The Used World (18 page)

I have to go, I have to get out of here, Rebekah thought, without taking a step. She was afraid to blink, afraid to turn her head. Nothing like this had ever happened to her; she had been afraid as a child sometimes, but that fear was not the same species as this. She knew she was standing in a cavernous space and that what had crippled her was a congregation of inanimate objects; she knew, intellectually, that the mannequin (the
mannequin
) in the Costume Shop had not moved, would not move. She also knew, intellectually, that it was moving.

Time passed; the Christmas lights blinked off, on. Above her the fans thrummed and there were slight noises everywhere: clocks ticking, the gurgle of a drain, dolls grinding their teeth. Rebekah stood frozen.

Hazel came out of the drugstore carrying two huge bags, which were so heavy she gave up and dragged them. Claudia knew she should get out and help her, but felt justified in staying put, since the baby’s diaper had soaked right through the waterproof Carhartt’s. It had been quite a feat on his part, but he had succeeded.

“I asked a matronly sort in the store what I should get, I told her I was going to a baby shower for a new adoption, and she said at six months he needs formula and cereal. So look, I got this formula you just pour in a bottle.” Hazel poked through the items in the larger of the two bags in the backseat.

“Could you close the door? You can tell me on the way home.”

“And I got cereal with bananas in it, and a bowl that heats up, and a baby spoon. Also some bibs. Here are diapers, twenty-four for now but I can get more tomorrow, and here’s zinc oxide since he’s bound to have diaper rash. I got a pacifier, a digital thermometer, baby wash, baby shampoo, a sponge thing you lay him on in the sink, baby towels, a baby brush, though I notice he doesn’t have much in the way of hair. I got a pack of onesies—that seems to be some sort of little underwear thing—and a nightgown, tiny little nail clippers, look at this. Here’s a six-pack of bottles with cartoon characters on the side, quite cute. This is a thing you strap to his wrist and he can shake it like a rattle.”

“Hazel, please get in the car and close the door.”

Hazel closed the back door, slid into the front seat. “He needs, in this order, I think, food, a bath, clean clothes, a good night’s sleep, a visit to the doctor, and more stimulation. He needs to be held a lot, according to the chubby woman in the drugstore.”

“Let’s get home, then.”

“And he needs a name.”

“Hazel, I am not I am not
I am not
keeping this baby.”

Hazel pulled out of the parking lot, irritating four other drivers in the process. Humming, she ran the first red light she came to, then rubbed her hands together and glanced at Claudia. “What an adventure we’ve embarked upon!”

Claudia had never seen her look quite so happy.

After they had discovered that the baby could indeed scream like a normal child, which happened all through the diapering process; after they found that he could eat far more than they would have thought, and instantly throw it back up in an impressive, far-reaching arc; after he kicked and flailed and howled over being given a bath (he was, as Hazel predicted, bright red from stem to stern, and he had cradle cap); after they had gotten him powdered, onesied, wrapped in a blanket and asleep, Hazel left, saying she’d be back as soon as she could with a crib and everything else Claudia could possibly need.

Claudia held the baby in Ludie’s old rocking chair, the one in the living room next to the window, and rocked, hummed a low, slow version of “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore.” Tears had dried in his pale eyelashes, gathering them up like the arms of starfish. He hiccupped periodically in his sleep, and sometimes his mouth trembled as if he would cry again, and Claudia couldn’t tell if he was heartsick or exhausted or ill in some way not indicated by her new thermometer. She didn’t know how to care for someone who couldn’t speak, who couldn’t give the slightest information about what ailed him. What if he was ill and Claudia missed it? What if he was dying? She pressed her nose and face against his head, which now smelled like baby lotion. His hands were gathered up in fists on either side of his face, and she slipped her pinkie finger inside his hand, which opened up just a little, then squeezed, and Claudia knew she was in the worst trouble in her life.

