by Pete Fromm
She pulls up a shaky smile, and says, “Can I see her?”
If his hands weren’t full, he’d slap himself on the forehead. He turns, offering the arm cradling the baby, and she lifts her up, almost wrapping around her. She tilts her head to the room, says, “Could I?” and he says, “Of course,” and without another word she leaves her suitcase at the door and slips into their room, and all Taz can do is walk down the hall to the other room, the nursery, clutching the bag of groceries with undue care, feeling something cold inside, smelling onions. He settles the groceries into the crib and starts out, but at the door stops, wondering where he’ll go, what he could possibly do. He reaches for the knob and slowly pushes the door shut, steps back and sits on their big-girl bed, and through the polished fir of the door, five raised panels, a century of paints peeled off with a heat gun, Marnie finishing it off with steel wool, he hears Lauren break down.
DAY 4
It is sometime in the middle of the night he guesses. The baby lies on the bathroom counter, on a towel he’s folded over the leprous Formica. The diaper is off, in his hand, and he stares down at the baby’s smooth nakedness. There is a plastic clip over the nubbin of umbilical cord that looks like it could fall off, though at the checkup that morning they’d said it all looked good. He doesn’t know which of the S’s the baby is on. How far past three they go.
From the doorway, Marnie’s mother says, “Ted? Is there anything I can do?” She nearly has to shout.
He’s in his underwear. His hair sticks every which way. He hasn’t slept in four days. He says, “Why do you ask?”
She tips her head, gives him her own version of the look.
“Needing some shades,” he says.
She’s blank.
“You know, ‘Future’s so bright I gotta wear shades?’ It’s a song.”
“I know,” she says, and steps into the bathroom.
“You do?” he asks, like he might not have heard. The baby’s screams echo off the old tile, ricochet around the room.
She sings, barely a murmur, “Things are going great, and they’re only getting better.”
He glances around the bathroom, as if their crate of records might be sitting right there. “Marn’s got it on vinyl somewhere.”
“I know,” she says. “She stole it from me.”
He looks back to her, surprised, and she smiles, waves it away, says, “It’s okay. I haven’t missed it.”
The three of them crowded into the shotgun bath; one sink, double faucet, one hot, one cold, the skiff of delaminated countertop. The leaky throne, the rusted claw-foot. Tiny hex tile, white gone to gray. Along with the kitchen, one of the bigger reasons they could even pretend to afford the place. On the towel, the baby wails, staring into light he’s sure should be blinding.
He blinks, finishes taking a new, factory-folded diaper off the stack in the corner. Pulls it open, lifts the baby by the ankles, her rear off the towel by an inch, slides the diaper underneath, works the Velcro.
Her mother tightens the sash of her robe, preparing for business. She says, “I’ll take her. Really, you need to sleep.”
He buttons the onesie around the legs and picks her up, holds her squalling against his ear, drowning out all else. “I’ve been sleeping like a baby,” he says, then, to sound less like an asshole, adds, “I have to learn how to do this.”
He waits for her to step into the hallway, then slips past to the baby’s room, the bassinet in the crib, the big-girl bed, leaves Lauren standing abandoned in the hallway, and stands alone himself, rocking the baby until, at last, she takes a staggered, deep sigh of a breath and stops, eyelids fluttering down. Sleep. A moment later he hears steps, shuffling in the darkness to their room, his and Marnie’s, the cherry double bed, the stained mattress.
In the dark, he puts the baby in the basket, settling her in like she’s nitro. On her side. Moves the rolled blanket against her back. To keep her from tipping over, something the nurse showed him. Or a book they’d read. Something.
He hears, down the hallway, her weight settle onto the mattress, the slight crush of springs, the creak of a slat, and then nothing. She just sitting there, as awake as he is, as alone without Marn. He sits, too, his hands weighing down the ends of his arms, the same way his head weighs at his neck. Eventually, no noise coming from the crib, or from down the hall, he sets his elbows on his knees, and lets his head sink into his hands, too lost to dare close his eyes, afraid of what he’ll find there in the dark, in his head.
