She blinked, startled, her blue eyes fixing on it as it made another soft grunting sound. Ma’am paused in the midst of pulling Bebe’s special dishes from the cupboard. Her arm came around the bundle, patting and smiling down into the folds of cloth.
Fixed on the sling, Bebe forgot herself. Without having been invited, she took three hesitant steps into the kitchen before she stopped, her fingers constantly, nervously tapping at one another as she rose onto tiptoes in an effort to see what was making those noises. There was something alive in that sling. The breathy gasping sounds became punctuated by wet sucking or smacking noise. Even knowing it invited disaster, Bebe shuffled two steps closer still, skirting around Ma’am to rise on tiptoes yet again. A very tiny three-fingered fist appeared above the folds of the sling, making a single grabbing, flexing motion at the empty air before disappearing below the edge of cloth again.
Bebe’s instinctive step back somehow became a shaky step forward as, fingers nervously tapping away, she leaned in for a closer look.
Ma’am noticed her long before Bebe came back to herself enough to realize where she was. And more importantly, where she ought to be.
Bebe flushed, a burning, uncomfortable shade of pink. Ducking, she hurriedly retreated to the kitchen doorway, but froze when Ma’am stopped her.
“Come here, Bebe.” A good three feet taller than Bebe, Ma’am lowered herself to squat, bringing the sling to Bebe’s waist level. With two fingers, she pulled the folds back to openly reveal the newborn baby cradled in the crook of her arm. She beckoned to Bebe with her other hand, snapping her fingers like she did when she was impatient, though Bebe could see no hint of annoyance anywhere in Ma’am’s expression. She was smiling, and that made her instinctive urge to obey easier to succumb to.
Bebe crept closer, her gaze dropping from Ma’am to the baby once more.
“No touching,” Ma’am cautioned as she drew near.
Bebe dutifully tucked her hands behind her back and, with a good two feet between herself and the sling, stopped advancing.
It was a very strange looking baby, seemingly so small in Ma’am’s arms, although it likely would have overflowed Bebe’s. It had a copse of thick black hair on top of its head and, when it yawned, there wasn’t a single tooth that she could see in its mouth.
When it smacked its gums on the fist of one small hand, a long-buried memory suddenly flooded to the forefront of Bebe’s mind: her mother leaned against a slat-board stall wall, bathed in sweat and gasping in relief, one arm hugging a bloody newborn daughter to her breasts, the gnarled length of its umbilical dangling down between her splayed and shaking legs. It was just a flash of a memory, dashing quickly in and out of consciousness again. A fleeting, intangible thing that didn’t bear thinking on, and yet Bebe couldn’t stop the cold tangle of knots from tightening in her gut. She didn’t like change. Change always seemed to bring new and terrible things.
But this was Sir and Ma’am’s baby, and that made it her baby now too. For their sakes, she tried to swallow past the rising dread inside her. “Hello,” she whispered, winning an instant smile from Ma’am—which changed nothing and yet somehow held the power to almost make everything feel better.
Ruffling Bebe’s hair fondly, Ma’am stood up. “Out,” she said cheerfully, gesturing towards the open kitchen doorway, and Bebe went. She leaned against the jamb, resting her forehead lightly against the wall, scratching nervously at one shoulder as she tried to reconcile herself to the baby’s presence. She watched while Ma’am filled her bowl with grain cereal and water and put them in the cooker. Pressing her thumb to the pet-proof key plate, the box hummed to life, but Ma’am wasn’t paying attention to it. Once more, she occupied herself with the baby, rocking it slowly, alternately humming and singing and every now and then Bebe heard familiar words tossed in, like ‘come’ and ‘sleep’. After a few minutes, the cooker beeped and Ma’am brought out her bowl. She mixed a package of purple fruit into the soft and steaming grains before calling, “Supper time, Bebe.”
