Seahorse Daddy

By Sarah Clowes

Two months ago, I became a dad. It did not start in the usual way. You see, I’m still a virgin. It was not an immaculate conception; instead, a surreal chain of events partitioned my life into “Before” and “After.” A year ago, I was living with a friend in a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment, and now it’s me, my infant son, and forty-seven rats.

“After” is cake. Who knew spit rags and formula would swell my heart like a red supergiant? But really, who wouldn’t love Leif? He’s wide open and trusting, and frankly, a genius. He’s only two months old and I could swear he said “hi” yesterday. Then there are the rats. For the most part, the rats and I are in solidarity, figuring out the nuts and bolts of parenthood together. I must admit, it does concern me that the rats are multiplying faster than I expected, but they are inspiring nurturers: they make nests in the shredded paper I got from my job at Kinko’s; the females nurse one another’s babies; and they lick the little ones to stimulate circulation. Unfortunately, between taking care of the rats and Leif, I haven’t been able to get to work. We’re surviving, though. JoJo, my old roommate, forgot a Patek Philippe watch when he left. I pawned it, so we’ll be okay for a while.

JoJo and I met in college when we were in the percussion section of the marching band. JoJo played the marimbas; I played the bass drum. I admired JoJo’s idealism. He was always thinking about the less fortunate, like when the band went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I remember JoJo talking to a homeless man for an hour and giving him $50. Anyway, after we graduated, JoJo tried to parlay his affinity for rhythm into meaningful work by teaching hip hop tap dance to underprivileged kids. He got a gig at the park district, but the intermittent schedule didn’t pay, so he had to dip into his trust fund. Still, I admired the fact that he followed his dream and tried to share beauty with those in need. Our downstairs neighbors didn’t love the late-night clacking when JoJo practiced, but sometimes you need to follow your bliss.

Following his bliss was what led JoJo to Rosemary last October. The night started off in a normal way, but as the hours passed, it felt charged with otherworldliness. JoJo and I went to a Halloween party. Our friends Ray and Kaia had cooked up a backyard fire behind the house where they stayed, and they lit up the yard with fairy lights and luminaria. The moon was huge, dripping milky light. We did a drumming circle, like we usually do, and it went deep: a primordial soup of heartbeats melting the edges of the world. By the time we finished, we were in sort of a trance, and JoJo and I started wandering around the neighborhood. A few teenage trick-or-treaters and some people our age in costumes stumbled to or from neighborhood bars, slurping up starlight. That night, JoJo, very uncharacteristically, wore a tux his mom had gotten him for some family event. He’s only 5’5”, but he showered before the party and slicked his cornsilk mane back into a pompadour. The effect was fresh, dapper. Me, I did my usual Halloween trick where I put on my blue fur shirt and a jackal mask. Based on our costumes, it wasn’t surprising that Rosemary chose JoJo instead of me. To be fair, JoJo’s attentive and charming. He does well with the ladies, and Rosemary took our breath away.

I still remember the way the moonlight reflected on her white lacy wedding dress and illumined her delicate features. When I first saw her, I did a double take because she looked so otherworldly, like a ghost bride – stunning, translucent, gorgeous, yet lost, fathomless sorrow in her eyes. JoJo stopped in his tracks and waited for her to approach, as if taming a feral animal. I froze too, caught in a moment molasses-thick with fate. With slow, gliding steps, Rosemary moved ever closer so that we could see her blood-red lips, her cheekbones, the ivory lace swaying loosely against her narrow hips. JoJo knelt in the damp grass and held out his palm as if proposing marriage or genuflecting to a queen. Wordlessly, Rosemary slipped her fingers into JoJo’s, who kissed her palm gently and held it next to his cheek. Back in our apartment, through the wall separating our bedrooms, I heard JoJo playing his bongos for Rosemary in the wee hours of the morning.

I didn’t find out much about Rosemary until noon the next day, by which time she had disappeared. JoJo brewed us some black coffee, and I whipped up some omelets.

“I guess you had quite a night,” I said, pouring a bag of shredded cheese over the eggs.

“It was a page out of a book,” said JoJo, pouting as he stared at the rusty Plymouth Reliant in the lot outside our kitchen window.

“Huh?”

“Rosemary,” said JoJo. “It felt like she walked out of a fairy tale.”

“Yeah.”

Before the Keurig finished, JoJo placed his cup under the spout and collected coffee while spilled drops sizzled on the heating element, filling our kitchen with the smell of burnt coffee.

“You know what she was dressed as?” said JoJo.

