Hush Little Baby (2 page)

Then she was out of sight, and Kit Innes was standing in the sun with a very small person in her arms.

M
UFFIN MASON COULD NOT
wait to be older.

But then when she got older, it didn’t make any difference. No matter how much time passed, she remained shorter, skinnier, had more rules, and could not reach or see as high as her brother. All summer, Muffin had ached for school to start up again, because she would be in fourth grade. But by the end of September, she realized that was all she was in — fourth grade. Her brother, in high school, had all the fun.

And even in fourth grade, Muffin was not impressive. When they did percentiles for height and weight, Muffin was in the bottom ten percent. Compared to her sturdy classmates, she was a pencil. When they did tests for reading group, Muffin was not in the highest. When they showed off their soccer skills, Muffin had none.

This afternoon, Muffin was in the back of the family van.

Her big brother, Rowen, was in the middle.

Her parents were in the front.

Everybody was in a terrible mood.

They had just come from a high school event in which it was clear that all the kids in this entire school system were skanks and wrecks and broken glass. Mom and Dad could not imagine why they lived here. They were appalled by the disgusting students with whom Rowen seemed to be friends. They were ready to move to some other part of the country where nice people still lived.

All afternoon, Rowen kept pointing out nice kids, hoping to calm Mom and Dad down, but today the nice kids dressed in disguise and blended in perfectly with the creepy ones. Mom and Dad did not know what this world was coming to.

On the way home, Dad was out of cash and they stopped at an ATM machine — and it didn’t work. It kept his card five minutes and then spit it back. “Not only do I live in a town where my son goes to school with druggies and foul-mouthed kids wearing torn obscene T-shirts,” muttered Dad, “but I can’t find a working ATM.”

Rowen said, “Dad. All the kids you saw this afternoon are perfectly nice. You just don’t like their clothes.”

Rowen himself dressed beautifully. He loved looking like a catalog ad, and would practice draping a sweater the way the model wore it on page forty, and letting a suspender fall like page seventeen, slouching his socks just as they did on page eleven. “It won’t help, Row,” his sister, Muffin, often told him, “ because you have a face like raisins in a pudding.”

Actually, Rowen was quite handsome, but Muffin was always irritated with him for being so much older, so she never gave him compliments.

“You take Muffin with you when you go to Shea’s tonight,” said Dad. “I thought we could leave her home alone without a sitter, now that she’s nine, but we can’t. Not now that I’ve seen what kind of people this town breeds.”

“Dad!” yelled Rowen. “No fair! Shea invited Kit over for me. We’re going to rent movies. I don’t want Muffin there.”

Muffin kept quiet. She might be crummy in spelling and arithmetic, but she was smart. The way to get your way was to say nothing.

“I don’t wanna baby-sit!” moaned Rowen. “Dad! Come on! Keep Muffin.”

Muffin adored her cousin Shea, she adored her aunt Karen and uncle Anthony, and she adored their dogs, cats, parrot, gerbil, ferret, and water garden with fish.

She understood that she was not to get in the way, or Rowen might behave in a very uncatalog manner and smack her one, but at Shea’s, staying out of the way would not be a problem, because at Shea’s house everything was in the way; always. There was no order or plan; there was nothing neat or clean. There was dog and cat hair everywhere, and animals napping or exploring or running in their cages or in need of water.

This was a complete contrast to Muffin and Rowen’s parents, who were very neat. It was impossible to believe that her mom and Aunt Karen were sisters. Mom especially did not believe it.

Mom and Dad had spent a ton of money on their house, and their wallpaper, and their chairs and table, and their house was going to stay clean and sparkling and beautiful — and it did. If you played a game on Mom’s dining room table, you cleaned it up and counted the pieces.

Whereas at Shea’s house, you couldn’t find the game. If you did locate it, it was missing the board.

Vaguely Muffin heard her brother continue his argument that a nine-year-old would absolutely ruin an evening of three sixteen-year-olds.

But in the Mason household, Dad always won. It was remarkable. One year, Row kept score. But there was no score. Dad was the only player. It was like living with the weather. If Dad rained, you got wet.

