by Beth Kephart
“She dropped her sock,” I say.
“Where’s Baby?” he says again, louder, and it takes Sergeant Pierce and another cop to keep Peter’s paws off me. He’d throttle me if they’d let him. He’d throttle me like he’s done before. “Let him do,” I say. “Just. Please.” Because I’m done, dead and gone, if I don’t have Baby.
“What’s the mother’s first rule?” Peter says to the sergeant. “What is it? You know what it is.”
The sergeant looks from Peter to me with sergeant eyes.
“Taking care,” Peter answers himself. “Taking care is the first mother rule. I tell her every day: Take care. Every morning I leave here I say it. Every night when she tucks Baby into bed.” His face is lit-up lava. The pupils in his eyes aren’t stones but hurricanes.
“Mr. Rane, we have a situation. Step back, now, and lower your hands. If you love your baby like you say you do, you’ll give us room to do our work.”
Peter lowers his fists.
“Be useful,” the sergeant says sternly. “Make me a list of the people you know. Anybody anywhere who could be out for a little revenge.”
“Ask her,” Peter says.
“Ask me what?” I say.
“Ask her what she was doing upstairs when my daughter was out back, all by herself, defenseless, in a swing. Ask her: Is that a mother?”
“We’ll be looking,” the sergeant says, “after every possible lead.”
Sophie
I made the world’s best icosahedron. Like my life depended on it, I made it. Arranged it pretty on the cutting board, put it front and very central, on the kitchen table. Like the flowers you see on the TV shows, that’s how I displayed it. So that when my mother came home, it would be the first thing she saw—not me, in my changed clothes, feeling hopeful.
“Look,” I said. “It turned out perfect.”
“And did you learn,” Mother asked me, “about the principles of solids?”
“Archimedean solids,” I said. She stood, judging, not speaking. She held her head to the left, then to the right, and closed one eye and sighed.
“Here,” she said. “Help me with this.” She handed me the Styrofoam leftovers box that she had brought back from work. I popped the lid on a pair of hot dogs. “One for each,” she said, and I put the dinner out. I offered her mustard and ketchup, waited for notes, a little discussion, but she said nothing, and I worried that she knew, or maybe guessed, that I’d been lazy. When she finished her hot dog, she stood and dragged herself away from the table. I stayed behind, thinking about Joey and sliders. I heard her climb to her room and shut the door. I made my way to the attic.
Which is where I am now, looking out at the night above and Joey’s house below, the big tree between. There are yellow flames in his rectangle windows, curtains folding in with the breeze. I lean out as far as I can, get near as I can to Joey. I watch the windows, looking for signs of him looking for signs of me. I see the edge of a hallway, the back of a chair, the half of a table, and finally Harvey, rousing up the air around him, Aunt Cloris on his tail. When she sits at the slice of kitchen table I can see, she picks up a long knife and starts splitting envelopes. She writes out a list. Harvey settles. No Joey.
Up here, alone, I wonder how I could ever explain—how I got here, how long I’ll stay here, how it has been. I’d have to start with Chap, the cat I lost. I’d have to go all the way back to the almost beginning, when Chap, my cat, disappeared. I was four. I was alone.
“Chap!” I cried. “Chap!” But I’d opened the door just to test the day, and he was through the yard and down the walk, wicking his tail all around. He zagged toward the street, then into the street and up the black asphalt road, where a long yellow bus with big fat wheels was coming too fast in his direction. “Chap!” I screamed, and then I was out there on the walk and in the street, hollering against the wind in the direction of the school bus. I heard the slamming squeal of the brakes on the bus. I saw Chap’s fluffy tail beneath the hulking yellow. I kept running until the bus had stopped, and then I didn’t see Chap, and then I lost him.
“You be careful,” I heard the bus driver call—an angry voice, a reprimand, the kids behind him laughing. But his anger was like nothing compared to my mother coming home—my mother finding the door unlocked, Chap gone. “I told you” is what she said. “I told you about doors. About safety.” I was four and it was all my fault. We found a better house, with better locks. We kept on moving. “It’s you and me now,” my mother always said, and every single time, she meant it.
Emmy
“I told you that we shouldn’t have done,” Peter says.
