Shadow Baby

by Alison McGhee

  “Good night,” I said.

  Then I left the kitchen. I went outside and started down the dirt road. The daisies were nodding on their long stems. The Queen Anne’s lace was standing tall, with the tiny black dots in the center of each that always make me think of bugs. Queen Anne’s lace is not native to North America. It came from another country. It’s an immigrant plant.

  “And that’s all she wrote,” I said to the old man. “So as far as I know, my father is alive and living somewhere in this world.”

  “Then there’s still a connection. You have a connection to your father.”

  If you are ever close to someone in the world, then there exists an invisible connection between you and that person, a connection beyond the ken of ordinary people. I read that in a book about reincarnation and near-death experiences. It’s a true book. I didn’t make it up. I told this to the old man once and he nodded. He believed it, too.

  Tamar? Not a chance.

  “Ma? What do you believe happens when you die?”

  “You’re dead, that’s what happens.”

  “But at the exact point of death, what happens? Where does your spirit go?”

  “In the ground, along with the rest of you.”

  That’s Tamar. I knew I could count on an answer like that, and that’s the answer I got. Still, I persisted. It’s my nature to persist.

  “What about the white light?” I said.

  “What white light?”

  “The tunnel of white light that envelops your spirit. The people you loved who come back to help you from this world into the next.”

  “Oh, that white light,” Tamar said. “That’s just the last neurons popping off in your brain. Pop, pop, pop. It’s like a camera flash.”

  “Then how do you explain the many documented cases of eerily similar near-death experiences?”

  “I don’t,” she said.

  That’s another thing about Tamar. She feels no need to explain or excuse. That’s why you can’t argue with her. You run into a brick wall. Any time she senses the presence of Baby Girl, for example, the wall appears.

  “Ask your mother about your grandfather,” the old man had told me.

  “You don’t know Tamar,” I said. “She is unaskable.”

  “Ask anyway,” he said. “You have nothing to lose.”

  I could feel the truth in what he was saying. I had nothing to lose. The other half of that sentence is and everything to gain. My third-grade teacher was fond of that saying. “Children, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.” She made that saying fit a variety of situations, situations that you wouldn’t ordinarily think it would fit, such as putting plastic bread bags over your shoes before you put your shoe-boots on.

  A few days later I tried to ask Tamar about my grandfather. She was eating her dinner, which was the dinner I had made. If I make dinner, she’ll eat whatever I make. Even if it goes against her personal rule of cans and jars, she’ll eat it: green beans, chicken surprise, and corn pudding. I read how to make corn pudding in a recipe book in the library. In my corn pudding recipe, there is a consistent relationship among all the ingredients.

  One can of creamed corn, one can of regular corn. One cup of sour cream, one stick of butter. One package of cornbread mix. I like that kind of recipe—all the ingredients in a ratio of one to one—because it means I never have to write it down.

  Did the pioneers write down their recipes? They did not.

  “So,” I said.

  I could see Tamar’s face get a look on it. She could tell that something was coming, just from the way I said “So.”

  “So,” I said again.

  I thought of the old man. Ask her about your grandfather anyway, the old man had said. But I couldn’t.

  CJ Wilson may sometimes ask his father, Chuck Wilson Senior, about his mother, or CJ’s mother may be a forbidden topic in the Wilson trailer. Still, there must be times when CJ thinks about his mother, wonders where she is and if she is still living somewhere in this world. CJ might dream about his mother, at night when he’s asleep on the pullout couch in the living room of his trailer, which is where I imagine him sleeping.

  “Clara, would you clear the table, please?” Tamar said on a Tuesday night the week after the old man told me I should ask her about my grandfather. “It’s court night. Chuck Wilson’s done it this time.”

  That was uncharacteristic of Tamar. She does not discuss the dealings of the court with me.

  “Second DWI with a suspended, doing 70 in a 25 zone, totaled his Camaro. Plus a resisting arrest and attempted battery of a police officer. State trooper,” she corrected herself. “Which is worse.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Six-month minimum. And the state’ll get his kid, I guess. Do you know this boy, Charles Junior Wilson?”

  “No,” I said. “Never heard of him.”

  I did know CJ Wilson the chicken, though. I knew that chicken inside and out. I could sense the soul of CJ Wilson, the chicken, emanating from the broken-down barn. Sometimes at night, last year, when the old man was still in his trailer in Sterns and my chickens were still scratching and pecking in the broken-down barn, I lay awake at night and thought about them. I told no one, though. Those chickens were my secret. I said nothing about CJ Wilson the boy, either. Never once in our time together did I ever mention CJ Wilson to the old man.

  Tamar was annoyed by the lack of eggs from my chickens. There were still only a few eggs, the ones that I could reach in and grab from outside the pen.

  “Clara! When are we going to see some more eggs out of those girls?” Tamar had started to ask.

  “Pretty soon, I guess,” I said.

  I did not tell Tamar that the barn had started to stink, nor did I tell her that the chickens had gone insane. Even on a twenty-below day, I could smell the barn coming from way across the field. Through the snow I trudged, bearing my heavy buckets of feed and water, just as Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl, would have done.

