Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  He drove for nearly thirty miles with her asleep next to him in her car seat. When he’d gone to get his truck, Mrs. Blessing had come out of the back door, tall and dark and faceless against the golden light from inside the kitchen. He’d gone upstairs to the apartment and pitched his things into the old duffel bag that his dad had had in the army, and he’d stopped to figure out what he should take and then taken nothing because he didn’t need anything, nothing at all.

  When he got to the truck she was standing by it, stooped slightly, one hand to her heart. Jennifer was right; she looked older now, smaller maybe, diminished, but instead of feeling bad he thought it served her right. He bet he looked older, too.

  “Charles, I’ve spoken to my lawyer, and he says there is some possibility that you could fight these people for—”

  “He’s full of shit,” he said, throwing the duffel in the back without looking at her, using the crude language intentionally. If she thought he was one of those guys, he’d be one of those guys. “Fight them for six months while she stays with another set of strangers and at the end they win. She has a mother. The mother always wins. That’s the way it is.”

  “You were as good a mother to that child as any woman I’ve ever seen. I told the sheriff so.”

  He looked her in the eye and he thought she moved back a bit when she saw what he looked like. “Well, that didn’t make a whole lot of difference when you called the cops on me like a common criminal. That didn’t make a whole lot of difference when you let them think that I was the kind of person who would live here and take care of your place and make the goddamned coffee and then sneak over and cut the wires for the alarm and steal the silver out of the dining room. You knew me. You knew me. You knew me better than anybody has ever known me. You knew what kind of person I was. And one look and you passed judgment on me like I was an entirely different person from what you knew.”

  “I made a mistake,” she said.

  “You sure did,” he said, and he got in the truck and drove down the drive without looking in the rearview mirror.

  They’d gone over the truck, after they’d hauled him in with Chris and Ed and Joe. They’d gone through the glove compartment and the tool box bolted to the flatbed. He could tell they’d gone through his drawers upstairs, and the other rooms, and then they’d found something worth looking for, sleeping soundly, her fever down. He hoped they’d fed her before they carried her off, so that she hadn’t wailed all the way to town.

  They’d left him in a windowless room at the police station, the cuffs tight and a cramp growing in his shoulder where the angle of his arm pulled on the joint. There was no clock and he couldn’t see his watch. There was no night turning to gray dawn and blue day, no feedings to figure the time by. He’d felt like he was going crazy. The sheriff had finally come in and unlocked the cuffs, his arms falling hard to his sides.

  “By rights I ought to get your side of the story, but let me tell you what your buddies say,” he’d said.

  “They’re no buddies of mine.”

  Ed and Joe had told the truth, for once, had just thrown down on Chris and said that Skip hadn’t been part of it, that he’d tried to get them to leave, and leave the stuff. The sheriff said he’d asked Chris about what happened, and he’d asked for a cigarette. “You guys saw who had the gun,” Chris had said, leaning back in his chair.

  “He’s a damn liar,” Skip said.

  “Thanks for the news flash. Now I got another problem I need to discuss with you.” And from his breast pocket he took out a flyer and laid it gently on the table in front of Skip, so gently that Skip thought it might be a warrant, or a photograph of something awful, something the sheriff thought would shock him out of his seat.

  POSSIBLE HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION, it said at the top, and then it told a story in the way the cops always did, like a science experiment instead of something about human beings. A white female, age nineteen, had been brought to the hospital with postpartum bleeding at the end of June. Investigation found no trace of an infant. White female uncooperative. Officers investigating the whereabouts of the infant or its remains.

  “Ah, hell,” Skip said, and put his head down on the table.

  “You want a cigarette?” the sheriff said.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “I bet you never figured that, that she’d get caught and they’d think she killed it. The only reason she hasn’t been arrested is because they got no body. I talked to the girl’s mother this morning. We’re about halfway between the university and her house. She asked her daughter if she’d ever been in a place named Mount Mason and she broke down.”

