The Baby Merchant

by Kit Reed

  It’s like blundering into a catfight.

  A tangle of growling, squalling noises overflows the DelMar office. The words don’t factor. Somebody yowls and then Marilyn’s beautiful contralto splatters like an egg hitting a fan. Inside, she and a kid saw back and forth, and the words? Ugly words. There are threats and reproaches, there is whining, “You this,” “I didn’t,” “You that,” “Did not,” cut short by a smack and an outraged howl. The office door falls open and an angry toad of a child runs out, spraying her with a hateful glare. He isn’t as fat as his mother. Yet. He’s almost as tall as Sasha, but he’s sobbing like a toddler. He stumbles along on Marilyn’s high heels with his face rouged and his body hobbled by a rucked up evening gown.

  Marilyn explodes into the doorway. She’s been sweet— no, syrupy— with Sasha. Now she’s somebody else. “God damn you, Delroy Steptoe, you wrecked my formal!”

  “Did not!”

  “Look here, you …”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “You ripped the shit out of it.”

  “Who cares? You’re too fucking fat to fucking fit in it.”

  “You’d better the fuck care.”

  “Fat, Fat!” The bawling child vomits up his worst. “O-beast.”

  “Shut up you little fuck, I’m your fucking mother.” You’re so lucky, babies are the sweetest things. Marilyn rages on, the way you do when you have no idea that anyone sees. Would she have said what she said to him with Sasha standing there? “I wish you were fucking dead.”

  Delroy pulls his mother’s ruffled skirts up over his big pink butt and moons her, howling, “Well I wish you wasn’t o-beast.”

  A white hunter Sasha dated once said in all seriousness, “Don’t let a rhinoceros get you between it and the water.” This is Marilyn now.

  “Well, I wish I never had you.” The fat woman brings her fists down on her fat child’s temples so hard that something in his nose ruptures and blood flies. “So there!”

  Fleeing, little Delroy sees what Marilyn doesn’t. He sees Sasha riveted at the edge of the parking lot. He pulls loose and heads her way wailing, running hard. Poor kid. Is she supposed to save him from his mother, hug him, what? But— weird— even from here she feels it: the furious, squealing child is one of those rare people who trigger instant dislike. Where Sasha should have tried to help she backed away. She didn’t stick out a foot and trip him, but it was close. Shaking, she stood aside and let the parade of grief go by. “Um,” she says helplessly now. She reaches for Marilyn’s arm as if to slow down her charge but her mind is rushing ahead: I must be abnormal, a real mother would help. God, what if it was my kid?

  At her touch, Marilyn whirls. “ … the fuck?”

  Sasha is too upset to speak. “Um.”

  Halted, angry Marilyn can’t recover her sweet tone any more than she can cobble a feasible smile. “Fuck do you want?”

  Think fast, get it over with. “I can’t go back because he threatened to kill me,” Sasha says.

  Like that, Marilyn morphs back into whatever she was pretending to be before the image slipped— sweet, decent woman, only a little plump. Her voice plumps up to match. “Oh, you poor girl.”

  “So don’t go finding the father for me.”

  “Girlfriend, you’re covered.”

  “I need your word.”

  “I’ve got you covered, girl.”

  “Promise.”

  “Really.” She smooths Sasha’s hair in a clumsy, motherly feint. “If the bastard shows up I’ll call the cops on him.”

  Raging Marilyn was scary; sympathetic Marilyn is worse. In another minute the woman will be plastered to Sasha like a new best friend. She’s assailed by nightmare visions of Marilyn bonding, confiding, Marilyn dragging out dressy clothes and laying them out on the asphalt for her to admire; she’d expect Sasha to come into the office for coffee and sit on the red leatherette sofa, sliding in to bump haunches while they looked at wedding pictures, or she’d act all the roles in The Marilyn Story while they did each other’s hair. “I hope you don’t think Delroy and I were really fighting.”

  “Who, me? Oh, no.”

  “We just love to take on. Now how about a cup of …”

  “Can’t. I’ve gotta go.”

  “You aren’t having contractions, or anything, are you?”

  “No!” Shaking, Sasha flees Marilyn’s voracious smile.

