Waiting for Christopher

by Louise Hawes

  When they reached the entrance, she felt him stiffen in her arms. He raised his head, kept turning around as if he were trying to catch a scent. At the turnoff to the gravel path that ran up to the trailer, he bent from his waist like a jacknife, strained toward the ground. She put him down and let him walk the rest of the way.

  The relief was familiar, like something she’d known would happen all along. And the regret, too. As Christy spotted the blue doublewide, he tried to break free of her hand and run. “Ma,” he said, not looking at Feena—his eyes, his open-mouthed smile, his excited body, all turned toward the shabby trailer. “Want Ma.”

  She’d picked him up, feeling sick, wondering what to do next, when she heard the car behind her. It overtook them, and she saw the gold crest on its side. Even though the driver was in plain clothes, Feena knew a police car when she saw one. As it nosed up the gravel road past them, then into the trailer’s driveway, she tugged Christy into the laundromat, her heart pounding.

  The detective climbed the steps to the trailer, and Delores Pierson, cigarette in hand, opened the door. In the seconds before she let the policeman in and closed it behind them, Feena changed her mind a thousand times. First, she decided to wait, to stay and explain things to the baby’s mother, and to the officer, to give Christy up and turn herself in. Next, she was certain that would be a mistake, that the police might not let Christy live at home, that he’d end up in an orphanage or a foster home or wherever kids were sent when they had no place to go.

  But if her brain was divided, her heart knew what it wanted. The instant the door closed, as if it were the starting signal for a race, Feena tore off with Christy, streaking out of the park gates and running through the woods.

  She didn’t stop until they were nearly back at the boat. They were coming out of the woods when she heard voices in the turnoff, saw the two police cars pulled up almost to the clearing. She didn’t know what it was Christy was about to say, what he wanted to ask, but she clapped her hand over his mouth and, her footsteps sounding like padded drums, headed back the way they’d come.

  The playground would be too dangerous, and even the library seemed risky. (What if the librarian had told the police about the strange orphan girl with no identification?) Ryder’s, the scene of the first “kidnapping,” would certainly be crawling with police. Suddenly, she’d run out of safe places, and Raylene’s idea of getting away didn’t sound as silly as it had a few hours ago.

  There were two problems, of course. Feena couldn’t drive, and she didn’t have any idea where she would go if she could. She had spent her summer in the old Chevy with the gearshift in park, not exactly a geographic adventure.

  “A bus trip.” Wasn’t that what Raylene had said? Was it too late? Instinctively, she headed for the CVS, where Raylene was still at work. Yes, it was near the playground, but if they were careful, if she and Christy waited behind the store in the parking lot, they could catch Ray when she left.

  A man came out the back door of the CVS, just as they got close. A boy a few years older than Christy rode on his shoulders, one hand around the man’s neck, the other waving a small white prescription bag. The boy, flushed and giggling, wore a cardboard clown hat and kicked the man’s chest with his heels. “Faster! Faster!” he yelled.

  “Bwu,” Christy announced, waving excitedly at the boy’s hat. “Got bwu.“

  Feena scanned the playground and parking lot for police cars and slowed her pace. “Yes,” she acknowledged, kneeling beside him, keeping one arm around his waist. The cone-shaped party hat, its foil trim glinting in the sun, was indeed blue.

  “Pay!” Christy whooped now, reaching toward the boy, whose horse father had crossed the parking lot and was galloping in the direction of the playground. “Want pay!”

  “No, Christy.” Just for a second, Feena glanced back toward the CVS, hoping, however unreasonably, that Raylene had read her mind and would suddenly materialize at the door. Unfortunately, a second was all Christy needed.

  He had broken her grasp before she knew it and was running joyfully, arms wide, toward the playground. “No!” she called, standing, racing after him. “Wait!”

  He didn’t. He careened after the boy and his father, crossing the parking lot, heading toward the sandbox where he’d played with Angel. But he never reached it. A man in uniform intercepted him, kneeling down to say something Feena couldn’t hear, then standing to take his hand.

