The Used World (25 page)

Where had she put the baby? He was with Caroline. Claudia should wear a little bracelet printed with
HE IS WITH CAROLINE.
Was someone going to come for him, was she going to have to kill someone, would she go to jail? “My stomach just somersaulted.”

“You should try to get over that,” Rebekah said, tipping her head back against the rolled wood. “I’m tired.”

“Okay, the baby. The baby reminds me that I got an afternoon appointment for him and for you with Dr. Gil; this is the last day he’s going to be open until after New Year’s, so you have to go.”

Rebekah raised her head. “When did you say?”

“This afternoon.”

“I’d rather not. And also we shouldn’t leave Hazel here alone, it’s going to be busy.”

“Do you realize how long we’ve been sitting here, leaving Hazel alone? And we get to make it up to her this evening; she needs us to pick up some things downtown.”

“Still. I’d rather not.”

Gil Parker’s office was still in the one-story brick building he’d moved into in the early 1970s, when it had seemed a good idea to abandon everything attractive for anything else. The waiting room hadn’t changed at all: there was a metal sculpture on the wall of three men (the three Greek physicians whose names Claudia could never remember); fake-wood paneling; and a corner devoted to faded plastic toys and copies of
Highlights
and
The Bible in Pictures.

“I don’t like doctors,” Rebekah said as Claudia held the door open for her.

“Have you ever even seen a doctor?” Claudia whispered.

“There was a doctor in the church, thank you, who took care of our ailments,” Rebekah whispered back.

“Where did he get his medical degree, in a vision?”

“You’re mean. I don’t like
secular
doctors.”

“You might have to make adjustments,” Claudia said. The sleeping baby, dressed in a fat, fuzzy snowsuit, weighed, it seemed, two hundred pounds in his car seat basket. A hard plastic runner ran from the doors to the front desk to keep the snow and salt off the carpet. Claudia stepped on it and felt again a tilt, a seesawing dissonance in her chest: the smell of the building, the runner, the metal sculpture. How could she come to terms with it and keep coming to terms with it, that she would lose all she loved and everything familiar to her, if now and again she stumbled into a room unchanged? As if it were possible to keep the room unchanged?

Gil’s wife, Judy, was still behind the reception desk, as she’d been all of Claudia’s life. Now that Claudia was past forty, Judy had finally ceased calling her A Long Cool Drinka Water. “My goodness, you brought the whole battalion.”

“Judy, this is Rebekah, and this is…” On the drive over, she and Rebekah had gone through a list of their favorite names, but hadn’t settled on one. “Oliver. Oliver James. James was my dad’s middle name.” Claudia’s face turned scarlet. She reached up and tugged at the neck of her sweater.

“Hello, Rebekah. Claudia, take that baby’s hood down and unzip his suit before he overheats. And go sit down while I tell Gil you’re here.” Judy typed something into the computer and began printing out a form. “I saw Millie the other day at the Home Depot, she looks like a dadgummed Biafran. Whose baby is this, now? He belong to you, Rebekah?”

“No, he’s…” Claudia reached out for the diaper bag on Rebekah’s shoulder. Tucked into a zippered pocket in the front were the official papers, signed by the baby’s thirty-eight-year-old maternal grandmother from her semi-permanent residence at the women’s prison in Indianapolis, transferring guardianship from herself to Claudia Modjeski. Signed by Hazel’s attorney, Harold Piper, and a nearly senile judge who frequently lost to Harold at the back-room poker game at the Top Cigar and Lunch. Official papers. “He’s mine, actually.”

Judy stood, peered over the counter at Oliver’s sleeping face. “Congratulations, then.” She looked back up at Claudia and raised a single eyebrow.

“I’ll bring in the birth certificate as soon as I get my copy.”

“That’s fine. Oliver, you say?”

Claudia nodded, then watched in fascination as Judy wrote
Oliver Modjeski
on a piece of stiff paper and slipped it into the colored tab of a manila folder. Just like that.

