Waiting for Christopher

by Louise Hawes

  Feena nodded.

  “Let’s get some soda first, okay?” The smile was a grin now.

  So they changed direction, walked to the deli on the corner, then back across the soccer field to their secret trail through the woods. The afternoon was Florida at its best, a sort of lazy heat with breezes in the shade. At the sight of the clearing where the boat waited, Feena felt happier than she’d been in days.

  “It’s almost as if it was all meant to happen,” she said, snug in the familiar galley, unpacking the soda and the Little Debbies they’d bought. She handed Ray one of the gooey cakes, a treat they would never have allowed Christy to eat. “Sugar rots your teeth,” Raylene had declared, and that was that.

  “What do you mean?” Raylene tore open the wrapper on her cake. She, too, looked happier, more relaxed than she had all week. She sat in her old place on one side of the galley table, her long legs bridging the gap between them, her sandaled feet crossed on the bench by Feena.

  “I mean, my mom getting this job in Florida. The Pizza Hut, Ryder’s—everything.”

  “So?”

  “So it was the only way we’d end up taking care of him, the two of us.” Feena opened her own cake, took a bite, thought. “Like, when you look back at things you hated? Sometimes they make a sort of sense.”

  “And sometimes they don’t.” Raylene took a sip of her trademark orange soda, then sat frowning, thoughtful. “You know what I named my second sister?”

  “What?”

  “The one we’d already named, she was Dinah, after my grandmother. But I picked the other name all by myself.” She grinned, remembering. “First, I thought about calling her Barbie, on account of the doll on that lamp.” Raylene balled up her Little Debbie wrapper. “Or Patrice,” she said, kneading the ball of paper between her palms. “I always liked that name.

  “But then I remembered how long my mom and I had been waiting. How we’d scraped and painted and planned. So I just wrote Hope instead of all the fancy things I’d thought about. Hope. Isn’t that some name for a dead baby?”

  “I think it’s beautiful. And I’m so sorry, Ray.”

  “It happened a long time ago.”

  “No.” Feena smoothed the table, studied the whorls in the rough wood as if they were hieroglyphs. “I mean, I’m sorry about Christy.” She looked up at Raylene now. “Here you took care of him and me. You cut school and ditched work. You broke the law right along with us, and never complained once.”

  “Look, that isn’t—”

  “And how did I repay you? I went and took Christy home without even telling you. I—”

  “Will you be quiet?” Raylene threw her Little Debbie ball across the galley, missing the plastic bag they’d hung on a peg. “There’s something I didn’t tell you, too. Something I thought you figured out, on account of you’re so smart.”

  “What?”

  “Just that I don’t do stuff unless I want to, that’s all. I like hanging with you. See?”

  Yes. Feena did see. In a shy rush of joy, a moment in which she hardly dared look at the other girl, Feena realized what she should have known all along. What she should have sensed under the jive and the teasing, the fast talk and the sweet walk. Raylene was her friend.

  nineteen

  By Friday, Feena’s and Raylene’s spirits had brightened considerably. Raylene even suggested they go shopping after school. “I figure we’ll get Toffee some new books,” she said. “I read that piano story so many times, I learned how to play!” She ran her supple fingers up and down the keyboard of an air piano.

  “And let’s buy some overalls, too,” Feena rhapsodized. “Wouldn’t he look adorable in them?”

  “Uh-huh.” Raylene nodded. “It’s about time he found out he’s a boy.”

  So they stopped by the Pizza Hut long enough for Feena to sweet-talk Lenore out of her credit card, then took the bus to what passed for a mall in Washanee—a department store, a shoe store, two outlets, and a Pasta Palace. It was almost like playing house, looking at the rows of baby outfits on little plastic hangers, debating colors, arguing over prices.

  “I already spent last week’s paycheck,” Raylene scolded when Feena dragged her into Step Ahead. “I’m not about to blow this week’s on cowboy boots the size of my thumb.”

  “But look how cute.” Feena picked one of the tiny boots up, turned it so Raylene could see the cactus and the eagle stitched across the toe. “He loves blue.”

