The Fading Place

by Mary SanGiovanni

  She popped the trunk and took out the spare. The policeman insisted on changing it for her, and she wasn’t in a mood to argue. When he was finished, he stood and said, “There you go, ma’am. All taken care of. But that donut there won’t get you guys too far, so you’ll probably want to get where you’re going soon. Stay in the slow lane and you should be fine, all right?”

  Charlie nodded, offering a weary smile. “Thank you, Officer.”

  “Thanks,” Simone said stiffly. The baby uttered a few fussy cries and Charlie, through sense of maternal instinct, scooped the baby out of Simone’s arms to soothe her. Simone, caught off guard, relinquished the baby with a small gape of the mouth and a half-word that might have been “hey.” Charlie stepped away from the traffic, crossing around to the passenger side to grab the pacifier from the diaper bag. Instantly, she felt a surge of relief that Haley was safely away from traffic. She felt fairly certain that Simone wouldn’t do anything to create a scene or arouse suspicion. For that moment, she and the baby were safe.

  The feeling was short-lived, though, as Simone slid into the backseat next to the baby, pulling the gun from the pocket on the back of the driver’s seat. “I could have killed the three of you,” she said petulantly. Charlie glanced back at the policeman, who was already in his car and waiting for them to situate themselves. She thought of grabbing Haley and running for the police car. Simone wouldn’t shoot them in front of a state trooper, would she? She couldn’t.

  But…she could. Charlie believed there was a part of Simone that was just crazy enough to shoot her in the back, or—God forbid—the baby in the head, and risk death by cop if she couldn’t have what she wanted. Or worse, she’d shoot them before Charlie even had a chance to get Haley back out of the baby seat again. She should have run to the cop’s side as soon as she had hold of Haley. God, that was stupid. Stupid, stupid. How could she not have thought of that?

  “Get in the car,” Simone told her. “Not so much as a blink toward that cop or I’ll kill the baby.” Her free hand hovered in front of Haley’s nose and mouth, as if she meant to suffocate her, nice and quiet, no gun needed.

  Charlie crossed around to the driver’s seat and got in. When traffic allowed, she pulled away from the shoulder and onto the highway. The trooper pulled out as well, then shifted over to a faster lane and passed ahead of them. Charlie watched the police car stretching the distance between them with a sinking weight in her stomach.

  She and Haley were alone again with a psycho.

  * * *

  Simone tapped Charlie’s shoulder with the gun and said, “Take this exit coming up—the Edgely exit.”

  Charlie’s body tensed. They were getting closer.

  She knew the aptly named town of Edgely sat on the border of the old mining areas and backed up to a short side of the woods. It was one of the last town names she recognized past Wexton and what remained of Thrall. Edgely was, so far as she knew, on the cusp of what residents of Bloomwood County referred to as “The Sink.” She’d heard varying accounts of its boundaries, some claiming it extended to engulf even parts of Wexton, but mostly, she’d heard that Edgely was a gatekeeping town, of sorts. From what she gathered, The Sink had been mostly reclaimed as hiking trails, bear preserves, and state parks, miles and miles of largely untouched wood that went back to Revolutionary-era New Jersey and before. The trails attracted only the most experienced hikers and campers. However, the urban legends that warned people off the woods a little farther southeast bloomed full and colorful up in The Sink. Stories of ancient things dug up by miners, plagues that wiped out whole families, collapsing mines and haunted, empty towns were largely unknown outside the state, and within, relegated to rumor. And most folks she had encountered claimed there was something not quite right with the heads of those few stubborn stragglers who insisted on staying in that area. Something in the water, they said, or in the very dirt itself. Or maybe a legacy of strange accidents and disappearances had worked its way into the psyche after a while. Maybe there was something to Simone’s belief that foul things came up out of the ground after all.

  “Is this where you live?” Charlie asked. Her mouth felt separated from the rest of her, a part of her working on adrenaline now to fill the silence.

  “I used to. Some of these old houses in Edgely still have people living in them. Old people, mostly. The baby’s father.”