  “She’s mine. She’s mine.” Skip kept his head down on the table and he cried until he couldn’t cry anymore and the sheriff sat by silently.

  “You know Mrs. Liggett that lives up on Thatcher Street?” the older man finally said. “She used to be the nurse at the high school, maybe before your time. She is a hard case, and I say that knowing she and my wife have been friends since they were girls together. She came and took that baby away and she said to me when she called from the hospital, someone has taken very good care of that little girl. She’s clean, she’s well nourished, and she’s got a pleasant disposition.” And at those words Skip wept again, thinking of Faith smiling at Mrs. Liggett, who was a hard case. It had been a long time since he cried, and he did it the way he did everything to which he was unaccustomed, in fits and starts but with conviction.

  “This child has to go back to her mother. You know it and I know it. There’s no two ways about that. But I can cut you a break when the time comes so you get to play a part.”

  He’d given Skip a copy of the flyer, and when he came out of the station, blinking in the noon sun, feeling dirty in last night’s pants and an old “Don’t Do Drugs” T-shirt one of the officers had found in a box of castoffs for when they pulled homeless people in, Jennifer was sitting in the lot in her little blue car, reading the paper. Her eyes were red and there were two empty cardboard coffee cups on the console.

  “I drank your coffee. I’m really sorry,” she said.

  “My stomach couldn’t take it anyway.”

  “There’s got to be a way to get her back.”

  “You’re an optimist.”

  “One of us has to be. Get in. My dad wants to talk to you.”

  There was an apartment over the auto body shop that no one ever wanted to rent because Mr. Foster opened for business at seven A.M., and the banging and clanging and yelling at one another went on all day and sometimes into the evening, and he rented only to nonsmokers and people who didn’t have pets and who went to church. But Skip got up early anyhow, and the noises were companionable even when he was done for the day, and he didn’t mind the smell of motor oil or the view of the township road stretching off between flat cornfields because at least it didn’t remind him of the smell of mown grass and freshly laundered baby shirts and the sight of the pond reflecting back the spiky swell of the pine-covered hills. There was the smell of coffee in the morning, from the Mr. Coffee that Craig Foster kept on the file cabinet, and that was bad sometimes, struggling up from sleep, like a dream of a life that disappeared as he set eyes on the unfamiliar acoustical tile ceiling above his head.

  “I hear you’re a good mechanic,” Mr. Foster had said.

  “You’re going to get in trouble with your wife,” Skip replied.

  Mr. Foster had shrugged. “You have to know how to take Nadine. You have to see where she came from and what she went through. You think there’s bad places around here? That’s nothing compared with where she lived. All these little tin shacks with no toilets, kids all naked and running wild, the soldiers carrying on. Men of a certain age, they give her the heebie-jeebies. Like your age, you know? She doesn’t mean anything, really. You just have to know her, know what her life was like.”

  Nadine never came to the garage. Maybe it was because all the guys who worked there were men around Skip’s age. When Jennifer visited there
was a strange silence. “I think she’s working on something with her lawyer,” she said to Skip.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Skip said, bending over an engine.

  When he went into town to pick up two special-order parts at the post office, he’d stared into each stroller on the street. He’d run into Chris’s mom taking a plastic garbage bag into the Laundromat. Her nurse’s aide’s uniform made a rustling sound as she fidgeted. “Well, Skipper, that damn boy managed to get himself into trouble again,” she said, as though being arrested for breaking and entering were like a tornado or a hole in the field that you caught your foot in, one of those things that just happened to a person because of timing and bad luck.

  “He should have been locked up a long time ago,” said one of the other mechanics in Craig Foster’s garage, whose sister had gone out with Chris a couple of times.

  He was a nice guy, a guy named Fred who’d been two years behind them in high school, and he’d tuned up Skip’s truck so it was humming as he drove along the interstate with the baby drooling on her dress. He’d never put her in a dress; it seemed foolish, all that fabric eddying around her working feet and legs. He glanced over. She looked like he supposed a baby should look for a special occasion, meeting the mother who’d dumped her in a box on his doorstep in some sad-sack flannel shirt.