  As if in slow motion, Feena saw Christy point in her direction, saw the policeman gather him into his arms and come toward her. And then, like a nightmare unfolding, she saw another figure behind them both. He was almost as tall as the swings—a giant of a man who stood just as he had last week, his hand shading his eyes. It was the same man she’d seen on the steps of the blue trailer. The yelling man.

  Trapped, Feena stayed where she was. Without Christy, she had no reason to run. “You lose something?” The officer smiled as he crossed the lot, then lowered Christy to the sidewalk. Squirming happily, the baby tugged at the policeman’s hand, pulling him toward Feena.

  Feena, doing what came naturally—what she would do even if it meant going to jail—held out her arms. Like a magnet slipping in place, Christy ran into them.

  “How old is she?” The officer had brown eyes, only a little deeper than his uniform.

  “What?”

  “Little Miss Cutie Pie.” He nodded at Christy, whose sweet face looked like a porcelain doll’s under the headband. “How old is she?”

  Feena willed the policeman to turn around, move on, get an urgent call on his beeper. “Three,” she told him, remembering the paper had said two.

  “Cute as a button.” The officer folded his arms, obviously in no hurry, and smiled down at Christy. “Cute as a little button.” Behind the policeman, the oversize man from the trailer had seen something that caught his attention and was moving toward them.

  “You baby-sitting?”

  “Yes.” Feena tightened her grip on Christy. Had the yelling man recognized them? Or was he only after the policeman? “I should get her home now.” She turned away, then back. “Thanks a lot.”

  “I thought maybe you two were sisters.” The policeman’s shoulders, his perfectly pressed shirt, hid only part of the big man, who was now waving at them, yelling something Feena couldn’t catch, didn’t want to. “You look like you could be. Anybody ever tell you that?”

  “No.” The man had nearly closed the distance between them. Despite his sequoialike bulk, he was moving fast, his shadow stretched out behind him in the dusty baseball diamond that bordered the parking lot. “Hey!” he shouted in a voice Feena remembered all too well. “Wait up!”

  “I really have to go,” she told the officer. “Thanks again.”

  “Hey! Hey, wait up!” This time the policeman heard, turned toward the playground, and as he did, Feena knew she had only one chance. She picked Christy up, moving as quickly as she could without running. That was one thing she’d learned from her mother’s TV shows: Don’t run. They know you’re guilty if you do. And they can always run faster.

  The two men were talking, Christy’s father looming over the policeman, when Feena reached the door to CVS. That was when she heard it. “Feena!” She turned wildly, like a cornered animal, and saw the battered car that had pulled up in the lot beside them. “Feena Harvey,” Mr. Milakowski shouted. He was wearing glasses, clutching the steering wheel with both hands, holding on to it as if it were a life raft. “You should get in. Time to go home.”

  Feena stayed where she was, stunned.

  “We need to hurry,” the old man told her. He had stopped his sedan opposite the yelling man and the policeman, blocking her from their view. “You must get in now.”

  But Feena stood frozen as the officer stepped around from behind the car and put his hand to the brim of his cap. He smiled at Mr. Milakowski. “You know this young lady, sir?”

  Peter Milakowski smiled back, nodding, as Feena remained paralyzed. “This is my grand
daughter,” he told the policeman. He took one hand off the wheel to open the passenger door for Christy. As he did, the big man loped over to the car, too.

  “Sorry, we must go now.” Mr. Milakowski was rolling up his window while Feena pushed Christy onto the front seat, got in herself, and closed the door. “We are already very much late.”

  With the yelling man beside him, the policeman spread the fingers of one hand wide and rapped smartly on the window with the other. He looked suddenly stern, impatient. Mr. Milakowski glanced at Feena, put a finger to his lips, then rolled the window down again.

  As the officer leaned into the opening, one arm across the bottom of the window, the yelling man tapped his shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said. His respectful tone surprised Feena, but she saw the way he looked over the policeman’s shoulder, the way his eyes swept the inside of the car. “Excuse me.”

  “I told you, I’ll be with you in a minute, sir.” The policeman turned around and stared at the yelling man. “All right, sir?” He cut the last word short, nearly spitting it out. Then he turned back, leaned through the window again. “Better get a seat belt for Cutie Pie,” he told Mr. Milakowski. “That’s no safe way to ride, okay?”

