Wish Club

by Kim Strickland

The ambulance driver appeared nonchalant as he wove quickly in and out of traffic. Claudia couldn’t tell if he was oblivious to her presence or, worse, showing off because of it. He picked up the radio from the center console and told whoever it was on the other end that Unit Eight was a “two-four” at Strawn and they were “five-out” from Mercy. Claudia assumed he would call Mercy next to give their ETA, like they did on TV, but he just put the mike back in its cradle.

  They raced through the familiar streets faster than she’d ever gone down them before, and she wondered if the baby’s condition was that critical or if the driver was just driving that fast because he could. Although there were a surprising number of assholes who wouldn’t move out of the way for an ambulance. Maybe that was how the driver got his contempt for the road. Claudia could see one such asshole in her side mirror, a black Lexus following closely behind them, passing all the drivers who had pulled over, turning someone else’s misfortune to his advantage—a real-life ambulance chaser.

  What a world to be born into, she thought. A world in which it seemed no one gave a shit about anyone else, in which everyone seemed only to care about themselves: a world in which a young girl can give birth in the bathroom of a prestigious private school and literally throw her baby away. Why? Because it interfered with what? Her plans for herself? Other people’s plans for her? What? There was not one single reason—not any combination of reasons—that Claudia could think of to excuse it.

  It was so unfair. All the effort she and Dan had been putting into trying to have a baby, and here some teenager just effortlessly gives birth in a high school bathroom and, seemingly just as effortlessly, abandons it.

  Claudia wondered why the girl had done it that way, why she hadn’t gotten help from someone—a teacher or her parents—anyone. There were posters all over the place, on the buses and on the subway, asking “Pregnant? We can help.” But Claudia realized the Strawn girls weren’t exactly the public-transportation type.

  That girl must have felt she was all alone.

  How long would it take them to find her? And what about the father? This could become a huge, long-drawn-out mess. Peterson must be having a cow. The thought gave Claudia schadenfreude as she imagined him pacing up and down his office, wearing out his expensive shoes, worrying about the potential disgrace to the Strawn Academy.

  Claudia wondered how anyone could have hidden an entire pregnancy. April Sibley had used the bathroom earlier during third period—maybe she had seen something. Claudia visualized the way April’s forehead had furrowed while taking her test, the way her hand had gripped her pen with white knuckles. She’d seemed so agitated.

  Oh my God. Maybe it was April.

  No, of course not April. Even though this baby was small, he looked to Claudia’s inexpert eye to be about full term, and April hadn’t put on any weight—well, not that Claudia had noticed anyway. April had always been a little on the plump side. But certainly someone so hell-bent on becoming valedictorian wouldn’t allow herself to get pregnant, wouldn’t let something like this get in the way—

  Oh my God. Peterson was really going to have a cow—or maybe a grandnephew. What kind of a mother would April be? She was so young.

  Well, you never know. People can surprise you sometimes. Maybe April, or whoever it was, would rise to the occasion, but Claudia still thought it would be better to be raised by people who really wanted you in the first place, by people who loved children and who wanted nothing more than to have children.

  People like her and Dan.

  The idea came into focus in her mind the way a stereogram did. It crept into view like the 3-D image, appearing briefly only to quickly disappear, and finally reappearing for good when she focused on it the right way. Once she got it. She remembered how empty her arms had felt when she’d handed the baby over to Marion; how, after just a few short moments, they missed the weight and warmth of him. Maybe, just maybe, she was meant to find this child. Maybe, somehow, he was meant to be hers.

  Oh that’s crazy. No way. Not a baby that could be one of her student’s. Maybe April’s. Related to Peterson. No.

  Claudia crossed her arms over her chest and looked out the window, trying to ignore the recklessness of the driver.

  But maybe.

  And then it hit her. Her wish. The chant from Wish Club.

  The connection came barreling into her like a sucker punch. No more waiting, no more strife, bring to her a brand new life.

  Had they done this? Could she be the one responsible for this? They’d wished that she get a baby without delay and here it was, one month later and she had found a baby. No one can deliver a baby more without delay than that.