  He saw a playground from the highway and took the exit and sat her car seat near the swings, where she could see the two little boys whose mother was pushing them, her left hand on the back of one, her right hand on the back of the other. Faith’s eyes went up and down as the swings did, and her smile went on and off, on and off, like a blinking neon sign. She hooted at the boys, and they imitated the sound right back at her, and she did it again, more loudly.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a girl,” their mother said to Skip as the boys tried to grab at each other across the empty air between them.

  “You’ll make those boys feel bad,” he called back.

  “Not them. Nothing makes them feel bad.” She shook her head. “There’s only sixteen months between them. Tell your wife not to push it.”

  He got back on the highway, with Faith making loud bird noises, her head moving from window to windshield as though she were looking for something. He kept thinking he could just drive on, drive and drive until he got somewhere flat and stale and safe, Nebraska, maybe, or Kansas. He’d never been to either place, never been anywhere, really, but somehow they sounded like places where you could get a little apartment and tell people your wife had died and take your daughter to school without much fuss or many questions. A rest stop flew by, then an exit, then another. He figured there were times in everybody’s life when they thought, just for a moment, that they could be different than they were. He’d had one of those times years ago, when he’d won that middle-school science prize with some experiment about fruit flies. He’d seen the ribbon on his little arrangement of corrugated cardboard and old Ball jars, and that night lying in bed he’d imagined a future: “Nice job, Skip—ever think about medical school?” “Yo, Skip, man, can I copy your homework?” “Skip, come on over to my house and study.” Maybe there was a way he could have made that happen; he still didn’t know. He taped the ribbon to the wall over the card table he used as a desk, and then, when his aunt and uncle painted his room one summer, it had disappeared. That was all right, too, because seeing it just reminded him that it was kind of a fluke. Like Faith had been, a burst of something incandescent in a long stretch of gray days.

  He pulled into the next rest stop and laid his head on the wheel. She was slumped forward, too, so that the two of them were in the same position of surrender. She raised her head and gnawed on her fist, got her thumb into her mouth and sucked on it loudly. He bought a doughnut and a soda and fed her again, stroking her hand with his index finger. He smiled and smiled at her, and she smiled back, so that the nipple fell from her mouth.

  He thought about begging those people to let him keep her, explaining how he had gotten up in the middle of the night to feed her all those weeks, so dopey that in the morning he could only be sure he’d done it by seeing the empty bottle on the nightstand; how he’d stuck out his tongue and razzed her so she smiled, then chuckled, then laughed; how he’d coaxed her pathetic little fuzz of hair into a kind of curl on top of her head with a bit of baby oil on his finger; how he’d made a little tent of netting over her so she could lie on the grass and watch the clouds and the birds go by overhead and not get eaten alive by mosquitoes. And he knew what they’d say if he asked. When all this had started he would have said that it was because he didn’t have enough—enough family, enough money, enough of a life. He would have thought that if he’d been able to offer Blessings instead of the garage behind Blessings, it would have made a difference. But listening to Jennifer talk about her father, watching Mrs. Blessing and Mrs. Fox with their strong profiles bowed over bowls of soup at the table near the window, he’d figured out that sometimes it all came down to blood.

  There were two ways to get out of the rest area, one that led to the highway running west, to Nebraska or Kansas, and one that led east, back the way he’d just come. He went east. It was a kind of circular thing: to be the kind of person who would have taken Faith in, he had to be the kind of person who would take her back. He drove with a buzzing sound in his head, careful to keep just a little above the speed limit. There were two dead deer along the shoulder, and an RV having a tire changed by a man who didn’t look like he knew what he was doing while a clutch of heavyset women circled him like disconcerted pigeons. There was the playground where he’d stopped, filled now with day-care kids with name tags on colored paper hung around their necks with cord. There was a Best Western where he could check in and play with the baby on the bed for another hour or two while the sheriff put his license-plate number out over the state police radio. He kept on driving. Faith was asleep.

