Wish Club

by Kim Strickland

  Henry stood in front of her with one hand on his hip, the other holding the bloodied rag. “I think we need to get you to a doctor, hon.”

  “Id’s bwoken. You think id’s bwoken?”

  Henry inhaled deeply through his nose as he reached a hand up and ran it over his scalp. His eyes snapped open as if just now he’d fully awakened from his nap. He brought his hand down in front of his face and examined the palm, as if maybe the hair he’d felt had come from there. He reached up again and ran his hand over his former bald spot.

  “Mara! I’ve got hair on my head!”

  “Thad’s whad I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  From the living room they could hear the voice of a sportscaster yelling, “It’s un-be-leev-able.”

  The class hunched over their tests, ran fingers through hair, bit lips, coughed, and occasionally sent her a dirty look. And occasionally, Claudia caught a dirty look when she glanced up from sipping her coffee and reading her New Yorker, as she made sure that the casual glances at the ceiling were only that and not attempts to casually find out what someone else had answered.

  Claudia enjoyed test days; all the work being done, she could relax and catch up on her reading. The only problem she had with test day was that she couldn’t leave the room if she needed to and, after sipping so much coffee, Claudia needed to leave the room.

  She thought about putting April Sibley in charge while she went to the bathroom. Claudia looked over at April. She saw her face contort as she hunched over the exam, her head down low to the page and her knuckles white as she gripped her pen. It was unusual to see April struggling with a test. Claudia looked around to see if there was anyone else she could trust to stop the slackers and wanna-bes from cheating while she was gone, and decided that it was just coffee pee anyway, which always seemed to be more urgent than it really was. Claudia turned her attention back to her magazine.

  “Ms. Dubois? I need to use the bathroom.” It was April.

  Claudia eyed her a little suspiciously, but after imagining the repercussions of refusing the headmaster’s niece permission to pee, Claudia just said “sure.”

  After April left, Claudia flipped through her magazine, still looking up once in a while to make sure no one was cheating. There were several kids looking up at the ceiling now, and she looked up at it herself, to make sure no one had written answers there when she hadn’t been looking.

  “Guys? I don’t think the answers are going to appear up there, so maybe we could focus our eyes on our own papers?” She got a couple of embarrassed smiles, several more confused ones, and one dagger-like stare of irritation for the interruption.

  Claudia took a sip of coffee and returned to her magazine with a sigh. She was deep into an article when April returned from the bathroom, and Claudia silently reprimanded herself for forgetting for so long that she’d been gone.

  Class always ran over on test days and today was no different. She allowed the students who needed more time to use the ten minutes they were allotted between classes to finish up their essays. Today, one of them was April. When she collected the last of the tests, Claudia locked them in her file cabinet, grabbed her purse, and hurried for the door. She did not want to get into a discussion with April, or anyone else for that matter, about when the tests would be graded. Even though the next period was her free period, today Claudia really did have personal business to attend to.

  It wasn’t a long walk to the bathroom, but the urgency of her mission seemed to increase the closer she came to her destination. It was empty when she got there and she rushed into a stall.

  While the toilet was flushing, Claudia swore she heard a cat’s muffled yowling and she stepped out of the stall, cocking her head to listen, but heard nothing more and walked over to the sinks, her chunky heels echoing on the floor.

  As soon as the water was on, she heard it again. She turned the water back off.

  The sound had come from her left side. She walked over to the large red garbage can and looked behind it. The mewling sound came again—this time from inside the can. How could a kitten get inside…? Claudia lifted the lid off. Blood was smeared on the side and her hand slipped in it. Gross. She hurried her hand over to the sink to run it under water. These girls can be such pigs. She remembered one time she had entered a stall and sat down to see a bloody tampon hanging from its string on the hook on the back of the door.