  She stared out the front window of the ambulance, numb and not seeing. Her head vibrated with thoughts of wishes and connections and fate and hope. She didn’t notice they were near the hospital until the driver shut off the siren and it began to wind down.

  The ambulance pulled up the ramp and stopped by the entrance to the emergency room.

  Claudia thought it was something you’d probably never notice—how long it took for the sound of the siren to dissipate completely—unless you were actually inside the ambulance. The men took the baby from the back and slammed the doors.

  She got out, too, and started to follow them, thinking it was a strange thing for her to be paying attention to right now—the long slow exhalation of a siren, a sigh that had become softer and softer until it faded out, as if all its air had been spent.

  The playground music of squeaky swings and high voices filled the background while Jill sketched at the edge of the park. The mild, late-February weather had brought everyone out today, enjoying a reprieve from the cold and the snow, which still sat in huge gray piles from when it had been plowed.

  Charcoal dust coated Jill’s fingertips, making them look a little like the soot-coated piles of melting snow that surrounded her as she worked sketching the naked trees. She liked the way the catalpa trees looked in winter, their gnarled and confused limbs clinging to the seedpods, waiting for a real spring day to litter them down. She didn’t like the way her drawing was going, however. Everything seemed just a little bit off—out of perspective or proportion. It was just a rough patch, that was all. “You can’t be Picasso every day.” Who’d said that? She couldn’t remember where she’d heard it, but she figured whoever had said it must have been an artist, too.

  Jill was taking a break from her studio, where her painting over the past few days had become more and more laborious. Taking advantage of the warm weather, Jill had come outside to try to shake off some of her tension or nerves or whatever it was that was making it so challenging to work. She really had put a lot of pressure on herself, trying to make this show her big, breakout show. And that big canvas. Ugh. It was good to get away, to work on something different to try to spur her creativity. Jill focused on the gnarled branches again, trying to bring them back into scale with the rest of the tree.

  Every now and then a yell from the playground would rise above all the others, and she’d just now heard someone yell, “Mom?” Jill stopped her drawing and looked up, half expecting to find a bloody mess of a child in a heap by the slide.

  Twenty-seven years ago, she’d been the bloody mess. The morning it had happened had started out like any other, with her nanny, Sophie, waking her up, but during breakfast the day’s planned course of events had changed and her mother had ended up being the one to get her dressed.

  “I just bought those, Jilly,” her mother had complained.

  Jill’s tights wouldn’t come up all the way at the crotch. They hung suspended between her thighs, and she could feel the breeze through the fabric when she penguin-walked over to where her mother was standing.

  A six-year-old Jill smiled into her mother’s forehead while being jostled back and forth, her mother working the tights up, pulling the fabric up her legs in increments until the crotch of her tights hung only a couple of inches below her own. She pulled Jill’s skirt down over
them. “I suppose that will have to do.”

  Jill could still feel a breeze on her groin when she walked, and the way the elastic rested on her hips seemed precarious, but she didn’t dare argue with her mother on an occasion like this. White tights and a skirt for the playground were bad choices, too, but Jill didn’t dare tell her mother that either, for fear of jeopardizing this fortuitous turn of events. Besides, she knew from experience that nothing she could say about her outfit would change her mother’s mind. Her mother’s word on fashion was the last word. Period.

  Her nanny, Sophie, had suggested during breakfast that they go for a walk in the park and feed the ducks in Lincoln Park Zoo, usually one of her favorite past times. But this morning Jill had caught sight of her mother getting coffee in the butler’s pantry.

  “I don’t want to feed the ducks. We always have to go feed the stupid ducks,” Jill had said, her fork in her fist, a piece of French toast still stuck in the tines. “I want to go to the playground. Why do I always have to feed the stupid ducks?”

  “Okay,” Sophie said, “we be going to playgroun’ then. After breakfast, we can be going.”

  “Why can’t Mommy go too?” Jill’s voice started ratcheting up a little louder, a little whinier. “When can Mommy take me? I always have to go with you.”