“Bride o’ death?”

“Almost,” said JoJo. “La Llorona. A Mexican fairy tale ghost who wanders around looking for her dead kids after she’s stilted by her upper-class lover.”

“Shit. Wow…She was hot.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I really don’t.”

JoJo patted me on the shoulder and filled a second cup of coffee, burning more on the heating element. “Your day will come, brother Ephram. She was intrigued by your rats. Loves animals.” This gave me a pang of jealousy. Not everyone vibed with my rats.

At that point, I was only fostering four rats, and I had separated them into two different cages by sex. As it turned out, I hadn’t sexed them correctly, and the two boys, Fred and Ned, turned out to be Fred and Nedina. The next night, I heard a lot of noise coming from the rat cages, and now, in retrospect, I realize that Fred and Nedina were really going at it. The animal rescue place I was working with told me that rats copulate between 60 and 100 times when they mate, and their litters produce between six and twelve baby rats.

That morning though, I didn’t know about Fred and Nedina. JoJo and I just drank our coffee and enjoyed the melted mozzarella, coagulated deliciously on our omelets. I dumped a wad of salsa on mine, but JoJo ate his plain. He said Rosemary was undocumented. She and her two brothers had hired a coyote to get them over the border, and she and her eldest brother wired money back to their family every week.

“She dug the song I’ve been working on. ‘Tempest.’” said JoJo. “But I never heard her leave. She didn’t say goodbye. I don’t have any way of getting ahold of her.”

“Mysterious,” I said.

“She said her brothers would kill her if they found her here.”

Over the next few months, the rats multiplied, and I realized that I was not sexing them correctly. Once, a baby rat got out of the cage, and JoJo caught it in his bare hands as the little guy was running up the wall in my room. I bought more cages and got more shredded paper from Kinko’s. The rats seemed happy enough, and for the most part got along, although there was a problem with Fred and Josephina (formerly known as Joe) because Josephina was not receptive to mating. Unfortunately, by the time I realized what was happening and separated them, Josephina was pregnant. Although it did not turn out the way I expected, I do feel proud of myself for building a clean and decent habitat for the rats and keeping them healthy.

I didn’t see Rosemary again until about nine months later when she rang our buzzer on a Saturday at noon. When she rolled through the door, I hardly recognized her: instead of a gaunt, pale ghost, she was round, blush-cheeked, and heavily pregnant. Still stunning, she had transformed from a wraith to the epitome of blooming life. The timing was bad. During the three months after Halloween, JoJo had pined for Rosemary, moping around the apartment, peering through the window wistfully, as if she might appear magically from behind a streetlamp; worse, he played the Cure on an infuriating loop. For a while he stopped going out, and he lost his gig with the park district. Then, something shifted. There was a visit from his father, who took him to some kind of black-tie event. The next thing I knew, JoJo was spending all his time with a well-heeled, willowy, articulate influencer named Ainsley. They did a lot of raw, organic food preparation, juicing, and massages with Frankincense and Ylang Ylang oils. Ainsley taught JoJo all about skin care, and he said he felt better than ever. I had to admit, his skin did look good. Right before Rosemary showed up that Saturday morning, Ainsley bought a VW van in which she and JoJo planned to travel to California, documenting their adventures in nature for their adoring followers. It seemed like JoJo had hit a vein of gold.

As I said though, the timing was bad. That same morning when Rosemary arrived at our apartment, JoJo and Ainsley were packing up the van for their cross-country trip. In fact, JoJo and Ainsley’s VW van turned off of our street just as Rosemary was coming up the stairs.

“Ephram,” she said, flouncing onto our beat-up couch, eyes puffy and red, “I need help. I thought maybe JoJo…”

Although Rosemary and I had only exchanged a few words on Halloween, sitting next to her on the couch and holding her hand felt very natural, as if we had known each other forever. Tears wet her apple cheeks.

“I don’t know what to do. Some immigration agents took my brother, and I don’t know where he is.”

“Oh God. I’m so sorry.”

“My other brother is gone too. I don’t know what happened to him, and I’ve been staying on my friend’s couch. I just…” I handed her a tissue and she inhaled suddenly, surprised. Something was happening in her body.

I made Rosemary some tea and microwaved her a baked potato with butter and salt. It was underdone, but she didn’t mind. She even helped me feed the rats. There were 28 at that point.

“The babies are so cute,” said Rosemary. “But I guess the dads don’t really do much after they impregnate the females.”

I shrugged. It wasn’t something I had thought about.

