Waiting for Christopher

by Louise Hawes

  “If you think you look good now,” she told him when she’d finished and had rinsed out the brush, “wait till you see yourself cleaned up.” She wet a paper towel and rubbed it over his filthy cheeks, inside the folds of his neck. “Now,” she said, presenting him to the mirror again. “Who’s that?”

  “Cwiss?” he asked, checking with her rather than his reflection.

  “The new-and-improved Chris,” she said, tossing the towel into the trash and turning his head back to the glass. “Say hello to the clean and totally adorable Chris.”

  “Wo,” he told himself, obligingly. “Wo, Cwiss.”

  “Is there anyone cuter in the whole world?” she asked, shaking her head. He shook his right along with her.

  “How cute are you, Chris?” She set him down now, opening her arms across the damp, ammonia smell of the room. “Sooooooooo cute.” When he opened his own arms, she couldn’t help picking him up again, nuzzling his neck, kissing the soft, still-damp skin behind his ears. “Now,” she told him, “milk and bed.”

  But that meant opening the door. Going back into the world, where good people, law-abiding citizens, would think what she had done was wrong. Would want to take Christy away and give him back to his mother. Feena gripped his hand and wished they could leave without seeing the clerk. Mercifully, he was still engrossed in the dimly lit figures on his Gameboy, and they slipped past him to the baby food. Feena kept hold of Christopher, chose a squat glass jar containing alarmingly yellow Easy Chew Peaches. She was sure he was old enough for regular food, but it would be good to have, just in case. When they reached the dairy cooler, she lifted out a quart of milk, not thinking about how they’d keep it refrigerated.

  They were headed for the counter when she saw the face on the carton. It wasn’t Christy’s, she knew that; the carton must have been printed weeks ago. But the eyes were the same, and the nimbus of hair, like spun glass, above the small features, the uncertain smile. HELP FAIRHILL DAIRIES FIND THIS CHILD, it said in large letters under the black-and-white photo. Then, beneath those, in smaller type, were the facts. NAME: Lester Milton Dailey. DATE BORN: August 12. DATE MISSING: March 21. LAST SEEN: Oak Park, Illinois. At the bottom of the carton was an 800 number.

  Feena felt teary, indignant, as she studied the picture. Who would name a baby Lester, anyway? She looked at the little boy’s half-closed eyes, his wary smile. They probably didn’t even love him. They obviously hadn’t cared how the flashbulb frightened him when they took this picture.

  Christy reached up, tried to lower her arm, take the carton from her. “Me carry,” he urged. “Me carry mik.”

  Maybe there was no “they.” Maybe the boy’s father had left, and there was just the baby and his mother. Was she waiting, just out of the picture’s frame? Was she a careless, angry mother who didn’t take care of him, who didn’t deserve a second chance?

  As if it were burning her hands, Feena yanked the milk away, walked back to the dairy case and dropped it in. Being a lousy mother wasn’t like making a mistake on a computer, after all. You couldn’t just press the delete key and make everything all right again.

  “We’ll get little ones instead.” She plucked up two pint cartons and gave one to Christopher to carry. Would Christy’s face be on next week’s cartons? Did his mother have a picture of him—some sloppy, phony Kodak moment that would make people sure she loved him? “That’s it,” she soothed, closing his tiny fingers around the milk, herding him back toward the counter. “That’s my helper.”

  The boy was still bent over his Gameboy. Barely looking at them, he extended one arm and spread his palm while he continued to detonate tiny star shapes on the gray screen. Once Feena had fished some change from her pocket, though, and led Christy out of the store, things got harder.

  She considered going back to the old restaurant, but it was too far from the house, and it had no doors that shut, no way to make sure he’d stay where she left him. She needed to put him to sleep where she could hear him if he woke and cried, somewhere safe and close.

  If only she could take him home, tell Lenore what had happened. For an instant, a syrupy millisecond, Feena imagined herself curled up with Christy in her own bed. But then she pictured the long walk they’d have to take to get there, Lenore looking at them over the remote. Her mother would never understand, Feena was sure of it. Not even if she turned off the TV long enough to listen.

