You Are My Only (3 page)

I wish I were driving now. I wish I had wheels and speed, a map that would take me right this instant to my baby. The night is knots and splash, drips and skid, and one road has ended and another begins, and the lone whistle of a long train roars by. The neighborhood changes—from houses to retail, from window light and TV flicker to lanterns up above. At the gas station, the pumps are still. At the Clock and Watch, the gutter is splash. Maybe they're hiding Baby in the shadows between places, in the dark behind bushes, on the other side of barrel trash cans. Maybe she's there, in the back room of Reilly's Saloon. Baby's head makes a snug fit inside my palm. She taught herself smiling. She's a genius at smiling. If she's out here, near, I will find her.

A car goes by, soaking me through. My feet are two pale fish inside the tight ponds of my Keds. I leave the street for the train station. I leave the station and cross onto the tracks, slick-backed and shiny as snail glisten. The black gauze of the clouds flap at the moon, and from the tracks I can see into the backs of people's houses, the private places where the lamps have not gone off. It's like looking through snow globes, worlds behind glass. If Baby were there, in any of those houses, I would see. But all I see is that tower of folded towels and that face of a cat and that woman slipping a nightgown down over her shoulders. All I see is a man in a burnt-orange chair, reading the newspaper, wearing his glasses on the bald glow of his head.

No one rocking Baby. No one cooing at Baby. No one holding her up to the night.

The sop inside my Keds is growing chill. My jeans have worked themselves loose at the waist. The air smells like skunk and peroxide. Before Baby was born, that's what bothered Peter most—that I smelled things he said weren't there.

“You're just imagining,” he'd tell me.

I'd tell him, “Am not.” My way of smelling, it runs in the family. My way of seeing, too, my way of explaining: it was Mama's before mine, and it now belongs to Baby.

“Baby!” I call into the night. “Baby!”

But my voice skids away, rides the slippery tracks. Far away, at the bend in the rails, the night is lamped. It is yellow and growing brighter, and now I understand: the train has big yellow eyes. Lovely ocher liquid eyes. They put the shimmer down on the tracks and splatter the dark. Now the train is past the bend. Now it throws its wide eyesight into the lean between things. The ballast and sleepers start to rumble at my feet. The rails clink up and down, and the longer I stand here, the louder they clink, like some soprano heart.
Be smart
, I tell myself.
Be calm.
I turn and stare into the night. If Baby can't be found, I do not wish to be found either.

Rumble and clink. Brighter and loud. The fish of my feet in the sloshing puddles.
Train, come and get me. Take me to Baby. Find me my one little girl.

And then “Jesus Christ,” a voice says. “Jesus Christ, what were you thinking?”

His weight is a monster bat fallen from the sky. Through the rumble of lamplight, I am dragged. Across the brightening rails, I am banged, bones against steel against steel.

“Leave me alone,” I tell the monster. “Leave me be.” But I can't wrestle free and I can't stand, can't feel my own weight in the hard wind of the train passing, can't touch the steely cars, because my arms are knotted up with his and my ankle is a crack of pain and he is stronger and insisting.

“Out on the tracks with a train coming? Are you crazy?” He has a brogue in his voice. He is loaded down with gravity, dragging me now past the final ballast scatter to the tall grass margin along the track, and staying low while the train roars by. Chains and speed. Unzippering light. Me wrenching and yanking, unfree.

“I'll call the police,” I say. “I'll have them arrest you.” Calling the words out over the train roar. His weight is a shackle.

“You were standing on the tracks.”

“I know where I was.”

“The train was coming.”

“I was looking for something. For someone.” The train is high. The train is speed. The final car sears past, and that is when, at last, he loosens his hold—not altogether, but enough so that I might breathe. My leg is a long, lean pole of pain. “You broke my ankle,” I tell him.

“You'd have been killed.”

“It doesn't matter,” I sob. “I lost my Baby.” They are weather words, thick suds of sorrow. “She was stolen.” All this time I have not seen the man's face. To someone looking down on us, we might seem one body, two heads.

“What's her name?” he asks at last.

“Baby,” I sniff, and saying her name hurts me more than I can bear.

“Baby?”

“Only four months old,” I say.

He says nothing for a good long time. My ankle hurts, my heart hurts, like everything is broken. I'm inside out with the leftovers of rain. “You've told the police?” he asks at last.

“Of course.”

“Then let them do their work and find her. Go home. Wait for them there.”

The tall grass is a wet itch up to my hips. My ankle is a church dome, a balloon. “I can't,” I say. “Peter hates me. Peter blames me. I am his suspect number one.”

I cannot stand on one leg, I cannot run. There is a man in a crouch behind me with a brogue in his voice, and in the dim light, I lean back and crank my head to get a dark, blurred look at him. His forehead is big and hangs low on his face. His eyes are tucked into caverns. His nose is a tulip bulb laid on its side. His mouth is too small for his face.

“What are you doing out here?” I ask him.

“The trains,” he says after a long time. “I like to watch them.”

Up above, the gauze clouds are still flapping at the moon. Down the tracks, the train vanishes. Across the way, one by one, the lamps go out in the houses. The alleys are dark. A trash can rattles. Baby could be anywhere, or she could be nowhere, too. I have no time, and no direction, and no faith in Sergeant Pierce.

“Baby is lost,” I say at last, and I think he understands me, this man, because he doesn't move, and he doesn't hurt me, and he doesn't say,
Stop crying. There, there, we'll fix it.
He smells like garlic and chicken bones.

“Maybe it isn't broken,” I say after a lot more time goes by. I test my ankle to prove my theory, squish my Keds to the ground. But the pain goes right up my pole leg, and I cry out.

