Blessings (8 page)

“How’s life in the Magic Kingdom?” said Chris, and Skip shrugged. “They need any part-time help out there, ‘cause I just got laid off from my sheetrocking job?”

Skip shrugged again. It froze him, to think of Chris anywhere
near Blessings, or the baby. He looked at his watch. Debbie was almost half an hour late. A girl named Mary Beth down the bar waved at him. “Hey, Skip,” she said. “What’s new with you?”

“I need a job, and I need pussy,” Chris murmured in his ear.

“Ah, man,” said Skip, putting down his beer on the bar with a thud. “Don’t talk like that. You’re too old for that kind of talk. That’s low. That’s just low, man.”

“Fuck you, man. You’re pussy-whipped by that old woman. You never come to the bar, you’re never at Ed’s. You missed the demo derby. What the hell is it with that place? When I was a kid my aunt Patty used to pass around the food there at parties and she’d come home saying, ooh, the silverware, the flowers, the fucking lake. I bet you don’t fish in that lake, my man, because she’ll cut your heart out. Jimmy’s old man went out there once, and he pulled a twenty-two-inch brown trout out of that lake at six in the morning, and there she was, standing on the front porch. She wanted him to weigh that goddamned trout and she told him she wanted him to pay for it by the pound. By the fucking pound!”

“What’d he do?” Skip said.

“He paid her six bucks for the goddamned fish. Which reminds me, I’m going to come out there someday and fish in that pond. I hear there are still some big browns in there. And it’s not like she’ll ever notice. We’ll go fishing, and then you can either quit, or we’ll get you fired. You got to get out of there, man. You even smell like a girl. You smell like suntan lotion or something. What are you doing, basking on the diving board?”

It was the baby wipes, and the baby powder. Skip was thinking about how to explain away the smell when Debbie blew through the swinging door from the back room, but not before Chris narrowed his eyes and looked at Skip like he was seeing him through smoke. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Debbie, knowing she was late, pulling the letter from the back pocket of her jeans.

Two minutes and he was out in the parking lot, the rain so heavy that he couldn’t make out his truck right away. He turned
on the interior light and ripped open the envelope like it mattered, like the old man really had something to say to him after all these years. He was amazed by the faint pulse of hope he felt in his own throat. On lined paper like the kind he used in school his father had written: “Son, We thought you would like to know that you have a baby brother. His name is Lance he eats good but doesn’t sleep all that much. Maybe you can come see him soon when he’s sleeping better. Take care of yourself and have a drink on me. Your father.”

A ten-dollar bill fluttered from inside the letter to the floor of the truck. Skip leaned over and picked it up, then let it fall again. He started up the engine and peeled out from the parking lot onto the flooded road, his back end fishtailing. He wondered whether his father’s wife had the same baby books he had, and whether she’d found out yet that the newborn diapers were too small for most babies and cut into the soft skin of their upper thighs. He’d be goddamned if he’d tell her, or send a card. Lance Cuddy. What the hell kind of name was Lance? A soap opera name, was what.

Lights came up on him suddenly out of the wall of water, a car heading his way, and both of them slowed down, afraid that the wind and the rain might just blow them headlong into each other. He was lucky with the lightning. It zigzagged toward the earth a minute later, when he was edging over the bridge over the big creek, and in the strange silver light he could see that someone had already blown out the guardrail on one side, so that there was a drop of ten feet or so to the creek bed. He went across at maybe five miles an hour, praying for his old bald tires not to slide on the bridge grid. He couldn’t afford to have an accident, not with the baby at home sleeping steadily toward her next bottle.

There was a car up ahead on one side of the road, its front end an accordion pleated around the engine block, and he pulled up behind it, his brights on, and ran to the driver’s side to see if anyone was hurt. But the car was empty, empty with the emptiness of an abandoned house, and as he got back into the truck, soaked and shivering, he realized that he was at the Boatwright house, where
cars were ranged around the drive and the lawn the way some people planted petunias. The Boatwright women all looked as though they’d been inflated with a bicycle pump and encased in stretch fabrics; the Boatwright men were short and wiry and always carried shotguns and cigarettes; Boatwright kids had gray skin and bad haircuts. In grade school there had been Boatwright twins in their class, girls with big round arms and raggedy bangs. For a nickel they’d show their privates behind the athletic-field bleachers.