  That was when it occurred to her that the cleverest criminals often did exactly what the police were certain they wouldn’t do. They returned to the scene of the crime. Isn’t that how the “perps” on her mother’s favorite detective series always made fools of an entire city—until, of course, the heavy, wisecracking star of the show figured things out?

  So she retraced her steps, headed toward the Pizza Hut, then behind it, and into the parking lot of Ryder’s. The place was deserted—no cars, no lights except for the neon S in Ryder’s, which sputtered and winked in the twilight like a giant firefly. “Can’t turn it off,” Mr. Milakowski always complained. “Why do I need that, I’m asking? I close at five, I open at ten. For what do I need an S in the sky?”

  Even though it was getting dark, Feena kept them in the cover of the rides and the small sheds that housed their motors, edging cautiously toward the miniature golf course. She knew where Mr. Milakowski kept the key, and she knew from the way Christopher’s eyes lit up when he saw the little house with its red roof and the giraffe painted on the door that she’d found just the right place for him to sleep.

  She wasn’t prepared, though, for the steam bath inside. There was, naturally enough, no reason for the booth to be air-conditioned, since it was designed for handing out golf clubs, not taking up residence. Still, she felt a momentary despair when the baby, just as any sane and sensible adult would have done, tried to run back outside.

  “Wait, Christy,” she told him, putting the two bags down, grabbing him around the waist. “This is going to be fun.” She propped open one of the metal flaps, then held him up to look through it. “See?” she said. “We’ve got our own little house, just you and me.” She opened the flap on the other side, and things began to cool off. “You and me and Lady Macbeth.” She pulled the huge boneless bunny out of the bag and sat with it on the concrete floor.

  Christopher stared, fascinated, at the rabbit but didn’t try to touch it. He approached slowly, as if he thought he might startle it, then sat down across from Feena. “Lord Christopher,” she said, holding the rabbit’s paw, touching it to Christy’s hand, “meet Lady Macbeth, the star of English 10A.” She folded the rabbit’s soft middle into a deep bow.

  “It be-ith an honor,” she squeaked for the toy, “to meet so fair a prince. Not all the perfumes in Arabia could smell as sweet,” she added, snuffling Lady Macbeth’s nose into Christy’s cheek, pushing harder and harder until he toppled, giggling, to the floor.

  While he played with his new toy, Feena sneaked a look outside, then, satisfied there was no one around, laid out the banana and plums. Surer of himself now, Christy grabbed the banana and mashed its end into the rabbit’s mouth.

  “I think Lady Macbeth is going to have milk instead,” she told him, peeling the fruit and breaking it into pieces. He downed it in seconds, then watched intently while she tried to open a can of beef stew. She’d forgotten a can opener, but he sat patiently, betrayed only by a trembly, chewing motion of his lips, as Feena banged and pounded the can against the counter where the clubs were tucked into their long, vertical nests. WHAM. WHAM.

  She succeeded only in denting the can and making far too much noise. Finally, she fished out the jar of peaches instead, twisted it open, and fed him with an old plastic spoon she found in the drawer with the pencils and scorecards. “Mmmm,” she said, as he devoured each spoonful. “Mmmm.” Though he seemed to need no encouragement at all, seemed, in fact, to be starving.

  After he’d drunk both cartons of milk—sharing make-believe sips with Lady Macbeth—and finished off the applesauce as well,
Feena made him a bed out of her sweater and the paper bags. “Time for a story,” she announced. “No,” she said each time his head popped up. “Not until you’re lying down.”

  She ended, of course, lying beside him; he held the rabbit and she held him. Through the open flap above them, the neon S blinked on and off, on and off. “This story,” Feena said, “is about a young girl who worked for a mysterious stranger, a man she never saw—” She stopped, realizing that Jane Eyre’s adventures at Thornfield might not be the stuff little boys dreamed of. On similar grounds, she rejected Rebecca and most of her old favorites. Beside her, Christopher clutched Lady Macbeth with one hand, wrapping the other through her hair. Even holding tight, though, he seemed worried, restless.

  “What would you like to hear?” she asked. “How about the story of the three bears?” Christy shook his head.

  “A brave little pig?” She thought of Charlotte’s Web, tried desperately to resurrect the plot. But Christy shook his head again.