  They settled on sneakers instead. Blue, of course. They found shorts and overalls and three shirts—one Raylene liked, one Feena chose, and one that had a polar bear on the front. They bought books, and building blocks, and a set of sand toys, complete with a pail, shovel, and rake.

  Feena was eyeing a bright yellow backhoe and a dollhouse family when Raylene called a halt. “Number one,” she said, “who’s going to carry all this stuff; and number two, who’s going to play with it?”

  When Feena continued to cradle the dollhouse mother, smoothing its skirt and hair, Raylene took it gently out of her hands. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go home and play with our toys.”

  “Okay.” Feena brightened, then followed her friend out of the store. “Mom will get a kick out of seeing all this stuff.”

  “I didn’t mean that home,” Raylene told her.

  “Huh?”

  “You know how we always told your mama you were spending the night at my house?”

  Feena nodded, filling with hope.

  “Well, how about you do it for real this time?” Raylene sounded almost shy. “If you want to, I mean.”

  Feena liked Raylene’s mother, liked her throaty laugh, and the way she exclaimed over the things they’d bought. Liked the way she put a candle by each of their beds that night. Raylene’s was green, and Feena’s was gold. They made a little ceremony out of lighting them, then talked until both of them were dizzy with exhaustion.

  Most of all, though, Feena liked the cheese grits Mrs. Watson cooked Saturday morning. The lush smell of it, the eddy-fingers of butter coasting across the thick ooze, were exotic, new to her. When she remembered, Lenore left bagels or English muffins in the refrigerator for breakfast. And she usually had Feena put them in the toaster, since half the time she’d end up burning them when she did it herself. “If you wanted Mother Goose,” she used to say defensively, “you grew up in the wrong house.”

  After breakfast, Feena and Raylene spent the rest of the morning asking each other what time it was. Until ten o’clock. “Anybody with kids,” Raylene said at last, “has got to be up by now.” They decided, finally, to bring only half of what they’d bought with them this first trip. They didn’t want to spoil Christy, and they could always bring more presents next week.

  They rushed all the way to Bide A Bit, then slowed down, like shy suitors, once they’d reached the entrance sign by the palms. They were juggling packages and arguing over who would give what to Christopher when Feena stopped a few yards short of the blue trailer. Stopped and stared. Something was wrong.

  The plastic geranium and pot were missing from the stoop, but that wasn’t what made her heart lurch when she looked at the doublewide. It was the windows. There were no blinds in them, and where she’d had to peek through slats, she could now look right into the empty living room. No furniture. No piano. No pictures on the wall.

  Raylene let her bags fall, ran up close to the front window. Feena watched her friend’s head drop, her fists clench. The moan she heard then was a little like Raylene’s songs, only harsher, deeper, like someone trying to catch her breath.

  Feena wondered if this was like drowning. As she stood there, listening to Raylene moan and watching the morning sun glint off the vacant windows, a hundred pictures shuffled through her brain. They were like snapshots, like the photos she’d looked at with her mother. But these pictures were not of her brother; they were of the other Christy, the little boy she’d taken back to this trailer just last week.

  Every minute, every day she
’d spent with him came back to her now. Came back in frozen memories, tiny colored scenes ready to paste in a scrapbook: Christy digging in the sandbox; Christy checking his bunny dress for blue; Christy grabbing her hand, begging for “mik”; Christy triumphantly resurrecting his favorite book from a pile; Christy, his face darkened, his arms raised to protect his head; Christy, eyes closing as a story put him to sleep.

  At first, Feena didn’t know who was crying. Raylene turned around, her stricken face a question mark, and Feena thought maybe it was Raylene who was sobbing so loudly. But then, when the older girl walked toward her, when Feena felt her own body shaking like a bad dance in Raylene’s arms, she knew it must be her. “They took him,” she heard herself say. “They took him away.”

