Waiting for Christopher

by Louise Hawes

  “Want,” Christy said, yearning toward the pail, wiggling his fingers like an acquisitive spider. “Want pay.”

  Feena stared at the pail, which had a circus seal painted on it. Her hand tightened on Christy’s, but he only tried more furiously to escape. In her mind, Feena saw another pail, a metal one, with the same seal balancing a ball on its nose. And another baby, with less hair than Christy had. A baby who looked at her with eyes lit from behind, a sun in each, shining just for her.

  She glanced up toward the benches, noticed that a second woman was sitting next to Dale, talking. In the instant she turned back to the sandbox, before her brain recognized what was wrong, her body knew. Suddenly, she couldn’t get enough air and her pulse was beating in her ears. When she looked up again, she understood why. The woman beside Dale, the woman smiling and smoking, was Christopher’s mother.

  Without explanation, before he could see the woman, Feena picked the baby up, turned, and raced toward the woods. She remembered the other baby, the one she’d given the pail to. She remembered how he’d vanished, just like that.

  She ran out of breath quickly, stumbling along the dirt path that led through the woods. But it wasn’t until the trees had closed around them, until the sun winked on and off behind the branches overhead, that she slowed down. It was the day she’d found the three pinecones. That was the day the baby had disappeared. She could still hear the grown-up voices, telling her how babies die in their cribs, how they stop breathing and no one knows why.

  It was too late to tell whether Christopher’s mother and Dale had watched them leave. All she could do was stand, sweating, and try to catch the sound of footsteps over her sharp, painful panting.

  Feena held him tight, this new baby. Even when she was sure they weren’t being followed, she started running again. Leaving behind all those quiet, reasonable voices. The ones who told her babies disappear and there’s nothing you can do.

  Christy? She was shaking when she collapsed onto the booth. The shadowy carcass of the restaurant seemed damper, more threatening than it ever had. She noticed a crumpled soda can on the steeply angled table. Was this a hangout? Did people come here all the time? Her arms and legs were stiff, as if her veins had filled with water—heavy, sloshing. Where’s Christy?

  “Don’t worry,” she told him, though he didn’t seem to be in the least upset. Now that she’d set him down, in fact, Christopher brightened. He reached across her for a book, opening it onto her lap. He moved his hands over the painted keys of the piano in the picture. “Ma.”

  Feena couldn’t bear the thought of Christy’s mother, of her arms, her voice, her small, pretty features lost in the center of that wide face. “No,” she said, too sternly. “Not now.” She pushed the book away, and his eyes clouded. “Ma,” he repeated. “Weed Ma.”

  “I don’t want to read,” she said, harsh and breathless as if she’d walked for miles. That was when she saw the shine gathering on the lower lids of his eyes, like rainwater spilling over, and she knew she wasn’t the only one who was tired, who wanted to stop running. “How about we get changed,” she said in a quieter, even voice. “And I’ll tell you a story instead?” She eased him into a lying position, got the package of diapers from her backpack. “A special story with lots and lots of blue things in it?”

  “Bwu,” said Christopher, somewhat mollified.

  “Uh-huh. Blue water and blue starfish and a great big blue octopus.”

  “Bwu.” Christopher picked up the skirt of Flopsy Jo’s jumper, studying it where he lay, looking, she realized, for the blue square she’d shown him that morning. She changed his diaper, again wrestling with the tapes that seemed to have been put in the wrong places, then pulled his rabbit from the pack and scooped him into her lap.

  “Now, this octopus,” she went on, snuggling down with him and Lady Macbeth along the length of the booth, “was friends with a beautiful mermaid. Who, by the way,” she added, “had a splendid blue tail.

  “Each morning, the two of them would go jogging along the ocean floor. The mermaid wore a Nike sweatshirt, and the octopus had sneakers on all nine of his feet.”

  “Bwu?” inquired Christopher. He ignored the rabbit, found his thumb instead, something she hadn’t seen him do before. At the same time, he reached for a strand of her hair, using it like the soft ribbon edge of a blanket, rubbing it against his nose, staring at her through his half-closed eyes.

