Baby Love (30 page)

“Could we stay here a little longer?” says Tara. “If I get Sunshine up now she’ll be fussy all day.” Melissa-Susan lies in her drawer, not moving.

“We have to hurry,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “We have to stop them before they kill any more babies.”

Carla dreams of a baby on the rocks. He is propped up in an infant seat, kicking a piece of grass with his foot. All around him the water is swirling. Where’s the mother? Is she crazy?

He is smiling, straining at the little safety belt that holds him in. He lifts his head up, leans forward. He has never been able to do that before. A butterfly lands just beyond his toe. He would like to hold it. Stretch.

There she is, in the water. Shampooing her hair. Bubbles drip all down her neck, onto her breasts. She is naked. There is a man with her—a boy really—scrubbing her back. “Not there,” she says. She’s laughing.

The sun’s in his eyes. He doesn’t like that. “Uh,” he says. “Huh. Huh. Uh. Bub. Bub. Bub.”

She can’t hear; the radio’s turned up too loud. “What do you think this is, a James Bond movie?” she says.

Kicking harder now. Butterfly gone. She hasn’t changed his diaper in a long time. His skin is beginning to turn pink. Toe on moss. Head forward. Hands reaching. Bub. Bub. Bub.

“I should check the baby,” she says. They kiss again.

Seat forward. He lands on his face against the rock, too stunned to cry. Water crashes down, lifts him up. He’s spinning, swirling, upside down. Moving so fast. Where is the air? It’s like being born again.

“The baby,” she screams. “The baby’s in the water.”

Head on rock. Bubbles.

Here is what Wayne did, once Loretta’s heart stopped beating. First he cut the nails on her toes and her fingers. When she was alive he kept them long, filed very sharp, so he could feel her fingers digging into his back, his thighs, his biceps, her toes running up and down his calves, while they made love. Feeling is the important thing. Not necessarily feeling comfortable.

He knew some places where he didn’t want to put the clippings. In the wastebasket, for instance, for some eager beaver police sergeant to hit on. Down the drain. So he swallowed them—felt them scratching deep inside his throat, one of the few places where he had never felt her before. He took the longest fingernail and carved a deep X in his forearm, deep enough to draw blood. He sharpened a pencil with his penknife and sprinkled the lead dust into the cut. He still has the silver-colored scar.

Then he clipped a little curl of her pubic hair. He didn’t wash the blood off, because that would have taken away her smell. He made it into a ring (her hair was that long, that thick; you could braid it) and he wore the ring all through the trial. The prosecutor would be up there leaning on the jury box, saying, “What we have here is an animal. No respect for human life,” and Wayne could sit listening, with his head leaned against his hand, his ring finger, just inhaling her.

After he got what he needed, he had to clean things up. Not with any plan about getting rid of the evidence, staying free. His life was over anyway. He just wanted to protect their privacy—his and Loretta’s. Certain things are private.

So he cut up her mattress. This takes a long time when you’re using nail scissors. Somewhere in all the blood was a clot he thought maybe was the fetus. He put that back up inside her—she would like that.

The mattress pieces—he stuffed them in four green plastic garbage bags and drove out to the highway, scattering them in little bits over a fifteen-mile stretch near where he had met her, watching out for cops, because there was a fifty-dollar fine for littering.

Then he went to Jordan Marsh to buy her an outfit. He never liked getting her clothes while she was alive—liked her naked, let her have a few pieces of men’s long underwear just because the room got cold, winters. But he wanted her dead body dressed just like anybody else, so they would never know.

It was the first time he’d gone into a store like that. There was a woman standing right by the door demonstrating a new line of umbrellas and another one that tried to squirt some men’s cologne on his arm. “Where can I buy a dress?” he said. “Also some shoes, and some underwear.”

She told him so many different departments he couldn’t keep track, drifted off.

Way in back, on the third floor, he found the pink chenille bathrobe. “It doesn’t matter what size,” he said. “I don’t need a bag.”

Underpants. He rubbed seven different pairs against his cheek, studied the way they made the crotch. “Are you interested in bikini style?” said the girl. No, Loretta would not like that. He chose the plainest kind. White, one hundred percent cotton, elastic on the waist and reinforced crotch panel. A white cotton brassiere. “What size?” she said.