  But Raylene, her jaw set, was already steering them next door. She rang the doorbell of the small white trailer that shared a driveway with the doublewide. “Excuse me,” she said when a slim girl with a wispy ponytail answered the door. “Can you tell me what happened to the family next door?”

  “Not for sure,” the girl told her. “Maybe Mom knows.” She turned around and screamed into the back of the house. “Mom! Someone to see you.” An older, thinner woman materialized behind the girl, and Raylene repeated her question.

  “I know the same as everyone else,” the woman told Raylene. “They were noisy and dirty and no good. I’m not exactly crying, now they’re gone.”

  “You know where they went?”

  “Nope.”

  Feena, who hadn’t spoken, who had stood stunned and useless beside her friend, remembered something Delores had said. She forced herself to ask about it now. “She mentioned this cousin in Atlanta.” Her hopes were rising like a foolish sun. It was either that or start crying again. “Do you think they went there?”

  “Maybe. They didn’t leave no forwarding address.” The woman half smiled. “Just a mess of beer cans.”

  “Did they all go together?” Delores had said she’d leave if she got a job. Feena called back the sweaty determined face, the dreamy young voice. “Did Christy’s father go with them?”

  The woman’s smile was more like a grimace, the face you make when a Band-Aid’s pulled off. “That wasn’t his father, honey. And I doubt that lug could travel past the nearest bar.” The woman looked hard at the two girls over her daughter’s shoulder. “What you want to know all this for, anyway? You social workers or something?”

  “No,” Raylene told her.

  “Was he crying?” Feena asked.

  “Who?”

  “Christy,” Feena said. “Christy, her little boy.”

  “I couldn’t say, honey.” The woman stared past them out the door. “Listen here, Lisa Ann. Didn’t you say you finished sweeping that walk? Looks to me, you finished before you started.”

  The thin girl moved away from the door. “Mo-om,” she said, stretching the word into two syllables. “Give it a rest.”

  The woman shrugged, continued. “That little kid? He coulda been laughing or crying, all I know. They left in the middle of the night.” She paused. This time there was no smile. “That kind always do.”

  When they had knocked on all the other neighbors’ doors and learned nothing new, nothing to pin the slimmest of hopes on, Feena and Raylene left Bide A Bit. They walked, wordlessly, as if they’d arranged it ahead of time, toward the old boat. They reached it just as the sun had found the stern and was poking long streamers of light through the cabin’s louvered doors. They sat inside, facing each other across the table, the bags of new clothes and toys between them.

  Neither girl spoke, and the only sound was the water, nibbling at the sides of the boat. Raylene pulled a shirt out of one bag, ran her finger along the grinning elephant on its front. “They found that other baby,” she said at last.

  Feena looked up, pretending an interest she didn’t, couldn’t feel.

  “It was in the paper. Mama showed it to me while you were getting dressed.” Raylene stopped her finger iron for a minute, smiled bitterly. “I got so excited about seeing Toffee, I forgot to tell you.”

  Feena said nothing.

  “Turns out, it wasn’t kidnapping at all, or not exactly. Turns out, the kid’s dad took him. Anyway, he’s home again.”

  “Good,” Feena said, on automatic. “That’s good.” She turned her attention to the other bag, pulled out some books, the shovel and pail. “I never should have taken him back,” she said now, staring at the toys in front of her, not at Raylene. “I should have gone to the police. That would have been the right thing.”

  “Right? This mess has gone way past right and wrong.” Raylene sounded tired, numb. “The police and the fixer-uppers don’t have all the answers, either. They make mistakes, too.”

  “But what if she’s still hurting him?” Feena studied the pail she’d chosen, the octopus hugging a starfish. She squinted, focusing on that cartoon hug. “What if she doesn’t stop smoking? What if she—”

  “What-ifs work both ways.” Raylene had started ironing again, her hands passing back and forth, back and forth, over the tiny shirt. “What if it’s the beginning instead of the end? What if it’s the best for everyone, starting over like this?” She brushed under one eye, forced herself to look hopeful. “What if Toffee’s mom has gone and done what you said? What if she’s found that second chance? Grabbed it and kept on running?”

