No mention of such a person had appeared in the news story about the baby on the highway. For so long, I had accepted being an orphan and being never able to discover who had abandoned me, so I was surprised to be overcome by a sentimental yearning to know more about that young woman—if nothing other than the color of her hair, her eyes. But Hakeem had seen her only at a distance and not clearly enough in the early light to report any details about her with confidence.
Bridget took one of my hands and held it in both of hers. Her hands felt unusually warm, so mine must have gone cold.
Hakeem erupted from his armchair and paced back into the dining area, into the galley, and then came toward us again. “I parked on the pavement with the truck’s emergency lights flashing and went to see what the girl had left in the basket. I didn’t realize it was a bassinet. When I saw a baby, I felt sick that someone would be so desperate to throw away such a precious thing.”
Stopping at a set of bookshelves that contained volumes about UFOs and ancient astronauts, he plucked one of the many clove buds from a small dish on a shelf and brought it to his nose. He breathed deeply a few times and returned the bud to the dish.
“Just then,” he continued, “I heard engines approaching fast from both the north and south. The first was Caesar Melchizadek on his way to work at the casino, and the other was Bailie Belshazzer in his Chevy pickup, headed for the wind farm. With my power-company truck blocking one lane, something bad could have happened. I should have grabbed the bassinet and taken you off the highway, but I was kind of—I don’t know—emotionally paralyzed by what I’d found. I wasn’t thinking straight. I waved down both Caesar and Bailie. They pulled off on the shoulder of the road and got out of their vehicles to see what the trouble was.”
He sat once more, back stiff, arms on the arms of the chair, hands clutching the upholstery, feet pressed flat on the floor, as though bracing himself for an earthquake. He remained wide-eyed, and gradually it became clear that neither our unannounced visit nor my identity accounted for his expression of surprise, which seemed perpetual, as though every smallest thing he looked upon astonished him.
“We gathered around the bassinet,” he said. “I was on my knees. Caesar was on one knee, and Bailie was crouched down. They were facing me, so they didn’t at first see what I saw behind them. Forty feet past them, right there on the highway . . . it was as if this large door opened, maybe fifteen feet wide and twice as high. An invisible door. A door in the day. It opened inward, and beyond it there wasn’t the highway or desert. Cobblestones, like an ancient road, dwindled away into darkness, not just into night, but . . . into a star-filled nothingness. As if the cobblestones were floating in space, with stars under and above and to all sides.”
Even one day earlier, I might have sided with Sheriff Monkton in the prescription of a psychiatric evaluation for Hakeem, but not after the Screamers at the truck stop.
He flung himself up from the chair and began to pace again, combing his hair back from his forehead with the fingers of his right hand, his left hand shaking like that of a man with a benign tremor. As if the weight of his revelations made him heavier, each footfall sent a soft, hollow thump through the crawl space under the floor, as had not been the case before.
“Weirder still, I get the feeling that someone or something is coming toward us along that cobblestone road, coming out of the stars. No, wait. That’s not right. It’s not just some feeling. I know for sure that something’s approaching along the cobblestones. Because, I can feel it coming, something powerful, the way you feel the air taking on weight when a thunderstorm is coming. And then I can almost see what it is. It’s invisible but I can see the space where it is, just inside the door in the day. It’s like how heat rising off a highway distorts the air, so the air ripples and quivers. The air is quivering in the shape of a man, a very tall man or something like a man, but I can’t see him, only this suggestion of him. I think I must be losing it, having a breakdown. But then somehow I know he’s real and that he’s there because of the baby, worried that the baby has been abandoned on a highway, and wants to be sure it’s safe. I don’t know what I said then, but I must have said something, because Caesar and Bailie turned to look. I expected maybe they wouldn’t see anything, but they did. They did.”
He went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and withdrew a beer. He popped the cap off the bottle and returned to his chair and took several long swallows. He didn’t offer us a drink. Reliving the supernatural event on the highway probably so unnerved him that he expected to need every bottle he had before the day was done.