Shadow Baby

by Alison McGhee

  Tamar’s arms around me were too tight.

  “Could you stop?” I said. “I can’t breathe.”

  All around us the smell rose, thick and heavy. I felt as if I were choking to death in a broken-down barn full of dead insane chickens. All the months, the months and months I had kept the secret of my vicious chickens came crowding down on me and I couldn’t stand it. Days and weeks and months of not telling anyone about the chickens, their meanness and cruelty, the way they kept after me, pecking and hissing and clawing, came crawling up out of the heaps of dead dark feathers, snaking around me, invisible and strangling. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop.

  “You should have told me,” Tamar said. “You should have told me about these chickens.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I could have helped.”

  “You wouldn’t have helped. You’ve never helped.”

  Words, crawling out of me, me not stopping them. Tamar’s arms falling away and a choking sound coming from her. The smell of death rising around us like the locusts that once ate up all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s summer fields, and the CJ Wilson chicken convulsing where he lay. Tamar leaned away from me.

  “You never told me about my grandfather, or my father, or Baby Girl,” I said. “No matter how many times I asked, you never told me. That’s the only thing I have ever asked you for help with, and you never helped.”

  Tamar reached out to the CJ Wilson chicken but didn’t touch it. She took a deep breath of the rotten air around us.

  “You listen to me,” she said. “Listen to me, Clara Winter.”

  I held my breath against the stench of the broken-down barn and listened.

  “There is nothing I could tell you that would help,” Tamar said.

  I kept holding my breath.

  “Nothing would help, and everything would hurt,” Tamar said.

  I stared at CJ, lying there, heaving up now and then, its black eye dull. You must kill this chicken, I told myself. I said it out loud to give myself strength. You must put him out of his misery.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to the chicken. I bent down close to where its ear must be. “Don’t you worry. It won’t hurt.”

  Quick and clean, I thought. Make it quick and clean.

  I picked up a chunk of broken-off cement and I brought it down on CJ Wilson’s head.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tamar was at the kitchen sink brushing her teeth when C. Winter came to the door. I recognized him immediately. He was the same man who had sat in his apartment on Genesee Street in Utica, unable to meet my gaze. He came up the steps to the kitchen door. Tamar was behind me. One of her many oddities is that she prefers to brush her teeth at the kitchen sink, in front of the window. She likes the morning light, she says. At night, when it’s dark, she brushes in the bathroom.

  “Hey,” he said.

  What do you say to your grandfather, when you don’t know him?

  “Hi.”

  Behind me the sound of brushing stopped. I felt Tamar walking across the kitchen. The air she displaced moved before her. She held her toothbrush like a gun.

  “Tamar?” my biological grandfather said.

  She said nothing. She stood there with toothpaste foaming out of her mouth. When Tamar brushes her teeth she brushes for a long time. She leans against the sink and stares out the window while she brushes. I timed her once: five minutes, thirty-three seconds.

  “Tamar,” he said again.

  He took his hat off. It was a Yankees baseball cap, one with the intertwined N and Y. That’s what they used to do in the olden days. A gentlemen, in the presence of a lady, would take his hat off. It was a social given. It would have been an extreme insult not to take your hat off in the presence of a lady. There were other places you had to take your hat off, too. Church, indoors, dinner. That was the social more of the time.

  Tamar said nothing. She stood there with her toothbrush. She looked at him.

  “Hi,” I said again to C. Winter.

  “Hi,” he said.

  C. Winter still couldn’t look at me. His eyes kept moving around. He stood there with his baseball cap in his hands. The time for hesitation was past. She who hesitates is lost, and much had already been lost. I looked up at C. Winter and asked him a question.

  “Why did you take Glass Factory instead of Route 12?”

  He twirled the cap in his hands. His eyes darted. He said nothing.

  “Route 12 would’ve been plowed,” I said. “What was your reasoning?”

  He shrugged.

  “Please,” I said. “Tell me.”

  He looked up at me. Tamar stood still beside me. The toothpaste on her brush was drying. I could see it turning hard and white. My biological grandfather cleared his throat.

  “Tamar—” he said.

  “Please,” I said. “Please.”

  “Because I made a mistake,” C. Winter said.

  I felt around for my roll of note-taking adding-machine paper in its useful and beautiful paper holder, but it was gone. It was lost to flames, and unlike the famous Rocky Mountain lodgepole pine it would never regenerate. I resorted to air-writing. Because I made a mistake, I wrote in the air with my nose. Clifford Winter gave me a look but I kept on.

  “You made a lot of mistakes,” Tamar said. The white foam at the sides of her mouth was dry, too. It moved along with her jaw when she talked.

  “Tamar—”

  “Dad.”

  “I did,” C. Winter said.

  “Grampa?” I said.

  They both turned to me. Grampa was a surprise word, an ambush word, startling them both, hanging in the air like a bubble.

  “What was my father’s name?” I said.

  He might come out with it. My father’s name might be waiting on the tip of C. Winter’s tongue, and topple off, and then I could write it in the air with my nose. I could write it and keep it forever. For the rest of my days, my father’s name would be mine, to have and to hold. C. Winter said nothing.

