Happy Baby (2 page)

When I first met Maria we were fifteen and both living in state homes for wards of the court. All the boys were playing basketball when the van from the girls’ home arrived. She was just admitted, wearing all pink: pink shoes, pink earrings, pink shorts and shirt. She looked like an unopened piece of candy. She was shy and scared but I knew something horrible had happened to her because girls don’t often end up in group homes. We made a lot of promises then, about staying together and looking out for each other. Or maybe I made all the promises, about protecting her and keeping her safe.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she says, reaching to the counter for the bottle.

“Sorry.”

She has an arm around Kyle’s waist, her head tilted toward the baby’s crown. Kyle has his little hands on the bottle.

“He’s like a little person,” I say.

“Except he knows what he wants.” I stare at the baby, a pile of creases between rings of fat. His skin is the color of eggnog; he has enormous ears.

I notice Maria isn’t wearing any rings but that doesn’t mean anything. I can see the top of her bra where her shirt is unbuttoned. I was married once, before Ambellina. Ambellina has children I’ve never met. A girl and a boy. But sometimes just a girl. Ambellina’s story changes from time to time. I’m sure she has a daughter, because the girl comes up again and again. I’ve heard the stories change from grammar school to high school in the time I’ve been with her.

Kyle has little brown hairs, curly and soft, different from Maria’s black hair, which has always been straight and dry. The two of them are smiling. I wonder how much time she spends here, speaking with her baby, and if she talks to anyone else. She turns the child around so he faces me, his fat little belly hanging over his diapers, his mouth open, waiting for some more good news, the bridge of her hands under his arms. The baby is directly between us. I lean back in my chair, fingers on the cup handle. I thought Maria would be alone or she would be married but I didn’t expect this. Two smiling faces. The pale baby, his mouth the shape of a firecracker with a wick on both ends. Maria, her dark cheeks flushed. That could have been our child. He’s not even a year old. I would have named him Kyle too, if that’s what she wanted.

“Tell me something,” Maria says.

“I live in San Francisco now. Every day it’s the same temperature. My girlfriend didn’t want me to come here.”

“Maybe you should have listened to her,” Maria says. “I’m just teasing. You want some more tea?”

“Sure. It’s good tea.”

“Hold on a second. Let me get this pot going again. And let me change this little guy.” Maria keeps Kyle against her as she reaches over the stove light. Maria used to be skinny. She used to starve herself.

There’s a couple of clicks as the flame pops beneath the kettle. She leans her hip into the cabinet and lays Kyle on top of a towel on the counter, pulls the pin out of his diaper. Kyle kicks his legs like he’s riding a bicycle.

“This isn’t a bad place,” I say. “Bigger than my place. I live on a busy street and dirt comes through the window from the exhaust. There’s a factory across the street where they make fancy chocolates but you wouldn’t know it looking at the sidewalks at night. I’m thinking about moving somewhere nicer.” I scratch my head.

“Hand me one,” she says, lifting Kyle, pointing to a box. I get up and grab her a diaper then sit back down. The old diaper goes in a sack held with two rods. She wipes Kyle and fastens the new diaper around his legs.

“How about you?”

“About me?” Maria begins. “I still live in Chicago.”

“Ha ha.”

“Well, there was Joe. That’s most of it. You met him.”

“I did. I met him the hard way.”

“Everybody met Joe the hard way.” I bring the cup back to my lips before realizing it’s empty. “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let him do that.”

“It was out of your hands.”

“I can’t even tell you. I loved him the most.”

I feel something drop and put the cup down harder than I mean to. I don’t think I ever doubted for a day that I loved Maria the most. My wife knew that. She could sense it. I love Ambellina too, but it’s different. On my last day in the group home I was almost seventeen, Maria and I were in the smoking room waiting for the car that was going to take me to a place called Prairie View. I would have done anything for Maria then. My hand was inside her shirt, fiddling with the bottom of her bra, feeling the weight of her breasts. She slid her leg over my legs and then to the other side of me and I was on top of her on the couch. We were waiting for that car and it felt like we had all the time in the world but we used it as best we could. I don’t know if staff heard us or not. But no one came to the door.