“It wasn't hurting you that I was after,” he says.

“I know.”

“I was just here, watching the train, and there you were. You had your back to it. I thought you couldn't hear it.”

I can bend my ankle, but it hurts bad. I can move my foot an inch to the left, an inch to the right, but the swollen dome of my ankle scrapes the cotton ridge of my Keds. “I can't go home,” I say, “until I find Baby.”

“That was the last train of the night,” he says.

“Tell me what to do,” I say. “Tell me where to find her.”

“I don't know how people think. People who steal babies. I don't know where they hide.”

“I have Baby's sock,” I say. “Yellow.” I reach for my purse and I dig inside. “Baby didn't like her socks,” I say. “She dropped them all around.”

“Sounds like any other kid,” he says.

“She wasn't any other.”

“You want to tell me about her, then? Would it help any?”

“The only thing that would help would be finding her,” I say.

“You want to tell me anyway?”

“Maybe,” I say. “I don't know.”

“It's your choice.”

I let the darkness fall between us. I let the silence go on and I let the tears come up and I let the stars that come out shine and then there's nothing for me but talking—telling this strange, dark man how the happiest of all my days was the day Baby was born. “As though I was born right alongside my little girl,” I say, and he nods—I think he does. I tell him how Mama died before she made acquaintance with my Baby, and how I've learned mothering on my own and also from the doctor who wrote the book of rules that tells you what to do. I married the same week I graduated high school, I say, and then I explain as how by then I didn't have choices, and I've done all of my new learning on my own.

“She chews the tip of her fourth finger,” I say. “She'll fix her eyes on pretty things. She likes daddy longlegs and a finch on a tree and the puppet I sewed out of one of Peter's socks. She liked the day I took her into the woods behind our house. She liked the finch we found—pretty and yellow.”

“I like birds,” the man says.

“Nobody knows when Baby needs what she needs, except for me,” I say, and now I'm crying again. I cannot stop.

“The world's not right,” he says, and his big hands squeeze the place on my arm just past the knob of my shoulder. He's a big man, and he's awkward.

In her La-Z-Boy throne she sits—her feet bony bare on the foldout stool, a Ziploc of ice on each knee, her hair splitting at her shoulders but not falling straight, not curling nice, only bunching and sagging over her faded work shirt. To her side, the sun pushes against the tight velvet curtains. Behind, the stairs go up, break a landing, turn their way up some more. Beside her is the table of library books in their shiny, noisy sleeves.

“ ‘Although many solid figures having all kinds of surfaces can be conceived, those which appear to be regularly formed are most deserving of attention,' ” she reads, from a book by a guy called Pappus. “ ‘Those include not only the five figures found in the godlike Plato, that is, the tetrahedron and the cube, the octahedron and the dodecahedron, and fifthly the icosahedron, but also the solids, thirteen in number, which were discovered by Archimedes and are contained by equilateral and equiangular, but not similar, polygons.' ” Her glasses have slid to the end of her nose, leaving little red marks on the bridge. The long hairs of her eyebrows make a sad tangle with her lashes. Something about the Archimedeans makes my mother lonesome, but there's no guessing at what. All I know is that it's Sunday morning and a boy lives next door, and I am itching to see him, and that my mother's giving a lesson on the Archimedeans instead, because my icosahedron wasn't perfect.

“Mother,” I say, “shouldn't you be resting? With work and all, and your knees?”

“Be grateful,” she says. “Pay attention.”

I open my mind to the great outside—to the sun way past and the stirring of wings. I hear my mother starting in on the thirteen glorious solids: The truncated tetrahedron. The cuboctahedron. The truncated octahedron. The rhombicuboctahedron. The icosidodecahedron. Words like the parts of a song in a language I don't speak. Birdsong, maybe, or wing tune. “ ‘Figures of thirty-two bases,' ” she's saying. “ ‘Twenty triangles and twelve pentagons.' ” She leans back and the La-Z-Boy squeaks the way it has always squeaked since she found it along the side of some curb. “Looks like a turtle,” I told her when she brought it home. “It was lost,” she said, “and now it's found.”

“You hear that?” I ask Mother now.

“Hear what?”

“The birds outside.”

She pulls the glasses from the end of her nose and stares at me with her hard black eyes. “What did I tell you?” she says.

“To pay attention,” I answer.

“To me,” she says. “Not to the birds.”

I uncross my legs. I cross them. I snake the one around the other and pull both together tight until they hurt bad and my legs go numb and I uncross them and unbend them and unsnake them and then curl up into a ball to rub the blood back into my leg. My mother waits for me to finish, then reads again, all glory to the snub dodecahedron. “ ‘Ninety-two bases,' ” she says. “ ‘Eighty triangles and twelve pentagons.' ” As if she designed the thing herself.

“That's nice,” I say. “Real nice.” Adding the
real
for effect.

She trades the one book in her lap for another from the tower and starts flipping through with her long, long hands until she finds a picture of the snub dodecahedron, which somebody built out of snips of bright paper. The snub dodecahedron puts my icosahedron to shame, which is, I know, my mother's point.

“See what is possible,” she says.

“Um-hmmm.”

“See how lovely they are, the Archimedean solids?”

“Seems kind of abstract,” I say. “If you're asking me.”

“Why am I,” she groans, “the only one taking an active interest in your future?”

Active interest in my future?
I think. But I've got plenty of that. I'm interested in Joey next door. In his teacup aunt and his stick-skinny aunt. In his big dog, a friend of mine, if I'm a friend of Joey's. In learning to throw better than girls are meant to throw.

“It's very nice,” I say, hoping to ease her.

“What is?”

“Your snub dodecahedron.”