  On court night I watched out my bedroom window for Chuck Wilson. A big man driving a pickup with gigantic tires dropped him off and then backed fast out of the driveway. Chuck Wilson’s short hair was flattened down on his head. I could still see comb marks. His red flannel shirt strained at the bottom of his belly.

  Next day, the day after court, CJ reached out and gave me a shove. A sound that could be a laugh or could be a phlegmy cough came out of Tiny. He reached in his half-pounder M&M bag on the dashboard and selected three red ones. There’s a story that he keeps dirty pictures underneath his candy bag. It’s possible.

  I said nothing. I sat tight on a green vinyl seat next to Bonita Rae Farwell, a North Sterns girl. The North Sterns girls are quiet most of the time but loud when they have to be. They know how to talk mean. They know how to handle the boys; some of the boys are their brothers.

  Those girls would not worry about being murdered by a flock of insane chickens. This is what I believe to be true.

  From the back I noticed that CJ’s head was shaped like a bullet. His dusty dark hair was shaved close to his scalp, with a few dried lines of blood where he got nicked. I once heard him tell the other boys that he and his father took turns shaving each other’s heads. In a little while he came swinging down the aisle.

  “Wipe,” he said. “Wipe.”

  The night before, I had stayed in my room while Chuck Wilson Senior was in court in the kitchen with Tamar. I did not listen through the furnace duct. I turned on the radio and read The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Thus was I able to ignore CJ on the bus. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. That’s how the saying goes.

  Crystal Zielinski heard the old man talking about Clifford Winter who lived on Genesee Street in Utica.

  “Utica?” she said. “Do the both of you need to get to Utica, Mr. Kominsky and Ms. winter?”

  Crystal stood there with her red dishrag and Johnny’s plate of half-eaten french fries. Ketchup smeared like blood.

 
“Because if you need to get to Utica you can use my truck,” Crystal said.

  “That would be good,” the old man said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Crystal took some keys out of her apron pocket. “Be my guest. I just filled it and I won’t need it until I close at ten.”

  Johnny Zielinski loves red so much that even Crystal’s truck is red, redder than a fire truck.

  “You’re a good driver,” I said to the old man when we had driven halfway to Utica. He knew how to drive, even though he didn’t have a driver’s license. Why didn’t he? Reading, that’s why.

  I will keep the old man’s secret forever. Nothing will drag it out of me. Even if I’m strapped in a folding chair in the basement of a building with a bare lightbulb shining in my eyes and deprived of food and water and sleep for days on end, I will not give away the old man’s secret.

  Before I went in to Clifford Hazzard Winter’s apartment building at 1431 Genesee Street, the old man asked if I wanted him to come with me.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Did the pioneers head westward?”

  “Yes,” the old man said.

  “And that’s your answer,” I said.

  But there was nothing I wanted more than the old man walking next to me down the hallway with the dirty floor and the dark brown paint chipping onto it, and into the elevator that wouldn’t go up even when I pressed 6 seven times in a row, then kept my finger on it for a count of fifteen, and then pushed open the stairs door and walked up and around the five flights of stairs to 6.

  The old man waited for me outside Clifford Winter’s apartment building. He let the motor idle. Only motors and people can idle. It’s very rare that you see that word used with anything other than motors and people. If you’re a person, you can idle your time away. If you’re a motor, you can idle while someone sits behind the steering wheel, drumming his fingers in a rhythm that you can’t hear.

  If the old man had been with me, I might not have noticed the broken light halfway down the hall. I might not have counted as high as I counted. If you’re extremely nervous, you can count. That’s a trick that my fourth-grade teacher taught me.

  “Class, if you ever find yourself extremely nervous,” she said, “try counting. Count as high as you possibly can. If you want, insert ‘one thousand’ between each number.”

  That’s how I got to be so good at counting exact seconds. It was on the advice of my fourth-grade teacher.

  The buzzer next to the door was broken. The cover was hanging half-on and half-off. There was a ripped piece of yellow paper with C. Winter written on it stuck on a piece of chewed gum above the buzzer. How do I know that the adhesive was used chewing gum? Because I looked. I looked around that hall for quite a while. The floor was marble. There was a large cobweb high up in one corner of the hall. It was next to the ceiling, where even the tallest broom could not have reached.

  I looked at the door across the hall from C. Winter’s.

  M. Trivieri.

  Down the hall: S. Klusk.

  Does no one in Utica go by a full first name? Does everyone use initials only? Is this an unwritten rule? I was pondering these questions and lining my feet up perfectly evenly on the dark brown crack between two marble tiles when C. Winter’s door swung open.

  “What do you want?”

  I knew it was C. Winter speaking to me. I turned around and gazed upon him. He looked right back at me.

  “What do you want?”

  He did not sound impatient, nor did he sound suspicious. He sounded as if he would ask what it was I wanted as many times as it took, until he had an answer. He sounded like Tamar.

  “I’m Clara winter,” I said.

  The air around him became still. If you train yourself, you can learn to sense the quality of the air around someone, how it moves, whether it shimmers, when it freezes. The air around C. Winter had been ordinary air, invisible, bored even, until I told him who I was.

  “And you are C. Winter, are you not?”