DAY 5
He wakes sitting in the rocker, alone, tilts away from its spindles. Each spindle has left a groove in his back. He opens and closes his eyes. Looks first for Marnie. He is still in the nursery, in his boxers, a baby blanket stretched across his lap. Folded over. Pinched beneath his legs. A little hammock he remembers making for her. Tiny flowers, a web of vines. Rocking the only thing that put her back to sleep. But there is no baby.
He rubs at his eyes. His neck. Flexes his back. Wonders if he’s still asleep, if he’ll finally, at last, wake back up, right next to Marn, huge, the mattress as clean as the day they brought it home.
He takes in the whole room. Morning, the windows not yet shut against the heat, a breeze easing in. More than a hint of smoke now, the air palled with it. The September fires scorching everything in their path.
He grips the arms of the rocker, glances down, checks the floor, under the bed. “Come out, come out,” he says, his voice like a stick against concrete.
He stands slowly, shakily, and from height can see into the empty bassinet. “My god, Marn,” he whispers, “she’s walking already.”
He turns, sees the single bed, still made, never yet slept in. Turtles swim on the turned-back sheets. Not cartoon turtles, no Yertles, just blocky prints of sea turtles, blue-black but mottled with sunlight, sailing through their silence.
Her mother, he thinks. She must have taken her from his lap. Something he’d never felt. World’s worst guard dog. The baby Lindberghed from underneath his very nose.
He eases down the hallway, peeks around the corner into the living room. The two of them sound asleep. The baby in her lap, Lauren is half curled around her on the mangy couch he has yet to throw out. For a moment he can’t take his eyes away. The blond’s frosted in, not quite hiding traces of gray, and her mouth’s slack, a gold crown glinting, but, still, he sees Marn there, just like that, giving him a break, taking her turn. Out like a light.
He slides back to the bedroom and sits on the edge of the second bed he’d ever built, the big-girl bed he’d made as much for Marnie as for their baby; walnut he hadn’t scrounged, that they couldn’t afford, fitted mortise to tenon. A blind fox joint he’d brought in from the shop to show Marn, explaining the bevels, the wedges, how you had to trust it would fit, how, once joined, it was impossible to take apart. One try and done. His first one. Getting way ahead of himself, she’d told him. But she’d bought the sheets, matching, kind of, her stencils, finished it that way; the bugs in the sky, the turtles in the sea. Their whole world ready.
He fingers the hem of the sheet, edges it back and slides between them, slips underwater with the turtles, still hoping to wake up.
DAY 6
His dresser is in his and Marnie’s room, her mother’s room now. He pulls the same shorts and T-shirt from the floor beside the bed, puts them on again.
The bathroom door is open, a new towel folded beside the sink. He reaches and touches it. There are more diapers on the stack. The diaper pail beneath the sink is empty, smelling of bleach.
At the end of the hall, their bedroom door is also open. He stands in front of it, says her mother’s name, clears his throat, tries again. “Lauren?” He leans in, but can’t make himself go any further.
In the living room, on top of Marn’s old hoop rug, yet another blanket has been folded and the baby lies on it, blinking at the ceiling. He wonders how long since he has seen her. The ceiling fan whirls at its lowest setting. The baby seems enthralled. Maybe
it can focus now.
He stands in the hallway door, a hand up on each side of the jamb, watching the baby watching the fan. The sleep, however long it was, has cleared some fog, the baby coming more into focus, and he forgets about his search for her mother, until, from the kitchen doorway, she says, “Ted?”
He turns, sees her holding a spatula, her right hip canted out, a ghost stance that staggers him.
“Did you get some sleep?”
He tilts his head toward the baby. “I must have.”
“Your friend’s out on the porch. Rudy. He won’t come in. He says he’s fine, but he never leaves.”