  “You mom very busy. I be taking you to playgroun’.” Sophie had spotted Mrs. Trebelmeier in the butler’s pantry too, and a flicker of fear had passed across her face.

  “She’s always busy. What does she always got to do?” Jilly’s sad, sad voice now. “How come she can’t ever take me?”

  Her mom had come around the corner with her coffee cup in her hand. “How come you can’t ever take me anywhere?” Jill pouted, eyes brimming with just the right amount of water, even though real tears had not been an intentional part of this tantrum.

  Her mother’s blue eyes glared at her, and Jill’s lower lip quivered, also quite unintentionally.

  Sensing the danger, Sophie tried to intervene. “You mom very busy. After breakfast, I be taking you to park—”

  “—the playground.”

  “—the playgroun’. You mom has lots things to do today.” She stopped, apparently unable to explain what those things might be. Mrs. Trebelmeier glared at Sophie, raising the level of fear in her nanny’s eyes. But then: “My schedule’s not too full this morning, Sophie.” Mrs. Trebelmeier had surprised them both. “I could take Jilly to the park for a little while.”

  It was a cold morning under an overcast sky, but Jill’s face was radiant as she held her mother’s hand on their walk to the playground. She had the most beautiful mother: refined, almost regal, and always perfectly turned out.

  Jill’s face fell as they approached the playground, though, when she saw that none of her friends were there. She and her mother had arrived a little earlier than usual because Jill hadn’t performed her standard morning litany of tantrums; there had been none of the I’m not wearing that, I don’t want to brush my teeth, Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! You’re pulling my hair, You tie my shoes. Today, Jilly had been the perfect little lady.

  She headed for the merry-go-round first, pushing one foot along the concrete. The hulking metal wheel ground to a squeaky start. She held on to the cold bar and smiled at her mom each time she circled past her bench. Her mom had a pleasant enough expression on her face, but her eyes were focused far away, not on her daughter going around and around.

  The merry-go-round was hard for her to push all by herself and Jill quickly lost interest, never able to build up enough speed for her satisfaction. She abandoned it for the slide. The soles of her patent-leather Mary Janes slipped over the metal steps as she scrambled to the top. She slid down with her hands in the air and this time her mother did smile back before calling out, “Be careful not to get your new tights dirty.”

  Where could they be? Jill thought on her way up the steps again. Surely some other kids should be here by now. She scanned the playground as she slid down. She thought she spotted one of her friends outside the far gate and she reached up a hand to wave, but it was just a short blond woman walking by. The ground caught her by surprise and her feet stubbed into it, flipping her over and landing her head on the cement. There was a moment immediately after she hit, before it started to hurt, when she opened her eyes and stared into the ground without moving her head, a moment when she thought, “I’m okay.” But then the pain started, and she peeled her head off the ground, reaching a hand up to find blood.

  She couldn’t breathe normally; she could only suck in tiny gasps of air. She got to her knees, but they’d been scraped and she sank back onto the ground. Still the tears wouldn’t come, there was only her heart palpitating hard in her chest and the strange hyperventilating sensation. Blood soaked the hand she held to her forehead, and she looked through her hair for her mother, who was still seated on the same bench, with her gaze directed above and past Jill.

  Her tongue explored the newly rough interior of her mouth, the cracked and chipped teeth, the metallic taste of blood. Tears started to fill her eyes. What was her mother looking at? And then, finally, she found her voice. “Mom?”

  Her mother had turned to look at her, taking a moment to recognize the tangled and bloody mess as her daughter. “Jilly!”

  As she’d come toward Jill, she searched in her pockets for her handkerchief, and then she bent at the waist in front of Jill. “Oh Jilly,” she said, holding out the handkerchief, “you’ve ruined your new tights.”