  At least Marilyn has stopped barging into the room. When you’re glad to get rid of somebody it makes you feel guilty and paranoid. Maybe it’s hurt feelings over the refusing to come in for coffee. Maybe she’s ashamed because Sasha caught her real voice coming out of her true face that day.

  Unless Marilyn’s afraid she’ll find Sasha in labor and have to help until the ambulance comes. Or cut the cord and clean up because the ambulance is too late. Unless there is, as Sasha believes, something so obscenely different about this pregnancy that even Marilyn, who’s had two children (“We never talk about Earl”), doesn’t want to be exposed. As if desperation is something you can catch. When Sasha looks in the mirror now, she is embarrassed and surprised. Nothing like this has ever happened to her body before. It’s like the final stages of an arcane, contagious disease.

  At least Marilyn’s stopped coming around. OK, so be it, fine. It is a relief not to have to deal. When Marilyn does get in touch, it is in writing. Sasha comes in from another supply run on the mall to find a note on the shag rug. Instead of letting herself in with her passkey, Marilyn had shoved the paper under the door. It must have taken several tries because the note is mashed into zigzags and partially ripped.

  DO YOU WANT TO KNOW IF ANYBODY COMES SNIFFING AROUND?

  Even a week ago she would have roared into the office and asked. She would have collared Marilyn, a neat trick given her amplitude, and shaken an answer out of her: “What do you mean, sniffing around? Was somebody looking for me?”

  But she is beyond it now. Inertia caught up while Sasha wasn’t looking. It’s getting harder to move. She can’t sleep, can’t concentrate, can barely make it through the days. It’s hard to get up in the morning. Half the time she can’t bother to dress and the other half, she dithers, moving small objects in a desperate attempt to prepare.

  There’s nothing Sasha can do to keep what’s happening to her from happening. There is no way to reverse the process, so she does what extremely pregnant women do. She brings her unit in the DelMar to an obsessive, twice-scoured level of readiness, imposing an order that would astound and delight the headmistress at her old boarding school. Truth? It’s the one thing about her life that she imagines she can control. She lines up supplies the way you do when you think that no matter where the next trip takes you, you may not make it back alive.

  Unlike the pristine space Tom Starbird created for himself, or emptied, so he could bear to be in it, Sasha’s room is carefully decorated and piled with useful objects and, if you thought you were going to have a baby, a hundred percent ready. Whenever she thinks of a necessary item she struggles out to the mall, ticks it off her list and scores a chocolate bar; on her last foray she had a box of pralines sent to the girls, no card but Luellen will know and stop worrying about her. Meanwhile she is socked in here for the duration, fully armed for whatever is to come. In fact, she overprepares. Receiving blankets, baby washcloths and towels, wipes and formula and bottled water, what else. Maxi Pads, for after, because she’s read the book. She is beyond ready. She perceives herself as safely hidden here in the dingy outskirts of Savannah, Georgia, and Gary? She doesn’t know.

  She takes out Marilyn’s note. DO YOU WANT TO KNOW IF ANYBODY COMES SNIFFING AROUND? Not really, no. I’m too pregnant to cope.

  Later in the week: knocking. Shit. Marilyn.

  Groaning, Sasha grapples with the covers: was I asleep? Again? No way to pretend she isn’t home: curtains drawn, car out front. When she hears Marilyn’s key in the lock she struggles to the door, calling, “Coming!” when she means: don’t come in.

 
“It’s me, honey. I had to warn you.”

  “What?” At any other stage in her life Sasha would have pushed past the manager, run for the car and scratched off like a NASCAR ace. She should have! At the sound of the word “warn,” she should have left her stuff behind and disappeared, but she’s too scattered to think fast and too big to move. She droops like a blown dandelion in the warm, damp air, waiting for a breeze to lift her and carry her to higher ground. Before she can choke it back she gasps. “My God, is he here?”

  Marilyn fixes her with that squint. “Is who here?”

  “I don’t know, I thought you were coming about …”

  “No listen! They stole a baby out of the hospital. You hear?”

  “My God.”

  “Turn on the TV.”