The sweet fruity aroma accompanied Bebe as she followed Ma’am to table and her special chair, the seat of which was set a little higher than the others and which had an extra rung at the bottom to make it easier for her shorter legs to climb. By now, Sir was in the living room. He gave Bebe a very brief but knowing glance as he pressed his thumb to the keypad, and the fire sprang effortlessly back to life. Without offering so much as a single word of scolding, he crossed the dining room to ruffle her hair before meeting Ma’am at the table. When she pointed to the package questioningly, they both looked at it, and then across the table at Bebe.
Pulling her bowl closer, Bebe pretended not to notice just so she wouldn’t have to meet their judging frowns. In her mouth, the cereal had all the guilty consistency of sawdust, especially when Sir made that knowing sound in the back of his throat.
They conversed over her head, his ‘Bebe’ following the word ‘outside’, which made Ma’am hm in disapproval now too. Their censure was both fleeting and half-hearted, and when both seemed willing to let it pass without further scolding, some of the knots unfurled inside her. Bebe swallowed what was in her mouth and breathed a little easier.
Cutting into the package with his thumb claw, Sir opened the box.
“Oh,” Ma’am said, and Bebe glanced up in interest as Sir withdrew a small sleepsack from the box. Now here was something familiar. Bebe used to have one just like it, back when Sir and Ma’am had first brought her home. This one was decorated with speeding transports in an assortment of pastel colors, while hers had simply been blue. She never had liked wearing hers, but this particular sack was obviously meant for the baby. It was much too small for Bebe.
Sir bent to kiss Ma’am’s cheek. They both bowed their heads, briefly touching the baby in its sling. Then Ma’am took the sack and the baby and retreated to their bedroom, presumably to put it on him. Poor baby. Bebe felt bad for him, and frankly, she couldn’t see much point in making him wear the sack. As small and feeble as he was, Bebe had a hard time picturing him getting up in the night to wander the house.
Depositing the now empty package into the incinerator, Sir gave Bebe one last pat on the head before he followed. He switched off the light as he went, leaving her to finish her supper in the dark by herself. Only the flickering shadows cast by the crackling fire were left to keep her company.
Bebe poked listlessly at the berries in her bowl, separating them from the cereal, saving them for last, wishing one or both had stayed out here a while longer. Usually they all had supper together. She didn’t like eating alone.
But at least they had come home.
Heaving a soft sigh, she finished her food, then carried the dishes into the kitchen and laid them in the bottom of the sink. She briefly considered washing them. She’d already broke the rules once—many times tonight, in fact—but she really didn’t want to make Ma’am angry. So she left them as she was supposed to and went back to her cushion by the mantelpiece. Sinking down with her back to the fire, she listened to what few sounds filtered back out to her from the bedroom. Soft talking and laughing, the whisper of an occasional kiss, the grunting coos of the baby as he was buckled into his brand new sleepsack.
Now that the baby was here, maybe Ma’am would want her to help more. But then, she had already broken the rules so many times, she really didn’t want to do anything more. All things considering, they’d both been very tolerant of her misbehaviors. After a while, she got up again and went to her toy box in the corner. She dug through it until she found her own, well-worn blue sleepsack in the very bottom. She hadn’t had to wear this in a very long time. Back when she was new, she’d hated every second that she’d been forced into its claustrophobic confines, with her arms and legs trapped close to her body, sometimes too hot and unable to move well enough to do anything about it. Poor baby, she thought again, and put it on out of sympathy.
With her hands inside the sack, it was impossible to fasten the neck collar properly, but
she lay down with it half on. Curling onto her side, she spread her blanket up over her as best as she could before cushioning her head on her arm to sleep. Today had been a strange day. Tomorrow would be better, she decided as she closed her eyes. Tomorrow things would go back to normal, and she would do her absolute best to teach the baby the rules of the house. Maybe he would like it here every bit as much as she did. And maybe, just maybe, things wouldn’t have to change too much or too badly.
But they did, because nothing was normal after the baby came. Day after day, he took up all of Ma’am’s and Sir’s time. Night after night, Bebe was awakened by reedy wails. Sometimes he quieted after only a few minutes. Sometimes, he cried for a very long time, and then either Sir or Ma’am would come out into the living room to walk around, gently rocking and patting at the squalling bundle in an effort to soothe him.
