9781529925203

MYRIAM LACROIX

Myriam Lacroix was born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing. She currently lives in Vancouver.

MYRIAM LACROIX

How it Works Out

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First published in Vintage in 2025

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 2024

First published in Canada by Doubleday Canada in 2024

Copyright © Myriam Lacroix 2024

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Meaning of l ife

To Allison, I figured it out. I know how it works out.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

They’d planned on getting beer from Toby’s, but instead they got a baby, and they were not unhappy about it. Myriam and Allison hadn’t talked about kids yet, but finding one seemed to be a sign that it was time. Besides, being lesbians, this spared them the trouble of adopting or getting one of their friends to have sex with them.

They found the baby in the alley behind their apartment building, close to a gutted couch and confetti and some blood. There’d been a fight outside Toby’s— on stand­up comedy night, of all nights. That was Toby’s. They were inspecting the couch, wondering if they could turn it into some sort of art installation, when they noticed little feet kicking at the inside of a flannel cocoon. Allison wiped her glasses and Myriam kneeled, poking the bundle.

“Look how serious this baby is right now,” Myriam laughed. She traced its droopy cheeks and sullen brow. “I like, love this baby.”

“That baby’s a critical thinker,” Allison agreed. “I’d hang out with that baby.”

Back at their apartment, they gave the baby a bath in the kitchen sink. They rubbed it until it was clean and warm and happy, then dried it with a dish towel and took turns smelling its head. It smelled like green apples from the dish soap.

They wrapped the baby in a sweater and gave it a tour of the apartment. The narrow kitchen, with its lemon­slice wallpaper. The Boggle corner. The broken kids’ toys Allison collected from the alley to use as instruments, and the bathroom, whose walls were covered in red­lipstick poetry because Myriam wrote in there and frequently felt oppressed by the page. The baby loved the apartment. It gurgled and touched and put everything in its mouth.

They made their new baby a bed next to their bed by stuffing blankets inside a Rubbermaid bin, but they couldn’t get themselves to put it down. They pressed it between their skins and fell asleep, warm as hams.

Jonah, because they’d never met anyone with that name. They had no idea what Jonahs were like, and they liked the element of surprise. They were not going to be the kind of parents who call their baby Mozart or Beyoncé. In fact, they immediately agreed they would never wish any real­world success on Jonah. That was how people ended up with stomach ulcers, or making bad art.

They called Myriam’s mom first to tell her the news. They told her a desperate woman with no eyes inside her eyeholes begged them to take her baby and raise it as their own. They said that because they knew Myriam’s mom wouldn’t understand, she’d pester them about not making any efforts to find the parents.

“Babies are expensive,” she pestered anyway. “How’re you gonna pay for diapers or dentists or, worse, orthodontists? With Allison working at that call center?”

Myriam’s mom thought that because Allison had short hair and wore men’s shirts she should be the breadwinner. She understood nothing about lesbianism, and she understood nothing about them.

“If you don’t try to be more supportive, we’re gonna tell Jonah he only has one grandmother,” Myriam said. She hung up.

Allison’s parents offered to host a late baby shower, and Myriam and Allison invited all their friends. Myriam wore her gold latex minidress, and Allison put on a gold chain to match. They dressed Jonah up in a little white ­and­gold dress they’d taken off the baby Jesus doll at the Salvation Army.

Myriam and Allison’s friends decided that Jonah was a very cute baby, which meant he’d be an ugly adult. Allison and Myriam didn’t mind. Ugly people had more incentive to tell good jokes, or develop an amazing sense of fashion.

They all sat by the pool in lawn chairs with Allison’s parents occasionally refilling the chip bowls, and nobody swam. Myriam and Allison’s friends were not the swimming type. They wore thick makeup and boots that took a long time to lace.

“You have to let me do a photo shoot with Jonah,” their friend Ash said. “Anne Geddes meets Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Baroque an homage to Jonah’s dark provenance.”

Ash was the best thing to have come out of Myriam’s general arts undergrad, and Myriam told them so.