  “Of course,” Feena told him. “Blue sneakers with blue laces and blue bells that rang whenever the octopus jogged.” He continued staring, though he lost focus, lids drooping until his eyes were nothing but moist slivers of azure. “They ran for miles, those two, over mountains of sand and squashy fields of seaweed.”

  Lying beside him, Feena knew she couldn’t give him up, couldn’t risk taking him to the police. What if they didn’t believe her? She listened to his even breathing and felt an old tenderness, a secret, buried joy. She remembered that other baby, remembered dropping into his crib, batting his mobile and setting the puffy clowns spinning, whirling above their heads. As her own eyes closed, she remembered, too, throaty baby laughs, like singing bubbles, like the language of birds you could almost understand.

  The voice was soft and moany, but Feena couldn’t make out the words. Shaking off sleep, she heard it even after she’d opened her eyes. There was someone singing, someone coming toward them, getting closer and closer. By the time she’d sat up, put a finger over Christy’s mouth, it was too late. They were face-to-face.

  Raylene Watson was alone, unusual enough in itself. But she was singing, too. An almost sweet song that came to a sudden end when she saw Feena and the baby. She threw her head back, then grew visibly stiffer, taller. She hid something she’d been carrying behind her back, and without disguising her disappointment, fixed Feena with her cinnamon stare. “What?” she asked. “You decide to ditch school and home both?”

  Christy wriggled down from the booth, and Lady Macbeth tumbled to the ground. He didn’t stop to pick her up, but rushed, like the worst kind of traitor, straight to Raylene. Feena was suddenly aware of shame, physical and heavy, swamping her. She was ashamed her lips were chapped, while Raylene’s shone like mother-of-pearl. Ashamed the baby’s ponytails were again hopelessly cockeyed, one nearly slipped from its band. “No,” she began to ad-lib. “No, I didn’t ditch anything.” Ashamed that she’d been asleep, that she felt tears still in her eyes, she said, “I just need to watch my … little sister, that’s all.”

  “Here?” Raylene didn’t take her hands from behind her back, merely scanned the dusty ruin with her eyes. “If you’re waiting for your order, you got a long wait.” Her tone was back to the cool crustiness she used in the halls at school. “Cutler’s Family Style’s been closed five years.”

  Christy held his arms out, begging to be picked up, and Raylene had a choice to make. Slowly, she bent down, laid a paperback book on the ground beside her, then folded her arms around him. “Hi, Toffee,” she said, her voice soft again. “How’s my bit of sugar?”

  “It’s Christy,” Feena told her, reaching out, straightening the droopiest ponytail. “Her name’s Christy.”

  “Christy.” Raylene said it over slowly, as if she were feeling the shape of it in her mouth. “Christy,” she asked him then, “you mind if I call you Toffee?”

  Feena, who had learned her lesson, glanced only briefly at the book Raylene left behind on the ground. She lifted her backpack off the other side of the booth, making room for the two of them across from her. “Your mom sick?” Raylene asked, depositing Christopher, then walking to the old oven and opening its lopsided door. As if she owned the place, she reached in and took out a can of orange soda, the same brand Feena had seen on the table. “She can’t take care of Toffee herself?”

  Feena nodded, grabbing the lie Raylene offered. “Just a cold,” she said. “But she doesn’t want the baby to get it.”

  “Uh-huh.” Raylene took a long sip, lowering the can when Christy beg
ged for some, too. “You plan on spending the night here, or what?”

  Raylene listened, with only a hint of a smile, while Feena concocted a story about her mother being too sick to watch the baby but not too sick to be left alone. About how she was sure things would be better by tonight and so they’d go home any minute. It didn’t make much sense, but it didn’t need to, because why should Raylene care, anyway? Why should she be hanging around them the way she was?

  Why, Feena wondered as the sun’s buttery haze turned pink and long fingers of shadow spread across the grass, didn’t Miss High and Mighty just go away and leave them alone?

  But she didn’t. She chattered and fussed and played with Christy. She told him about the people who worked at CVS. About the crazy customers, like the woman who came in every day to buy a small jar of baby food for her toothless tabby. When Raylene had asked her why she didn’t get seven or eight jars at once, the woman told her she couldn’t be sure what kind of food her cat would feel like the next day.