He put his hands on the glass display case, spreading his fingers to just the size of her two breasts, making them curve out just in the shape of Loretta. “Like that,” he said.

“Oh. Thirty-six B.”

Then he bought her some pink bedroom slippers with rhinestone clips, and rhinestone earrings. He bought her a fourteen-carat gold ring and a natural-bristle hairbrush from England. The one thing he would not buy, even now that it didn’t really matter, was makeup. How could you paint that face?

He carried the packages up the steps to their apartment and laid them next to her. He carried her to the bathroom, scrubbed her all over, until their smells were gone. He shampooed her hair and blew on it very softly while it was drying, to make it fluffy. Then he brushed and brushed. Then he eased the brassiere over her arms, fitted her breasts into the cups. He started to hook the brassiere in back and then he turned her over again to kiss her one more time in that place just above her nipples.

Her skin was colder than usual and her legs were getting stiff. He put the shoes on slowly, and the robe, screwed on the earrings and fitted on the ring, leaving the underpants until last. Then it was time and he put her feet through the leg holes. He had to take off the slippers and put them on again. He slid the panties up her legs.

Done. A few hairs sticking out the sides of the double-reinforced crotch panel, that was all. A single dot of blood. He turned her on her side and buried his face in her buttocks. That’s when the policemen broke down the door.

“All I can say is, you’d just better not come home with one of those strapless numbers,” says Doris. She still doesn’t understand why Jill wouldn’t want her to come along on the shopping trip. People have always said what a smart shopper Doris is.

“Believe me, you’ll be much more popular with the boys if you leave a little something to the imagination,” says Doris. She has suddenly noticed that her daughter’s filling out on top. Jill had better not have any ideas about some low-cut Raquel Welch number, that’s all.

“I’ll only look at the turtlenecked prom gowns, O.K.?” says Jill.

“You don’t need to get fresh with me, young lady. Don’t forget where that fifty dollars in your purse came from.”

“O.K., O.K.,” says Jill. She is heading for the door.

“Aren’t you even going to get something to eat?”

“I’ll stop somewhere on the way.” Jill puts her hand out for the car keys.

“I’ll never get over it,” says Doris. “It seems like only yesterday we were sending you off to first grade. I keep wondering, what happened to my little girl?”

S
ANDY SAYS
M
RS.
R
AMSAY
probably just went to some friend’s house with Melissa. Maybe she’s going through menopause or something. That’s supposed to make you act a little weird. Sandy says she has a friend with a car. They can ask Carla if she would just drive them around town, looking for an old green Cadillac. While they are at it they can look for Mark’s Valiant too. It’s seven-thirty. Carla is probably up by now.

Greg has to see Tara again. He can’t wait until noon, the way he said. He will go over to her house, explain that they have to talk. The truth is, that’s the one thing he doesn’t feel a need to do. But just having her in his car again, sitting beside him on the seat (what kind of hairdo will the baby wear today?) might make things clearer. Carla is still asleep. He will just leave a note.

Nothing good on the radio. Just a lot of stuff about that volcano that keeps erupting. In the local news, escaped mental patient, believed dangerous. Jill isn’t really paying attention.

She needs gas, pulls into Speedway. A man taps on her window; she rolls it down. “Five dollars’ worth of regular,” she says. Why is he barefoot?

“Say,” he says after he has put the nozzle in her tank. “There’s someone I’m trying to find. I wonder if you’d know where she lives.” He tells the name. “She lives alone,” he says.

“I think that’s the girl my father does odd jobs for,” Jill says. She gives him the directions and a five-dollar bill.

By the time the station attendant wakes up, Wayne is a half mile down the road.

Mark was so beat he slept right through past sunrise. It must be half-past eight now, and he’s sitting here in broad daylight with a girl he just met, wearing nothing but a seat cover. Val is curled up in the backseat with her arms crossed over her breasts. Asleep, she looks like a little kid.

At least his pants will be dry enough to put on now. He puts his feet in the legs and steps outside the car to pull them up. That’s what he’s doing—standing in the dirt with his pants around his ankles and his ass in the breeze—when he sees his wife coming down the road with their son in her arms.

