Other People's Children

by R. J. Hoffmann

  “She’s ours,” he managed. Even to Jon, his terror sounded a lot like wonder.

  Gail pressed close. Eleanor wiped tears with a tissue. Paul focused and clicked. Paige stood apart from the rest of them, folders of paperwork clutched to her chest, staring hard at the door she had just come through.

  Gail

  All the nurses, doctors, and machines with blinking lights made Gail feel safe in the hospital. After Paige told Gail that Carli had been discharged, she felt even safer. They wouldn’t see Carli again. Gail had insisted that they stop communicating after the birth. She just couldn’t imagine sharing a child with another mother.

  Gail held Maya, and Jon held Maya, and they fed her, and they stood at the glass with their noses pressed against it. Gail’s mom and dad stopped by, but thankfully they didn’t stay long, so Gail and Jon only had to share Maya with the nurses. Gail couldn’t wait to get Maya home, but when, after a day and a half, the hospital let them take her, it all seemed terribly abrupt. They signed the discharge papers, and a nurse gave them the baby and said they could go.

  “That’s it?” Jon asked.

  “That’s it,” Gail said.

  The sliding glass doors whooshed open, and they walked through with Maya. Just like that, they were out in the world.

  “It just seems like there should be some sort of training process,” Jon said. “Some sort of certification.”

  “We’ll figure it out. Where’d you park?”

  Jon stood on the curb scanning the sea of cars, looking utterly lost. “This way,” he said. “I think.”

  They walked up and down three rows of cars but couldn’t find theirs. “Did you park in the garage?”

  He shook his head, scanned the lot, changed directions again. Gail followed, carrying Maya. She couldn’t help wondering how they would care for this little human if they couldn’t even find their car in the parking lot.

  “It’s just that we’ve been here so many times over the last few days,” he said. He held the key fob up on the air, pressed the unlock button. “There should be a manual at least.”

  “For finding your car?”

  “No. A baby manual. A how-to. Frequently asked questions. Something.”

  Gail smiled to herself. She’d read dozens of books about what to expect, what to buy, how to get your baby to sleep through the night, how to potty-train. She learned how to cure diaper rash and colic and scabies even. She’d read the FAQs on hundreds of websites. She left a few of the thinner books on Jon’s nightstand, but they all found their way back to her own unread. She was certified. She could probably write the manual that Jon was asking about, but he wouldn’t read that, either.

  “We’ll be fine.”

  Finally, their car chirped from two rows over. Jon loaded the gear into the trunk. Gail settled Maya into her car seat, and Maya immediately began to cry. Gail strapped her in. She cried louder. Gail loosened the straps. Maya screamed.

  “What’s wrong?” Jon asked.

  “She’s crying,” Gail said. “That’s what babies do.”

  But even as Gail said this, she unbuckled the straps. She lifted Maya out of the seat, made sure that nothing was under her, lowered her back in. She only cried louder. Gail buckled the harness again, adjusted the straps. “She’ll probably stop once we get moving.”

  Gail climbed into the back seat next to Maya. When the car started moving, Maya kept screaming. Jon peered into the rearview mirror. “Is she hungry?”

  “I fed her right before we left. Keep your eyes on the road.”

  Tears streamed down Maya’s scarlet face. Gail tried to slip her pinky into Maya’s hand, but her fists squeezed tight. Gail knew it was perfectly normal for Maya to cry, but she wondered if it was normal that she wanted to cry, too.

  “Does she need to be changed?” Jon asked, his eyes twitching in the mirror.

  “I changed her right before we left. Drive.”

  With every cluster of traffic, with every red light, Maya renewed her protests. Jon kept glancing up. “Can you just try feeding her?”

