Where is the Baby?

by Charlotte Vale-Allen

  Tally loved his work; she loved him. Their feelings for each other were immediate and absolute. When he revealed that he was on a student deferment and would be inducted into the military following his graduation in June, she said, ‘We’d better get the license right away then.’

  Purely as a formality, because she so rarely saw them, she’d phoned to invite her parents to the ceremony. As Tally had anticipated, her father initially sounded pleased for her and said he was willing but, his tone changing and voice dropping to a near-whisper, admitted that he had to turn the matter over to her mother, who immediately came on the line, angry. ‘We have an important luncheon booked that day! You can’t seriously expect us to change our plans on such short notice! This is so typical of you, Natalie. You never think of anyone but yourself!’

  When she called him, Warren exclaimed, ‘What wonderful news! I’ll call Alexis right now. We will be there, Tally!’

  In keeping with her status as an emancipated woman, she chose to keep her own name. Clayton didn’t mind. She was nineteen. He was twenty-one. Eighteen days after they met, they went downtown to City Hall and got married. Warren and Alexis happily witnessed the ceremony, then insisted on taking the newlyweds to lunch at The Top of The Mark.

  The next day a courier delivered an envelope that contained a check for ten thousand dollars along with a note that said, ‘I am sorry we couldn’t be there. I wish you both every happiness. Love, Dad.’

  Surprised and touched, she wrote a thank-you note and sent it to his office where she knew he’d actually receive it. Anything sent to the house would be intercepted by Ivory who was likely, first, to raise hell with her husband for daring to send any sort of gift to their daughter without consulting her and, second, she would destroy the note. In doing all this, it would never have occurred to her that she’d confirmed Tally’s receipt of her father’s gift. It was safer to circumvent her mother altogether and deal directly with her father who, every now and then, revealed a functioning heart – something her mother did not possess.

  Their honeymoon was a long weekend at the ranch. Clayton fell in love with the place. ‘It feels familiar, like home,’ he declared, quickly deciding that next to the porch with its panoramic view, his favorite spot was a wide tree trunk by the river where he was content to sit with a book, looking up every now and then to watch the river water rushing past.

  Alba and Joe Seven Moons took to Clayton on sight and, at Tally’s insistence, sat down with them to the standing rib roast celebration dinner that Alba prepared.

  When they returned to the city, Clayton moved into her quaint apartment on Potrero Hill. They worked slavishly to complete their theses, his on the effects of sunlight on the urban landscape in photography, and hers on the issue of what forms might legitimately be considered contemporary art.

  After defending their papers, they returned to the ranch to spend their final week together before he was to report for duty. He didn’t want to go but believed it was the honorable thing to do. One defended one’s country, his great-uncle had told him. During the war, Clayton’s dad had been a private in the army, based in Italy, and Uncle Bradford had been a captain in the navy, seeing action in the Pacific.

  ‘It’s only a year-long deployment,’ Clayton assured her. ‘Then it’ll be behind us.’

  That one year lasted forever, her longing for him initially relieved by his frequent letters. But they came less and less often until his last one arrived three months before he was discharged. The long silence worried her.

  A year later, a haggard stranger came back. Thin to the point of emaciation, his pants were held up by a length of rope. His fair glossy curls had given way to a buzz cut so short that in sunlight he looked bald. His complexion was ashen, dry; his cheeks and somehow faded eyes were sunken. His nails were bitten to the quick, blood-rimmed, and he chewed on his fingers constantly, unable to hold a conversation of any length. He clung to her as if she was all that stood between him and a terrifying descent into frigid darkness.

  A month after he returned, he gathered all his prints and negatives and built a bonfire in back of the house. He couldn’t be persuaded to save any of his work. Jaw clenched, eyes narrowed, he stood chewing on a forefinger, watching until the fire burned to ash. Tally stayed to one side, trying to understand what was happening, able only to believe that what he’d experienced in Viet Nam had been too dreadful to tolerate. His very being had been altered by the experience.

  She thought he might rally when her pregnancy was confirmed. But he shook his head. ‘It’s a mistake,’ he told her, anxious and fearful. ‘This isn’t a world fit for children. You should get rid of it while you can,’ he said with frightful solemnity.

