Baby (4 page)

Sophie liked carrots and didn’t like milk. Beets were for spitting. She hated baths, screaming so hard we had to shut the windows so no one would
hear, but she loved to sit in the bay until her skin wrinkled, pouring water from one bucket to another. She napped with Byrd in the afternoons, and Byrd sang every song she knew to Sophie: lullabies, show tunes, hymns, folk songs, and once, in a loud and happy voice, something about a drunken sailor until Papa knocked on the window for her to stop.

School began, and I went off the first day. No plaid dress.

“How come?” I asked Mama.

Mama saw my expression.

“But, Lark, I thought you always hated those plaid dresses,” she said.

“I did,” I said. “I do.”

I smiled at Mama, but my thoughts startled me.

But I wanted one anyway, Mama
.

Sophie cried when I left. She sat in her pajamas, her arms stretched up to me, her lower lip jutted out.

“La!” she cried mournfully.

“La!” Sophie said, smiling, when Lalo came to walk to school with me.

“I could stay home from school,” I said.

“You’ll do no such thing,” said Mama, “She’ll learn that you come back.”

At school the library had been freshly painted, the smell of paint mixing with the smell of old books. The shelves were dusted, the books neatly lined up as if daring us to take them down and read them. Ms. Minifred was slicked and clean and ready for us.

“Good morning. Sit up straight, Lalo,” she said. “Slumping may stop the blood from going to your brain.”

Lalo grinned. Under the library table was his new lunch box, black and shiny like Ms. Minifred’s hair. For Lalo another year like all the other years.

“This year we will be talking about the power of language,” said Ms. Minifred. “The power of words. And how words can change you.”

I stared at Ms. Minifred.

What about when there are no words? I thought.
Silence can change you, too, Ms. Minifred
.

Ms. Minifred looked at me, as if she had read my thoughts.

“Words,” she said.

She looked away, out the library windows, as if she was hearing words from far away. Then she waved her arm at the library shelves.

“In this room, in these books, there is the power of a hundred hurricanes. Wondrous words,” said Ms. Minifred.

Lalo and I looked at each other and smiled. Another year.

Mama was right. Sophie was waiting for us at home, her face pressed against the window, when Lalo and I came up the porch steps at the end of the school day.

The second week of school Sophie took her first step, pushing off from Papa’s tiled tap-dancing table. Papa clapped, Byrd smiled, Mama cried, and from then on Sophie walked; sometimes tilted forward as if a wind pushed her; sometimes tottering so that our hands went out to protect her.

Sophie rode the island’s dirt roads on a seat on the back of Mama’s bicycle, pointing to dogs and cats. She learned to wave by cupping her hand and waving to herself. She learned what the word
hot
meant when she touched the oven door, and that
no
meant
no
when she went near Mama’s wet canvases.

And then very suddenly one day she began to put her hands behind her back and bring them out in fists, hands flat, or two-fingered shapes.

“Rock, paper, scissors,” said Papa softly. “Sophie learned. She doesn’t know what it means, but she learned.”

Mama smiled.

“That’s how it is with children,” said Byrd. She paused. “Someday, she will remember all of this in some way, you know.”

We looked at Byrd, then at Sophie. Mama turned from the window, her smile fading, all of us thinking of Sophie’s mother. Papa watched Mama. It was as if Byrd, in one sentence, had pulled Sophie back from us to a place where we couldn’t follow.

Sophie got up unsteadily and looked at Papa. She picked up one foot and put it down. She did it again.

“The shuffle,” whispered Mama. “She wants you to dance.”

Mama watched Papa.

“She wants you to dance,” she repeated, her voice so thin, it almost broke.

There was a silence. Then Papa leaned over and picked up Sophie. Slowly he began to dance holding her, Sophie beginning to grin at him. But Papa didn’t grin back at her. He looked at Mama as he sang.

Papa and Sophie danced a long time, the late afternoon light falling over them like a spotlight. Mama watched, standing by the window. Byrd sat, straight as a tree. Only Lalo smiled.

“Come, Larkin,” called Papa. “Dance with us.”

I shook my head. “I can’t,” I said.

The next day Sophie’s letter came, almost as if
Byrd’s words about Sophie’s mother had made it happen. Five one-dollar bills slipped out of the letter in Mama’s hand as she read.

She loved the wind and she loved music. She remembered them together; the sound of the wind in the marsh grass and a song that she dreamed, a thread sound of song that she couldn’t remember when she woke
.

Winter came fast with a surprising sudden snow the day before Thanksgiving. We bought Sophie a snowsuit, red boots, and mittens, knowing that the snow would never last. Island snow never lasted. Sophie didn’t like the mittens; she didn’t like the snowsuit; she didn’t like snow. Sophie did like her red rubber boots, shuffling around the house in them during the day, taking them to bed with her that night.

We ate Thanksgiving dinner in the dining room; the glasses gleaming, candles lighted, Sophie in her red boots. Dr. Fortunato stopped by on his way to see Rollie’s wife, who had a temperature,
but he really came to see Sophie. Griffey came to eat with us, and he played his accordion for Sophie. She liked “Roll Out the Barrel” and loved “Amazing Grace.”

