| | We had been given a pair of free tickets to the opera and were driving home to get ready.
Although only five years old and destined to spend the evening with a baby sitter, Jack amused his mother and me by loudly singing the one opera he knew, a la Bugs Bunny: "Fig-a-ro! Fig-a-ro! Figaro! Figaro! Fig! A! Rooooo!"
We were happy.
We tumbled out of the car and were about to race up
the hill to the front door, when we heard the shrieking. She came out of the apartment house across the street.
She was young, more a girl than a woman. She moved like a sleep walker, staring straight ahead, but she had a large handbag slung over one shoulder and carried something in her outstretched arms.
As I ran across the street, everything slowed, stretched, the way Einstein said traveling near the speed of light would be. I wondered, why weren't other neighbors appearing, drawn by the terrible shrieking? Why had she come outside just as we had gotten out of our car, as if waiting for us?
Somehow, from the first moment I had heard the shrieking, I knew.
"What's wrong?" I asked her. "What happened?"
She began mewling, whimpering incoherently, but she did not resist when I lifted the baby from her arms.
I cradled the blue-veined, hairless head. Its grey eyes were dry, and stared into nothingness. Its skin was cool and stiff, like a cheap plastic doll.
The firemen were the first to arrive. Huge men, they crowded into our small house and gently set the child on our bed.
While Jack's mom calmed and distracted the young mother in our kitchen, I took Jack upstairs. Thankfully, there were still late afternoon cartoons on, and Jack sat wordlessly in front of the television.
I hugged him.
"What's wrong with that lady's baby?" he asked.
"We don't know," I said. It was a chance to prepare Jack for what we would have to tell him later, so I added, "But the baby is very sick. That's why we had to call 911."
Downstairs, I watched from our bedroom doorway as the firemen worked. They knew the infant was dead, but they did not, would not, concede. I watched two big fingers pressing softly on the narrow, fragile chest; a man's mouth puffing the smallest breath between the infant's tiny pursed lips; a green liquid seeping from the child's mouth, staining the white bedspread.
When the ambulance arrived the EMTs took charge. In minutes, they had the mother and child in the ambulance and were driving away, with flashing lights but no siren.
I went upstairs, and found Jack staring out the window, watching the firemen climb onto their idling truck.
"Jack?"
He closed the curtain guiltily.
"It's okay, Jack." I went to the window and pulled the curtain back. We watched the big truck growl down our street and drive away.
Jack went back to lie in front of the television.
"Jack, how are you doing?"
"Fine. Are we going to eat soon?"
"It might be a while. How about an apple and some cheese?"
"Okay."
In the kitchen, I found Jack's mom taking a bunch of keys from the woman's handbag.
"There's another child in her apartment," she said.
"No one's there?"
"No. The father, or boyfriend, or whatever he is, works nights."
The rage I heard in her voice made me go to her, because I was feeling it, too. But when we tried to hug, our bodies were stiff, awkward, and she pulled away.
"I'm getting Jack something to eat," I said. "Then I'll put the bedspread in the wash."
"No, throw it out. Throw it away."
************
The boy was not quite two years old, and filthy. He was naked, but for a soiled diaper. His black hair was greasy; his sallow skin had dark stains from sweat and ground in dirt. He was the only child I have ever seen who had an expressionless face, yet his eyes, dark and wide and calm, took everything in.
Jack's mom carried him into the bathroom. "I'm going to bathe him. I think she said his name is Jeremy."
"Hey, Jeremy," I called softly.
The boy looked at me, but made no sound. Jeremy was silent and unresisting as he was bathed, dressed in Jack's old toddler clothes, and put in Jack's old crib taken down from the attic.
Jack helped us place some of his old toys into the crib. Jeremy watched, but did not move.
"Show him how to use them, Jack."
Jack demonstrated each toy, explaining in a pedantic tone of voice how it should be used. But Jeremy only watched, and would touch nothing.
He would not eat anything we offered except raisins, but greedily drank bottle after bottle of fruit juice.
As we ate our dinner we tried to talk of mundane things, of Jack's kindergarten, our jobs, the neighborhood, but nothing held our interest. Jack dodged every overture we made to discuss what had happened, so we talked about it ourselves, in terms he would understand and that might invite his questions. He ignored us. Then, growing impatient, he became boisterous. We didn't stop him.
