by John Searles
“Baby-sitting lesson number three,” Jeanny said, yawning. “Infants never sleep through the night.”
I went to her and rested Sophie in the crook of my arm as I sat back on the bed. She was really going at it with her bottle now, and the sucking sound made me think of Marnie’s cat, Milky, the way she used to make the same noise as she lapped her milk. That cat would still be alive if Marnie hadn’t been so stubborn about setting the thing free even though she lived close enough to the highway that freedom was a death sentence.
“Did you get any sleep?” Jeanny asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I had a weird dream.”
“About what?”
I watched Jeanny’s eyes as she stared up at the blank vastness of the ceiling. It looked like outer space up there. Heaven or hell. A car passed, creating a grid of lights above us that changed shape and faded to black once more. I made a mental note to pull the blankets and curtain back over the window before falling asleep again. “There was more blood in this room,” I told her. “A big spot on the floor at first. Then it washed over the whole place. Shimmering, sort of.”
Jeanny put her hand on my shoulder. I don’t think she knew what to say.
We were quiet a moment. I listened to Sophie making that Milky sound with her bottle as I tried to shake the red from that dream, that vision of my mother in the mirror.
Baby.
Maybe.
Stranger.
Too.
“Do you believe in signs?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Jeanny said, rolling over onto her side to face me.
“Like there are things in your life—events or omens—that are meant to guide you to a certain place?”
“You mean, do I think things happen for a reason?”
That wasn’t exactly what I was asking, but I told her yes anyway. As I waited for an answer, I watched Sophie breathing. Her body was a loaf of bread rising in the heat of an oven, falling when she exhaled.
“I guess I think some things are meant to be. Fate,” Jeanny said after a while. “And other stuff is just up to chance. Who knows the reason behind it?”
My mind scrambled over the last month of my life—that FOR SALE sign pitched in Edie’s front yard, those pregnant women walking into the hospital, that Newsweek reporter calling. All along I had believed that it was my mother guiding me. That I was meant to follow those signs. But something made me wonder if it was only me wanting to see it that way. After all, if she were going to lead me, wouldn’t my mother make certain I understood her message in the mirror?
I found myself guessing how Jeanny would categorize all the things that had happened to me in the past year. Fate or chance?
Then I thought of Jeanny sitting next to me on the bus, and I asked, “Do you think when we met today, it was meant to be?”
Jeanny was quiet for a moment.
“Should I take that as a no?” I said, feeling stupid for asking.
She laughed. “It’s not a no. I just have to think about it some more. I’m not sure yet.”
Neither was I, I supposed. But I hoped that the answer might be yes for both of us down the road. I didn’t say anything more about it though. Instead I kept quiet and rubbed my hand against Sophie’s satiny baby skin. “My mother believed in signs,” I said into the darkness after a while. “She told me once that if I watched carefully, life would always lay signs right out in front of me, telling me which way to go. And now that’s she’s gone, I keep looking for them.”
“I used to think like that after my dad died. I thought that if he really loved me, he would find a way to contact me from the dead. I’d think, okay, if you can hear me, make the sun come out from behind that cloud, or make the phone ring. But it never happened.”
More than ever I wanted to tell her about what I had seen in the mirror but felt afraid she’d think I was losing my mind. Hell, even I was afraid I was losing my mind. “Does that mean you don’t look for him anymore?” I asked.
Jeanny stretched her arm over the side of the bed and grabbed her bag. She pulled out that silver cigarette case she had snapped open and closed on the bus. “See the letters?” she said, pointing to an engraved M and G on the top.
I nodded.
She told me that they were her father’s initials. Michael Garvey. He used to keep his guitar picks in the case along with his cigarettes. Now Jeanny took it with her wherever she went as a reminder of him. “I guess I see him in the things he left behind and the things he taught me instead of looking for him in the clouds. Doing that helps me to let him go.”
