All There Is
By Tasha Haas

I heard the baby hit before I saw it. A soft thunk sound, muffled but solid. I looked and saw what had made that sound and it was the baby’s head hitting the marble floor of the hospital. It didn’t make a sound after that. Didn’t squeal, didn’t cry, but its mouth opened and closed, opened and closed but nothing came out. A second later that stopped too, and the baby was still.

It wasn’t like it jumped out of my arms. I dropped it. That was the truth.

It was brand new. Its body red and hot and sticky still, its eyes slits with a tiny prick of light between. She’d held it maybe five minutes, then I took it to wash and diaper. The father was there too, both of them smiling hard. I don’t think the father held it.

I was going down the hall with it. I wasn’t daydreaming that I remember, I wasn’t thinking about anything special. I wasn’t talking to it and not looking at it either. I had seen it as it came out and it was sweet and ugly and miraculous like they all are and it looked perfectly healthy. But I was working now, working the middle of the shift, when I didn’t get sentimental during the births, I just didn’t because there was plenty of work to do and I had to do it.

Thirteen years a nurse and I’d never done anything like this. I’d made mistakes, all of us did. Kept a woman in the sweat room all night after surgery when she didn’t need to be in there. She came out hot and cranky, but alive. Maybe thirteen was my unlucky year.

It was heavy in my arms, a thick weight through the blanket. Then my arms were light. I don’t know.

It was late, after two, and dark and quiet in the hall. I picked it up and held it to me and my hands were shaking. It wasn’t moving and I was sure it was dead. I looked up and down the hall. No one. Rounded shapes of light lay on the floor at each door from the nightlights in the occupied rooms. One door showed no light and I remembered it was empty. I went into it. The room was dark except for a piece of blue streetlight across the bed next to the window. I laid it in that and then I began to shake it. My hands were shaking and I was shaking it and shaking it. I couldn’t stop. In the shaking I kept my eyes on its eyes, but the color was dull in the slits, there was no tiny light and the eyes weren’t seeing anything. I knew it was dead and finally I stopped and looked at it lying there dead on the clean sheet and then I went out, leaving it in the dark room, a small dead lump in the blue piece of light.

I walked down the hall and into the stairwell. I took the stairs to the basement and walked down another hall and another and came out in the parking garage. I didn’t meet anyone. As I crossed the empty garage I thought of my cigarettes and my keys in my locker but I didn’t stop.

Outside I crossed the big parking lot. Then there was the gravel lot then the lake. I walked a long time along the lake’s curve looking at the ships. They were big and white out on the water. They were sharp and their lines were thin. They looked like paper boats in the darkness. They looked like you could push them over with your finger. Strings of windows lit up their sides. They were cargo ships but at first I thought they were cruise ships. I looked at them for a long time as I walked and thought about the people inside, the people dancing and drinking martinis.

On the way back I saw stars. They were far up in the sky to the north over Lake Michigan and there were not many, but there were some. I didn’t want to come to the hospital when it came but I put the feeling away and went straight in through the back to my locker. The lights were on bright on the bright green lockers but no one was in there. There were a few people I couldn’t see because if I did, I would break. I couldn’t see Doreen and I couldn’t see Ray. I didn’t see them. In the locker were scrubs and a couple changes of clothes and a pair of tennis shoes and a Stephen King novel. All of this I left. They could have it. I took the rain jacket I’d worn in that evening when the rain had been coming in gray slices and felt my keys and cigarettes in it and went out. Later I wished I’d taken the Stephen King.

As I drove home it was getting light. The light was all on the door when I unlocked it, that clear pale gray morning light. Usually when I came home it was still dark, about an hour from light. Today was a different morning. I went in and the apartment too looked different. Smaller, and dim gray and cluttered even though it wasn’t that cluttered. The apartment was nice. It had some nice things in it, things my ex and I had gotten together. The matching couches and the glass coffee table and the framed landscape prints that reminded Dennis of Colorado, where he was from. The fresh flowers I’d bought at the grocery store the day before sat on the coffee table, the light through the blinds hitting some of them.

I went to the kitchen, dumped the old coffee filter and saw the trash needed taking out. I put a new filter in and two scoops of coffee. I stood looking at the coffee in the filter, I never did turn the coffeemaker on. I looked at my hands, then each finger and fingernail. The ragged hangnails.