Taz blinks, glances through the window, Rudy hunched out there like a gargoyle. Now and then he’s heard him talk to someone, a friendly murmur, sometimes a ‘Thanks,’ or a ‘No, not yet,’ drifting through the open window, occasionally a ‘Fine,’ and once a ‘Well, how do you think?’—Hagrid’s Fluffy barring the door. “That’s Rude for you,” he says.
She shakes her head. “You people and your names.” But she tries a smile, says, “I’m making eggs.”
He turns for the shower. “He’ll eat as many as you can make.”
She says, “I’ll scramble the whole dozen. Don’t be long.”
He stays under the showerhead until the hot gives out. Finds himself standing there shivering.
He steals into his room, slips fresh clothes from the dresser she’d refinished, does not glance anywhere else, take a chance of even a glimpse of anything of Marn’s.
Her mother lets him get dressed before she tells him to come to the table. She does not ask.
The eggs are already on the plates. Mountains of them. Bacon. She is holding the baby. She says, “You need to eat as much as you needed that sleep. And then we need to talk.”
He looks down at the table, rubs at his face. “I’m sorry, but I, I don’t really remember anything, not since . . . Do we have a plan?”
She dips a shoulder, maybe a shrug, maybe just rocking the baby. “Who would have planned anything like this?” she says, but quickly adds, “I came one-way. That was the plan. Just staying as long as Marnie needed.”
He can’t imagine Marnie ever making any such plan. He picks up his fork, takes a bite, feels guilty for it. The mindless body, insisting on going on.
“Ted?” she says, as soon as his mouth is full. “There’s the funeral to think about.”
He pushes back his chair.
“You can’t,” she says. “You can’t just not.”
“After breakfast, okay?” he says, picking up his plate. “I better feed the beast out there,” he says, heading for the door, even as she calls out that she’s already taken a plate to him, that he still wouldn’t come inside.
He drops down on the porch steps beside Rudy, who does have his own plate, is busy shoveling it in. Beside him sits a full ham, wrapped in clear plastic. “Hards and Dan dropped it off a while ago,” he says. “Your third ham.” He waves his fork toward what is suddenly a kind of garden. “I just started planting the flowers.”
Taz looks, sees some actual plants holed into the weeds, more just bouquets, cut flowers, ribbons hanging limp, the card holders stuck into the ground along with the flowers. Rudy gardening, nothing hard to believe anymore. Taz says, “She ask you in?”
Rudy pushes in bacon along with the eggs. “I opted for the company out here.” He uses a knuckle to push in a bit of egg. “But, man, she can cook.”
“They’re eggs,” Taz says, and watches Rudy eat, the flurry of it. He cannot muster another bite himself. “Anybody can scramble an egg.”
Rudy shoots him a glance, trial-runs a smile. “You couldn’t scramble an egg like this if you lived in a henhouse.”
“You crack them, you whip them around.”
“There’s all sorts of other goodness in here.”
“It’s called cheese, Rude.”
“And onions, the green kind.”
Rudy picks through the eggs, and Taz looks down the block. “Mushrooms, maybe,” Rudy says. “Some sort of fungi.”
“Only fungi around here is whatever’s growing on you,” Taz manages.
“Cold, man,” Rudy says, polishing his plate with his toast. “So?” he asks.
Still looking down the street, Taz says, “So what?”
“How’s the little one?”
“She’s asleep.”
“The big one?”
“I don’t even know when she’s leaving.”
“Okay,” Rudy says.
“How about you? You planning on staying out here forever?”
“Nah. Just keeping down the riffraff. You know. The first few days.”
“Thinned out yet?”
“Pretty much. You got a week’s worth of casseroles in your freezer.”
“Thanks,” Taz says.
Rudy shrugs, glances down at Taz’s plate. “You going to—” he starts, and Taz hands it over. Watches the frenzy resume.
Taking a breather, Rudy says, “Everybody coming over, Taz, they’re, they’re just doing what they can, you know? We’re all busted up. Don’t know anything else to do.”
“I know, I just—”
“And,” Rudy says, raising his voice just enough to interrupt. “Her, in there”—he jerks a thumb back—“she’s just doing the same.”
Taz sucks in his cheeks.
