This person was in her, part of her, and now he’s not. He was once hers alone, and now, for the rest of her life, she’ll be sharing him with the world. It’s amazing to her how the human body can stretch, and she thinks that if the heart can, too, maybe it can stretch big enough to fit them all.
It’s late, long past when Amadeo should be asleep, but he’s pacing the living room, the grin pulling at his face. When he and Yolanda left the hospital this evening, Angel had been dozing, the baby asleep beside her in the Plexiglas bassinette. His mother, who had been quiet all night, went to bed almost immediately, neither eating dinner nor preparing anything for Amadeo.
Amadeo posts online about the birth. Within an hour, two distant cousins and a friend from high school whom he hasn’t spoken to in years like his post. He refreshes his social media pages again and again, but no new congratulations come in. He flips through channels, pages through The Santa Fe New Mexican. He needs fresh air, he needs to leap and run. He needs to drive fast down dark roads. He’s a grandfather!
Amadeo lets himself out quietly, taking his truck keys from the hook by the door. His mother will kill him if she hears he was driving. If he gets caught, he could spend a year in jail and lose his license for three. But that old Amadeo already doesn’t exist anymore. Out here, nearly two in the morning, there’s no one to catch him, and the night is bright with stars, a fattening half-moon high and small in the sky. The cool air smells of juniper and seems saturated with possibility.
He starts his truck and, without headlights, reverses down the dirt drive. He turns onto the cracked paved road, and then he is on his way, heart full and airy.
When he’s out of sight of his house, he flicks on his headlights, piercing the darkness. Not ten feet in front of him is a coyote, head canted over its pointed shoulder, red eyes. It’s small, thin, its wiry fur too white. There is something malicious and hungry in its narrow face.
Amadeo slams on the brakes. The coyote stares through the blinding brightness of the headlights and right at him in the dark cab of the truck, though of course that isn’t possible.
Amadeo taps the horn, once, twice, but the coyote doesn’t flinch. “Scram,” Amadeo says, his voice strange and quiet. He considers rolling down the window and yelling, but an irrational fear tightens like a cord around his chest. Amadeo can’t explain the way he feels; he has the sense that an unseen hand took a scalpel and cut a hole into the fabric of the night, letting in something supernatural.
When the coyote still doesn’t move, Amadeo eases off the brakes, and the truck advances slowly. He wants to scare the coyote off the road, tip this moment back into normalcy so that the night can resume. But instead of fleeing, the coyote takes a step toward the truck, eyes glowing.
With shaking hands, Amadeo flashes his brights, but the coyote doesn’t flinch. He snaps his headlights on, off, on, off. The coyote remains there, motionless, until, in the space between light and dark, it vanishes.
AND THEN Angel and the baby are home. Angel lays Connor out on the couch and peels the diaper off him. Black tar-poop is smeared across the narrow red bottom.
“Come on, Angel. Do you have to do that here?”
Angel lifts her head from her scrubbing with the baby wipe to train a look of contempt on her father. “When you change his diaper, you can do it wherever you want.”
Amadeo is disturbed by Connor’s soft spot. The fontanel, Angel insists on calling it, pronouncing it with panache, like it’s a French pastry. Amadeo watches it throb. It’s sickening that a child should be born so delicate and precisely formed, bluish red with such long thin limbs, obscenely fragile fingers, the veins on his temples and across his skull netted and pulsing under the impossibly thin skin. Even wrapping him in a blanket could cause injury, let alone lifting him.
He’s not a beautiful baby, despite what they all keep telling him and each other. Connor Justin Padilla has patchy long dark hair over a peeling, crusted yellow scalp （“crib crap,” Angel pronounces with authority）， cheeks so full they squish his lips, and an oddly dented skull that narrows at the top. His unnervingly large black eyes make him look like some nocturnal woodland creature, except that they’re unfocused and slightly crossed. Two weeks old, and he already has a little mustache, heavy eyebrows, a furry forehead. His grandson is a manimal, thinks Amadeo.