“To the best chosen family in the world!” Myriam cheered. “And to our cute­ass baby!”

They all raised their glasses and took big gulps of their drinks. Myriam was drinking lemonade in case her breasts started making milk from being around a baby, but Allison got sloshed. About five beers in she climbed onto the diving board and started screaming the lyrics to a song she’d written for Myriam.

“Until our asses hang like sandbags! And our pussies smell like kelp! Say you’ll love me, baby, or I’ll be needin’ help!”

“Okay, okay, I’ll love you forever!” Myriam shouted as Allison inched closer to the edge of the board. She rolled her eyes and laughed, blushing behind her hair. “So dramatic!”

Allison jumped in anyway and Myriam waded in after her, wrapping her arms around Allison and kissing her with full tongue. They made out in blue ­lit water until Allison’s mom yelled that the pizza was here, then they wrung out their clothes and rejoined their friends. On the pool deck, Ash was passing around one of their signature joints, and Kamran was giving Jonah an undercut with tiny leopard print on the sides of his head. Allison started playing a synth she’d found in her childhood bedroom, and her best friend Nate drummed on patio furniture. They played space ­age versions of lullabies that everyone danced to, undulating their hands against the dark night sky.

Around sunrise Allison’s dad drove them home, and Allison puked a thin string of puke on the family van’s carpet. Back in their room, Allison and Jonah fell asleep right away, but Myriam stayed awake, wondering about the meaning of life.

Myriam and Allison had met when Myriam was in university, at a show in a run­ down punk house in East Vancouver. Allison had just finished playing a set and asked Myriam if she thought her last song was “derivative.” Myriam had never heard that word, but the way Allison asked her, with sweaty hair and an electric vulnerability in her eyes, made Myriam want to have sex with her right away. Two years later, they were so in love it felt like living inside a dream, only some nights Myriam got nervous. She’d grown up with her single mom, moving every time her father made a new threat. She couldn’t turn love into a story that made sense, and would get into these existential spirals.

Myriam looked at Jonah, whose toes were curling in his panda socks. She didn’t agree that babies gave a meaning to life. Nuclear families were a concept made up by the same people who wanted you to get full­ time jobs or sell your art for money. Still, when she lifted Jonah from Allison’s heaving chest and held him in her arms, she could feel the exact dimensions of her happiness, its weight and humid breath. It wasn’t a dream.

Myriam couldn’t stop smelling Jonah’s neck. At the store, on the bus, while changing his diapers. His baby smell was intoxicating, like the smell of permanent markers or very fresh flowers. Allison found a knitting kit in the dumpster and started making

Jonah lots of little hats and tunics, all from the same purple wool. Myriam learned to cook. After her shifts at the café, she’d come home and soak bread in milk and sugar to make soft pudding that Jonah could eat. She stewed apples with cinnamon, for vitamins and because it made their apartment smell like a candle store. She thawed frozen peas and puréed them with the heel of her hand.

Some nights Myriam still wondered about the meaning of life, but then Jonah would yawn and put his hand against the side of her head, tangling his fingers in the curls as his eyes slowly closed. Allison would pull them both into her chest, which, despite being flat and ribby, was the most comfortable chest in the world. The questions would float away, making way for sleep.

Things were like that, when Jonah was a baby. Soft, warm, easy. They spent all their free time playing— dress­up and tickle fights and spin the baby’s bottle. When one of them got feelings they’d practice primal screaming and make up dances to it, spinning around until they were so dizzy they fell limply onto various surfaces in the apartment.

Then, one day, when he was two, Jonah got an ear infection. Myriam and Allison had avoided going to the doctor until then, but this time there was no way around it. Jonah’s upper lip and chin were permanently caked with snot from crying all the time. His little child body felt like a hot­water bottle. They took him to the walk­in clinic by their house and claimed to have lost Jonah’s health card.

“No problem,” the receptionist said. “I’ll look him up in the system.”

“Fuck the system,” Allison thought to say. “The system is oppressive and one day the world will return to its natural state of anarchy.”

“Just have a seat, please.”