  He drove past the exit you took to the Boatwright place and saw a heavy woman in red shorts hanging laundry on a droopy line. It seemed like there was a raccoon in a cage on the front porch, sitting on top of the washing machine. He drove past the exit for McGuire’s and could see the parking lot half full even though it wasn’t even lunchtime. Someone had painted the side of the garage next to McGuire’s with the words “Real Men Love Jesus.” Off the other side of the highway he could see the peak of Foster’s auto body behind a stand of elms. The Wal-Mart loomed off the highway, and then the trees closed in, and he was getting off on Rolling Hills Road, his shoulders stiff from holding on to the wheel so tightly. The fields were striped yellow, brown, and faint purple with high grasses, and a pair of hawks rose through thin clear air. He turned in and reflexively thought that the grass needed to be cut at Blessings. The cat had left a dead squirrel splayed in the doorway to the basement, and he wondered who was making the coffee now that he was gone.

  There were three cars in the driveway, the sheriff’s car between the big sedan that belonged to Lester Patton, Mrs. Blessing’s lawyer, and a blue Toyota he had never seen before. The Toyota had a bumper sticker that said WE BRAKE FOR ANIMALS and an infant car seat in the back. He wondered what they thought he was going to do with his. From the back of the house he could see Nadine peering through the window, wiping her hands on a striped dish towel, and even though it had been only a week he felt that he was coming back here after a long time away, the way he felt whenever he drove by the elementary school, as though a ghost of himself lived there still even though he was long gone.

  Nadine stood at the back door and he was waiting, just waiting for her to say something. He could hear her voice, crowing, “Big trouble for you.” But she just stood there with her arms crossed, her head to one side. Faith was still asleep, a dead weight against his shoulder, her red lower lip thrust out as though she were annoyed at her own dreams. When he moved past Nadine she looked down and her eyebrows came up and she said, “Pretty baby,” but without rancor.

  The living room was full. Mrs. Blessing was in
the wing chair. She struggled to her feet, said “Charles,” half questioning, but he would not look at her, remembering the crowded darkness of the room the last time they were there together, the accusation in her eyes. Her lawyer was on the sofa with its back to the room; the sheriff stood in the corner with big circles of perspiration on his khaki shirt. On the brocade sofa, shadows cast on their faces by the awning outside the window, were the other three, a woman with soft brown hair and glasses and dangling silver earrings, a man in a green polo shirt with the words “Lucky Dog” over his heart and a hairline with pale points over both his temples, and between them the girl. Skip knew she was nineteen and that her name was Paula Benichek. What he needed to know he could see in an instant, the light brown hair that had surely once been blond, the small pointed chin with a kind of soft knob at the end, the narrow upper and full lower lip. She looked as much like Faith as an adult can look like a small child, and so, while the girl’s mother raised her hands to him, her fingers splayed and trembling, while the daughter sat with her arms crossed and her face truculent, it was into the lap of the younger woman that he placed the baby, angling her so that the young woman’s lap made a natural cradle. Faith blinked, closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and made the shouting sound she’d made to the boys in the playground.

  From his pocket Skip took a letter and laid it next to the young woman, who was staring at Faith with a broken terrified expression in her eyes. He’d written the letter the night before on some lined yellow paper, not thinking, just doing, the way he always did when he had to get a dead thing off the drive or clear the septic lines. “6 a.m.,” it started out, “4 ounces formula Isomil no iron (constipates her). Back to sleep two hours. 9:30 a.m. 4 ounces. Up until 12.” He wasn’t willing to give too much, but for Faith’s sake he wanted them to know her schedule, and that she’d had her first set of shots. The other stuff they’d have to find out themselves: how she kept her fist next to her one cheek when she slept, how she blinked so hard in the sunlight and then sneezed and sneezed and smiled as though she loved sneezing, how she raised her feet to the ceiling and tried to grab on to them with a little furrow in her forehead.