Tomato Girl (14 page)

“The baby, Ellie. The baby came out of me,” she cried, her face twisted.

Sweat trickled down my neck. I couldn't swallow or breathe. It was as if all the air had been sucked from the room. I opened my mouth, gasping for one deep, clean gulp.

I wanted to erase the sight of Mama holding the bloody thing
she called her baby. I swallowed again, and forced myself to kneel beside my mother. I hadn't been there when she fell down the stairs, but I wouldn't leave her again. “Oh, Mama, I'm so, so sorry. Please. Tell me what to do, Mama. What do I do?” My voice shook.

Mama closed her eyes and leaned against the toilet as if she couldn't sit up anymore. As she cradled the baby to her chest, she began to sing a lullaby, her voice quivering.

“Mama, please! You have to tell me what to do. Should I call for the ambulance? Daddy's not here …” I'd never called the ambulance, but had practiced at school. Why did Daddy have to pick now to go for Tess's tomatoes?

Mama's mood changed from sad to mad. “He's off somewhere with that slut, isn't he?” She spat the word
slut
the way a snake hisses at passing ankles.

“I don't know,” I lied, “I can go find him …”

“No, Ellie. He mustn't know about this.” She looked worried.

“Mama …”

“Promise me, Ellie. Promise me you won't tell Daddy that I bled out the baby. If he finds out, he won't love me anymore, not ever … he'll go away with her and … and we'll never see him again. Do you want that to happen?”

I kneeled beside Mama and touched her damp hair, brushing a stray wisp from her brow. Her skin felt moist, but cool. “Mama, Daddy will understand. You need a doctor. I'm scared!”
Be the still, calm water.

“No! I just need you to help me, Ellie.” She held out her hand, red with blood. “Please help me.”

I nodded. “I'll help you, Mama. Just tell me what to do. How do I help?”
Be the gentle rain.

“Go downstairs and bring the Reynolds Wrap.” Mama's voice sounded sure.

“Reynolds Wrap?” I wondered out loud.

“I can't put him in the ground, I just can't. We'll keep the baby in the freezer. He'll be safe there. Then we'll clean up. Daddy can't see. He can't see this, Ellie!”

Unsure, but anxious to be out of that bathroom, I hurried downstairs for the aluminum foil. The tomato soup I'd left on the stove had boiled over, splattering the stove and counter with red drops.

As soon as I saw the red, I ran to the sink and threw up.

B
ACK UPSTAIRS
, I
HANDED
Mama sheets of aluminum foil. I might have torn the pieces too big, but I didn't want to measure the baby. I didn't want to touch it, didn't want to know what its skin felt like in my hands.

While Mama wrapped the body, I looked up at the white swirled ceiling, not wanting to see the dead baby again until it was wrapped in foil. Waves moved inside my stomach. I swallowed the sour taste that tried to climb my throat.

Mama spoke to the baby. Over the crinkle of foil, her soft voice cooed. “It will be all right, lovey. Ellie will take you to a safe place. It will be cold and dark, but you mustn't be afraid.”

When she finished, she handed me the bundle and told me to take it to the basement and lay it in the freezer. “Put the baby in a nice place, Ellie. Near the cakes and strawberries, not near the beef and venison.”

I wanted to tell my mother the baby was dead and wouldn't care where I placed it, that it couldn't hear her singing, couldn't hear her words. But Mama has places in her mind that no one else can go, places where things that make no sense to anyone make perfect sense to her.

Taking the dead baby into my hands, I promised to lay it where she wanted.

The walk to the basement never seemed so long. I wanted to run, to get the baby into the freezer and be done, but my knees felt like rubber. Falling down scared me. I didn't want to drop
Mama's baby. I hurried down the stairs and outside to the sidewalk.

The cellar stairwell scared me more than ever now that Mama had fallen there. I'd never come here in the dark without Daddy. The shadows and cool brick seemed to close in around me. I hurried to open the door and flipped the switch to turn on the overhead bulb. Light filled the center of the room, chasing shadows to the edges. My legs shivered as I stood in the damp, dimly lit space. The single lightbulb flickered above my head. Please God, don't let the bulb burn out and put me in blackness.