  ‘I want this baby,’ she said quietly, wounded. ‘And once you meet him or her, you’ll want the baby, too.’

  ‘No! It’s a mistake,’ he said again.

  She tried to get help for him, arranging appointments Clayton refused to keep. ‘Please let me help you,’ she asked repeatedly.

  He just shook his head and walked off to the river’s edge where he’d sit unmoving for hours simply staring at the water. He no longer read or listened to music. He just sat, looking out but, in reality, gazing inward.

  She tried to comfort him, tried to get him to talk. Nothing worked. The gifted, sensitive man she’d known was in hiding or perhaps gone forever. Nothing she said or did had any effect. He was fretful, jittery. He’d lost the ability to smile. He couldn’t eat more than a bite or two of anything. He had nightmares that caused him to cry out, startling both of them into wakefulness. He wept without warning, inconsolable. She’d gaze into his eyes, searching, but unable to find him. She had no idea who this person was but she couldn’t give up trying to retrieve the man she loved who had to be still somewhere inside him.

  When she returned late one afternoon from her regular monthly trip to Carson City for a check-up with her obstetrician, she found the driveway crowded with emergency and police vehicles. Her heartbeat turned chaotic, her mouth went dry. Alba had been keeping a watch out for her and came running to steer her away from the house. ‘Don’t go in,’ Alba warned her. ‘Come with me, Tally, please come with me.’

  But of course she went in, entering in time to see the paramedics cutting Clay down from the center beam in the living room. The coroner, the sheriff and several deputies stood by, watching. They were terribly gentle with him, lowering his weight into the body bag on the waiting stretcher, zipping closed the lurid black container before bearing him away. The coroner was holding Tally’s hand but she didn’t notice until she turned to watch the paramedics directing the stretcher out to the ambulance, when the warmth of the hand enclosing hers penetrated the chill that gripped her. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t think.

  She was twenty-one years old, six months pregnant, a widow.

  Ten weeks later, Anna was born. And for the first time since Clayton died, Tally felt warm. Alba and Joe fussed, insisting on babysitting Anna the first night home so Tally could get some rest. Seeing the baby in Joe’s strong brown arms was comforting. As she lay down to nap, Tally couldn’t help thinking things were beginning to look a bit brighter.

  Anna was easy, a jolly baby who loved to eat, loved to sleep, loved being cuddled and sung to. She had thick dark curls and chubby limbs and her eyes quickly turned the familiar crystal blue of her father’s eyes; she splashed happily with excited energy while being bathed in the kitchen sink. She made giddy noises as her hands smacked at the water. Alba stood by with a towel, ready to receive the baby for the nightly ritual of cooing and cuddling and then a feeding with her mother before bed.

  Then one morning five months into her motherhood, Tally got up and went to get Anna for her morning feed. She looked into the crib to see that the baby lay motionless. Her skin was cool. Tally couldn’t breathe, and held the baby, trying to think what to do. She felt her mind starting to melt.

  The same paramedics came again and so did one of the deputies. Anna couldn’t be r
evived. The assistant district attorney arrived, as did the coroner, and they talked quietly with the paramedics while Tally clutched the baby, trying to will her awake, trying to infuse her body with vital warmth.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ the young lawyer said consolingly, a hand touching lightly to her shoulder.

  ‘So very, very sorry,’ the coroner said.

  Then they went on their way.

  Joe and Alba gazed on in shock as Tally begged the paramedics to explain what had happened to Anna, to explain how she could just go to sleep and not wake up again. The older of the two EMTs, Paiute-Shoshone like Alba and Joe, with a much lived-in face, said softly, ‘It happens sometimes. It just happens, and there’s no explanation.’

  Tally couldn’t absorb that and continued rocking the baby in her arms until, finally, Alba convinced her to let the paramedics take Anna. ‘You’ll see her later,’ Alba said.

  ‘She’ll still be dead,’ Tally replied, noticing the depth of the wrinkles surrounding Alba’s eyes. She realized she had no idea how old the woman was. In her late sixties, maybe her late seventies? She looked ancient. Why had Tally never really looked at her before?

