The Accidentals

by Minrose Gwin

  I went two weeks after Lou Ella, a Tuesday. Nobody had told me what to expect. By the time it happened, I’d begun to worry that the skin on my belly wasn’t going to hold, that any minute I was going to pop like a balloon and the baby would come flying out as if it’d been shot from a canon.

  I’d seen enough to know about my water breaking, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, a scalding pain in my belly woke me out of a dead sleep. It set me straight up in the bed, gasping and choking.

  The new girl was awake. She took one look at me in the moonlight, her eyes dark and mysterious. “You want me to call somebody?” These were her first and last words to me.

  I nodded, still trying to catch my breath. She ran out of the room hollering at the top of her lungs, “Somebody! Somebody! Somebody come quick!”

  The nun in charge rushed into my room, her habit askew, a red line across her forehead where she’d laid her head on the desk downstairs. Over the past months, Frances had rubbed off on me. I’d planned every detail of this moment. So I was ready, more than ready, the suitcase under my bed packed three weeks ago. Every night after I brushed my teeth, I’d pack my toothbrush so I wouldn’t forget it. I’d gathered my favorite things: the ring Daniel had given me, a pretty flower pin from George, a bright orange scarf of my mother’s, a bottle of her Forbidden cologne I’d snitched before I left home. I tied the smaller items up in the scarf that I kept under my pillow.

  “I’ve called the ambulance,” the nun said. “Let’s get you downstairs and ready.” She handed me my jacket, which was hanging on the bedpost, and I struggled to get into it while she stood there waiting.

  The new girl reached over and took one of my arms and put it in the jacket; then she took the other, as if I were a little girl and she my mother. When she pulled my hair out over the collar of the jacket and smoothed my hair the way my mother used to do, I began to cry.

  WHEN I GOT to the hospital, I realized I’d forgotten the scarf with my things in it. But then another pain hit and I forgot again.

  It took me a long time to have my baby. The nurse, whose breath made me gag, leaned over me, hollering to do this and that thing, not do this or that other thing. At the end I fought the mask; I thought they were suffocating me, putting me to sleep like the animal I’d become.

  When I surfaced, there was a bright light shining in my eyes. I squinted and caught sight of the nurse as she bent over it.

  “What?” I said.

  “A girl,” the nurse said. “It’s a girl.” The nurse’s voice had an odd catch to it, as if she’d spoken in the middle of a hiccup.

  She held my baby under the light, looking down at her with an odd fascination, much, I imagine, as I might have gazed upon her had she been given to me in that moment, had I not been blinded by the light.

  Later, when I woke up again, my breasts like molten rocks, I asked for her. She’d been taken away, I was told. Policy in these cases. Never mind, I thought, I’ll see her soon enough; she won’t have to wait long for me to take her back.

  12

  Frances

  BEFORE YOU GO CASTING ASPERSIONS, PUT YOURSELF IN MY shoes. Here I was ready to take Grace’s little child, a child not my own: to take it and care for it, give it a decent life. This poor motherless child would have had not only a devoted mother but also an award-winning teacher of English grammar, with a plaque from the mayor himself to prove it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my heart was in the right place; my intentions were, well, noble, downright noble, if I do say so myself.

  What happened was most definitely not my fault.

  First of all, I should have been properly prepared. I went to the hospital expecting a minor problem. Let me emphasize minor: “a little something wrong with the upper lip, easily fixed,” the nurse said on the phone. Those were her exact words. I pressed her on this point. “What do you mean by ‘a little something wrong’?” I could hear my voice rising as I asked the question. People say I have a high voice; they mean shrill, which in this case it might have been. For one thing, I was exhausted. Grace had been in labor for eighteen hours; I’d gone home to get some rest and had fallen asleep on the sofa in my clothes. The phone had jarred me from a dream about travel, something about Greece: suitcases and a train station, not knowing which train to take, directions in symbols I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I had fumbled the phone on the table beside the sofa and almost dropped it.