Knowing the freezer lid was hard to open, I carefully placed the baby on the floor and pulled the lid up with both hands. A blast of cold air hit my face.

Then as I had promised Mama, I tucked the dead baby between plastic bags of strawberries and a box of honey-glazed do-nuts. He would be happy there. It was silly to talk to the baby since dead things can't hear. Still, it seemed the right thing to do. Mama would have said something to reassure the baby, so I did it for her. “Rest here, little one. We won't be far away.”

I closed the heavy freezer door and hurried back upstairs where my mother soaked in the tub, washing the blood from her hands and thighs. She looked up at me. “You put him in a good place?”

“Yes, Mama.” I'd never watched my mother bathe. I noticed the scars across her belly, and wondered if the baby had stretched her skin somehow. Mama's eyes looked glassy, but I didn't want to stare or watch her cry. Afraid to upset her more, I looked away.

“It's so cold in the freezer, Ellie.”

“I know.”

“And so dark. He'll be afraid, won't he? I shouldn't have sent him to the freezer. That's not a good place.” Her voice broke as if she were going to cry again.

“No, Mama. The baby won't be afraid.”

“How do you know?” Her eyes widened.

I tried to think of something to say, anything to keep her from
sending me back to the cellar to bring up the baby. If Daddy came home and saw her rocking it, he'd have the doctors take her away, maybe this time for good. Daddy might not care now that he had Tess. I couldn't let that happen. I needed Mama.

Using the sponge, I washed Mama's bowed shoulders. “Because I told him. I told the baby not to be afraid.”

Her face looked hopeful. “You did?”

I kept talking. When you love somebody, the words you need come as sure and easy as rain.

“Yes, I told him not to be afraid, that his mother loved him, and that he was in a safe place. I told him about Jellybean, and how the Easter bunny was coming soon.”

Mama leaned back in the tub. “You did good, Ellie. I don't know what I'd do without you.”

After her bath, Mama dried off with a towel. While she went to her room to dress in a fresh gown and get into bed, I cleaned the rust-colored stains from the bathroom floor.

I thought about my God promises, how I'd tried to be good and God still killed my mother's baby. I figured all the talk in church about God being good and loving was just a lie. The truth is, God didn't need Mama's baby half as much as she did. Why couldn't He do that one thing? Was it too much for God to spare a little baby? Maybe God's like the rest of us, doing bad things sometimes just because we can. Only with God, it's not little things like sneaking into the boys' bathroom or stealing an extra cookie when your mother's not watching. With God, it's sending tomato girls to steal your father's heart; it's killing your mother's baby to make her mind go.

D
ADDY'S VOICE CAME
from downstairs and startled me. He couldn't learn about the baby, at least not yet. Mama wasn't ready for him to know the baby died. Maybe Mama was right, that pretending the baby was still alive meant she could make things work again.

I hurried to hide the Reynolds Wrap and Mama's stained clothing, shoving them both to the bottom of the clothes hamper.

A moment later, Daddy tapped on the bedroom door before he stepped inside. “Feeling better, Julia?” His voice was as even as butter. He tiptoed around Mama as he tested her mood. He didn't mention Tess, which meant he wanted to make peace.

Feeling grateful that he was trying, I walked over to my father and wrapped my arms around his waist. His strong body felt as solid as a tree. A bit of happiness washed over me.

Mama sat up in bed and smiled. “Yes, Rupert. I'm just a little tired.”

Daddy tousled my hair and moved closer to Mama's bed. He sat down beside her. “What's this?” he asked, pointing to a bulge under the cover next to her.

Mama smiled again. “It's for the baby, Rupert.”

She pulled out a skein of pale blue yarn and knitting needles. A half-knitted bootie dangled in her hand.

T
ESS STOOD IN THE
kitchen and scrubbed the red soup stains. I remembered how she'd done the same thing the morning after Mama's accident, cleaning the stove and floor where the stew had burned.

“Let me do that,” I said. “I'm the one who made a mess.” Really, I felt so tired and sad that I wanted to curl up on the sofa, and yet something in me made me take the sponge from Tess's hand. I wanted to clean up the spill myself. Maybe to show Tess I didn't need her, that I could clean my own messes. We could manage fine if she just went away.