The doctor was a short old guy with really long eyebrows. He was grumpy with them, told them that even anarchist parents had to make sure their child had health care. He sent them off with a handwritten prescription for antibiotics.

In the lobby, they thanked the nice receptionist and promised her that they were going to try to accept organized society. When they turned around, Jonah was throwing magazines on the ground and a lady in a pinstriped jacket was looking at him funny. Deep creases were forming in her makeup from how much she was frowning. Allison picked up Jonah and apologized to the lady. As they left the clinic and turned the corner into the alley where they’d found Jonah, they heard the lady yell: “Hey, where’d you get that baby?”

“We got the baby in the normal way of giving birth to him!” is what they should have answered, but instead they started running. That was a bad call. The woman charged them like a provoked pit bull and caught up to them almost instantly, grabbing Allison by the sweater. She was breathing hard and her face was red like a demon’s. At first glance, she’d looked like the kind of lady Myriam and Allison would never talk to: a business executive or a paralegal, someone who lived in a condo with chrome appliances. From up close, though, they could see that the skin under her makeup was leathery, that her too ­ tight bun was held together by a purple elastic threaded with silver tinsel, that her skirt suit wasn’t so much navy as the tired color of a

varicose vein. She was a fraud, which meant that she was one of them, which meant that she was no more entitled to having a baby than they were.

“Where’d you get that baby?” the lady asked again.

“You can’t have him,” Allison said. Another faux pas. She may as well have said finders keepers.

Myriam got a feeling like a cold glass of water down the back. This was the same feeling she’d gotten as a teenager in her Montreal suburb, when she’d sense a manager trailing her through the aisles of a department store and her messenger bag was full of crop tops and flavored lip gloss. She yanked the woman’s bun back and the woman collapsed like a folding patio chair. She grabbed Allison by the arm and they ran. When they looked back, the woman was trying to sit up on her knees, a palm on the back of her neck. Her eyes didn’t know where to be in their sockets.

Allison pulled Myriam into the yard of an apartment building that wasn’t theirs. They snuck around to their own building, half a block down. Myriam was pretty turned on by how clever Allison was, throwing the woman off their tracks like that. When they got back to their apartment, they calmed their sweet baby and didn’t waste one second after he was asleep to start fucking like astronauts who just came back from a mission and actually survived and took off their spacesuits and were suddenly irresistibly bare and fleshy, floating around their tiny tin­ can room. They loved everything about this situation. They loved having a baby, yes, but they also loved fighting together against a nemesis. They loved breaking the rules in the name of their love, and they especially liked getting away with it.

When Jonah woke up from his nap, they put all the pillows, cushions and blankets they owned on the living room floor and lay down on them. They poured chocolate chips into their palms and ate them with their pinkies up, as if they were tiny appetizers. They cut up some picture books and rearranged them however they wanted. When Allison had to leave for her evening shift, she kissed their baby on his face for five minutes, then she kissed Myriam deep and put her hands in Myriam’s underwear, stroking her bum.

“She’s out there,” Allison said when she came back later that night. “She’s just sitting out in her car. I had to come in through the back.”

Allison’s nostrils pulsed open and closed like little jellyfish: she was worried. Myriam took her by the hand and pulled her onto the couch, wrapping her arms and legs around her from behind, like a backpack.

“She’ll go away,” she said in Allison’s ear. “When we wake up, she’ll be gone.”

She wasn’t gone. She was there as they ate their Corn Pops, did their morning aerobics, listened to their morning podcasts.

She was still there when Myriam came back from work around dinnertime. She was there when they went to bed. The following morning, they parted the blinds and there she was, wiping something off her windshield with a napkin.

She’d spend the whole day on their street, sitting in her old gray Camry. Sometimes she’d step out and circle some buildings, or she’d get on her knees in the middle of the street and say please, please with her hands clasped over her heart. She’d drive off late at night and be there again the next morning.

