Baby Teeth

by Zoje Stage

  Beatrix considered her for a long, silent moment. She sat forward in her chair.

  “I’m going to ask you a difficult question. Since you’re focusing right now on the things you think you did wrong, I’m curious if there’s one particular thing that stands out.”

  Suzette turned her head toward the window, but what she gazed at was farther away than the trees beyond.

  “When we found out we were having a girl, I wanted to give her a Swedish name. An unusual name. Matt, Alex’s partner, had twins not that long ago. A daughter named Stryker and a son named Sound. Alex thinks it’s a bit weird. But I kind of understood, this image Matt had for his children. A girl named Stryker is not going to be defeated, by anything. And a man named Sound would be calm. Reasonable. Strong.

  “I guess the names I liked were a little odd. Saga. Blix. Majken. Solveig. Alex really didn’t want her to have a name that everyone, in this country anyway, would mispronounce—we always have to correct people with Yensen. I don’t know why but I didn’t want her to have an ordinary name. Sometimes I wonder if we’d named her something else, would she be someone else? But that’s not … What I really didn’t want …

  “She was born with dark hair. My hair. I needed to look at her and see Alex—I wanted baby Alex. But she looked like me, like my mother. I let him pick her name, so I’d always remember she was Alex’s child. Alex, Alex who I love. It was Alex I wanted. All along.”

  * * *

  The first week was hardest; after saying goodbye at Marshes, she managed to keep her giggling fits private. The relief and disbelief and disgrace sometimes burst out—a happy and sad eruption of “Is this really happening?” By the second week their parental anguish softened. Enough so that time passed at an ordinary pace, not the surreal, dragged-out rate of the intermittent mourning created by Hanna’s absence.

  Suzette stood at the counter, barefoot, head bowed over a recipe. Her hair fell around her face and she tucked it back behind her ears, concentrating. She wore a loose T-shirt, soft as a spider’s web, and jeans rolled up to the knee; a youthful outfit that suited her mood. The garden lay in sunlight and the breeze coming through the open door rustled the sketches that covered the table. She’d placed them there to gain perspective on a series of drawings: a progression of views through a doorway. In some the door was only open a crack, in others the viewer seemed about to step through into another place. But she set them aside after Alex, home from the gym, went up for a shower and she had a different type of inspiration. Those cinnamon buns she’d been meaning to make. It would cheer him up.

  Baking didn’t come easily to her and she knew she had to follow the recipe exactly—no extra pinches or experimental flourishes. She wanted them to be as much like his mother’s as possible, picturing in her mind a lazy afternoon in the backyard with their own little fika, enjoying their coffee and kanelbullar over a winding conversation. They needed to relearn how to be together. Every day. Just the two of them, without Hanna. She would help them find a new routine, new joys.

  Alex jogged down the stairs, trailing clean, soapy aromas from his shower. He struck a pose, and waited for Suzette to look over. When she did, she squealed with delight and threw out her arms. She stood on tiptoe to wrap her arms around his neck, taking in the smooth feel of his cheek against hers. Then she stepped back to admire his pink, bare-shaven face.

  “I didn’t think you hated my beard that much,” he said, mockingly hurt.

  “No, it isn’t that. But I love this face, this smooth face.” She held his cheeks in her hands. “This is the face I fell in love with.” And it struck her that he was trying, too, in his own way, to make a difference, to break away from old routines and embrace their household of two.

  “Do I look younger?”

  “You look less like a hipster.”

  He laughed. “It was getting to be too much. Every guy at work has a beard now, and Matt is sporting a waxed handlebar mustache.” It was Suzette’s turn to laugh. He gathered her toward him. “Look at you, so beautiful, so young. I love this makeup-free, carefree you.”

  Her cheek had stopped oozing, and though she’d been instructed to let it heal the rest of the way uncovered, she wore a Band-Aid whenever she was with people, even Alex. She believed it was the large square Band-Aid that made her look youthful, but she appreciated Alex’s devotion. They kissed, and their bodies connected with a crackle of desire, but she resisted and pulled away. “Okay, I’m not quite ready to make love on the kitchen floor. I’m on a mission.”

  “I could make a pun about that.” He followed her back to the counter. “What are you making?”

  “A surprise.” She wriggled away from him.

  “A yummy surprise?” he asked, trying to read the recipe over her shoulder.

  “Maybe, if I’m not distracted.”

  “I like yummy surprises.” He wandered over to the table to study her drawings.

  With the clang of glass against glass, Suzette took the largest Pyrex mixing bowl out of its nest of bowls. She dragged the canister of flour across the counter, then reached into the cupboard for a package of yeast and both the white and brown sugar.

  “These are really interesting.” He straightened the pictures where the breeze had made them crooked and overlapping. “I’ve never seen you draw stuff like this before—where your design, architectural skills blossom into something totally different.”

  “I can’t really explain it, but … When I start one I get all these other ideas. I’m just going with it.”

  “You should, they’re really cool. Your gray work is so detailed.”