  “Would you believe it, Toffee?” Raylene tickled Christopher, rolling him over on the booth. “If I had myself a talking cat like that, it better make up its fuzzy mind, and fast. Not be giving me orders up and down, right?” Then she tickled some more, until the baby giggled, helpless and thrilled, pedaling the air like a racer.

  Feena was, she had to acknowledge it, more than a little jealous. Of how Raylene and Christy played, as if they’d known each other forever. Of how the baby followed Raylene’s every move, seemed to watch her with the same intensity, the same awe Feena had thought he reserved just for her.

  As the minutes passed, she was not only jealous, she was worried. The sun had sunk behind the woods, and her mother, long home, would be wondering about the second note, about her daughter’s sudden spurt of popularity.

  Part of Feena—the part that read romantic novels and loved adventure—watched her dilemma from above, saw herself as a tragic heroine with a secret no one could share. But another part—the part of her that remembered Lenore’s face, the sudden brightness when she’d offered Feena the Chinese food last night—wished she could just go home and go to bed.

  “Raylene?” She turned to the other girl now, using the same words, the same voice she had yesterday—had it only been one day?—on the playground with Dale. “Do you think you could do me a favor?”

  Raylene looked at her, expressionless again. She seemed to save that vacant stare just for Feena. But Feena was too tired to care. “Do you think you could watch my sister while I run home and check on my mom?”

  “You live close?”

  Careful. “Close enough.”

  “Okay, I guess so.” Raylene appeared to have a moment’s doubt. She checked Christy, who, unfazed by Feena’s standing and gathering up her backpack, remained bent over his new books, piling and un-piling them according to some secret baby formula. “But I got a life, you know. Make it quick.”

  “Sure.” Feena shrugged into her backpack, dashed toward the highway. She’d stepped over Raylene’s abandoned book and the pieces of broken sign before she turned and went back. She stroked Christy’s hair, kissed his forehead. “I’ll see you in a little while,” she promised. “Thanks, Raylene.”

  “Yeah. No problem.” Feena had cleared the sign again before Raylene yelled after her, “Just get your butt back. Hear?”

  nine

  The sharp smell hit Feena as soon as she walked inside. The bathroom door was open, and her mother stood in front of the mirror over the sink. Wielding a dryer, her mouth pursed, Lenore studied herself, turning slightly as strands of brown hair blew out from her head at crazy angles. She clearly hadn’t heard Feena come in.

  Feena glanced over her shoulder into the darkened living room. The Sony was on, its colorful glass eye winking away, unwatched. This, in itself, was extraordinary, but what Feena saw when she turned back to the bathroom was horrifying. Spreading from the part in her mother’s hair, like an alien mutation spawned in the dryer’s heat, was a broad grape-colored stripe. Feena noticed the forest of plastic bottles on the top of the toilet, the box with a photo of a laughing woman whose hair was so bouncy it obviously lit up her life. “Mom?” She said it louder the second time: “Mom!”

  The guilty surprise, the trapped expression on her mother’s face when she looked up, made Feena want to turn away. Made her wish she could forget this moment forever, so they could go back to normal. When Lenore finally turned off the dryer, they stared at each other, wordless.

  Feena recovered first. “Is this a cry for help?” she asked, nodding toward the box of hair coloring. Her voice sarcastic, her arms folded, she felt the panicky thrill of changing roles, of becoming Lenore’s exasperated parent.

  The broad smile that took the place of that other look, that trapped look, was phony through and through. “Oh, hi, Feen.” Lenore, avoiding Feena’s eyes, turned back to the mirror, talked to her daughter’s reflection instead of the real girl behind her. “I … well, I just thought I’d try a new me. Got tired of the old one.” Another forced grin, her eyes sliding from Feena’s mirror twin to her own. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think?” What was next? Was her mother going to get a belly ring? A barbed-wire tattoo, like the one on the arm of the boy who sat in front of Feena in geometry? “I think you’re going to get quite a reaction at the DMV tomorrow.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Feena remembered her mother complaining about what “stuffed shirts” the people in her office were. She couldn’t imagine what they’d think of Lenore’s fluorescent henna job.