  As if it were yesterday, Jill remembered the sensation of peeling her forehead from the pavement, the initial relief that her skull was in one piece. She’d ended up with a pretty good-sized goose egg on her forehead, one missing and one chipped front tooth, and a couple of skinned knees. Her mother had held a constant wince on her face while she wiped the blood from Jill’s face, but the look of horror that had appeared there when Jill had opened her mouth to reveal her damaged smile was entrenched in Jill’s memory forever.

  The dentist hadn’t been much help, refusing to utilize any cosmetic dentistry on baby teeth, and Jill often wondered why her mother hadn’t pursued it by going to another dentist with her checkbook in hand. Probably, at some point, her mother had become too busy to be caught up in her daughter’s smile, perhaps consoling herself with the fact that Jill’s missing teeth were in fact just baby teeth and that they, and therefore her smile, would grow back.

  A cold breeze kicked up and the pages of Jill’s sketchbook fought against the clips that were holding them down to her board. Jill blew the charcoal off of her cold fingers and continued to draw, but the tree branches she was sketching began to move, making them look to her like the grabby, gnarled fingers of an old woman—witch’s fingers.

  In spite of the apparent success of her first wish—for a perfect man, which, as she got to know him better, Marc was turning out to be—Jill couldn’t shake a growing sense of uneasiness. No matter what they called it, wishing, energy raising, whatever—it was, she felt, on some level still witchcraft, and there was a part of her inculcated by her Catholic upbringing that still thought it was wrong.

  But she couldn’t quit now. Jill was waiting for her wish for creative inspiration to kick in. Her opening was in a month, and she still had the big canvas to do. She needed to get going on it, or, at the very least, on something else. But maybe she needed to be patient. If it turned out half as well as her first wish had…

  And as for Marc, well. In all the years of dating and relationships, she couldn’t understand now why she’d never tried dating a younger man before. She’d never met anyone like him. He was so fun. So free. So amazing in bed, unlike the pathetic fumblers of her early twenties. She loved that he was so not into the where is this headed routine. He was polite and funny and charming, and gorgeous beyond belief on top of it all. The way some women stared at him when they were out together—they ought to be ashamed of themselves. But it gave her a thrill. That’s right, ladies, he’s with me.

  He left her sho
rt, meaningless messages on her voicemail. “Grrrrr.” How fun was that? She couldn’t imagine uptight Michael ever leaving a message like that.

  Marc had finally asked her to sit for some portraits and she’d agreed, pretending to be reluctant, but secretly thrilled. This was the way he preferred to connect with his girlfriends, and she thought it was great.

  He’d certainly connected with his black-haired model. They’d both shared a laugh about Jill’s interruption, later, when they could talk about it, although Jill’s laughter had felt forced and hollow.

  She and Marc hadn’t had any exclusivity conversations about their relationship. Jill wasn’t seeing anyone else, and she sort of assumed that he wasn’t either, but for the first time she could remember, Jill felt like she wanted to ask him not to. It was as though she couldn’t get enough of him—and she didn’t want to share.

  One night the previous week, she’d been on her way out of 4400 North when she’d seen the lights on in his studio. Jill had knocked, but he hadn’t answered. She’d waited a long time before deciding he must have just forgotten the lights and left them on. She couldn’t bring herself to think of any alternatives.

  The cold breeze in the park was more constant now and it was clear to Jill and everyone else that their “spring break” was over. Jill put her charcoals in her art bin and snapped the lid down. After securing a cover sheet over her drawings, she stood up and folded her portable canvas stool, collected her things, and headed back through the park to the pedestrian tunnel that would take her under Lake Shore Drive and up across the street to her building. She passed the mothers and nannies hurrying their children along, all of them wearing coats too thin for the changing weather.

  Winter had returned to Chicago like it always did—without fair warning.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In my next life,” Gail thought, “I’m going to have kids who sleep in the car.”

  The whole way back from Dominick’s Emily had sung the Caillou song over and over. Of all the PBS cartoon soundtracks, the one from Caillou was the most insidiously evil, in that you really only needed to hear it once to have it stuck in your head all day. The way Emily was carrying on, Gail was fairly certain she wouldn’t be able to get the Caillou song out of her head until sometime around the middle of next week.