  “Nothing much,” the nurse said, “just a bit of minor surgery required.” That is a direct quotation. She had a voice that made me think of cough syrup. It soothed me, calmed my uneasiness. Grace’s baby had finally come, thank the heavenly hosts. Everything was going according to plan, just a little something about the mouth, a bit of minor surgery, which I could well afford. I had been saving up; I had insurance. Babies are not cheap, and I am nothing if not responsible; just between us, the only member of this family who is. Holly promised to do his part, send money every month until it was on its own; but ever since Olivia went and did what she did, and that was years ago, he seems like a man bumbling around in the dark. I bet it’s all he can do to get out of the bed in the morning and get June off to school and himself to work. (I could have changed all that, made them a home and none of this would have happened. What a fool he was to send me away!)

  This same nurse, this woman, told me I would have to wait to pick it up; it would have to stay at the hospital until Grace signed the papers, which she had not yet done since she was still under the gas, would be for hours, the woman said. When we hung up and I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I realized I did not hear her say boy or girl, though surely she must have said one or the other. She must have said that first thing, and I missed it.

  I had asked the nurse to call when Grace woke up. I thought she might need something, and I didn’t want to make two trips. To pass the time, I went into the baby’s room, which I’d painted lime green, a cheerful color, not too loud.

  I’d set the crib up against the back wall, the new sheet on it washed twice so it wouldn’t be scratchy. Look around this room now, and you will see how prepared I was. I had knitted a blanket and some booties to take to the hospital, and a week ago I’d laid them out on the baby bed so I wouldn’t forget them. I’d made sure to get the softest angora, a buttery yellow since I didn’t know whether it would be a boy or girl.

  I hoped it wasn’t a girl. Girls are such a trial.

  By late afternoon Grace had bestirred herself enough to send word that she didn’t want to see me. She did not feel well. It had been an arduous labor. They were giving her a few days in the hospital for her to collect herself before going home. The nurse told me to stay put; I’d be called when the baby was ready, which would be a day or two. There were legal matters, paperwork to process.

  Needless to say, I was disappointed. I thought I’d go to the hospital, sit by Grace’s bedside. She’d be happy to see me, her own aunt, blood kin, who’d bailed her out of this mess. Someone in a uniform would roll in the baby. We would look at it together, maybe even get to hold it. We would have that moment to remember always, the two of us seeing it together for the first time, the way a family would.

  Having nothing else to do (I’d taken the rest of the school year off so the baby could receive my full-time attention, which only goes to show how good my intentions were), I put my tea down on the changing table in the baby’s room and started to count everything, a redundant task, one I’d undertaken many times. In the chest of drawers I’d put six dozen diapers, which I hoped were sufficient to the task, two dozen gowns in varying colors with the drawstring at the bottom for easy access, a dozen white undershirts, pads to put on the bed, rubber pants, socks, everything durable, nothing fancy: babies don’t know what they’re wearing. No teddy bears. No stuffed toys of any kind. Babies can smother on them.

  I sat down in the rocker I’d bought at a secondhand shop. It still smelled of the boiled linseed oil I’d rubbed on it to bring up the wood grain. When I began
to rock, it started edging across the floor as though it were making a getaway, which I didn’t expect and which was probably why it was given up. As I rocked and the chair scooted toward the front wall, I found myself wondering what it would be like to hold a newborn baby in my arms. I couldn’t remember anyone ever giving me one to hold. Would it turn to my useless breasts? What did I know about taking care of a baby? A growing child? How would I manage on my own, alone in the world, Grace having gone back to her life? A strange girl, inscrutable really, though I’d tried to be kind and discreet, never asking the questions other people might have been crass enough to ask.

  When I visited her on Sundays at Our Lady, she seemed reluctant to talk about anything but food. She was always asking me to bring her sweets. I would bring them, but not many of them; Twinkies and Moon Pies and Almond Joys are not healthful foods. “Only two?” she would say and then cram them into her mouth, glaring at me, tossing the wrappers on the floor next to the oily-looking sofa she sat on in the living area. In her last month, she would sit with a pillow behind her back for support. I sat in a straight chair beside her and watched her wolf down the sweets as if she were a starving waif on the street. “Don’t you get enough to eat here?” I would ask. “No desserts,” she would snarl; “they never give us desserts.” Her arms and legs were toothpicks; she sat on a slight tilt, as if the bones on one side of her body had mysteriously given way.