At first Tara thought they were just stopping here so Mrs. Ramsay could drop off some of her pamphlets. It seemed unusual that an abortion clinic would agree to distribute a pamphlet called “I Am Your Fetus,” but she thought maybe it’s like the TV stations giving equal time to all the presidential candidates. She understood that something funny was going on when Mrs. Ramsay told her to walk up to the reception desk with Sunshine and then keel over on the floor, saying, “Get me a doctor.” The real reason she was willing to go up to the reception desk was because Melissa-Susan, out in the car, has been looking so strange, and when she said that to Mrs. Ramsay, said maybe they should stop by the hospital, ask if there was a pediatrician who could take a look at her, Mrs. Ramsay said, “All she needs is a good dose of my milk.”

When Mrs. Ramsay said that, it suddenly occurred to Tara that she might be more than just odd, that Wanda might not have been told about their vacation plans, that they might not really be headed for Disney World, or if they were, it might not be a good idea for Tara and Sunshine to come along. That business about passing through Jupiter, Florida, to say hello to her old friend Burt Reynolds—that was definitely not true. All this Tara understood. What she did not understand was that while she was trying to explain to the woman at the reception desk about Melissa’s funny green diarrhea, while the plump-looking girl sat on the Danish modern sofa reading
Mademoiselle
and those identical twin girls crawling around on the floor reached for their mother’s urine sample, while the boy in the leather jacket clicked away on his rosary beads and the doctor was saying, “I am not a pediatrician but if this is a real emergency”—while all this was happening, Mrs. Ramsay was sprinkling gasoline in the operating room and lighting a match. The first Tara heard of any such goings on was when the other nurse ran out, yelling, “Call the fire department. There’s a crazy woman trying to burn the building down.” There was so much confusion then that Tara just slipped away without anybody noticing.

Jill has chosen not to have an anesthetic. That way she can get out of here in two hours, be at Jordan Marsh by noon, stuff a prom gown in the shopping bag she brought along, drive home in time for work.

She’s lying on a paper-covered table waiting for the doctor to come. She’s wearing a white hospital gown, open at the back. The paper crackles when she shifts her buttocks. She slides one heel in the stirrups, remembers a pony ride she took once—her father holding the reins—at the Hopkinton fair. There’s a poster of koala bears taped to the ceiling. A Muzak version of “I Am the Walrus” drifts in from the hall. A nurse rushes through, setting out a row of metal implements. Get all your ingredients ready before you start, her mother says. The secret to good cooking.

“Doctor will be with you in a moment,” she says. She pats Jill on the foot. A new song comes on—heavily orchestrated Joni Mitchell. Jill closes her eyes.

She hears the door open again, the clatter of bottles, metal, hitting the floor, a crash. The reason she doesn’t open her eyes is, she doesn’t want to remember the doctor’s face, see it in her dreams. She especially doesn’t want to see what comes out when it’s over. She is going to think about the day she and Virgil went to Weirs beach and got tickets for the Water Slide. She is going to think about that until they’ve wheeled her out of this room and the worst of the cramps are over. Putting on her bikini now. Standing at the top of the slide, looking down, and the man punching her ticket. There’s water splashing against her back and she is shooting along the aqua tube. Chlorine in her eyes but she doesn’t mind. Gliding around a curve, speeding up, nearing the pool at the bottom and then hitting water. Up for air, Virgil beside her. One of her breasts has popped out of her bikini top, but no one else notices. “Lose a tit?” he says. They kiss.

Gasoline smell, a popping, crackling sound. Jill opens her eyes and sees a face she knows but can’t place. Redheaded woman throwing lit matches on the floor, somebody yelling, “Run.”

For a second she forgets where she is, and then she is down off the table, jumping over a burning spot, racing down the hall. Not until she’s out the door and standing on cool grass does she realize she left her best-broken-in pair of jeans on the chair inside, and the back of her hospital gown is flapping in the breeze.

“Gone,” says Mrs. Farley. “Forty-three dollars’ worth gone, if you want to know. She and the little bastard left sometime in the night. No note or anything.”

He will never find Tara, Greg knows. She would never come back to a place like this.

“You have any kids?” says Mrs. Farley, who did not take the time to put on her prosthetic brassiere before answering the door, so that her chest is not simply flat but actually caved in. “Take my advice,” she says. “Don’t.”