I take my time. I like the feeling of the cool upstairs air against my wet skin, and as I cross the upstairs hallway I stop by Aunt Connie’s room and check on Paul in his crib. Aunt Connie is in the shower. I can hear her singing. She’s left Paul alone again, and again I’ve found him, and he’s smiling up at me. I smile back and I think how strange it is that this little boy has found his way into a house that before him had only girls. I think about trying to feed him again and begin to rub my chest with my palms to warm the skin, but then I hear the singing stop and the water turn off in the bathroom and I run up another flight of stairs to my room, and on the way up I can hear Paul laughing. I put on my pajamas, even though it’s only four o’clock.
I want to stop loving him, but I can’t so I try to make my meanness toward Paul go away, my urge to take him into the backyard and dump him in a pile of leaves outside where no one would ever find him, even though I know eventually someone would. He wouldn’t cry, even if it was still raining. He wouldn’t make a sound, except maybe to laugh at the storm clouds, but soon enough his rescue would come. He’s never alone for long.
* * *
—
Our new house is wedged in between two other tall, narrow houses that hide beneath big starry seedpod trees like ours does. Fab calls it “the hideout.”
“Let’s go back to the hideout and get you cleaned up. You’re filthy,” she says to me sometimes after we’ve been to the park. I like to set my belly in the seat of the swing and pretend to fly, letting my hands drag in the dirt until my nails are solid mud. I never notice how dirty I get until I’m staring at my own brown bathwater.
My room is at the very top, and just outside the window is a flower box that Fab built. It’s filled with freshly rained-on daisies because that’s my name. Daisy is. Fab and Aunt Connie call me Dizzy on account of when I was younger I was always bumping into things. I used to be covered in scrapes and bruises from all the sharp corners in our old house. The edges of the banister and the ends of the kitchen counter and the jagged, biting corners of the brick fireplace would always find me. In that house, when it was just Fab and me, I would tear circles into the carpet, sometimes clipping the coffee table or the little stuffed rabbit sitting on the wicker bicycle, which, in that house, was next to the china cabinet, which I would also sometimes knock into if I wasn’t paying attention.
I lie on the floor of my room and close my eyes and try to forget about doing mean things to Paul, but it’s hard to make my mean thoughts go away these days. I think it’s because I’m growing up.
I go back downstairs. Aunt Connie is in her bedroom now with Paul. The door to the bathroom is open and steam is coming out of it like an oven. Aunt Connie’s wrapped in a towel folding laundry on the bed. Paul’s lying in a pile of our underwear and trying to roll around and laughing like crazy.
Aunt Connie is Fab’s friend, which means she’s not really my aunt, but Fab always calls her Aunt Connie when she talks to me, like when she said, “Aunt Connie’s going to live with us in the new house for a while, just until the baby’s born, but it’s a secret and if anyone calls or comes to the door looking for her, you need to forget that she lives here. Can you do that, Diz?” But no one’s come looking, so I haven’t needed to, which is good, because sometimes I can’t control which thoughts I end up remembering and which ones I forget.
When Aunt Connie had Paul everything in the house was better. The inside air was fresher and the windows let in more light, and even though I knew, even then, that he was better than me, and that it probably meant no one would think about me anymore, I didn’t care, because I wanted him to stay with us forever. And now I think he’s going to, because Aunt Connie’s suitcase that used to sit at the foot of her bed is gone. For good, I think.
“You wanna help me fold, Dizzy?” Aunt Connie asks, and I say yeah and hop onto her bed, which is warm from the laundry. Aunt Connie’s short blond hair is flat and clumped together because it’s still wet. Her towel covers everything from her armpits to her knees, which isn’t much. She kneels on the bed while she separates the clothes. Her face is flushed red and her nose looks like a sharp little red reindeer’s nose. I sit next to Paul and start to pull pairs of underwear out from under him. He squeals and keeps trying to roll, and depending on which pairs I take from the pile, I can either make a slope that will roll him off the bed and onto the floor, or a slope that will protect him from rolling. I fold the underwear into little squares like Fab taught me.