  “My father’s name,” I said. “What was it?”

  Nothing.

  “Her father’s name,” Tamar said. “What was it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Surprise surprise,” Tamar said. “I don’t know it either.”

  “I’m talking to my grandfather,” I said.

  “So am I,” she said.

  “But you can’t remember his name,” I said.

  “I never knew his name. There’s a difference.”

  C. Winter reached over and put his cap onto the stack of wood in the woodbin. He placed it carefully on the top row of wood, which I myself had stacked. I take pleasure in stacking wood. Even in a woodbin, which is meant to hold chunks of wood any which way, I will stack. I like neat and orderly stacks of wood.

  “You did so know his name,” I said. “You just forgot it, is what you said.”

  “I never knew it,” Tamar said.

  C. Winter rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. Tamar threw her toothbrush, with its stiffened bristles, at his cap. It hit the intertwined NY and didn’t leave a mark. I wrote Tamar’s words in the air: never knew his name.

  “So neither of you know my father’s name,” I said. “And you made a mistake in taking Glass Factory.”

  “Yes,” my grandfather said.

  “Did you have any knowledge of infant CPR?”

  He looked up at me.

  “What’s that?”

  “Infant cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Did you have any knowledge of it?”

  He shook his head. Still rocking.

  “Did you try to save my sister?” I said.

  Rocking.

  “Was there any attempt made on the part of either of you to save my baby sister?”

  I looked at Tamar, who was looking at C. Winter, who was looking at the porch floor.

  “My father’s name is unknown,” I said. “You by mistake took Glass Factory Road. Neither of you knew infant CPR, nor did you try to save my baby si
ster. Is that right?”

  No answer.

  “Is that right?”

  No answer.

  “And what about winter?” I said. “What about the ice and the snow? What about trucks in ditches?”

  “They didn’t have infant CPR back then,” Tamar said.

  “It was eleven years ago,” I said. “Of course they did.”

  “Eleven years ago is a lifetime to you,” Tamar said. “But all it is is a snap of the fingers.”

  She snapped her fingers, something she’s very good at. There was a crack on the porch like a whip; that’s how good she is at snapping.

  “They didn’t think about things like that back then,” Tamar said.

  “You tried, though.”

  That was C. Winter. He was still rocking. His head was still shaking. Back and forth it swung.

  “You tried, Tamar.”

  I looked at him.

  “Your mother tried to save your sister,” he said.

  I fell. You can fall while sitting down, strapped into a bungee cord safety system in your car, and you can fall from a standing position. I fell on the porch and then I wrapped my arms around my knees. His words went scrolling along the bottom of my mind: your sister, your sister, your sister.

  “So I had one,” I said. “I had a sister.”

  “Yes, you had a sister.”

  “No,” Tamar said. “Sisters are alive. Sisters are living. Clara never had a sister.”

  “She did,” my grandfather said. “She had a sister.”

  I closed my eyes and watched the words in my head: sister, sister, sister. I had had a baby sister. We had swum together, drunk the same salty water, heard the same sounds. From far away Tamar’s voice had come to us over months. We had known the sound of her voice, and the way she moved. We had known the rhythm and feel of our mother’s heartbeat as she lay sleeping in darkness that for us remained dark. My sister might have held my hand. She might have touched my face. If babies can love before they’re in this world, my sister might have loved me.

  “What was her name?” I said.

  “Her name was Daphne,” my grandfather said.

  Her name was Daphne. My grandfather moved across the porch. He stretched out his hand to Tamar.

  “Tamar.”

  Tamar was crying.

  “She had no name,” she said.

  “You gave her a name,” my grandfather said. “Her name was Daphne. Daphne Winter.”

  “She never had a chance.”

  “No, she didn’t,” my grandfather said.

  Then his arm went around Tamar. She didn’t hug him. She didn’t lean her head on his shoulder. She just stood there, crying. She didn’t wipe the tears off her cheeks, or blow her dripping nose. She just stood there.

  “I’m sorry,” my grandfather said.

  “Sorry’s not good enough,” she said.

  He rocked on his heels and kept on rocking and finally Tamar turned around and went inside. I was alone on the porch with C. Winter.

  “What are you sorry about?” I asked.

  “You name it, I’m sorry about it.”

  “Are you sorry that you took Glass Factory?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sorry about Daphne?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sorry about Clara winter?”

  He looked at me. I didn’t know I was going to say that until I heard it coming out of my mouth. Are you sorry about Clara winter? I could hear the words hanging between us.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry about Clara winter.”

  He said it with a lowercase w. I could hear it. I could hear it in his voice, and the way the word formed itself on his tongue: winter.

  “Would you say your own name for the record?”

  “Cliff Winter.”

  “Clifford Winter,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  He said his own name with an ordinary W. But that wasn’t what I was thinking. I was thinking how, if I had known my nonhermit grandfather from the time I was a baby, I would know that he was known as Cliff. I wouldn’t have to ask him, for the record, what his full name was.

  “What else are you sorry about, Mr. Winter?”