At first, Bebe crawled out of bed, sympathetically walking alongside them. She tried to pat the baby’s foot when she could reach it, but that ended abruptly the night she failed to pay attention to Sir’s movements and he accidentally stepped on her.
“Bed, Bebe!” he snapped, lashing out at her in unexpected irritation, shoving her back towards her cushion.
Hurt, Bebe slunk back to her bed and huddled there unhappily, her eyes burning because nobody was getting much sleep these days and her toes throbbing because he’d trod on them. Hugging her legs to her chest, she watched until the baby finally fell asleep and Sir carried him back down the hall to his and Ma’am’s room.
After that first week, the baby moved from Sir and Ma’am’s room to the room right next to theirs; the Forbidden Room, a place so off-limits to Bebe that she wasn’t even allowed in the hallway while the door was open. In all the years Bebe had lived here, she could count on one hand the number of times Sir or Ma’am had entered that room. Now, the door stood open all the time, and Bebe was spending more and more time relegated to her cushion. She tried not to feel bitter about it; after all, it wasn’t the baby’s fault. But it did seem just a little unfair that the baby, who was still so new and untrustworthy as to spend not only his nights trapped in that sleepsack but most of the daytime too, got to go in that room when she couldn’t. Even the sweeper went inside, and here she was forced to sit, unable to do anything more than watch.
Halfway through the second week, strangers began to arrive. Before the baby, while visitors weren’t unheard of, nowadays it was happening on a near daily basis. Mostly of them Bebe didn’t mind. Some wanted nothing to do with her, coming only to visit the baby. Others were actually quite nice. Almost all brought Sir and Ma’am presents, which they seemed to enjoy and which helped to soothe Bebe’s hurt feelings at how she was being treated. Many brought toys for the baby, and once, one man even brought a toy for her. It was a softly-plushed tentacled animal that matched the one he also gave the baby. Bebe wasn’t much for playing with toys, but she was happy to be thought of.
Unfortunately, along with all these visitors also came one who was not a stranger. It was the Old Woman. Even before the baby, she came over far more often than Bebe would have preferred. The Old Woman didn’t much care for Bebe. Over the years, that growing dislike had become as close to mutual as Bebe dared to let herself get. The Old Woman liked to yell at Bebe. Sometimes she even stamped her walking cane at her, just to intimidate her. At first, afraid she might extend that same intense dislike to the baby, Bebe tried to stay close to him, but that faint protectiveness lasted only until the Old Woman took a swing at her with the cane. After that, Ma’am sent Bebe to her cushion and there she knelt, sometimes for hours at a time whenever the Old Woman stopped by.
From her place by the fire, Bebe watched as the Old Woman eyed her suspiciously, bending her head towards Ma’am and whispering. Bebe couldn’t hear much, only the occasional ‘bad’, ‘steal’, ‘eat’, ‘hurt’ and of course ‘Bebe’ sprinkled liberally throughout those accusing snatches of conversation.
At first Ma’am laughed at her, but by the end of the third week, the Old Woman was coming every day and Bebe began to notice Ma’am wasn’t laughing anymore. When the whispering started, she tipped her ear to the Old Woman and studied Bebe while she listened, and she frowned.
Then Ma’am began to whisper to Sir. He laughed, too. At first. But by the time the baby had been with them for one full turn of the moon, the bad changes that Bebe had initially feared began to happen.
She wasn’t allowed to eat her dinner at the table anymore. “No,” Ma’am would say whenever Bebe tried to get close to the baby, and nobody was getting any sleep at night. The baby kept crying. During the day, during the night, all the time. He just kept crying.
At a loss for how to fix what used to be a very happy home, Bebe tried to make herself useful. Not so much when it was Ma’am trying to coax the baby to be quiet, but Sir sometimes still let her close enough to steal soft pets at the baby’s kicking foot on those seemingly endless nights of walking, rocking and singing. Whenever Sir let her, she brought him toys for the baby to play with, or carried away the soiled diapers to be burned in the incinerator, and sometimes when Ma’am fell into an exhausted sleep on the couch, the baby tucked up into the crook of her arm, Bebe did her best to help him stay quiet.