At first it was fun to sneak around like spies whenever they left the house, but, after a few days, the woman’s presence started getting to them. They left the apartment less often. They kept the blinds closed. They stopped taking Jonah to the park, and if he cried too loud they all huddled in the bathroom, stuffing towels under the door so the sound wouldn’t seep out into the street.

It was almost two weeks after their trip to the clinic, and Allison and Myriam had planned a parent meeting. Until now, parent meetings had meant coming up with fun new art projects, or sharing intel about where to score free baby stuff. Not this time.

They’d thought the woman would have given up by now, but they were starting to worry she never would. The day before, she’d gone into the alley, written down give Me baCk My boy in blue chalk and stood over it, screaming like a burning witch.

“Maybe we should move,” Allison said. She was sitting at the Formica table, playing the same ominous notes over and over on a toy keyboard.

“And leave our apartment? The best apartment in the world?” Myriam said, pacing the kitchen. “I don’t think so. Anyway, we’ll never be able to get Jonah’s drawings off the floor, and we can’t afford to lose our damage deposit.”

“Well, we have to do something,” Allison said. “You know she could actually take our baby, right?”

Myriam picked up a rag in the kitchen and started wiping the counters, which was disgusting because they never cleaned them. Allison’s song faded away, and for a moment Myriam imagined that she was alone in the kitchen, that this was her apartment, that there had never even been an Allison or a Jonah. In a world like that, her mind wouldn’t spin at night with unanswerable questions about the universe. The questions wouldn’t be worth asking.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Allison said, putting her arms around Myriam because tears were falling down her cheeks. Whenever Myriam cried Allison’s voice got soft and hesitant. She sounded so helpless. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you or Jonah,” Myriam said, crying in Allison’s neck. “Everything would be so terrible.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” Allison said, squeezing Myriam protectively. “Whatever we have to do, we won’t let it happen.”

Myriam blew her nose into one of the Easter napkins they’d gotten at a discount.

“What are you saying, bun?” she said. “Like, we kill her or something?”

Allison rubbed Myriam’s back, considering.

“I don’t know,” she said after a while. “I don’t think I’m ready to take a human life. We could do blackmail, though.”

“You mean get some dirt on her?”

“Maybe. We do have the advantage. She can’t see us, but we can see her.”

And they could see her right then through a crack in the blinds, sitting in her car and mouthing the words to some unknowable song, deep half­moons carved out under her eyes by

the yellow streetlight. They could feel her presence like a mop bucket weakly but relentlessly slopping all over their shoes.

Allison asked her parents to babysit and borrowed a coworker’s car for the night. She and Myriam parked three cars behind the old Camry and hid under a musty wool blanket on the backseat. When the sexual tension of being on a mission got to be too much, they played a game where they made each other cum and had to stay very still and quiet. By midnight, they were so exhausted they almost didn’t notice when the Camry’s taillights turned on. Allison climbed into the driver’s seat with her hood down to her nose and Myriam joined her, sinking low in the passenger seat. They followed the Camry slowly, from a distance, through the dark streets of their neighborhood. The woman pulled into the driveway of an old brick bungalow only a dozen blocks from their apartment. Allison had to parallel park and wasn’t very good at it, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. She walked around the side of the house and down a small staircase, into the basement. Myriam and Allison snuck across the wet grass and crouched on either side of a small slit of basement window.

Dina poured the milk first, then filled the top third of the glass with Kahlúa. She stuck her finger deep into the glass and swirled until it was homogenous brown—adult Nesquik. The first gulp pulled her back into herself, into her clothes, into her basement apartment with its humming refrigerator, bluish ceiling lights, the beautiful Christmas tablecloth she’d inherited from her

grandmother and used year­round because it was so sturdy, the reds and greens and oranges so rich.

“Who’s winning?” she managed to say.

“It’s a tie,” Ken said, looking at the television. “Did you find your kid yet?”

“Don’t you go calling him my kid, Ken. He’s your kid, too.”

“Fine, fine, sorry I asked,” Ken answered. “What’s for dinner?”

