by John Searles
I turned and saw Edie again through the bars and smudges, still looking wiped out and holding the baby in her arms. To me it was not just a baby. It was the one my mother couldn’t keep. The one she aborted.
The radiator was off, and I could hear her again.
“You are my life,” she kept saying in the high voice of a cartoon princess, a little less weary than the day before. “You are my life.”
After a long, anxious half hour, I watched her set her life down in that boat bassinet. And I thought once again of that biblical baby floating down a river. Edie bent to kiss the baby, then left the room. I walked right up to the window and peered inside, knowing she would see me if she came back. I pictured the surprised O of her mouth, her hand slapping her heart, startled. With my face so close to that dishwater-dirty window, I could hear the shower running and Edie humming. I didn’t recognize the tune, but it had as many peaks and dips as a roller-coaster ride. Up and down she hummed, as the sound of spraying water accompanied her.
I reached my hand under the open wedge of the window and pulled. I had expected the thing to be as stuck and glued as it looked, but the frame slid right up. The wood on wood made a loud scraping sound, and I froze. Waited to see if Edie had heard, but she hummed still. And the water sprayed. I had a clear view of the bedroom but no way to get in because of the bars. In that moment I made a plan in my head: grab one of the curved pipes out of the trunk of that car, hook the hood of the bassinet and drag it toward the window, gently lift my sister through the bars.
Difficult. Not impossible.
But I had only so much time before Edie would be done with her shower. I was about to put my plan into action when I looked at the edge of those bars over the window and saw that they were hinged. I tugged on the other end, and they opened with a rusty creak. There was no lock, or if there was, it had long since rusted away or been removed like everything else in this dilapidated building. I took it as a sign that I was meant to get inside.
One hand pushed the pink balloons out of the way. Legs first, then body, and I was standing in the bedroom. The very spot where I had watched Edie kiss that man. It was as if I had stepped into the television set, a room I had been watching for years. The dimensions were different than I imagined from outside. Smaller. Brighter.
Sophie made a gentle cooing sound, and I carefully picked her up. She was as light as a kite, something airborne and gravityless. I felt that if I let go of her, she would float up toward the ceiling instead of falling to the floor. She looked less like a baby and more like an alien, an embryo still. Too unformed and fragile to be out of the womb. Her face was round and pink. A baby with light-colored skin who could definitely be my sister. She made an uncomfortable little peep, and that was all. My arms were fine, she must have thought, better than that rickety bassinet, because she kept on sleeping.
I took her bottle, her blanket.
Quietly scooped all the baby stuff into a bag that hung on the doorknob.
Edie hummed. Shower water sprayed.
I walked toward the window, then thought better of it.
The front door opened easily, and I didn’t have a reason to hide.
I was taking what was mine.
My mother’s.
Even my father’s.
A moment later I was out on the street, and Sophie was beginning to cry. A long, breathless shriek in the cold New York afternoon that made me shake. I reached the end of Forty-seventh and turned down Ninth Avenue. My heart beating fast and frantic like Edie’s would be when she stepped from the shower, her wet feet making impermanent patterns on the floor as she walked to the bedroom and found the bassinet empty. For the moment, though, she was simply humming, probably staring up at the giant silver eye of a shower nozzle as the hot water poured all over and steam rose like clouds. I imagined that eye to be God. A great being who already knew what suffering awaited the woman below but refused to stop it.
This was His will:
The woman was humming.
And I was walking away with her life in my hands.
SEVEN
Sophie shrieked louder and louder as I moved along the dirty gray sheet of sidewalk. A deafening rattle of a sound that seemed too wild coming from the small pink hole of her mouth. She sounded like she was choking, gagging, struggling for air. I envisioned her throat as a black tunnel filling itself with phlegm until there was nothing left for a newborn baby like her to breathe. Clogged like a sink or a sewer, she would end up dead and lifeless in my arms. A punctured balloon, deflated and impossible to patch.