Rebekah had to pee, and in fact could imagine herself peeing like a racehorse for five or six solid minutes. But not even that, not even a physical emergency was enough to cause her to move. She realized she was going to die this way and it would be a source of great embarrassment to Hazel.
STUPID GIRL, SLIGHTLY PREGNANT, DIES FROM FRIGHT AND A BURST BLADDER; HAZEL HUNNICUTT “EMBARRASSED.”
So not funny. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and what had formerly been the curved backs of beasts became again a Turkish rug draped over two sawhorses and a console stereo from the 1960s. It hardly mattered, as under the conditions the truth was as scary as the illusion.

A car pulled into the parking lot, and Rebekah’s scalp tightened, causing her ears to lift slightly. She strained to hear with the same intensity a dog would give to distant footsteps. There was a car in the parking lot, and this, finally, broke Rebekah’s paralysis. She fell on her knees below the level of the window, then remembered the door didn’t have one. She stayed on her knees anyway, as she felt slightly faint, and curling up in a ball took pressure off her bladder.

The car door opened and closed with a muffled whump. The heavy door between Rebekah and the parking lot prevented her from hearing whether the visitor had keys, but she could hear the sliding door on the storage unit grind up on its metal track. Rebekah was scarcely breathing and still her pulse hammered in her ears. Something in the storage unit toppled; something else was scooted across the concrete floor. Whoever was out there wasn’t trying to be quiet.

After a few minutes the storage unit door was lowered on its tracks. The parking lot was silent just long enough for Rebekah to hear footsteps heading for the door she had her ear against. She turned and ran toward Your Grandmother’s Parlor, leaping over a low bookcase she knew impinged on the aisle just slightly, changed her mind and turned around, leapt over the bookcase a second time. She ran as fast as she could toward the bathroom, slipping around its entrance just as the back door opened with a metallic groan.

Damn damn damn damn,
Rebekah whispered—the only swear word she was comfortable with—trying not to panic. The bathroom was an enclosed space in the middle of the store; it had not a hint of a window and was as dark as a bank vault. Hazel kept a bucket and mop in the corner, but the room was small enough that if the bucket had rolled out even a few inches, Rebekah was bound to trip. Who could be here? It wasn’t Hazel, who had said dozens of times that she’d gouge out her own spleen before she’d visit the Used World at night. It wasn’t Hazel, it couldn’t be Claudia, because…it just couldn’t be. Claudia would no more raid her workplace than rob a bank. And no one else had keys.

Rebekah hadn’t reset the alarm. She smacked her forehead; she hadn’t reset the alarm. But how could I have? she thought, justifying herself; I was catatonic and had lost the use of my digits. She steadied her breathing, tried to discern whether the intruder noticed the absence of the alarm. There was, it seemed, a heavy pause between the closing of the door and the turning on of the middle bank of lights. Standing in the bathroom made Rebekah realize even more urgently that it was pee or die. Pee, or
die.

The intruder moved down…it sounded like the left-hand aisle, the same aisle Rebekah had originally chosen. What sort of a person would rob an antique mall? A desperate man of taste, someone hoping a Mission-style mule chest would help him finally complete his bedroom ensemble? More likely it was a run-of-the-mill drug addict; the newspaper had reported only yesterday that an estimated 40 percent of the county’s unemployed were addicted to methamphetamine, which the editors had called a Rural Plague.

Rebekah felt for the stall door and was able to slip around it without moving it. The door was on a spring that complained heartily when sprung. Please please, she thought, let there be toilet paper, if there isn’t any toilet paper it’s my fault, as I am the one who’s supposed to change it—and there was some. Rebekah found the end of the roll and lifted it, unwinding a few feet, which she lay on top of the water in the toilet bowl. So far so good. Now she had to get her blue jeans unbuttoned and lowered without making any noise.

There was a crash from somewhere near the Nostalgic Kitchen; it sounded like a wooden bowl falling on the concrete floor. After the first noise, all sorts of things either fell or were tossed, which Rebekah took as a sign. She sat forward on the toilet seat, trying to hit the front of the bowl, one of Peter’s tricks for using the bathroom silently. Of course she wasn’t a boy and didn’t have perfect aim, and also as soon as she began she wasn’t entirely in control.