“There’s chicken in the fridge. You could just get off your ass and warm it yourself,” Dina said, opening the fridge and peeling Saran Wrap from a dish of chicken covered in cream of mushroom. She scooped two chicken breasts and two dollops of mashed potatoes onto plates, microwaved them one at a time.

“Your job called. They’re wondering when you plan on going back. ‘Soon,’ I told ’em. Didn’t seem to believe me. Go figure.”

“I’ll go back when I have my boy. If they don’t like it, they can shake a can of Coke and squeeze it up their tight asses.”

Dina didn’t want to go back to work. She couldn’t stamp another passport application, force another customer service smile, put on another stiff skirt that left deep red grooves in her sides. For the first time since she’d lost her boy, she felt alive. After all the scenarios she’d imagined—Lucas being eaten by alley dogs, or chained up by psychopaths who made him drink his own urine—the thought that two young dykes in ripped denim had found and claimed him seemed like a joke. Knowing that the only thing standing between her and her Lucas was a couple of anarchist idiots filled her with hope. She knew they were hiding inside one of those cheapo apartment complexes. It was only a matter of time before they gave themselves away, and she’d be right there when they did.

Besides, sitting in her car all day allowed her to connect with herself, to think her thoughts and figure out how she really felt about things. The answer was that she felt like life had decided to make the space above her head its toilet seat. She looked like shit, felt like shit, probably smelled like shit and, irony of all ironies, hadn’t herself taken a proper shit in at least two weeks, making her acutely aware of all the shit piling up in her gut every time she took a bite of buttered bagel, ate a bowl of minestrone, got up in the night to eat an Ah Caramel in fucking peace. There must have been at least six chicken breasts sitting in her gut at that very moment, and there were about to be seven. Dina took a steaming bite of mushroom chicken.

Realizing that she felt like shit was a bit better than feeling like shit but being too dissociated to realize it. Now, if she started to punch her steering wheel, she knew why she was punching it. If she started to slap herself in the head, looking up to the sky and asking god what the point of life was and why didn’t he just blow her head off with lightning, because it would actually be less cunty than taking her baby—she could reassure herself that she’d only called god cunty because she was in a difficult place, emotionally. And who wouldn’t be, in her situation? The same scene had been replaying in her head for almost two years. Bringing baby Lucas to comedy night wrapped in a flannel blanket because babysitters were expensive and she couldn’t stay in that damned basement one second longer. Why should Ken get to have all the fun? Ken mouthing off at Toby’s, as usual, shouting “Get off the stage, faggot!” to some kid who, it turns out, really was a faggot, the kind with a tear tattoo and boxinggym arms. The kid had taken Ken out to the alley and punched

him until his face didn’t look like his face. The kid kept hitting and hitting—Dina had never seen so much blood. Then he’d started dragging Ken down the sidewalk by his shoe, saying homophobic fuckers like him didn’t deserve to live. That had scared her, really scared her. She didn’t much like Ken herself, but the idea of living without him made the ground drop under her feet. She’d tucked the baby in a corner of the alley and gone after Ken. “Help!” she’d screamed like a twit. As if people hadn’t already made the decision to stay out of it. She’d tried to pull on Ken’s leg, get the kid to let go, but the kid had kicked her off like a dog. She’d fallen to the ground and hit her head on a fire hydrant. The rest was fuzzy.

She’d come to on a stretcher in some hospital hallway, doctors and nurses running around her like clean chickens. She’d walked right out of the hospital, hailed a cab she couldn’t pay for and gotten out at Toby’s to find the alley empty, with nothing but blood and confetti where her baby should have been. That night, Ken had come home from the hospital and the two of them had beat the shit out of each other. They’d looked pathetic, swinging at each other and missing half the time, dizzy from concussions and pain medication. Still, it was the first and only time they’d hit each other, and they’d made it count.

The next day, they’d wept together in bed, disinfecting wounds and icing bruises. The day after, Ken had gone back to work, proudly parading his black eyes and casts, and seemed to forget about Lucas completely.

“They’re not gonna do anything,” Ken had said when Dina called the police. “Why should they care? You’re not pretty enough to be in the paper.”