“A pregnancy, not my mind.”
Maggie frowned. “Yeah. Okay.”
When Maggie got up to get them each a soda, Ava checked her phone. No response from Mercy.
That night, she dreamed that she walked through the swamp, cradling a swaddled baby in her arms. It had to be her baby, because it had little tufts of black hair and the widest dark eyes. Ava snuggled it close to her chest as she walked through the dense undergrowth, stepping over knobby cypress roots and dodging wet patches of mud. The mist shifted up from the boggy soil, filling her nose with the smell of damp and decay, peat and brackish water. The branches knotted together overhead, the sunlight dappled and mist-shrouded. Something called up in the trees, a thin high scream. And something bellowed, deep and low to the earth. It made her think of the sound Mercy had described to her, the roar of an alligator.
She kept walking, driven by some dream-urge that had purpose, but no sense. She ducked under a low branch and felt cobwebs stretch across her face. And then she stood at the edge of a murky green pool, some little lagoon that fed in rivulet tributaries out into the deeper channels. On the opposite bank, she saw the wide slide marks, where the gators had gone into the water. A single shaft of sunlight beamed down onto the water, turning the surface opaque, dotted with midges.
Her voice built in her chest, and hurtled up her throat before she could stop it. “Big Son!” she called. “Come on out, you big son of a bitch!”
Clutching the baby tight with one arm, she knelt and plucked a rock from a small pile of them. She tossed it in.Plunk. The ripples ran outward from it, the green water lapping. Another rock.Plunk. A third, and she saw the disturbance on the surface, the little ridges that broke the water, the knobs of the eyes, the tip of the nose. Here he came, and he was monstrous.
“Big Son!” Ava called again.
And then she gathered the baby up and heaved it out over the water the same way she’d thrown the rocks. The gator’s head broke the surface and his jaws opened as she screamed…
And then she was in her bedroom, tangled in sweat-drenched sheets, panting, new morning sunlight bombarding her senses.
She’d overslept; it was well past time to get up for school.
Stay home a few days, Maggie had said, but she didn’t want to. She hated the way she felt trapped.
And Mercy hadn’t texted her back.
She was eating breakfast when she deciphered the dream.
She set her half-eaten toast back on her plate and said, “I was pregnant.”
Maggie whipped around, eyes tight and startled under the tight pressure of her yoga headband. “Yeah…” she said, slowly.
“No,” Ava said, “I mean, I was pregnant, and I knew it, and I knew there was something off about that text, but I went to Carter’s house anyway. I was stupid. I put myself – the baby – in harm’s way.”
“Ava, sweetie.” Maggie came around the table. “You had no way of knowing–”
“ I might as well have thrown it to the alligators.”
Maggie’s brow furrowed. “No, baby–”
“I wanna get a tattoo.”
“Take a look.” Ziggy wiped the last of the ink away and sat back on his stool, tattoo gun in one gloved hand, pleased smile playing across his mouth. “Pretty sick, if I’m honest.” He tipped his grin up to Ava. “You think?”
“The sickest,” Ava agreed, glancing down at her foot.
“I’m the worst mother in the world,” Maggie said. “It’s official.” She peered over Ziggy’s shoulder to get a look at the tat. “It’s perfect, though, Zig.”
The wiry little tattoo artist was the best in the city, and his cramped parlor was papered in wall-to-wall sketches and designs, the paint beneath hot pink, the floor tiles black and white check. His fellow artist and business partner, Ursula, with a bull ring through her nose and dyed black pixie cut, came around to see for herself.
“Nice,” she said, nodding. “Subtle. Cute. Plenty of detail.”
Ava rested her chin on her raised knees and smiled down at the new ink on the top of her left foot. Very small, very tasteful and realistic, an alligator looked up at her, head raised, tail curled, ready for battle. A way to mark the tiny gator growing inside her that she’d lost. A reminder for her to be careful. A tribute to the man she loved, all rolled into one.
Once Ziggy had dressed the tat and she’d stepped back into her sneakers, as she and Maggie left the parlor on a mission for ice cream and a wasted day of playing hooky, Ava checked her phone.
Still nothing from Mercy.
“Does it hurt?” Leah asked, bending her head low over Ava’s red-around-the-edges raw tattoo.