  The mewling sound came again, and she came back to the trashcan. Blood saturated some of the paper towels inside and Claudia’s heart started thumping, afraid of what she would find in there if she dared to look. She heard it again, louder, and this time it didn’t sound like a cat but a baby’s cry. She dug through the bloodied paper towels and found a tiny, tiny baby at the bottom of the can, his eyes closed tight.

  “OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGod.” She reached in and picked up the baby and cradled him to her chest.

  “Oh my God, my little one, what happened to you—what are you doing here?” She touched the side of his little red face. She pulled up the bottom of her sweater and wrapped it over him. He was still wet and gooey, with a strange white paste on his skin. She paced back and forth, breathing hard. Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out. Claudia headed for the door. The baby started mewling.

  “Ohh.” Claudia walked toward the door then stopped. I need to keep him warm. He needs to be warmer. He was already wrapped in the bottom of her sweater, and she enveloped him now inside her suit jacket as well. She needed to get him to the nurse, to Marion. She needed to call an ambulance. Claudia raced out of the bathroom and hurried toward the stairwell. She went down the stairs carefully, holding the baby like a piece of crystal, keeping one hand on the handrail.

  These sorts of things didn’t happen at fine, upstanding private schools like Strawn. This is going to cause a ruckus, she thought. What was Peterson going to do? Of course they needed to find the mother right away. He would probably lock down the school, but she might already be gone. They had an open campus. Peterson would definitely want to keep this as under wraps as possible, try to avoid a scandal for the school.

  The mother had to be one of the girls. Well, probably it was one of the girls, but there weren’t any she knew of that had been pregnant, not in any of her classes or that she’d seen in passing down the halls—or heard about in the faculty break room.

  The boy’s little cries subsided and Claudia stopped halfway down the stairs, opening her jacket in a panic to make sure he hadn’t stopped breathing. No. But he started crying again as soon as she’d stopped. Claudia covered him back up with her jacket and continued until she reached the first-floor hallway, where she ran as smoothly as she could to Marion’s office, trying not to jostle the baby too much.

  Henry O’Connor turned out of a doorway, his eyes down, reading some forms in his hand.

  Henry O’Connor. Upper-grades math teacher. Boys’ cross-country and baseball coach. Mara’s husband.

  “Henry!”

  “Claudia?” He stared down at her blood-stained sweater. “What happened? Let me help you. Do you need to sit down?” He gestured back toward the office he’d just left.

  Claudia kept up her pace down the hallway. “No, Henry. It’s—I found a baby!”

  “You what?” Henry fell into a slow jog next to her. His eyes widened when he looked down and noticed the bulge under her jacket. “Holy shit.”

  “He was in the girls’ bathroom.” Claudia was breathing hard. “I’m taking him to Marion. Call 9-1-1!”

  Henry turned around and ran full-speed back down the hall to his office.

  Claudia spun into Marion’s waiting room. Two girls sat on the bench outside Marion’s door. Their mouths gaped open. Claudia ran past without acknowledging them and tried the interior door. It was locked and she banged her fist on its smoked-glass panel so hard it vibrated in its frame.

  “Marion! Marion open up, it’s an emergency.” She banged on the door again. “Marion! Please, it’s—”

  She could hear Mari
on muttering from the other side, always an emergency.

  Marion opened the door with a pissy “What is it?” before looking down at Claudia’s bloody front. Claudia pulled back part of her jacket to reveal the baby’s slimy head and crying face.

  Marion’s eyes got huge as she sucked in a mouthful of air. “Oh!” she said, her Minnesota roots drenching the word.

  “I found him. In the bathroom upstairs. Just now.”

  Marion reached her arms out for the baby. “We have to call 9-1-1. We need to get him to the hospital right away.”

  Claudia hesitated before handing him over, not sure if it was the baby she didn’t want to give up, or Marion’s starched white cotton she didn’t want to see smeared with blood. Marion always wore the old-fashioned white cotton uniform, even though the trend in nursing fashion these days was toward cartoon animals and multicolored scrubs. After she handed the baby over to Marion, her arms felt strangely empty.

