.”  He’s studying copyediting through an extension program at Stanton Community College.

She sexily bites her lower lip.  “Maybe I can help you study.”  She pushes her chest toward his perfect face.

“What do you know about editing?”

She sighs.  Either he’s deliberately missing the point or he’s denser than a brick wall.  “I can rub your neck while you work.”  She brushes the back of her hand down his cheek.  “I can rub all sorts of things.”

He sits up.  “That sounds nice, but messing around together in my parent’s basement isn’t my idea of fun.”  He’s living with his folks until he gets a job.

“How will they know?”  The idea of making love while his parents watch network television a floor above actually makes her giddy; she and Jack had done those sorts of things when they were in college visiting his family over breaks.  She remembers Jack putting his forefinger over her mouth as she moaned.  Shh.  You’re being too loud!  Both of them giggling.

André pulls on his turtleneck.  “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

He does that a lot, dismissing her with some bit of nonsense.  “Okay, next week, then.  Come over here as soon as you can.”

“7 o’clock.  On the dot.  You can count on me.”

Jack’s armpits smell like vinegar and his skin is sticky from an evening spent poring over paperwork.  He kisses Jen’s cheek as he crawls into bed, releases his full weight onto the mattress, and lets out a pained moan.  Not even thirty minutes later the creature begins one of its screaming fits.  Jen covers her ears, hoping she can make it go away, but it’s like trying to block out the sound of a thunderstorm.  She pulls herself to her feet and stumbles into the nursery, wondering how someone so small—she’s only twenty-three months old—can produce so much noise.  “Be quiet, April.  Daddy is sleeping.”

The beast sniffles and closes one eye; it’s her way of thinking hard about something.  “Daddy big.”

“It’s because he eats pizza for dinner every night and doesn’t exercise.”

“Bye-bye!”

“Does that mean you want to go back to sleep?”

“Cookie me!”

“Cookie you?  I don’t think so.”

“Baby.”

Jen thinks this exchange would probably seem cute to her Pilates friends and wishes she had a video so she could play it for them.  She doesn’t have the knack for telling stories of these midnight escapades like some of the others; she ends up sounding as annoyed as she really is about being woken up.  “You’re a monster.  Such a silly monster.”

“Baby!”  A soft familiar sound follows this exclamation.

Jen pinches the top of her own nose.  No one tells you your kid is going to poop more often than a rabbit.  She flips her daughter on her back and starts peeling off the soiled diaper.

“Mommy smell!”

“You’re the one who smells.”  She holds out the soiled diaper.  “You smell this?”

Jen cleans up her daughter.  She has Jack’s thin lips and pale skin, along with his crooked nose.  If Jen hadn’t been there when April had emerged from her body like a squealing monkey, she wouldn’t believe it was her child.

April gurgles.  “Drink.”

“No.”  Jen clicks off the light.  “Go back to sleep.”

“Mama!”

Her head feels thick.  “Go back to sleep, honey.”  If she could just get one peaceful night.  “Please.”

April takes as much air as she can into her lungs and then releases a piercing, hawkish shriek.

Jen flicks the light back on.  “Jesus, April.”  She drags her feet to the crib.  “Not another night like this.  I can’t.”

More shrieking.

“I’ll make you a deal.  I’ll give you a cookie if you stop.  April?  Honey?”

A scorching rage is building behind Jen’s eyes.  She covers her ears and drops to her knees beside the crib.  “Can’t you fucking shut up?  Just shut the fuck up!  Shut up!”  She pounds her palms against her temple.  “Shut.  The.  Fuck.  Up!”  April’s howls come in pulsing waves like a police siren.

“What the hell is going on in here?”  Jack’s hairy stomach sags over his boxer shorts.

Jen sits down on the floor facing him and wraps her arms around her knees.  “Did I wake you?”  She hears what a dumb question that is.

“It sounds like World War III in here.”

“She was crying and I was—”

“What were you doing?”

She wishes he would go back to bed.  “I don’t know.  I guess I lost it.”

“I guess you did.  Jesus, Jen.”

“I’m tired, that’s all.”

“I know, honey, but we’re both exhausted.  It’s just that I’m the one who has to get up and go to work every day.  Can’t you talk to your girlfriends about what you should be doing?”

She hates when he says this; when’s the last time she had a night out with her girlfriends?  Doesn’t he know that spending all day with the baby is hard work?  She would kill for one day of even the worst kind of office drudgery.