  “Fine,” Gail snapped. She pulled a bottle from her bag and poured water from the thermos. She dropped the nipple onto the floor. She scrabbled through her bag for another. She’d heard babies cry before, but the truth was, none of the books she read, none of those websites prepared her for the knot in her stomach when the crying baby was her own. She finally found another top and attached it to the bottle. She shook it and tried to ease the nipple into Maya’s mouth, but Maya’s lips remained stubbornly closed. When Gail took the bottle away, Maya screamed even louder. Jon accelerated.

  When they careened onto Myrtle, Gail saw the sign that someone had planted in the front yard next to the redbud tree. WELCOME HOME, MAYA!, it shouted, the pink letters almost matching the blossoms on the tree. Pink balloons bounced in the wind. Gail relaxed just a little. Jon parked, hopped out of the car, and opened the back door. His hands shook as he unbuckled Maya and lifted her out. He cradled her to his shoulder and patted her back, but she screamed. He walked back and forth on the driveway, whispering into her ear.

  Gail unlocked the front door. Jon paced back and forth in the front room, then the dining room, patting Maya’s back, whispering. He tried funny faces. She screamed. He handed her to Gail, and Maya wailed. They checked her diaper, but she was dry. They tried another bottle. She screamed. They took her temperature with the ear thermometer and with the one that swiped across her forehead, but they both read normal. Maya’s face grew purple from the screaming.

  “Should we call the doctor?” Jon asked.

  “And tell him what?” Gail asked. “That our baby is crying?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She was never like this at the hospital.”

  “Jon, we can do this,” Gail said, for herself as much as for Jon.

  Jon played his guitar and Maya screamed along. They tried laying her in the crib, but that didn’t last long. They tried the rocking chair. Gail sang to her, and Jon even tried the Cookie Monster hand puppet, but she just cried louder.

  An hour and a half after they arrived home, Gail held Maya in the sunroom and stared out the back window at the buds on the maple. She considered the unthinkable: calling Cindy, or worse yet, her mom, for advice on their first day home. Maya was still screaming when Jon came up behind Gail and wrapped his arms around them both. Her crying slowed as he swayed all three of them back and forth and hummed “Helplessly Hoping.” She settled to a whimper as Jon kissed her on the crown of her head. Just before Jon whispered “I love you” into Gail’s ear, a blessed silence settled upon the house.

  Carli

  Carli put Band-Aids on her nipples before she put on her bra. Nobody had warned her about the leaking, and her first day home, two warm wet circles of milk had soaked through her shirt while she watched TV. It took her a while to find pants that fit. All the maternity clothes that Gail bought for her were too big, and her jeans from before were all too small. She finally settled on a pair of black sweatpants. Black, in case she bled.

  When she came down the hall into the front room, she found her sister, Wendy, and her boyfriend, Randy, sprawled on the couch, their legs tangled on the coffee table. The curtains were closed against the sunlight to protect the hangover they were inevitably nursing. Randy was playing a video game—first-person shooter by the looks of it—while Wendy painted her fingernails. Randy was tall, quiet, his red hair buzzed short. Wendy looked a lot like Carli—the same dirty-blond hair, freckles, the blue eyes set just a little too far apart—but everyone had always called Wendy the pretty one. Carli knew it was Wendy’s confidence, her arrogance really, that made people say it.

  “Marla just left,” Wendy said, her voice husky from lack of sleep. “Which is good for you, because something must have crawled up her ass.”

  Randy chuckled, but maybe he just belched. His thumbs danced across the game controller, and his eyes never left the TV.

  Wendy was ten when she first started calling their mom Ma
rla. It was the day that Marla kicked Wendy out of the car for spilling a soda and made her walk the last mile home. Wendy never called her Mom again after that, and Carli, just eight at the time, followed Wendy’s lead. Marla never said anything about it—she pretended not to care—but Carli sometimes saw Marla stiffen a bit when she heard her first name like that.

  “Where you goin’?” Wendy asked.

  “Pickin’ up my check,” Carli said.

  “Stop at Seven-Eleven on the way home. I need a pack of Camels.”

  “And a Red Bull,” Randy said. He hacked up something solid and swallowed it back down. He never took his eyes off the screen.