  I wanted to ask her to come back home with me. Having had her in the house, keeping her up on her lessons, feeding and clothing her, I found that her sheer animal being, the morning sickness, the swelling, the lethargy, had strangely warmed me. I wanted to tell her this, that, after the baby came, I wanted her back—she could live with me and the baby, make a fresh start, go to regular school, have girlfriends, go to slumber parties—but something in her face, a tightness at the mouth, stopped me. I tried to think what might offer her some relief from her predicament. Once I’d suggested we take an outing. It was a beautiful winter day; the exercise would do us both good. “Maybe the zoo,” I said. “I read there’s a baby giraffe.” She gasped as if I’d suggested something so outrageous it shocked even her. I reached over and touched her shoulder, noticing in that moment that her belly had pushed up the maternity top she was wearing, which was a hideous shade of pink and too short. What was I thinking buying the poor thing such an outfit? The baby’s roundness had loosened the elastic part of her pants. How I longed to touch it!

  For a breath of a moment, she leaned into my touch so that her hair brushed my hand. Then she shuddered and shook her head like a wet dog, tears spraying the air between us. Sunlight poured through the windows, and her tears caught the light in midair before they fell. Then she pushed herself up from the sofa and left me without a word.

  I WAS TOLD I had to wait another day to bring it home. I was told it was a girl. I pictured it wrapped up in the yellow angora blanket. It had taken me three months to knit the blanket and two for the booties, which were much harder. I went to the hospital to see it but they said it was being fed and I should wait for a better time. It was having some issues with feeding; nothing serious, they assured me.

  Then they told me Grace hadn’t signed the papers. “Why not?” I asked the nurse at the front desk.

  She shrugged. “Some of these girls, they like to wait a day or so.”

  One day melted into the next. The weather was unseasonably warm for February. When I went out and tried to work in the yard, I found myself soaked to the skin. When I came in, I took a long tepid bath to try to calm myself. I had begun to think the worst: that Grace might have decided to keep the child and ruin her own life, that it might have pneumonia and perish before I had a chance to lay eyes on it. I took to the rocking chair, my lifeboat, rocking endlessly into the night, pushing the rocker from one side of the baby’s little room to the other, humming lullabies to myself like a lunatic. In the early morning hours of the second day I fell into bed exhausted, only to toss and turn until dawn.

  Finally the nurse called. “Your niece has signed the papers,” she said. “The child’s been moved to St. Vincent’s up on Magazine. You can pick her up there.”

  I wept with relief. “Thank God.”

  Then the nurse said, “Oh, and we’re assuming Grace is with you. Her father’s here to get her, but her bed was empty.”

  Before I could answer, Holly took over the phone. “Frances, you have Grace there, right?”

  “I haven’t seen her since before the baby.”

  “Well, she’s disappeared into thin air, then. This is nonsense. I’m going home. June’s there by herself, I need to get back. She’ll turn up. Call me when she does.”

  Then I remembered the knife, and I began to tremble. I opened my mouth to tell him he needed to find her; she wasn’t in her right mind, hadn’t been in months—who knew what she might do—but by the time I began to speak, he’d hung up.

  Why hadn’t he come by to confer with me, things being in such a state? Which I know is a dangling participle. Which I am aware is a sentence fragment. Why hadn’t I been allowed to see my child these three long days; yes, my child now, who had now been moved like a piece of furniture to an orphanage? I showered and dressed, white hot with fury. How dare they keep me from it! And when it came right down to it—knife or no knife—what an ungrateful wretch my niece had turned out to be! After all I’d done for her!

