Lost to Light

by Jamie Bennett

  But I decided to push back. “Mom, the books say that you shouldn’t put babies to bed with a bottle. They can choke. And get ear infections, and cavities.”

  “How could she get cavities when she doesn’t have any teeth? I’m just saying, you and Will were excellent sleepers. It worked for me. And you’re starting to look very run-down, Caroline. It’s worrying me and Dad. Right, Jim?”

  He was peering into the oven to read the front page.

  I kissed her cheek. “I’m fine, Mom. I have to run. I’ll be home at six.”

  She leaned forward and kissed Janie’s soft little neck. “Don’t forget to change her.”

  “I won’t.” She stunk. With her little angel face, it was hard to fathom the evil that I found in her diaper.

  “Your turn to cook,” my dad reminded me. He looked very happy about this statement. The three of us traded off nights, and if I said so myself, mine were the best dinners. My dad was sucked into trying recipes out of magazines that had a lot of ingredients but never exactly worked, and for my mom, it was hard to pull together a variety of dishes in the toaster oven, her appliance of choice.

  I quickly changed Janie and gathered up her gear for the day, then hazarded a quick glace in the mirror at myself. It was a mistake. The bangs that I had cut pre-baby were now at strange cheekbone-length fringe, but at least all that scraggly hair hid my dark-circled eyes a little. My clothes looked rumpled, and like they belonged to someone else—completely unfitting, not to mention unflattering. I tugged at the shirt and rolled the waist of the pants. Not any better, and definitely not matching. I had never been a fashion plate, but things were looking pretty bad.

  At least I didn’t have spit-up on me. But, the day was young.

  I carried Janie, her bag, my lunch, and my purse out to the carport, or porte cochère, as my mom liked to call it. Things sounded better in French. I buckled Janie in, remembering the first few days I had used that instrument of torture, the infant car seat. Torture for me, not for her, because somehow I hadn’t understood that there was a chest clip that opened, allowing the side straps to split apart so you could just lay the baby down. Easy peasy, right? Not if you didn’t know about it, and had been spending half an hour trying to maneuver a wobbly newborn baby in and out of the GD straps without undoing them. Every car trip had made me want to cry. I was sliding newborn Janie up through the straps when a lady in the grocery store parking lot had stopped me. “You know that opens, right?” It was like holy light shone down on me, that’s how life-changing opening the chest clip had been. It was one of the first in a long line of head slapping, duh moments in my real-time coursework in the care and feeding of infants. A lot of times I felt like I was failing some of the pop quizzes. But Janie was healthy, and pretty happy (except at night, darn her) so overall, I gave myself a passing grade.

  We hit the road, first to Janie’s daycare, then for me to go to my job as a receptionist at an accounting firm in downtown Phoenix. Not my dream career, but it was what I found right away after I graduated with a degree in English and had to start paying back my student loans. Then when Janie came along, I stuck with it. The hours were good, they were pretty decent about time off for sick kids, and there was nothing to take home with me. Pay wasn’t great but we could make it if we lived with my parents, also not a dream of mine, but they were happy to help with the baby. Janie had changed up a lot of my thinking. It was definitely all a workable situation, and it was ok for now.

  Until I could sort all this out with Tuck Whitaker.

  Tucker Whitaker, Tuck to his teammates and legions of fans. Janie’s dad. The guy who didn’t answer emails, messages on his social media accounts, or any other form of modern communication. Even letters. The guy who had sicced a lawyer on me telling me to back off, or he would take out a restraining order and sue me into oblivion if I tried to establish paternity through the courts. Yeah, that prince of a guy, the one who might very well be sitting on his A in a Mexican prison as I rode the icy, air-conditioned elevator up to the sixteenth floor to Hogg, Wiener, Marquez, Stuart, Plotsky & Dodge. Only Dodge was still at the firm, a nice old guy who still kept an office but spent most of his time on the golf course. The other five founding partners were long dead, but their names stuck around.