Before she can respond, he asks, “Don’t you love our baby?”

She looks around the nursery:  the toys she had arranged neatly in their boxes, the tiny dresser full of freshly laundered baby clothes, the gentle nightlight.  Evidence of her hard work.  Her face burns again.  “Of course I do!”

“Then you have to get it together.  Learn how to comfort her.”

“I’m trying.”

“Are you?”

“Of course I am.  I… I…”  She can’t think of a proper defense.  But what is she guilty of?  He talks like he’s the expert in how to raise kids, but he’s going to go to work tomorrow and defend some teenager who killed a loving couple in their sleep.

Jack rubs his chin.  “Listen, I have to be up at 6 a.m.  I can’t come in here like a referee every night.  When the trial is over, things will be different, but for now, you have to handle this.”

She doubts any of that is true.  “I know.”

April wails.  He stares at the baby, hands on hips.  “Poor thing.”  Jack takes a breath.  Then he sits down on the floor and wraps his arms around Jen.  He stinks, still.  “Shit,” he says, “We should have—Once this whole…”  He stops mid-sentence and rests his head on her shoulder.

“I know,” she says.  Anything to get him to leave her alone.

“I’m sorry, hon.”  He caresses her arm.

Reconciliation used to lead to sex, but this conversation feels perfunctory, like he’s a funeral director and she’s bereaved.  No surprise, either; they’ve barely touched since five or six months before the creature was born.  “I am too.”

After a moment he gets up and stands over her.  April is still crying but beginning to wind down.  “I’m glad we had this talk,” he says.  “This was good.”

“Yeah.  Really good,” she says.

She spends Saturday staring out the dining room window as a freezing rain slaps down against Franklin Road.  Icicles hang down from the gutters and the thin metallic railing that leads to the walk.  Tree branches bend under the weight of ice that encases them like a cast for a broken leg.  When April cries, Jen imagines curling up in André’s arms and looking up at his clear eyes.  His belief in his own promising future makes her believe something good can happen to her too.

Jack comes home before nine—reasonable for him—and she listens to him drone on about the trial over leftover moo shu pork.  Sometimes she tries to imagine what it was like that night for Billy Lawson, what kind of rage drove him to pull the trigger and kill those people.  She can picture herself strolling into the house, looking around for stuff to steal.  She can see her small feet on the carpet leaving tracks of mud.  She can hear a clock ticking and rain battering the windows.  But the images that float through her mind always evaporate into a foggy dream.  She can feel her heart beating, looking forward to running away to a beach in Mexico, but she can’t feel the fear.  Or the anger.  Why not just steal everything—pick them clean—and leave them alone?  Whatever rage has built up in her brief life, she knows at least she’s not a murderer.

Jack snores louder than he usually does; Jen tosses and turns until finally dozing off before morning.  Her husband gets himself up, dressed, fed, and out of the house before she stirs.  Her legs are bags of sand as she drags herself into April’s bedroom; incredibly, the creature is sleeping, her chest huffing in and out, a puddle of drool forming in a dimple in her cheek.  There’s no acrid smell either.  It’s a fucking miracle.

Without dressing, she makes a cup of coffee and sits in the kitchen, chin in hand, staring at her phone.  It would be easy to call her lover and beg him to meet.  Yes, his upcoming test is important, but she has needs too.  If he really loved her, he’d make time to visit.  But she knows it’s hopeless; calling would only make her seem desperate.  And besides, men need to think their careers are more important than their partners or they get restless and run away.  She’s never understood the male ego; how is a trial or a bunch of words on a page more important than a kiss?  Maybe that makes her old-fashioned, she thinks, but she can’t help how she feels.

The next three days bring more of the same, though she’s asleep before Jack crawls into bed with his vinegar smell at night.  She sleeps restlessly and wakes several times each night to perform her domestic duties.  When she’s not with André, she feels more like a wet nurse than a woman.  The last day before her meeting with him is the most difficult to endure.

He calls Friday afternoon and asks if they can meet at the library, instead of her home.  It’s a romantic gesture—it’s where they first met each other—but she doesn’t want to risk being seen together.

“It’s important,” he says.

“Why?”

“I don’t want to say over the phone.  You have to trust me.”

“I do trust you.”

She taps the phone three times, their code for “I love you.”  She can’t risk saying it out loud.

“Me too, babe.”

