Aurora 06 - A Fool And His Honey (12 page)

Like most horrible things—roller coaster rides, committee meetings, vaginal exams—the trip eventually came to an end. After thirteen hours on the road (during two and a half of which Hayden screamed) we got to Corinth. By that time I didn’t like anyone in the Mercedes, myself included. Rory directed Martin to his family’s home, in a section of Corinth as derelict as any I’d seen in Lawrenceton. When we pulled up in front of a tiny brick house set up on a hill, the steps up to it steep and crooked, Rory ejected himself from the car with unflattering speed. “I’ll give you a call,” he promised. “Thanks for not turning me in. Take care of old Hayden, now.” He went up the steps two at a time, his extra clothes clutched to him in a paper bag, his hair sticking out all around from a knit watch cap he’d had stuck in his pocket. The streetlight gave the blond hair a tinge of green and his progress a definite touch of the surreptitious.

We watched him go with relief.

“If he had two thoughts at one time, they’d throw a surprise party,” Martin said mysteriously, and I nodded.

“The question is, is he bad or good underneath the stupidity?” I said.

“I don’t think he’s smart enough to be bad,” Martin said.

The same streetlight made my husband look hard and angry. Really, he was just tired and grumpy. Maybe.

“You don’t have to be smart to be bad,” I reminded him.

It was too late, and we were too tired, to cope with any surprises the farmhouse might have to offer. We checked into the Holiday Inn, staggered to our room with all the paraphernalia the baby required. Martin set up the portable crib while I changed Hayden, who rejected another bottle. There was a little refrigerator in the room, so I stuck the bottle in there, laid Hayden in the crib, and patted him on the back until he fell asleep. By that time, Martin was in bed. I felt like an elephant had rolled over on me and lain there for hours. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and crawled in beside him.

Two hours later Hayden woke up.

I was standing beside the crib when I attained consciousness.

Hayden was hungry.

The formula was cold, and there was no way to heat it.

Finally, I tucked it in my nightgown next to my body—you can imagine how good that felt—

and held Hayden and jiggled him in the room’s straight chair, trying Binkys and bouncing and humming with no effect. When the formula was slightly less chilly, I stuck the nipple in Hayden’s mouth, and after a brief protest, the baby began to suckle.

Martin slept all the way through this.

In the morning, when he shook me by the shoulder—very gently—I buried my face in the pillow.

“Roe,” he said, kissing me on the cheek, “it’s nine o’clock, and the baby’s awake.”

“Take care of him.”

“I changed his diaper,” Martin observed, trying not to sound proud and failing. “I think he’s hungry, and there aren’t any bottles.”

“Go to the store, and see if they sell formula already made up,” I advised. “Or take him to Craig’s aunt and uncle and let them worry about it.”

Martin heartlessly laid Hayden on the bed by me, and I raised my head enough to see his tiny finger waving. He made his little “eh” sound. His cheek was close enough to kiss, so I did, inhaling the now-familiar baby smell. I could hear the diaper rustle, and knew Martin hadn’t put it on snugly enough. Oh, hell.

I sat up, groggy as it is possible to be. “I was up with him last night,” I said, fixing Martin with as baleful a stare as I could scrape together. “While you slept,” I emphasized, in case he hadn’t gotten the point. I could not find any trace of sympathy for Martin in my heart. It didn’t make any difference that his niece was missing and her husband dead. He’d had what I hadn’t—

undisturbed sleep.

“I’ll go look,” he said hastily. “What kind should I get?”

I made him write it down. Hayden was beginning to escalate in his demands. “And hurry,” I added, in case he hadn’t gotten
that
point.

There was no going back to sleep. I found a Binky, stuck it in Hayden’s mouth, rejoiced to find that pacified him at least for the moment. I dashed into the bathroom, took a hot and sketchy shower, scrubbed my teeth again, and was appalled at the amount of makeup I needed to make myself look healthy this morning. I pulled on tobacco-brown slacks and a sweater of a deep yellow that I believed was called goldenrod. I took a moment to sit down on the bed and do some research with the local phone book. Then I finished rigging myself out with my rings, a chain, some earings, my gold-rimmed glasses, and socks and loafers ... By the time I’d finally put myself together, Martin was coming back in the room with a bag. It contained clean bottles and a few cans of ready-made formula.

