I can tell by the way you take your infusion you've spent some time in a mental institution.
Story. Stroy. Ystro. Oystr. Story.
Baby Jesus
I really didn’t know Karen was insane until she stole that baby. I mean, sure. She had all those kooky emotional problems going for her, but in my experience, that’s par for the course when you’re dealing with the female brain. You know, garden variety schizoid woman stuff like trapping you into saying she really does look fat in that dress, or insisting that you promised to go to dinner with her and her sister Monday night (yes this Monday night, Robert), or managing to ask you to fix the lawn mower or the garbage disposal or to shovel up the dog shit out of the back yard just as you sit down in front of the tube with a beer. And, sure, sometimes she’d talk seriously about the merits of song lyrics as poetry or try to convince me that we should run through the sprinklers at midnight, but I pretty much chalked that up to a weird childhood. For serious, though, I never saw this whole kidnapping thing coming.
This one time, I came home from work late. I dropped my box of tools by the door (Karen was always after me to stop that; it’s heavy, and metal, and I was starting to make dents in the wood floor) and scooted into the bathroom to take a piss. We only have one shitter in the house, on the bottom floor, but we do fine between the two of us; Karen’s never been the sort of woman to take ten years in front of the mirror, and me, well, I don’t mean to brag, but I could probably take a shower quicker than you wash your hands. No joke.
Anyway, the bathroom door was open a crack, and I didn’t think twice about barging in and dropping trou. It wasn’t until I’d shaken dry that I heard this noise coming from the bathtub, behind the shower curtain. It sounded like a mouse chewing on tissue paper (we had a couple of them in the attic, last winter, enough that my ear got pretty attuned to the sound). Our shower curtain, the new one with the yellow fish swimming in a purple plasticine sea, was pulled shut so as to open up the creases and fight off the mildew, and I pushed it back to get a look inside at the mouse or whatever it was making noise in the bathtub.
Well, it wasn’t a mouse. It was Karen, sitting all curled up next to the faucet. It looked like she was in her white nightgown, and her dark hair was all snarled and hanging down around her shoulders and her back. She looked like an angel. The showerhead was dripping on her head, so I couldn’t tell if she was crying or if her face had just gotten wet (when she sniffled, I figured it out). Hey Karen, I said. Hey, baby. What are you doing?
She told me that she’d gotten in trouble at work that day, but that it wasn’t her fault. This seemed to happen a lot, with Karen, but the way she told it each time made me believe her. I’m not sure I still don’t believe her. You see, Karen was a nurse, an RN, the kind that takes care of babies right after they’re born. Postpartum care, yeah, that was her department. She worked under this lady named Jackie, who, as far as I could gather, was a real bitch. Karen said that Jackie basically just sat behind the intake desk all day and made the other nurses get her coffee and blankets and shit. From what Karen said, Jackie was too fat to even move between the little plexiglass cradles they have set up for all the newborns in the nursery. If you ask me, there’s not much use to a postpartum nurse that can’t actually see to the little ones, but you know: I’m not the king of hospital land; I don’t make the rules. Karen said it was up to her to take care of the new babies, and to tell the truth, they were probably better off that way. She’s always been great with kids. I didn’t see what this Jackie’s problem was with Karen spending all that extra time in the nursery, especially if she wasn’t doing it herself. My Karen was always great with kids. Nothing sketchy, you understand. Not like those pervs that head off to Thailand so they can feel up poor little ones that never did anything. No, not Karen. She just wanted to be a mom so bad, so bad I could feel it when I held her bony hips through that flimsy white silk, so bad I knew it when we made dry, useless love.
I guess I probably should have thought it was a little weird that she was sitting in the shower to have a cry session. But I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I figured the shower’s as good a place as any to curl up if you’re planning on getting wet. Right? Right. I climbed in there with her, in my work boots and dirty jeans, and she kissed me with tongue. That was the best things got, I think, right there in that fucking tub, when she was unbuttoning my plaid shirt and telling me Welcome home, Rob. The next day she came home with that baby.