As he crawled through the valley, the water running across the road in rills of mud and gravel, Skip realized that it was less than a mile from the Boatwrights to Blessings. And for a moment he was afraid that his wet engine would stall and he would be caught in the Boatwright world forever, the way a lot of the guys he knew had been, since Boatwright girls would sleep with anyone, and sleeping with a Boatwright girl just about guaranteed a pregnancy. For one terrible moment he imagined that his baby was a Boatwright. But he knew it couldn’t be true. She was too plump, too pink, her nose and chin too distinct. Besides, there was no such thing as an unwanted child among the Boatwrights, just as there was no such thing as a wanted one. Babies just happened.

“Lance Cuddy,” he said to himself. “Lance goddamn Cuddy.”

He almost missed the turnoff into the driveway, as many times as he’d taken it, would have missed it if the birch trees had not made a ghostly show just before the fence curved in. At first he thought it was because of the rain, which was impenetrable, nearly as deep as the night, dark gray on black. But as he came down the long drive and around the big circle, the back of the house on one side of him and the front of the garage on the other, no lights came on to illuminate the truck, and from inside the house he could hear a high thin screaming sound. He threw the truck into park and ran up the back steps to the big house, and then realized that what he was hearing was the sound of the alarm. He knocked and knocked at the back door, cursing Nadine, who had refused to give him the alarm code, or even show him how it worked. “You
don’t need,” she’d said, looking at him as though he had one hand on the strap to her purse.

Upstairs in the apartment over the garage the rain made a hard heavy noise on the roof. There were no lights there, either, not even the red glow of the clock on the stove in the kitchen. He felt his way to the drawer by the refrigerator and took out the flashlight. Outside the kitchen window, that looked back over the fields and then the long tangle of forest, he could see nothing but the rain. His work boots sounded of wet as he squeaked down the worn wooden hallway floor.

Like the birches that had been beacons on the road, there were two small columns of white in the living room, two candles burning on the old steamer trunk. Slowly he swung the the flashlight up, and saw Mrs. Blessing sitting on the sagging chair, holding a light-colored raincoat to her throat, two feet of wet white cotton hanging from beneath its folds. A scarf with some pattern of flowers was tied over her hair.

“Jesus Christ,” Skip breathed. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“Don’t speak to me about being frightened,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I’ve been here all alone, no electricity, no power, no light, for who knows how long. And that hideous alarm sound.”

“Did you call the alarm people?”

“The phone’s gone, too, everything’s down, and then there’s a terrible smell of burning and I don’t know where it’s coming from. And I had no idea where you had gone.”

“How did you get in?” Skip said.

“I have a key, of course. What sort of a question is that?”

He was catching his breath now, his heart trying to slow down from the drive, the bridge, the alarm, and above all from the sight of Mrs. Blessing in the small room. He felt funny, shining the flashlight right at her like that, illuminating all the lines in her face and the fear in the set of her mouth and the wild glare in her light eyes.

“You have to do something,” she said.

“I will.”

“Right this minute. The entire house could be burned to the ground while you fiddle about.”

“Not in this rain it won’t.”

There was no smell of fire in the apartment, only the smell of rain and mothballs, maybe from Mrs. Blessing’s raincoat, and the smell of powder and the sweet smell of baby wipes, that Chris had scented with his nose for secrets and weakness. Skip shone the flashlight onto the face of his watch. It was twenty minutes until twelve.

“You needn’t worry,” Mrs. Blessing said sharply. “I’ll stay here with the child while you see about the alarm and the fire.”

“What?” Skip said.

“You can imagine my surprise,” she said, her mouth pursed, “to come in here looking for help and discover that, behind my back, without permission, you had your child living here.”

