The New Moon's Arms (10 page)

“How is the boy, Doctor?” asked Gene. “Mistress Lambkin probably wants to know, too; she’s the one who rescued him.”

“Me and Hector. You know; who I just met today?”

Evelyn boggled. “
You
rescued him?” She still looked like a hungry baby bird when she let her mouth gape open like that.

“Well, I found him…”

“But my dear! How wonderful of you!” She beamed at me and patted my hand like I was five years old and had managed to recite my ABC’s in mostly the correct order. “Lucky little boy. What a good thing you had your wits about you.”

Well, eventually I had, anyway. “He will be all right?” I asked. I pulled my fingers out of her too-warm grasp.

“We think so. No apparent head injury.” She turned to Gene. “He blew overboard a boat in the storm last night, I think your people said?”

“We don’t know for sure,” Gene told her. “No sign of his parents. His leg is broken?”

“Yes. A greenstick fracture. Common for children. Their bones are so flexible that they often don’t break all the way through, just bend and splinter. Like when you try to break a green twig.”

I winced. Ifeoma had broken her leg when she was young. I still remembered the horrible dull crack when she had jumped off the roof of my car and landed wrong.

“I’ve got him in a cast. He has some bruises, but other than that and the fractured ankle, he seems all right. Physically, anyway. Can’t really tell, for nobody here can understand him. But he’s had no adverse reactions to any of his treatment so far. We’ll monitor him over the next few days, just to make sure.” Evelyn frowned. “There are other things about him that are disturbing me, though.”

“Like what, Doctor?” asked Gene.

“For one thing, his chest is overbroad for a child his age. I wish I could understand what he says!”

“Maybe it’s German?” Gene suggested.

“No, I speak German. It’s not German.”

Of course she spoke German. And French, I remembered. Had been top of our class in school. And she was still as graceful as a hummingbird. Bitch.

“His eyes are strange, too,” she said. “He seems to have some sort of haw.”

“Of what?” I asked.

“A transparent third eyelid,” she said.

My heart jumped a beat.

“Sometimes a reptile is born with haws,” continued Evelyn; “a throwback, you know? And cats and dogs have vestigial ones. Humans too. Not usually fully developed, though. And he has rough skin on his inner knees.”

“Like callous?” asked Gene. “Could somebody have been keeping him bound up?”

Evelyn looked horrified. “Oh, God; you really think so?”

He shrugged. “It’s possible.”

“I didn’t notice any ligature marks, though.”

“Can I see him?” I asked. Maybe if I looked at him closer, I could convince myself he was just a little boy. Bigfoot wasn’t real, either. Or happy endings.

“You know,” Evelyn said to Gene, “you might be right. That big chest, the eyelids, the webbed fingers and toes…”

Webbed? Oh God. He really was like my mermaid girl. “I want to see him,” I told them, a little louder.

“Even the webbing is odd,” she said.

“How you mean?” I asked.

“Some humans are born with fingers and toes fused together.”

“Like you forget?” I held up my left hand, the two last spread to show the membrane of skin that didn’t quite come up to the lowest joint. “Partial syndactyly.”

“I
did
forget.” She flushed. “Yours is pretty common; only between two fingers, and so slight it doesn’t impair your ability to function. His is like that, too; tiny. Not like some people where it’s so pronounced that it pulls the longer fingers down to match the shorter ones, and the whole hand curls up. His not worth putting him through the trauma of surgery. They will be something for him to impress his school friends with.” She smiled.

“So what’s strange?” Gene asked.

“To have them between all four fingers.”

He nodded. “With all those deformities,” he said, “maybe his parents are embarrassed about him. They keep the child locked up, sometimes restrained. They don’t teach him language or social skills.”

“What a horrible thing!” said Evelyn. “And no sign at all of his parents?”

I felt a wave of anxious heat. “I need to see him,” I whispered. I rubbed my sweaty, tickling hands against my thighs. The rush passed through me.

Then a high wail came from down one of the corridors. “That’s him!” Dr. Chow gasped. She took off at a run. Gene followed, me at his heels.

The little boy was standing on the floor of his room, feet wide apart, holding on to the leg of the crib for balance. There was a nurse bent over him, shaking a finger at him. “Bad! You mustn’t get out of bed, understand? You’re sick!” The nurse turned as we came rushing into the room. “I’m sorry he disturbed you, Doctor,” he said.