We hear Fab come home, and Aunt Connie jumps off the bed and rushes downstairs, and I’m alone again with Paul. He doesn’t seem to care that Aunt Connie has abandoned him again. He’s so confident. He looks up at me from his bed of underwear and laughs, because he trusts me. I don’t try to touch him or feed him. I pull pairs of underwear from him like flower petals. Downstairs I can hear Fab say, “Connie, for Christ’s sake, the windows are wide-open,” and Aunt Connie is laughing.
* * *
—
When Aunt Connie first came to live with us I stopped wanting to run away, and for a while I would only get mad when I thought Fab was paying too much attention to Aunt Connie and not enough to me, which was all the time, especially when she would get angry for no reason and cry and scream at us and pull her hair. It was obvious that having Paul inside her was having some kind of effect, over her and over Fab, who was always touching her belly and trying to calm her down. And it had a kind of power over me, too, because as long as Paul was inside Aunt Connie I almost never thought about leaving, and once he came out I stopped wanting to.
I only actually ran away once. It was before Aunt Connie and Paul, in the old house. Fab had fallen asleep on the couch again. Her head was sideways on her shoulder and ice was melting in the glass between her legs. It seemed like a good time to run away. I packed my purple knapsack and let myself out through the garage. I made it as far as the next neighborhood over, but when I got to the line of trees that separated us from them, I turned around. When I think about it now, I’m not sure what went wrong.
Now, instead of thinking about running away, I just think about doing things to Paul, like leaving him out in the garden for the birds to peck and poop on, or in the driveway behind the wheels of the car.
* * *
—
The next day is Saturday. I wake up early and Aunt Connie and Fab are sleeping in Aunt Connie’s bed, cuddled up together like baby rabbits with Paul asleep in his crib nearby, and I know it’s all because of him. He called Fab into the room the night before is my guess. Fab usually sleeps in her room, but she sometimes comes in late to help with him, in case he wakes up in the middle of the night, even though he hasn’t for a while. He’s an excellent sleeper. My guess is he called out to Fab in his sleep, drawing her to him without words in that way he does. And now here they are, all three of them asleep in the same room, the whole family. Fab pushes her face into Aunt Connie’s bare shoulder. I can hear Paul breathing in the crib, peacefully and beautifully, the way he does everything. They all seem so happy to be asleep.
The way they moon over him sometimes, Fab and Aunt Connie, the way they coo at him and hang on each other’s shoulders and blow up their faces at him and sigh when he smiles. More than once I’ve sat in the middle of the floor with my hand over my mouth and my nose plugged waiting for them to notice me. It happens often enough that sometimes I think my life is like my old ant farm, and Fab and Aunt Connie and Paul are like me when I didn’t notice for weeks that all the ants were dead, and I’m the ants.
I go downstairs to watch TV, but then there’s a knock at the front door, so I answer it, which is not something I’m supposed to do alone. I look out the window first to see who it is and it’s a man. He’s tall and his hair is blond and wavy and his eyes are blue. He sees me staring at him through the window, and he asks me through the glass if Sabrina lives here. Sabrina is Fab’s real name the way Daisy is mine. I don’t answer him. I don�
�t say anything for a while and then he asks me if Connie lives here, and my shoulders go a little stiff, because I remember that no one is supposed to know that Aunt Connie’s here, but this man does. Now he does, anyway. I’ve given it away with my eyes and my not saying anything and not forgetting that Aunt Connie lives here, which I now know is what I should have done, and the man asks through the glass if there’s a baby in the house, and tells me to open the door and let him in, and then I realize that he’s here because of Paul, and I’m relieved, because I’m off the hook. Some people are just drawn to Paul, the way Jesus’s disciples were drawn to him. This man isn’t the first. There’s Aunt Connie and Fab and me, plus a few weeks ago Valerie and Clayton, and also our neighbor Rachel, who keeps coming over to invite us to her church, even though she knows we already go to one, which is what makes me think she keeps coming because of Paul. And now this man. There’s nothing I can do about it, so I leave him standing there and go back to watching TV. Fab and Connie and Paul keep sleeping. Eventually he goes away.
* * *
—
The Valerie and Clayton story is that a few weeks ago a woman came to our door holding a toddler in one arm and a plate of cookies in the other. It was early, but I was up and had already dusted the coffee table and taken the garbage out to the garbage bins on the side of the house, which are my two chores. Fab and I answered the door together. Fab was dressed in a brown bathrobe and her hair was a mess. She’d just woken up and was holding a mostly full cup of coffee and was in no mood.