  “Maybe they need a little shaking up, huh?” Her mother wasn’t smiling now, or sheepish, just hopeful.

  So hopeful that, even though she wasn’t at all sure why, it made Feena want to cry. “Maybe,” she agreed, too late.

  “Eaten yet?” Lenore brushed past her, headed for the coat closet jammed into the narrow space between the bathroom and the front door. “We could go out.” She started rummaging through the sweaters and coats that dangled above an unorganized heap of sneakers, boots, tennis rackets, and a carton of ancient Christmas decorations.

  “I can’t.” Feena hadn’t meant it to sound so sharp, so hard. “I’ve got to get back to my friend’s house,” she said more gently now. “But I could bring some takeout home with me later if you want.”

  Her mother backed out of the closet. “No,” she said, passing Feena again, finding the couch and the remote. “I guess not.” She bent over the control, her bright new hair falling across her face. “Don’t bother.”

  But now, suddenly, Feena wanted to bother. “It wouldn’t be any trouble,” she said. “Really.”

  The Sony blinked, and its screen filled with a bowl of pasta and a bottle of spaghetti sauce. Feena stood, caught for a second, as the sauce serenaded the pasta with a booming operatic aria and the spaghetti answered it in a trilling soprano. She tried to come up with something else to say, but all she could think about was Christy and Raylene, waiting. She was nearly to the door when Lenore, without turning around, said, almost to herself, “Nothing’s changed at all.”

  “Huh?” Feena thought maybe her mother was talking to the television.

  “Not a goddamn thing is any different,” Lenore repeated, still facing the screen. “We pack up our worldly goods, drive a lousy twelve hundred miles, and life still sucks.”

  “What do you mean?” Feena walked back toward the couch, but not all the way. “Everything’s different. We’ve got a new house. You’ve got a new job.” She took another step forward. “I’ve got a new school.”

  Her mother pressed the remote, and the spaghetti and sauce disappeared, replaced by nature footage of a huge bird, its wings spread wide, chasing another bird off the screen. “For two years,” an announcer’s voice said, “this albatross has defended its decoy love against all comers. Convinced the plastic replica is its mate, the befuddled bird has remained loyal for—” The remote clicked again, and a gospel group was belting out a chorus
, “Never again, never again, my Lord. No, never again. Never…”

  “Yeah,” Lenore said, hardly audible over the music. “I guess things are better for you.” She turned to Feena, still clutching the remote. “Are they, Feen? Are they better for you?”

  Better! Was changing everything, shuffling it up, and letting it fall anywhere, like a deck of cards, her mother’s idea of making life better? For a nanosecond, Feena considered sitting on the couch beside Lenore, telling her in no uncertain terms just how unbetter things were. “Uh-huh.” She nodded, thinking of Raylene, picturing the hint of a frown that meant Her Highness was not pleased. “Things are fine, Mom.”

  Lenore waited, wearing that eager, pork-with-pineapple expression of hers. She wanted more, Feena knew. She needed to hear how leaving the apartment in Connecticut—saying goodbye to Feena’s only serious friend, making it nearly impossible for her father to find them if he ever decided to, driving away from the small grave, where no one cut the grass—how all this was a great move. It was as if she had taken everything away so they had nothing left to lose. As if she actually thought it was all for the best.

  “I really have to go, Mom.” Feena walked again to the door, spoke without looking back. “We’ll talk later, okay?” But when she’d shut the door and was running back toward the restaurant, she could still see that silly expectancy, that dumb hope on her mother’s face.

  Raylene and the baby didn’t seem to have missed her at all. They were sitting on a blanket beside a patch of spindly-legged echinacea that shot up through the weeds and dense matted grass. Lady Macbeth lay on her side behind them, one bright eye catching the last of the twilight. Both their heads were bent over Raylene’s paperback; even Christopher didn’t look up until Feena’s sneaks stopped at the edge of the blanket. Where on earth had Raylene gotten a blanket, anyway?

  “And that,” Raylene told Christopher, not even glancing at Feena, “is the end of the story.” She closed the book and put it to one side. Feena tried to read the title, but all she could see in the quick casual glance she gave it was the picture on the cover. The silhouette of a house on fire. Was it Thornfield Hall?