  “Where do you live now?” Part of Charlie’s mind screamed at the absurdity of making small talk with her soon-to-be killer, but she couldn’t help it. So close now to their destination, Charlie felt she was running on instinct. All those escape plans, those ideas of killing Simone and saving herself and the baby, wavered like mirages in the hot sun. She was no superhero, nor had luck ever been on her side. And all her mind could wrap around was trying to make that moment, and then the next, and then the next, as normal as possible. As safe as possible, she supposed. Was it crazy? Maybe. But how could anyone say what proper behavior was when faced with impending death?

  “Nowhere,” Simone said in that faraway, disconnected way. “Nowhere important. But now I can bring the baby home to him, and we can be a family again. He’ll have to see then.”

  Charlie considered this for a moment. Simone’s plan was to take her baby and return to a man who thought she was a nut-job to begin with? What did she think it would prove, other than she was crazier than before? Couldn’t she see…? But obviously she couldn’t. Her disconnect was such a chasm from reality at that point that obviously she couldn’t see the inherent flaws in her plan. And Charlie found she couldn’t help trying to inject some kind of scaled logic back into the conversation. “Don’t…don’t you think he might try to take her away again?”

  “He won’t. Not when he sees how healthy and happy she is with me. She won’t cry. Not this time.”

  Her answer chilled Charlie beneath her skin, and she instantly regretted having asked in the first place. Babies cried. It was an unavoidable characteristic. And the thought that Haley could put herself in danger from here to wherever this man’s home was simply by being a baby snapped her out of her own kind of fade.

  Simone would not take her baby.

  The exit to Edgely came up and Charlie took it up a slight rise. The signs for Edgely indicated she should turn left.

  “Head toward Edgely?”

  “Yes.”

  As Charlie drove, she glanced surreptitiously around the front of the car. A bendy straw lay on the floor of the passenger side. So did the nub of a pencil with a broken-off tip. Neither would be strong enough to stab Simone with. There was a half-drunk Poland Spring bottle sloshing around down there, as well as some miscellaneous crumpled papers, all of it useless to her. Did she have anything in her purse? She struggled to think. The pain was ebbing, but commanding specific thought processes still took some effort. Her purse was in the backseat, and she doubted Simone would give it up to her rather than just fish around inside for whatever Charlie asked for.

  All Charlie had in the front with her was her set of keys, dangling from the ignition.

  “Take the right up there. Just follow the road down until I tell you to stop.”

  The road hardly looked like the park entrance a nearby wooden sign claimed it to be. It was little more than a dirt-and-gravel path poking through the trees. The canopy formed by overhanging maples, elms, and oaks cast heavy shadows over the road, and they passed beneath into near-total darkness. Charlie turned on the headlights and still found herself slowing down, as much to accommodate for the road conditions as to delay what the end of this particular road meant.

  Simone tapped the muzzle of the gun lightly against the top of the baby seat. “You know,” she said softly, “she really is a beautiful baby.”

  Charlie’s throat tightened. “Thank you. She is. Haley is my whole world. I have nothing without her.”

  “My baby was beautiful, too. A beautiful baby girl.”

  “You…have a daughter?” Charlie asked, frankly surprised.

>   Simone’s face gathered those dark clouds again and she said, “She died.”

  For the first time, Charlie felt a sense of genuine sympathy for this woman. She had never seen herself as a mother before Haley, but now that she had her, she couldn’t imagine the illimitable and undiminished pain of losing her.

  “Simone,” she said, “I’m so sorry to hear that.” She was, too. It pained the maternal part of her. Likely, the loss of that baby girl played a big part in Simone’s coming undone. Now that she thought about it, probably a big part in this whole afternoon, as well.

  “I had her before the doctors and the hospital,” Simone explained. “Well, before most of the doctors. No one wanted me to have her. They told me I wouldn’t be able to take care of her, that I wasn’t doing anything right. It was like they didn’t believe I loved her, or that I wanted to be a good mommy. But I did. I tried.”

  “Simone—” Charlie began. A sick hammock swung with a lump of unease in her stomach. Her head began to ache again. She was pretty damned sure she didn’t want to hear where this was going.