  DESPITE THE HEAT, I dressed up. I put on my white lace blouse with its nice tie at the neck, my best short-sleeve suit, a navy blue, and black patent pumps. I wanted to make a good impression, let them know they were dealing with a lady of quality and substance. I put my favorite rhinestone pin on my breast pocket, then removed it, thinking it might prick the baby when, at long last, I would be allowed to hold it.

  For the child, I took an extra diaper and some rubber pants because you never know what will issue forth from a baby. The blanket was too hot for the weather, I knew, but I decided to take it so those people would know what kind of person they were dealing with, not trashy and irresponsible like my niece but a decent woman, a good mother. Before I left, I mixed the formula the doctor had prescribed (yes, I had located an excellent pediatrician). I boiled the six bottles and nipples I’d purchased a month ago and put all but one in the refrigerator. Just in case it was hungry, I put the one, along with the diaper and rubber pants, into the diaper bag I’d purchased months ago, years ago it seemed. I considered taking the booties but decided against it because of the heat. I just hoped its feet would stay small so it could wear them when the weather turned cool in the fall.

  By the time I pulled into the hospital parking lot, the sun was directly overhead and the air was clammy. I dabbed perspiration from my forehead with a handkerchief and snatched up the diaper bag and blanket. As I walked at a clip across the parking lot, my forearm began to itch under the blanket and the heat from the blacktop wafted up my skirt and stung me through my hose.

  What happened next is hard to tell. How I came and looked and flew. How what I wanted, my sweet baby girl, had been already defiled. How, when I first caught sight of Grace’s little child, all I could see was it: that foul breach in the nature of things. Sheer evil is what I saw, the mark of a terrible sin, one I can’t even imagine. I knew I’d never be able to look at that child again, operation or no operation. All I’d ever see was that yawning tunnel of a mouth, leading straight to the doors of Hell.

  So I sit here rocking, asking you to consider that none of us is without flaw. Think of the mote in your own eye. We all have our empty spaces where something of substance ought to reside, our chasms of moral ineptitude. I lean out over the ledge of mine and see that I am a woman who lacks imagination.

  God help me, I could see only what was right before my eyes, right in front of me. What I saw was a creature from another planet.

  13

  Ed Mae

  THE CHILD FAVORED WATER. BY THE TIME OCTOBER rolled around, she’d got big enough to sit up, and I’d put her in the kitchen s
ink and let her splash around while we bathed the little ones. She had herself one fine old time, whapping the water with her fat little hands, squealing like a stuck pig. Going on eight months and still bald as an egg, not a trace of eyebrows even, nothing to lend her some features, pull the eye up, away from the lip.

  My specialty was the newborns, so when the nurse brought her in, less than a week in this world and hollering like somebody’d lit a fire under her, they handed her off to me. Nobody’d warned me, nobody’d said a mumbling word, so when I unwrapped the blanket I near about dropped the child on the floor.

  Now I was used to ugly. White girls, they can pop out some peculiar-looking babies, all splotchy and milky-eyed, heads like toadstools. The ones I saw in that place where I worked, St. Vincent’s, they were the throwaways. They knew it too, knew they were trash, knew their girl mamas don’t want nothing to do with them. They was extra. Extra hung like a caul over their sad little old man faces.

  But that one, that Baby Girl, she was the be-all end-all of ugly. Looked like some kind of evil slapped that child upside the head, said, There, take that, be a big old ugly catfish. Hooked and brought up hard. All she needed was a set of whiskers and a tail.

  No two ways about it, she was God’s child and He made her that way, but for what intent and purpose, you tell me. I ask the nurse how come they didn’t fix that thing, tuck it in and sew it up the way you do that flap of skin at the rear end of the turkey, and the nurse say let the family what takes her fix it. Whoa horse, I say, who’s going to want her, looking like that? All a matter of money, nurse say, which made no sense because this one was eating us out of house and home.

  Just to take the cake, she was dark too. Not dark dark, but the color of mayonnaise gone bad. Her skin was actually her best feature to my mind, but she was a white baby and white babies are supposed to be white.