“Done what, Peter?” I’m shaking. I want him to hold me, but he’d never. I want him to tell me we’ll find Baby. But there is hardly a difference in his mind between me and the crime that’s been committed, and the rains have come in, and the dogs have quit searching; they’ll start again tomorrow. “We’ll be looking after every possible lead,” the sergeant said. Peter’s hurricane eyes storm through me. He wells up inside himself and turns away.
“Shouldn’t have done had Baby.”
“You don’t want Baby?”
“I don’t want this. You were her mother.”
“Were, Peter? She’s not a were.”
I can’t keep my heart in my chest. I can’t breathe, and I can’t stop walking back and forth, back and forth, the north and south of nowhere. Peter stands at the window, looking out into the night, big as he has ever been. He wasn’t big like that when I met him in high school. He bullied himself up since with a pair of dumbbells, a glass of egg yolk and milk with his morning coffee. “What are you training for?” I used to ask him. “The Olympics?”
“I married you for your cheesecake,” he used to say. My mama’s recipe, passed on. Mama taught me every kitchen thing I know. Peter fell in love with my cooking.
“Somebody took her,” he says now. “What does somebody want with our Baby?”
I can’t abide; I can’t. I think of Baby in her swing, way up high and smiling. I think of me, finding Baby, never losing Baby, always near my Baby. It’s eight steps to the stairs and thirteen steps up. I pull my canvas Keds from the closet shelf. I dig the purse that Mama left me out from the bottom of the trunk. I trade my cotton skirt for my roll-up Levis. I stick a comb in my back pocket. There are thirteen steps down, and the front door is white. I’m out in the night, searching for Baby.
“Emmy Rane!” I hear Peter bark after me. “Emmy Rane, where do you think you’re going?” But I won’t come home until I have her back. I won’t.
It has kept on with the rain—big fat drops that taste like dew. All these weeks without rain, and now it comes, but from only half the sky; the other half has half a moon hanging huge, and I follow the moon, straight-ahead west, and now south and now again west, at the bend in the road. Baby’s eyes are round; they are living sapphires. She will not close them, I am sure, until she sees me coming.
Baby, I am coming
My Keds make whisper hurry hurry sounds across the cement walk. In the broken places, in the cracks, it’s getting sloppy. I feel a dampness sinking in around my toes and wish I’d remembered socks, but I’m not going back and it isn’t cold, just a little chilly beneath the eye of the moon. They searched the whole woods—the police and their dogs. They went partway up the railroad tracks on the opposite side of the trees, until, with the dark and the rain, they called for quitting and asked for more photos, said they would call out all the forces. I don’t know where they’ll go tomorrow, what leads they think they have, who they imagine would do this, or why, what time they’ll drink their coffee and start. But I can’t wait. I won’t. The moon is my lamp, and I follow. My heart is a sick, soft place, and my lungs are very small.
On the street, the houses are all lit up like jack-o’-lanterns or blued through with TV. “We’re not getting any TV,” Peter says. I asked him only once. Sometimes I wish I’d married Kevin O back when I had choices. There was a row of daffodils
behind his mother’s house, and in spring he’d cut me some. But Peter was three years older than me, and he had a job already, working at the refinery. He had the ’82 Nissan pickup that he said someday he might teach me how to drive. “When you’re ready,” he said. “I’m ready,” I told him. “When I say you’re ready,” he said.
I wish I were driving now. I wish I had wheels and speed, a map that would take me right this instant to my baby. The night is knots and splash, drips and skid, and one road has ended and another begins, and the lone whistle of a long train roars by. The neighborhood changes—from houses to retail, from window light and TV flicker to lanterns up above. At the gas station, the pumps are still. At the Clock and Watch, the gutter is splash. Maybe they’re hiding Baby in the shadows between places, in the dark behind bushes, on the other side of barrel trash cans. Maybe she’s there, in the back room of Reilly’s Saloon. Baby’s head makes a snug fit inside my palm. She taught herself smiling. She’s a genius at smiling. If she’s out here, near, I will find her.
