Free Turtle Baby by Abigail Padgett Page B

freckles, which would now be splatters of beige putty. Her hand around the now empty coffee cup was trembling.
    The hell with demure, Bradley. Demure is not what you have in mind here. By the way, what do you have in mind here?
    "Perhaps this is somewhat premature," he offered.
    "No," Bo answered thoughtfully. "Not exactly."
    Accustomed to occasional manic episodes with their predictable sexual surges, Bo assessed her feeling for Andrew LaMarche and found it to be something slightly different. The usual compelling inclination was there, trailed by a cloud that seemed full of lightning and half-lit corridors. The unknown. But so what? This was just something that happened. A gift from a universe probably created in the same yearning away from aloneness.
    "I can't go to visit your family, Andy," Bo began, "and I'm not going to marry you, but I do have an idea."
    "Bo, I want to have a life with you, not just—"
    "I'm only talking about tonight, Andy. I'm saying yes, let's do something tonight. I'd like to go down to Tijuana to see Chac's show, maybe talk to her about the legal hurdles ahead in getting Acito back. Will you go with me?"
    Something in the atmosphere switched gears. In reversing their roles she'd seized the reins of a situation that had gone on for too long. If people wanted to make love, they should just do it and get it over with, Bo reasoned. And wasn't it the prerogative of the woman to set the terms of that experience?
    Andrew LaMarche stood and shot his cuffs. "I'll be happy to go, but do you really think it's wise?"
    "Absolutely," Bo said, crushing her cigarette in the Styrofoam coffee cup before throwing the whole mess into the trash. "And now I've got work to do. I'll just check in on Acito before going back to the office." She waved the violet nosegay. "See you tonight."
    "Oui," Andrew LaMarche said, reverting to the language of his Cajun childhood as he invariably did when under stress.
    Bo found Acito untrammeled by IV lines, happily banging on a Fisher-Price drum in the fourth-floor playroom. He shared a playpen with a black baby girl whose exquisitely cornrowed and beaded hair, Bo assessed with admiration, must have taken somebody hours to do. Acito ignored his companion, focusing exclusively on his drum.
    "You cad." Bo knelt and smiled through the pen's mesh side. "You're going to tell her nothing matters but your music, right?"
    "Dogwuggg," Acito said as Bo stood and gathered him into her arms. "Wugggeee."
    "Dogwood is woody." Bo nodded, hugging him.
    His companion immediately dropped to her diapered rump and began banging on the drum with both hands. Acito turned in Bo's arms to watch, and a glassine string of saliva fell from a pool at the corner of his mouth.
    "Still teething, I see," she said with approval. "You're doing a fine job."
    In profile his classic Maya nose seemed more pronounced. Bo imagined him in quetzal feathers and embroidered loincloth, standing atop a limestone pyramid in some jungle as yet unscathed by Spanish invaders. And maybe he'd have that flattened forehead Eva said the ancient Maya created by binding infants' skulls between boards. A desirable deformity that made the child godlike.
    Any deformity, Eva said, was considered a blessing by the ancient Maya. A cleft palate or clubfoot, an extra finger or crossed eyes—any departure from the physical norm was evidence of the gods' favor. Bo placed the baby back in the pen, hoping no hidden virus was creating its own deformity within his cells. The HIV test results wouldn't be back until Monday.
    Instead of going straight back to the office, Bo turned onto San Diego's central artery, the old Cabrillo Highway, and grinned. Taking charge of the Andrew LaMarche problem entailed certain responsibilities.
    In five minutes she was in the artsy, upscale little community called Hillcrest, home to coffeehouses, restaurants, counterculture music emporiums, several specialty bookstores, and a shop catering to the sexually active.
    "I'm