  Feena sat still, head bent. “I can’t stop thinking about him, Ray. I can’t stop picturing him in my mind.” She lifted her eyes to Raylene’s now, but held tight to the pail as if it might jump out of her hands. “You know how patient Christy is? How he’ll sit where you tell him? Well, I keep seeing him, his hair in his eyes, his mouth moving like water the way it does. I see him just sitting there, waiting for you and me to come back and get him.”

  “I hope he thinks about us some.” Raylene’s voice was husky, lower than usual, and Feena saw the shine in her eyes. “But I hope he doesn’t wait.”

  “No.” Raylene was right; Feena knew that. You couldn’t spend your life looking behind you, waiting for someone who’ll never come back. “Do you think he’s too young to remember?”

  “I remember a song my grandmother used to sing.”

  “So?”

  “So I wasn’t much older than Toffee when she died.” Raylene waved a mosquito away, forgoing the usual execution-style swat. “I don’t know a single word. But I can still hear the music, and I can still feel the feeling. I figure that’s the kind of remembering Toffee might do.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “I don’t know. But sometimes a little is better than nothing at all. I mean, maybe there’s no such thing as a fresh start. Maybe you can’t live without hurting some. I keep thinking about that book you ‘borrowed’ from me.”

  Feena couldn’t laugh. She couldn’t even smile.

  “Remember what Janie says when she and her man get caught in that flood? When he asks if she’s sorry she ever met him?”

  Feena thought back to the scene where the two lovers are huddled inside a tiny sharecropper’s shack while a hurricane screams outside. How differently Jane’s and Janie’s stories had ended, one finding her lost love, the other living on memories. Was it asking too much for Christy’s story to have a happy ending?

  “She says she’d rather wake up to the sun, even if it’s only for one day, than be fumbling around in the dark her whole life.” Raylene slipped the shirt back in the bag. “I had more time with Christy than I did with my sisters. I’m not sorry.”

  “But what about Christy?” As waves mumbled underneath the deck and the sun shifted its bright attentions from the door to the window, Feena tried to see into the future. Numb with the loss of the little boy she’d known for weeks and loved for years, she wondered where Christy would grow up, who he would become.

  “A few days, Ray. That’s all we gave him.”

  “Days of peace. Space to breathe.”

  “But it wasn’t real.” Feena remembered the duck and the decoy,
shook her head. “It was make-believe, way too short to last a lifetime.”

  “We did the best we knew. My guess is, it was the best he ever had.”

  Maybe it was, Feena thought. Maybe love, real or unreal, short or long, was better than none. And maybe Christy would remember those precious days, those few spins of the planet when she’d held him in her arms. But more, so much more it ached, she wanted the rest of his life to be easier than its start.

  Another part of Raylene’s book came back to her, the part where Janie talks to the tiny seeds as they’re carried off on the wind. She whispered the words to herself now, like a charm or a prayer. “I hope,” she told Christopher as the future plucked him up and whirled him away from her, “I hope you land on soft ground.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A book isn’t a book without readers. And those who take the time to read a book before it’s published are among the most precious resources a writer has. This time around, I am especially grateful to Marc and Robin Jacobson, Amy Ehrlich, Norma Fox Mazer, and Marion Dane Bauer. Thank you, one and all.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  I wrote Waiting for Christopher to tell a story, Feena’s story. A character popped into my head, and I was off and running—that’s how all my books begin.

  In order to write Feena’s book, though, I had to do research on abused children, real children who need their stories told, too. I learned that abuse is a vicious cycle and that most abusive parents were once abused children. The key, of course, is to prevent abuse before it happens, to teach new mothers and fathers to be effective, loving parents.

  But sometimes it’s too late for prevention. Sometimes a child’s safety or life is at stake. What should you do if you see a child in danger? First, I hope you’ll educate yourself about child abuse. The website of Prevent Child Abuse America (www.preventchildabuse.org) is a good place to start. Second, to get help in your area, use the national hotline established by Childhelp USA: 1-800-4A-CHILD.