  She laid out a collection of different sized bowls, intent on preparing a complete mise en place before mixing any ingredients. She’d learned from past mistakes where she’d found herself short of an ingredient or two deep into her preparation process. Flour billowed up in a poof as she dumped first one cup, then another, into the bowl. Just as she was about to drop in a third cup, she caught sight of something in the flour.

  At first, she thought it was an insect of some kind and she grimaced, digging it out with her fingers. It was smooth and brown, and the right size to be the husk of some sort of bug, but on further inspection … No legs. Too smooth.

  She sucked in her breath, realizing what it was.

  “What’s wrong?” Alex asked, alerted by her gasp.

  “Look.” She wiped it off so he could get a better look. Back at her side, he squinted, trying to understand what she was showing him. “It was in the flour.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s half of an Imodium capsule. Remember when my medication seemed to suddenly stop working?”

  A light dawned on his face. “She…” But he couldn’t say it.

  “I wasn’t getting sick. I thought maybe I’d used loperamide for too many years, but it wasn’t … Hanna tampered with my medicine.”

  He took the empty half capsule from her, like he needed its solidity to make what she was saying real. His face registered pain, then resolve. With a tiny nod, he opened the cabinet beneath the sink and dropped the capsule into the garbage.

  “It means…” She’s a diabolical monster.

  But before she could find a better answer, Alex pulled her in by the elbows and rested his forehead against hers.

  “It means we did the right thing. Our girl needs help. She needs to learn right from wrong. They’re going to help her. They’ll teach her. And someday she’ll come home to us, when she knows…”

  “They’ll help her,” she agreed—convinced, at least for a moment, that it wasn’t her fault.

  He held her in his strong arms and she let her past doubt and misgivings dissolve. When she really considered it, the last couple of weeks hadn’t been so bad. She didn’t have to do as much laundry or cleaning. No one bothered her during the day, and she liked the time alone. A magical thing happened when she lost herself in her sketches: they came from nowhere and afterward their existence surprised her. And it wasn’t as if they’
d lost their child permanently. Hanna was alive and they would see her again. And they could hold out hope that their future life together would be better than it had ever been.

  Things weren’t so bad. They were getting better.

  Dr. Stefanski had referred her to a hematologist after another round of wonky blood work. The hematologist believed he had a solution for Suzette’s chronic low energy: she was extremely anemic—with rock-bottom levels of B12, iron, and vitamin D. She’d likely been deficient for years, a malabsorption issue common for anyone who’d had intestinal surgery. Suzette remained ambivalent about Dr. Stefanski’s historic disinterest in her energy issues, but at least someone was finally on top of it. The following week she’d have her first iron infusion and B12 shot, and she’d already started on D3 supplements.

  It was almost too much to hope for—feeling well—but she hoped anyway.

  Meanwhile, she and Alex would finally, blissfully have time, like they’d once had. Before … They’d strengthen their relationship. They’d work with Beatrix and learn better parenting strategies. Marshes would untangle their daughter’s convoluted wiring and in a year—or two, or three—they’d all know how to communicate with one another.

  She contemplated these things as she and Alex held each other. And later she gave them voice because it was likely that she hadn’t shared enough—with him, with Hanna—and she vowed to amend her ways.

  “It’s going to be so much better,” she said. “My health. Us. And she’ll come home when she’s ready and we’ll all be…”

  As he hugged her tighter she felt his body agreeing, accepting. The separation was better for all of them.

  * * *

  “As good as my mom’s!”

  It was a generous assessment on Alex’s part, though the cinnamon buns turned out better than she’d expected. As she’d hoped, they lazed all afternoon and evening in the yard, talking about Alex’s progress with the Skinny Building, the merits and uses of laminated strand lumber, the possibilities for constructing semi-floating furniture out of repurposed sailing canvas, the goings on in the White House, the newest scandal in the EU, and the unlikelihood that they’d ever commit to growing vegetables when it meant giving up a portion of their precious green space. After the sugar crash made them more sullen and vulnerable, they spoke less and watched the sky change color.

  “This one’s my favorite,” Alex said when it turned a sharp blue.

  Suzette waited until the purple crept in. “I like this one.”

  Under the cover of darkness, safe from having to see too much, she admitted to always being a little jealous of Hanna’s love for Alex—and to some extent, his love for her. And Alex admitted that he was envious of her seemingly effortless ability to run a household.

  “My brain fixates on imagining structures, putting things together. It’s an endless puzzle. But it’s all … mechanical. But you imagine a home, an environment, how people will live and function inside a space.”

  “But I don’t see the real people.”

  “We’re dreamers.” Their fingers danced a courtship as their arms lay flopped over the lounge chairs.

  “You’re a really good father. I should have said it more.”

  Barks of protest and laughter drifted in from the street and neither of them spoke until it was quiet again.

  “We should take a trip this summer. A real trip. A few weeks,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Want to?”

  “Yeah.” And the more she thought about it, the more she really wanted to travel. It wasn’t something she’d felt comfortable with when they were younger, when her Crohn’s still wasn’t well controlled. But it seemed possible now. Exciting, even. “Where should we go?”

  “Wherever you want. Think about it, and we’ll start making plans.”

  She clapped her palm against his, grinning.