“Don’t look at me that way either,” she says. “You look like a wolf.”

Kyle starts to cry. I turn away for a second. It’s an awful sound. The kettle is ringing and the room is filling with steam. Maria reaches over and shuts the stove off, the pot rattling across the burner.

“Let’s give the baby some attention,” she says. “Let’s all look at the baby. Who’s the baby? Are you the baby? Everybody loves the baby. Everybody listens to the baby when the baby cries.” She’s bouncing Kyle and soon Kyle is happy again. It seems so easy.

Maria pours tea into my cup. She’s still holding Kyle with one arm. The cup full, she keeps the pot near to my hand. “I’ve had burns like those,” she says. “They’re going to scar. First they’ll become like little craters on your wrist. Then, as they heal, they’ll leave pale round marks. I have eight of them on my right thigh. Starting on my knee and finishing at my waist. They’re like buttons.”

I stare at her middle, try to imagine her new scars beneath her clothes. “What are we talking about?”

“I was telling you my story.”

I hide my hands in my lap for a moment until she looks away.

“How did you find me, by the way?” she asks, placing the kettle back on the stove and taking her seat across from me but holding Kyle so his face is just above the table, his tiny hands gripping the edge.

“I see you,” I say to Kyle. “People aren’t that hard to find. You can find anybody now for fifty dollars.”

“So, Joe. I lived with Joe for years. He always took care of me. This is what I think. That some people, they get what they want, it just makes them want more. He was a violent person.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“He never hurt me too much.”

“How would you know?”

“Don’t joke. They gave him fifty years.” She’s quiet for a second and the baby is still. In the silence I hear voices coming from the wall. It’s her neighbors having a conversation about soup. She smiles awkwardly when she realizes what I’m listening to. “He had two strikes already for some other things. He strangled a man outside of the Oak Club. I saw him do it. They had said something to each other. Joe was the bouncer. I never got the full story. Everybody has a different view of the situation. Sometimes Joe would kick somebody out just to have a fight.”

She takes Kyle in both hands again and bounces him up and down. I wish she would stop playing with the baby. He yells and claps. I wait for her to continue while she pulls Kyle toward her and he stretches his arm out and she takes his fist in her mouth Then she opens her mouth and he takes his arm back. She turns in her chair and crosses her legs.

“You’re spoiling him,” I say.

“That’s OK. One of us needs to be spoiled. Makes up for the cheap diapers. Anyway, this guy. You know I would let Joe do anything he wanted. I wanted him to do whatever he wanted to me. I tried to cover the bruises with makeup. My caseworker wanted to put me in a woman’s shelter to get me away from him, so I stopped meeting with her and lost my SSI. I didn’t care what she thought. But he needed more. Hence the bacon grease.”

Maria reaches across the table to touch the blisters near my fingers. They’re raised and yellow with pink halos around them.

“Wait. Don’t do anything.” She touches the blister carefully. “Joe wanted to hurt people; he couldn’t help it.” I can feel the bubble of liquid move just a little bit under her pressure. Her finger glides along the top of the blister. “He would pierce me with things. He carved his name into my back with a scalpel and covered it with baking soda so it wouldn’t heal. I could show you.” She waits for an answer.

“No. I’m not interested.”

“Fine. People don’t think that’s love. But listen, this is important. If you pop these you have to cover them with Bacitracin and a Band-Aid. You have to watch out for infection. But you shouldn’t pop them. They’ll heal better if you don’t.”

I nod my head. “Promise me.”

“Sure.”

“Liar.” Maria continues to look at the blisters. “OK. Joe is standing up and he has his hands around this guy’s throat. And the guy is turning blue. And people are pulling on Joe’s arms, trying to get him to let go. But Joe worked out six days a week;. He only ate red meat. One guy was literally hanging from Joe’s arm with his full weight. But nobody could get him to let go. He still had the guy’s neck when the police came. There were three cars surrounding Joe. I thought they were going to bulldoze him into the bar. Those police, with their guns, you could tell they were scared.”

“A badge doesn’t change that.”

“I wouldn’t testify and they threatened to lock me up for contempt of court. They came around here. They said they had a warrant but I didn’t ask to see it and the only place they searched was the refrigerator. They didn’t need me—there were dozens of witnesses. Finally they left me alone.”