“You wouldn’t believe what I had to pay for this,” he said with some indignation.

“I don’t care. Did you get a can opener?” I asked tensely.

He produced one from the bag with an air of triumph, and I gave him a heartfelt kiss on the cheek. He was about to go for something more meaningful when I heard the warning tune-up behind me.

“He’s getting serious,” I said, panicking. “We’ve got to get the bottle ready now!”

Working together we had a brand-new bottle full of brand-new formula ready in record time, and Hayden was gumming away on the nipple in blessed near-silence. While I aided and abetted, Martin checked the skinny Corinth telephone book for the address of Craig’s family, the Harbors, who’d taken him in when his parents died.

“Maybe they’re on their way to Lawrenceton,” I said, with a wave of horror. “Maybe they’re on their way there to collect Craig’s body!”

“Nope,” Martin said, his eyes never leaving the columns of phone numbers. “Padgett Lanier told me Craig’s brother had asked him how to ship the body back to Corinth when the autopsy was over.”

I felt a tide of relief sweep over me. The people who had raised Craig for the past five years were here in Corinth. I was not thinking of the Harbors as bereaved; I was thinking of them as baby repositories. And I’d lost any shame I had about it, too.

“Here they are,” Martin said absently. “Eighteen-fifty-six Gettysburg Street.” He closed the phone book and returned it to the drawer with a much more cheerful air.

“Who’d want to name a street after Gettysburg?” Obviously, I was talking right off the top of my head.

Martin looked up at me, his eyebrows raised and a patient look on his face.

“Oh,” I said, abashed. I’m not one of those unreconstructed southerners who refers to the War of Northern Aggression, but it seemed I’d been indoctrinated to some extent. I made a face at my Yankee husband. These people probably had an Appomattox Avenue, too.

We packed all the baby’s things in his diaper bag, folded up the crib for the last time, and went carefully down the stairs to our car. We hadn’t had coffee yet, or breakfast, and yet that seemed secondary to getting Hayden to qualified caregivers.

Since Corinth is only a little bigger than Lawrenceton, we found the Harbors’ house quickly.

To my silent dismay, it seemed like a darker shadow of the place where we’d dropped off Rory the night before. This house’s once-white siding was peeling, and the front yard had not a blade of grass.

Martin and I avoided looking at each other. We slowly got out of the car, and I opened the back door to extract Hayden. He was sound asleep, and I pulled out Ellen Lowry’s blue-and-white-striped blanket to drape over his head. A chill rain had begun to fall. Martin covered us with an umbrella. We picked our way across the yard to the door. My heart sank at the sight of the ripped shades at the two front windows. Who could have guessed, seeing the Harbors at the wedding, that this was how they lived?

Then I chided myself for my snobbery, reminded myself that children grew up healthy and cherished in the poorest of homes. But I knew it wasn’t the poverty that bothered me. It was the air that the people who lived under this roof had given up. They no longer cared—about peeling paint, or the lack of bushes to soften the mean lines of the old house, or the absence of stepping stones to keep visitors’ feet dry on messy days. There was not even a two-dollar doormat outside the front door to wipe my feet on.

But someone had put a big black bow on the door knocker, to show this was a house of mourning.

Martin leaned forward to rap on the wood and slid his arm around me. I leaned into its warmth, my hand absently patting Hayden’s round little bottom.

I hardly recognized the woman who answered the door as the same Lenore Harbor I’d met at the wedding. She’d put out a great effort then, I realized, seeing her now. Her hair had been done, her dress and shoes new. And she hadn’t been smoking. A cigarette hung from the corner of her mouth now, jiggling when she spoke to us out of the other corner.

“I halfway expected you, Martin. Come on in, I guess. I haven’t had a chance to clean up, I’m sure you know we’ve just been knocked on our butts by this news about Craig.”

Her voice was raspy, but she didn’t sound exactly as I’d expected. Sad, yes. . . but not agonized. She wasn’t Craig’s blood mother, of course. My heart began to sink.

