Baby Teeth

by Zoje Stage

  It slightly concerned her that turning on the kitchen light would somehow awaken her parents, but she needed to see to do her work. The hardest part was lugging a chair over to the counter—if only Marie-Anne had a physical self and could help her. It was heavy, and she didn’t want to make any noise or leave scuffs on the floor or bang it into her chin or knee. The chair bumped against her a few times, but she finally got it right against the lower cabinet and then stood on the seat.

  She used her flashlight to better illuminate all the medications Mommy kept in the cabinet. Some were just over-the-counter ones, like the chewable Tylenol she took when her throat hurt. She didn’t want to mess with anything that she or Daddy might take, so she concentrated on the clear orangey bottles that had Mommy’s name on the sticker. The pen thingy she injected into her belly would be too hard to tamper with; she’d already ruled that out. And she wanted something that Mommy used every day—unlike the pen thingy. She looked at one of the packets she’d seen Mommy mix with water, like instant lemonade. Could she poison it with something? But if she tore it open, there’d be no way to reseal it. Her best choice would be the little plastic-looking two-tone brown pills. Mommy took one with both breakfast and supper. She couldn’t pronounce the name of it, but the label said, “Take one capsule by mouth every four to six hours as needed for diarrhea.” She’d seen a commercial on TV where, by magic, a capsule opened and a million tiny balls spilled out, so she knew they could be pulled apart.

  The bottle was a bit tricky, but she imitated how Mommy pressed her palm into the top of it, then turned. After a few tries, she got it to open.

  She held one of the capsules between her thumb and forefinger. It looked so small, not at all like the animated thing she’d seen on TV. But she soon found that with a little twisting, it popped open. The capsule wasn’t filled with tiny balls as she’d expected, but with a fine white powder that looked exactly like flour.

  For a moment, she weighed her options. Her original idea had been to dump out all the medication into the sink, but the capsules might feel too light if she left them all empty. Getting a tiny drop of flour into each one would be hard to do without making a mess, but it might be worth the effort. She tried putting the two halves of the capsule back together, just to verify that it would work. Easy peasy. It looked good as new. Testing it, she pinched it between her fingers and it squooshed, flat and empty. Nope. Definitely have to refill them.

  She grabbed the fat canister of flour with both hands and tugged it over. The smallest-tipped object she could think of was a teeny tiny plastic-handled paring knife—she’d used it before, standing at the counter on a chair like she was now, slicing bananas and melon chunks on her own special cutting board. Daddy liked fruit salad. Very quietly, she slid open the drawer and found the knife.

  For the next two hours she painstakingly sabotaged her mother’s pills. The process was too exhausting and boring for her to do all of them. But she scooped up the ones she’d altered and put them back in the bottle so all the ones on top were flour instead of medicine. The sink was filled with white powder residue, so she turned on the faucet and let the water wash it all away.

  She yawned. Silently as a worm, she put everything back where it had been, turned off the light, and returned to bed.

  * * *

  Everyone seemed a bit groggy at breakfast. Mommy swallowed her pill. Hanna tugged her pajama collar up to cover her mouth, hiding her grin.

  * * *

  They all went to the office supply store, and it was hard to tell which one of them was having more fun. Daddy liked trying out the different ergonomic chairs. “Not the best they make, but still comfy,” he said. Hanna tried them all, too. They took turns spinning each other. She was surprised to see that Mommy was attracted to the same things she was, colorful packs of everything you could think of—card stock, Post-its, highlighters, and especially the metal binder clips.

  “You’re a big girl now,” Mommy said. “Kindergarten students don’t need their own notebooks and supplies, but first graders do.”

  Mommy and Daddy had a list of things she needed, and she got to pick her favoritest of each item. She chose a purple backpack, a red lunch cooler that reminded her of Daddy’s, a yellow binder and some three-ring lined paper, a matching yellow pencil case, pencils with swirly patterns around them, gummy erasers that looked like flowers (she couldn’t wait to toss one under her bed), a rectangular plastic container with a magnetized rim that kept a zillion colorful paper clips from falling out (“To use at home,” Mommy said), a pack of fat highlighters, an adorable jar of thumbtacks, and a square bulletin board (“We can put it right on your wall,” Daddy said). Plus all sorts of random objects because no one could stop oohing and aahing over all the rows of stuff. Daddy got a heavy bundle of paper for his printer and Mommy got some Post-its and a giant sketchbook.

