Hex has started showing, and things are getting harder for her... and the rest of us. Several nights a week we're sleeping under the bridge. We've invested in a handgun, thermal clothing, waterproof blankets and higher quality sleeping bags. Most recently we toyed with the idea of buying a tent but in the end decided it would accomplish just as much as the ceiling of the bridge, in that it would only keep out the rain/snow but not the cold, which is by far the worst part of it.

The only saving grace is that 3 or 4 times a week, we're able to get a room. That's all because of Adam and Gus. They've started turning tricks at these underground parties they find online, and they make a ton of cash doing it, but the bad part is they're both smoking meth again and most of that money is going to drugs. Adam claims it keeps them warm, which is true, and that it makes doing whatever they do at those parties easier, which I don't know for sure but imagine is probably true too.

Hex isn't happy about it but seems to view it as a necessity in our current situation. She tells Adam not to overdo it, and he assures her he's not, and won't.

At her last doctor's appointment, we got some great news. Hex's belly is big enough now they can do the ultrasound with the wand and jelly like in all the movies, so we can really see everything. It looks like a real baby now. We can even watch it moving.

"You can see the legs kicking here," the doctor says, pointing them out.

Adam turns his head sideways. "So its body is here?"

"No, there's its head. It's sleeping with its hands up by its face. See the fingers?" she asks.

Adam smiles. "Aww... yeah I do! It moves a lot when it sleeps."

"So do people. It's just not as noticeable. And... right now I have the perfect view. I can tell you what it is... if you want to know the sex?"

Hex looks at Adam, and they both grin.

"Yeah, tell us!" Adam says.

The doctor smiles. "It's a little girl. Congratulations."

Adam whoops with joy, and Hex brightens. "Really? You sure?"

"Fairly certain. See here, we call this the hamburger. It's the inner and outer labia. When you see the hamburger on an ultrasound, it's a tell-tale sign it's female."

"Oh my God," Hex whispers, and she grabs Adam's hand. "A daughter."

"Can we name her Daisy?" Adam asks excitedly.

"Daisy? Like the flower? That's a little cutesy..." Hex says. I can tell she dislikes the name, but I'm wondering if she knows the story about Adam's sister.

"Because she'll be adorable! Come on!" Adam begs.

Hex just laughs and shakes her head. "Baby, I'll think about it. That's all I can promise."

——————

West is not at next week's meeting, or the next, or the next. A whole month passes by without him, and now it's already the end of October. Grace is worried.

"I wish I had his number," she says, looking through her bright pink fanny pack like it might be there.

"Me too," I say.

I'm certain he's relapsed and I feel terrible, like I had something to do with it or something. He was one of the only things that made these meetings tolerable, but I still come for Cricket's sake.

I haven't had a visit with Cricket since that first one. On our biweekly check ups, Cruz keeps asking me if I wanna see him and I say no.

"I don't get it, Ember. You're completing your requirements, you're working hard, not making excuses, showing up for every test and every meeting, but you're every bit as apathetic about a relationship with your kid as some of the worst deadbeats I've ever encountered in the field. How do you expect to form a relationship with your baby like this?" she asks me in her office on a freezing cold Halloween afternoon.

I watch the season's first snow falling lazily outside the window. I'm just too afraid to face Cricket again. I can't say that though.

"I think it's better if he doesn't get confused about who I am versus the foster mom," I say with a helpless shrug.

"He knows your voice. He remembers you," she says gently.

"What do you mean?" I ask, picking at a tear in my jeans.

"In the womb, he heard your voice. He can identify it out of hundreds of other voices. There have been studies."

I think about Jesse screaming at me, hurting me. "Did he hear everything?" I ask.

"No. It's more like he felt the vibration of your voice reverberating in your body. It's like a fingerprint, the different intonations, completely individualized. The same is true about you knowing his cries. It's a deep bond between mother and infant."

I have no clue what intonations are.

"You're telling me that if I saw him right now he would know I'm his mother?"

"Yes. A hundred percent. He couldn't articulate it or show it, but studies are clear he would know it."

I sit and think about that for a long time. Cruz is waiting for my response.