  “The baby’s father didn’t often leave me alone with her. Said I was too sad, and the sadness made me distracted. I tried to tell him about the fade, how something was coming up from the ground sucking the color and life from things, how I was worried it would suck the life from us, from me, maybe from the baby. He wouldn’t listen. He kept saying how I was sick and couldn’t be trusted to have the baby on my own. That stupid nurse he hired did everything. She barely let me near my own daughter.

  “Well, one day I called the nurse and told her not to come. I said that the baby’s father would be home for the day, and we could manage fine without her. She was happy to have the day off. Happy to be away from me, and that was just fine by me anyway, because I never liked her. Never trusted her. Why should I? She was feeding all the lies about me to him, and to the doctors, saying I couldn’t keep things straight, that I forgot things, that I was too impatient, too rough. Which were lies, all of them. That fucking bitch lied about me all the time.

  “Well, anyway, he didn’t have the day off. I just wanted to spend some time with my baby. She was my baby. I carried her around. I gave birth to her. She was mine. They couldn’t possibly understand that kind of bond, how that makes you different, how it changes you into a mommy and makes you a different kind of person. She was my baby. I deserved to be able to spend time with her, just me and her, me and her, me and her.”

  “Simone—”

  “But then she woke up from her nap and started screaming. I fed her, I burped her, I changed her, but she kept crying. I couldn’t make her stop. She kept crying and crying and I couldn’t figure out why and all I could think was, ‘Oh God, I’m failing, I’m a failure I’m a bad mother I can’t do this I can’t do this I can’t!’ So I laid her down on the bed and she was kicking her little feet and punching her little fists in the air and her face was so, so red that I was surprised she could even get air in her lungs. I mean, her cries sounded kind of choked like they just couldn’t muster up enough to do justice to whatever she was crying about and I thought, ‘It can’t breathe anyway, not like that’…”

  “What did you do?” It was out of Charlie’s mouth before she could stop it, half question of curiosity, half horrified accusation.

  From the rearview, Simone looked at her without really seeing her. “It wasn’t my fault, Charlie. The foul things were in the room. I could feel them. They were screaming, screaming, trying to break me down to fade me away. Trying to suck all the life out of the room. The bed was soft, the baby was soft, the pillow was soft. With the pillow over her, I couldn’t see that red face, and the cries sounded muffled, like they were far away, like someone else’s baby. Not like a baby at all—like one of those foul things bleeding up from the bed where we’d made the baby, bleeding up to drain all the life and color away from me, all the music, the breath, the life. I could feel one moving around, you know, under the pillow. Like…like if you’ve ever tried to pick up a field mouse with a towel? Or a big bug with a paper towel? Know how they squirm and you can feel their movements and the little bulk of them beneath your hand? It was like that. Then it stopped moving. I took the pillow away. The face wasn’t red anymore but blue, not like my baby’s, but then the baby’s father came in with the doctors and they screamed that it was my baby and took it away from me.”

  Simone looked out the window for a long time. Her eyes were pregnant with unspilled tears. Charlie didn’t speak. She couldn’t. Her eyes were bright with tears, too, blurring the road in front of her. Listening to Simone recount infanticide had knotted her throat with horror and fear and strangely, with a kind of grief. Simone had done something so alien, so tragic. She had committed an unforgivable atrocity. And she was sitting less than inches from Charlie’s baby, whose cries might set her off. She was sick and unstable and…

  And heartbroken, Charlie realized with a pang in her chest. This woman was trying to fix the unfixable, to take back what she had lost. It could very well be because Simone knew somewhere, beneath the levels of disconnect, way beyond that unhinged door, that she had taken the most precious thing in the world to her and destroyed it for reasons she couldn’t now understand. Or maybe she did know. Maybe even she might have periods of lucidity, where she could understand that on some level, the chemicals in her brain were way out of whack. Maybe she was aware enough to know that her own actions had irrevocably changed her life. But, Charlie figured, time had accumulated enough grief and despair that she had finally built up windows and doors and foul seeping things and conspiracies by the government and inhumane doctors, all things that relieved her of responsibility and guilt. However, building that cracked and failing sanctuary in her head had broken down whatever she had left that allowed her to function in society. What was left inside her was broken and confused, and at that moment, Charlie understood how incredibly lonely that had to feel. How desperation to make that loneliness go away could drive her to shove a gun in someone’s stomach, maybe, in an attempt to claim some kind of salvation.

