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A baby wailed from the front porch, and it hit me. For some reason, I just knew that Kimberly was on the other side of that door, and she was in possession of a baby. Confused and alarmed, I rushed to the door and yanked it open.
“Kimberly?”
“Hey,” she said, bouncing the baby in her arms and looking as flustered as I had ever seen her. The baby couldn’t be more than a couple of weeks old, much closer looking to a newborn. She got a binky in the baby’s mouth, and the wailing stopped temporarily.
“Kim, what the hell?”
“Can I come in?” she asked.
The suspicious look she gave over her shoulder was enough for me. I pulled her inside and shut the door behind her, locking it. Whatever she had gotten into this time, I needed to figure it out pretty quickly.
Kim didn’t wait for me in the living room, opting to just head back to the bedroom that she had stayed in multiple times before. I followed her and watched as she laid the baby down on the bed and tossed a bag on the floor, opening it up to reveal a handful of diapers and unraveling the swaddle.
“Kim, can you tell me what is going on?” I asked.
“Just a minute,” she said.
She finished changing the baby and then sat down beside her, taking off her watch and setting it on the nightstand before rubbing her eyes. They were red and puffy. She had been crying, and recently too.
“I know this is a strange question, but you have to give me some leeway here. Is that baby yours?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, then broke into tears.
I was used to Kim showing up at my door with issues and problems, but this was a whole new circus. What had she gotten into, and why hadn’t she told me any of it? I felt like I had talked to her through text just a couple of months ago, and she hadn’t mentioned being pregnant.
“Okay,” I said. “Who’s the father?”
“Manny.” I didn’t recognize Manny from the pantheon of boyfriends she’d had over the years, but I nodded anyway.
“Where is Manny?” I asked.
“Jail,” she said.
“Ahh.”
“Hawk, it’s so bad,” she said, trying to hold back more tears. “He got in with this gang in Tulsa, but he was getting out. Things were going good for a long time. I thought we had our shit together. Then he said he bombed a police station and that we had to go on the run. We didn’t even get out of the city before they arrested him, and I had to take everything and leave on my own.”
“Wait, he what?” I asked. “He bombed a police station?”
“After hours,” she said, as if that absolved any wrongness about it. “They had charged him with a murder he didn’t do and made him miss his baby’s birth.”
“And he responded by blowing up a police station?” I said, exasperated.
“He didn’t blow it up,” she said. “Just blew a hole in one of the walls. It was like a prank.”
“Kim, people don’t blow holes in police stations as a prank,” I said, my voice growing louder. “What the hell?”
“Please, don’t shout. I can’t take this baby crying anymore.”
“This baby?” I said. “You mean your baby?”
“Yes,” she said, hanging her head. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Hawk. He was supposed to be clean and out. We were supposed to get a house and figure this out together. Now they are looking for me. I think.”
“You think?” I asked. “You think or you know?”
“I think,” she said. “I don’t know. They said that if he tells the cops anything, they’ll kill us both. Hawk, I’m so scared.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling my heart squeeze.
It was my sister. As much as I disagreed with her choices the last few years, she was still the little girl in the sundress who wanted piggyback rides until I collapsed. She was still the person who I cried with when we found out the cancer had come back with Mom. And she was still the person that I promised to protect and help on Mom’s deathbed.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed softly.
“Alright,” I said, pulling her into a hug. “It’s going to be okay. We will figure this out.”
“They know where we lived,” she said, tears soaking my sleeve. “I can’t go back there. He was so mad that I got pregnant, and now I don’t know what to do.”
“What are you talking about? How could he be mad you were pregnant?” I asked. “I thought you were settling down.”
“He doesn’t want kids,” she said. “We were going to run off to Canada together.”
I hung my head.
“Well, none of that matters now, okay? You’re safe and I can help. Do you have anything else in the car?” I asked.
“Just a few things. What I could grab,” she said.