  Carli cranked the dead bolt and opened the door. Wendy looked up, squinted into the light. “And stay the hell away from Marla. She’s got that look.”

  Carli gripped the black pipe railing and eased herself down the three concrete steps. Stairs made the stitches pull. When she lowered herself into her Corolla, she sucked her teeth. Eighteen years had taught Carli to expect little from Wendy, but they were sisters, and as she drove to Giamonti’s, she couldn’t stop thinking about everything that Wendy didn’t say, what she never asked. It was like she had done her best to ignore all the puking and the eating and Carli’s bulging belly. She never asked about the strange lady in the Subaru who picked her up and dropped her off. She didn’t say anything about the hospital or the baby or the leaking milk. For Carli, everything had changed, but I need a pack of Camels was the best Wendy could manage.

  * * *

  Carli turned into the strip mall and pulled up in front of Pay Day Loans so that nobody from work could watch her struggle out of the car. As she walked past the empty storefronts where Kinko’s and Blockbuster used to be, she tried to walk normal, but it was hard to remember what normal felt like.

  When she looked through the tinted glass, past the row of empty booths, she saw red hair behind the counter and froze. Marissa. Andy was with Marissa before Carli, and she turned nasty after Carli and Andy hooked up. Carli’s hand rested on the door handle, and she thought about coming back the next day, but she needed that check. She pulled the door open, and the bell rang. Marissa looked up and saw Carli. Her dull blue eyes brightened. One corner of her mouth lifted a bit.

  Carli avoided looking at the clowns as she made her way to the counter. Tommy Giamonti’s wife decorated the place back before she died of colon cancer, and Tommy wouldn’t let anybody change a thing. Nobody could explain why she chose the clown theme, but between all the beer mirrors hung pictures of clowns. Photos and drawings, color and black-and-white, large and small, all of them clowns.

  “How you feelin’?” Marissa asked when Carli got to the counter.

  “Fine,” Carli said. “Is Matt in today?”

  “Nope. Rick’s the manager.”

  Marissa and Rick. She should have called first. She walked past the counter, through the empty, greasy kitchen. She heard pans clattering in the dish room. She made her way to the tiny office in back near the time clock. Rick rattled the keys on the adding machine with one hand and traced a column of numbers on a sheet of paper with the other. He wore his red Giamonti’s polo shirt and black jeans. His wispy yellow hair strained to cover his bald spot. His face, as always, bloomed as red as his shirt, as if he was angry or had been holding his breath. When he finished with the numbers, he leaned back in his chair against the file cabinet and looked her up and down. “Well. If it isn’t the handmaid herself.”

  Carli worked to keep her hands away from her belly where the empty place was beginning to stir. “I came for my check.”

  “ ’Course you did,” Rick said, but made no move to get it. “Everything turn out all right? Ten fingers? Ten toes?”

  “Can I please just have my check?” Carli said. She focused on the Corvette calendar above Rick’s head.

  “Sure. Of course.” He started to work the small safe. “Just wanted to make sure everything went OK. You know me—always trying to make sure that the customers are satisfied.”

  Carli looked away, toward the ovens, and then back to find an envelope in Rick’s hands.

  “Should I put you back on the schedule?”

  Carli thought about the stitches and the dull ache that coated everything, but she also thought about her tuition bill and credit card minimums and her car payment. “Yeah. Any day but Wednesday. I got class on Wednesday.”

  “Right.” His lips twitched. “College girl.”

  He tossed her the envelope, but she missed it, and it fell to the floor. Rick swiveled back to the adding machine and resumed pounding the keys. Carli eyed the check before bending awkwardly to get it. She stretched against the pain. Just as she picked up the envelope, she felt a sharp pull at the stitches, and she swallowed a breath. When she stood and walked toward the front, she felt blood trickle down her leg. She walked past the register, past Marissa, without a word.

  “I saw Andy last night,” Marissa said to her back.