  I was two minutes late and I quickly switched the phone off the service. When I was hired and the office manager, Bettina, trained me, she had told me to only use the first two names of the firm when answering the phone. “It takes much too long to say all the partners, and we’re best known by our first two names.”

  “Are you really sure?” I’d asked her, hiding a smile, and she answered yes, in a confused way. Did she really not hear it?

  “Hogg Wiener, may I help you?” Due to my great maturity, I managed to only crack up when I said it for the first two or three months of my employment. Three years in, it didn’t even make me crack a smile. Mostly.

  The phone kept me busy for most of the morning. Lots of people needed help with their money. During breaks between calls and clients coming in I checked the various news sites for updates on the Tuck Whitaker situation in Mexico. And checked out sales on baby clothes, because Janie was growing super-fast and none of my college friends had kids yet to give me hand-me-downs.

  Whatever was going on behind the scenes with Tuck was being held close to the vest, because there was no additional information, which the websites duly reported. I read some of the comment sections too, and the more paranoid sports blogs, to see if anyone had insider info not being conveyed on the major sites. Looked like most people were complaining that it wasn’t fair that he was being prosecuted because he was an American in a foreign country, which was a load of horse S. Something that had been pounded into me, growing up as a Navy brat, was that you were always subject to local law. Your embassy or consulate could only intervene if you were being treated worse than how they treated all the native-born criminals. The diplomats couldn’t get you sprung.

  But maybe they could if you were Tuck Whitaker, handsome, big-time ball player, with a fat contract and a ton of endorsements (I had been researching his financial situation). Maybe the laws didn’t apply to you, in any country. All those things had sure shielded him so far from the responsibility of parenthood.

  At noon my friend Amy, an accounting clerk, came by to get me for lunch. We had thirty minutes and used every one of them. When I saw her coming down the dimly lit hallway with the baby poop-colored carpeting (the firm was busy but the office was old and ugly), I grabbed my lunch bag and ran to the elevator to push the up button.

  “What’s new with Josef?” I asked her, as the elevator creaked its way up to the roof. She rolled her eyes and started filling me in.

  “Well, remember how I got him that interview for the loading dock job at that store where my friend is the manager? I got him that tie that we picked out online, and I laid out his outfit, and everything. And then the dingbat forgot to go! I had texted him like an hour before, so he would remember to get ready, and then he said he got so caught up in writing that he totally forgot. He had turned off the sound, I guess, so he didn’t hear the ringer on his phone. Or feel the vibrations. Or see my emails alert on his laptop screen. Or hear the landline.”

  This was the same old story, in a slightly different format. Amy’s live-in boyfriend, Josef, was a real tool.

  “So still no job?” I asked, trying not to seem judgmental.

  “Writing is his job,” she defended him, then sighed. “But still no paycheck.”

  “That’s rough,” I commented, as the elevator doors opened at the top floor. We glanced up and down the hallway, then quietly pushed open the doorway to the stairwell to the roof. Seven months ago, I had tried the door and found it unlocked. I managed to keep it that way with the help of a rubber band over the latch that no one had noticed yet. It was a beautiful spring day in Arizona, not hot yet, and not the bone-chilling sixty-degree weather we’d suffered through in January. Ha ha.

  We settled do
wn, backs against the stairwell wall, and Amy continued her story.

  “Anyway, I came home and was like, ‘Why didn’t you go to the interview?’ and he was like, ‘I lost track of time!’ and I was like, ‘But I was texting you!’”

  I let my mind drift a little. Upshot was, he was a lazy A who enjoyed her supporting him while he worked on his mythical novel, in which he had been involved since dropping out of college, five years ago.

  I realized that Amy had paused, and was looking at me expectantly. I had no idea where the story had gone. “Do you believe him?” I asked. That was always a safe question in any Josef story. Mostly he was lying about something.

  “Well, the whole thing about the cat and the bananas, I’m just not sure about. But I do know how he loses track of time while he’s writing. Like last week, when we were supposed to meet for dinner at my parents’ house and he was two hours late.” She smiled. “They don’t understand what it’s like to be an artist! You know, following the muse.”