I went into the bedroom and sat on the end of the bed. My thoughts ran in circles, from why to how to what kind of person was I that it had happened to me or I let it happen, what kind of horrible person, but I knew the answer to that, it was murderer, that’s what kind. Then to if only I could go back, go back, go back to that single moment or the moment just before. The slightest tightening of my arms, that was all it would take. Then the thoughts would start again, same circle.

An hour, two hours, I don’t know. Then I was looking at the bedcover, the big violet flowers on it, and it was just like a hotel bedcover. It had been on my bed for years and I had liked it fine but I had never seen how it was exactly like a hotel bedcover, thin and gaudy in that way. Cheap, infested.

I went to the bathroom and changed from my scrubs into jeans and a tee-shirt, my hands dreamlike on my body. Not looking in the mirror I opened the medicine cabinet and took a tube of lipstick. It’s funny how the only thing I took was lipstick, no toothbrush, no toothpaste, no moisturizer. I still wasn’t thinking too clearly at that point. My purse I had left in the car, so when I went out that was the only thing I was holding—the lipstick clutched like a rock or a weapon in my one fist.

In the car it was really light now. The light was all over inside the car. You could see how the air was all thick with dust. The air is always like that but we don’t see it.

I drove out south of Chicago and got on the interstate. The rest of that day and night I drove. The further out I got, the more stars there were in the windshield. I watched them like I had never watched anything before, like everything I was depended on that watching.


In Wichita it was morning again and I had to stop. There were truck stops and finally I went into one. I had some coffee. I hadn’t had any yet and I never go without my coffee.

Before she brought it I went into the bathroom. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands and dried them and looked around. At the dirty tile and the dirty striped wallpaper and the black and green grime lining the base of the toilet and it occurred to me I hadn’t done anything wrong. I ran my hands over my face and stroked my head, my dirty hair. My hair was not thick and I felt the shape of my head through it, long and oval, all bone. I stroked it a while. I cupped my hands over my face. I looked in the mirror through my fingers. Slowly I took my hands down. I didn’t look good but there was the same basic shape of the face I had always had underneath. I felt in my purse for the lipstick and put it on. It was dark, plum, evening lipstick. I always liked that lipstick, I always felt good in it. I put it on heavy, too heavy. I smacked my lips and looked. They were dark and thick and I looked ready for something.

When I came out the coffee was there, and it was cold. The light on its surface tilted and shook. The men were sitting around smoking and drinking coffee, some in circles around tables and some alone. They were not the kind of men I was used to. Dennis had sold computers. The doctors and orderlies and interns were modest and clean-shaven and they didn’t wear hats. Everything about these men was foreign, rough-edged, their faces and voices and the sound of their boots scraping back and forth under the table as they grunted at each others’ jokes. Their bellies in plaid western shirts hung over their belt buckles. Some wore cowboy hats, others greasy baseball caps with trucking company logos. I sat holding the coffee in its thick cup up close, breathing into it as if it were hot. Finally I paid and went out.

As I was going out a man passed me in the paneled hall. He wore jeans and a blue mesh baseball cap and a well-trimmed beard, brown with silver patches. As he passed I stopped and turned toward him. The stopping was unexpected and he stopped too, then went on, into the lounge, a little room filled with smoke and a television with the volume on very low. A Hispanic kid was sitting on the vinyl couch with his legs stretched out staring at the television. The man sat on the other couch. He looked up and saw me standing in the doorway looking at him. He looked back at the television. I went in.

There were the two couches, a recliner near the television and a metal folding chair at the end of the man’s couch. I sat in this chair. The length of the couch was between us and we were facing the same way, not each other. I stared at the kid’s pointed cowboy boots, thinking of the baby. A Spanish soap opera was on.

Pretty soon I heard the man strike a match and light a cigarette. I felt him looking at me.

“Smoke?” he said. His eyes had deep creases around them and his brows were thick and gray under the hat but his beard was mostly brown and he had strong, symmetrical features. His eyes were oddly pale, though in that light I couldn’t tell if they were blue or green.

“I have my own,” I said, still looking at the boots. I got my pack from my purse and lit one.

“Where you headed?” he said. I pulled on the cigarette and saw it was trembling.

He looked back at the television. I opened my mouth and closed it.

