Waiting for Christopher (19 page)

True to his word, Mr. Milakowski didn’t ask any questions on the ride back, just dropped her home as Lenore was pulling up in the Chevy.

“Hey!” Feena’s mother called as the old man drove away. “Thanks a lot.” She waved after his car, then handed Feena a paper bag. “Just in time.” She grabbed another bag and led the way inside. “I got Mexican. You staying?”

Lenore had apparently adjusted to the pattern—every other night now, Feena was away from home. But not anymore. The relief surprised Feena, the light-bodied, free feeling. Not anymore. “Mom?” She followed her mother into the kitchen.

“Yeah? Better put that down; it’s dripping.”

“I have something to tell you.”

“Sure. But let’s eat first, okay?” Her mother got out forks and glasses, laid the Styrofoam take-outs on the table. “I had to drive to the moon for this stuff; it’s probably cold already.”

So they both ate while Lenore drank. Feena had tried to stop her from putting the wine out, but there was something her mother wanted to celebrate. She even poured Feena a token sip, then insisted on their clinking glasses. “It’s not a big deal, of course,” she said. “But a raise is a raise. Right?”

“Right.” Feena, hungrier than she’d been in days, tore into the lukewarm frijoles, then watched with a kind of hopeless resignation as her mother grew less happy and more morose with each sip. Soon, the raise was forgotten, and what took center stage was a long list of grievances. “I’m supposed to be thrilled,” Lenore asked her chicken enchilada, “because the department finally decides they’re going to pay me for half the work I do?” She sawed away at her food with the wrong edge of a plastic knife. “This is supposed to make my cup run over?”

“Well, they must like what you’re doing, Mom.”

“Maybe, yeah,” Lenore said. “I guess it’s a good thing somebody somewhere appreciates me.”

Feena, debating a second helping, ignored the warning flares and fell into the trap. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean you; that’s what I mean.” Lenore studied the wine in her glass, letting it slide along the sides as she spun the stem in her fingers. “I mean you can’t even stand to be home, and I guess I don’t blame you.”

Her mother’s head got so low, Feena could hardly hear her. “I don’t like being stuck with me any better than you do.”

“What?” Feena sat up now, pushed her plate away. “Are you serious?”

“New house. New state. New job,” Lenore said. “Same old me.”

Feena hated this, really hated it. “Mom—”

“Same old dream every night.”

“What are you talking about?” She was looking at the top of her mother’s head now, the place where the purple streak started.

“There’s this long tunnel,” Lenore said, studying something in her lap. “It’s black, darker than hell.” She spoke in a monotone, as if she were reciting something she knew by heart, something that had lost its power to surprise her. “Christy’s there; your brother’s there at the end, and I’m walking toward him. He’s just a baby, right?” She looked up now, through Feena rather than at her. “But he knows me, knows who I am. And when I get closer, he lifts up his little head and cries.”

Feena, who had never heard her mother sound so soft, sat spellbound. Who belonged to this quiet hollow voice?

“I don’t pick him up,” Lenore told her. “I just stand there while he cries louder and louder. Finally I can’t stand it, and I start yelling at him. ‘Shut up,’ I say. ‘Shut up,’ as loud as I can. ‘Will you just shut up and let me get some sleep!’”

“Mom—”

“And then it’s quiet.” Lenore set her glass down, still staring past Feena. “Suddenly, it’s so quiet.” Her shoulders shook, but her gaze was clear, as if her body were crying but not her eyes. “I’d give anything if I could hear him, just once more. I’d lie down and die, honest to god. If he’d just wake up, if he’d just start bawling.” She’d taken off her glasses and now she put her head in her hands. Feena couldn’t see the tears, but she heard them.

“Mom, it’s okay.” Feena stood and put her arms around her mother. “It’s all right. Everyone gets mad.”

In between the sobs, gulping out the words. “He was afraid of me.”

“I know,” Feena told her. “We’re all afraid of people we love.” She laughed. “I’m afraid of you.”