The sheer terror of something like that going wrong now that I had her sent my heart ramming beneath my rib cage. I tried to shift Sophie around so she’d stop. Her head wobbled in a way that chilled me, loose and liquidy, like it might slide right off her body. I thought of my father’s drinking buddies, the way their heads swiveled and swayed, sloppy just like the boozy wet tongues in their mouths. Somewhere in a distant memory I heard Marnie’s voice say, Her head’s not screwed on too tight. But she had been talking about one of the dippy nurses at the hospital. Not a baby. Just a turn of phrase, I knew, but it rang in my head regardless. I wondered if there was something wrong with Sophie. Something I wasn’t aware of, something I couldn’t have known watching from her the window. Or were all babies’ heads loose until their spines grew strong like the trunk of a tree to support the weight? Screwed them on good and tight. I simply didn’t know. But I didn’t want to take the chance that her head would roll off down the sidewalk—a fleshy bowling ball knocking at the bright stabbing heels of three hookers making a daytime appearance on the corner—so I cupped my palm at the back of her skull and held her body tight to my chest. Kept walking as she cried.
A homeless man looked up at me and winked one of his glazed eyes. For a brief second I wondered what it was he saw when he stared at me. A boy with his baby sister. A young father with his child. It could have been anything given his perspective, slumped and delirious against the hard beige brick of a city building. An empty McCormick’s vodka bottle in his unclean hand.
I walked past his gaze and put my mind on Sophie. She felt so fragile inside her blanket that I worried her fingers might freeze like icicles. Just in case, I decided to get her out of the cold ASAP. There wasn’t a cab in sight, so I walked one block over to Forty-fourth and Eighth, feeling the eyes of those evil kids who had followed me upon me still, watching from the shadowy windows above my head. On the corner I hailed one of those Checker cabs and climbed carefully inside.
“Where to?” the driver asked over the crying the second I settled in with Sophie in my arms. He was a gray-haired Italian man with thick black glasses and an unlit cigar dangling from his mouth.
“Can we just drive around?” I asked him, not knowing where to go next. I had to calm the baby down but still wasn’t sure how to do that.
“I need a destination,” he said. “So I can record it for my boss.”
Leave it to me to find the only cabbie in New York who played by the rules. “Then take me to the Statue of Liberty,” I said, spitting out the first location I thought of.
When he picked up his clipboard and started to write, I looked down at Sophie, who—for no apparent reason—decided to stop crying as I rocked her in my arms. I said a silent prayer of thanks and kept watching her. She had a strange V-shaped indent on her head beneath the soft blond fuzz. Again I thought she seemed more like an alien than a child. I counted her ten fingers the way new mothers always do, just to be sure. She was zipped up in one of those soft infant outfits that covered her feet; otherwise I would have counted her toes, too. I reached beneath the blanket and held one of her feet in my hand. It was the smallest foot, and she was the smallest baby, I had ever seen. My mind flashed on that PBS show from the other night, and just for a moment I found myself on the priest’s side. I couldn’t imagine yanking this poor little life before her birth.
But would Sophie have been Sophie eight months ago?
I wasn’t su
re.
“You mean the Liberty Island ferry?” the driver was saying, still holding his clipboard.
“Huh?” I said without turning my gaze from the baby. I was trying to spot some resemblance in the miniature landscape of her face. Truthfully, she looked too small and unformed to gauge a thing like that. But I kept searching.
“Lady Liberty is on an island,” the driver told me. “If you want to get to her, you have to take the ferry. Is that where you want to go?”
No, it wasn’t. I had just suggested it to stall for time. But taking a boat ride with a baby in such cold weather didn’t seem like a good idea. In fact, New York City itself didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore—especially since Edie, and no doubt the police, would come looking for Sophie the second she found her missing. I stared straight ahead, out the driver’s window, and racked my brain for a place to go. Heading back to my uncle’s was a definite dead end. But where else was there? That’s when I thought of the bus station only two blocks away.
“Would you like me to take you someplace,” the driver said, “or are we just going to sit here all day and meditate?”
I glanced down at Sophie, and she blinked open her eyes. They were a watery blue color, and she looked not at me but through me. Inside me in a way I couldn’t explain. They made me think of the liquid window in the slick black Magic 8 Ball that Marnie kept on her coffee table. To me Sophie’s eyes were like one of those underwater messages.
