The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  She continued the Main Street visits well into the final month of her pregnancy, always circling back before reaching the park, whose regulars had professionally segregated themselves: The homeless claimed the circular granite bench surrounding the flag, whether to use it as a bed or to sit with their backs against it. The laborers and other unemployed scattered themselves in the grass, where they ate takeout and drank Fireball nips. (At least, this was Millie’s suspicion, as the sidewalks were frequently littered with empty Fireball nip bottles, and it was unlikely that Main Street attorneys and bankers were sucking on them before morning meetings. The bottles were so ubiquitous in the sidewalk litter clusters that Millie, curious, once bought one of her own and swallowed it in the cab on the drive home. It would have been unmemorable had it not tasted so much like candy.)

  The protesters claimed the retaining wall closest to the street, the causes on their signs ever-changing and their opposing positions separated by about six feet of empty space. One day, their signs would support or oppose state-run children’s shelters. Another day, they would express outrage or exultation over the IVF ban (or, when shelter levels dropped below the minimum threshold, its temporary lift). They were for or against Exile, for or against licensing, for or against pre-evaluation counseling and the new three-day waiting period, for or against the law requiring shelters to release drops at eighteen years old versus twenty-one, for or against the revival of welfare benefits strictly for released drops, for or against the continued rationing of spices, fruits, and vitamins in an era of licensing, etcetera.

  Millie concerned herself with none of that. When she was close enough to read even one sign in the park, she pressed the WALK button and crossed the intersection to delight the other side of the street with her mound, her awkward waddle, and her rosy cheeks. When walking hurt her feet, ankles, and back, she drew even more attention, and if she could safely stay out all day and all night, she would.

  In part to avoid Lenny’s constant admonitions. She issued them not as a show of concern for Millie, but for the pregnancy. She advised her on what not to eat, what not to drink, why not to smoke (“Where in the world do you keep them, now!?” Lenny once wheezed, flipping over cushions and lifting rugs in the suite and, when she didn’t find them there, thrashing unsuccessfully through the upper levels).

  Every night before bed, Millie measured herself in the mirror, first with a look at herself from the front, and then from each side, to see what they saw. The more it stood out from her sturdy frame, the wider she smiled and the more she looked forward to her next walk on Main Street.

  The only troubling aspect of a late-stage pregnancy was that she would sometimes experience a kick or a punch from the inside. Patting down the offending limb temporarily corrected the behavior, but it did little to ease her mind. She had such trouble sleeping those nights—Did it already hate her so intensely?—that even the pillow in the center of the bed wasn’t soothing. So she slept, when she could, during the day, snuggled up in Gabriella’s nightgown, lights off in the basement, but with the door open at the top of the stairs so she could hear the comforting sounds of daytime and Lenny’s routine.

  When even that failed, she hugged the pillow and visualized a deep pink parlor, an elaborate flower arrangement, Millie’s picture propped on an easel beside her casket, and—one by one—mourners stepping up to the lectern to share their final, and therefore genuine, feelings about her.

  Hugh, with his tie unevenly knotted and his thick brown hair hanging over tear-filled eyes, would say, I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anyone, and I’ll miss her until the day I die. Floyd, pockets bulging with his long, skeletal hands: I shouldn’t say it, because Lenny won’t like it, but I loved Millie the best. She was different, or. Lenny, a tissue held to her nose and the sobs making it a challenge for anyone but Millie to understand her: We were like sisters. No, we were sisters. I’m ashamed of every second I failed to let Millie know I cared, because I did. I will never have a better friend. If I may, I’d like to read one of Millie’s articles to all of you here today. I’ve saved it all this time. Millie’s dad, his dark, wavy hair curling over his ears, a sad smile wrinkling his eyes: My only regret is that I didn’t find my way back to my silly willie Millie before today, though I damn sure tried. If not for that accident…

  Millie had yet to hear the rest of his story before falling asleep.

  Millie was sneaking down the front walk to the car waiting at the curb when the contractions began.