  It was almost eleven when they dragged themselves up the stairs, heavy with cinnamon buns and sunshine and the soporific lullabies of night insects. When they reached the top, Alex stopped.

  “What?” she asked.

  He went to Hanna’s room and just stood there for a moment, peering in.

  Then he shut her door.

  HANNA

  IT WASN’T SAFE at Marshes for little Skog. The other children lumbered like monsters, their movements wild and exaggerated. Half of them yelled and the other half growled or looked out from suspicious eyes, ready to bite. Savages, all. Even the way they laughed was barbaric, shrill like a fire alarm. She wanted him with her every minute of every day, but she feared for him, so delicate and defenseless. When she had to leave her room—for school or therapy or meals or playing—she left him nestled between her pillow and the wall so he would be hidden but could still see what was going on. No other children ever came into her room because of The Rules, and the adults were respectful of everyone’s Personal Items, so he was safe, in theory. At night, they whispered together. Sometimes he dried her tears with his felted hand. He told her what she already knew: She’d messed up with Mommy’s spell; Marshes was Mommy’s revenge.

  Hanna spent most mornings with a woman whose clothing often matched her orange hair. Her name started with a T so Hanna called her Tangerine. She made a lot of statements like “It makes me sad when I see someone crying.” Hanna was supposed to slap one of the cards on the table in front of her—the True card or the False card. Most of the time she needed a third option, a What Does This Have to Do With Anything card. So she smacked the False card.

  I feel happy when my mother gives me a hug. False.

  I feel sad a lot of the time. True. False. True.

  I like myself. True.

  I make friends easily. False. True—if Skog counted. But she knew how adults thought. They liked what they could see right in front of them, solid things. They encouraged imagination but hated anything imaginary. Hanna knew they didn’t understand how reality was malleable. It flowed on a wave in front of Hanna’s eyes, and she could choose to be outside or within it. Parents and schools wanted her to be within it, because it was easier for them and they’d forgotten how to swim to other planes. That’s why she was sent away. She didn’t think her actions strayed so far from okay-normal-enough. But now she understood that everyone else disagreed.

  Still. Marshes seemed like an unfair punishment.

  So much for her fairy godmother, Beatrix. Wicked witch after all.

  At playtime, she liked to see how far she could wander from whoever was in charge of watching her. One day, while Brown Teeth was distracted helping another aide with an angry boy, Hanna slipped past the play yard and down a hill. She considered running past the wooded area, across the meadow and all the way to the road—maybe she could run all the way home. But she couldn’t leave without Skog. And at least the trees gave her something to hide behind. A fat black trunk loomed in front of her, and she ducked behind it to catch her breath and decide what to do next. But she found an older girl sitting there, her face like a pug’s, and her arms starred and striped with pale scars.

  Pug Face jumped to her feet, grabbed Hanna by the arm—harder than Mommy ever did—and spun her back in the direction of the play yard. Hanna hesitated, intrigued by the puckers and lines on her arms, and their shared desire for privacy.

  “Did your parents do that?” Pug Face asked, jutting her chin toward Hanna’s still-bundled wrist.

  Hanna touched the stretchy bandage, now raggedy and blackened by time. Is that what everyone thought? She’d never ratted on Daddy; she kept it only because she liked it. But maybe they wouldn’t let her go home until …

  Pug Face pushed her again, then punched her shoulder blade. “Probably deserved it. Now get going, twat!”

  Hanna ran away, back up the hill, her shoulder a bloom of pain. She unwound the filthy bandage and tossed it away. It flagged on the spindly branches of a dying tree. She tried to reach the sore spot on her back to rub it. It made her think of Skog and tears rushed to her eyes. Was he really safe? Would
Pug Face or another brute find him eventually? They’d rip his arms off. Pull out his eyes. Stab him in the belly so his beans spilled out. It would be even worse than what Mommy did to the potato because Skog was a really real friend, and she couldn’t survive Marshes without him.

  She needed to get him someplace safer, but where? If she kept him with her she might accidentally leave him somewhere, or he might fall from her bag, or tumble out of her shirt if she tried to keep him tucked against her body. The monsters would see him only as something to destroy. Children know where other children are vulnerable; the more she loved him, the greater his peril.

  Maybe it was already too late.

  Maybe, in her absence, they’d already seized him.

  She ran as fast as she could, determined to rescue him.

  Panicked and bawling, she ran across the play yard, indifferent to the shouts of protest as she plowed through a game of kickball. All she could see were Skog’s amputated hands and feet, his black-bean organs and blood scattered irreparably all over her floor. As she raced for the dormitory, Brown Teeth chased after her.

  “Hanna, wait! Little bear, what’s wrong?”

  Hanna shoved open the doors and charged up the stairs.

  Brown Teeth caught up with her on the landing. She scooted in front of her and got to her knees, holding Hanna’s arms.

  “I have to make sure you’re okay. Are you hurt? Did something happen? Is your wrist okay?” She caressed Hanna’s bare skin, now exposed by the removal of the bandage.

  Hanna wailed and pointed toward her room.

  “Okay, we’ll go to your room. And we’ll make sure everything’s all right.”