So when Dad said Muffin would go with Row to Shea’s house for the evening, she was going with Rowen to Shea’s.

Kit Innes heard herself laughing in a peculiar detached way, like a recording behind a television show.

The sun was glaring on the translucent skin of the tiny baby. The baby was not actually bald, but had a fine down of almost invisible hair. When Kit brushed her cheek against the baby’s, it was like brushing velvet.

She went into the house, closing the front door with her foot.

The stuffy dark of the house had disappeared. Dusty racing through and the burble of the water cooler and the warmth of the baby had taken care of that.

Kit looked down. Perhaps this was a very lifelike doll. Dusty did collect dolls. Dusty loved the full-page magazine ads where you pulled the card from the magazine and ordered a beautiful shelf doll for $59.95 a month for four months. When Dusty had lived here, one entire bedroom had been filled with dolls. Dusty never played with them, though, and her reasons for collecting them had never been clear. Dusty liked the act of buying things, and once she’d bought something it had no use; she was bored and had to go buy another.

It was clear that this was not a doll.

With no warning, its little chest heaved. It made a croaky sound, not the soft coo Kit would have expected. More like a frog. Its little back arched, and its miniature feet pressed down on Kit’s waist, not as if the baby were trying to stand, but as if a convulsion were coming on.

Kit was terrified. What was she supposed to do?

What if it died? What was that horrible thing babies got, that sudden infant death thing? How did you know? Should she call an ambulance? Why was its little chest jerking around, both getting air and not getting air?

“Come on, baby, take a good breath. You can do it,” she crooned, hoping that babies did not sense fear the way attack dogs did.

The baby breathed deeply. Its little head sagged so fast that Kit had to catch it in her palm, so it wouldn’t snap off. It seemed to lose its spine, and turned into a Beanie Baby, all sag and no bone.

Kit felt the same.

Cradling the baby very carefully, so it would not notice that anything was happening and react by suffocating itself, Kit walked into the family room. Here the decorator had gone huge: huge furniture, huge shelves, huge jugs and baskets, and a huge collection of duck decoys, although Dad had certainly never hunted a duck. Dad hunted movie concepts.

The wall of windows was high above the seventeenth hole, with a view of water hazards, artfully planted trees, and a sweet little curve of bridge. If a golfer was going to behave badly and swear at his game, it was here.

To Kit’s right was a stretch of long thin glass cabinets — the romantic British butler look that some people might refer to as a kitchen. Dad did not cook. He hardly ever had food around. If Kit stayed over here more than a day or two, Mom packed a picnic basket. Sometimes she would send a thermos of Dad’s favorite coffee, which was when Kit wanted to know why they hadn’t just stayed married, and Mom wanted to know why Kit had to bring
that
up again, and it took all Kit’s self-control not to develop an attitude.

Anyway, Dad was an eating-out kind of guy, so the room was not really a kitchen, but just an extension of the family room that happened to have appliances and sinks.

The baby stirred. Its little face stretched out of shape and its body quivered, as if on the verge of a sneeze, and then it sank back with a burble and slept with its tiny mouth open.

Kit was already exhausted and she had not been in charge of this baby for two minutes.

She didn’t think the baby was literally a newborn. It didn’t have the wrinkled, red, rashy look of being brand-new. It looked softer and a little rounded, as if it had had a week or two to get used to the world. But Kit doubted the baby was as old as one month.

She balanced the tiny body in the crook of her left arm, and with her right hand she spread the flannel blanket across the middle portion of the sofa. The decorator had chosen a leather couch, dyed hunter green to give it a British library look, crusted with brass studs. Kit lowered the baby into the dip of the sofa, where the seat met the back, so the baby could not roll over and fall off. Although it looked like an awfully young baby for knowing how to roll.

The moment it left the warmth of her arm, the baby woke up.

Its eyes opened so wide that Kit giggled, and the baby stared not at her, the source of the giggle, but straight up, as if its eyes didn’t go left and right yet. It gurgled, a much sweeter sound than the frog croaks. Its feet began to wave, as if the baby thought feet were hands.