Sophie finished her bottle, and I got up to put her back in the makeshift crib. I thought of my mother, tried to imagine letting her go, but she felt too close. I pictured her spirit hovering above me like one of those galeros. What would it take for her to disintegrate and drop to the floor so she could be released from this world? I supposed I had thought it would happen when I took Sophie, when I proved somehow to my mother that I had made a mistake by stealing that money. But I wasn’t so sure anymore. Maybe she would hang over me forever, an invisible weight on my back, like the angry eyes of those kids who had followed me on the street in Hell’s Kitchen.
“Wait,” Jeanny said as I was about to lay Sophie down. She had put her father’s silver case on the nightstand next to the glass with my mother’s gum. “You need to burp her first.”
Jeanny told me what to do, and I gently bounced Sophie until she let loose a bunch of baby burps, which made us both laugh. She spit up a blob of creamy goo on my shoulder, too. Jeanny got up and grabbed a towel, cleaned us both up.
“There,” she said. “My two babies are as good as new.”
I put Sophie in her guitar-case crib and got back in bed next to Jeanny, wrapped my arms around her. Up close her sweater smelled faintly of that perfume she’d sprayed on back on the bus. Beneath that I breathed in something entirely different. It was the way I imagined her house might smell. Like hand-washed clothes and unvacuumed rugs. Meals stewed up in oversize pots to feed so many mouths for the week. I wondered if Jeanny sprayed that perfume on herself to cover the smell of her house. To help her become something other than a girl from Little Street. Thinking of that made me hold her closer. And when my mind filled with the image of Jeanny staring up at a cloudy sky, waiting for her father to make the sun come out, it broke my heart, because I knew how she felt. “What was your dad like?” I asked her.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything,” I said. “Just tell me about him.”
“Well, he was a great musician. You name the instrument and he could play it. He loved any kind of art. Music. Painting. Dance. And he loved to talk about the world. My father always told me to speak up for what I believe in. A message I know most girls don’t hear. He was pretty liberal like that. I guess you would call him a hippie.”
I thought of my dad dubbing her street Hippie Street and wondered if he had ever come across Mr. Garvey around town. “I know your mom changed, but did anything go back to normal, or even close to normal, for you after he was gone?”
“Hardly,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I wanted to know because I cared. I needed to know because I couldn’t imagine my life ever going back to normal again.
“Well, for one thing, he wouldn’t have put me in St. Bartholomew.”
Not the answer I expected, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I had in mind. “So why do you go there?”
“After a few years in elementary my parents decided to home-school me. But when my father died, it was too much for my mother to handle, so she wanted to put me in school again. Only the superintendent was not very happy about the”—she held up her index and middle fingers to put the next words in quotes—“hippie-dippy idea of home-schooling. The guy wanted me to stay back a few grades. So that’s how I wound up at St. Bartholomew. I took a test, and they actually put me ahead one grade. My mother told me to ignore the religious stuff and absorb all the rest. Unfortu
nately, it’s mostly religion. But it adds fuel to my fire, and it beats staying back.”
“At least the uniform looks cute on you,” I said, remembering that day on the bus when she had stepped on board wearing that wool sweater and plaid skirt. Transforming in the bathroom like Superman in a phone booth.
Jeanny groaned. “Oh, I hate that ridiculous outfit!”
“Really,” I said, teasing her. “It suits you perfectly.”
She seemed absolutely tortured by the thought of it. “If you ever say that again, I’ll have no choice but to tape your mouth shut.”
“It suits you perfectly,” I repeated, deadpan.
“Stop it!” she said and grabbed a pillow, shoved it my face.
“Okay! Okay! I’m kidding!” I pushed her off. Poked a finger in her ribs. “We’ve got to loosen you up, Miss Garvey. You’re so serious.”
“Very funny,” she said, rolling her eyes.
Something about her smile made me lean forward and kiss her again. Both our mouths opened to each other right away, and I slipped my tongue between her lips. Her breath was wet and warm, and I could feel my body getting hot as we moved together.