An important thing to remember is that Karen never wanted to get married. She was great that way, real progressive, although sometimes I wondered how that cushy hospital insurance would kick up my benefits. Independent plumbers don’t make a ton, you might be surprised to know (I mean, we’re slogging through your shit and hairballs all day, and we have to endure all your jokes about asscracks; one’d think they could at least throw in some dental at the union). But mostly, we both knew we weren’t headed for the altar, at least not anytime soon. We were happy, I’m pretty sure. She talked about babies all the time, but I always thought that we’d wait to have that talk until we were out of debt, until we owned the house, until I was ready. Sometimes I think she just got tired of waiting. Most of the time though, retrospectively I mean, I don’t think she was ever planning on waiting at all.
It was late morning, Saturday, my only day off that week [It’s tough to decide when you want your day off, in my profession, because as soon as you decide you want to sleep in like a normal person, somebody tries to flush something they shouldn’t, and I’ve got to take the shit-sucker and the snake down to suburbia. Usually, people want it done when they’re out of the house, like they think not being around when I discover their spectacular abuse of an innocent septic unit eschews any potential embarrassment. Listen, people. For serious, let me state for the record: your shit stinks, no matter who you are or how organic your diet is, and dragging the kids out for a day at Disneyland while I’m running the unit down your U-bend doesn’t let you off the hook. God damn.]. The sky outside was that sort of grey where it could be really early or like one in the afternoon, and I was so tired I didn’t really care. A car alarm went off outside, and I wanted to shoot someone. But, you know, what do you do about someone else’s car alarm? I pulled the comforter over my head.
I could hear Karen padding up the stairs in sock feet. I assumed she was wearing mine, as she’d been complaining about being out of them again just last night. The woman couldn’t keep track of a pair of socks to save her life, but she always looked so damn cute in my giant grey ones-they went most of the way up her pale shins-that it never really bothered me. I liked the thought of her moving around this house, this wooden house I built, in my clothes. My Karen.
[Only, I guess, as it turned out, she wasn’t so much anybody’s Karen as she was her own woman. A crazy woman on a mission. A kamikaze Mother Teresa, if you will.]
I could feel her knee fold into the bed carefully, just like she always did when she was about to crawl in and spoon. The blankets made a soft, papery sound, a rustling sort of gentleness next to my ear. I think it was then that I felt afraid. The movement was right next to my head, and it was so weak-pathetic, ineffective, but still there-that I knew something was different. It was like ghost worms curling up next to my brains, caressing my personal space, or something. I made myself open my eyes, and sit up, and when I saw that little bundle of pink baby squirming where I thought Karen’s head would be, I was sure as hell thinking I was dreaming.
Karen giggled when she looked at me. I must have looked like some real mouth-breather, but could you blame me? She was sitting on her heels on the bed, all crouched like some fucking nonchalant nymph over her maaagic baby, while I was sitting there with drool and stubble on my chin, wondering how I’d reproduced overnight. All I could do was gape in her general direction, and she kept smiling, and reaching out her finger for the baby to grab in its tiny fist. Finally, I cleared my throat and said Uhm, Karen? Who does this belong to?
I gestured in the general direction of the baby bundle, at that point. I didn’t want to make any unfair assumptions re: the sex of the thing, and ‘this’ seemed a safe, gender-neutral option, but Karen was offended.
-This? This? This is our baby, Robert.
-What.
-He’s a boy. Isn’t he beautiful?
-What.
-His name is Hector. Would you like to hold him?
-What.
-Stop saying that, Rob!
Well, I told her, what did she expect me to say? Thanks for the bundle of joy, stork-lady? I was officially freaking out. My girlfriend, my nice, sort-of-normal girlfriend, had just sat a baby (a fucking baby) down in our bed and told me it was Ours. Mine. I stumbled out of bed and headed downstairs. Where are you going, she says. To get a glass of fucking O.J., I say. I can’t handle mystery children on low blood sugar. Don’t swear around our baby, she says. Our baby, she says!