  The parking lot was a death trap of monstrous bugs: hulking SUVs in endless rows. The sky hung low in thick gray stripes and people scampered in and out of cars and stores like they were afraid the rain would come and wash them all away. After they put all the stuff in the trunk Daddy pointed at another store and said, “We could get you a computer.”

  “I’m not ready,” Mommy said. “Not sure what I really want. A tablet? Don’t know yet.”

  Daddy took Mommy’s hand, so Hanna took his other hand. “Clothes then? Some new school clothes, squirrely girl?”

  Hanna usually fussed when she went shopping with just her mother, but it was a treat for Daddy to come along. But once they were inside he went off to the boring men’s section to look for gym pants, even though Mommy asked if he really needed them. Hanna tried to follow him but Mommy called her back. Hanna ignored her, but then Daddy told her, too, and suddenly the store wasn’t nearly as much fun. Stupid Mommy and stupid clothes.

  Mommy clicked her tongue as they strolled past the racks. “It’s all for summer.”

  Every building in the mile-long complex was the opposite of their house. Vast quantities of everything, enough for twenty cities of a million people on display in each one. Hanna squinted, picturing how different it would be if the place were empty. If every store had only a single item hanging among the circular racks. Shopping would be a treasure hunt then: If you found the item in ten seconds and if it was your size, you could keep it; otherwise you had to leave it behind. She hated how much everything there was in the everywhere outside of the house. Too much and too much. Sometimes she wished she could turn off her eyes instead of her mouth.

  “What do you want to wear to school on your first day?” Mommy asked.

  Hanna held a polka-dotted bathing suit against her body. It had a navy-blue background and dots of different sizes and colors. If it was almost summer, she’d get to go swimming soon. Farmor and Farfar would come. They would go to the park with the lake.

  “You can’t wear a bathing suit,” Mommy said as she looked through a rack of sale items.

  Hanna bounced a little, clutching the colorful bathing suit.

  “No, Hanna.” She picked out a simple pale-yellow dress with a white collar. “This looks like something you’d like.”

  “Mmmmnnn,” Hanna whined. She made angry or whining noises at everything Mommy pulled off the rack.

  “You don’t want something new for school?” Hanna rubbed her eyes, her face in a grump. “Okay. We won’t get anything. Let’s go find Daddy.”

  Hanna ran ahead of her.

  “You didn’t find anything?” he asked when they found him looking at a folded wonderland of T-shirts.

  “She didn’t want anything.”

  Hanna’s face crumpled like she was about to cry. “What’s wrong, lilla gumman?” She pointed back toward the kids’ things.

  Mommy gave one of her annoyed sighs. “She wanted a bathing suit. I think she’s tired.”

  “It’ll be summer soon. Does she need one?”

  “We haven’t tried on her old ones yet.”

  “Nothing’s expensive here. Did t
hey have her size?”

  Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! She gripped his hand and jumped up and down. She led the way to the polka-dotted bathing suit. She glanced back at Mommy, who trailed behind them with a pinched face. Daddy wasn’t looking, so she stuck her tongue out. Mommy scratched the tip of her nose with her middle finger—the bad finger that meant a bad word. She couldn’t quite tell if Mommy was just fixing an itch or giving her the bad-word finger. It didn’t matter. Daddy bought her the bathing suit, so she won another round.

  * * *

  Otters swam like ripples of fur, peering at her through the glass. She liked them best, so far. She held Daddy’s hand the whole time and didn’t have to compete with Mommy, who stayed home. Not feeling well. Hanna was very proud of herself. She didn’t need Marie-Anne to do all the sneaky things. She almost wished she could tell someone how clever she was.