Kit’s father was very big on photographs. Perhaps it was his Hollywood attitude, or perhaps all fathers are big on photographs of their children. By Kit’s estimate, Dad had taken a million snapshots of her, and a thousand movies. Dad believed every event, no matter how minor, must be immortalized. He still photographed her at the airport, arriving and departing, each and every visit she made to him in California. Fearful that he would miss a minute of her life, he handed a pack of cameras to Mom and Malcolm whenever he left New Jersey for a longer stretch than usual.

Dad had a collection of very impressive, very expensive cameras, but everybody else was afraid of them. There was too much adjusting to do, and too much fear of breakage or loss. So for years now, he’d been buying disposable cameras by the dozen and ordering people to use them in his absence. So, sitting on the counter in the unused kitchen was a stack of cameras, all still in their bright yellow cardboard boxes.

Now the baby was waving all four limbs, giving it more in common with upside-down turtles than with humans. Kit opened a camera, peeled away the foil, and took a flash photo. And because she had been brought up to believe in quantity, she took five more. Whatever angle she used, the baby was adorable.

She had been afraid of the baby to start with, because it was so little and so unexpected. But now she saw that the baby was beautiful. Even though the baby seemed fine lying in the slant of the sofa, Kit had to pick it up again. She nuzzled its face and tummy. “Go back to sleep, little sweetie,” she crooned. “Mommy will be back in a minute, Mommy will be —”

And then she thought:

How do I know Dusty will be back in a minute?

For that matter, how do I know Dusty is the mommy?

D
USTY DROVE AWAY WITH
good intentions. She had a mental list of things that must be accomplished swiftly and in the proper order.

But handing the baby to Kit was such a relief.

Babies were enormously difficult. You could think of nothing else.

And Dusty was accustomed to thinking of her own body, not some little twenty-inch, eight-pound body. (She’d had a cat that size once, but the cat took care of himself. The baby, now — it most definitely would not take care of itself. It had not once slept more than two hours at a time, and sometimes it slept only ten minutes!)

She had gotten quite cross with the baby for refusing to sleep during the night. And not only did it stay awake, it would not lie peacefully in the little bassinet at the motel room. It whined and whimpered and croaked. Some nights not even picking the baby up and rocking and cuddling it would soothe it. Sometimes it just kept on crying.

It was so annoying to be backed into a corner. Dusty liked a world where all the choices were hers. She was determined to make this work out her way, no matter who got stubborn and difficult.

The rental car drove smoothly, and she found a nice calm radio station and listened to nice calm music. That was boring, so she found hard rock, and began dancing her arms and shoulders to the music. She had ten pounds to lose! The weight horrified Dusty. Having a baby was not good for your figure. Or your stamina. Or your complexion. Or anything that Dusty could tell.

She drove past the turn she’d meant to take.

She noticed it half a mile later.

Dusty had found that if she looked hard enough, she could always see that things were meant. Now she realized that Kit, who never went to her father’s house when Gavin was in California, had been
brought
to the house just to help her, Dusty. It was meant for Kit to be standing in the door just when Dusty expected the house to be empty. So it was
meant
for Kit to take care of the baby.

And who could be better at such a task?

Kit had her father’s strong will and decisive manner (and none of her mother’s unfriendly attitude). Kit was terribly reliable.

Dusty kept driving.

The sky was so blue and the sun so yellow and the day so warm.

She thought, I deserve some time to myself. I didn’t ask things to work out like this, and it’s way too hard. I’ve been struggling with this baby and this situation for seventeen days now. I will get my hair done and have a facial, and I’ll charge an outfit that fits, so I don’t feel fat. Something with style, maybe in that new shade of plum, and then I’ll go to the aromatherapist. I need to lavish attention on myself for a change. It just isn’t good for you to give up all your space and energy. You must take time for yourself.

Dusty felt better. She loved thinking of her Self, which felt like a person zapped inside her, whom she could admire and be glad about. But not when her hair was nasty and her stomach sagged and she had been up all night with a baby who would not improve.

Once her hair was done, she would face her problems. You could do anything if your hair looked good. Kit was lucky, her hair always looked good.