  On the screen, another of television’s hypnotic, disorderly and riveting, unscripted real-life dramas is unfolding. Live. Day-old girl stolen from the neonatal ward. Before she could be chipped! They see tearful parents, grim Savannah police, experts on kidnapping, trauma counselors, stunned relatives, the works. Watching with her knuckles crammed in her mouth, she forgets about Marilyn until Marilyn speaks.

  “Isn’t it awful?”

  Absorbed, Sasha murmurs, “Terrible,” but her emotions are disturbingly mixed.

  “Those poor parents, that poor little thing.” The bed shakes as the manager sits.

  There is Marilyn’s perfume, there is that cloying, personal ponk in the air because Marilyn is carefully made up but not quite clean; the combination should have driven Sasha out of the DelMar forever but she’s entirely too pregnant to go. While Marilyn shifts on those fat haunches, while she mutters and squirms, grunting with each televised blow, Sasha is unnaturally still. She watches from a strange posture of detachment. Solve a lot of problems, she thinks and then she thinks she deserves to be extinguished on the spot.

  “I’m so glad I’m not pregnant,” Marilyn says. “I’d be worried to death!”

  “They’ll find the baby.”

  “Can you imagine? Can you just imagine? It’s probably lying murdered in some ditch.”

  Sasha shudders. “Don’t say that! I bet it’s some poor woman trying to replace one she lost.”

  “From your lips to God’s ears.”

  “If she lost her own baby, you know she’ll take good care of this one.”

  “What if they can’t catch her? What if she doesn’t give it back?” Marilyn’s anxiety buzzes, filling the room like a flock of gnats. “It will kill the parents, think how awful, your brand new only baby gone, she could be dead, she could be anything, and you’d never know.”

  “They’ll find her,” Sasha said.

  “You be extra careful at the hospital, honey,”

  “I will. Oh, look. She’s found!” They always do. It was simple enough, the chief of detectives was saying, we went through the register of still births, we researched all those women and we followed up. Sasha punches the remote and the picture disappears. With that hateful, unaccustomed effort, Sasha gets to her feet. Valedictory. “So that’s that. I’ll see you later Marilyn, OK?”

  Marilyn doesn’t care, she chatters on. “Whatever you do, once you have that baby, you be good and careful with that baby.”

  “I will.”

  “Girlfriend, you gotta take care! Once you get that baby, don’t let that baby out of your sight.”

  Oh, move! Sasha thinks. Leave while you can, but she’s too far along for that. She’s too far along for anything. Whatever is going to happen, will happen. Careful, she’s too far along to be careful. Yawning, exhausted, she gets Marilyn out the door with a muddled promise. “Don’t worry, I will.”

  17.

  “Excuse me, did you lose this?”

  Luellen Squiers knows she didn’t but the extremely cool, black-haired guy in the black T-shirt and jeans worn all the way down to silver is so cute that she doesn’t care. Also the silver plastic phone thingy he is holding is very nice— will definitely fit her cell, when she finally gets it back from where Eleanor put it when they checked her in. She smiles her nicest. “Who, me? Well, yeah.”

  “I found it back there.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “Glad I caught up with you.”

  This makes her smile even wider. “Me too.”

  Nice smile on him too. Standing here, happy to be in this conversation. He says, “So you’re um, having a baby?”

  “Pretty much.” It’s Friday again, probably the last Friday Luellen will be making the special trip to town. She’s so big now that she’s like to pop and if she has to carry this baby ten more minutes, she’ll die. She’s gonna be pooping out this baby soon, no problem, everybody says the second one’s always a lot easier than the first and her first slid out like a greased piglet, no big deal, she’ll get done with it, she’ll get her figure back and then she can go home. Looking at this guy, Luellen wishes it was over with and she was skinny and cute this very minute but if she was, she’d be home with Mama instead of talking to him here. “Probably next week.”

  “Congratulations.”

  I love the way you look when you smile. “I guess.”

  “No, really.”

  “That’s not what Mama said. She said don’t come back until you hand it off. She dudn’t believe in birth control.” She gestures at the mini-van with the Newlife seal.

  “Heh. Institutions.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He looks around. They are the only two people standing here. “Don’t you guys usually travel in a group?”