“No,” she whispered to him. He simply stared back at her, greedily sucking at her old pacifier which she slipped it into his mouth, his eyes so large and dark and intently focused on her that she could see her own image reflected in their inky depths. Like First Ma’am, he never said a word. Not to her or anyone else. He just grunted and suckled and waved his fists until, afraid he might jostle Ma’am awake, Bebe took his hands in hers and gently tried to hold them still. Using First Ma’am’s way of talking, she signed to him, Sleep now.
But the baby began to fuss instead, screwing his face into a grimace that she knew meant another bout of crying was about to begin.
Bebe barely got back to her cushion before the first lusty wail startled Ma’am awake. She took one look at the pacifier, which had spilled from the baby’s mouth and now lay neglected on his chest, and erupted from the couch. She whisked the baby away, yelling at Bebe all the way down the hall. When she returned, it was with the Bad Bebe hairbrush Sir had discovered under the sink clenched tightly in her hand.
It was the worst spanking she had ever received from the usually so gentle and forgiving Ma’am, and when it was over, Bebe fled sobbing to her cushion. When Sir returned home from work, Bebe was crying at one end of the house and Ma’am and the baby were wailing in disjointed harmony at the other.
The next day, Sir did not go to work. Instead, he stayed home to take care of the baby while the Old Woman took Ma’am out of the house. Bebe stayed on her cushion, still hurt, her bottom a mottle of purpling bruises, depressed and not wanting much to do with anyone, much less the baby. At least not until Sir lay him across the seam of two couch cushions while he went into the kitchen. The baby lay there, seemingly content for only a few seconds before, stretching out both arms and extending its leg, in a single jerky motion, he rolled over and nearly fell off the couch. Bebe’s mad-dash scramble to catch him saved him just in time.
The baby cooed at her.
Bebe rolled him carefully back onto his back. What were the chances he might actually stay like that? She darted a hasty glance towards the kitchen where she could still hear Sir moving around. Then, slipping her hands around the baby’s chest, she tried to lift him just enough to push him all the way to the back of the couch.
Behind her, the front door opened and Ma’am and the cranky Old Woman returned. Bebe let go of the baby and jumped away, but it was too late.
“No!” Ma’am dropped her bags, yelling, “No, bad Bebe!”
Bebe dashed for her cushion but the Old Woman shoved past Ma’am, swinging wildly with her walking cane. With a low ‘whup!’ of rent air, it caught Bebe across the small of her back, knocking her sprawling to the floor. The blow knocked the air right out of her. Pain exploded up her spine and down her legs, and then acro
ss her shoulders as the Old Woman hit her again, screaming, “Get, get!”
Bebe scrambled for her cushion, pain blazing across her back, and burst into tears once she reached it. Everyone was yelling now, including Sir who came charging from the kitchen. Even the baby, who screamed and screamed even after Ma’am scooped him up and ran with him to the bedroom.
Sir yelled at the Old Woman who yelled back, and then snapped around and left in a huff. He slammed the door after her, then glared at Bebe. She snapped into a tight ball, the throbbing welts growing on her back and the bruises on her buttocks flaring in fresh agony, when he suddenly descended on her. Though his expression suggested he might, he didn’t strike her. Instead, he scooped her up under one arm, a clumsy, burdensome flailing baggage of wind-milling arms and legs, and lugged her through the house to the rear door. Without a word, he dumped her into the backyard and slammed that door, as well.
Bebe sprawled half on the ground and half on the steps, in too much pain and shock to move any more than what effort it took to raise her head. She began to shake. Pushing up on her arms, she dragged her legs down off the stairs and sat on the ground. Her knee was scuffed and bleeding. There was dirt on her belly, arms and, she suspected, probably on her face. The tip of her chin was stinging. With trembling fingers, she gingerly touched the spot and then looked at them. At least she wasn’t bleeding there.
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