A car goes by, soaking me through. My feet are two pale fish inside the tight ponds of my Keds. I leave the street for the train station. I leave the station and cross onto the tracks, slick-backed and shiny as snail glisten. The black gauze of the clouds flap at the moon, and from the tracks I can see into the backs of people’s houses, the private places where the lamps have not gone off. It’s like looking through snow globes, worlds behind glass. If Baby were there, in any of those houses, I would see. But all I see is that tower of folded towels and that face of a cat and that woman slipping a nightgown down over her shoulders. All I see is a man in a burnt-orange chair, reading the newspaper, wearing his glasses on the bald glow of his head.
No one rocking Baby. No one cooing at Baby. No one holding her up to the night.
The sop inside my Keds is growing chill. My jeans have worked themselves loose at the waist. The air smells like skunk and peroxide. Before Baby was born, that’s what bothered Peter most—that I smelled things he said weren’t there.
“You’re just imagining,” he’d tell me.
I’d tell him, “Am not.” My way of smelling, it runs in the family. My way of seeing, too, my way of explaining: it was Mama’s before mine, and it now belongs to Baby.
“Baby!” I call into the night. “Baby!”
But my voice skids away, rides the slippery tracks. Far away, at the bend in the rails, the night is lamped. It is yellow and growing brighter, and now I understand: the train has big yellow eyes. Lovely ocher liquid eyes. They put the shimmer down on the tracks and splatter the dark. Now the train is past the bend. Now it throws its wide eyesight into the lean between things. The ballast and sleepers start to rumble at my feet. The rails clink up and down, and the longer I stand here, the louder they clink, like some soprano heart. Be smart, I tell myself. Be calm. I turn and stare into the night. If Baby can’t be found, I do not wish to be found either.
Rumble and clink. Brighter and loud. The fish of my feet in the sloshing puddles. Train, come and get me. Take me to Baby. Find me my one little girl.
And then “Jesus Christ,” a voice says. “Jesus Christ, what were you thinking?”
His weight is a monster bat fallen from the sky. Through the rumble of lamplight, I am dragged. Across the brightening rails, I am banged, bones against steel against steel.
“Leave me alone,” I tell the monster. “Leave me be.” But I can’t wrestle free and I can’t stand, can’t feel my own weight in the hard wind of the train passing, can’t touch the steely cars, because my arms are knotted up with his and my ankle is a crack of pain and he is stronger and insisting.
“Out on the tracks with a train coming? Are you crazy?” He has a brogue in his voice. He is loaded down with gravity, dragging me now past the final ballast scatter to the tall grass margin along the track, and staying low while the train roars by. Chains and speed. Unzippering light. Me wrenching and yanking, unfree.
“I’ll call the police,” I say. “I’ll have them arrest you.” Calling the words out over the train roar. His weight is a shackle.
“You were standing on the tracks.”
“I know where I was.”
“The train was coming.”
“I was looking for something. For someone.” The train is high. The train is speed. The final car sears past, and that is when, at last, he loosens his hold—not altogether, but enough so that I might breathe. My leg is a long, lean pole of pain. “You broke my ankle,” I tell him.
“You’d have been killed.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I sob. “I lost my Baby.” They are weather words, thick suds of sorrow. “She was stolen.” All this time I have not seen the man’s face. To someone looking down on us, we might seem one body, two heads.
“What’s her name?” he asks at last.
“Baby,” I sniff, and saying her name hurts me more than I can bear.
“Baby?”
“Only four months old,” I say.
He says nothing for a good long time. My ankle hurts, my heart hurts, like everything is broken. I’m inside out with the leftovers of rain. “You’ve told the police?” he asks at last.
“Of course.”
“Then let them do their work and find her. Go home. Wait for them there.”
The tall grass is a wet itch up to my hips. My ankle is a church dome, a balloon. “I can’t,” I say. “Peter hates me. Peter blames me. I am his suspect number one.”
I cannot stand on one leg, I cannot run. There is a man in a crouch behind me with a brogue in his voice, and in the dim light, I lean back and crank my head to get a dark, blurred look at him. His forehead is big and hangs low on his face. His eyes are tucked into caverns. His nose is a tulip bulb laid on its side. His mouth is too small for his face.
“What are you doing out here?” I ask him.