  The elephants looked like boulders with fat stumps for legs. She wanted to climb a giraffe’s neck, its spots like a ladder. The peacocks strutted and showed the world their rainbows. They were very arrogant. Hanna wanted to wrap her fist around one of their delicate heads and squeeze. Would it crack open like an egg? The monkeys bore wise, sad faces that told the truth. She wasn’t fooled by the way they played, climbing with their four identical hands while their tails asked, Why? Why? Why? It was like watching babies in a prison.

  Maybe someday there’d be a zoo full of people. Just ordinary people sitting at a dining room table with a meal they hated. The free people would stand on the other side of the glass, watching them sniff their food in misery. In another room, children in bunk beds would have to wear pajamas all the time. They’d sleep so much they wouldn’t grow, and parents would say to their own kids, “That could be you, if you aren’t good.” In the last room would be a solitary woman, bony and dirty, orange haired like an orangutan, sitting in a big stuffed chair watching the same three hours of television over and over, day in and day out. Poor monkeys.

  “Have you ever said anything to Mommy?” Daddy asked. “Spoken to her?”

  She shook her head. They walked along the plant-lined path on the way to the food stand, where Daddy promised her some french fries.

  “Are you sure? Not even once or twice? When you were bursting with words and just couldn’t hold them in anymore?”

  She furrowed her eyebrows and stuck her lips out, shaking her head. If she had anything to say so badly, she’d say it to Daddy, not Mommy. And she couldn’t be held accountable for Marie-Anne.

  “But if you had anything to say—really, really important, or even just really, really silly, you know you could come to me, right? You know I’d listen?”

  It was like he could read her mind. She kissed his hand, then gripped it in both of hers and did a little skip. Daddy skipped, too. They skipped all the way to the french fry place.

  SUZETTE

  SHE’D TRIED TO explain the pain to him, back when she was pregnant. At first they just thought it was another strange consequence of her ever-changing hormone-infused body. So she didn’t mention it right away. Then it became almost too difficult to speak, too difficult to swallow food. She ate a lot of nondairy ice cream and little else. It melted in her mouth and slid down her esophagus. It did nothing to ease the pain.

  It was as if someone had shoved straight pins through the back edges of her tongue. Both sides. She’d looked in the mirror so many times half expecting to see the tiny silver pinheads. She wanted so badly to pull them out and make the pain go away, return her tongue to its natural flexible state. But as hard as she looked, there was nothing to see. She didn’t know how—or to whom—to report such a pain. The agony in her throat was somewhat different, as if she’d swallowed a razor blade and it stuck there, unwilling to budge up or down. Every time she swallowed even her own saliva, the razor blade screamed, Gotcha!

  The pain had been relentless, a torture beyond what she’d previously been able to imagine. She googled mouth sores and found lots of gross pictures of inflamed cankers, but nothing in her mouth looked like that. Finally, she found a post that revealed the answer. By then she’d had Crohn’s disease for nearly fifteen years, but her symptoms had always been confined to stomach pain and cramping and diarrhea—all of which she was already experiencing; she’d never heard of anyone having excruciating but nearly invisible sores in their mouth. Though six months pregnant, she’d lost ten pounds by the time she knew to go back to her gastroenterologist. Dr. Stefanski recognized what was happening immediately: it was another symptom of her flare-up. Because of the pregnancy, he still wouldn’t start her on one of the biological drugs, even though the pain was relentless. She’d been reluctant to take even Tylenol, but she needed to gain weight during her last trimester, so Dr. Stefanski wrote a prescription that helped with her symptoms until the baby was born.

  She leaned over the bathroom sink, trying to turn her cheek inside out. Maybe she’d just bitten it while chewing or in her sleep. She could feel the spot with her tongue but couldn’t see anything in the mirror. It could be nothing, but there was a chance that her body could develop antibodies that would render her injections useless. Usually she tried not to think about it because the drug worked so well and she prayed it always would. Even after her recent bowel resection she’d only needed a few Imodium a day and was pleased with how quickly her digestion got back to normal. She’d been prepared for the worst; for months following her adolescent surgery she took the maximum dosage—eight Imodium a day—and still worried about straying too far from a bathroom every time she left the house.

