The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  She took off her wig and put it on the back seat, ignoring the dark openness of the unoccupied space. She powered on the music to Benny Goodman’s “Get Happy.” She turned it up.

  Through ten songs and twenty-three miles, she incrementally raised the volume. If a distressing thought or feeling broke through the barrier of sound, she sang along, making up words if the lyrics were unfamiliar. At a notoriously long red light, she took the last drag of her fifth cigarette and stuffed it into the flower of squeezed filters filling the ashtray. The light was still red when she lit the next one.

  “I stopped the cart in the freezer aisle,” she whispered. “We needed peas.” She had read that for a lie to be persuasive, it was important to include minor, but not too many, details. “But then I also wanted a pie crust. It was only three freezers down, so I walked away. When I turned around, she was gone.”

  There are unwanted children filling up shelters and adoption agencies all over the country, he would say. Why would anyone steal one in a grocery store?

  “Convenience,” she said to the empty car.

  Katherine opened the window and reached out her hand. It was cooler, but the forecast had predicted it would get no lower than seventy degrees. She would be comfortable enough until someone claimed her.

  The man with the black and white dog had probably already taken her home.

  But what if he had walked right past her?

  What if his dog had smelled Millicent, turned wild, and attacked her?

  What if other hungry, nocturnal, animals found her? Rats? Bats? Raccoons? Cats?

  Katherine crushed out her cigarette, opened all the windows, and stared up at the red light. Two cars waited across the intersection, but no one was behind her. Rather than draw attention to herself with a brazen maneuver, she reversed onto the shoulder, used her turn signal, and made a U-turn.

  She tried to maintain her speed limit on the long, dark stretch but unconsciously pressed harder on the gas at each vivid image of Millicent’s carrier cradling nothing but her shredded and bloody yellow t-shirt. When she turned onto Morncrest twenty minutes later, she became so distracted she drifted right and bumped the curb. She stopped the car.

  The street was, for the time of night, swarming. Singles with strollers. Couples with toddlers. Most were accompanied by dogs, even the few couples without children Katherine saw walking in her direction. If not for the avoidance of eye contact they all seemed to make with equal commitment as they passed each other on the narrow sidewalks, Katherine would have thought they were going to a block party, or a private concert in someone’s a garage. But there was no air of festivity, no urgency or excitement. Every single person on the sidewalk was exceedingly, identically casual.

  That oddness aside, the numbers comforted her. She doubted, now, that there was any reason to worry the baby had been or would be attacked by a dog, or by any other animal, for that matter. She had probably already been taken in, and that was all Katherine needed—to see that she and her carrier were gone. She pulled away from the curb.

  The distant light of the fountain came into view as a blue dusting on the tree branches bending over it. The closer she got to it, the wider the birth the late night strollers seemed to give the fountain until—at once, it seemed—the sidewalks cleared. No one ahead of her, no one behind. A little father ahead, a motion light caught the white sneakers of someone stealing around the back of a house, but everyone else was magically gone.

  Katherine unconsciously released pressure from the gas pedal when she drove close enough to see the fountain’s base. It had changed, somehow, had more texture and shadows, or—

  Children. She stopped, put the car in park. Toddlers. Babies laid like flowers at a memorial in the light at the stone base. Where she had left one baby, there were four…five…six…a cluster propped against Millicent’s carrier, and then against one another, one baby used as support for the next. And there were older ones, too, anywhere between five and eight years old (she had no idea about children’s ages), sitting among the babies.

  Katherine got out of the car and headed for Millicent without closing the door. She took a quick survey of the children surrounding the carrier and was relieved that most wore cool clothing—t-shirts or thin cotton onesies, open-toed shoes or no shoes at all. They were also calm, quiet.

  Obvious when she got closer was that not all of them were bathed, and their clothes, in many cases, were dirty. Millicent was by far the most promising-looking baby there. Katherine was frankly baffled that no one had taken her. But there really were so many of them. Too many. An intimidating choice for anyone, which meant they would all likely stay where they were until the police came to take them to a shelter.

  Shelter life was not what Katherine had envisioned for Millicent.

  She pulled at the carrier handle, and the babies stacked against it shifted.

  “You can’t take that.” A boy, a young teenager, maybe, stepped out from behind the fountain. He sucked on a narrow cylinder and blew a cloud of blue smoke. It hovered briefly, hypnotically, in folding, swirling clouds, and then steadily descended, molded over small, bald heads, slithered into t-shirt wrinkles, curled into tiny, dark nostrils. “They’re all gonna fall down, can’t you see? You can take the baby if you want it, but leave that seat there.”

  Katherine needed to be clearheaded to drive, so she flapped the smoke away from her face as she let go of the handle. She rearranged the babies around the carrier and lifted out a glassy-eyed Millicent.

  “You want an older kid, too?” The teenager tucked his hair behind his ears, uncovering a bruise high on his left cheek. His yellowed t-shirt was starched. He shrugged a narrow shoulder at Katherine. “Thirteen’s not so bad, you know. It just means I know how to do stuff.”

  “No, thank you,” Katherine said. “I only—Just one child, please.” She realized with some amusement that she sounded like she was making a purchase.