  Alba eased the baby out of Tally’s arms and surrendered her to the older paramedic, then held Tally gently, securely, while Joe went with the men out to the ambulance.

  It was over. Dead husband. Dead baby.

  But no. It was an election year and the district attorney wanted to make a case out of Anna’s death. So despite the assistant district attorney’s angry argument that there was no case, that according to the paramedics and the coroner, there was no evidence of any physical harm to the baby, the DA charged Tally with second-degree murder. A murder trial would make the district attorney the center of attention, especially if she tried the case herself. It would ensure her re-election.

  Tally found an old Chanel suit of her mother’s that seemed perfect for the occasion and wore it when she surrendered herself to the surprised sheriff, who said in an undertone, ‘Go home, girl, and talk to your lawyer.’

  ‘Just lock me up and be done with it,’ Tally said tonelessly.

  ‘Natalie Paxton, I’ve known you your whole life. You’re no murderer. You’ve had lousy luck and that’s the God’s honest truth. It’s a goddamned shame. But you’re young; you still have a future. Don’t go along with this bullshit! There’s no case!’

  She was deaf to his words.

  When she learned what Tally had done, Alba immediately phoned Warren and he got on the next flight, arriving at the jail in a rental car that afternoon.

  ‘We’ll fight this,’ he told Tally, having made some calls from the airport before he’d boarded his flight. ‘They have no grounds. This DA is blowing smoke, making noise to get attention so she can win re-election.’

  ‘I don’t care, Warren,’ she said, defeated. ‘I just don’t care.’

  ‘Tally, the penalty for second-degree murder is fifteen years in prison!’

  ‘I don’t care, Warren.’

  ‘If you plead guilty, Tally, if you allocute, it can’t be undone. Let me get a Nevada criminal lawyer in to defend you. Any halfway decent attorney will get the case thrown out. For chrissake, a first-year law student could get this thrown out!’

  ‘Thank you for caring, Warren. Would you please draw up papers to transfer ownership of the ranch to Alba and Joe? Annalise would have wanted them to have it. And will you take care of everything for me while I’m away? Whatever needs doing.’

  ‘You know I will,’ he told her with unshed tears in the rims of his eyes.

  ‘Good. I’m very tired now. I’d like to lie down.’

  Seeing she would not be swayed, he kissed her forehead and left her there.

  In a special session the next day, with only Warren, Alba and Joe in the courtroom, Tally waived her right to counsel and confessed. ‘I must have done it,’ she told the judge. ‘No one else was there.’

  Even the judge asked her to reconsider, but Tally said, ‘Let’s finish this,’ and sentence was passed. Fifteen years, as Warren had warned. She didn’t care; she was beyond caring. Her life had started to unravel with Clayton’s death and had ended with Anna’s. She was as dead as they were.

  ‘And that’s the story,’ Tally said, taking a swallow of her now-cold coffee. ‘The district attorney did not win re-election, by the way.’ She looked down to see that Faith’s hand was wrapped around her own, as if tethering her to the present. She looked into the girl’s eyes and for a moment she knew how it might have been to be mother to an eighteen-year-old Anna. It was possible, she thought, that surrogates appeared through some cosmic mutual need. Whatever it was, Faith felt to Tally like an unexpected and very valuable gift: a daughter to stand in for the one she’d lost.

  You can be my mother, Faith thought, sensing Tally’s thoughts. I want to be a daughter. I need so badly to be someone’s child.

  Hay’s thoughts were on the dead soldier and he recalled Tally’s comment that day they’d spent together in the snowstorm. He remembered saying to her, Those of us who did come home . . . we weren’t the same.

  And she’d replied, No. Not the same at all.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said quietly now, ‘it had something to do with Clayton’s philosophy on sunshine. To me, it didn’t feel as if the sun ever shone benevolently in ’Nam.’ He shook his head. ‘Things happened over there . . . beyond belief. It was hard to wrap your mind around the stuff that went on. And most of the guys were still teenagers. So young, too young really . . . It was like some novel of insane horror fiction, a book that just would not end.’