“It’s all right.”

There was a thick plaster cast on the boy’s leg. They’d diapered him. With his plump body, the diaper gave him the appearance of a tiny sumo wrestler. He’d been crying. Would he let me pick him up?

“Evelyn, it’s okay for him to be putting weight on that leg so soon?”

“Yes, if it’s not hurting him. It will help him put down new bone tissue.”

All I needed to hear. “Come to Auntie Calamity,” I whispered. I reached my arms out to him. He stretched his out to me, his palms wide. Yes, he did have webbed fingers. Then he dropped down onto his hands and tried to walk to me, bumsie in the air. Like the blue girl had. Must have hurt his leg to do that, for he lifted it in the air and started crying again. I rushed to him and picked him up, ignored the twinge in my lower back. I cradled his frightened little body to me. He immediately put a thumb in his mouth. With the other hand, he grabbed my ear.

“Ow!” I tried to pull his hand away, but he wouldn’t let go. He had reached for comfort, hard, with both hands. If my heart had been melting for him before, it was like butter in the hot sun now.

“Look how easy he went to you! You got to be his mummy!” said the nurse.

“No.” He didn’t belong to me.
Yes,
said my heart.
Mine.

“Odd, that crawl,” Evelyn said.

“Maybe they kept him somewhere where he couldn’t stand all the way up,” Gene told her.

“Please don’t tell me that. I don’t even want to imagine it.”

“He’s had a long day,” I said. I pulled myself tall and officious. Maybe they would go for it if I brazened it through. “He’s coming home with me, right?” Child needed someone to mother him, not a hospital bed in a lonely room.

Gene said, “No, I…”

Evelyn frowned. “To your home? No, my dear. That’s not how we do things.”

Chuh,
I thought.
Go
’way with your stoosh big island self.
And what was this “my dear, my dear,” like she was my bloody mother? After me and she were the same age.

“He has to go into custody till his parents are found. Isn’t that right, Mr. Meeks?”

“Yes. Quite right. We’re looking for them. Going to want to talk to them about this boy’s injuries.”

Damn. “But I can visit with him today?”

“If you really want to,” replied Evelyn.

That would have to do. Gene glared a “good day” at me, and Evelyn left to finish up her work. I sat on the chair beside the bed. The boy had fallen asleep in my arms. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to him. I tried to see the insides of his knees, but he stirred. I couldn’t bear to wake him. Besides, he felt good in my arms. Not like I had anywhere to go.

By the time the little boy woke up mid-afternoon, everybody at the nurses’ station knew my name, where I worked, how old I was; hell, probably my bra size and all.

The child lay on his back and looked around him. He had a puzzled frown, and tear-tracks down his face. I went to his crib. They’d put the slats up to keep him from falling out. “Think I’ll remember how these blasted things work?”

He stuck his thumb in his mouth and stared at me. When small children look at you like that, it’s like they’re seeing right into your deepest heart.

Took me some fiddling, but I finally was able to lower the slats at one side of the crib. He’d raised himself up on his elbows to look at me. His legs were spraddled, so it was plain to see the marks on his inner knees and on the ankle without the cast.

Gently, I sat beside him on the bed. I licked my thumb and used it to wipe away his dried tears. And still, he just
looked
.

I reached to touch the marks on his knees, but an orderly bustled in, wheeling a food cart. I pulled my hand away. “Lunch time!” she chirped. She parked the cart, checked the boy’s chart at the foot of his bed. “Ohmigod,” she said. “He the boy who nearly drowned last night. Nuh true?”

“Yes. This is him.”

“God bless. God bless.” She hauled out a wheeled table from behind the door, and put his lunch tray on it. “The nurses could feed him,” she told me.

I pulled the tray towards me. “No. I will do it.”
Mine
.

She nodded. With a final “God bless,” she pushed her cart out of the room.

The child informed me of something or other. “You think so?” I replied, improvising. I took his hands, spread the fingers to see the membranes again. So strange! But not unheard-of, Evelyn had said. I peered into his eyes. They just looked like eyes to me. He pulled his head away and spoke again, sounding frustrated this time. I felt foolish, inspecting a lost and injured child, looking for what? Gills? Scales? Jesus. Had to stop fooling myself. The sea didn’t have people living in it. Somebody would know what language he spoke. Somebody would find his parents, or the remnants of them.