She gets to the nearly empty library a half-hour early with April and passes the circulation desk.  She tries not to make eye contact with the mousey librarian; Jen’s husband was defending the kid who had killed the woman’s parents.  It had nothing to do with her, but Jen felt guilty by association.  She couldn’t help thinking that everyone close to the case hated her.

The aisles are deserted.  Jen puts April down in her carrier and picks a book off the shelf.  It’s The Elephant Whisperer.  On her phone she Googles the title and finds a story about the author.  After his death, the elephants he rescued marched to his house in South Africa and held a two-day vigil.  Since they had no way of knowing he’d died no one can explain how they did this.  All at once she flashes back to her sixth-grade science class where a teacher talked about how some men in Africa had murdered all the male elephants for their tusks.  Her science teacher had said that elephants have emotions, just like human beings.  When the young males lost their fathers and had no one to teach them right from wrong, all they had left was their anger and they went on a rampage, raping rhinos and killing people.  It seemed savage to her sixth-grade self, but now, thinking about the elephants from this book, she realizes that elephants are amazing creatures—almost civilized.  They mate for life and even bury their dead.  She laughs mirthlessly; humans certainly aren’t so loyal.  She is so caught up in her thoughts that she startles when a book falls to the ground.  A couple of kids giggle on the other side of the shelves and Jen is relieved.  For a moment she’d imagined it was Jack spying on her.  Silly thought.  She tucks the book into the baby’s carrier, promising herself to check it out.

One afternoon a few months back she’d hired a sitter to get some time to herself and, after getting her hair and nails done, found herself in the library reading the first Fifty Shades of Grey romance.  She felt more self-conscious than titillated and decided she should make an effort to improve herself by reading a book about real life.  After thumbing through a few dusty hard covers, pulled out The Diary of Anne Frank.  She’d heard of this one.  She crouched on the floor, started reading, and was immediately captivated by the beauty of the writing.  How was it possible that a young girl in those terrible circumstances had such nuanced thoughts?  Then all at once, a man with a wiry frame and thick hair at the far end of the aisle caught her eye.  André smiled at her.  Without thinking she stood and said, “Can you help me reach a book?”  She didn’t have one in mind so when he approached, she pointed.

“This one?”

Her memory of this moment is sepia toned.  “Yes, that’s it.”

It was 1776 by David McCullough.  “You in grad school or something?”

“No.  I just like history.”  She was surprised at how easy it was to lie.  “What about you?”  He was doing research on the Civil War for his novel.  “Wow, you must be smart if you’re writing a book.”

“I don’t know,” he said, but she could tell he thought he was smart.  He puffed out his chest; there was no shame in him.

“I used to write poetry when I was in college.  I guess every girl does.  It wasn’t very good.”

He nodded.  “My book uses poetic techniques.  You’d probably really love it.”

She touched his forearm.  “Can I read what you have so far?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”  She remembered feeling a moment of irritation, but he held up a finger to stop her from objecting.  “That’s not what I meant.  It’s just, it’s a mess.  No one would understand it at this point.  It barely makes sense to me.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“Yeah?”

He invited her out for a cup of coffee, but she didn’t want anyone to see them together.  She whispered, “Why don’t you come over my house for dinner some time and I’ll make something for you?”  She still can’t believe she’d said that.  Some days she plays this scene over and over in her mind to recall the raw sexual excitement.

“I’d like that.”

He took everything else in stride.  He knew she was married because of her ring, but he wanted her, he said, when they met at her house a few days later.  “The heart wants what it wants.”  That was the first time she remembered being surprised a writer could fall back on a pat explanation for human behavior.  Maybe writers are like everybody else; it was a disappointing thought that she decided she didn’t want to believe.

He arrives ten minutes late.  His hair is messy and he’s only wearing a sweater and jeans.

“Where’s your coat?”

“I must have forgotten it.”  His voice is monotone.

“It’s freezing out.  How could you have forgotten?”

“I don’t know.”

Sure no one is watching them, she puts her hand in his.  “Why did you want to meet here instead of home?”

“Because I have something to tell you and if we met at your place, I would have already ripped off your blouse.”

She takes a breath.  “Okay.  Tell me.”

“I didn’t pass my editing exam.”  His face is red with anger.  “It was totally different than the practice test.  The whole thing is a scam.”

She falls back a step.  “At least you know what to expect now.  With how hard you work, you’ll definitely pass it next time.”

