Shadow Baby (15 page)

“Because it means that things fit together,” I said. “Things that don’t ordinarily go together
can
go together and then the whole will be consistent. It means that there’s a reason why things happen the way they do.”

“Take a baby,” I said. “And take a truck in the ditch. Those are two things that don’t ordinarily go together. But if you’re looking for consistency you can find it. It can be done.”

“How?”

“Well, that’s what I’m in the process of finding out. I’m looking for consistency. I’m training my eye to see possibility. Someday the two will mesh.”

“And then you’ll have your answer.”

“In the fullness of time I will have my answer,” I said. “That is what I believe to be true.”

If I knew for sure that it was Baby Girl’s destiny to die, my mind might be eased. If only I had the unshakable belief that she was never meant to take breath in this world. That would be something for me to believe. I could look people in the eye and say, “It was her destiny to be stillborn.” That simple statement of fact would answer all my questions. Facts are not arguable. Facts preclude argumentation. I asked Tamar once about this issue.

“Ma, do you believe in predestination?” I said.

“No,” she said.

Immediate. Simple. Clear. She didn’t have to mull it over for a second. That’s Tamar. Tamar is not a muller, nor is she a hemmer or a hawer.

“So what do you believe in then?”

“Luck,” she said. “Hard work. Marinated artichoke hearts.”

That’s Tamar also. Once in a while she comes out with a
non sequitur
. She likes to amuse herself that way. It’s a rare occasion that Tamar laughs. A laughing Tamar is an occasion to make the most of.

Later I asked her a follow-up question. That’s something that reporters often do. They ask a question, it leads them down another path of thought, and they ask a follow-up question. Sometimes I treat Tamar as if she were the subject and I were a reporter. I used to take notes on my roll of green adding-machine paper, neatly inserted into the paper holder that the old man made for me, but my green adding-machine paper no longer exists. It is no longer part of this world.

Tamar had a strong dislike of my roll of adding-machine paper anyway.

“I hate that thing,” she used to say. “I hate its narrowness and its green color. I hate the fact that it’s one endless roll. Be like the vast majority of the population, Clara. Use a normal sheet of paper.”

I humor her and use my legal pad in her presence. Most legal pads are yellow. Mine is orange. It came from the reject bin at Jewell’s. I hate the color orange, but I feel an obligation to the reject bin.

“So, if I understand you correctly,” I said, “you believe that luck and hard work, not predestination, determines a person’s chances in this world.”

“Correct.”

“Does destiny play a role in life at all, then, according to you, Ms. winter?”

“Very little if any.”

“What about a baby who seemed normal in every regard but who died at birth? Did luck or hard work play a role in this instance?”

Tamar stood up. She headed outside.

And that was it. Sometimes reporters keep on asking their questions and they keep on asking and they keep on, and once in a while their subject screams out the truth, just to shut them up. I hoped that Tamar would do that, too. But she didn’t. She never does. On the subject of Baby Girl, Tamar’s a closed book.

M
y baby sister was born with perfect fingers. I know because once I asked Tamar and she answered without thinking. I sprang the question on her. If there were anyone else to ask, I would ask anyone else, but who is there? My grandfather is a sore subject. I know that because that’s how Tamar refers to him.

“Sore subject,” she said to me when I inquired about him. “Moving right along.”

That’s another one of Tamar’s famous flat statements:
moving right along
.

“Just tell me one thing,” I said. “Did she have all her fingers and toes?”

“Who?”

Tamar knows who I’m talking about. Still she pretends ignorance.

“My baby sister. Did she have ten fingers and ten toes?”

“Yes,” Tamar said. “She had all her fingers and all her toes. But she wasn’t your sister. Your sister is someone who lives with you and grows up with you. That’s not what she was.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t touch that remark. Not with a ten-foot pole. Tamar has all her answers ready. The not-being-a-sister, the what-makes-a-sister and what doesn’t. How would she know? Did she ever have a sister?

“Do you consider yourself an authority on sororal relations?” I said.

“Where do you get these words, Clara?”

“Sororal relations is not a word, it’s a phrase.”

