The baby slept in a crate in the trailer’s kitchen, and Cello had to step over Emil sleeping on a pallet of old blankets to reach him. The baby had a name, of course, but Cello hated to use it, hated that the baby bore the name of his biological father. Every time Cello held him, he was stunned in stupid love by the baby’s light, warm weight.
He took the child outside into the dewy night, and stared down into his blinking little face. The baby knew Cello loved him, as much as babies could know anything. If Joanie fled without him and took the baby, Cello didn’t think he would recover. But he didn’t know if he could endure a life away from the garden, either. His heart was buried as deep in the earth as the sacred Vine of Heaven that twisted and bloomed around them.
Mother Joseph had chosen each child and brought them to Letta and Sil and the garden’s fecund swirl. None of them really belonged there, but there they were, inexplicably held. Each child had come to the garden with a hastily signed, official document. Mother Joseph made sure this at least was done according to the law. Including Cello and Joanie, there were six of them. The youngest was Emil, who was five, followed by Miracle who was eight. Sabina and Marcela were older, thirteen and sixteen. Cello had always envied them a little for being real sisters.
The rest of them weren’t blood-related. They mostly looked alike, except for Cello. The kids had the same burned-tanned skin, and their hair and eyes were all shades of dark. Cello guessed that it was the way they lived—mostly outdoors, always out under the sun. Letta liked that they all looked the same. It was easier to pass them off as a family if anyone came to the farm.
Even Joanie looked that way: dark and darker. He was lighter than the others, even after years of working outside, and his hair was long and straight and blond. He hated how greasy he looked compared to the rest of them, how he looked like a stranger.
When the kids were old enough to ask, the questions came. They were a painful surprise each time. How did I get here? Will we always stay? There had never been any parents at the garden, only Sil and Letta. Parents had meant nothing—none of them had seen what it looked like for a mother to love a child until Joanie came home pregnant. When the tenderness began to show, when it started to lift from Joanie’s body like a haze of pollen, it had been Miracle’s turn to ask.
“There’s really a baby in her?” She combed her short, dark hair away from her face as she leaned in over Joanie’s belly.
“Of course, dipshit,” Marcela said.
“And it really comes out? Like an animal?” Miracle drew in her breath, astonished.
“Yeah,” Sabina said, her voice soft as she concentrated on rinsing out a round of washing in the sink. It was winter—February—when Joanie was nearly six months along. There wasn’t much to be done outside, so the six of them huddled in the kids’ trailer. Emil was asleep—still taking naps, he was so little.
“That’s how I came out?” Miracle asked. “Really?”
“Of course,” Cello told her.
“But Letta didn’t—”
“Oh, God, no!” Marcela called from her seat on the floor, scraping the peeling polish from her toenails.
“Then who?” Miracle had looked right at Cello then, her small mouth twisted, suppressing an enormous feeling.
“Who knows?” Marcela said, tying back her furiously curly hair. “You just showed up one day. Mother Joseph said she came by a new little one, and did Letta want to keep you.”
“Course Letta didn’t say no,” Sabina said, her smile a warm flare shot out specifically for Miracle. “You were the prettiest baby. And Sil was so happy. We had a drought then, and the day you came, it rained.”
“We saw Marcela and Sabina’s real mama,” Joanie said, looking up from her small globe of a belly.
“Who was she?” Miracle whispered.
Joanie looked over at Cello, unspooling the memory between them like two ends of a skipping rope. Mother Joseph’s truck had driven up to the trailers and the driver ejected a woman with a push from the cab. She was covered in lesions, a small, gaunt body wearing two different shoes. She’d dropped the children by the door like some macabre stork, and was swallowed back into the truck in the span of a minute. The two little girls hadn’t looked back once at the person who abandoned them. Marcela gripped her toddler sister against her side tightly and wailed when Letta first pulled them apart. Blood dribbled down Sabina’s soft little arms where Marcela’s uncut fingernails had held her close.
“She was nobody,” Marcela said as she lifted herself from the floor and moved to her sister’s side. She dipped her hands into the sink and began to wring out the wet clothes that pooled there.
“You remember her? Did you ever see her again?” Miracle asked.
Sabina shook her head.
“It’s a good thing we didn’t, because I would’ve strangled her if I had.” Marcela violently unfurled a small, green T-shirt—Emil’s favorite—as she said it.
“What about Cello and Joanie?” Miracle asked, looking over to where they sat, Joanie on her cot, Cello on a plastic crate.
“We don’t have the same parents,” Cello said, knowing that wasn’t what Miracle had meant, but unwilling to tell her more.
“Well, Joanie’s baby’s gonna have a mom,” Sabina said, turning to nod at Miracle. “And that’s nice.”
“Yeah, if nobody tells Mother Joseph about it,” Marcela mumbled.
“Of course nobody’s gonna tell her,” Joanie said, propping herself up against the trailer’s thin wall. She shot Marcela a sharp look, as though pinning the conversation closed.
* * *
Cello wondered now, with the child in his arms, if someone had told on Joanie. It would explain her panic, and her urgency. If Mother Joseph had found out about the baby, of course Joanie would be desperate. He swore—on his own two hands—that he would do anything to keep Joanie and the baby safe. He felt the soft waves of the baby’s tiny snores even out, and because it was still nearly dark, Cello carefully set the baby down beside Joanie, and left to do what she had asked.
Cello would never have believed he could be coldly deceitful, that he could betray the only family he’d ever had so swiftly or so easily. But it was easy, because Sil and Letta didn’t suspect him. It was Joanie who they watched carefully—she was unpredictable. They watched Marcela, too, because she was selfish. Nobody watched compliant, steady Cello.
The chill of the almost-morning raised gooseflesh along Cello’s arms and on the back of his neck. Sil and Letta would still be sleeping. Cello decided to cut from the very first plot that had ever been planted at the garden, because Sil checked it the least. Cello secretly hoped the cuttings would languish away from their parent plant. That way, Franklin Lees wouldn’t get what he wanted, but Joanie would, and his loyalty to the garden wouldn’t be too corroded. He still felt a tingle of nausea as he approached the old grove, dripping with green and fragrance.