“I’m not taking it again,” he says.  “And who wants to be an editor, anyway?  I should be doing something that inspires me and makes me want to wake up every morning.”

“And when your book sells, you won’t have to worry about money anymore.”  She smiles eagerly.

André pauses.  “I can’t keep living with my parents.  It’s ridiculous.  I’m twenty-five years old.”

“There’s no shame in living with your parents at your age.”  As the words pass her lips, she realizes she doesn’t believe them at all.

André stands up straighter, looking resolute.  “I’m going to move some place quiet.  Vermont, I think.  Get an easy job, like cashier or bartender, and finish my novel.”  He turns away from the shelves and focuses his attention on her.  His voice softens.  “I want you to go with me.”

Jen is startled; she takes a step back and knocks over a stack of books that had been piled on a trolley.  She’s relieved because picking them up gives her a moment to think.  Does he really mean this?  Is it possible?  And her daughter—was André ready to raise a child with her?  The baby cries and throws the elephant book out of the stroller.  Does Jen even want to bring the baby?  She picks the book up and stuffs it back into the stroller.  She straightens but can’t quite look André in the eye.  Jen is aware of an icy draft coming from the windows at the end of the aisle.  “That’s crazy.  I have a baby.  My husband…”

“I know how it sounds, but I love you and I really think this is the right thing to do.”

She hears the percussive clanking of a heating pipe coming to life, the intermittent banging.  “I love you too,” she says.  “But I can’t.”

“Why don’t you think about it?  Give it one night.”

“Okay,” she says.  “One night.”

She sits on the edge of her bed past midnight replaying the scene from the library in her mind.  If she stayed behind in Benfield, wouldn’t she regret it?  Vermont with André would be a life worth living.  Maybe she would begin writing a memoir of her own.  Obviously, she doesn’t have as much to say as Anne Frank, but maybe she’s learned a thing or two in her thirty-one years.

A headlight fills the room with light, briefly flashing a silhouette of an icicle on the ceiling.  Startled, she rushes to the window to see if it’s Jack, but it’s dark outside except for a distant streetlight.  She pulls open the window.

April screams from the other room.  “Mommy!”  Jen tries to shut out the screaming, but it’s impossible.  “Mommy!”

Jen slams the window shut.

They make a plan to run away Monday morning.  In the meantime, Jen acts as if nothing’s changed, even though she feels something has sparked to life inside her.  It reminds her of the anticipation she used to feel on Christmas mornings with her parents and brother when she was a kid, excited to open presents, and she realizes that she’d been lying to herself since the day she learned she was pregnant.  Jack had been sitting on the couch watching a football game when she told him.  He jumped up and hugged her and she’d thought, he wants this and that’s enough, his joy will carry her until she’s happy too.

She spends Thursday morning at Stop & Shop buying TV dinners that Jack can easily prepare when she’s gone, along with several cases of baby food.  A Muzak version of The Beatles “Hey Jude” plays on the speakers overhead and sounds compelling in spite of the tacky arrangement.  A few paper snowflakes dangle from the ceiling, limp and cracked, and yet they make her think of hiking hand-in-hand with André along a snow-covered trail in Vermont, a string of shimmering stars lighting up the blanket of the sky above them.  Later, she sits at the mechanic’s as he finishes the inspection for their Audi, listening to the tangled music of his tools ringing and clanging.

She’s aware of every moment that moves her closer to Monday when her new life will begin:  Jack’s snoring, April’s bawling, the leak in the attic that’s starting to come through to the bedroom.

When Monday finally arrives, she can barely breathe.

“I have errands to get to,” she says to Jack over breakfast.

“This early?”

“Go figure.  I’m feeling motivated.”

“That’s great.”

As she watches the Audi move through the automatic car wash—Jack will appreciate this little gesture—she jots down a short note:  “Dear Jack, I’m sorry but our life together was stifling me.  Maybe this comes as a shock to you, but it shouldn’t.  There’s nothing in Benfield for me and I can’t go through life without hope.  There’s a bunch of baby food in the basement.  I’m sure you’ll manage.  Please don’t look for me.  I’m sorry.  Jen.”

April cries all the way to the courthouse and, as usual, there’s nothing Jen can do to quiet her.  But the usual frustration dissolves as she realizes this is the last time she’ll ever need to feel this way.  She parks the car in the rear parking lot and turns around to face her daughter in the back seat.