  Gazing intently at Hay, Tally said, ‘Clayton talked all the time about how the sun didn’t shine anymore. I couldn’t make sense of what he was trying to tell me, no matter how hard I tried.’

  ‘No one who wasn’t there could ever make sense of the things that went on, Tally. There was no rhyme nor reason to any of it.’ He took a deep breath and shook his head again. ‘We ended up with thousands of dead kids and five or ten times as many wounded or eternally damaged ones. And for no real reason.’

  His eyes on his hands as he rolled a fresh cigarette, he said, ‘I signed up as a translator. Completely clueless.’ He shook his head, a mix of disgust and bewilderment in his expression. ‘My mother was French. We lived in Paris the first five years of my life,’ he explained, glancing up briefly. ‘My dad was head of the European arm of an American corporation. Anyway’ – another shake of his head – ‘I was just graduating from Princeton with a major in French and a minor in communications. I was fluent, thanks to my mother, and the military needed French-speakers in Viet Nam. The recruiters offered most of the guys in my graduating class commissions. Second lieutenant. I didn’t think of it as going to war. It just seemed as if it’d be an interesting job with an impressive-sounding title.’ He rolled his eyes at his youthful naivety. ‘There was no limit to my ignorance.’ He paused to light his cigarette, then said, ‘The short version is I was captured just walking along the street in Hanoi one afternoon. They thought I was someone important because of the uniform and the insignia. Two men grabbed me, threw a burlap bag that smelled of chickens over my head and shoved me into the back of a car. I couldn’t believe what was happening. And they refused to believe I had nothing of any value to tell them. So after their efforts with small hand tools failed to get them any useful information, despite my willingness to spout their propaganda or say any damn thing they wanted me to say, I got put into a “black box” for seven months.’

  His eyes filled and he had to pause to pull himself together. Even all these years later, the mere thought of that box made him feel he was on the verge of death, unable to breathe or see properly. Terrifying shapes in the narrow darkness, eerie sounds in the near distance, the sense that insects were crawling over him so that he couldn’t stop clawing at his skin.

  He took a hard drag on his cigarette, then continued.

  ‘After the first couple of weeks I couldn’t think my way past it. I just crie
d all the time. Couldn’t stop. Could not stop. Pitch black, no room to stand up. Everything got utterly distorted. Even when they let me out for an hour now and then I couldn’t function. I remembered how to do things, simple things like washing myself, but it took me some time to actually do them. I could feel myself slipping away, letting go. And all the time I kept crying, on and on.

  ‘I probably would’ve been in the box a lot longer, until I lost my mind altogether or until I died, but a group of relatively new POWs staged a breakout. And suddenly I was outside, able to move, and there was a bit of light again in the world. By the second day out, the tears stopped.

  ‘The newer guys brought along the older ones who were still mobile, and we all helped carry the ones who couldn’t walk; everybody helping everyone else. Somehow, amazingly, the whole group was able to cover the miles to Hanoi.

  ‘About half of us were given honorable discharges and after getting checked out by the medical staff, we were to be shipped home. The rest of the guys were given a few weeks’ R & R and then put back on active duty. I was one of the group that got discharged – for which I was then and still am now grateful to the bottom of my soul. I’d been terrified that they’d make me stay in country.

  ‘While I was awaiting transport, all I could think about was getting home to my parents, especially my father. We were very close . . .

  ‘Then the mail caught up to me – a big envelope stuffed with almost a year’s worth. I learned in a letter from my father’s lawyer that there was nothing left of home. A dryer fire set the house ablaze one winter night five months earlier, and my parents were asphyxiated in their sleep.’ He gazed off into space for a long moment, then shook his head yet again and took another drag on his cigarette.

  ‘I took a couple of downers one of the other guys en route home offered me. And for the first time in a year I slept through an entire night. It felt like a gift, beneficence. I woke up feeling physically a little stronger and mentally shredded. I started shopping among the men and by the time I was on-board the transport home, I’d amassed enough pills to help me sleep for a thousand nights.