So, I’m pacing around in front of the fridge, drinking Tropicana out of the carton (because, you know, I’ve got a baby upstairs, and at this point, why not), when Karen comes down. She’s holding Hector, and the way she holds him, it’s obvious she knows what she’s doing. Like I said, Karen’s got this way with kids. The crook of her arm was supporting his head and she was rocking him and everything, and she kid was gurgling up a storm. Karen always wore a lot of rings on her fingers, and Hector seemed to love those, too. That, or he just liked to grab shiny things, which, you know, totally plausible. He seemed pretty small to me, even for a baby, but he had a thick shock of black hair that basically stood straight up on his little noggin.
Karen, I say. Let’s take a minute, here. Tell me again, because I don’t think I heard you the first time. Who. Does this baby. Belong to. To whom. Does this baby. Belong.
God, I didn’t think she’d ever stop staring at me.
Karen, I say again. This isn’t funny. Does this belong to the neighbors? Are we babysitting?
-Rob, she says, widening her eyes. His name is Hector, and he belongs to us.
-Oh my God, Karen, no he does not.
-Why are you so scared of this, Rob?
The phone rang just then, and I almost threw the orange juice across the fucking room. I was feeling just a little jumpy. But I ask you again: can you blame me? Can anyone blame me for any of this? I put down the white carton on the countertop and went for the phone, just like any normal person would. That is, until Karen started yelling at me. Wait, Rob, she says. Wait. Please. I looked at her like I was finally beginning to understand what had happened. Mind you, I most definitely did not understand what had happened, but the important thing was that Karen thought I did. The phone rang again, vibrating in its black cradle.
I put my hand on the phone, and Karen says Okay. Okay, Rob. Are you happy? I tell her that I am not even a little bit happy, and that I won’t be happy until she tells me where Hector came from. Just hold on, she says. Calm down. I can explain. Don’t pick up the phone.
Well, tell the truth, all this talk of Calming Down and Holding On and I Can Explain was not even vaguely relaxing. She was starting to look like a real crazy, all of a sudden, talking like hey Rob, for serious, I know that you think I stole a baby, but for real, it’s all good, and in my head it’s starting to sound like holy shit holy shit my girlfriend is insane. My woman. Has stolen. A fucking baby. The phone is still ringing, and just to grab on to something solid that might be able to lead me out of this den of funhouse mirror batshittery, I pick it up before Karen can say anything.
I say hello, just like I’m a normal person saying hello on a Saturday morning, and not at all like someone with a stolen baby in their house: Hello, who is this? Well, the voice on the other end is having none of that; she-and it is most definitely a she-says I’m sorry, who is this. I can hear a hum in the background on her end, but it’s all muddled to a warm buzz, like a dryer running.
-Um, this is Rob Fitch.
-Rob Fitch, is Karen Forrester there.
-Who?
-Karen Forrester. This Jackie Conrad, from Placentia-Linda Hospital. This number is on her contact card as her residence. We have been calling her cellular device for the last two hours.
Something clicks in my brain, right then. At least, I think it does. The hospital-nay, the Postpartum wing-is calling here for Karen. I mean, a part of me is ready to say Hell yes Jackie Conrad, Karen Forrester is standing right in front of me-in my kitchen, actually. You may talk to her as long as you please. Oh, and were you by any chance missing a baby? Because I happen to have an extra. You know, just lying around.
But there’s something else going on here, there, in my brain. I mean, this lady asks questions without questions marks. She tells questions. And I’m pretty positive that this lady, this Jackie Conrad, is the overlord Karen’s been talking about, what with the tone and the no, I’m sorry, who is this. And maybe Karen isn’t crazy, you know, and I have to think about that; maybe she can explain. I would really like to consider that option, Mr. Trebek, because I’ve been with this woman for what. Three years now, and I’d really rather not find out that she’s turned out, after all the house building and the sex and what not, to be a baby burglar. I could definitely be jumping to conclusions here. Yeah, definitely. And who on God’s green earth says ‘cellular device,’ anyhow.
Karen’s still looking at me, looking like I could sneeze and she would crack and shatter into millions of tiny bits of stained glass. Most people can’t tell when she gets like this just by looking at her, but I can see it in the little lines around her eyes and in the way her ears ride a little higher than normal on account of the tension, and the way she locks her knees when she’s standing, to keep herself from running, running the hell out of Dodge. Jackie C buzzes in my ear.
-Mr. Fitch. Are you there. Mr. Fitch. Excuse me.