  “Okay. What about a rabbit like Lady Macbeth?” More head shaking. Feena was beginning to think the head shaking was a game—to wonder if he even knew what it meant—when Christopher suddenly released her hair and pointed toward the slice of sky showing through the tin flap. “Nake,” he said. “Want nake.”

  Feena looked where he pointed. “Nake,” she repeated to herself, and then she understood. She thought for a minute, then began again. “This story,” she told him, “is about that whirly, curly snake in the sky.”

  “Nake!” Christopher said, reaching for the sinuous, winking S. “Wo, nake!”

  “Hello, snake,” Feena repeated after him. She turned to Christy, who was closing and unclosing his pincer fingers, straining toward the sky.

  “Nake,” he said. “Want nake. Want pay nake.”

  “That snake’s too high, Christy,” she told him. “We can’t play with him. But I can tell you his story, okay?”

  Christopher nodded, settling against her. She told him that the snake’s name was Sylvester and that he’d once been a normal snake, a snake who lived on the ground in a nice, cozy hole behind a rock.

  “Wock,” Christopher echoed, sleepily.

  “That’s right.” Feena talked on, the story unfolding, to her surprise, practically as fast as she could tell it, like a flower in one of those stop-action nature films. It all started, she said, when Sylvester bit the toe of a dragon, a purple dragon with yellow spots. A purple, fire-breathing dragon, who didn’t look where he was going and nearly stepped on Sylvester, but it didn’t matter who was right and who was wrong; all that mattered was who was big and who was little, so Sylvester ended up being kicked way, way up in the sky.

  “Up,” Christopher recited in a dreamy singsong. “Nake, up.”

  “Yes,” said Feena. “And at first, Sylvester didn’t like it up there at all. But soon he made friends with a little fat star that got caught on one of his curls. And then he found out the stars had a shining school and that he could take lessons there. Well, pretty soon, what do you think happened?”

  But Christopher didn’t speculate. He had fallen asleep, his head collapsed against the giant rabbit, one arm laid carelessly across Feena’s shoulder. Slowly, holding her breath, Feena inched her way out from under him until she was standing, fumbling in the shadows for the key. It was only then she realized she’d forgotten to use the new diapers, hoped he was tired enough to sleep until she could sneak out in the morning after her mother left for work.

  If he didn’t sleep through, if he woke in the middle of the night, scared and alone, she would hear him. She’d sleep without an air conditioner, leave her window open. And nothing, nothing would keep her from going to him if he needed her. She didn’t dare kiss him for fear she’d wake him, but she stood still in the dark, watching the play of the light on his features. “Good night, Christy,” she whispered before she shut the door. “Sleep tight.”

  Lenore was sitting in the cool dark. Only the TV was lit, only the TV talked. Feena had nearly reached her bedroom when her mother half turned from the set. “Have a good time?” she asked.

  “It was okay.” Relax. Not too hot and not too cold.

  “New friend?”

  “Sort of.” Did they interrupt movies for kidnappings? Would her mother have listened, or would she have used the extra minutes to get a snack, another drink? “What’re you watching?”

  “Oh, it’s just an old thing I’ve seen a billion times.” Lenore stood up, turned her back on the television. “I’m glad you had a good time, honey. If you’re hungry, I got Chinese.”

  Feena’s insides were turning over like a stalled engine, but she was even more worried than she was hungry. “Anything special on TV? Any news?”

  “News!” Lenore gave one of her disparaging snort-laughs, picked up her glass, and followed Feena into the kitchen. “I get enough tragedy at work, baby. I don’t need extra doses on CNN.”

  Good. So far, so good. “Have you eaten, Mom?” Quickly, before she sits down, before she starts pumping. “‘Cause if you have, I think I’ll just take some fried rice in my room, okay? I’ve got a ton of work.”

  Her mother actually looked disappointed, like someone throwing a surprise party nobody wanted. Her smile, under those mascara-ringed eyes, was forced, too quick. “Sure,” she said, sitting heavily at the tiny table by the fridge. “Sure, go ahead. I’ll just freshen this up.” She lifted a vodka bottle over the forest of white cartons, some closed, some with their flaps wide, smeared with brown sauce. “Try the pork.” She nodded toward the biggest carton. “It’s got pineapple mixed in.”