“Did he”—Judy looked back at the computer screen—“come from a foreign country?”

Rebekah let out a small laugh and headed to the waiting room.

“You could say that,” Claudia answered.

Judy took two clipboards off the wall beside her, handed them to Claudia. “Fill one out for the baby, have your friend fill out the other.”

“I told you, he was my father’s best friend,” Claudia whispered, even though there wasn’t another soul in the waiting room. As she talked she rocked Oliver’s car seat with her foot.

“I know, but how old does that make him?”

“Let’s see, he was a couple years younger than my dad, and he would have been, this year—Gil’s probably seventy-seven.”

“Oh Lord.”

“Rebekah, you have to see a doctor. The baby has to be vaccinated. Gil is where we have to go.”

“We were never vaccinated,” Rebekah said quietly, looking away.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.” Rebekah smoothed out her blue jeans with the flat of her hand, as Ludie would have a tablecloth.

“You did so say something.”

“I only said that we were never vaccinated, the church doesn’t believe in it.”

“Well, that’s just—” Claudia stopped herself. “My guess is that you’ll have to have some shots, too, then. I don’t know how it works.”

Rebekah sighed. “I’m uncomfortable.”

“I understand that.”

“And also, I’ve never had, what do you call it. An internal exam.”

“So it will be a day of firsts. Where’s the diaper bag?”

“It’s under my seat. I really don’t want to do this.”

Claudia rocked the car seat, pushed up the sleeves of her sweater.

“We could just get back in the car and you could take me home,” Rebekah said. “I’ll take vitamins, whatever you want.” She shifted in her seat. “I’m uncomfortable.”

“I know you are.”

“Between my hip bones, really low, I keep having this sharp, muscular pain. It’s like a stitch in my side, only spread all the way from one side of my abdomen to the other.”

“You should tell Gil.”

“Or you could take me home and I could have a nap.”

Claudia tapped her pen on Oliver’s intake form. She didn’t know much about him, but she’d filled in her address and phone number. The date. Her insurance information—she’d need to add him to her policy.

“Also I’m worried about leaving Hazel alone for the afternoon. It’ll be busy.”

“Can I ask you something? Why does Hazel hate your dad so much?”

“Whew.” Rebekah took a deep breath, blew it out. “They met once, when I had a cold—let’s see—about three years ago. Hazel stopped by with some medicine and soup. I didn’t really want to let her in the house, because I was afraid he’d come downstairs.”

“Why? What would he have done?”

“Oh nothing, really, it’s just that he’s not very skilled at, um, disguising his contempt for people outside the church.”

“Nice.”

“Well, he has his standards.”

“So what happened?”

“Hazel insisted on coming in; it was sort of odd. She’s not really the type. I brought her into the parlor, because I couldn’t very well say no, she was trying to take care of me. And Daddy came downstairs just like I was afraid he would. They shook hands and I could see him taking her in, her hair, her clothes and jewelry. She was wearing that ring she has that’s the head of a goat.”

“She’s a Capricorn.”

“Right. That one. He was sort of chilly at first and then just before she left—she was only there a couple minutes—he said, ‘I understand you dabble in astrology and the dark arts now, Miss Hunnicutt.’ My heart near stopped beating.”

Claudia gave a little whistle through her teeth.

“Hazel said, ‘You’ve heard that, have you?’ smiling at him as if they were friends, or as if he were a complete fool, it was hard to tell. Daddy said, ‘I know plenty about you.’ And then Hazel looked as if she got a little bigger, you know how she does?”

Claudia nodded.

“And she said, ‘I know a fair piece about you, too, Mr. Shook.’ She wasn’t smiling anymore, and the air in the room felt—it reminded me of the scene in that movie, what was that movie again?”

“I’ll need more to go on than that.”

“It doesn’t matter. So then Daddy, who’s never been sassed by a woman a day in his life, says, “I’m of a mind to come to your house sometime in the night and
burn
all your books about astrology and devil worship. That’s what I might do.’ Hazel laughed, said, ‘If you ever step foot on my property, or touch anything I own, I’ll be forced to shoot you through the heart like the common criminal you are.’”