I wonder how she pays rent here. Maria took our savings with her when she left me, a couple of hundred dollars, but she left her clothes, and the apartment continued to smell like her for a long time. This is a small apartment to have a child in—a little front room, the kitchen part of the living room, a television set with a towel over the front of it. A cable sticking out of the wall not connected to anything. Hundreds of paperback books, the kind you get in a grocery store. A bedroom I can see from here, just big enough for a pine bed and a dresser. But there’s no crib. She must sleep with Kyle, so if he wakes up crying she’s there right behind him, her breasts and her stomach. I bet he goes right back to sleep. I bet he has no idea how small the apartment is that he’s living in because she doesn’t let him know.

“He’s not Joe’s child, is he?”

“No. He’s not. He’s only my child.”

“Can I hold him?”

“In a little while. Not just yet.”

I stay for the day with Maria and Kyle. We take a walk down a side street to the park. The weather is perfect for it. The park is empty. There’s only one basketball rim there now. There used to be two, and a light. Probably the neighbors complained about the children playing basketball at night. The sun is almost down and we’re sitting on a brown bench in front of a sprinkler-fountain when Maria hands me Kyle. He feels like a doll filled with jelly and he weighs more than I thought he would. My wife almost had a baby twice. After that there wasn’t any chance of anything working out.

I hold Kyle so he’s standing on my leg. I squeeze his belly with my thumbs. He smiles at me, his face cocked to the side. He looks curious. I won’t try to spend the night with Maria. I wouldn’t want to interrupt the two of them. Two older boys come running past us, one of them boys carrying a crowbar and the other laughing. They’re together. They’re running after someone else we can’t see.

“You ever go to visit Joe?” I ask.

“He’s in Marion,” she says and I nod. “But that’s not why I don’t want to visit him. He wouldn’t like Kyle. So maybe I’m wrong to say I love him the most. A mother doesn’t love anybody more than her baby.”

“A good mother.”

“Most mothers.”

“Some mothers.”

Maria laughs. “God, you can be cynical. I write Joe letters. I edit Kyle out. Actually, I make up the letters. I write him fictional stories where I’m at the gym and I’m working out all the time with his old friends. I tell him he has a fan club back here and everybody misses him. I tell him about a friend I made up. Joannie. I say Joannie and I went to the movies today and a man offered to buy her popcorn. It doesn’t matter. There’s no chance of parole in this state. It’s not like I’m going to see him again.”

Across from the park on one side is a row of identical houses. The houses are new. On the other side of the park each house is different and in front of one a woman in a long dress has come outside barefoot to water her lawn. Two doors down from her there is a house that looks abandoned, the slats untreated and rotting, the yard overgrown with weeds. There’s trash in the plants, cups sitting on branches. The mailbox hangs upside down, its lid gaping open. In place of a buzzer two wires protrude from a hole next to the door. I look a little harder and see a face behind a curtain. The house isn’t abandoned at all.

I hand Kyle back to Maria and she stands him on her leg. “Who’s the baby,” she says to him again. “You’re still the baby aren’t you? The baby needs attention.”

It’s after dark, but the weather hasn’t changed. I don’t remember the weather being this nice in Chicago when I was here. The weather is so flawless right now you can’t even feel it. I remember Chicago as always too hot or too cold.

I leave Kyle and Maria at the door to her apartment. She stands in the doorframe and I stand back at the rail with my bag over my shoulders. I could fly back or I could spend a day visiting my old schools and places. Maybe go to the top of the Sears Tower and look out over Chicago, check out the lake and the condominiums at the end of Lake Shore Drive where my wife’s boyfriend lived. But if I get home early maybe I can see Ambellina tomorrow. I think she’s actually worried that I won’t come back.

“I could put you in a cage,” Ambellina said. I was lying with my head in her lap and she was stroking my hair. She had hiked her skirt up and her bare legs were warm. I was naked and wet, fresh from the shower. “I could take you back to my house and lock you in the basement. Then where would you go?” Her finger brushed against my ear and she gently squeezed my nose shut. Then she started crying because she knew. She knew before I did. I’m not going back.