  That made her somehow less of a monster, less of a force of unadulterated darkness. Charlie considered that. Simone wasn’t a kind of wall of powerful evil. She was human. Weak. And humans, especially broken, weak ones, could be overcome. They could be fought off. She still had a chance to survive this, to protect Haley.

  Human or monster, she still meant to kill the woman in the backseat of her car. The more she came to learn about Simone, the more this inevitability seemed a necessary avenue in her survival.

  Simone continued talking. She was no longer aware Charlie was listening. It was no longer explanation or excuse. It was confession. “I tried to tell him I hadn’t hurt her. She didn’t suffer,” Simone said, her own eyes shining wet in the streams of moonlight. “Just…just a little squeak was all, and then…nothing. Like she just went to sleep, just like that. But they treated me like I was one of those things, that I had faded all the life and breath and color from my beautiful baby girl. They acted like I couldn’t handle being a mommy. They wouldn’t let me see her or rock her or feed her. They wouldn’t let me go to the funeral. I don’t even know where she’s buried. The bastard won’t tell me. No one will tell me.”

  Simone sniffed suddenly, drawing the back of her hand across her eyes and under her nose. “They gave me pills to dry me up in the hospital. All that milk just weighing you down, all that love and life and nourishment with no one to give it to…it hurts. You’ll never know, but it hurts like hell. I just wanted to die. I looked forward to the fade then. That’s where they put you when they think you hurt babies—a fading place. No color, no life, no movement. But they wouldn’t let me die, so I spent a long time trying to get better. Years. I worked so hard for so long to prove to them I could be a good mommy. That I could protect a baby from the foul things that might seep up into the crib and steal her breath, that I could keep her fed and clean and dry. I wanted them to get me a doll so I could show them but they told m
e it would only hinder my progress. That’s what they said. Hinder my progress. They thought hikes and fresh air and exercise were the key to everything.

  “I worked hard to show them anyway. I sat in their groups and talked to their doctors and learned the words they wanted me to say. I did everything they told me for seven years, just to show them I could have my baby back. Although, she isn’t much of a baby anymore. She’d be seven today.”

  “Today…is her birthday?” Charlie asked.

  Simone smiled. “Yes. She’s a big girl now.” The smile abruptly fell off her face, and her grip on the gun tightened. The disconnect, Charlie realized, was more like a faulty wire now, the connection cutting in and out without warning. Sometimes—Charlie could see it in her expression—Simone understood the reality and gravity of her life, and the situation that life had put them all in. Maybe putting into action all those fantasies about having a baby again had wiggled some wires loose—or back into place. Maybe it was what stood on the other side of the door, now that it was so far unhinged.

  Charlie wasn’t sure if the woman was more dangerous when oblivious to reality, or tormented by it.

  “Here,” Simone said. “Pull over here.” She pointed to a small clearing where the trees overhead opened up to a silvering sky. It reminded Charlie of Simone’s moods, how quickly the dark clouds were gathering across an otherwise pale and placid surface. It was going to rain. Oh boy, was it ever.

  A little ways off in the clearing, an old Volvo sat beneath a cover of overhanging branches. Charlie figured it for Simone’s car. It had the same fragile, turned-in-on-itself look that she did, as if will and will alone held it together for now, but any number of things might cause it to break down completely. From where she had pulled off, she couldn’t tell if there was a baby seat in the back. The thought struck her simultaneously as both ridiculous and important. How did Simone think she was going to get Haley to Edgely without a baby seat? Of course, she could always just take the one Haley was sitting in, and the diaper bag, too, once Charlie was dead. Just transfer the whole kit and caboodle, as Charlie’s mom used to say. And Charlie’s body would be left to cool in the front seat, the blood from the bullet hole coagulating in her hair, with no trace of the baby that had defined so much of her sense of self, had changed her life so profoundly over the last year. The baby that had been her reason to keep going.