Lenore pulled back, mascara ringing her eyes. She looked at Feena hopefully. “Really?”

“Really.” For the second time in a matter of weeks, they’d changed roles. They stayed like that for a moment, Feena holding her mother, stroking her hair, noticing among the purple and brown, some streaks of gray.
Gorgeous, Feen. You’ve got gorgeous hair
.

It was Lenore who pulled away, who stood and walked into her bedroom. Feena watched her mother open the bottom drawer of the dresser, get down on her knees, sniffing, and fumble through whatever was squirreled away there. When Lenore brought the box of photos back with her, setting them on the couch like an offering, Feena felt a little Christmas thrill run through her.

They hadn’t looked at them in years. Side by side, with no TV blaring in the background and with the good strong light from a desk lamp Feena carried in from her room, they passed the pictures back and forth. In one, Feena’s brother was, if not exactly sitting, propped at a sagging right angle in a green baby chair. On each side of him, holding a hand apiece, were Feena and her father, grinning like fools. In another, Feena was leaning over the baby, tickling him, not with her hands, but with long, dangling locks of her red hair. In others, Christy was alone, resplendent in baby fat and sparse blond hair, crawling, lying, kicking, even tear-stained and howling directly into the camera’s eye.

It was a while before Feena noticed something missing. “Where were
you
, Mom?” she asked, forgetting. “Why aren’t you in any of these?”

Lenore laughed. “Who do you think took them?” She was leafing through the faded shots, looking for something. “Here,” she said at last. “Here’s my favorite.” She handed it to Feena, who saw herself at four, naked to the waist, the baby cradled in her arms.

“You were trying to nurse him, Feen. Isn’t that something?” Her mother’s voice was warm, admiring.

Feena looked again at the picture. The little girl’s eyes were cast down, Madonna-like, toward Christopher, who obligingly nuzzled her flat, milkless chest. His face wasn’t visible in the photo, just the clutching fingers. She shivered, shook off the tiny shadow hands that pressed suddenly, like warm breath, against her skin.

“Mom?” Feena put the picture on the coffee table and turned to Lenore. “Can I tell you something?”

Lenore nodded. Then while she stacked the rest of the photos in her lap, cupping them there as though they needed warmth, Feena told her mother everything. About the other Christy, who looked the way her brother might have; about his mother; about Raylene and cutting school; about Mr. Milakowski and the police. She didn’t stumble over her words the way she had with Raylene. Telling Lenore was different, she realized, easier somehow. And she wondered, watching the lamplight frame her mother’s head and hands, bleach the lines from her face, why she hadn’t done it sooner.

“All that love,” Lenore said when Feena finished. “You had that inside all this time.” Her cheeks were still smudged with mascara tears, but she was smiling. “And you’re sure she’s going to quit smoking?”

“Yes.”

“And hitting?”

“No hitting.”

“She means it?”

“You should have seen them together, Mom. I tried so hard to make him happy, but all she had to do was”—she remembered Christy on his mother’s lap—“just
be
.“

“God, Feen, why did I go and move us to Florida?” Lenore touched her daughter’s hands shyly, handling them as if they were brand-new, as if they were a baby’s. “We could have been warm any damn where.”

When the doorbell rang, they were both startled. It was the first time Feena had heard that strident, ugly bleat. She hadn’t even known the Pizza Hut came equipped with anything besides the brass knocker, a horse’s head that hung, beyond the reach of any but the tallest guests, on the peeling front door.

Outside, in air only slightly warmer than the living room, their visitor stood with one hand on her hip, her eyes telegraphing outrage. “Seems to me, you got some explaining to do,” Raylene said.

T
he fact of Raylene—her graceful frame, her angry face—at their door stunned Feena. Her friend seemed wrong here, out of place, smaller. “How did you know where I live?”

“They told me at school. I said you were craving your homework.” Raylene folded her arms. “Are we going to talk out here?”