“The trains,” he says after a long time. “I like to watch them.”
Up above, the gauze clouds are still flapping at the moon. Down the tracks, the train vanishes. Across the way, one by one, the lamps go out in the houses. The alleys are dark. A trash can rattles. Baby could be anywhere, or she could be nowhere, too. I have no time, and no direction, and no faith in Sergeant Pierce.
“Baby is lost,” I say at last, and I think he understands me, this man, because he doesn’t move, and he doesn’t hurt me, and he doesn’t say, Stop crying. There, there, we’ll fix it. He smells like garlic and chicken bones.
“Maybe it isn’t broken,” I say after a lot more time goes by. I test my ankle to prove my theory, squish my Keds to the ground. But the pain goes right up my pole leg, and I cry out.
“It wasn’t hurting you that I was after,” he says.
“I know.”
“I was just here, watching the train, and there you were. You had your back to it. I thought you couldn’t hear it.”
I can bend my ankle, but it hurts bad. I can move my foot an inch to the left, an inch to the right, but the swollen dome of my ankle scrapes the cotton ridge of my Keds. “I can’t go home,” I say, “until I find Baby.”
“That was the last train of the night,” he says.
“Tell me what to do,” I say. “Tell me where to find her.”
“I don’t know how people think. People who steal babies. I don’t know where they hide.”
“I have Baby’s sock,” I say. “Yellow.” I reach for my purse and I dig inside. “Baby didn’t like her socks,” I say. “She dropped them all around.”
“Sounds like any other kid,” he says.
“She wasn’t any other.”
“You want to tell me about her, then? Would it help any?”
“The only thing that would help would be finding her,” I say.
“You want to tell me anyway?”
“Maybe,” I say. “I don’t know.”
“It’s your choice.”
I let the darkness fall between us. I let the silence go on and I let the tears come up and I let the stars that come out shine an
d then there’s nothing for me but talking—telling this strange, dark man how the happiest of all my days was the day Baby was born. “As though I was born right alongside my little girl,” I say, and he nods—I think he does. I tell him how Mama died before she made acquaintance with my Baby, and how I’ve learned mothering on my own and also from the doctor who wrote the book of rules that tells you what to do. I married the same week I graduated high school, I say, and then I explain as how by then I didn’t have choices, and I’ve done all of my new learning on my own.
“She chews the tip of her fourth finger,” I say. “She’ll fix her eyes on pretty things. She likes daddy longlegs and a finch on a tree and the puppet I sewed out of one of Peter’s socks. She liked the day I took her into the woods behind our house. She liked the finch we found—pretty and yellow.”
“I like birds,” the man says.
“Nobody knows when Baby needs what she needs, except for me,” I say, and now I’m crying again. I cannot stop.
“The world’s not right,” he says, and his big hands squeeze the place on my arm just past the knob of my shoulder. He’s a big man, and he’s awkward.
Sophie
In her La-Z-Boy throne she sits—her feet bony bare on the foldout stool, a Ziploc of ice on each knee, her hair splitting at her shoulders but not falling straight, not curling nice, only bunching and sagging over her faded work shirt. To her side, the sun pushes against the tight velvet curtains. Behind, the stairs go up, break a landing, turn their way up some more. Beside her is the table of library books in their shiny, noisy sleeves.
“ ‘Although many solid figures having all kinds of surfaces can be conceived, those which appear to be regularly formed are most deserving of attention,’ ” she reads, from a book by a guy called Pappus. “ ‘Those include not only the five figures found in the godlike Plato, that is, the tetrahedron and the cube, the octahedron and the dodecahedron, and fifthly the icosahedron, but also the solids, thirteen in number, which were discovered by Archimedes and are contained by equilateral and equiangular, but not similar, polygons.’ ” Her glasses have slid to the end of her nose, leaving little red marks on the bridge. The long hairs of her eyebrows make a sad tangle with her lashes. Something about the Archimedeans makes my mother lonesome, but there’s no guessing at what. All I know is that it’s Sunday morning and a boy lives next door, and I am itching to see him, and that my mother’s giving a lesson on the Archimedeans instead, because my icosahedron wasn’t perfect.