  The boy apparently had the same thought.

  “That’ll be fifty dollars, then.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Babies are fifty. Toddlers are…uh…I don’t know, twenty-five, and teenagers like me, we’re only ten. Ten dollars. And I can do more than clean, or some shit like that. I’m good at solving problems, and, uh…and I also have organizational skills.”

  “I have no use for any of that. But, thank you.” She looked around. People were emerging from the darkness, watching her. A trio—a woman with a stroller and a dog—jogged down the sidewalk from the far end of the street.

  “So, you don’t want an older kid,” said the boy, who seemed unfazed by what was happening around them. “I get it. Whyn’t you take two babies, then, instead of just one? I’ll give ‘em both for seventy-five.”

  “No.” Katherine held Millicent to her as if she were feeding. It was the only time she had ever held her, the only way she knew how. She stepped gingerly to the street.

  “Fifty dollars for that one,” he said. “But if you want this one over here, I’ll give it to you for five.” The boy picked up a baby of Millicent’s approximate age and cradled it comfortably in one arm.

  “I really only want this one.”

  “What makes that baby so special? This one’s just as nice, and a lot cheaper.”

  She laid Millicent on the driver’s seat and reached past her to get inside the glove box.

  “Hey, hey, you don’t need to—take him for free. You don’t have to pay me at all. Just don’t shoot—”

  Katherine stepped out of the car with a short stack of tens and twenties flat on her palm. She brought them as close to the boy as she could without stepping on any hands or feet. He reached out and took the cash. He counted it slowly, the baby bobbing in his arms with the movement.

  “This is a hundred,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “That baby, it’s yours, right?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why you want it so bad. You left it and changed your mind, right?”

/>   “No. I simply like this one.”

  “Yeah? I bet you’ll like this one, too, if you don’t want me to run to one of these houses and call the police.”

  Katherine looked out at the houses. Motion lights flicked on and off as people continued to come out of the bushes and the dark spaces between garages. The woman jogging with the dog and stroller had stopped on the sidewalk half a block away and was tying the baby’s shoe. There was no way to know for certain that all of these people were here for the same reason as Katherine, but she had a good feeling they were. They would be allies, were she to call out the boy as a threat. But threatened people were unpredictable. They could deal with him civilly, or they could do it violently. He was just a boy.

  Katherine insisted that she had left no one at the fountain. She said he could call the police if he wanted to, but that when they arrived she would tell them she had been so appalled by the recent spate of baby-selling she had taken it upon herself to perform a citizen sting operation.

  “As evidence,” she said, “I will point to that baby in my car and the money you have in your hand. Do you know what the penalty is for selling children?”

  “No.”

  Katherine had no idea, either. She would have said the punishment was a year in prison, as it was for abandonment, but that hardly seemed an impressive threat to a boy like this.

  “Labor camp,” she said.

  When he rolled his eyes, Katherine explained what conditions were like for prisoners at the isolated prison. Meal worms for meals, sewer water to drink, weeks at a time of pitch-black darkness—

  The jogger approached on the sidewalk, stopped for a moment to watch Katherine and the boy, and continued past them. When they were alone again, Katherine added that there were beatings, torture, and rape at this labor camp. And that no one, to anyone’s knowledge, had ever left.

  “Ever,” she said.

  The boy tucked the bills into the diaper of the baby in his arms and then held the baby out to Katherine. “See, I’m paying you. I’m not selling babies, I swear. Me and him got dumped here just like everyone else. Please take him. If you don’t, I don’t know what’ll happen to him.” He leaped over the tiny bodies to the street and pushed the baby against Katherine’s chest, holding it there when she didn’t reach up to take it. “Please, lady. I can tell you’re not crazy. He’ll be safe with you.”

  Katherine backed into the car and slid Millicent to the passenger side. She gently pushed the boy and the baby distant enough to close the door and instructed him through the open window to call the police and tell them where he lived. He laughed at her and took the baby and Katherine’s hundred dollars to his original spot beside the wall. When she asked if she could drive them somewhere, the boy ignored her.

  “Why are you staying here? Can you not at least use the money to stay indoors tonight with your brother?” she said.

  The boy shrugged at her. “And then do what?”

  Katherine watched in her rearview mirror as the boy set his brother in Millicent’s carrier. The jogging woman returned to the fountain, and a second teenager appeared from behind the wall. The two teens thrust their middle fingers at the woman scooting her stroller into place. She ran off with a return finger flashed over her shoulder, the dog trotting at her side.

  PART TWO

  ELEVEN

  For as many mornings as she was young enough for toys, Millie played in the kitchen corner while her mother made breakfast. When she was allowed to sit at the table, it was to eat her oatmeal and berries and listen as her mother read stories from the newspaper. Her smooth fingernail would underline the words as she sounded them out.