  She cursed and waved away the driver, then shuffled inside to call the shelter as Lenny had instructed her to. When Lenny arrived twenty minutes later with a strange woman carrying towels and wearing rubber gloves, Millie’s breath was fresh from the toothpaste that had removed the red stain from her teeth and two hurried glasses of wine from her breath. (Lenny had warned her there would be no hospital-grade pain medication, and the ibuprofen hadn’t been as effective as Millie would have liked.)

  Fortunately, the delivery wasn’t as painful as she’d anticipated. The baby gushed out on a stream of fluid that splashed into the strange woman’s arms. (Mille was sure Lenny had said the woman’s name more than once—Paula or Polly or Pauline—but Millie hadn’t seen the point of committing it to memory.)

  “Well, con…congratulations,” Lenny said as the woman handed Millie the baby.

  Millie looked at its face and then at Lenny, who didn’t seem to notice that, though swollen around the eyes and covered in what Lenny said was Milia, it more than resembled Floyd.

  “She has your blond hair,” Lenny said.

  The baby was less interesting to Millie than it had been as a fetus. It cried and demanded things Millie couldn’t identify. Feeding was either painful or tedious, depending, but often both. And she was tremendously bored by the pressure of having to constantly be near it.

  She persuaded Lenny to babysit during the day (Lenny owned the shelter, after all, and had plenty of staff beneath her to compensate for her absence) while Millie—purely out of boredom and a need for money—freelanced from a library on a pseudonymous “mommy column” for the Daily Fact.

  “It won’t be much longer,” Millie said. “As soon as I have the funds, I’ll be on my way.”

  She’d have asked Lenny for the money, but she wasn’t quite prepared to travel with a baby. And because Lenny never offered to give her money to help her leave, Millie assumed she appreciated her companionship.

  _____

  Lenny spent so much time away from the shelter that she missed the residents and was worried they missed her. She’d managed one lunch with Gabriella and her baby, Elmore, but even on a no-wig day when Millie stayed home, Lenny couldn’t leave the house. Twice she’d found Millie’s baby lying dangerously close to the edge of the living room couch while Millie slept in the basement. One morning Lenny found the baby flailing around under the coffee table after she’d already dropped off the couch, her naturally pale face red from yowling and her fat arms shaking tiny fists. On a night of such loud screaming that it scared her awake, Lenny hurried downstairs to the lit kitchen and walked in on Millie hissing “Shh!” and shooting a stream of breast milk at the baby’s face.

  There were routine problems, too. Millie didn’t change the diaper. She forgot the baby was in the sink during the baths Lenny reminded her to give. She left the baby on a floor in a room full of sharp corners, long wires, or small cat toys, and no amount of “Millie, you can’t…” changed a thing.

  The days Millie left the house without taking the baby, Lenny fed her the formula she’d brought home from Pauline’s infant care shelter and burped her in the foyer. Except for the basement, it was the only part of the house where she could stand and bounce with plenty of room and no windows close enough to see her through.

  The only problem with the foyer was that the high ceilings magnified sound. One day, Lenny let Andy inspect the baby on a soft blanket on the foyer floor, and her wide-eyed shock at the big, black nose in her face made Lenny laugh so su
ddenly and so loud that it echoed off the hard floor and walls. Andy barked and bounced back with his ears down, scaring Margaret (Millie hadn’t named her, so Lenny called her that when they were alone). Margaret screamed so loud that Lenny was sure anyone walking on the street could hear her. She picked up the wailing baby and held her until she calmed down, closing her eyes to Margaret’s sweet weight and breathing in the musky smell of her neck.

  She did try to be patient with Millie. She tried to let her learn her own way. At night, she listened at the top of the stairs for signs Millie was helping Margaret get to sleep. What she usually heard instead was, “Will you please be quiet,” and once, a confusing, “You interrupted Hugh. Now I have to start over from the beginning!” A few times a week Lenny had to sneak down in the dark to get the baby from the basement and do it herself, rocking her in her top floor bedroom until they both fell asleep.