“Mommy loves you, okay?”  It bothers her that she feels nothing as she says the words, so she tries again.   “Mommy loves you.  You remember that no matter what daddy tells you.”

Inside, the sound of April’s crying pings and bounces around the marble staircase that leads to the courtroom.

“Shh,” she whispers.  “Just be quiet for a little while.”  April howls.  Jen tightens her grip on the baby carrier with one hand and compresses the sides of her own temples with the other.

It isn’t difficult to find the courtroom where the Lawson trial is being held; a horde of reporters linger outside the door, chatting and sipping coffee, waiting for the day’s proceedings to begin.  She doesn’t want to leave the creature near any of these leeches, so she walks past them and down a narrow hall around the side of the court.  Ahead of her is a deserted bench.  Perfect, she thinks.  But there’s a security desk manned by a policeman that she has to get past first.

“My husband is Jack Breneman.”  She switches the carrier from one hand to the other.  “Can I get through here?”

“Not without paperwork.”  The guard is pale with blonde hair and light blue eyes.  He takes a sip of something from a Styrofoam cup and then grins; he seems to enjoy preventing her from passing.

She leans closer to see the name on his badge.  “Please, Ron, I need to talk to my husband.  It’s an emergency.”

“Why don’t you give him a call?”  He self-consciously covers his badge with one hand.

“He’s not answering.”

“Because he’s busy.  That’s my guess.”

She glances at the bench on the other side of the desk.  “Listen.  Can I put the baby down right there for five minutes?  I need to…”  She doesn’t have to make an effort to look harried.  “You know.  The bathroom.”

He considers it.  “You’ll be right back?”

This is the ideal place because it guarantees someone will notice the creature and call her husband.  “I promise.”  She rushes past Ron before he can change his mind and deposits April on the bench.  “Thank you so much.”

“Hurry up.  I’m not a sitter.”

“I will.”

Instead of immediately racing back outside where André should be waiting by now in his parent’s SUV, she climbs a set of stairs that leads to a deck that runs along the perimeter of the open atrium and finds a location where she can watch the security desk without being noticed.  She wants to make sure that Ron calls her husband once he figures out she’s not returning.

She pulls her buzzing phone from her purse, but before she can see who is calling, there’s a commotion near the security desk and Jen cranes her neck to see what’s going on.  Billy Lawson is being led in handcuffs out of a back room by two policemen.  She holds her fist to her heart as they sit the murderer down next to April.  The policemen don’t seem to notice, but Billy, his lips twisted, watches the creature as she cries.  Even with cuffed wrists, he tries to cover his ears.  Jen recognizes the routine and knows nothing will block the sound.  Billy leans closer to the baby until they’re nearly butting heads.  April’s face is crimson.  Billy’s is pale.

Against her will, Jen is transported to the crime scene on the night of the murder.  She imagines herself standing in the corner of the bedroom, next to a box pleat curtain, and a bureau covered with sparkling gold jewelry.  A portable chess board, a pair of nail clippers, tweezers, a crossword puzzle and pen sit on his nightstand; hers has a crusty bottle of skin lotion, nail polish, a Steven King novel and a pair of reading glasses.  The woman sleeps on her back, her wrinkled skin twitching.  The man lies on his stomach.  Both snore.  Billy edges into the room.  His eyes are spinning; his lips are wet.  Everything is tinted red; there’s no thought, no reason—there’s only anger, torture, the injustices of the world, there’s a trumpeting sound, the angry roar of an elephant.  Billy pulls a handgun from his pants and aims it at the man’s head.  The pistol is heavy; he holds it with two hands.  It’s the heaviest object in the world.

Jen springs down the steps two at a time and races toward the security desk.  Ron tries to say something, but she rushes past him and clutches at the carrier.  The two policemen guarding Billy stop her, each gripping one arm.

“Whoa there,” says Cop 1.

“What the hell?” says Cop 2.

Jen looks the first in the eyes.  “My baby.”  She’s calm.  “Please.”

Ron tips his cap.  “It’s okay,” he says.  “She’s good.”

They let her go and Jen pulls April from the carrier—her crying is coming in panicked bursts—and buries her nose in her daughter’s bald scalp.  She smells like stale corn chips.

“Hey!  Your carrier!”  The murderer’s voice is softer than she would have thought.  She glances back; she and Billy lock eyes.  Somehow it feels like he is the only one who isn’t judging her.