You Are My Only (2 page)

“Don't forget,” he says, “about tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

The baby is missing. The baby is not where I left her—checked the rope and strapped her in, pulled my weight into the branch above, and said out loud, “This is good and nice and sturdy.” I nudged her high and sang to her, “
True, true, the sky is blue
,” and she smelled like baby. There is not one single other thing that smells like baby, that cheeks against your cheek like the cheek of a baby. I kissed her. I promised, “I am coming right back, Baby.”

There was a pluming plane overhead. Two white trails of smoke, and a second plane—smaller, chasing. I had wanted a blanket so that I might lie nearby, so that all afternoon it would be Baby in her swing and me on the spine of the earth below, watching the ants in their jungled green, waiting for the red-tailed hawks to slice the plumes from the planes. It is twenty-eight steps to the back door, which is red because I painted it red, and it is nine steps to the downstairs closet, but I'd forgotten: I'd left the blanket upstairs, in the trunk by the bed, beneath the hooked rug Mama was working when she passed, beneath Mama's collection of hats. There are thirteen steps up, and there are thirteen steps down, and when I opened the red door where the brushstrokes had dried rough around the brass plate, Baby was gone.

There was a yellow sock on the ground, below the swing—the color of a chick, Baby's best color. She was always kicking off her socks, my baby.

It hasn't rained for weeks. The earth is bone. There were no shoe prints in the grass, no signs. There were no cars in the street, and the woods behind the house are deep. I heard a crackle and I ran, and maybe it was squirrel scuttle on leaves, maybe it was the hooves of deer, but I kept going in the direction of the sound, through the ragged scrapes of early-autumn trees, my skirt poked and unthreaded by the hard tips of the low branches, until all I could hear was the weight of me and my baby's name in the shadows: “Baby! Baby!”

My baby is gone. My baby is gone, and I should have called the police first thing. I should have had a decent, right-thinking thought in my head instead of growing desperate in the trees, draining the day of precious daylight with my every failing footstep. Peter came home to the red circle of the law's lights, to the house torn inside out and bright with every watt we own. To dogs in the woods and yellow rivers of light. They told Peter right at the end of his second shift. He smells like refinery and trouble, like the smoke up and down the river.

“Where's Baby?” Peter asks me now, the skin around his nose flaring the way it gets before his eyes go stone-cold blue.

“She dropped her sock,” I say.

“Where's Baby?” he says again, louder, and it takes Sergeant Pierce and another cop to keep Peter's paws off me. He'd throttle me if they'd let him. He'd throttle me like he's done before. “Let him do,” I say. “Just. Please.” Because I'm done, dead and gone, if I don't have Baby.

“What's the mother's first rule?” Peter says to the sergeant. “What is it? You know what it is.”

The sergeant looks from Peter to me with sergeant eyes.

“Taking care,” Peter answers himself. “Taking care is the first mother rule. I tell her every day: Take care. Every morning I leave here I say it. Every night when she tucks Baby into bed.” His face is lit-up lava. The pupils in his eyes aren't stones but hurricanes.

“Mr. Rane, we have a situation. Step back, now, and lower your hands. If you love your baby like you say you do, you'll give us room to do our work.”

Peter lowers his fists.

“Be useful,” the sergeant says sternly. “Make me a list of the people you know. Anybody anywhere who could be out for a little revenge.”

“Ask her,” Peter says.

“Ask me what?” I say.

“Ask her what she was doing upstairs when my daughter was out back, all by herself, defenseless, in a swing. Ask her: Is that a mother?”

“We'll be looking,” the sergeant says, “after every possible lead.”

I made the world's best icosahedron. Like my life depended on it, I made it. Arranged it pretty on the cutting board, put it front and very central, on the kitchen table. Like the flowers you see on the TV shows, that's how I displayed it. So that when my mother came home, it would be the first thing she saw—not me, in my changed clothes, feeling hopeful.

“Look,” I said. “It turned out perfect.”

“And did you learn,” Mother asked me, “about the principles of solids?”

“Archimedean solids,” I said. She stood, judging, not speaking. She held her head to the left, then to the right, and closed one eye and sighed.

“Here,” she said. “Help me with this.” She handed me the Styrofoam leftovers box that she had brought back from work. I popped the lid on a pair of hot dogs. “One for each,” she said, and I put the dinner out. I offered her mustard and ketchup, waited for notes, a little discussion, but she said nothing, and I worried that she knew, or maybe guessed, that I'd been lazy. When she finished her hot dog, she stood and dragged herself away from the table. I stayed behind, thinking about Joey and sliders. I heard her climb to her room and shut the door. I made my way to the attic.