“Hiiiiiiiii,” the woman with the toddler and the cookies said. “I’m Valerie. I’m a friend of Lindsay’s from across the street?” Valerie’s face was mostly huge white teeth and lipstick. I got the feeling she was waiting for Fab to introduce herself.
“Okay,” said Fab.
“Okay,” Valerie said, “well, Lindsay and I are members of a neighborhood mothers’ circle. It’s nothing special. More like a calling tree, actually. Just kind of a way for mothers in the neighborhood to get to know one another. Just a list of names and phone numbers, plus we have a luncheon every now and again, and schedule zoo trips and things. Just mothers and their kids. That kind of stuff. So anyway, Lindsay and I are members. Lindsay and I and our boys. This is one of them, right here, this lil’ guy.” She rehoisted the toddler onto her hip. “This is Clayton. You’re a member, aren’t you? Aren’t you, Clayton? Clayton, can you say hi?”
Clayton looked at Fab and me, then buried his head in Valerie’s shoulder and made a little whimpering sound like he was about to start crying but wasn’t sure why.
“Awww, he’s shy. Are you a little shy today? He’s shy today. Anyway, I’m just here to invite you to join our mothers’ circle. Well, our calling tree, really. Circle sounds so formal, doesn’t it? Calling tree’s better. Whatever. Anyway, how it goes is, we add your name to the list, then we give you the list, then, if you ever need a babysitter, you’ve got a whole little list of people to call.”
“My daughter’s old enough to look after herself. She doesn’t need a babysitter,” Fab said, even though I’ve never been left home alone in my life.
“Well, of course she doesn’t,” Valerie said. More teeth. More lipstick. “I can see she’s a big girl, aren’t you there? Aren’t you a fine young lady?” She knelt down, talking directly to me, and for a moment I felt that impulse, like now I should be polite and say something, but right then I felt Fab’s hand give my shoulder a little squeeze, so I didn’t.
“But really, though,” Valerie said, turning her attention back to Fab, “I’m here because Lindsay mentioned you also have a newborn, so—”
“We don’t,” Fab said.
“Oh!” Valerie said without slowing down. “Oh, well, that is funny now, though, because Lindsay swore to me that she’d seen you around with a stroller. Maybe she was just confused. This little lady’s too big for a stroller, aren’t you?” Valerie looked at me and winked. Clayton looked at me and stuffed his fingers in his mouth accusingly. Fab’s hand got tighter on my shoulder, so I pretended to be the statue of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in our church, where Mary’s heart has been poked with thorns and stabbed with a sword, but still she doesn’t move.
“The baby’s my sister’s,” Fab explained. “It doesn’t live here.”
“Oh, I see,” Valerie said. “Well, that makes a bit of sense there, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it, Clayton?” Clayton burrowed deeper into her shoulder, taking his spongy, drool-soaked fingers out of his mouth and wrapping them around Valerie’s neck for dear life, almost pulling off that cry again, and I remember thinking that this had Paul written all over it, that Valerie was exactly the kind of person who would show up on our doorstep, smiling and bearing gifts like the Magi, not even knowing it was Paul who had summoned her.
“You have a good one,” Fab said, and closed the door. Through the glass, I could see this surprised Valerie. She stood there for a few seconds, wondering, I think, what to do with the cookies. I hoped she might leave them, but she didn’t. Eventually she and Clayton and the cookies left. Fab was already back in the kitchen, but I watched them go. From over Valerie’s shoulder, Clayton nodded his head slightly, wiping his nose on his mother’s sweater. His eyes were on me as he snotted her up and down, and with all his nodding he seemed to be saying, Yes, you’re right. You’re dead right. It’s exactly as you imagine.
* * *
—
This is how it happens. More people are aware of Paul every day. Hidden away in his crib upstairs, Paul is calling people from across the neighborhood, maybe even across the country, and they know exactly where to find him without knowing how or why. Sometimes I think that Paul might be getting things ready for when Jesus comes again in glory, that he’s calling the righteous to separate them from the wicked, or maybe the other way around, and when he finally grows up and the Second Coming comes, God and Jesus and Paul will judge us all. You shall not know the day or the hour, the Lord says, so why shouldn’t the hour be now? It’s maybe a silly thing to believe, but maybe not as silly as other things, especially when you see how people notice Paul and tend to him. I could be turning blue in a room full of people and no one would ever notice and tend to me.