  When Millie said she needed a babysitter so she could write “incognito” for the Fact to earn money for her move to Wisconsin, Lenny tried to feel better about things. Millie was trying to be practical, she told herself. And she’d be gone soon. But it didn’t make her feel any better. As much as she didn’t want Millie in her house, the thought of her leaving with Margaret and taking full responsibility for her, even if only for the time it took her to find Hugh, was…unthinkable.

  _____

  To allay the monotony of supervising the baby—and because people bestowed nearly as much reverence upon parents with infants as they did carriers—Millie flaunted it up and down Main Street, sure to struggle with the oh-so-charming burden on her arm. Because she hadn’t thought about what to call it, when anyone asked for its name she would say whatever occurred to her. “Annabelle,” she said one Saturday. “Betty,” she said the next. On the baby’s eighth Saturday, Millie was about to tell a coochie-cooing man the baby’s name was Hester when she witnessed Gabriella pulling her baby from the back seat of shiny black AV in a spot near the park.

  Millie stopped.

  And then she half-laughed at her own foolishness. She was in disguise! She took another step forward.

  She stopped again.

  They had spent months together in that magnificent basement. If Gabriella possessed any observational skills whatsoever, she would recog-nize Millie’s height, her build, her gait.

  Millie had started to turn around when Gabriella announced, just loud enough, “There you are.”

  They held eye contact through Millie’s sunglasses.

  Had Gabriella been a true stranger, Millie would already have reacted. It was too late to pretend.

  “Exile Dahl! Exile Dahl!”

  A crowd of protesters marched briskly toward Gabriella from the park. Following close behind them, a gathering of equal size chanted, “A child is a right! A child is a right!”

  Gabriella hurriedly secured her baby in its car seat and looked one last time at Millie. She tapped her ear, smiled (menacingly, Millie thought), and mouthed, “Police,” before backing out with a squeal of her tires.

  Millie sprinted down the sidewalk, the baby jostling so hard against her chest that its vomit splashed all over her chin and neck. She called for a driver from a restaurant phone and made her plan in the car while gagging and wiping her neck with her sleeve. She would pack her things, contact the Fact about the pay she’d asked them to hold until she needed it, and purchase her bus ticket with cash.

  The driver circled the neighborhood twice as directed, stopping to let Millie out only when she was convinced it was safe. As she ran to the front door, she felt suddenly grateful for having seen Gabriella. She was tired of hiding, and the people on the street had grown so used to seeing her that the only acknowledgement they seemed capable of mustering was a tight smile or an impatient nod, regardless of how enthusiastically Millie flapped the baby’s hand or foot at them in greeting.

  _____

  Sudden, cracking knocks on the front door launched Bertram into a twisting flip before he streaked up the stairs. Lenny dropped the string they were playing with and opened the door. A batty-eyed Millie barreled past Lenny, then spun around and thrust the baby at her.

  “Lock it,” Millie said, but she threw herself at the door and punched in the code herself.

  Lenny laughed when Millie told her Gabriella had threatened to turn her in. She promised Gabriella would never do that.

  “She’s a good person,” Lenny said.

  Millie snorted and dashed to the basement.

  Lenny bounced Margaret on her hip until she got tired of waiting for Millie to come back. She went downstairs to find her on her knees, jamming clothes into an oversized duffel bag in the middle of the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Lenny tightened her hold on the warm, squishy body fatiguing her bicep.

  Millie looked up through her mass of frizzy hair. “This was always the plan, as I understand it.” She jumped up and ran to the bathroom.

  Lenny took Margaret upstairs and paced the foyer. “It’ll be all right,” she whispered into the baby’s velvety ear. Margaret curled her fist against Lenny’s shoulder. “It’ll be all right,” she murmured again and again.