  “I saw Henry O’Connor in the hall. He’s calling 9-1-1.”

  “Good.” Marion gave the baby a quick once-over before she clamped down on his umbilical cord with her fingers. She turned to the boy on the examining table behind her, whom Claudia hadn’t noticed until right then. “Sean, you’re done,” she said, nodding her head toward the door. “Tell Mr. Redding I said you can sit out gym today.”

  Sean was staring, red-nosed and open-mouthed, at the bloody baby in Marion’s arms. A little trickle of snot seeped from one of his nostrils.

  “Sean, I said you’re done.”

  “Uh,” Sean tore his eyes from the baby and looked up at Marion. “Uh, Mr. Redding said he wanted a node.”

  “Just tell him I SAID SO and go tell him NOW.”

  Sean stared at Marion with a stunned look for about a nanosecond before he tore out of her office.

  Marion calmly pulled a sheet from a drawer under the examining table and wiped the baby off before pulling out another one and wrapping him up in it tightly.

  She held him so naturally, pacing the room, her shoulders relaxed. Claudia knew she’d raised four children and the majority of them now had children of their own. She was accustomed to holding little babies, and she made it look as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be standing in the first-floor nurse’s office at the Arthur G. Strawn Academy holding a baby that had just been pulled out of the trash.

  The baby must have understood he was in good hands because he stopped his crying. “You are quite a little trooper.” Marion’s nose did Eskimo air kisses with the baby’s nose. “We’ve got an ambulance on the way. They’re going to take you to the hospital where you’ll get some extra-special care.”

  Watching Marion pace the office, idly chatting and cooing over the newborn, Claudia could almost forgive her for all her nosey, boorish gossip and uninvited advice.

  Well, the gossip this little incident was going to stir up would surely blow away anything Marion could dish out. The news vans would probably be rolling up shortly after—maybe even before—the ambulance did. Claudia didn’t have to look outside the door to know the two girls sitting in the waiting area were long gone—discreetly text-messaging their friends while hiding behind locker doors, all symptoms of premenstrual cramping long forgotten.

  “You found him in the trash can?” Marion looked up at her now.

  “He sounded like a cat. I thought someone—I thought there was a cat, a kitten in there at first. But the blood. I couldn’t believe it when I reached in and found him. I mean a baby! Who could do such a thing? To a baby?”

  “Did you see the mother? Who was it?”

  “There was no one else around. I have no idea where she is—or who she is.”

  “Call Charles’s office. He needs to know about this. Let’s get him down here. And we need to try to find the mother, too.”

  Claudia went over to Marion’s desk and picked up the phone to call Headmaster Peterson.

  It felt as if her whole body were vibrating, she was so angry—or sad. Maybe betrayed was the better word, because she didn’t feel like crying. She felt like a part of her world had cracked. Like the vibration in her chest was the aftershock of the earthquake that had just rocked her foundation. Claudia had spent the better part of her life always trying to believe the best of people. She knew the world wasn’t perfect; obviously bad things happened and bad people existed, but they all had the fictional quality of a media story, an intangible feeling of distance to them. The media turned events into stories. It’s what they did. But the stories made it seem like bad things only happened far away, in bad places and in bad neighborhoods. Not here. Not in her world. Not at her school, in the bathroom she used every day.

  Peterson’s receptionist picked up the phone. “Is Charles there? It’s Claudia Dubois.”

  “Headmaster Peterson is not available at the—”

  “You need to tell him to get down to Marion’s office right away.”

  “He’s asked that he not be—”

  “It’s an emergency…You have to tell him. Interrupt whatever he’s doing and just tell him.” Claudia hung up the phone.

  They could hear sirens approaching. Marion looked up from her cooing. “I think it would be best if we drew as little attention to ourselves as possible.”

  Claudia nodded. This was the Marion she knew. The one who would try, like Peterson, to avoid scandal for the school.