But then, Valerie had, I guess. She had said I was a big girl. A fine young lady. Even so, I wished she hadn’t, because I got the same feeling from her that Fab did. That is, that she was only pretending to be good. That, really, she was a liar and a snoop. Judge not, the Lord says, but honestly, she was.
* * *
—
The next day is Sunday, which means church. Only Fab and I go. We don’t talk during mass. I try to listen and understand what’s going on. Fab spends the whole time kneeling and praying while the rest of us sit and stand and sing. I don’t know what she prays for, but I assume it’s for Paul and Aunt Connie. She used to sing along with the choir and take Communion. We used to go twenty minutes before mass started so that she could kneel and pray the rosary, saying each of the mysteries out loud—the joyful, then the sorrowful, then the glorious. But now she just prays quietly to herself.
I listen to the priest. It’s the Sermon on the Mount today, where Jesus talks about the meek inheriting the earth, and I think, if I’m the meek, then no way. If most of the people in the world are better than me somehow and the rest are, let’s say, the meek, then that’s still a lot of people left to inherit the earth. The odds I’ll end up with anything seem pretty slim. Just because they’re meek doesn’t mean they won’t try to take more than their share.
We pull into the garage at the hideout and Fab and I get out of the car and the blond-haired, blue-eyed man who was at the door the day before is walking up the driveway. Fab spots him right away and yells, “You get the fuck away from here.”
“I have to talk to Connie, Sabrina,” he says. “All I want to do is talk, I swear. Just let me see her.”
He keeps walking toward the garage, and Fab rea
ches down into a box near the car and pulls out my plastic T-ball bat, which is kind of flimsy and cracked down the middle from when I broke it. Then she drops it and grabs a rake.
“I swear to God if you come anywhere near this house I will kill you,” she says, and then points the rake at him like she means it.
“She can’t hide from me forever, Sabrina,” he says. “Tell her I’ve already talked to lawyers about custody. I’ll be back here with the police, and then you’re fucked. Tell her that. Is she home? I want to see her, goddamn it. See her.”
“Fuck the fuck off,” Fab says, and she starts walking toward him with the rake. “I am not kidding around.”
“Neither am I!” he shouts while backing away toward a car parked on the other side of the street. Fab keeps the rake pointed at the car as he drives away.
* * *
—
We’re eating Fab’s special macaroni with hot dog slices and potato-chip topping in the living room. On the TV is an educational program about apes who’ve learned to dig for termites with sticks. We’re trying to have a nice dinner as a family, but Aunt Connie keeps gulping down tears and letting out little yips of panic from the love seat. Paul is lying shirtless on the floor next to us. He hasn’t eaten yet, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s singing to himself, and every few minutes Aunt Connie leans over him and strokes his face or his bare chest and starts sniffing up tears again. Fab sets her macaroni on the coffee table and holds Aunt Connie at both shoulders and whispers something close to her ear, and Aunt Connie finally cries out loud for real.
Paul’s looking at me. He looks so happy. His mother is crying, wiping her eyes with her T-shirt, and my mother is holding her, rocking and squeezing, and Paul is happy as a clam. He’s rolling his head around on the carpet and laughing at me, and at the stuffed rabbit sitting on the wicker bicycle next to the television stand, and his cheeks just couldn’t be rosier. And in spite of everything, I’ll admit, he makes me happy. I want to lie down and roll around with him on the floor and be his mother. I could do it. Better than Aunt Connie, who barely knows what to do with him half the time. She sometimes leaves him sitting on the couch or in his crib for an hour while she’s off in another part of the house doing other things, or sometimes just hiding. Other babies howl when they need something, but not Paul. Paul would lie in his own dirty diaper forever and laugh about it. He would starve to death with a smile on his face. You’d poke his hollow belly and he’d giggle and wave his pale, bony arms and never once let on that your neglect was killing him. He lets Aunt Connie be a bad mother. When she’s home, Fab takes care of almost every real Paul chore there is, but she works in the daytime. Aunt Connie feeds him when it occurs to her and waits until his diaper sags to change him.
The Sea Beast Takes a Lover Page 8