  He nodded. Then one of his eyes started to move. It moved just a little bit. The air around him shook itself, broke apart and started moving again, fast and furious even though he said nary a word.

  “May I come in?”

  I stood there, waiting. His one moving eye moved a little bit more. Then I was inside his apartment and standing in C. Winter’s hallway. I closed my eyes for one brief second and thought of the old man waiting for me outside, down five flights of stairs, the motor idling in Crystal’s bright red truck. I stood in the dark hallway of C. Winter’s apartment and pictured the beautiful, unearthly red of Crystal’s truck.

  C. Winter—my biological grandfather—was not a hermit, nor was he a pioneer. He was so unlike what I expected that I became confused in his apartment and had to get out my roll of adding-machine paper so that I could look up the questions I wanted to ask him.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  That was one of the first things that C. Winter said to me.

  “Notes,” I said.

  After he asked about my paper roll I could no longer unroll it. C. Winter’s eyes were upon my spool of green paper and I couldn’t let him see it. You know when there’re things you can’t do. It’s an instinct. Instinct told me not to unroll my adding-machine paper in front of him.

  I cleared my throat. I picked up my pen and balanced it between my thumb and my forefinger. If you do that, and then wiggle the pen slowly and curvily, the pen looks as if it’s made of rubber. This trick also works with a pencil.

  C. Winter sat in his chair. His eyes didn’t rest on me the way a hermit or pioneer grandfather’s eyes rest on their beloved granddaughter. C. Winter’s eyes roamed. I saw them roaming around his living room: the blue chair, the TV that sat on top of a wooden crate, the mattress on the floor. His living room was nearly his whole apartment. Off behind one corner was a small kitchen, called a galley kitchen. Galley kitchens are ship kitchens, small, in which you can stand in one place and reach everything you need. Everything in a galley kitchen is within arm’s reach. I learned about this in a book I read on boatbuilding. It was a real book.

  “I admire your galley kitchen,” I said. “It must be very convenient.”

  When I said that to C. Winter, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t like his galley kitchen, even though it was clean and neat and didn’t smell. I didn’t like C. Winter’s galley kitchen because it was not the old man’s kitchen, and all I could think about was the old man’s galley kitchen in Nine Mile Trailer Park, with its yellow-striped dish towel hanging over the stove door handle.

  C. Winter’s eyes kept moving around the room. There are people with eye diseases whose eyes never stop moving. They jiggle back and forth in unison, or one eye roves. It’s possible that one eye can remain stationary and the other can rove free within the eye socket. I read that in the medical encyclopedia.

  “Isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, you can reach everything without having to take a step.”

  C. Winter’s foot started jiggling. Some people have a disease in which their entire body trembles. Every muscle, every bone, all the time. I forget what it’s called. The trembling cannot be controlled. Twenty-four hours a day, the victims of this disease live with the trembling.

  “Do you ever have to take a step?” I said. “Just a tiny one, I mean?”

  “I don’t cook.”

  His voice was a surprise. You don’t know that you have voice expectations until the actual voice is there, the sound waves coming at you and entering into your skull, and then you realize that you had expected something entirely different. C. Winter did not sound like what I believe a pioneer or a hermit would sound like.

  “Nor do we, except on rare occasions,” I said. “Tamar believes that food tastes best when eaten directly from a jar or can.”

  “Why do you call her Tamar?” he said.

  I couldn’t answer him. I was already into my train of thought. Words had piled themselves up in my
brain and they could not be stopped. They had to emerge in the order I had already given them.

  “Tamar, for example, will not eat margarine because she says it’s science run amok.”

  He smiled.

  “She always used to say stuff like that.”

  “She still does,” I said.

  He was still smiling.

  “She still does,” I said again. “Tamar says stuff like that all the time. Margarine is science run amok, food should be eaten out of cans and jars, the most ingenious invention on God’s green earth is the Swiss army knife.”

  “That sounds like her,” he said. “That does indeed sound like her.”

  “Don’t call her ‘her,’” I said. “Her name is Tamar. Everyone’s got a name.”

  He shook his head. His eyes roamed. His knee jiggled up and down.

  “Everything on God’s green earth has a name,” I said. “Or should have.”

  I saw Crystal’s bright red pickup the minute I came out of the apartment building where C. Winter, my biological grandfather, lived. I kept my eyes trained on the drumming fingers of the old man the entire time I was walking down through the green-plastic-awning roof over the little slanting tunnel that leads out of the apartment building—in case it rains?—and walking across the parking lot where a few rusty cars and a few rusty trucks were parked. I watched the drumming fingers of the old man sitting behind the steering wheel of the idling truck until I was at the truck itself. Then the old man stopped drumming and let me in.

  “Well?” the old man said.

  I shook my head. I climbed in next to him and strapped the seatbelt over my shoulder, across my chest, and buckled it. It was too loose. I pulled it as tight as it would go. If I had had access to my emergency seatbelt system I would have hooked it up, but the only place in the world where my seatbelt system exists is in Tamar’s car, at home.

  Dark gray air hung above us, a winter sky. Across the street there was an A&P store with three shopping carts left in the parking lot.