  He was still on the porch, rocking. He could rock from the balls of his feet to his heels and then roll back up again in a smooth movement. His hands were in his pockets. His baseball cap was still lying on the top row of stacked wood. He nodded over at the wood.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t see you stack that wood,” he said. “That would have been a pretty sight, I’m sure.”

  “How did you know it was me who stacked it?” I said. “It could have been Tamar.”

  “No,” he said. “Tamar is not a stacker. She’s a thrower. When it comes to wood, Tamar’s careless.”

  It was true. Tamar doesn’t care about stacking wood. She feels that it’s just as good to toss it up on the porch in a jumble and then pluck a piece from the jumble on an as-needed basis. Tamar cares not for neatness in firewood. Were it not for me, we would have a porch strewn with chunks of wood. No rhyme, no reason.

  “That’s something I’m very sorry to have missed,” he said. “Having a granddaughter who’s a stacker. Who taught you to stack like that?”

  “I taught myself,” I said. “I looked through the catalogs and saw how they stacked the firewood in the pictures.”

  He nodded. “Mmhm,” he said. “Just as I suspected.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Then he started laughing. We both laughed, him rocking, me holding onto the post by the steps.

  “But I’ll tell you what I’m most sorry about,” he said when we were finished laughing. “Clara winter. That’s what I’m most sorry about.”

  The old man as a young man might have stood across the street and stared at a young girl named Juliet, and loved her.

  Someday, maybe, I will be walking into Jewell’s Grocery, or standing on a folding chair in the Twin Churches church-house, and a boy will look at me and love me. It’s possible. It could happen.

  It doesn’t always happen that way though.

  Take Tamar. She did not love my father, nor did he love her. She does not know his name, and it’s doubtful if he ever knew hers. She wasn’t lying. She was telling the truth.

  The music was extremely loud, is what Tamar told me. The music was so loud that no one could hear her.

  “He turned up the music,” she said.

  For a while that’s all she said. She put her hands over her ears as if she was hearing the loud music. Tamar hates loud music. She will not allow loud music in the house. When Tamar listens to music she listens to the radio at a volume so low that I can barely hear it. She does not wake up to music, nor does she like to listen to it at a volume above a whisper. When I set my clock radio, I do not set it to music. I set it to WIBX’s morning radio show, which is conversation, and I set it at a whisper. This I do in respect for Tamar.

  I didn’t know what Tamar was telling me.

  “He turned up the music?”

  She nodded. “Way up. No one could hear me.”

  “No one heard you.”

  That’s something you can do if you’re not sure of what to say to someone else. You can repeat what they say, with a little twist. You can turn a statement into a question, such as “he turned up the music?” or you can twist the statement and repeat it, as in “no one heard you,” instead of “no one could hear you.”

  “No one,” she said.

  She put her hands over her ears again. She rocked back and forth, like her father had done on the porch when he said he was sorry.

  “How old were you?” I said.

  “Eighteen.”

  I thought about that for a while. Eighteen is how old Tamar was when her mother died. I used to think that eighteen was not a young age. It was almost twenty, and twenty used to seem quite old.

  “My mother had just died,” Tamar said as if she could read my thoughts. “It took a long time for her to die. I ran
away. I couldn’t stand it, stuck in the house with my father and that incessant sadness.”

  Incessant is not a word I would have associated with Tamar. Even as she spoke and I listened, the word incessant went scrolling across the bottom of my mind.

  “All I could see ahead of me was days and nights and weeks and years of sadness and quiet and darkness and stale air in a shut-up house,” Tamar said. “I was too young. I couldn’t see that a day would come when it would get better.”

  “Where did you want to go?” I said.

  “Florida.”

  “Why Florida?”

  “Sun. Beach. No more winter.”

  “But you love winter,” I said. “You’re Tamar, lover of snow and cold and ice.”

  She shook her head. “It was a long time ago,” she said. “A long, long time ago.”

  “Not so long ago,” I said. “Twelve years, is all.”

  “Twelve years and a lifetime.”

  “So what happened?” I said.

  “What happened is what I told you. I packed my bag. I left. I went to a party at Roy Cover’s house because his house was in Utica and the Greyhound station was three blocks away and the bus left at 2:00 A.M. And when it was time to go I went upstairs to get my sweatshirt—you don’t need a winter jacket in Florida—and he followed me and shut the door and locked the door and turned the music up.”

  “Roy Cover?”

  “No. Not Roy Cover. Him. The guy.”

  The guy.

  “My father?”

  Tamar barked. That’s what you call that kind of a laugh. “You don’t have a father,” she said.

  “Did my grandfather know what happened at the party?” I said to Tamar.

  “Yes. Your grandfather knew.”

  “So what happened then?”

  “What happened was that your grandfather told me it was my own fault, and that he would not help me raise the child. You’re on your own, Tamar, is what he said.”

  You’re on your own, Tamar. That’s all she wrote. End of story. No ifs ands or buts. Sore subject. Moving right along.

  The next time C. Winter came to the house on a secret Wednesday night visit I asked him about it. Usually he sat on the porch and talked to me while Tamar was at choir practice.

  “Did you know what happened to Tamar at that party in Utica?” I asked him.