I tried my hardest not to look around the room, but it was impossible not to absorb the depression that hung over the ancient furniture and loose linoleum, the plethora of overflowing ashtrays and discarded magazines. The Harbors had received a couple of plants and some sympathy cards, and they were arranged on the shelf of a nasty maple hutch. The ribbons on the arrangements stood out in brilliant contrast to the rest of the material in the dingy living room.

But it wasn’t the age of the furnishings, or even the presence of the ashtrays; it was the lack of maintenance, or care, of these things that bothered me.

This wasn’t what I had pictured as a temporary home for Hayden.

“And this is your wife?”

Lenore Harbor had met me at the wedding, but didn’t seem to recall that. Martin reintroduced me, and Lenore waved her hand at the couch. We perched there uneasily after piling all Hayden’s gear near the door.

Lenore turned her head toward the back of the house and called, “Hugh! Martin and his little wife are here!”

There was a curious sound from the next room, a kind of long wheeze, and then Hugh Harbor made his way into the living room. He was preceded by the
thump! shuffle, thump! shuffle
of a person using a walker. Hugh was about Lenore’s age, somewhere in his midfifties I estimated, and he was gaunt, with neutral coloring and light brown hair outlining a tonsure.

He greeted us in a wheezy voice. I noticed an oxygen tank sitting in the corner. Surely it was dangerous to smoke in a house with oxygen tanks? I remembered Rory saying that Hugh Harbor had been ill. I wished now I’d paid more attention, asked more questions. But in the rush to find someone to take Hayden off my hands, I hadn’t thought enough . . . about anything.

“I’m so glad you made the drive to come back to Corinth,” Hugh Harbor said. I wondered how he knew we’d driven. He eased back into a green vinyl armchair with stuffing protruding from one arm. There was a towel spread over the seat. I suspected the towel covered worse depredations. “We don’t think that Gina could’ve hurt poor Craig.” Hugh wheezed. “Musta been some thief, don’t you think? Or some guy who just saw Gina, thought she looked good? Craig wouldn’t a let anyone mess with Gina.”

“We’re sure Regina didn’t have anything to do with it,” Martin agreed firmly. I could tell he was mighty relieved. It would have been horrible if they’d believed Regina had killed Craig.

“I know Hayden will be a consolation to you,” I said, but I couldn’t hear any excitement in my voice. I sort of extended the baby, who’d been lying in my arms.

They gave me a very peculiar look, and I could tell they’d been married many years. Their faces held almost identical degrees of puzzlement and surprise.

“Of course, babies are wonderful things to have,” Lenore said, with a distressing lack of enthusiasm. “Hugh and I raised a houseful of them. We didn’t know you and Martin was even expecting, young lady.”

Martin and I turned to look at each other. We probably had twin expressions too; and they were of sheer bafflement.

I didn’t think I could talk, even if I could think of what to say. Martin looked down at Hayden, back at Lenore, who was taking advantage of the break in the conversation to light another cigarette.

“This isn’t our baby,” Martin said, not sounding very sure about it. “This is Craig and Regina’s boy, Hayden.”

You would have thought we’d announced we were going to strip and have sex on the floor.

The Harbors once again had twin expressions—this time, shock and fascination. After they’d absorbed what Martin had said, emotions scudded across their faces like clouds on a windy day.

“This is the first we’ve heard of it,” Lenore said finally. I could have sworn it wasn’t the first thing she thought to say. Hugh nodded agreement, the top of his bald dome glinting in the overhead light as his head bobbed back and forth.

“You didn’t know Craig and Regina were expecting a child?” Even knowing the answer, I had to ask. My heart couldn’t have sunk further. It was at the level of my big toe.

“No,” Hugh said. “They never said nothing about having a baby. Are you sure this boy is theirs?”

We did the Tweedledum and Tweedledee thing again, searching each other’s faces. I gave a tiny shrug.

“That’s what Regina told us,” Martin said carefully. I had expected Martin to be visibly upset again, but to my relief, he had returned to his more familiar persona of cagey businessman. His face was unreadable; his hands loosely clasped each other in a relaxed way.