“Mo,” said Sophie. “Mo.”

“You’d better learn some new songs,” said Byrd.

“I’m working on it,” said Griffey, insulted. “The sewer business is busy, you know.”

Griffey began to play “Amazing Grace” again.

“She loves this song,” he said to Byrd. “She does.”

Byrd nodded.

“She has taste, this child,” said Byrd.

Later we walked to town, everyone coming out to say hello and to wave to Sophie and to call happy Thanksgiving from their porches. The light sat like porcelain on the water; the sea calm, the sky the gray of silver-dollar plants.

That night Papa danced good-night for Sophie, dancing “Me and My Shadow” over and over. Lalo taught Sophie how to blow a kiss. Mama got out her sketchbook and began to draw Sophie, the lamp spilling light over her work. I
looked over her shoulder as she drew Sophie, all rounded edges, and then the sharper larger figure of Papa holding her.

“Do you think she remembers?” I asked her suddenly.

Mama looked up at me. Her eyes shone bright.

“Remembers?”

“Remembers her mother,” I said. “Do you think she misses her?”

Mama stared at me.

“I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “But it doesn’t matter, Larkin. We’re doing the right thing.” Mama sat back and looked at me. “You know that, don’t you? Sometimes you have to do what is right.”

What is right
. I didn’t answer, but I felt my face grow hot with sudden anger. There were words in the spaces between us; those words we had never spoken, words about what
I
thought was right. It was hard to say what I thought without getting rid of those words first. Mama, staring at me as if she knew my thoughts, suddenly straightened her shoulders and went back to her drawing. Conversation was over, that one subject that stood between
us closed. I watched her sketch, hating the look of her hand slipping across the paper as if she was brushing away all the words I needed to hear. Papa and Sophie came to life on the page, the two of them sitting in a chair by the fireplace now; Sophie imitating Papa—
rock, paper, scissors
—her hands, almost like Mama’s: quick shadows like butterflies in the firelight.

“They never named him,” I said.

We stood on Lalo’s favorite place on the island, the north cliffs that stood high above the water. Lalo liked the high places, the dangerous edges of the island that always scared me.
He isn’t afraid of anything
. Lalo looked at me for a moment. His hair blew across his face. He turned, then threw a rock out over the water. He leaned down to watch the rock disappear, a tiny splash from where we stood. I shivered and pulled my hat down over my ears, hooking my fingers in Lalo’s belt as I always did.

Lalo straightened and smiled at me. This was his favorite cold, windy weather, too, and he only wore a sweatshirt.

“I won’t fall, Larkin. I never fall, so stop worrying. Remember? Once I slept in a tree.”

I remembered. His mother had once taken him to a new barber who cut Lalo’s hair too short. Lalo hid from everyone, spending a day and a night up the tree by the pond until his mother lured him down with kale soup and cake.

“You haven’t fallen yet,” I said. I looked out at the water, gray and dark, whitecaps everywhere. “But things happen when you don’t think they will. Things happen that you’ve never even thought about. Ever.”

We began to walk the cliff path toward town.

“So,” said Lalo. I could see his breath hang in a cloud. “It’s only been six months since he”—Lalo looked sideways at me before he finished— “since he died. Mama said it takes people time. She says it’s different for different people.”

I didn’t say anything. Lalo picked up another rock and drew back his arm to throw it.

“Why didn’t they name him?” I asked.

Lalo paused, then threw the rock way out over the water.

“So,” he said, his hair lifting strangely in the wind, “
you
name him.”

I stopped.

“What?”

“You always do that,” said Lalo. “You always say, ‘What?’ when you don’t know what to say. Or you don’t want to answer. The fact is, if you need him named, then you name him.”

I stared at Lalo and he stared back. Then he turned and began walking again. I stood, watching him as he walked down through the beach plum; past the clumps of chickory gone by; past the juniper bushes.

“You’re dumb,” I yelled at Lalo. “You’re so dumb. The very dumbest!”

The sky darkened above suddenly, a cloud in front of the sun, like in a movie when it was suddenly serious and you’d better pay attention. Lalo disappeared over the hill and I stopped yelling. Then, after a moment, he appeared, looking at me.

I looked at the sea again, then I walked after him. When I reached him he was sitting by the old scrub oak tree that perched at the edge of the cliff.

I stood next to him and looked down on the town. I could see a car moving along Main Street, the church spire in the middle, a fishing boat coming into the harbor.

“It wouldn’t matter, you know,” I said. “It wouldn’t matter as much, except—” I stopped.

Lalo looked up at me.

“Except that Sophie’s here,” he said.

Tears came then, I couldn’t stop them, flooding down my face, cold and startling. Lalo didn’t move. He didn’t come over to put his arm around me, or put his hand on my arm. He just stared out over the water. And I cried, thinking about what my father had said to me not so long ago.

“Don’t love her,” he had said to me about Sophie.

Don’t worry, Papa. I don’t know how to love Sophie. I don’t know how to love Sophie because I don’t know how to love my brother
.

I cried.

Lalo sat under the tree, not looking at me.

The sun came out.