The following morning Legion takes over for Lily Ana at the café allowing her to tend to Zuzu. Lily Ana imagines him delivering pastries and coffee while announcing the news to all who will listen. He will be drunk in a few hours. She will have to go back. Paul also had gone to the café for coffee but had rushed back with it still in his hand. She continues at the sink washing and sanitizing with a bleach mixture while Zuzu and the baby sleep.
“Is she OK, you think? Should we go to a hospital?” Paul asks Lily Ana while flopping into a kitchen chair.
“She is good. They are both good. Nothing to be concerned about.”
“I thought last night that she had died, that they both were dead. How could anybody survive such barbarism?”
Lily Ana looks out the window in front of the sink and sighs. Who is he to call them barbaric?
“Men don’t understand. They know things but they don’t understand. Women give birth every day. Of the women giving birth right now, this very minute, how many do you think are in nice hospitals? How many have doctors to pump in drugs so they won’t feel it? Since the beginning of time, women have gone through this. Women are made for this. You men think that women are made for your enjoyment, but everything about a woman’s body is for making babies. It’s only a trick on men that they find these baby machines irresistible. The better equipped a woman is for babies, the more a man is attracted.”
She turns to Paul expecting him to engage with some rebuttal, but Paul is wilted in the chair looking at his feet.
“But not all survive.” Lily Ana continues, “I don’t know if either would have survived last night without your help.” He still does not look up, so she walks in front of him and lifts his chin, surprised to see his eyes glistening. “Thank you,” she says. “God sent you here for a purpose; we just didn’t know what it was until last night.” And when he still does not respond: “Now go get into bed. You look worn out.”
Paul looks over at mother and child, still sleeping soundly underneath the swirl of the overhead fan. “What can you tell me about her?”
“Well, she arrived here from France six months ago, already pregnant––”
“No, no. Legion has already told me that. I want to know…” He stops mid-sentence, his mouth open. He either does not know what he wants to ask or can’t bring himself to say it.
Paul looks out the window, “What will happen to them?”
“She is the daughter I never had; the daughter Legion never had. We love her, and now the boy, as our own.”
“But you can’t expect her to stay here, raise the baby here. We can’t let that happen.”
Lily Ana wonders where the we came from but lets it pass. “She will be fine here until something else happens. She will stay if she wants, or be taken away by some American tourist. You can’t plan what she will do. But as long as Legion and I live, they will always have a home here.”
Paul is quiet as Lily Ana continues with her chores. Suddenly, she wheels around to look at Paul unabashedly, pondering his eyes until he looks away. She thinks she sees the symptoms.
A person can fall in love, and yet be unaware. She had learned this the hard way. An Italian boy’s enthralled eyes flash before her mind’s eye, accompanied by the pang in her gut that always comes with the memory. It had been months after he had left her for a prearranged marriage that she realized the import of what they had lost.
She had not suspected Paul was even susceptible.
≈≈≈
The screen door slams startling Zuzu from a dream of being pushed underwater by a monster. “Lily?” she calls out as she opens her eyes and sits up.
Paul turns over his chair getting up. He stands, mouth slack with indecision, alternately looking between her and the door.
“Paul, are you OK?” Zuzu asks.
“Yeah. Lily Ana just left. Do you want me to go after her? Is anything wrong?”
Zuzu tries to swing her legs off the bed. Pain shooting through her abdomen jolts her out of the fog of first waking. She throws back the sheet. “I have a baby!” she declares pulling it onto her lap.
The baby’s face wrinkles into a snarl and little arms thrust out with clenched fists as if to punish whoever woke him. “I did it. I’m a mother.” Zuzu says with growing amazement. She presses the baby’s face to a breast when it begins to whimper.
Paul turns his face away.
“Would you bring me a glass of water? Bring a chair over. Let’s see what we have here.”
They both admire every move the baby makes until he falls back asleep against her chest. She checks the diaper, but there is nothing yet. Paul examines each finger and toe separately, obviously fascinated.
“Thanks for sleeping with me last night. I’m used to sleeping alone, but I needed someone to snuggle last night. It was all so scary.”
Paul sits back, his face serious. “What will you do now? Will you contact the father?”
“No. He doesn’t want anything to do with us. He’s probably expecting to pay child support, but I’ll never contact him. I don’t want to ever see him again or for him to have any rights concerning the baby.” She searches Paul’s eyes, deciding how much to tell him.
“I don’t know if Legion said anything, but he will be the father. We’re legally married; did you know that? He wants me to register the baby as his natural born child. I don’t want the baby to ever know about his real father.”
Paul stares at her blankly. She can almost hear the thoughts grinding in his head.
“Would you leave me now? I need to take stock of myself and don’t want you watching. Go to the café and tell Lily Ana that everything is all right, but I need to talk with her when she can get away.”
Paul is opening the screen door when he stops and looks back. “I want to be the father.”
“What?”
Paul rushes back, sits again, leans forward over the baby. “Dad is dying; he can’t be the father.”
“It’s just to give him a name, so the baby won’t be illegitimate.”
Paul’s gaze drops to the slumbering baby and then his eyes are pleading with her. “I want this to be my son. I want to marry you.”
“Paul, what are you saying? You don’t even know me.” Her face turns from shock to sternness. “I know you’re not attracted to me. Betty and I are friends. She tells me everything.”
“That was a mistake. Yes, I do want you and the baby. You make me feel things I’ve never felt before.”
“Even if that were true, it still wouldn’t work. See, I don’t want you.” She was surprised to see Paul’s eyes moisten. “No, I don’t mean it like that exactly; it’s just that I don’t ever want to be touched by a man again. The thought of it disgusts me.”
Paul’s face softens, “I understand—”
“No. It’s not what you’re thinking. I don’t like women over men. I just don’t trust men—all men. I could never fall in love or get married—not really married. Do you understand?”
Paul runs to the door, throwing the screen door wide.
≈≈≈