While I cleaned, Tess set plates for the sandwiches and macaroni salad she and Daddy bought. She tried to make the table look nice, arranging napkins under each wrapped sandwich and piling chips and pickle slices to the side. I hated her for trying to make my mother's place her own.

Daddy had decided some things. He explained at the table how
he thought we needed a schedule, a routine. He said he would sleep on it, and tomorrow give us each a schedule and chore list. There was plenty for everyone to do, and we would all pull together and make this work. Tess would do most of the cooking and laundry. I would do the sweeping, dusting, and washing dishes. Daddy would tend to Mama, but I'd be expected to take her food up to her room and spend some time each day reading to her. He'd spell it out in black and white sometime tomorrow, post a schedule right on the refrigerator where everyone could see.

The rest of the evening was like standing outside someone's house and looking in through the window. You see what goes on: the meals being cooked, eaten, dishes cleared away; the father watching television while the mother darns socks; the children fighting over marbles or playing Old Maid. But you aren't a part of it, you can't taste the lemon cookies or feel the cool, blue marbles in the palm of your hand. You are an outsider, looking in on a world that isn't yours. That's how I felt watching Daddy and Tess. I didn't belong.

At the kitchen table, I bit off pieces of crusty bread and spooned macaroni into my mouth.

Tess and Daddy talked. Their voices sounded so ordinary, as if they'd always drifted across the kitchen table and I just hadn't noticed before this day. Daddy was at ease with Tess in a way he never seemed with Mama.

After dinner, Daddy played the radio low and set up the Scrabble board on the coffee table. Tess twirled her pale hair around her fingers and made words from tiles.

They asked me to join them, and I declined, but I don't remember what excuse I gave. I do remember feeding Jellybean his bedtime gruel and trying hard not to think about the dead baby in the cellar.

No matter how hard I tried, though, I could think of nothing else.

M
ARY
R
OBERTS CAME BY
the next day with a coffee cake covered in golden crumbs and bits of buttered brown sugar. “A get-well gift for your Mama,” she said. “My mother wanted to come herself, but she has to finish making coconut cream pies for the church bazaar.”

Mrs. Roberts made award-winning pies and had a wall covered with blue and red ribbons from county fairs. I wondered if Mama would be happier if she had something people admired the way they did Mrs. Roberts's pies. Mama had plenty of talent, but her ideas came from places no pie judge would understand.

I thanked Mary for the cake and invited her inside. Tess and Daddy had already finished their morning coffee and gone outside. The smell of coffee hung in the kitchen a long time because Tess used more beans, fixing it the way she said Europeans drink their coffee. She told us she planned to vacation in Paris when she made it big selling Avon. Daddy had smiled, nodded, and said that would be just grand.

“Could we buy you a ticket now?” I'd asked in a tone so smart even Mary Roberts would have been impressed.

“Ellie!” Daddy had scolded me, his voice so disapproving I left the room.

“We should make a special tray for your mama,” Mary said as she followed me around the kitchen.

“That's a good idea.”

Mary fixed a cup of tea by using hot water from the tap. You're supposed to boil the water on the stove, but tap water works when you are in a hurry, and doesn't taste so bad if you don't mind weak tea.

I cut two cake squares and placed them side by side on Mama's plate, then looked through the cabinets for the silver tray. Maybe using something pretty to serve Mama's food would make her feel a little better.

Mary, who had learned origami at church camp, folded the paper napkin into the shape of a bird, and I hurried to the garden to clip pansies from Mama's flower bed. We found a bud vase for the flowers and carried the finished tray upstairs.

“I'll take it in myself,” I told Mary. “You could go get Jellybean ready to play outside. He's in my room, on the bed.” The idea of Mary talking to Mama scared me. The dead baby was an awful secret.

“Oh, we have all day. I'm in no hurry. Besides, my mother will want to know if she liked her cake. It's made from a new recipe; this one has walnuts in it.”

My forehead dampened. My knees felt like hinges ready to fold.

Mary knocked lightly on Mama's door.

No answer. Good. Maybe Mama was in the bathroom. We could leave the tray and slip out before she noticed.