Of course. She’d come over and made a circuit of the place. She owned it, after all, and she owned him, too, in her way. Skip felt his shoulders slump, as though his body knew the sad pathetic ending to this latest brief episode in his life before his mind did. It was like when the sheriff’s car had been waiting behind his truck at McGuire’s the night after the Quik-Stop robbery; his whole body had gone slack, his eyes sad, in the moment before he had known to say to himself, well, that’s it, then. Chris’d be pleased, he thought, when he heard Skip got fired from Blessings. “Welcome back,” he’d say, standing at the bar at McGuire’s. Lose the job, lose the baby. He guessed he’d wind up leaving her in the hallway at the courthouse for the social workers after all. His stomach turned, the beer gone sour.

“I was surprised by her, too,” he said finally in a tired voice, pointing the beam of the flashlight down at the floor. The room was quiet and the rain slowing, so that the individual raindrops fell on the roof like the sound of a child hammering on one key of a piano, one low note again and again. From their pattern he could tell that the storm was moving, and that by daybreak the air would be clear. He went down the hall to the hook where he hung the big slicker one of the Fosters had left behind.

“Charles,” she called querulously after him, and he stiffened. “What is this baby’s name?”

“She doesn’t have a name yet,” he said.

“That’s preposterous. Where’s her mother?”

“She doesn’t have a mother either.”

“I
t’s impossible to imagine how someone could do everything that is needed around here and take care of an infant as well,” she said.

“I would never have hired a man with a small child,” she said.

“Babies are very unpredictable,” she said.

Mostly he said nothing. He looked down at the Aubusson rug in the small study and rubbed at a paint spot on his brown work pants. This was the room where Lydia Blessing did what she thought of as business, where she told the carpenter the estimate was too high, complained to Nadine’s husband that the heat in the car was still insufficient, paid bills and wondered aloud why everything cost so much. Her father had done business here as well, with the decanter at his elbow.

“Are you absolutely certain?” she said. “Just placed on the steps like that, in a box? Wasn’t there any sort of identification, or some sort of note?”

“It’s not the kind of thing you’d make a mistake about, ma’am,” he said.

“It’s very difficult to believe that someone would just abandon an infant in the middle of nowhere like that,” she said, straightening a stray envelope in one cubby.

“It is the ideal place for you to have the baby,” her mother had said sixty years before.

She put her hand to her forehead. There it was again, the echo, the minuet of words spoken in the present with those from the past. It had gotten worse since she had seen the baby in the yellow
glare of the flashlight, sleeping with a fist pressed to its pursed lips. Her mother had been right, of course. In the middle of nowhere had seemed a good place to raise a child during that first year of the war. There were always rumors that bombings would begin in New York just as they had in London, and the social life of the city was constrained, partly in deference to the war, partly because there were no men around.

Of course the young Lydia had thought it was a temporary measure, and that Blessings would once again become a country retreat when the war was over and real life began. In her mind’s eye she could see the apartment she and Benny would have, the brocade sofa against the long wall of the living room, the barrel end tables, the painting of a sailing schooner over the mantel. Benny would go downtown to his father’s firm, which would someday be his firm, and Lydia would play cards with girls she had once gone to Bertram’s with, and their children would go to Bertram’s, too, or the Thomas Makepeace Vester School for Boys, which was where Benny and Sunny had gone before they had gone away to boarding school. Sunny would come to dinner and make them both laugh, and the children would love him, perhaps as well as, if not better than, they loved their mother and father. It was as though it all really existed; it was all there, all true, as though, as their upper-school science teacher had said, Professor Einstein had indeed shown that all time took place simultaneously, only in different locations.

In the middle of the night, as Meredith had been mollified by the rubber nipple and the thick yeasty-smelling formula, as the soft sounds of the outside slipped into the silence of the house, Mrs. Blessing had imagined that in an apartment on Park Avenue an older, wiser Lydia was going over the menu for a dinner party and telling a roomful of overexcited children to go see Nanny, please, and go to the park to play. It was only the moments alone with Benny she could not imagine, what she would say, what he would say, how he would touch her, what it would feel like, whether it would always feel cool and hesitant and smooth when he kissed her.