I took the lids off the containers on his tray. I picked up one of the dishes and a spoon. “Well,” I said to him, “look like you and me can’t palaver. So let me introduce you to the joys of grape Jell-O.”

The spoon seemed to be a complete mystery to him. He opened his mouth wide for it, all right, but then he clamped his corn-kernel baby teeth down on it, hard, and refused to let go. Either his parents had made him eat with his hands, or his brain was abnormal, like his body.

Gently, I tried to tug the spoon free, but he kept it in his teeth and tossed his head back and forth like a puppy’s. Surprised a laugh out of me.

And then he did something precious. He giggled; a liquid, happy noise. My heart lifted to see that he could feel joy. The parents hadn’t quite broken him, then.

The Jell-O was not a success. After that first, accidental mouthful, he wouldn’t swallow any more. He just screwed up his face and spat it out. Next try, he wouldn’t even do that; he pulled away from the spoon I’d put to his lips and twisted his head from side to side. “If Ifeoma had been this fussy when she was small,” I said to him, “she would be bony like one stray dog now.”

I had better luck with the applesauce. Got a little of it into him. But the real hit was the porridge. He swallowed the first spoonful and immediately opened his mouth for more. And the minute I looked away, distracted by a nurse who’d come to check on us, he had the bowl up and overturned on his head. The long tangles of his hair were slimy with porridge.

They gave me a basin of water so I could wash the mess out. Ignorant of his cast, he tried to climb entirely into the basin. God knows what kind of deprivation they had been keeping him in. He was new to everything. It was like having a baby again and discovering the world again with him. He drew me in like a sponge draws water. I swear a current flowed between us, warm and fluid.

I towelled his head dry; as dry as that mess of dreadlocks would get. Some of the trash in it had been
tied
there; pieces of shells, mostly. How anybody could do that to their child’s hair?

His gurgling chuckle sounded like “agway, agway.” He gazed up into my face like I had all the lovely secrets of the world written there. He whimpered if I tried to go from the room. I didn’t mind. I stayed.

As far as he was concerned, his bedsheet was a toy. He clambered around in it and twisted and turned until he was practically mummified.

“No, Agway,” I said, unwinding him. Looked too much like the seaweed he’d been wrapped in on the beach.

He kept pulling his diapers off. Didn’t bother him to piss and shit right where he was. “Someone going to have to toilet-train you,” I told him, “before it’s too late for you to learn.” And milord, that hair. I was itching to wash it. Fine if his parents wanted to be Rastas and smoke ganja and make their hair grow wild like any rats’ nest, but it wasn’t right to drag a child into it.

Little more time, he began to reach for his injured leg and wince. I rang for a nurse. She had a look at him, then brought him some liquid painkiller in a dropper.

“Not baby aspirin?” I asked her.

“No. Could kill them.”

“You lie! That’s what I used to give my daughter when she was little.”

“Me, too. Nobody told us different.”

“She liked the taste of it too bad.”

“Yes. You have to keep those things away from them.”

Agway got the hang of the dropper pretty quickly. I guess it was sort of like a nipple. He startled at the taste of the first drops of the medicine. The look on his face was priceless.

The nurse pulled the dropper away. Playing stern, she shook her finger at him. “Don’t spit it out, now,” she said. We made encouraging faces at him, mimed taking medicine from the dropper, pretended it tasted good. He screwed up his face, but he finally took it all. “That’s a good boy,” crooned the nurse. She patted him on his damp head and left. He whimpered again. His leg was still bothering him.

“Never mind, babbins. The pain will stop soon.” I gathered him up, took him to the armchair over by the window. I sat in it and rocked him. “The pill bottle was on my bed,” I told him. “Rita and Sharmini and me used to work in that gift store down by Post Road. I can’t remember the name of it now. Selling all kind of stupidness to the white people, you know the way; dried coconuts carved into monkey heads, shit like that. Anyway, Rita and Sharmini came over to my apartment the Friday night for dinner. They had a case of Banks beer with them. By the time we finished eating our buljol and I put Ife to bed, we were three sheets to the wind. I found a radio station playing tumpa. We turned it up loud. Pretty soon we were dancing around the room, laughing and carrying on. Ife just slept. She was used to my carousing.”