Girls in Trouble (8 page)

For Eva, falling in love with the baby was almost like falling in love with a mate. There was the first stage, that giddy infatuation and euphoria, where everything Anne did was delightful and incredible. Look at how she grabbed Eva’s finger and held on fast! Look how she was trying to lift her head just so she could follow Eva’s every move! It killed Eva with pleasure, it made her want to move around the room, taking extra steps just so she could see the baby’s response. Eva walked out of Anne’s room so the baby could nap, and two seconds later, she went back in. Leaning over the crib, she inhaled Anne’s scent: powder and roses. She touched the silky skin, the bunny toes, and then she crept from the room.

But then there were the day-to-day adjustments to this new presence, and the mountains of diaper changes and spit-ups didn’t make it any easier. Eva boiled bottles in the kitchen and then ran downstairs to throw in laundry and got back upstairs just in time to put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. She was just about to go downstairs and put the clothes in the dryer when Anne woke up, and the mewling cry that had seemed so impossibly delicious a week before now made Eva shut her eyes. She grabbed a bottle from the fridge and ran it under the hot water to warm it. Anne’s cries went up a decibel.

“Here’s Mommy,” she said, entering Anne’s room. Anne’s face was scrunched tight as a purse. Her hands balled into angry fists, and when Eva picked her up, Anne’s whole body stiffened, as if it were Eva’s fault that Anne had to wait. She fed her, and then lifted her up to change her. “There, a nice clean diaper,” Eva said, and then, just as she was about to fasten the tabs, Anne peed over the diaper.

“God!” Eva breathed, and Anne waggled her arms and legs. “Stay still,” Eva ordered. Her temper frayed. Grabbing for another diaper, she heard
the jangle of the phone in the other room. It might be school and she needed to talk to them, to ask about her class for next year. It might be George. She picked Anne up to go get the phone, and it abruptly stopped ringing. How did anyone ever have time to do anything? She thought of the mothers at the preschool, how the nonworking mothers were just as harried as the working ones, how sometimes the only difference was that the working mothers were better dressed, and that instead of a sloppy pony-tail, they had a really good haircut.

She fastened Anne’s diaper and Anne suddenly yawned. “Sleepy again?” Eva said. She felt guilty. She shouldn’t have snapped. Anne was just a baby, what was the matter with her? She put Anne back in her crib and went to finish the laundry. She boiled bottles, and then went to check on Anne, who was awake in her crib, not making a sound.

Anne was now so quiet, it was eerie. Eva picked her up and made parabolas on her little back. “Sleeping?” Eva asked, and started to set Anne down in the crib, and as soon as she did, Anne’s eyes flew wide open. “Don’t have anything to say?” Eva whispered. She watched the tiny chest rise and fall and rise up again.

“A quiet baby! Count yourself lucky!” Christine advised when Eva called to give her the daily report. “You can work. You can read.”

“Of course I can,” Eva agreed, starting to feel a little better. When she got off the phone, she decided to work on her lesson plans for the next year. She set Anne in the bassinet beside the table and she started fiddling with ideas. But Anne was so silent, that instead of helping Eva to concentrate, it took her focus away. “Hey,” Eva said, and Anne gazed up at her with enormous eyes. “What are you thinking?” Eva asked. Anne yawned, her lids fluttered, and then Eva bounded up and turned on the radio. She had heard music was good for babies, that it helped them with their speech, and she, for one, couldn’t wait for Anne to start talking. She leaned over to Anne. “So what do you think, should we go to the park, see some people?” Eva asked. “Are you getting a little stir-crazy, like me?” She suddenly thought of Sara and missed her; it’d be wonderful to have her company in the house again, her help. Anne studied her toes, ignoring Eva. She got Anne’s jacket, she filled some bottles. Already, thinking about getting out, she felt a little lighter, and then as soon as she reached to put
the jacket on Anne, she heard a pattering against the window, and when she looked up, she saw the rain, and the heaviness came back.

