Spinning (16 page)

While the decorators finished, Spring and I spent the entire next day out of the apartment. It was amazing what you could get, if you were willing to pay a 30% surcharge. In the late afternoon, after she “talked me into” a trip to Haagen-Dazs, I took her to her room.

She seemed very confused.

“Look,” I said, “it’s your new room. It’s yellow! Yellow bed, yellow dresser, a yellow rocker, even yellow walls. And we’ll hang some paper up over there in case you’re ever…inspired.”

She looked a little stupefied, like she was wondering where I had put her old room.

“And look there,” I said, pointing. “What’s that?”

On two of the walls, I had cartoons painted. One wall featured a line of ducks playing with a teddy bear.

“What’s that, Spring?” I said, pointing.

Spring stared at the image on the other wall. Painted in purple was a simple box, quartered and a simple sliver of a moon.

“… Harold?”

“Yes, Harold’s window.”

Spring sat on her new bed. Her expression was more animated and she seemed intrigued with her new room.

“Look here,” I said, opening the closet door. Harold stood inside peeking out at the moon and still wearing his pajamas. “He’s in your closet…”

Spring laughed spontaneously. It sent an unfamiliar thrill through me. I realized that I had been anxious about her reaction.

But then her brow furrowed. “Where’s Mommy going to sleep?” she said.

My mood sank and I went to sit next to her on the bed.

“She’s going to stay right next to you while you sleep. I picked up Diane’s picture and handed it to her. “She’ll always be with you… here.”

I put my hand over my heart. I knew we were going to have this conversation many times. Spring touched my hand.

“Here?”

“Yes, she’s inside me.”

Then she put her hand over her heart. “I can feel her.”

“As long as your heart beats, you know she’s inside of you.”

Spring stared. She was clearly confused, but she was trying to understand. Then she climbed off the bed and pulled a book from her new shelf. She sat in the rocker and leafed through the pages.

“You okay if I go inside?” I said.

She nodded from over the top of the book.

I returned to the suitcase and once again piled the contents onto the countertop. There had to be a reason Diane kept this stuff.

“I’m trying Diane,” I said to my vision of her. “I’m trying to understand. I know it’s a slow process, but you’ve got to give me more than an
E,
a suitcase full of clothes and an old thermos.”

I went through the items again. Maybe they weren’t her things and she was holding them for someone The shirts could have belonged to anyone. And then the picture. Why would she keep a picture of herself? It looked like it meant something to someone… maybe Spring’s father? An old boyfriend? I put the contents back in the suitcase and went to have a talk with the urn.

“What is it, Diane? What does all that stuff mean?” I was very agitated. I suppose I just needed to release some of the tension. “Is it supposed to tell me something? Well, it isn’t good enough. I need more. If you want me to help Spring, I need more.” I was pacing and stupidly half-waited for an answer.

“Who are you talking to?”

Busted.
“Sorry, Spring. I guess I was talking to myself.”

She looked disappointed. “Oh, I thought you said Mommy’s name.”

That’s when I noticed I was feeling a little hot and needed some air. My chest felt tight and I tried to inhale. At first, it felt like allergies, when you can only get so much oxygen. I decided to sit down. I must have looked bad because Spring seemed very concerned and sidled directly next to me. Maybe I
was
having an allergic reaction. To the level of responsibility.

I took a deep breath and smiled. “It’s okay, Spring. I’m just tired.”

She hugged my leg.

“I’ll be okay,” I said again, feeling a strong need to reassure her. Staring into her eyes, I could see a thousand questions behind them, but the most important one remained: “When will Mommy be home?”

There was a very real chance that I was all Spring had which meant that I instantly needed a neural link in child rearing, something the people in the
Matrix
movies could provide if they weren’t, you know, fictional. I could bandage her knee and maybe handle soothing her after a simple nightmare the kind of thing you could pick up from an ad for cold medicine or greeting cards. If it got more complicated than that like dealing with grief, for instance I was way out of my depth.

I went through a mental checklist of my qualifications: I could help arrange Spring’s stuffed animals, and I knew what she liked for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Mr. Barnes said that Spring could remain at his daycare facility as long as necessary, which would be a huge help once we started doing that again. I knew that Spring’s favorite stuffed toy was a Teddy Bear disguised as a duck, and that she liked to draw.

Did any of that qualify me to parent her in any way? It hardly qualified me to be a Saturday night babysitter.
I hadn’t been paying enough attention while Diane was alive. I didn’t think I needed to. I figured that my role in Spring’s life would be to provide comic relief at most.

Spring stared at me, probably still unsure of my condition. That made two of us.

“Can you go get your crayons? I have a special request.”

At first, she looked confused, but went to get them anyway. She returned with blue, yellow, orange, and eggplant and handed me the blue crayon.

“What?” I said. “I wanted you to draw. You want me to draw something?”

She nodded.

“What?”

“A peng-win.”