He started singing a song about firemen that he had learned in kindergarten. "Hurry and get the hose out! Hurry and put the fire out!"
Jeremy started banging a toy xylophone with a tiny mallet we had put near him in the crib. Jack stopped singing. Jeremy stopped banging the xylophone, watching Jack from the crib. The moment Jack started his song again, Jeremy resumed banging the xylophone with the mallet. ************ After his evening ritual of washing, dressing in pajamas and being read to, we asked Jack if he wanted to talk about what had happened.
"No." He stretched, yawned, looked at the wall.
His mom stroked his hair and said, "If you have any questions or want to talk about it anytime, it's all right to."
He sighed, bored. "Can David tell me one of his stories?"
His mom turned off the lights as she left the room. I lay near Jack, rubbing his warm back while I made up a story.
As I was leaving the room Jack asked, "Was it a boy or a girl?"
I hesitated, seeing again the tiny, bluish body on our white bedspread. "A girl."
"How long is Jeremy going to be here?"
"I don't know. Probably just overnight. Maybe longer."
"He can't take my toys when he leaves." ************ We sat in the kitchen, not talking much until we were certain Jack was asleep. His mom cried softly, and I wondered why I couldn't do the same, why I felt so emotionless. Each time I checked on Jeremy I would come back mystified. "He's still not sleeping."
"He'll sleep when he has to," Jack's mom said.
"He's absolutely silent, but when I stand by the crib, he watches me. It's unnatural, isn't it? Shouldn't he need to sleep?"
We were quiet for a long time.
"She hasn't called," I said. "It's nearly midnight."
"We don't even know her name."
I pulled the large handbag across the kitchen table and took a fat wallet out from it. I found a driver's license. "Here's her name." I passed the license to Jack's mom. "Look at the birth date."
"Eighteen." She passed the wallet back. "She's a child. A child, having children."
In the photo on the license the girl wore heavy eyeliner and rouge and lipstick. Was she trying to appear older?
There were other photos in the fat wallet, more than a dozen. Each one was a photo of a child.
I passed the wallet to Jack's mom. "Look at the other photos."
She looked at the photos. "Who do you think all these children are?" she asked.
"They can't be related." I spilled the contents of the handbag onto the table: a few cosmetics, a small mirror, a parking ticket--and dozens more photographs.
I began turning the photos face up. "All children."
There were snapshots of small boys and girls on swings and monkey bars in playgrounds; a girl with skin the color of cream and coffee sat, nervously beaming, astride a mechanical rocking horse on the sidewalk in front of a department store. There were cheap studio photos of boys and girls, none of them more than four years of age, all of them smiling, staring straight into the camera.
"All the children," Jack's mom whispered. "All the children."
Spread over the kitchen table, the photos made a random collage. Every race and ethnic lineage could be seen in the children playing on swings or riding tricycles or naked in wading pools. And every child was smiling, was happy to be the focus of attention.
We talked long past midnight, but we could make no sense of the photographs, just as we could make no sense of the girl-mother, or Jeremy, the silent boy awake in the crib a few feet from us, or the nameless infant girl who had died that afternoon.
We were exhausted, but could not sleep. We went into Jack's room and knelt beside his bed a long time, just feeling his breath on our hands, stroking his warm face and hair. The way Jack's arms were spread wide, bent at the elbows, and his legs stretched apart, he seemed to have flung himself backward off an abyss--down, down, down into sleep. *********** Jeremy's grandparents took him away the next day. They were kind and sincere people. We were reassured by their concern for Jeremy.
It was several days later when we saw Jeremy and his mother as she pushed him in a stroller. The girl seemed transformed: her hair was lush from brushing, her complexion fresh. She wore no makeup, but her youthfulness made her pretty. Jeremy was filthy again.
We were uncomfortable near her. She made immature small talk about the weather, about Jeremy's father, whom we had never met. She cooed down at Jeremy and fussed with his coat. She explained, using large, awkward words, the language of bureaucratic indifference, how a routine investigation had been made into the baby's death. She was relaxed, almost enthusiastic, as she told us that SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, was to blame for her daughter's death.
A few weeks later, we noticed there were two young men who drove battered cars moving into the girl's apartment.
We never saw her, never saw Jeremy, again. |