That night, Anne woke them at three, an hour before her normal feeding. Eva turned to George, who was sleeping so soundly an atom bomb wouldn’t have woken him. “George,” she said, shaking his shoulders, but he still slept, and she swung her legs over the bed to go and get the bottle.

She held the baby and fed her, humming something under her throat. Anne sucked more greedily, her eyes squinched shut. Anne drained the bottle and Eva set it down, standing, the baby in her arms. A slant of moon came in through the blinds. Eva looked down at Anne and was startled to see the baby watching her with grave slate eyes. “What?” Eva whispered. “Tell me.” And then Anne put her small baby hand on the side of Eva’s face, like a conversation, and something fluttered through Eva’s stomach, and no matter how late it was, and how tired she was, she stayed right where she was, swaying the baby in her arms, as if Anne might be a dream that would disappear in the cool light of morning.

I
t was morning, twelve days since she had given birth, and the day Sara was due to go to Eva and George’s. She was trying to stay in bed until after her parents left. Already, she had been up since five, grabbing for her summer reading,
The Mill on the Floss,
trying to get lost in it the way she usually was, but today it wasn’t working. Maggie Tulliver whispered at her, but she couldn’t hear. She missed the baby too much. She missed George and Eva, and even though every day she had called, first from the hospital and then from home, it wasn’t the same. “Just have to change Anne,” Eva said, her voice rushing. “Just have to give the baby a bath. I’ll call as soon as I can,” George promised.

She could smell her mother’s coffee, the slightly burnt toast her father loved and Abby always scraped. She could hear her father’s voice, but not what he was saying.

Sara couldn’t stay in bed anymore. Leaping up, she grabbed her blue robe and headed for the bathroom, locking the door. She turned the water on full force, as hot as it would go. The mirrors had to be fogged over before she’d undress. She couldn’t bear to look at her belly, at the stretch marks like white webs. Her breasts shrunk down to nothing.

She stepped into the shower. The hot water hit her like a punishment. She grabbed the soap and washed, staring up at the tiles, the door, anywhere but her body. Danny never could stop looking. He used to say her
skin reminded him of apricots, that her being so sleek, so small-boned, was sexier than the lushest model. He used to wrap her hair around his hand like a skein of yarn, and then he’d draw her gently against him. She sighed just as he drew a breath in. “I inhale, you exhale,” he said.

What would he think now if he saw her body? She tilted her head toward the water, so it coursed down her like rivers. What would he think now if he saw Anne? Would he say, “I made a terrible mistake,” the same way she sometimes did? Even now, she still couldn’t help harboring hope that Danny would come back. He still had to sign papers saying he knew there would be a hearing giving up his rights, which wouldn’t be until six months from now. A lot could happen in six months, couldn’t it? He could still find her.

Or she could find him if she only knew how.

She had thought about that the day George and Eva had taken Anne home from the hospital. She had been holding the baby tight in her arms. The baby seemed tinier than anything she could have imagined. Chubby legs folded in like commas. The baby’s face didn’t look anything like Danny’s, but Anne was the only part of Danny that was still hers. The moment Eva lifted the baby away from her, the whole room got darker. It didn’t matter what she had felt before, or promised, it all seemed like a terrible mistake and Sara suddenly wanted time to stop.

“Wait!” she cried, and Eva smiled, one hand protectively over the baby’s head. “We’ll see you soon,” George promised.
Stay with me
, she wanted to tell them.
Don’t go
. And then they had left and Sara had lain in the white hospital bed, staring at the walls, her arms suddenly so empty she couldn’t imagine anything could ever fill them.

Sara bent to the spigots, making the water hotter. Then she sat down in the tub, the spray pouring over her, and she thought about the baby, and about Danny.

Danny Slade.