"I want to wait," I say.

Coward.

——————

At the bridge, it's still snowing and cold. Adam and Gus are hitting the meth pipe over and over to get warm. They've got their knees up and their coats wrapped over their skinny legs, making themselves look like wadded up pieces of trash. Hex sits next to Adam wrapped in a big blanket. The hood she's created hangs so far over her head I can't see her face, like she's the Grim Reaper.

I spot Jesse in our sleeping bag and walk over to him.

"Did you get money?" he asks desperately, sitting up and looking at me with starvation in his eyes.

Not starving for food. He's starving for that fix. Fix is such a fitting word. A fix fixes it all doesn't it? I have no fix.

His limbs are jerking with dopesickness. I shake my head, and I brace myself.

"You didn't make ANYTHING?" he shouts.

The sound echoes off the ceiling under the bridge and slams back onto the top of my head. I think about reverberations, like Cruz said. This bridge is one giant womb inside a giant monster and no one can hear us and no one who could would care.

Jesse's on his feet and he's grabbed my wrist and he's dragging me down toward the ravine. Above us, the boys smoke, oblivious. A thick white meth cloud wraps around them like an angel's wings. Hex has the blanket so far over her head I don't think she can see what's happening, if she's even awake.

"You're telling me you were out there FOUR fucking hours and you couldn't even get me a dime bag?"

He shakes me by the shoulders.

"WHAT WERE YOU DOING?"

Now he shakes me like a paper bag, trying to get the last of the crumbs outta the bottom.

"FUCKING SOME OTHER GUY?"

He shoves me hard, and I fall off the slanted concrete wall down into the ravine. It's a six foot drop easy, and I land in the snow on my ass. The pain shoots straight up my spine and electrifies my skull. Jesse jumps down.

"Hey, leave her alone!" Adam shouts at us, realizing what's going on.

Humiliated, I roll to my side and get up on all fours.

"Oh hell no, bitch, you stay right there where you belong. With the trash," Jesse says, and I feel his shoe on my back as he shoves me down again, face in the snow.

I'm up to my elbows in dirty gray slush and garbage, freezing so bad my teeth might fall apart. Jesse kicks me in the stomach and I'm on my back again staring up at the concrete ceiling. Veiny cracks arc across it like lightning.

"GET AWAY FROM HER!" Hex screams, and she's trying to slide into the ravine but the ledge is icy and she can't get to me very fast. She has one hand holding the gun in the air. Adam and Gus are doing the same beside her.

"STAY OUT OF THIS!" Jesse shouts at them.

"Get away from her or I'm taking the shot! You won't hurt her in front of me! EVER AGAIN! You hear me, motherfucker?" Hex yells.

I can hear it in her voice- she's serious, and Jesse knows it too. He steps backwards away from me.

"I tried, Jesse," I say helplessly.

It's sorta true. I panhandled on my way to and from the foster care agency, but too many cops had already sucked the area dry.

"Trying isn't good enough! Ever since you got clean you just forgot what it's like! You forgot how awful it is! You FORGOT HOW MUCH IT HURTS!" he cries and then he falls beside me and starts sobbing helplessly.

Everybody stops where they are. Hex has one leg over the side of the ledge and the gun still held above her shoulder, and Adam and Gus freeze mid-run. Jesse doesn't cry. Not like this. Not in front of anyone but me.

I feel this sudden urge to shield him from everyone else's eyes and I move my body in front of his and throw my arms around him. He buries his face in my chest.

"Baby, be strong," I whisper in his ear.

"Why?" he says, and that tiny word contains all the deadly poison of despair he has started to ingest this past year.

Hands begin to land on us like snowflakes. Adam's, blistered with burns from the meth pipe, lands on mine. Gus's, all scabbed up from picking at himself, goes to Jesse's shoulder. And Hex's strong touch lands on both of us, spread out like the wingspan of a white bird. We are a five pointed snowflake, just for an instant.

"Get up. Come on," I say to Jesse. "We have to get warm quick."