-I’m sorry, Jackie, I think you must have the wrong number, there’s no Karen…what was it? Right, Forrester. No, there’s no Karen Forrester here. Uh-huh. Nope. I’m sure. Yeah. Bye now.
When I look up, Karen’s face is so bright that I think she might start leaking tears and sunshine, and she’s so beautiful that I can hardly see the way her hair is sticking out at strange angles, or that she has been biting her lip so hard that she’s started to bleed. They were going to give him away, she says. They weren’t ever going to see him again anyway. They’ll never be the wiser. And I just want her to be quiet, you know, so I don’t have to know that I probably just screwed myself over big time with the Matron Conrad by telling her Karen didn’t live here. I want to put my fingers over Karen’s mouth to make her shut up, so I can stop thinking about what she is telling me, about what she has done. But she just keeps coming closer to me, holding Hector out like I’m supposed to hold him. I feel the counter behind me. Hector is blinking in my general direction; he’s searching me out with his big brown unfocused eyes. Whenever he moves his head he overdoes it; he bounces a little as he tries to correct himself and his fat little arms shake; his tiny fingers clench. And Karen won’t stop whispering. She just keeps talking, repeating these things. Even later, when they tell me what happened, that her little screw-up at work the day before-the one that had driven her into the bathtub-had actually gotten her fired, and that she walked in to turn in her security card that morning and when she left there was an empty crib in the adoption ward, all I can hear is what she was telling me before, in the kitchen.
They didn’t even want him. They didn’t even want their own baby.
Baby Jesus
I really didn’t know Karen was insane until she stole that baby. I mean, sure. She had all those kooky emotional problems going for her, but in my experience, that’s par for the course when you’re dealing with the female brain. You know, garden variety schizoid woman stuff like trapping you into saying she really does look fat in that dress, or insisting that you promised to go to dinner with her and her sister Monday night (yes this Monday night, Robert), or managing to ask you to fix the lawn mower or the garbage disposal or to shovel up the dog shit out of the back yard just as you sit down in front of the tube with a beer. And, sure, sometimes she’d talk seriously about the merits of song lyrics as poetry or try to convince me that we should run through the sprinklers at midnight, but I pretty much chalked that up to a weird childhood. For serious, though, I never saw this whole kidnapping thing coming.
This one time, I came home from work late. I dropped my box of tools by the door (Karen was always after me to stop that; it’s heavy, and metal, and I was starting to make dents in the wood floor) and scooted into the bathroom to take a piss. We only have one shitter in the house, on the bottom floor, but we do fine between the two of us; Karen’s never been the sort of woman to take ten years in front of the mirror, and me, well, I don’t mean to brag, but I could probably take a shower quicker than you wash your hands. No joke.
Anyway, the bathroom door was open a crack, and I didn’t think twice about barging in and dropping trou. It wasn’t until I’d shaken dry that I heard this noise coming from the bathtub, behind the shower curtain. It sounded like a mouse chewing on tissue paper (we had a couple of them in the attic, last winter, enough that my ear got pretty attuned to the sound). Our shower curtain, the new one with the yellow fish swimming in a purple plasticine sea, was pulled shut so as to open up the creases and fight off the mildew, and I pushed it back to get a look inside at the mouse or whatever it was making noise in the bathtub.
Well, it wasn’t a mouse. It was Karen, sitting all curled up next to the faucet. It looked like she was in her white nightgown, and her dark hair was all snarled and hanging down around her shoulders and her back. She looked like an angel. The showerhead was dripping on her head, so I couldn’t tell if she was crying or if her face had just gotten wet (when she sniffled, I figured it out). Hey Karen, I said. Hey, baby. What are you doing?