Claudia shook her head. “But what did
that
mean?”

“I don’t know. Daddy turned bright red, his hands gathered up into fists, but he turned and marched straight upstairs and slammed his door and Hazel laughed all the way to the car.”

“I can picture that.”

Gil’s nurse, Patti, stepped out into the waiting room and called Oliver’s name. Claudia stood and picked up Oliver’s seat, said to Rebekah, “Fill out your form while I’m back there.”

Rebekah picked it up and sighed, took a peanut butter cracker out of her pocket.

Gil tipped his head back so he could see through his reading glasses. “You don’t know his birth date?”

“Not—” Claudia shook her head. “I haven’t gotten his birth certificate yet. I had to put in a request at the courthouse and they’re going to send it to me. So no.”

“Well.” Gil made a notation in Oliver’s chart. “I would put him at five, six months. Either way his weight is low, and his head circumference is in the thirtieth percentile, so our first priority will be nutrition.”

Claudia held Oliver on her lap, her hands wrapped around his chest. His rib cage felt tiny, breakable, as if she were holding a rabbit. Gil consulted a small book, put it back in his pocket. He breathed noisily. He seemed healthy, hale, but Claudia knew he’d cut his patient load to almost nothing, and that he’d wanted to retire for more than a decade. It wouldn’t be long before he was gone, taking Judy with him, and then Claudia would have to face moving on to Gil’s young replacement, someone who knew nothing of her and had never even met Ludie or Bertram. She lowered her face, smelled the top of Oliver’s head.

“Claude?”

“I’m sorry—I’m listening.”

“I’m sending home this higher-calorie formula. We’ll start his vaccinations today and you’ll call me if he has a reaction—a rash, a fever above a hundred, vomiting, or diarrhea. Call me at home. Now, you’ve brought a friend”—he shuffled through some folders—“Rebekah?”

“Yes. She’s pregnant, she’s not married, she chose the absolute worst insurance plan from Hazel’s HMO. Her deductible is more than most people would pay for a car. Is there…could you just charge me for her co-pay and whatever her insurance doesn’t cover? She doesn’t need to know.”

Gil removed his glasses, sat back in his rolling chair. He slipped the glasses into the pocket of his coat, let his hands lie loosely in his lap. The baby squirmed, arched his back, still unhappy from being awakened from his nap. Claudia turned him around and raised him to her shoulder as Gil sat passively studying her. He seemed to be considering the situation, and in no hurry to make a pronouncement; she had forgotten this element of his personality. He took a deep breath and said, “I don’t want to go through a pregnancy and deliver a baby, Claudia.”

“I understand.”

“I am elderly and tired and I want to tend my garden.”

“I know.”

He rubbed his eyes, watched her bounce the grizzling Oliver. “I could recommend a wonderful ob/gyn clinic right here in Jonah.”

Claudia nodded. She wasn’t the pregnant one, she wasn’t the person who should care, but as soon as she pictured Rebekah walking into a big, cold clinic, cycling through eight different doctors who would never know her, she felt sick.

“We could compromise,” Gil said, his shoulders still drooping, his eyes watery. “If Rebekah will agree to see my new partner in the clinic, Dr. Mehta, when I’m not here, and if she’ll agree that he might be in charge of her delivery if I’m too tired to get up, I’ll take her on as a new patient. But.” He raised a finger in the air. “After the baby’s born you have to promise me that you and Oliver and Rebekah will move over to Dr. Mehta and let me die in peace.”

Dr. Mehta. The light that contained Claudia’s history flickered, dimmed. But she agreed.

Is your mother living or dead?

Rebekah looked at the question twice, trying to imagine how her pregnancy was dependent on its answer.

Dead. Cancer.

Is your father living or dead?

She thought, Well, what is the truth? She checked Dead and felt a momentary burst of guilt and joy.