  “Dwive,” Christy begged, reaching across Mr. Milakowski for the steering wheel. “Want dwive.”

  “Sure, officer. Sure.” The old man nodded, patting Christy’s hands, smiling like a toothpaste ad. “I get a belt.” He rolled up the window once more, then pulled out of the parking lot.

  When Feena looked through the rear window, she saw the big man talking animatedly to the policeman; the officer, his arms folded, his head bent, seemed to be communing with the asphalt. The traffic light turned green, and Mr. Milakowski made a left onto the highway, driving, Feena noticed, considerably faster than the speed limit.

  seventeen

  Police,” Mr. Milakowski told her as they drove. “They come around today, asking questions. I tell them I don’t see anything.”

  “But how?…”

  “I don’t tell I find a plastic spoon and an old bottle of baby food where golf clubs should be,” he continued, squinting at the road. “I don’t say I remember you ask about hitting. But I put two and three together, see?”

  Feena nodded, amazed.

  “I come to the drugstore for my heart pills, then I see you with this baby. And I see police.”

  “Thank you.” There was nothing else to say. Nothing more or less. Mr. Milakowski’s car was a mess inside. The leather seats were prickly with rips; there were wads of tissues and empty paper cups on the floor. But Feena had never been so glad to be anywhere in her life. “Thank you.”

  “In Poland,” the old man told her, “the police come to school one day. They take Miss Marna. I never see her again.”

  They rode in silence for a few blocks, the blood red of poinciana trees flying by along the street, the corded banyans in between like hoary giants. “I don’t ask questions,” Mr. Milakowski said at last. “I don’t tell you what to do.”

  Feena looked at the old man’s profile, the nose that had surrendered to gravity, the withered skin. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I wish I did.”

  “Maybe nobody knows,” he told her. “Maybe they do the best they can. What their heart says, yes?” He didn’t turn to look at her, but his voice softened. “I drive you home now.”

  Feena felt the fuzzy top of Christopher’s head under her chin and remembered the way he’d run toward the trailer, tipsy with happiness. The way he’d made the word Ma sound like a joke, a song, a present. It wasn’t her heart that should make the choice; she knew that now. Quickly, before she could take it back, she asked, “Could we take Christy home first?”

  She gave Mr. Milakowski directions to Bide A Bit, then hugged the baby closer, knowing—in the same half-conscious way you sometimes know you’re happy—that she was about to lose something she could never get back.

  Perhaps that was why she was able, afterward, to remember the last mile of the drive so well, to recall exactly how Christy felt and looked in her arms—how his damp hair clung together in fine springy curls, how his neck tasted of salt, how his fingernails were so small and dirty she could hardly bear it.

  The trailer’s driveway was empty when they pulled up. The police car had gone, and the yelling man was probably still combing the parking lot. Surely, he’d been after the patrolman, not Feena or a little girl in a patchwork dress. Cautiously, she took Christy’s hand and opened the car door. Mr. Milakowski nodded, so she’d know he would wait for her. He was only a skinny old man, but that nod made her feel suddenly safer, surer about what she had to do.

  She scanned the gravel road, then let the baby drag her up the concrete steps. This time when Delores Pierson opened the door, there was no cigarette in her hand. For a fraction of a second, she smiled at Feena, but then she spotted Christy. The headband and the dress didn’t make any difference at all. She surrounded him, swallowed him in those vast arms. “Lord!” she said, her eyes closed while Christopher kicked and laughed in her grasp. “Oh, dear lord in Heaven!

  “Look at you!” She set him on her hip, put her chunky index finger on his nose. “What kind of getup is that, anyway?”

  “Ma,” Christy chortled. “Ma.”

  “Sweet Jesus, where are my manners?” Delores asked Feena, still cradling Christy. “Come on in!” She stood aside for Feena without letting him go. “If I was any happier, I’d be dead!” She patted Christy’s hair, his arms, his legs. “I can’t believe it; I just can’t believe it. Where’d you find my baby?”