  “You bought a lot.” Feena studied the food, the two places set at the table, each with one of the flamingo glasses Lenore had bought as a joke the day they moved in. The glasses had a plastic reservoir around the outside, so when you held them up to drink, a flurry of pink birds and metal confetti rushed toward your mouth.

  Lenore, too, glanced at the table, its abundant disarray. “Yeah, well…” She sounded almost embarrassed. “I didn’t know you weren’t coming home.”

  Feena dumped pork and fried rice onto a plate, picked up some silverware, and headed to her room. “Sorry, Mom,” she said, although it didn’t make her feel a whole lot better. They usually ate on paper plates by the light of her mother’s shows. “It’s just, you know. It’s a new school. There’s lots of stuff to catch up on.”

  “Yeah, well…,” Lenore repeated, not looking at Feena, not focused on much of anything so far as Feena could tell.

  Minutes later, though, when she’d closed her door, opened the window, and moved the tiny pots of African violets lined up along her air conditioner—when she’d assured herself that she could see the golf booth from both a standing and a sitting position, that she could hear Christopher if he cried out—Feena’s mood lifted.

  The rich, heady smell of the pork, so different from the barbecued ribs she and Lenore had eaten at the fast-food stops on their endless drive south, made her feel adventurous. The soy sauce and the bits of pineapple lent a tingly sweetness to every bite. Such sweetness that as she ate, there were times, for a few seconds at least, when she forgot her life had changed, that only yards away, Christopher was waiting.

  seven

  Feena slept fitfully, only a hint of air coming through her window, the sticky plate on the floor beside her bed. In her dreams, Christy cried out again and again. Over and over she woke, peering anxiously into the night, hearing nothing but the whir of her mother’s air conditioner, the faint hum from the late-night trucks that still used the highway, and the electronic crackle of the sputtering S just outside the golf booth.

  She’d set her alarm to go off a half-hour before her mother woke for work. But she was up a full hour and a half before that, scanning the fuzzy half dawn, then creeping into the kitchen. She was determined to do better this time, to remember things like a can opener and spoons and knives. She scribbled another note, this one a bit more detailed, aimed at warding off more mother-daughter di
nners.

  Had to leave early—BIG TEST! Might be late again. Don’t make dinner. Light. Keep it light. xox, Feen.

  Once outside, she crept to the booth, bent her head under a flap, and looked inside. Christopher lay just where she’d left him, except that the rabbit had somehow been jettisoned and was sprawled, nose down, at his feet. She took the key from its hiding place under the roof and opened the door as quietly as she could.

  She had hoped to watch him sleep, just for a few minutes. But it was no good; the second she moved inside, he turned toward the door, kicked his still-sneakered feet (how could she have forgotten to take off his shoes?), and sat up, rubbing his eyes with his fists.

  Instinctively, Feena knew he needed to see her face first, not the clubs or the counter or the strange place where he’d fallen asleep. Stooping down, she grabbed his hands, pulled them apart, and stared, smiling, into his half-closed eyes. “Good morning, Mister Sleepyhead,” she told him.

  The smile she got back, a dazzled, devoted grin, was worth the whole sleepless night. His first words, though, were a problem. “Mu,” he said. “Mu mik.”

  “You drank all the milk last night,” she said. “But don’t worry”—rolling him down, shimmying his jeans off, reaching for the box of diapers—“we’re going out to eat. Just you and me. Okay?”

  “‘Kay,” he agreed, letting himself be changed, wriggling only a little, staring around the narrow room, then like a swimmer stroking for shore, finding her face again. The diapers were hard to manage, the tapes kept unsticking, and Feena pulled them so tight that they nearly met at his tiny waist.

  “We’re going to play dress-up today,” she announced when she’d finished. She took the bunny jumper out of the CVS bag, slipped it on over his tee, and fastened the Velcro while he was still studying the lace border on the hem. “Isn’t it pretty?” she asked, guiding his hand so he could feel a soft velvet square in the patchwork. “And it goes perfectly with these.”