“They’re like bumblebees. They’re just drones. Their only function is to get the females pregnant. Papás vagos.” Confused, I wrinkled my brow. “Deadbeat dads,” Rosemary translated. She focused intently on the rat cage, which had two paper nests, then she turned and looked me in the eye. Despite my usual shyness, I let her brown eyes dive into mine.

“It’s the opposite for seahorse daddies,” Rosemary continued. “Those dads carry the eggs around in pouches until the babies are ready to swim on their own,” said Rosemary. “The seahorse daddies care for their young. Two kinds of dads.”

Rosemary could have stayed with me as long as she needed, but later that night she went into labor. Perspiring substantially and dizzy from stress, I called our neighbor, Anthony, a certified nursing assistant. Soon, he was out of his depth, so Anthony and I took her to the hospital. Rosemary was scared to go because of being undocumented, but I was afraid she or the baby would die if she tried to deliver in our apartment. Frankly, I thought I might have had a heart attack myself, but I tried to keep it together for Rosemary. While Anthony drove his Honda Civic through traffic, I held Rosemary’s hand.

“You’re incredibly strong,” I told her. “But why didn’t you come sooner?”

“I wanted to,” Rosemary said softly. “I tried to so many times, but something in my heart stopped me…until today. A one-night fling isn’t the best way to start to a life with someone.” Tears started flowing down her cheeks again, and I regretted asking the question. She had another contraction, then took a deep breath. “Ephram,” she said, meeting my eyes, “you need to take the baby if anything happens to me.”

“JoJo’s the dad,” I squeaked, trying not to sound as terrified as I felt.

“JoJo’s a bumblebee,” said Rosemary. “You’re a seahorse. I can tell by the way you are with the rats. The baby and I, we need you. We don’t have anyone else.”

“I think if JoJo knew…” I started.

Rosemary looked at the roof of the car and bit her lip. She spoke with her face turned away from me. “He knows,” she whispered. “When he was driving away today, he saw me. I watched his face register everything. He knows. He could have stopped. He could have come out and said something, anything, but he drove away. He and that girl just drove away.”

Anthony left after a couple hours. He was great, but he had an early shift and needed to get some rest. I stayed. It took 36 hours, but eventually the nurses invited me in to see the baby. Rosemary told them I was the father. I didn’t argue; being the father, even a surrogate, was the best gift anyone had ever given me. Rosemary even let me name him: Leif Benitez Johnson. Leif was my grandfather’s name, and Benitez is Rosemary’s family name. Johnson was mine. Anthony pointed out later that Leif’s initials are L.B.J. and calls him “Little Baby Jesus” to yank my chain; but secretly, I like it.

My next two shifts at Kinko’s came and went, but I stayed at the hospital with Rosemary and Leif. They were the best two days of my life. Becoming a dad was surreal and amazing. I felt so protective of Leif, our tiny treasure. He fell asleep on my chest while Rosemary recovered. The nurse said babies like to snuggle, skin to skin, so we did. I could feel his little heart beating, and his hands were so tiny, gently clutching at the hair on my chest. His sweet, fresh bread smell lulled me to sleep, and for a few hours, everything else disappeared. My dreams rose up like hot air balloons with Leif, Rosemary and I together, laughing, but I awoke to a shock.
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Rosemary was gone. Hospitals used to be safe for the undocumented, but now waiting rooms and other public areas are fair game for immigration agents. I don’t know how they found Rosemary, but now it’s me who looks down the street every day, wondering when she’ll return, hoping she’ll pop out from behind a streetlight. I’ve made phone calls and even contacted a pro bono lawyer, but no one can tell me anything useful. I don’t know if I’ll see her again, but I’m pretty sure JoJo will be back. On some level, I know JoJo won’t take Leif from me. Rosemary was right: he’s a bumblebee, not a seahorse. Raising this child is my job. Later, when Leif is stronger, when he can swim on his own, we’ll go out and look for his mother. Until then, I’ll keep my son, Little Baby Jesus, safe. I’ll raise him on stories of a beautiful ghost bride who wanders the earth searching for her lost children, who appears on Halloween night, like a page from a fairy tale, then disappears without a trace.

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​Born in England, Sarah Clowes grew up near Chicago, Illinois. She currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota where she teaches college English, reading, and literature and lives with her husband, daughter, and rat terrier. Her stories and poems have appeared in Chanter Magazine, The Wittenberg Review, The Manuscript, Enigma Magazine, and The Chrysalis Reader. She also lived in New Mexico on a reservation for several years. While she was there, she won first place in a poetry slam in Gallup, New Mexico.