The Biker
by Adelaide
Gaughran-Bedell
In my ninth week of pregnancy I could smell everything. I could tell where LouAnn had sat in the conference room from the tracings of her perfume on the polyester chairs. I could smell the dead animal in the mouth of my dog. I could smell my mother’s hands on the book she lent me—track her favorite poems from where it stuck. My taste sharpened, too. There was an acrylic taste of lipstick on Richard’s dick one night when we were having sex. The next morning he told me he’d fucked his coworker. He told me it meant nothing; I knew that he was telling the truth, I could smell it in the sweat on his skin.
In my ninth week of pregnancy, the biker came.
The morning that the biker came, Richard had made scrambled eggs. He had toasted two thick slices of sourdough from the good bakery. He scooped eggs onto my plate. Runny drips of yolk had hardened at the bottom of the plate, it peeled up against the spoon like skin. The eggs had a squirming texture, maggoty. I felt my body fill up with nausea. The ninth week also marked my first real battles with morning sickness. I spent most of my days either hunched over the toilet, or wondering if I was tempting fate by not being hunched over the toilet.
The eggs, the sickness, the need for fresh air, this is what brought me to stand on my stoop and watch the biker.
As the biker rode down our block, a horn honked behind him, he turned his head. He did not see the truck until it was too late. He caught the brunt of the hard metal in his nose and eye. He screamed, unearthly, and I thought for a second, about fleeing upstairs to the safety of my home and husband. I wondered when I would develop a maternal instinct.
His Tour de France shirt was ruined, blood stained the blue. I put my hands to the skin on his arms, so that he would know I was there. The biker, perhaps, was training to ride the Montauk Century, it was one month away. He would need to log some serious miles in the next couple of weeks, he would need to bracket out chunks of three to four hours a day to bike in circles around the park. The biker, perhaps, had been talking about this for months. He was not the sort of man who did many spontaneous things, or maybe he was.
I felt the heat of his blood, the beat of him. It is a lent person, who comes in moments like this, the briefest and most intimate of two lives touching. When the need is so great that any body will do. The truth about the biker is that I know nothing about him. Only the animal parts—his groans, the jagged movements of his body when all it has is pain. I can only guess at his name or his job or why he went on a bike ride that morning. But I do know the soft sigh that escaped from his lips when—after having called the ambulance and been told that it would take them five minutes—I started to sing. He put his head back against the ground, letting out a grunt of pain as he moved. He whimpered softly. Motherland cradle me, close my eyes/Lullaby me to sleep/Keep me safe, lie with me/Stay beside me don’t go. The biker wept red onto the pavement and quieted under my words.
In my ninth week of pregnancy I didn’t have it in me, to be angry at my husband. All I could think of was sickness, the baby, and today: the biker. Richard came out to the sidewalk when the ambulance was pulling up the block. He balked in panic at the blood that soaked my hands and my thighs, then gathered himself and pulled me up from the curb as sirens sunk into the distance.
The eggs had long grown cold and were developing a darker yellow crust over their edges, we would have to throw them out. Once, Richard and I had forgotten to take out the trash before a big trip. When we got home there were maggots crawling in our leftovers, writhing white against the black garbage bag.
The love of a mother is not a gentle thing, it is body pushing body to survive.
Richard and I sat at the table and he told me that he was jealous of the closeness I would have with the baby. And maybe that’s why he had let Emily touch her Sephora lips to his penis. It didn’t feel like our baby, it felt like mine. I got to spend these nine months with her inside of me, I would feed her after. We would be close, non-metaphorically. “That’s why I did it, I think,” he said, “I wanted to be leaving you out of something.” I wondered, for a moment, if I would feel angry at my baby, when she found someone other than me to love. Richard was never mine in the way the baby was.
I finished scrubbing the blood from my hands. Underneath the salt and metal was a soft human scent that was not my own, skin and warmth—the scent of life. I knew the biker in the way I know this child, in groans and movement and speculation. I loved him in the way that I love this child, pure and animal.
The Molotov Cocktail 