From the intruder came the sound of…was that a
drill
? A power screwdriver? Was a robber actually taking the time to dismantle furniture? He made a loud grunting sound, as if he were trying to lift something heavy. Rebekah heard the sound of the dolly, with its one crooked wheel, being pushed toward the back door; the man took one load out and came back for a second. She was going to live, Rebekah realized—this was almost over. The mannequin wasn’t going to kill her, neither her heart nor her bladder was going to burst, and the little clump of baby cells she was carrying around would get to grow one more day.

Before he closed the back door behind him, whoever had come and taken apart a display also turned off the overhead lights, casting Rebekah back into the cavelike, paralyzing darkness. She scooted around the bucket and mop, zipping her blue jeans and muttering
damn damn damn damn.
Once outside the bathroom she could hear the car start and drive away.
I ran to the bathroom,
Rebekah said to herself,
I can run away from it.
But after only three steps her legs felt leaden and her eyes darted back and forth at the shapes made once again diabolical.
Go, go,
she said aloud,
you have to get out of here.
Such terror couldn’t be good for the little bean pod, she was certain, and for the first time she tried to think of the mess she was in as containing
two,
even if one of them was, so far, nothing more than two gigantic eyeballs in a shrimp. That was enough. Rebekah sprinted past the NASCAR display, the entrance to the breezeway where the Christmas lights twinkled, and to the metal back door, stopping only long enough to grab her overnight bag from where she’d dropped it beside the low bookcase. Her hands trembled as she pushed in the security code, but she had the presence of mind to make sure she had her keys before she opened the door and let it close behind her.

With the baby asleep in the middle of Claudia’s bed, surrounded by pillows, Claudia and Hazel had spent forty-five minutes putting up the crib Hazel had brought back from the Emporium. Claudia kept eyeing the new crib mattress Hazel had picked up at Babies “R” Us, wondering if it would be entirely wrong to just put the mattress on the floor. In the whole time they’d been working on the crib, Hazel hadn’t brought up that she had just done something she swore she’d rather…Claudia couldn’t remember what. Something about her spleen.

“So?” Claudia finally asked, irritated that she had to.

“So, what?”

“So you went into the store at night and you’re still alive. How did it go?”

Hazel put down her wrench, looked puzzled a moment. “I don’t know that I would have gone through with it, but Rebekah was there.”

“What? What was she doing there?”

“I have no idea. Her car was parked behind the storage shed, way back in the corner next to the delivery truck, and she’d dropped her overnight bag just inside the delivery door.”

“Did you ask her what she was doing there?”

“No—all the lights were out, so I think she didn’t want anybody to know.”

“Wait.” Claudia lowered her screwdriver. “Did you
see
Rebekah?”

“I didn’t. She was in the bathroom the whole time I was there.”

“Hazel, good Lord! Do you even know if she was all right?”

“She’s all right.” Hazel reached in and tightened a bolt she’d put on and taken off four times. For some reason they kept putting the sides on backward, which meant that Claudia couldn’t push the release bar with her foot, thus lowering the side rail. Why she needed to lower it was still a mystery. “I waited in the parking lot at Richard’s until I saw her come out and leave.”

Claudia leaned back against the trunk at the end of her bed. No one in her right mind would choose to traverse the Used World alone, after hours, just to go to the bathroom. “What—what do you suppose that was about?”

Hazel shook her head. “Couldn’t tell you. Hand me that L-shaped thing.”

Claudia let the subject drop. Rebekah was impossible for her to grasp, anyway; she was like a creature fallen to Earth from some distant planet. She didn’t even know what solar system Rebekah would call home.

Two hours and an entire cycle of feeding, vomiting, screaming, and sleeping later, Claudia could say they’d made headway in meeting the baby’s needs. They’d figured out how to put the car seat, dusty from the storage unit, in the Cherokee, and they’d set up the changing table (which had seen better days) with diapers, changing pads, baby wipes, powders, and unguents. Hazel had unfolded something called a Gymini—a red, black, and white quilted pad with two arches crossed over the top, from which dangled animal shapes and rattles and crackly things. This was for the stimulation part of the baby’s needs.