Which is where I am now, looking out at the night above and Joey's house below, the big tree between. There are yellow flames in his rectangle windows, curtains folding in with the breeze. I lean out as far as I can, get near as I can to Joey. I watch the windows, looking for signs of him looking for signs of me. I see the edge of a hallway, the back of a chair, the half of a table, and finally Harvey, rousing up the air around him, Aunt Cloris on his tail. When she sits at the slice of kitchen table I can see, she picks up a long knife and starts splitting envelopes. She writes out a list. Harvey settles. No Joey.

Up here, alone, I wonder how I could ever explain—how I got here, how long I'll stay here, how it has been. I'd have to start with Chap, the cat I lost. I'd have to go all the way back to the almost beginning, when Chap, my cat, disappeared. I was four. I was alone.

“Chap!” I cried. “Chap!” But I'd opened the door just to test the day, and he was through the yard and down the walk, wicking his tail all around. He zagged toward the street, then into the street and up the black asphalt road, where a long yellow bus with big fat wheels was coming too fast in his direction. “Chap!” I screamed, and then I was out there on the walk and in the street, hollering against the wind in the direction of the school bus. I heard the slamming squeal of the brakes on the bus. I saw Chap's fluffy tail beneath the hulking yellow. I kept running until the bus had stopped, and then I didn't see Chap, and then I lost him.

“You be careful,” I heard the bus driver call—an angry voice, a reprimand, the kids behind him laughing. But his anger was like nothing compared to my mother coming home—my mother finding the door unlocked, Chap gone. “I told you” is what she said. “I told you about doors. About safety.” I was four and it was all my fault. We found a better house, with better locks. We kept on moving. “It's you and me now,” my mother always said, and every single time, she meant it.

“I told you that we shouldn't have done,” Peter says.

“Done what, Peter?” I'm shaking. I want him to hold me, but he'd never. I want him to tell me we'll find Baby. But there is hardly a difference in his mind between me and the crime that's been committed, and the rains have come in, and the dogs have quit searching; they'll start again tomorrow. “We'll be looking after every possible lead,” the sergeant said. Peter's hurricane eyes storm through me. He wells up inside himself and turns away.

“Shouldn't have done had Baby.”

“You don't want Baby?”

“I don't want
this.
You were her mother.”

“
Were
, Peter? She's not a
were
.”

I can't keep my heart in my chest. I can't breathe, and I can't stop walking back and forth, back and forth, the north and south of nowhere. Peter stands at the window, looking out into the night, big as he has ever been. He wasn't big like that when I met him in high school. He bullied himself up since with a pair of dumbbells, a glass of egg yolk and milk with his morning coffee. “What are you training for?” I used to ask him. “The Olympics?”

“I married you for your cheesecake,” he used to say. My mama's recipe, passed on. Mama taught me every kitchen thing I know. Peter fell in love with my cooking.

“Somebody took her,” he says now. “What does somebody want with our Baby?”

I can't abide; I can't. I think of Baby in her swing, way up high and smiling. I think of me, finding Baby, never losing Baby, always near my Baby. It's eight steps to the stairs and thirteen steps up. I pull my canvas Keds from the closet shelf. I dig the purse that Mama left me out from the bottom of the trunk. I trade my cotton skirt for my roll-up Levis. I stick a comb in my back pocket. There are thirteen steps down, and the front door is white. I'm out in the night, searching for Baby.

“Emmy Rane!” I hear Peter bark after me. “Emmy Rane, where do you think you're going?” But I won't come home until I have her back. I won't.

It has kept on with the rain—big fat drops that taste like dew. All these weeks without rain, and now it comes, but from only half the sky; the other half has half a moon hanging huge, and I follow the moon, straight-ahead west, and now south and now again west, at the bend in the road. Baby's eyes are round; they are living sapphires. She will not close them, I am sure, until she sees me coming.

Baby, I am coming

My Keds make
whisper hurry hurry
sounds across the cement walk. In the broken places, in the cracks, it's getting sloppy. I feel a dampness sinking in around my toes and wish I'd remembered socks, but I'm not going back and it isn't cold, just a little chilly beneath the eye of the moon. They searched the whole woods—the police and their dogs. They went partway up the railroad tracks on the opposite side of the trees, until, with the dark and the rain, they called for quitting and asked for more photos, said they would call out all the forces. I don't know where they'll go tomorrow, what leads they think they have, who they imagine would do this, or why, what time they'll drink their coffee and start. But I can't wait. I won't. The moon is my lamp, and I follow. My heart is a sick, soft place, and my lungs are very small.

On the street, the houses are all lit up like jack-o'-lanterns or blued through with TV. “We're not getting any TV,” Peter says. I asked him only once. Sometimes I wish I'd married Kevin O back when I had choices. There was a row of daffodils behind his mother's house, and in spring he'd cut me some. But Peter was three years older than me, and he had a job already, working at the refinery. He had the '82 Nissan pickup that he said someday he might teach me how to drive. “When you're ready,” he said. “I'm ready,” I told him. “When I say you're ready,” he said.