  For one giddy minute, it seemed possible. Feena could lie, couldn’t she? She could say she’d stumbled on the baby somewhere, the playground or the street. She would have remembered Delores was missing a child, would have brought him here. It was all perfectly logical, perfectly simple. She could drive home with Mr. Milakowski, feeling like a good citizen. Clean hands. A fresh start.

  But something brave and foolish welled up in her, something borrowed from Raylene, maybe. Or Janie Woods. “I didn’t find him,” she told Christopher’s mother. “I took him.”

  “What?” Delores said it lightly, humorously, as if Feena were telling a joke.

  “I took him,” Feena repeated. She peered over Christy’s head into the littered living room. “Can I still come in?”

  Delores’s face changed, hardened, but she nodded toward the inside of the trailer, and Feena stepped past her into the dark room. The whir of an air conditioner and the sound of a TV grew louder as Feena wound her way around end tables and ottomans, a porcelain cat with gold eyes, a teacart with chrome wheels, and, of course, the player piano. Feena had never seen so many things crammed into such a small space. It looked as if Christy’s mother was storing up for the world’s biggest garage sale.

  “What do you mean, you took my kid?” Delores, waving Feena toward the couch, perched on a tapestried love seat, Christy on her lap. He settled into his mother’s bulk, a little sultan on cushions. He seemed dazed but happy, like someone who’d just given a huge party and was waiting for company to leave.

  For the second time, then, Feena told the whole story. How she’d watched the two of them at Ryder’s. How she’d walked off with Christy when his mother had driven away. How she’d played with him, read to him, loved him. How she’d only meant to help. How she could still help—she would baby-sit, take Christy to the library, the playground, give his mother a break anytime she needed it.

  “Just what are you after?” Delores narrowed her eyes, held Christy tighter. “You aim to tell the caseworker about this?”

  “Of course not.” Feena wished the TV weren’t so loud; it was hard to hear herself over the noise. “Will you tell the police?” She glanced above Delores’s head to a cluster of gilt frames on the wall. Each one held a print of a child ballerina with oversize doll’s eyes. Each dancer was in a different pose. “I mean, about what I did?”

  “I get it.” Delores relaxed, her face softened. “Sure, sur
e. I won’t go to the cops if you don’t go running to DYFS. Deal?”

  Feena relaxed, too, lowered her gaze again to Delores’s face. She saw a look there, a hunger that gave her leverage. “There’s just one more thing,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I meant what I said about helping.” Feena hoped Delores couldn’t see how much she needed this. “I’d really like to see Christy again.”

  At the sound of his name, Christy rallied from his contented stupor. He wriggled in his mother’s arms. “Feen,” he said, stretching his precious, dirty hands toward her. “Want Feen.”

  “Well, I don’t need nobody watching over my shoulder every minute.” Delores put the baby down, then grinned at her visitor. “But I sure wouldn’t mind bein’ able to go shopping sometime. That would be real nice. If you’re sure you’re not going to DYFS?”

  Feena nodded. And if she had any doubts about bringing Christy home, they were erased as Christy’s mother chattered on. She said she would tell the police she’d found him at a neighbor’s; that was easy. She would get her old man to lighten up, too. Now that the baby was back, things would be normal again. And of course Feena could visit. So long as she didn’t go to DYFS or the cops, she could come by every week. Regular as clockwork. Starting first thing on Saturday. “That’ll be real nice,” Delores told Feena. “Give me time to get my hair done, stuff like that. Like being rich and having a live-in. You know?”

  And no, she promised, she would never hurt Christy again. Of course she wouldn’t. It was just stress, but things were different now. Her old man was back on the day shift, so he wouldn’t be lying around with nothing to do but complain. Sure, she would quit smoking; she had been intending to all along. The time hadn’t been right, that’s all. But now it was. Now everything would be better. Everything would be fine.

  And as Christy scrambled into her lap, Feena allowed herself to picture it all coming true. Christy would have more people who loved him, more people who cared. It made perfect sense. Feena wouldn’t have to give him up, she could still be part of his life. She could even take him home, show him off to her mother. He would love those flamingo glasses!