Feena stepped back from the door, just the way Christopher’s mother had made room for her earlier. Raylene brushed past without a word. “How are you, Mrs. Harvey?” she asked Feena’s mother in her best white-girl imitation. “I’ve been hoping to meet you for some time.” She smiled broadly and took Lenore’s hand. “And I guess you’ve been pretty curious about who Feen’s been spending all her time with, right?”

Lenore, of course, was charmed. She offered Raylene leftover Mexican, got a flamingo glass out of the cupboard. Soon the two of them were seated at the kitchen table, chatting as though they’d known each other forever.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” Feena said from the couch by the TV. (The kitchen table had only two chairs, and she didn’t want to watch Raylene’s company act, anyway.)

“What do you mean?” Raylene put down her flamingo glass, stared at Feena.

“I mean,” Feena explained, “I’ve already told her.”

Raylene looked incredulous. “Everything?”

“Everything.”

“Well, that’s fine, then.” There was the vestige of a smile on Raylene’s face as she pushed aside her plate, stood up from the table, and walked into the living room. “Maybe you could share some of that ‘everything’ with me.” Then the smile vanished, along with her polite voice and talk. Her hands were back on her hips. “What have you done with Toffee?”

When Feena explained, when she told how Christy’s mother had promised not to go to the police, how she was going to take better care of Christy, how she was even going to let them baby-sit (Feena didn’t see any point in not including Raylene, even though she’d never mentioned her to Christy’s mother), Raylene laughed. “And you believe her?” she asked. “Just like that, the slate’s clean?”

“She loves him, Ray. I know she does.”

“
Love
’s a word.” Raylene shook her head. “I can’t believe you took Toffee back there.” She looked to Feena’s mother for confirmation. “Did she tell you that baby was burned?”

Lenore nodded.

“What makes you God here, anyhow?” Raylene asked, turning back to Feena. “I thought you promised we’d decide this stuff together.”

“He wanted to go home,” Feena told her. “You didn’t see him; you weren’t there.”

“I wasn’t there because I was fronting for you. But I was there when you needed to drag your sorry ass to school. I was there when you had to go home and spend time with—” She stopped, remembering where she was, who was listening. “I was there when it counted, wasn’t I?”

“Yes.” There were tears in Feena’s eyes, but she brushed them away before they could spill over.

Raylene walked closer to where Feena sat on the couch. “Seems like you owe me some,” she said, unrelenting. “Seems like you got no cause to take that woman’s word before mine.”

“He was so happy when he saw her,” Feena insisted. “All squirmy and wiggly like a puppy.”

Raylene’s hands were back on her hips. “Don’t you know anything, girl? If you grow up in dirt, you love dirt. Is that reason to send him back?”

When Lenore spoke, it surprised them both. “Give her a chance,” she said. At first Feena was grateful, thought her mother was taking her part, but Lenore was defending someone else.

“That’s what this is, you know. A second chance.” Feena’s mother talked slowly, carefully, staring steadily at Raylene. There were tears in her eyes, but she let them brim over, run down her face. “Sure, I mean for you two. Who needs to be charged with kidnapping? But I mean for someone else, too.”

“Not everyone’s a natural mother; it’s hard for some of us.” She lowered her head for a second, then raised her eyes again, her features set like stone in the effort not to look away.

“We make mistakes; we get tired; and all the time there’s this image of the perfect mother in our heads. You know, this mother with a capital
M
? This patient, selfless, wise saint? And every day, every minute, we’re measuring ourselves against that picture, and we’re saying, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t be it.’”

“Mom—” Again Feena felt as though her mother were a child, wanted to hold her back, keep her out of hurt’s way. But of course, it was too late for that.

“And the sad thing is, we don’t always get another shot.” Lenore smiled at Raylene now, a thin, underwater smile. “What I’m saying is, if you plan on growing up to be perfect adults, then get right back there and take that woman’s baby away from her quick. Before she gets upset. Or exhausted. Or just wants some time to herself.

“But if you figure you might get impatient yourselves sometime, might want to scream or lash out or just plain run away, then maybe you ought to let her try again. And maybe you can be there for her when things get rough.”