The Used World (19 page)

“Sheesh, that’s it for me,” Hazel said, stretching.

“Wait—what does that mean?”

“It’s ten o’clock, it means I’m going home. To my house. And my sad sad cats.”

“I don’t—” What she wanted to say was that she couldn’t possibly be left here alone with a stolen human infant. “You could stay, I’ve got all these empty bedrooms and—”

“Claudia, you have to spend your first night alone with him sometime. It might as well be tonight.” Hazel looked around for her purse, headed toward the stairs.

My first night alone with him sometime, Claudia thought, her head in her hands. Somehow this was really happening to her, even if only for a night or two. Hazel insisted and Claudia acquiesced, and where before that had always seemed like a relatively simple plan, now Claudia could feel the sinister undertow of obeisance, the lunacy in surrendering one’s will to another. “Wait!” she said, following Hazel down the stairs. “I have an appointment in the morning and I don’t want to miss it. You’ll have to keep the baby, and also we haven’t talked about work—tomorrow’s Monday and we both need to be there, have you thought about these things, Hazel?”

“Indeed I have,” Hazel said, looking around the living room for her purse. “I’ll be out here tomorrow morning bright and early, and I’ll take the baby to my mother’s for the day.”

Claudia swallowed. “Your mother’s?”

“Do you have a problem with my mother?”

“No! Of course not, it’s just that she’s…”

“Old?”

“Well.”

“She’s eighty-three. I don’t know if that’s old anymore.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Mother is very healthy and strong, regardless of her age, and she adores babies, which is more than can be said for either you or me.”

“But what if he…”

“Listen to you!” Hazel looked up at Claudia. She wore an expression of such satisfaction that Claudia itched, momentarily, to slug her. “Worried about a baby you claim not to want! That is so cute.”

Claudia crossed her arms, glared. “I would be worried about any infant I thought might be in jeopardy. That doesn’t mean I would want to
steal
him or dress him up and pretend he’s my
own.
”

Hazel spied her purse next to the couch. “Yes, that’s fine. Keep telling yourself that. But I’ll remind you that earlier today—this very day—that same baby was a scant three feet from a box filled with gasoline-soaked rags.”

Claudia felt the color drain from her face. “He was?”

“He certainly was.” Hazel pulled on her gigantic sleeping-bag coat and a red hat trimmed with white fur. She looked very little like Tuesday Weld. “Bright and early,” she said, walking out the door.

Claudia locked the dead bolt, the chain. She waited for Hazel to drive away, then turned off the porch light and the sodium lamp that lit her yard all the way to the road. She rested her head against the cold pane of glass at the top of the door a moment, and headed back upstairs.

The baby was asleep in his crib, on his new yellow sheet, under his soft blanket and a mobile that played Brahms’s Lullabye while giraffes and elephants and koala bears danced around on strings. Claudia couldn’t imagine how much this had cost Hazel. For now the baby was sleeping and Claudia was alone again, on a winter night like any other, or she could pretend it was so. His bed was right there, only a few feet from her own, and between the sighs and ticks of the radiator, she could sometimes hear him breathing, or she could see the sad little swimming gesture he made with his legs, like a marine creature out of his element.

Claudia sat watching him a long time, half afraid to move or leave the room. What if he awakened and she couldn’t hear him? What if he knew he had been kidnapped, and woke up afraid? What if Legion suddenly roared into her driveway, all of them fat and dressed in black, like a squadron of locusts? She’d brought this fear up with Hazel earlier in the evening, who had left behind not only an entire layette, but also a loaded, unregistered .38 she’d confiscated from Edie the year before, and which Hazel claimed to have forgotten to take out of her car. A simple weapon for street criminals. Claudia was not to use her own gun in the event of an emergency, Hazel insisted, because if the .38 was fired, Claudia would have no problem insisting that the gun belonged to the assailants, and that one of them had turned it on his brother, as such people were wont to do.

“But I would have gunshot residue…”

“Wash your hands, change your clothes,” Hazel had said, waving away the possibility of crime scene investigators.

“But there would be—”

“Don’t worry,” Hazel had told her. “They’re all too busy rubbing their itchy noses and listening to the ringing in their ears to wonder where that baby’s gotten off to.”

“How did this happen?” Claudia had asked—asked herself as much as Hazel. “This morning I was one person, my normal self, and now I have an unlicensed handgun and a strange baby, and I’m actually talking to you about what statement I should give the police if I’m attacked by a motorcycle gang and shoot a couple of them? Explain this to me.”

Hazel had shrugged. “What a difference a day makes, huh?”

Claudia studied the sleeping baby and sighed. She looked around her bedroom, her mother’s room, and it was filled with all this foreign stuff, these objects she’d never lived with before, had no understanding of. It was like a nightmare of proliferation, or time-lapse photography, one of those dreams where mushrooms grow too fast. In one scene: her life. Minutes later: her life teeming, unrecognizable to her.

She stood up finally, and put on her pajamas. Her knees and hips ached, and her shoulder blades and neck, the places she carried tension, felt as if she’d been moving boulders all day. She got into bed, wishing she had hot chocolate, tea, something there beside her, wishing she’d remembered to eat.
A Prayer for Owen Meany
was on her bedside table, waiting for her. She picked it up and read the three epigraphs, the last of which was by someone named Léon Bloy:
Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig.
That was as far as she got before falling asleep.

“Rebekah?” Peter didn’t look surprised to see her. He looked…wary? Sad? He held open the storm door, gestured for her to come in.