“Where do you get these
phrases
, Clara?”

I gave her a look. I can do it, too, give looks, although I rarely choose to do so. The truth is that I attract unusual words and phrases. They come drifting toward me out of thin air, invisible, and then they sense my presence and quickly attach themselves to me. That’s because I’m a word-person. My first-grade teacher told me that.

“Clara Winter,” he said. “You are a word-person and don’t ever forget it.”

He was right. He knew. He could tell. It’s something that can be sensed. There’s a difference between word-people and non–word-people. The old man, he was a non–word-person. Was the old man’s mother a word-person? His father?

Who knows?

It all comes back to the truth, and what the truth might be. Still, it’s easier to make up a story than to tell the truth. I don’t even know what the truth is. Tamar will not answer my questions. She does not even allow me to
ask
my questions. It’s a force she exudes. It’s an aura that surrounds her. I want to know everything about my baby sister, and everything is what I don’t know. There is so much left unasked, so much that can’t be answered.

“Was I a premature baby?” I asked Tamar.

Notice how I did not say “were
we
premature babies.” Tamar would not have responded if I had used “we.” She does not respond to me when I refer to myself and my baby sister as “we.” Tamar answers only to “I.” I have to phrase everything in the singular, as if it was ever only me, me myself and I, no baby sister twirling and somersaulting beside me.

“A little.”

I’ve done a lot of research. There’s a great deal I know about conception and pregnancy and birth, things that Tamar may not even know despite the fact that she has experienced all three and I am but a callow youth.

Can a girl be callow? Or is it a boys-only word?

Tamar is a straightforward person. She believes that knowledge is power. More than once she’s told me,
Knowledge is power
, Clara.
If knowledge is power, then why won’t you tell me about my sister?
is my silent response. You can’t say that to Tamar though. She’s not that kind of person.

Baby Girl may have had undeveloped lungs. She may have been unable to take a breath of frigid Adirondack air even if she had wanted a breath of it.

A baby’s heart beats extremely fast. Not as fast as a hummingbird, but far faster than a grown human being’s. If you’re trying to get a baby’s heart going, you have to keep jabbing and jabbing at a baby’s chest. I doubt if that’s something Tamar knew how to do. This was quite a while ago. This was eleven years ago. They may not have known much back then, about how very fast a baby’s heart beats, and about how hard you have to work to keep it going.

Was Baby Girl an old soul? Was she not supposed to be born? Was she accidentally trapped inside my mother’s body,
a terrible mistake? Do babies have a choice? Do they have the ability to choose to live or die?

M
y roll of green adding-machine paper used to sit snugly in the holder the old man made for me. I can still see it, even though it no longer exists. When last I saw my roll of adding-machine paper, many notes had been taken about the old man. Most of them I took down when first I met him, when he was my immigrant oral history project. Some of them were about his little brother, Eli.

The day I asked him about Eli, the old man was wrapping tinfoil in the shape of a butterfly around a sweet potato. The old man loved sweet potatoes. He often ate one for lunch.

“Okay,” I said. “Why didn’t Eli come to America with you? That was the plan, wasn’t it?”

The old man pinched the tinfoil butterfly until it had antennae, then he carried it over to the fridge and put it inside next to his quart of Dairylea milk. The old man only bought a quart at a time. It would last him a week unless I put too much in my hot chocolate. Then he ran out and had none left for his coffee. He never said anything though. He just drank it black. I wonder now if the old man hated drinking black coffee, those times when I drank up his milk.

“Wasn’t Eli supposed to come with you?”

“It was snowing,” he said. “There was a lot of snow.”

He got up and went over to the sink and ran some water onto the dishes.

“Snow that was blowing straight into my face. I couldn’t see.”

I unspooled some more of my green adding-machine paper and wrote on it.
Snow … straight … couldn’t see
. I know about snow like that. The old man drank the rest of his coffee. It had to have been extremely cold by then, but he never wasted anything.

“Was Eli wearing boots?”

I pictured boots, heavy lace-up boots such as they must have made long ago in the old man’s country that doesn’t exist anymore.