  Carli said nothing and kept walking. The clowns leered.

  “He asked me if you really gave away his baby.”

  The leg of Carli’s sweatpants was warm and wet and sticky. She pushed through the door. Marissa said something else, but it was drowned out by the sound of cars rushing by on Division.

  Jon

  Jon looked for Gail. He padded around in his socks, searching all the logical places, trying to keep quiet. The old house made noises that he’d never noticed before. He was finding the floorboards that creaked, the steps that groaned. He thought Gail might be sitting in the nursery watching Maya nap, making sure that Maya was still breathing. She wasn’t there, but he stood at the door for several minutes, watching Maya nap, making sure that Maya was still breathing. Gail wasn’t in the kitchen fixing something to eat. She wasn’t in the front room, consulting her lists or making new lists. She wasn’t in the office, sorting through paperwork, filing things away. He finally found her in the bedroom, lying on the bed, hair spread across the pillow, hands folded across her stomach. Her eyes were closed, but he could tell by her breathing that she was awake.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She smiled but didn’t open her eyes. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”

  “You need me to get anything from the store?”

  “No. We have everything.”

  And the way she said everything, the way she licked the syllables, drew them out as if they were three separate words, told Jon that she didn’t just mean formula and diapers and lunch meat and milk. And the way that her lips settled back into a relaxed, gentle smile, convinced him that, for the first time in a long time, nothing was wrong, there was nothing to solve. He lay down on his side of the bed, careful not to let it creak. Gail shimmied over and snuggled in next to him, her head tucked into his armpit, her leg across his. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d ventured to his side of the bed.

  “She’s perfect,” Gail said.

  “I thought that she was never going to stop crying.”

  “They do that.”

  He’d known, of course, that babies cry. All their friends’ babies cried, and the babies in the Jewel cried, and there was that baby on that flight from Chicago to San Francisco who didn’t stop crying for four hours. But it had always just been noise, an annoyance, and he’d always thought embarrassment turned the parents’ faces red. But when Maya started to cry in the car, his whole body seized up and his breath came in gulps, as if he had emphysema, or rabies. His jaw still ached from the clenching. Every scream sounded like failure.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Gail asked.

  “Huh?”

  “She’s right in there. In the next room. And she’s ours.”

  He still couldn’t get used to the feel of her in his arms, so light and so heavy at the same time. Her skin was so soft and so thin. She squinted at him as if she recognized him, as if she was blaming him for something already.

  “And scary.”

  “Yeah.” Gail snuggled in closer. “A little sca
ry, too.”

  That baby was counting on them for everything. Food, clothes, shelter, college. And what if he lost her or dropped her? “You sure you don’t need me to get anything?”

  And just then it started. A tiny whimper and then a cough, and then it gathered to a full-throated scream. Gail giggled. “Just Maya.”

  They both got up and walked into the nursery. Gail plucked Maya from the crib and carried her to the changing table. “Hold her hands while I change her.”

  Jon gripped her tiny hands, while Gail peeled off the diaper and wiped Maya down. He knew that he should be watching, that he needed to learn how to do it, but Maya’s fingers wrapped around his pinky and distracted him. They were like tiny grown-up fingers, perfectly shaped, and she squeezed his pinky tighter than he expected. The neighbor’s golden retriever barked. He wriggled his finger, tried to ease it from her grip, but Maya held on tight. And then Gail was done, and he had missed his first training session entirely. He picked up Maya and held her carefully, tight enough to keep her from falling, but not so tight that he would break her.

  “You get the next one,” Gail said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “See, I’ve never really done that before. What if she squirms off the table?”

  “She won’t,” Gail said. “You won’t let her.”

  Jon eyed the changing table. It was way too high. He would just lay Maya on the floor until he figured things out.

  “My parents are coming over tomorrow morning.”

  Jon groaned.

  “I know,” Gail said. “She was like a bill collector. Calling every two hours.”