“Denver,” I said finally. My voice trembling too.

“Funny. Me too.”

I stared at the cigarette. I felt him looking at me, felt him thinking.

After a long pause he said, “You looking for a ride?”

The kid looked over and I looked back. I raised my eyebrows at him, like what’s-it-to-you. Without looking at the trucker I said, “I wouldn’t say no.”

For a few minutes he didn’t say anything. Then he stood up. He came and touched my shoulder and I stood and we went out, his hand trailing down my back.

We crossed the big parking lot to his truck without speaking. It was a metallic blue truck with Schooner Trucking Co., Lincoln, Nebraska scrolled on the door. He stepped up on the high step and opened the door and stepped back down and I climbed in and shut the door. On the console I saw his things: a miniature American flag, a tin of lip balm, cassette tapes, a rosary hanging from the rearview. Maybe he wasn’t a bad guy. It didn’t matter. It was quiet, perfectly still in the cab. So still the cab shimmered. The morning was in it that same clear hard gray light. But this was a different morning.

He got in beside me. I could smell his sweat and his deodorant over it. I stared through the big windshield. Men were crossing the lot, going to and from their trucks, and there were some cars parked in front of the restaurant and some getting gas. He rubbed his face and yawned.

“Didn’t stop last night,” he said. I looked between the seats in the back. There was a sleeper, a blanket pulled tight over it and a pillow. It was dark and clean. I climbed back on it. I waited for his hand on me as I went but it didn’t come.

I sat with my back against the cab and my legs out in front of me. He was looking straight through the windshield. His hair was buzzed short, silver along the line. I saw the shave under the plastic strap of the hat, the clean brown back of his neck. I took my shirt off. I had a thick white bra on. I took that off, too.

Finally he turned, saw me, and looked back through the windshield. I fell down on the sleeper and covered my head in my arms. I started to break. Then I felt his forearms on either side of me, close to my bare sides. He was climbing back, his weight on his arms. I felt my body stiffen.

When he was stretched out I turned over and put my hand on that clean back of neck. I pulled him to me.

“What do you think?” he said. His eyes were very pale green and serious. He wasn’t bad-looking, he had a kind of Mel Gibson look.

“Nothing.” I pulled on his neck. I pushed the hat off and ran my hand up his head, up the ridge where the two bones in the back meet. That was the spot it hit, that soft back of head on the marble floor. I pulled harder and kissed him and he kissed back. I felt the heavy lipstick smearing his lips.

I kissed him until he got hard. I tugged at his jeans and he unzipped them and pulled them down past his knees and I pulled mine down. His penis was cold and wet on the tip but it was hard, full of blood. He pushed against me and it had been a long time. Maybe three years, since Dennis. Then he was inside me and it felt good. I had forgotten. The very first of him inside felt so good. Then it didn’t anymore, it was rough and sad and the morning was coming in the cab gray and clear and hard.

He sat up and climbed half up front, his butt to me, balls swinging between his legs. He came back with a pack of cigarettes and dug a lighter out of his jeans. He sat with his back against the cab and I lay on my side with my head by his cold white hip. I looked up at his chest and it was like I was so much smaller. His penis fell toward my face, empty and wrinkled, gray-pink.

He handed me a cigarette and I took it and he lit it, then his own. I pulled in the smoke and let it out and he did the same. The sleeper filled with smoke, it moved into the front cab and mixed with the light. The rosary was hanging motionless in the light.

“Are you Catholic?” I said.

“Not really. Mom was.”

“You don’t believe in that stuff.”

“Nah. I don’t believe in nothing I can’t see, can’t feel for myself. I never came across no evidence there’s nothing else, d’you?”

“All there is is what is.”

“That’s it. All there is is what is.” He rubbed his hand over my bare belly. “I like the way you put it. That’s a real good way to put it.”

He blew smoke out his nose and grinned down at me. He raised his eyebrows. His lips were plum color, it looked funny. Police, I thought. The law. That’s what is.

“I think I’ll go on to Denver,” I said. “You can drop me off there. I’ll find my own way around. I’ll be all right.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m just glad to get the company when I can. Should we get going?”

I nodded. He pulled up his pants and climbed up front and flicked his cigarette out the window. He touched his finger to his tongue, crossed himself, and touched the rosary. Then he started up and shifted into gear.

Back to Contents