“Yes.”

“Did he follow in your footsteps? That’s what I did when I was nine and Tamar and I were stuck in the blizzard.”

“No.”

“Did you carry him then?”

“I left Eli with the lantern,” he said.

I held the thickly spread bite of toast under the table, then I put it into my mouth. I tried to swallow it without biting, the way Catholics do with the wafer.

“It was too cold,” the old man said. “There was too much snow. It was the dead of winter. I couldn’t carry him.”

The old man couldn’t carry him.

There was too much snow.

It was too cold. Too much snow
. That was all I needed to hear:
There are many ways to die
, I remembered the old man saying to me, long ago.

I wrote it all down. Then I wound the spool of green adding-machine paper back up. Around and around I went. It took a long time. Then I put it in my backpack. The old man finished wiping the dishes dry, plucked up his damp yellow dish towel, and hung it over the oven door handle. He hung it
exactly the same way he always hung it, smoothing out the damp wrinkles.

Too cold. Too much snow. I couldn’t carry him
.

The old man’s little brother, Eli, died in the snow. I watched the old man smoothing out the wrinkles in his yellow dish towel. Even if I closed my eyes so that the sight of the old man smoothing his dish towel disappeared, I knew I would still see him. Nothing would ever be the same as it had been minutes earlier. Now everything was different. Now he was an old man who had lost his brother.

The church lights were on across Nine Mile Creek, but they wouldn’t be on for much longer. Choir practice was almost over. Tamar would soon be driving up to the entrance of the Nine Mile Trailer Park. The windshield wipers would be on because of the almost-freezing rain, and the broken one on the right would be squeaking. I looked out the window at the church across the creek, trying to see the lights through the rain, but all I could see was a young boy—eleven years old—lying still in the snow, wearing a pair of heavy lace-up boots.

Inside my chest, my heart hurt. It came to me that my whole life long, I would carry with me the memory of the old man standing by his stove, smoothing his dish towel. Up and down, up and down, yellow stripes appearing and disappearing under his hand. Across Nine Mile Creek, the lights blinked out. The old man sat across from me at the formica table that he found on scavenging night, lost in his dark lantern world, unspeakably sad.

Six minutes ticked by, and it was time to go. I folded my jacket over my arm and took two sugar cookies wrapped up in a paper towel, one for me and one for Tamar, for the ride
home. I wiped my eyes on my jacket sleeve. It was dark. Tamar wouldn’t notice.

She noticed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Tamar kept one arm on the steering wheel and one eye on the road. She kept looking over at me. She knew to be quiet. When we drove into the driveway, she leaned across me and unbuckled my seatbelt. She stretched her arm way out and opened up the car door for me. She used to do that when I was a child.

It was cold in the house. It’s always cold in the house. I turned up the thermostat to 72 degrees and sat on top of the register in my room. Warm air came blowing up underneath me. It made my hair fly up in the air. It came seeping through the layers of socks and pants and underpants. I curled up with my knees to my chest and lay right on top of the register. Two floors below me, the furnace hummed. I love that hum. Warm air blew around me and through me. I warmed. My muscles started to unclench.

There were footsteps in my room. I kept my eyes closed. I stayed curled up. The footsteps came over to where I lay on the register. Something clinked onto the floor next to my head.

Footsteps receded.

I opened my eyes. Steam curled out of the mug on the floor next to me. I breathed in sharply through my nose, to try to draw the steam over to my nose so I could smell what was in the cup. Tea? Hot chocolate? The steam would not cooperate and drift itself over to where I lay breathing in quickly. I started to hyperventilate from trying so hard to drag it over.
Coffee? Hot mulled cider, which I had once read about in a book?

None of the above.

A mug of hot water, with slices of lemon floating in it. I took a sip. It tasted sweet. Could there be sugar in it? Could Tamar have spooned in some white poison, which is what she’s been known to call sugar? I lay back down on the register. Tamar had not turned the thermostat down, she had not said anything to me about wasting energy, she had not told me to put a sweater on if I was cold. Tamar, my mother, had brought me something sweet and hot to drink.