My chest against her chest.
Our legs touching on the bed.
I ran my fingers through her smooth hair. We kissed harder, and unable to hold myself back, I moved my hand to the front of her sweater. Slid my palm to her breast. She felt bigger there than I had imagined. I brushed her nipple with my fingers. When I pulled her closer, she stopped me.
“Wait.”
I lifted my hands an inch or two from her body like someone caught in the middle of a crime. “Sorry.”
“No. It’s okay. But. . . it’s just that. . . I’m, you know, I haven’t—”
“Me neither,” I confessed, wondering instantly if that was the type of thing I should admit. God knew Leon never would have.
“I like you, Dominick,” Jeanny said. “But we shouldn’t go too fast.”
“I agree. I mean, whatever you want to do is all right.”
“We can kiss some more. Okay?”
“Sounds perfect,” I said and leaned my lips into hers again, because the truth was I didn’t know if I was ready for more. As excited as I got being next to her, it still felt strange to think about sex in this room where my mother had died. It still felt strange to think of sex as an actuality at all.
We didn’t go back to sleep completely that night. We kissed and talked for hours. From time to time Sophie woke, and we took care of her, got her settled back in. Then we spoke in whispers and made out some more. I told Jeanny that I remembered seeing her that morning at the auction last year, and she said she remembered seeing me there, too. I told her about my mother’s plans to buy the station. I told her about that crazy cleaning lady at my uncle’s, and we laughed. We laughed even more about our bus driver, Claude. We talked about Edie again. The way I used to feel Sophie move inside her belly as we lay on her bed. The shock I felt when I overheard that phone call. And Jeanny told me all about her mother and brothers, how her mom stayed numb with a steady supply of prescription pills, how sad they all felt since their father died. She told me that when he was alive he used to take her—just her—on the bus to New York to see shows or go to the museums. She missed those times more than anything. And when we were done talking, we put our arms around each other. Because I had forgotten to close the curtain, the sun soon streamed in through the window, bathing us in light.
We lived like that for three days.
Kissing.
Talking.
Sleeping.
Watching TV.
Taking care of Sophie.
Jeanny never left. Once when I was in the shower, she phoned her mother, and I could hear that they were arguing. I asked Jeanny about it later, and she shrugged it off, not wanting to get into it. I made up my mind not to ask anymore, because I didn’t want her to give it too much thought and decide to leave. She knew what she was doing. And I got the feeling that staying in this motel was almost like another protest for her.
She was picketing the fact that her mother had checked out two years ago. That she’d stopped noticing Jeanny at all.
Leon swung by every afternoon to bring us whatever we needed. Clothes from my apartment that he snagged when my father wasn’t around. More pizza. Chinese food. Soda. Pretzels. Toothbrushes. Toothpaste. All of it on the house. I asked him about Ed’s cabin, and he said he would see what he could do, but I was going to have to be nicer to Ed if I wanted to use his grandparents’ place. I promised, even though something told me that I wouldn’t end up there. Not that I had seen any more signs from my mother telling me what was to come next. Whenever I looked into the bathroom mirror, only my expectant face stared back. I was beginning to believe that I had simply imagined her there. Imagined her voice all along, too.
At the end of each day Jeanny and I took turns going outside for air while one of us stayed behind with the baby. Taking walks was Jeanny’s idea, since she thought we might go stir-crazy sealed in that dim room. In the woods behind the motel we found a narrow, snow-covered path that led to a pond. The surface looked more like some sort of galactic landscape than the slick, smooth white of a skating rink. All jagged bumps and craters left by the wind and snow. Whenever it was my turn to take a break, I walked along the path to the pond and stepped out onto the ice. All that black water seemed like death down there beneath my feet, waiting for me, waiting for all of us, even Sophie, who had only just been born. I always slid around on my boots, then sat down on a tree trunk near the edge of the pond. As the sun set and my breath fogged the air around me, I thought about all that had happened and wondered what to do next.