Sara had met Danny over a year ago, a bright sunny May day when she was fifteen. Like everyone else, she had spring fever. All that week Sara hadn’t been able to concentrate. She meant to go to the library, and instead found herself at a shopping mall, drawn to all the filmy dresses, the blouses made of cheap, shiny material. She had spent days trying to finish
a paper at home, but the scent of the roses came in from the open window and drove her crazy, and when she got up and shut her window, their perfume grew even more powerful. It was more than spring fever, she told herself. This was possession.

She was in the science lab, measuring chemicals into a test tube for a project she was doing. She was the only one in the lab besides the science teacher, a middle-aged woman who insisted all the students call her Dr. Kubin, and who wore a white lab coat every day as if any moment she might be called to perform surgery. Dr. Kubin was saying something to Sara, but Sara felt drugged from the weather, and Dr. Kubin’s voice seemed muffled.

“Should I ask you a third time?” Dr. Kubin snapped.

“Ask me what?”

Dr. Kubin sighed. “Again, Sara? Those test tubes aren’t clean.” Dr. Kubin tapped one of the tubes, and Sara shut her eyes until there was a loud, sudden crash.

Sara’s eyes flew open. Her books were now on the floor, and there was Dr. Kubin, her hands on her hips. “Now, do I have your attention?” Dr. Kubin said acidly.

“I’m sorry—” Sara bent to retrieve the books, but Dr. Kubin kicked them out of her way with the toe of her pump. “Get out of my lab,” she said.

Sara needed to finish this project. It was the kind of thing that would be a real plus on her resume. And it was her project, her baby.

“Dr. Kubin?” Sara said, but Dr. Kubin ignored her and sat down at another computer, pulling up Sara’s program. “Dr. Kubin?” Sara repeated, and Dr. Kubin waved her hand, as if she were shooing a fly, and Sara grabbed her books and ran out of the room, fighting tears, and there, leaning against a building, smoking, was Danny Slade.

She knew him. Walk past the principal’s office and there was Danny Slade. Be late to school, and there was Danny Slade, outside, smoking, taking his time, so beautiful you could die just looking at him. He always wore the same musky patchouli oil, so strong that sometimes you could walk into an empty corridor, and you’d know he had just left it. She knew the stories about him. That except for Danny, his family was superreligious
and conservative, and that Danny was the black sheep, a boy who was smart enough, but didn’t give a damn about school, a boy who actually said things like “God is dead” in class and didn’t flinch when he was sent to the principal for it. A boy whose father had died in some scandalous accident that Danny wouldn’t talk about, which made it all the more mysterious. “I want him,” the girls stage-whispered when thev saw him, and even though Danny could have had any one of them, he kept to himself and that made them all want him more. He had long, glossy dark hair and strange eyes, bright and green as a traffic go signal, and now they were staring at her, as if he recognized her from somewhere a long time ago. That look worked its way into her bones. “Sara,” he said.

She was startled he even knew her name. He glanced at her books, taking another drag of his cigarette, lowering his head so his hair fell into his eyes. “You’re always reading,” he said. She thought he was making fun of her, the way some of the kids at school did. Every time report cards came out, someone would always jeer at her, “What’d you get, all As again?” as if being smart were a terrible disease you might never recover from. Every time her name or the name of another honors student was announced on the PA system for winning an award, there would be snickers. Eves would roll.

“Don’t ruin those beautiful eves,” Danny said. His voice was so soft, so kind, that she knew he wasn’t making fun of her and she burst into tears.

She tried to stop crying, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t take her eyes off his face. She was sure he was going to walk away, to leave her. He seemed the kind of boy who couldn’t stand tears, who couldn’t stand trouble not of his own making.

He threw his cigarette into the dirt, grinding it with his heel, and then came so close to her that her heart knocked against her ribs. He touched her arm as delicately as if she were a piece of fine china. “Want to do something besides read?” he said.

It was a question, but it got inside of her, like a command.

She followed him. She was too upset still to talk, but he didn’t seem to mind. He did all the talking. “Detention. Smoking in class,” he said. “What was your crime?”