“She’s been feeding me every day.” He grabs his waist, gives it a shake.
Taz looks away from that. Like feeding a stray dog, winning him over.
“So, anyway, I figure, once you get your feet under you, we’re going to have to, you know, do something. All these people coming over, they’re all in shock. They need, I don’t know, like a party or something. For Marn.”
Taz stares. “A party?”
“For Marn.”
Taz feels like he should laugh.
Rudy pushes himself to his feet, holding out the second empty plate. “You let me know when?” he says.
“What, you’re leaving?”
Rudy smiles, nods toward the front door. “I think my work here is done.”
Taz watches him amble off down the block, lifting his arm in a wave. Taz waves back, then turns, takes a breath, picks up the ham, and goes inside.
Lauren’s still at the table, the baby up on her shoulder now, facedown against the burp towel. She pats the baby’s back as she studies him, a look he remembers, as if he’s from an alien species, something she’d love to understand.
“Rudy,” he says, “loves your cooking.”
“Rudy,” she answers, “is a piece of work.”
He gives a little smile. “No doubt.”
“So,” she says. “This funeral neither of us want to face.” She keeps her hand going, the tapping on the baby’s back as gentle as raindrops.
Taz looks around the room, as if for exits. “I don’t know if I—”
The baby lets loose a burp that would make Rudy proud. Lauren almost laughs. “You know, this whole time, you’ve never even told me her name.”
Taz blinks, still thinking funeral.
“On the birth certificate it only says, Davis, girl. I haven’t even known what to call her.”
“It’s Midge,” he says.
“What?”
“Her name.”
“Madge?”
“No. Midge.” He can barely say it. “It’s a kind of fly.”
“Honestly?” she says, starting the shake of her head. “A fly?”
Standing there holding a ham, he sees Marn singing it to the swell of her belly. Her pushed-out belly button. “It was Marnie’s idea.”
She says, “All right then. Midge it is.”
DAY 7
He drives over with Rudy, plucking the pink bow from Midge’s head, sits looking at it in his hand. He glances around the truck, out the open window, as if Marnie watches, wondering, waiting. He has never even dreamt of littering before, but he flicks the bow out the window, watches it flutter in their wake, whispers, “I know, Marn, but,
seriously. Pink? The whole slippery slope.”
“What’s that?” Rudy says, and Taz just looks down at Midge, wonders if he shouldn’t have hired somebody, day care or something, not put her through this no matter what she could know.
There’s no clergy, no prayers, nothing like that, just a microphone, her friends getting up and saying some things. A few laughs, a lot of sniffling and choking up, and though whoever rented the place, put it all together, did him a huge favor, Taz can’t help but think it should have been outdoors. Up on the North Fork maybe. She’d have loved to hear the aspen leaves rustling, gold up against the smoky blue, the water hustling through it all. He puts himself there, lets the stories become the rush of the river, nothing that will lay him low.
He holds Midge the whole time, his hands occupied. No hugging. No handshaking. He looks at the floor, over people’s shoulders. She had so many friends.
People ask, and he says, Midge. The only explanation he gives is, “It’s a little bug. Tiny.” Hards, her college roommate, smiles. “What if she was a boy?”
“Midge,” he says again. “Or maybe Pike.” Almost like a conversation. “It was Marn’s idea.”
There’s a food spread, sandwich makings, some salads, but Taz still can’t muster a single bite and at the end, Rudy sidles up, says, “You need to go home with Lauren. Can’t let her drive away from this alone.”
Taz looks at him, and Rudy says, “Marn would skin you alive if you did.”
He drives her rental, the urn tight beside him. The car seat in the back, because it’s supposed to be. Her mother rides there with Midge and weeps.
People come to the house. He hadn’t expected that. Her mother tells him as they approach, she’d had it arranged, that it was necessary. She says Rudy helped. That he’d get through it. That they all would. She admits she’d rented the hall for the funeral, hired the caterer, he mumbles something about paying her back, and she just shushes him, says again that Rudy was so helpful.