Beneath the ice a dozen or so goldfish the size of trout floated still in the cold water, which seemed weird to me because it was winter. But there they were—bright orange bursts of life under the frozen surface. Judging from the goldfish motif in the motel, I figured they must’ve belonged to Old Man Fowler. I had never seen goldfish so big, and I always stared down at them as I knocked those questions around my brain before walking back to the room. Even though I didn’t come to a decision right away, I felt happy on those walks back to the room. It seemed odd to feel happy, considering my predicament. But knowing I was going to spend another night with Jeanny and Sophie filled me with a joy that I couldn’t put into words. It was a little like the way a man must feel returning to a family he loved. And this is what I told myself: My mother had one perfect day with Truman; I had three with Sophie and Jeanny.
Three days, that was all.
As happy as I felt, the whole while I sensed that menacing fairy-tale bird pecking away behind us, getting closer and closer all the time. I knew it was the part of me that realized this life would end. That somewhere Edie was looking for her baby. That sometime soon I was going to have to make up my mind. So it was during my last afternoon trip to the pond that I finally decided what to do.
I had spent a big part of the day laughing with Jeanny because she was trying, unsuccessfully, to teach me how to yodel. She said I sounded like a dying goat. We watched The Price Is Right and guessed along with Bob Barker and the gang. Jeanny whipped my ass and walked away with a washer and dryer, plus a brand-new car. After we finished the sandwiches Leon had brought us the day before, we played with Sophie. If you put your finger in her hand, she squeezed it tight. Since that was her first major physical feat besides blowing our eardrums with her crying, Jeanny and I were pretty impressed. When Sophie had had enough, we put her down for a nap and went into the next room, through the closets, and fooled around on the bed in there. Something we started doing after I explained to Jeanny that it made me feel more relaxed to be with her in that room, away from my mother’s tragedy. We both fell asleep in there, too, and when we woke, Jeanny suggested I go outside first.
I headed back to the ice and sat on that tree trunk. I was staring down at those meaty goldfish when I saw her.
My mother beneath the frozen surface.
/> She moved faceup, hair wet and snarled, watery and slow, drifting by me with that same message she had given me in the mirror the night I arrived in her room. Only this time I didn’t let my fear distract me. I watched every move of her mouth. And that’s when I finally understood her.
She wasn’t saying, Baby maybe stranger, too.
She was telling me:
The
baby
may
be
in
danger
here
with
you.
The sign I had been waiting for. But what was the danger?
My heart pounded, and I scrambled along the ice to follow her, slipping and banging my elbow as she drifted off into the gray murkiness of the pond. I watched her blue legs vanish into a tangle of weeds.
“Are you okay?” another voice said.
I yanked my head up to see Jeanny standing at the edge of the ice. “Where’s Sophie?” I asked, breathless.
“Leon came by. She’s asleep, so I told him to stay with her for a few minutes while I came to see you. Outside of that room for a change.”
“Is she okay? What if she wakes up?”
“I told Leon to shout out the window if he needs us. Don’t worry. Nothing will happen.”
“We should get back to her,” I said, thinking of my mother’s words.
“Relax. Leon will call us if she wakes up,” Jeanny said. “What were you looking at down there?”
I took a breath and forced myself to trust Jeanny. Something in my gut told me that whatever danger my mother spoke of was far greater than Sophie waking up with only Leon in the room. I stared down at the ice, and just as I had come to expect, my mother was gone. But those fish were still there. A red one—not gold or orange but a flaming red—kept still beneath me. “I’m watching the fish,” I said. “I wonder how they stay alive down there all winter long.”
Jeanny stepped out onto the ice and slid her way over to me. She pretended to figure-skate. Twirling. Stretching her arms out before her. “Let’s see,” she said, kneeling next to me.
“There,” I said. “See them.”