Never known my for my artistic ability, I attempted to draw a peng-win.

“Ta daaa.”

“That’s not a peng-win.” she said.

“You try then.”

She did. Hers looked similar, only with a happy face and wavy sticks for arms.
Great, we’re drawing at the same level.
I told her I liked it. After she drew some more, she grew tired and crawled onto my lap. I held her close to me.

All parents started as amateurs, right? At least I had a decent lap.

“We’ll figure it out, Spring. I promise,” I said. It was at least the second time I’d said it to her and the eightieth time I’d said it to myself. But she didn’t hear me. It wasn’t even 6:00, but she had already fallen asleep on me.

I’d been avoiding giving Spring a bath for the sake of both of us, but the next night I knew I had to face that particular demon. I hadn’t participated in the bathing process since my encounter with the cabinet door. After dinner, I told Spring that it was time for a bath.

She simply said, “Bath? Okay,” and walked down the hall.

I finished cleaning up the dishes and then walked slowly to join her. I could hear the water running in the bathroom and pushed open the door. Spring sat inside the tub with her clothes on, shoes and all.

“What are you doing?” I said, tamping down both laughter and consternation.

“My hair,” she said. Her teeth chattered.

It was true. Just like her mother had done, Spring had created something approximating a shampoo fin.

“Did you decide to do your laundry, too?”

She shrugged and my control slipped away. “Let’s take those off,” I said, laughing. I’m not sure that she did this to be funny, but Spring seemed pleased with my response. I added an inch or so of warm water to the freezing shallow bath. I removed her shoes and hesitated again. If I was going to bathe her, she was going to have to be naked. As odd as this sounds, I tried looking away while pulling her shirt over her head, but the shampoo from the fin covered her eyes and we both started to panic. Trying to remove the clothes without paying attention to a naked, little girl wasn’t working, and Spring had decided not to cooperate. I kept expecting the FBI to break down my door:

Diane would have definitely been laughing by now. I pulled the soggy shirt over Spring’s head and blotted her face with a towel. I could blot without panicking. Blotting was easy. I could even over-blot before moving on to the toughie: removal of her pants and underwear.

Again, my first inclination was to look away. Then instead of glancing at Spring’s nakedness, I’d probably pull her underwater and have to explain to the FBI why a half-naked girl with a limp shampoo fin was floating in my tub.
No thanks.
I took a deep breath, grabbed the waistband of her pants and pulled. She slipped like I hoped she wouldn’t and there was nowhere to grab. Her skin, still slick with shampoo and soap, disappeared in my grasp, and she momentarily slid into the shallow tub and blew bubbles out her nose. I scooped her up without a tear from her or me.

“Okay, let’s try this again…”

Before I could remove the pants, Spring slipped both them and her underwear off, proving that she had been perfectly capable of doing this herself all along. Now there was a fully naked little girl in my guest tub.

But no one broke the door down to end my unpleasant experience. No, I wasn’t that lucky.

“How do you do this?” I said, looking at Spring‘s face and torso. “What’s dirty?”

Spring shrugged.

Knowing that many little kids get nightly baths, I knew something had to get dirty, or why all the fuss? And I was afraid that that something was what I thought it was going to be. Spring pointed to her back.

“Okay. Your back? Turn around. Where’s your loofa?”

“My what?”

“Loofa? Don’t you use a loofa?”

She shook her head.

“What do you use?”

She pointed to a washcloth.

“This?”

She nodded.

Easy enough
. I washed her back. She turned around and I washed her chest. Of course, I attempted idle chitchat during both. “When’s your birthday?”

She shrugged.

“You don’t know when your birthday is?”

She shook her head.

I stuck the washcloth into an ear, also located safely above the waist, and twisted until Spring suggested it was
clean by saying,“Ow.” Hearing another “Ow,” I switched to the other ear.

“Spring, do you know what a sheepdog is?”

She shook her head.

“I used to have a sheepdog. His name was Hemingway and he had really long hair not as long as yours, but long and he loved getting a bath. I’d say ‘Bath time,’ and he’d run from wherever he was and climb onto my lap. He was about 80 pounds, a lot bigger than you, and sometimes he got a little heavy. He was dirty all the time. I remember when I gave him his first bath. I told him to get in the tub and he immediately grabbed for the loofa with his teeth.”

She stared.

“Which is pretty funny because you can’t use a loofa on a sheepdog.”

She failed to see the irony.

“Never mind.”

“Did you wash…” I pointed below her waist. If Spring had decided she didn’t need to wash there, I was just going to rinse her off with water from the big Yankees cup. She took the washcloth and made some passes there.

One step at a time.

Not so bad. I had made it through the tough part and drying was all downhill. A towel, a few pats, and you had a dry kid. Spring stood and even helped dry herself, but then grabbed a container of baby powder. After I had tried so hard to provide impersonal and conservative hygiene accommodations conforming to the Baths for Minors Act Spring turned around, bent over and mooned me.