  Maybe it was just an upset stomach. Maybe she’d eaten something iffy at that chain restaurant they’d gone to for lunch the day before while they were out shopping. She was distrustful of restaurants in general; they could bury cheap ingredients with salty, fatty sauces. She took an extra Imodium at lunch and another before heading upstairs for the night. Maybe in the morning everything would be back to normal. No mouth pain, no fucking diarrhea. Blips happened.

  But what if what if what if it was happening again, everything going awry, a new fistula about to announce itself? It shouldn’t happen again, her inflammation was under control and the surgery was supposed to make everything better. But Crohn’s was notoriously unpredictable, and what if she wasn’t in the majority percentage, and what if they’d made havoc of her delicate system in spite of it being “only a few inches.” Maybe she shouldn’t have trusted the surgeons. It was so easy for her worry to run out of control … defective no hope more cutting amputation of lower ileum what would be left would it be enough oh God … Stop. Stop. Stop.

  She lifted her flimsy T-shirt. Her scars lay there quietly, nothing to say. Not even a tingle beneath her skin. Their silence was a relief, a comfort even. She tousled her hair. Did she look younger? The shorter length revealed the tiny scar on her jugular vein, though only she would care about the pinkish speck. Too many things in her life were tinged with horror. She told herself not to think about it, and turned off the bathroom light and slipped into bed.

  While Alex and Hanna were at the zoo, she spent the day alone. It was nice, like a staycation. She binge-watched TV shows and started reading a long novel about a decades-spanning friendship that made her wistful. Alex gave it to her for the fifth night of Hanukkah, which was always their Book Night. Sometimes she thought about reconnecting with friends she’d made at the Art Institute. Being a mother—homeschooling—sapped her energy for other relationships, but at least she had Alex. The book, enjoyable as it was, made her feel lonely, so she set it aside and spread out, taking up more than her share of the bed. Hanna was asleep; Alex helped with her bath and got her ready for bed, as had become their routine. He was upstairs working, and she knew she had no reason to feel neglected—he’d kept Hanna entertained all day so she could rest. But she wanted him. She couldn’t risk calling out and waking Hanna, so she called his phone.

  “Hey—you almost finished?”

  “I’m never really almost finished.”

  “Could
you come to bed?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  She heard the flirty smile in his voice but didn’t want to disappoint him by telling him the truth: she just wanted to talk. “You’ll see.” Her voice sounded sleepy, not the least bit seductive. But Alex said he’d be right down.

  She turned off her lamp, leaving the room in the warm glow of his bedside light. It was easy to picture him, in the room above her head, in the cool glare of his computer screen, saving his work to the cloud. There’d been no porn on his laptop and no links that suggested such an interest, though she found the website where Hanna acquired her pictures of dead people—a Victorian phenomenon she had to admit was morbidly fascinating. She felt relieved rather than guilty about checking her husband’s search history; she was only confirming what she already knew. It was asinine that she’d doubted him, even for half a second—that, too, she could blame on Hanna’s machinations. Alex was not a depraved man, and surely Hanna would make him an object of her wrath if he ever harmed her in any way. Still, it bothered her to see how selective Hanna had been in choosing her pictures.

  Many on the website were of children, from babes to teenagers, and a few were of men. But Hanna was interested only in the dead women, most of whom, thanks to the washed-out black-and-white photography, appeared roughly the same age: midthirties. A long-dormant memory came to her of the anger that sometimes seethed when she lay awake as a teenager, her stomach roiling. There were moments when she contemplated sneaking into her mother’s bedroom and plunging a knife into her sleeping heart.

  Did Hanna harbor such fantasies, too? Sometimes Suzette was afraid the girl could read her thoughts: The regret she fought to keep from surfacing; the love that she hoped would overshadow her otherwise tepid feelings (if only Hanna were more likeable); her desperate need for her own time and space.

  A minute later she heard Alex on the stairs. Even when he tried to be quiet, the weight of his body, his low center of gravity, made the floors groan. He whipped off his T-shirt as he came in the room and tossed it onto the floor. He shut the door behind him and launched onto the bed beside her.