  “Oh,” she says. “You know about us.”

  “I do.” The smile spreads into a grin. “So where is everybody?”

  “Them all? They’re all in Ruby Tuesday eating onion blossoms. I don’t do onion blossoms, they give me gas.” They are standing under the awning that shades the strip mall restaurant where the driver likes to stop on their way back to the Newlife grounds. She used to like hanging out inside the pet store with her girlfriend Sasha instead of bloating up on the Friday Special, but Sasha’s gone. She left in the middle of the night. She left Luellen cold. Girl, you were supposed to be my labor coach? Luellen is beginning to feel sorry for herself. “At this point everything gives me gas.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Hey.” Smile for him. “It’ll be all over soon.”

  “Sweet. Well, nice talking.”

  Oh, no! He’s turning to go. Say something to him, Luellen, say something interesting to keep him standing here talking to you. You haven’t been this close to a hunk like this since you checked back in at the place. “So. Are you from around here?”

  He turns back just the way she hoped he would. “Who, me? Just passing through.”

  The man is mighty sweet in the black T-shirt, beginning tan on the face but the arms and neck are white. “You’re from up north, aren’t you?

  “Portland, Maine. I came to get my girlfriend but she’s gone.”

  “Oh, you mean Margie, Margie had her baby and a lady took it, so they sent her home.”

  “No, my girlfriend hasn’t had her baby yet, I came to get her and she’s gone. I love her to death and now I can’t find her.”

  “Oh, you mean Sasha.”

  Oh, he lights up when he hears the name. Beautiful smile he gives her. Black eyelashes. So cute. “Sasha, that’s her. Totally gone and the people at the desk won’t say why.”

  “Oh, them, they’re all bitches. Right,” she says, rummaging for something to please him. “Somebody said you’d been around.”

  His head lifts. “Who?”

  “You know, her boyfriend?” She prompts. “That would be you.”

  “Right. They won’t tell me where she went.”

  “Shuh, it’s not like she told them. That’s how bitchy they are. We hate them and we never tell them shit.” To keep this going she adds, “They took away my phone!”

  “If only she’d waited for me.”

  “Well, she didn’t.” Luellen hasn’t qui
te forgiven her. When your best friend walks out on you— your labor coach!— you’ve gotta feel a little bit betrayed.

  “I feel so bad,” he says, “I didn’t get to make up with her after we broke up.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “I know. I didn’t do it, breaking up was her idea.”

  “Really?” Luellen considers. She is thinking, is it really ever the girl’s idea?

  “I didn’t even know about the baby, and now …”

  “She never even told you she was preg?”

  He shakes his head.

  Aw, she is thinking. This is the kind of guy you want to take home with you, and put to bed and take care of until he feels better. Awwww. “That’s so sad!”

  “I really want to get back with her before the …”

  “Baby comes. That’s soooo sweet!”

  “But I don’t know where she is.”

  “She didn’t tell?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s awful.” Luellen hasn’t had a cute guy this close since Richie, and that’s so over that she doesn’t care if she never sees him again. Right now she is getting off on the attention, on standing here with this beautiful guy— older, with his cool clothes, great look, he has these brush-stroke eyebrows that go with the thick black lashes. The blue-gray eyes are so clear that you think you can see straight into his head, and they’re fixed exclusively on her. She sniffs. “I loved her but she never told me much.”

  “If I only knew where she went.”

  “If I knew …” What should she do? What is she supposed to do? When your best friend takes off without an if, an and or a by the way, what is she saying about what she really thinks of you?

  “I just want to make up with her. You know how it is.”

  “I wish I could tell you but.” It’s kind of thrilling, being in this tight with a man, like, he’s perfect and he needs you because he’s so sad. She would do anything to please him. “OK, where’s Sasha? Let me think.”

  “If she’d left a note, you’d know.”

  “Not even a post card from wherever she went to.” Squinting thoughtfully, she rummages for something to make him smile. “Oh, wait. You know what? I think she sent us a present. At least I think it’s from her. We got this great big box of pralines from, you know, Stuckey’s? It said Souvenir of Savannah on the top.”