She would have to work at keeping her thoughts straight; all she wanted to do was sit down in front of the woodstove, in which a fire was struggling to get going, and take in the room, the crisp cedar-and-woodsmoke smell that permeated the cabin. Rebekah used to carry that smell on her hands to Vernon’s house and to the store. She wanted to study Peter, the slight sunburn on his nose and cheeks, the way one side of his hair had been flattened down by his ski cap. Of course they needed to talk, she wanted to talk, but she would be happy just to be. For a little while, even if only a few minutes, she could pretend this was her cabin, as she used to pretend she lived here with Peter.

“Sit—here, Beckah, let me move this stuff.” He walked past her and picked up his duffel bag, on which two chairlift tags were hanging by metal clips. “I was out of…”

“I know.”

“Right.” He gave her a rueful smile. “My mom. The Minister of Information.”

Rebekah sat down on Peter’s futon couch; the cabin was starting to warm up and she felt sleepy. Peter carried his duffel bag into his bedroom, went into the kitchen, and began making tea. He didn’t need to ask if she wanted some (she did) or what flavor she preferred (mint and chamomile—he already knew). She was flooded with a sense of well-being all the more potent for what had preceded it; this day had been like driving too fast over a hill that could make a car go airborne.

The tea was done and Peter was back in the living room so quickly Rebekah wondered if she had, in fact, dozed off for a few minutes.

“It’s hot,” Peter said, handing Rebekah her favorite stoneware mug.

“Thank you. Peter, we need.—”

“Beckah, are you pregnant? Is that what you meant by what you said to my mom?”

Rebekah blushed furiously, put her cold hands against her face. “I haven’t been to the doctor yet, but this morning I used one of those stick—”

“A home pregnancy test?”

“Yes, and it made a plus sign so fast it seemed to be in neon.”

Peter sat back against the couch, closed his eyes. “I guess I don’t need to ask if—”

“If what?”

He wouldn’t look her in the eye. “If there’s any chance that someone else is the father.”

Rebekah was uncertain what she should do with her body, her face. Would a normal woman scream, commit an act of violence? All Peter was saying was that she had experienced one relationship and he had experienced another. His disappearance, his college student, and now this question—he was outlining for her, because she’d been too blind to see it, who she had been to him. She took a sip of tea, calmly. “No, there’s not a chance.”

Peter nodded, rolled his own mug between his hands. He finally looked at her and winked. “Sure it’s not Claudia’s?”

Rebekah gave him a steady look, and not as if she found him funny.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was a cheap joke.” He took a sip of tea; his own favorite was Red Zinger. “No chance of an abortion, I guess.” Peter said this with a tone of resignation bordering on the theatrical.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No chance of turning back time, either.”

“Sweetheart,” Peter said, taking both of Rebekah’s hands in his and turning her slightly toward him, “I don’t want you to go through this alone, I really don’t. I don’t know what it means—I can’t think…” He pulled one hand away and ran it roughly through his hair. “I can’t get my mind around it.”

“I can’t either.”

“I want to help, I do, but—did Mom tell you about the tour? Rebekah, this is so important to me, I should have done it years ago. I feel like, like if I don’t do it now I will have missed my chance and I’ll never know if I could have been—”

“I understand.”

Peter sat back, looked at Rebekah with such intensity she felt a familiar heat start at the back of her neck and travel down her spine. “You do?”

“I do. I do understand.” She meant it. Even though she had been raised knowing she would never have a career, much less a vocation, she had recently been able to see that life gives you openings both false and true, and that one of the measures of genius is knowing which doors to walk through and when.

“It’s going to be so great,” Peter said, taking her hands again. “People underestimate these do-it-yourself tours but they can really create a groundswell of support for an unknown artist. Green Day sold something like forty thousand—”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“No. Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s just…I see a real chance here, Rebekah. And I know I’m really young, maybe it could wait—”

“Aren’t you twenty-six?”

Peter nodded, sipped his tea. “Yeah, like I said, I know I’m young, but—”

Rebekah tried to pinpoint when twenty-six had become young. Imagine, she thought, someone questioning Vernon’s manhood at twenty-six, when he was working sixteen hours a day trying to save his family’s farm, when he had a wife who couldn’t get pregnant and he was waiting on a call for the ministry.

“…some towns I know ahead of time where I’m going to play, other places I’ll…”

In fact, Vernon wouldn’t have taken kindly to being called a “boy” at sixteen, and maybe not at six.

“…a few covers, maybe ten altogether, and I’ll alternate them in different towns so I don’t get tired of them myself. Listen to this, I just learned this on Friday—no, on Thursday I learned this.” Peter was up and grabbing his guitar before Rebekah could say anything. He sat back down beside her and tuned it up and there it was: a Martin D28 and a whole lot of hours Rebekah had worked for Hazel to purchase it. She counted on her fingers, squinted her eyes. More than two hundred hours, actually. Peter began playing a series of sweet, bouncy chords, sang:
I could while away the hours / Conferrin’ with the flowers…

She’d only seen
The Wizard of Oz
once, but would always remember it. Peter knew how to choose that kind of song, the one that touched his listeners without hurting them. Although in truth, Rebekah didn’t know who his audience was. As far as she knew, she was the only person who’d ever heard him play. That had been the case until Mandy, at least.

She clapped when he finished; told him the whole thing was wonderful, that people would love it. He sat back down next to her, talked a while longer about the music industry, its level of corruption. He knew he was entering a den of vipers, but what choice did he have, really?

“You should do this if it’s so important to you.”

Peter’s eyes filled with tears, and he put his arms around her, drew her close. “Oh, thank you, thank you, you are so great to see it this way.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.” Peter stood up with his guitar, uncomfortable.

“Will you tell me what happened? Why you stopped calling me?”

He didn’t answer for a long time. The guitar was put away, the pot was put back on the stove for more tea. Finally, he rejoined her in front of the woodstove. “I don’t want the truth to hurt you.”