  By the time Millie materialized upstairs, red faced and with blond curls stuck to her cheeks, Lenny was sitting at the kitchen island with Margaret’s sleeping head on her breast. Millie looked at them, bent over the sink and spit, then stalked over to Lenny and pulled Margaret from her arms.

  “Millie,” Lenny said, “Why don’t you stay?”

  _____

  A primal and profound yearning to stay anywhere she knew she was truly wanted nearly elicited an unthinking, “All right.” But being wanted present-ed an even more compelling reason to leave. What an unfamiliar and rewarding sensation of emotional empowerment to be the one leaving the very person who wanted her to stay!

  Millie said no. Even assuming Lenny was right about Gabriella (and she wasn’t; she hadn’t seen the self-satisfied look on Gabriella’s face), it would still, Millie explained, be wholly impractical to hide in the basement for the rest of her life. It would also be taxing to live in a town where the police would never entirely stop being interested in her. She knew that, now.

  The baby reached out to pull her hair. Millie craned her neck and shifted her weight to avoid the insistent, saliva-covered fingers.

  “Leave her here,” Lenny said, reaching for her. “I mean, you…you can leave her here.”

  Millie spun away and squeezed her arms tight around the baby. “She loves me.”

  _____

  Lenny wanted to cry for Margaret’s soft, new bones trapped in Millie’s suffocating hug. She didn’t have the power to do anything else.

  “Have you fed her?” Lenny said. “She should eat before you go.”

  With Margaret now flopping on her arm (Lenny relaxed, because at least she wasn’t being squeezed to death, anymore), Millie stomped to the sink and spit again. “You can’t expect me to anticipate every single thing under such stressful conditions. How long do you think the police will take to arrive?” She rolled her eyes before Lenny could say anything. “How long do you think they would take to arrive if they had been called?”

  “I don’t know.” Lenny wished it surprised her that Millie didn’t seem to care that if the police did come, they’d both be in trouble. But since they weren’t coming, the only real person in trouble—which Gabriella couldn’t have known when she’d teased Millie like that—was the baby. “Did you pack bottles and diapers?”

  “Bottles?” Millie said with a look toward the living room window. “Oh. No. Could you…?”

  “What about her toys? Her blanket?”

  “Yes, yes, Lenny. I’ll bring as much as I can put together in a hurry. Would you like to write me a list before I go?” Millie handed Margaret to Lenny so abruptly that the baby’s face scrunched into a knot and she cried. Millie groaned. “Bounce her around, or something, will you, while I—I won’t be long.”

  Lenny followed Millie as far as the living room entry,
stopping there to watch as Millie crept carefully to the back door. She slipped outside after looking left and right and started across the field faster than Lenny had ever seen her move.

  When she was sure Millie wouldn’t turn back, Lenny whisked the baby into the kitchen and yanked open the drawer.

  _____

  The last time Millie had seen the chocolate alligator, it was displayed on the shelf beside Hugh’s writing awards. She’d rescued it a mere second before he swept the awards, along with his prized miniature bust of Christiane Amanpour, into a vintage New Yorker tote bag. But where had she moved it in the rearrangement? Had she been clear-headed at the time, she’d have set it on a lower shelf, but it wasn’t there, so she hadn’t. Nor was it on an end table or on the bedroom nightstand or in a drawer or in any of the cabinets or under the couch…

  She was finding it difficult to breathe. She had archived not a single photograph. The few pictures she’d had, she’d deleted on the two-year anniversary of her dad’s final vacation. One glass of beer later, she’d emptied the recycle bin. She possessed not a single article of his clothing, and he had left nothing else behind—not a watch, a hairbrush, a shoe. Her only remaining evidence of him, the sole object she owned that he had ever touched, was that stale chocolate allig—

  There was one more thing. Millie ran upstairs to the linen closet.

  The orange towel was worn, with loose threads looped into impossible knots, but it was something. It unfolded when she tugged it from the bottom of the stack, one of the frayed threads catching on the flower petal setting of Lenny’s emerald ring. She unhooked the thread and stroked the stone with the very tip of her finger.