  “…argued against repealing the Citizen Amendment. ‘This is not a states’ rights issue, dagnabbit. If we as human beings, as citizens of this earth, accept that ‘right to life’ means every person, born or unborn, has the right to life, how can we, by all that is just and holy, condone the future denial of said right to life in this or that backward state? I say hogwash,’ state representative Lester Hightower said…”

  “…strongly opposed the proposed trial-basis return of welfare benefits. Frelinger cited recent findings by the American Employment Initiative that job seekers ‘not highly selective’ about their employment options will find work within one to three months of becoming unemployed. ‘Someone is always hiring,’ Frelinger said. ‘Whether they want you to wash dishes, clean toilets, enter data, or pour their coffee doesn’t matter. What matters is, will they pay you? If the answer is yes, there’s a job. So take it, you entitled, lazy [expletive]. And if you know you can’t afford to have a kid, how about this? Keep your d— behind your zipper where it belongs!’ A chorus of hisses and loud, unintelligible muttering silenced Frelinger…”

  Story time was the only one-on-one time Millie had with her mother. Sometimes she tried to play with her in the kitchen after the stories were done. Once, she crawled under the table where her mother sat looking out the window. She had her arms almost all the way around the baggy bottoms of her mother’s loose, dark pants when the chair slid back and the ankles were gone. She followed the feet to the counter and went for her ankles again. Again they slipped away, this time going all the way through the living room and out the front door. Her mother looked in from the other side of the square window, her face glowing orange and then hiding behind fog. When she came back inside, wind and burnt perfume rubbed into her clothes and long, yellow hair, Millie said, “Play,” and held out her favorite thing, a blue bus with yellow stripes on the sides.

  “Later, Millicent,” her mother said, but Millie understood “no.”

  “Play,” Millie said again, this time holding up a black racer with a red top.

  Her mother took the car, dropped it in the box, and brought Millie to the table for a story.

  “A Haverton woman disappeared Tuesday after taking the family car in for detailing, her partner, Jonathan Flores, said. Flores said he last saw Joan Spellman, 26, at breakfast Tuesday morning. ‘She said the car was dirty and she needed to take it in. I never saw her again,’ Flores said. Sources close to Spellman who wished to remain anonymous said they believed the disappearance was intentional. ‘She wanted out,’ one source said. Said another source, ‘She’s been waiting for this for weeks. I think it can just take some time, you know, to get the nerve.’…”

  Millie didn’t know why her mother was crying, and she didn’t know enough words to know what was being read to her.

  But she learned fast. Millie was reading like a ten-year-old on her fourth birthday. She could also print forty-two words that had more than one syllable. But the most important thing she learned was that reading and writing were the only ways to get her mother’s good attention, so she practiced all the time. Every night after she went to bed, she did spelling quizzes on her tablet under the blanket. In the car on the way to Lenny’s house most weekday mornings, she mouthed the words in books her mother kept in the back seat pockets. She also read at Lenny’s house during nap hour (Lenny always slept), and when everyone (except her Aunt Margaret) went to one of Lenny’s dad’s sites, she read the words printed on drywall and on tools. The workers also left magazines in the outdoor bathroom that she was allowed to take outside to read in the fresh air, as long as she stayed away from work areas.

  Millie taught herself three new words a day, but she only told her mother one every day and saved the big ones for when she needed them. A word like “remarkable” or “distinguished” could get a “Very good,” a “Well done,” or sometimes, a smile—right before her mother ran outside to smoke her cigarette. (Millie went up to her bedroom whenever that happened, now, even if her dad was home. She wanted to stay in the living room with him, but he didn’t pay any attention to her when her mother was out there. All he did was jump off the couch and walk back and forth and back and forth in front of the window. Sometimes he’d bang it with his fist.)

  Her dad’s attention was easier to get than her mother’s. He gave it to her whenever he w
anted. He came down in the morning halfway through the reading-aloud sessions and listened while making his coffee, saying, “Ah!” and “Really!” as she pushed through stories she only half understood, when she understood them at all. When it was his turn every other day to drive her to Lenny’s house, he tossed her over his shoulder and tickled her all the way down the path to the truck. On really nice weekends, if she wasn’t staying at Lenny’s house because her parents were on one of their vacations, her dad took her out to play in the weeds. Sometimes he brought her way out to the edge of their property and pointed into the distance at the wild meadow land they would own “any day, now, Millie girl, and when you’re all grown up, you can have your very own house out there so we never have to be too far apart.”

  He stopped making that promise when Millie was six.

  It was the third day of straight rain, and the whole time she watched her dad pack his suitcase he talked about the sunny skies in Nevada. Millie followed him and his suitcase downstairs when he was done, and after rolling his bag to the door he picked her up and brought her to the front window. He told her to think over vacation weekend about what color her house on the other side of the meadow would be.

  “Please stop feeding her that fantasy.” Her mother sat in the living room with her newspaper. Her suitcase was a shiny square against the wall. “Outside of what we put away for her education, we spend nearly everything we make. Yet, you insist on promising her a small fortune.”

  “So, we’ll save,” he said.

  Her mother turned and rested an elbow on the back of the couch. “No more vacations?”

  “We’ll find another way.”

  “No new car, then?”

  He laughed.

  “Millicent,” her mother said, “you may not understand any of this, but I think hearing it earlier is better than hearing it later. Are you ready to listen?”