  Marion looked down, frowning, at the front of Claudia’s blood-stained sweater.

  “Oh.” Claudia quickly took her jacket off, pressed it to her stomach, and crossed her arms over it to hide most of the blood. “Better?”

  Marion nodded, but one corner of her mouth was still turned down in a frown.

  “I’m going to cover him as much as I can with the sheet. It’s only a few steps to the front door, but…you should hold your arms just like that, but maybe you’re in pain?” She looked pointedly at Claudia. “Maybe you slipped on the floor in the bathroom and hurt your arm. Something like that.”

  Claudia looked back at her for a moment, then decided it would be best to play along. “Okay, I get it, make it look like I got hurt.”

  Marion nodded. “Any loud murmurs from our little champ here and your pain immediately escalates. Kapeesh?”

  “I—yeah, okay—but don’t you think it might already be too late? That boy, Sean—and the two girls in the waiting room. Henry O’Connor.”

  Marion silenced her with a look.

  “Okay, okay. My arm’s hurt.” Claudia didn’t want any trouble with Marion, because she knew Marion and Peterson were close. Peterson had probably gotten an earful about Claudia’s slacker tendencies from April. She didn’t need trouble with Marion, too. Claudia would play along with the ruse for her own sake—if not for the sake of the fine reputation of their fine school.

  The ambulance pulled into the circular drive in front and the paramedics were getting out when Claudia rotated out the door, meeting them on the sidewalk. They saw the blood on her sweater and she had to hold them off, telling them their patient was coming through the revolving door behind her.

  With her arms wrapped around herself in an effort to keep warm now, instead of hiding blood, Claudia stood at the back door of the ambulance watching the two men check out the baby. They worked quickly, putting a clamp on his umbilical cord and taking his vital signs.

  A handful of students had stepped outside the school lobby and gathered on the sidewalk next to the ambulance. They stayed several yards away from Claudia, but more students were coming up from the street on the front sidewalk.

  “He’s going to be okay, right?” Claudia asked, leaning in a little closer to the back door.

  “These babies tend to be pretty resilient,” one of the paramedics said without looking up.

  She couldn’t imagine how many of “these babies” he must have seen to make him so jaded by the time he got to this one.

  “What’s going to happen to him?”

  He shrugged. “Social Services usually takes over a
t the hospital.”

  Claudia glanced at the small crowd that was gathering before looking at Marion. “Maybe I should go with.”

  Claudia couldn’t decipher Marion’s odd look—confused, her lips thrust out and eyebrows raised. Didn’t she understand why Claudia wanted to follow this baby? Or was she pissed that she hadn’t thought of it first, it being in keeping with the whole broken-arm ploy? Or maybe Marion was thinking it was typical of a teacher to try to play hooky in the middle of the day—just another slacker.

  The driver shrugged at Claudia again. Whatever. It was obvious he didn’t care if she stayed or went. “If you’re comin’,” he said, “you gotta come now.” He shut the rear doors of the ambulance and pointed up front toward the passenger side, before disappearing around the back.

  With a quick glance at Marion, Claudia walked over to the passenger side and climbed in. Before her door was shut the driver started pulling out of the drive, at the same time reaching over to the center console to press a button. The siren started.

  From the rearview mirror outside her window, Claudia could see Peterson spinning out of the revolving door. He met Marion on the sidewalk and he reached out as if to touch her upper arm, but he pulled his hand back at the last second. They exchanged a few words and Peterson gestured his arm out at the ambulance as it rolled away.

  Peterson was tall and always looked distinguished in his dark suits and gleaming black Salvatore Ferragamo oxford shoes, but he had a disheveled quality about him now. His face was flushed, his tie just ever so slightly askew.

  Claudia watched them grow smaller in the mirror, then out of sight completely as the ambulance turned the corner and sped on its way. She stared at the mirror even after they’d disappeared, and she noticed that the usual admonition, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear,” was missing.

  Chapter Fourteen