It is decidedly so. . .
Without a doubt. . .
Outlook good. . .
I let that be my sign that the bus station was the place to go. “Take us to Port Authority,” I told the driver.
“Jeez Louise,” he said. “Another schizo in the big city. Imagine my surprise.”
A minute later Sophie and I were dropped off in front of Port Authority. I held her close to my chest as I walked inside. Carrying a baby seemed like dangerous work, and I watched my feet as I moved to be sure I didn’t stumble.
The place was relatively deserted compared to my other trips in and out. People darted for their gates. A voice announced departing buses on a hollow-sounding speaker: “Chicago, Gate Nineteen. . . Baltimore, Gate Eleven. . . Washington, D.C., Gate Twenty-four. . . ” When the list was finished, the speaker switched to the Fifth Dimension singing, “Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon. . . ” A maintenance worker mopped the floor where someone had spilled a strawberry shake. I stood there watching him slosh that pink goo around, soaking it up in the stringy gray noodles of his mop, as I wondered where to go with Sophie. The board above the ticket counter listed all the buses leaving in the next few hours. I could have caught one to Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, or even Miami. But all those places seemed random and pointless. A cross-country bus was leaving for Santa Fe at five o’clock, and for a moment I thought that maybe I should get on it as some sort of tribute to my mother. When I tried to picture Sophie and me among the cacti, eating one of those New Mexican breakfasts my mother always talked about, I came up with an empty, lonely feeling. It wasn’t as if that place had worked out for her either, so I decided against it.
The maintenance worker finished wiping up the spill and walked off with his mop dripping behind him, leaving a trail of pink dots. I closed my eyes and listened for that voice again, hoping it would tell me what was to come next. The only thing I heard was the speaker still playing that balloon song. Up, up, and away until the balloon burst and the music stopped abruptly. A muffled voice announced, “Boston-bound bus number Thirty-three will depart from Gate Seventeen in ten minutes. The bus will make stops in Bridgeport, Hartford, and Holedo. Passengers wishing to travel aboard this bus must purchase their tickets at the counter by the northeast entrance of the terminal.” The message repeated, and when it was done, I looked down at Sophie. Her eyes were open once again. Watery and blue. Looking into nowhere. I wondered if I should take that announcement and her open eyes as another sign. Until that moment I hadn’t considered going home, but it started to make sense to me. At least in Holedo I could enlist some help. If not from Marnie, then definitely from Leon. I could ask him to help find me a place to stay with the baby until I figured out my next move.
Holedo it was, I decided.
I was taking what was mine and going home.
With nine minutes to spare, I stepped around that line of pink dots and bought my ticket at the counter. Before heading down to the gate, I stopped at the newsstand, where I scoped around for anything Sophie might need. Next to the paperbacks and newspapers I noticed a pile of children’s books. Probably there for parents who wanted to occupy their kids on the bus ride. Sophie was way too young to appreciate any of the stories, but I grabbed two for her anyway—The Little Engine That Could and Hansel and Gretel—remembering the stack I used to flip through on Edie’s nightstand.
After paying up, I caught the escalator to Gate 17 and boarded the bus. I found two empty seats near the middle and sat by the window. I put my bag on the seat next to me so no one would park their ass there, and then I took to staring down at Sophie’s unformed face. Occasionally I looked out at the darkness of the station, smelling that dieselly bus smell and the dirty air from the bathroom as I tried to calm down. Out there in the darkness there were all kinds of faceless voices that called to me.
Now you’ve done it.
Now you’ve really done it.
You’ve saved this baby.
You’ve put this child in danger.
You’ve proved something to your dead mother.
You’ve taken something from Edie the way she took something from you.
You’re about to ruin your life.
I shivered at it all and looked at Sophie, who seemed peaceful again in the comfort of my arms. I already knew what a ticking time bomb she was when it came to crying, so I made every effort to keep still so she wouldn’t start screeching. This is my sister, I said in my head. I didn’t know if it was some sort of prayer or if I was just plain trying to convince myself. But that’s all I kept thinking: This is my sister who I am holding in my arms.