  It made me want to upchuck a little. “Were they pissed? I mean, PO-ed?”

  “Totally!”

  Her parents were understandably none too fond of him. “So what are you going to do?” This was another safe question in any Josef story.

  Amy sighed. “I’m not sure. I really want to support him, because I believe in his talent.”

  “But he hasn’t let you read anything yet, right?” That part always got me.

  “No, but I know he’s talented,” she insisted. Because he told her so. “But I’m getting a little…anxious about the engagement thing.” She looked down at her ring-less, naked finger. “He said as soon as the novel was finished we would get engaged, but when will that be?”

  Never. “Maybe you could give him a more definite expiration date,” I suggested. “Or maybe just lay out a timeline.” The real question in my mind was why she would want to tie herself legally to this deadbeat. But that wasn’t really something I could just say to her face flat out.

  She was horrified by my tepid suggestion. “If I give him any kind of limits, he could just say forget it and walk. He’s too free to be confined like that. I don’t want to lose him!”

  Why not? Men sucked, as far as I was concerned. I had ample proof: my whore of a brother, my cheating ex, and now Tuck Whitaker. The only good guy I knew was my dad, because my mom controlled his every move. And Mr. Dodge the CPA, who was about 105. Probably a little old for me.

  “Anyway, we’ll see, we’ll see,” Amy said, which were her code words for, “I’m not going to do anything about this, and I’m afraid you’re going to say something about Josef that I don’t like.”

  We ate our sandwiches while she filled me in on office gossip. I was a little isolated from the herd in the lobby cave and relied on her for all the scoop. Amy suspected that one of the senior associates was pregnant with her second child. She had been observed puking into her garbage can by Harriet from the mailroom. Things were getting hot and heavy between Makenna, the assistant who aggressively sold her daughter’s wrapping paper for school fundraisers, and Steve the IT guy. That was somewhat intriguing. As unmotivated yet angry as I was about my own love life, I was always interested in the romances of others. And speaking of anger, I checked my phone again for Tuck Whitaker news.

  “Holy shit. I mean, holy S!” I exploded. “Listen to this.”

  The diplomatic situation with Mexico and baseball star Tucker “Tuck” Whitaker has apparently been resolved. Whitaker’s spokesperson released a statement apologizing for the ‘mix-up’ regarding the Aztec artifact that Whitaker was accused of removing from the Palacio Presidencial yesterday. ‘Mr. Whitaker would like to thank the Mexican government and the American embassy officials for their help in clearing up this misunderstanding,’ the statement reads [click here to see it in full]. Sources tell us that the former USBC Rookie of the Year is currently on his way to the Redwoods’ spring training facility to join the rest of his teammates and will not be charged with any crime in relation to the disappearance of the almost 500-year-old rubber game ball.

  “Of course he got off!” I told Amy angrily. “He can steal all the Indiana Jones crap in the world and nothing happens to him.”

  “Well, isn’t this for the best? How would you get him to recognize Janie as his daughter if he was rotting in prison?” Amy asked reasonably. She was totally sensible about things that didn’t involve her stupid boyfriend.

  I threw a pebble. “Yeah. I don’t want him to lose his endorsements, either. We need him nice and rich to be able to bleed him dry for Janie.”

  “Caroline!” Amy said, shocked. “That’s terrible.”

  “Terrible is not acknowledging your baby daughter,” I told her. “Terrible is not caring what happens to your only child. The only one we know of, anyway. Who knows what other kids he’s dumped along the way?” I threw another pebble. “I just want her taken care of. Do you know that he’s a rich guy, even without all the baseball stuff? He comes from a really wealthy family, never wanted for anything. He sucks.”

  “Sucks,” she repeated, nodding. “Men suck.”

  “You can say that again,” I told her. So she did, and elbowed me, and we ended up laughing at her dumb joke. Thank goodness for girlfriends.

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