Hypothermia sets in fast, and our clothes are soaked. We have to strip right there in the freezing cold and change into dry clothes from our packs, and by the time I curl up in the sleeping bag I feel like I don't even remember what warmth feels like.

Adam starts a fire in a big old barrel, but the heat hardly touches us. Gus offers to go back out and drop our wet clothes into the wash at the Mission and also pick up some dope for Jesse. I'm more than happy to let someone else take over.

While he's gone, Adam gets the ouija board out of his bag and sets up the planchette and a few candles he took from the last motel's front office when no one was looking.

"Oh not that thing again," Hex says, rolling her eyes.

She's put the gun away in favor of the blanket again, but she and Jesse haven't said a word to each other.

"The veil is thinnest tonight! I have to try!" Adam replies exasperatedly, like this should be common knowledge. He goes to work lighting the candles with his lighter.

"What veil?" I ask.

"The veil between the dead and the living. It's thinnest on Halloween night, the thinnest it'll be all year. If you have anyone you miss, we can try to talk to them now," he says.

I haven't faced much death in my life. Maybe a couple of distant relatives. Nothing like Adam has.

"No, it's all yours," I say. "Who will you try to contact?"

"Daisy, of course," he says.

Hex's head snaps up. "Wait, who?"

"My sister. Daisy. You know," Adam says.

"I knew about your sister, but I forgot her name was Daisy! Is that why...?"

Adam nods. He doesn't say another word about it, but I see Hex is deep in thought, pondering the name in a way she hasn't before.

"Is there anyone who wants to communicate right now?" Adam asks the board.

Long ago he gave up making us join in these seances. He probably figured out that our skepticism does more harm than good.

The planchette predictably goes to yes.

"The spirit I want to talk to is named Daisy Eliza Taylor. Daisy, are you there?"

The planchette replies, "Yes."

"What!" Adam exclaims happily. "This has NEVER happened, you guys! EVER!"

"Okay, baby, don't get carried away. That's a fairly common name," Hex says gently. The fact that she's even pretending this could be real is a sure sign that she's attempting to be more sensitive than usual.

"No, it's her. I know it," Adam says happily. "But just to make sure... if you're Daisy, how old were you when you died?"

The planchette shakes slightly as it moves to the numbers 4 and 8.

"48?" Adam whispers, the disappointment clear on his face.

"She was two right?" I ask.

Adam nods. He looks so broken-hearted. It makes me feel like going over there and manipulating the planchette into answering everything he asks.

"It's not her. I'll try again later," he mumbles, moving the planchette to Goodbye.

He puts the board away, and Hex walks over to sit beside him. She opens the blanket and gathers Adam into her arms, making them look like one big and oddly shaped person from behind.

An hour later Gus returns with Jesse's dope and some Suboxone in case this ever happens again. Suboxone strips keep dopesickness away. They're hard to find because they're in high demand, coveted by every junkie around, and not even close to being cheap, but it's obvious none of us wants to deal with Jesse when he's this sick... ever again.

——————

West comes back to NA the next day. No smiles, no charms, no jokes. Just pale, much skinnier and unkempt. He sits beside me, as always. There's stubble on his face and fresh track marks on his arm. On one needle point there is a single bead of fresh blood, like it happened just now, and I realize he must have shot up in the NA bathroom. That's pretty... desperate, but who am I to judge anyone?

I'm not sure what to say, how to start the conversation. "How was your relapse?" doesn't seem like the way to go, so instead I whisper,

"What're they gonna do to you?"

West shrugs. "Nothing. I got through my probation this summer. I just kept coming anyway."

This is good news. Before tonight I was worried that maybe he had gotten himself arrested again, but it looks like this was just a run of the mill bender.

"I'm sorry," I say.

He says, "For what?"

"You know."

West laughs, but it's more like a thud that comes from his chest, like someone punched him there.

"Don't be sorry. This is who I am," he says.

"You don't have to be," I say.

He looks at me, and I blush. "Can we hang out after?"

I'm surprised. The thought of Jesse briefly crosses my mind, but it disappears in the thrill of West showing interest in me. "Um... sure. Why?"

"Because if I'm being honest, the only reason I came back tonight was you."