“Excuse me,” a soft voice said. “Is this seat taken?”
I looked up to see that skinny girl I always ran into. The one who had protested the police auction and ridden into the city on the bus with me the day my mother died. Her bulky black guitar case was strapped on her back like a heavy shadow. Bumper stickers on the thing read WOMEN’S LIB, EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK, ABORTION ON DEMAND. I thought of what my father would say at the sight of this girl and her opinions: Of all the seats on the bus, this lesbian has to sit next to me.
“Sorry,” I said. “That seat’s for the baby.”
“But the baby is in your arms,” she said, tilting her head and dropping her mouth open, exasperated.
“Why don’t you just take another one?” I told her, not caring how rude I sounded. “Clearly I need the space.”
She shifted her guitar case, and it accidentally clunked against another passenger’s bald head. “Watch it!” he said.
“Sorry,” she told him, then flashed her brown eyes at me. “Look around and point to an empty seat, and I’ll be glad to take it.”
I craned my neck back and noticed that all the seats were full. I had been so distracted by the baby and those voices that I hadn’t been paying attention to all the people getting on. “Have a seat,” I said, moving the bag of baby stuff aside.
“Why, thank you,” she said, plunking down with her mammoth guitar case next to Sophie and me. “How nice of you to offer.”
I shifted toward the window so she wouldn’t bother us anymore. Under my shirt I felt Joshua Fuller’s manila folder press against my stomach. With Sophie in my arms I couldn’t figure out how to get to those articles, so I decided to wait. Besides, I knew what they said, more or less. As I held Sophie’s tiny hand in mine—no bigger than a petal plucked from one of my mother’s funeral flowers—I tried to figure out exactly what I was going to do when I arrived in Holedo. Call Leon. Swear him
to secrecy. Ask him to help me find a place to stay. Then what? A big part of me knew that I should get off this bus and undo what I had done before taking it any further. But holding this baby, just looking at her miniature face and soft bump of a nose, knowing that she was possibly—probably—my sister, made me feel like I had salvaged something from my mother’s tragedy. In a weird way I was making things up to her by taking Sophie. Keeping this baby the way she wanted to keep Truman.
I couldn’t turn back.
And besides, it was too late.
The bus was starting.
The wheels were moving.
Little Miss Big Guitar emptied her bag as I held Sophie close and careful in my arms. I watched her reflection in the window as she pulled out a sandwich made with stuff that looked like it was picked from a field. Stringy, weedy browns and greens. No meat that I could see.
A vegetarian lesbian, I heard my father say. The worst kind.
When she finished nibbling her sandwich down to nothing, she took out a box of perfume called Tigress. The label asked, “Are you wild enough to wear it?” I guessed the answer was yes, because she squirted a dab of it on her slender wrist, stinking up the air around us. Next she pulled out a silver cigarette case. If she lit up, it would probably send Sophie into another crying jag. That was all I needed. But when she snapped open the case, there were nothing but colored guitar picks inside, all lined up like a woman’s painted fingernails. The girl slipped a pink pick back in place, then proceeded to snap and unsnap the case for no apparent reason. Maybe she liked the sound. Maybe she just wanted to bust my balls.
Sophie had been quiet up until this point, but she burst out again with a giant “Waaaaaaaaaa! Waaaaaaaa! Waaaaaaaa!” At first I figured the perfume and snapping had bugged her. But when she wouldn’t stop crying even after the smell had faded and the snapping had ceased, I worried I was hurting her somehow. I moved her this way and that in my arms, but her head kept doing that eerie wobble and she kept on wailing. The shrill pitch made me panic. What if something was really wrong with her? I was hardly prepared to handle it. The more she cried, the more nervous I became. I decided she might be hungry, so I grabbed her bottle and tried to pop it into her small, open mouth. That seemed only to make her more upset. She screamed louder than before. Her pink face turned red, highlighting the tiny veins under the soft blond fuzz and wrinkled skin on her head.