She told me that she’d gotten in trouble at work that day, but that it wasn’t her fault. This seemed to happen a lot, with Karen, but the way she told it each time made me believe her. I’m not sure I still don’t believe her. You see, Karen was a nurse, an RN, the kind that takes care of babies right after they’re born. Postpartum care, yeah, that was her department. She worked under this lady named Jackie, who, as far as I could gather, was a real bitch. Karen said that Jackie basically just sat behind the intake desk all day and made the other nurses get her coffee and blankets and shit. From what Karen said, Jackie was too fat to even move between the little plexiglass cradles they have set up for all the newborns in the nursery. If you ask me, there’s not much use to a postpartum nurse that can’t actually see to the little ones, but you know: I’m not the king of hospital land; I don’t make the rules. Karen said it was up to her to take care of the new babies, and to tell the truth, they were probably better off that way. She’s always been great with kids. I didn’t see what this Jackie’s problem was with Karen spending all that extra time in the nursery, especially if she wasn’t doing it herself. My Karen was always great with kids. Nothing sketchy, you understand. Not like those pervs that head off to Thailand so they can feel up poor little ones that never did anything. No, not Karen. She just wanted to be a mom so bad, so bad I could feel it when I held her bony hips through that flimsy white silk, so bad I knew it when we made dry, useless love.
I guess I probably should have thought it was a little weird that she was sitting in the shower to have a cry session. But I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I figured the shower’s as good a place as any to curl up if you’re planning on getting wet. Right? Right. I climbed in there with her, in my work boots and dirty jeans, and she kissed me with tongue. That was the best things got, I think, right there in that fucking tub, when she was unbuttoning my plaid shirt and telling me Welcome home, Rob. The next day she came home with that baby.
An important thing to remember is that Karen never wanted to get married. She was great that way, real progressive, although sometimes I wondered how that cushy hospital insurance would kick up my benefits. Independent plumbers don’t make a ton, you might be surprised to know (I mean, we’re slogging through your shit and hairballs all day, and we have to endure all your jokes about asscracks; one’d think they could at least throw in some dental at the union). But mostly, we both knew we weren’t headed for the altar, at least not anytime soon. We were happy, I’m pretty sure. She talked about babies all the time, but I always thought that we’d wait to have that talk until we were out of debt, until we owned the house, until I was ready. Sometimes I think she just got tired of waiting. Most of the time though, retrospectively I mean, I don’t think she was ever planning on waiting at all.
It was late morning, Saturday, my only day off that week [It’s tough to decide when you want your day off, in my profession, because as soon as you decide you want to sleep in like a normal person, somebody tries to flush something they shouldn’t, and I’ve got to take the shit-sucker and the snake down to suburbia. Usually, people want it done when they’re out of the house, like they think not being around when I discover their spectacular abuse of an innocent septic unit eschews any potential embarrassment. Listen, people. For serious, let me state for the record: your shit stinks, no matter who you are or how organic your diet is, and dragging the kids out for a day at Disneyland while I’m running the unit down your U-bend doesn’t let you off the hook. God damn.]. The sky outside was that sort of grey where it could be really early or like one in the afternoon, and I was so tired I didn’t really care. A car alarm went off outside, and I wanted to shoot someone. But, you know, what do you do about someone else’s car alarm? I pulled the comforter over my head.
I could hear Karen padding up the stairs in sock feet. I assumed she was wearing mine, as she’d been complaining about being out of them again just last night. The woman couldn’t keep track of a pair of socks to save her life, but she always looked so damn cute in my giant grey ones-they went most of the way up her pale shins-that it never really bothered me. I liked the thought of her moving around this house, this wooden house I built, in my clothes. My Karen.
[Only, I guess, as it turned out, she wasn’t so much anybody’s Karen as she was her own woman. A crazy woman on a mission. A kamikaze Mother Teresa, if you will.]
I could feel her knee fold into the bed carefully, just like she always did when she was about to crawl in and spoon. The blankets made a soft, papery sound, a rustling sort of gentleness next to my ear. I think it was then that I felt afraid. The movement was right next to my head, and it was so weak-pathetic, ineffective, but still there-that I knew something was different. It was like ghost worms curling up next to my brains, caressing my personal space, or something. I made myself open my eyes, and sit up, and when I saw that little bundle of pink baby squirming where I thought Karen’s head would be, I was sure as hell thinking I was dreaming.
Karen giggled when she looked at me. I must have looked like some real mouth-breather, but could you blame me? She was sitting on her heels on the bed, all crouched like some fucking nonchalant nymph over her maaagic baby, while I was sitting there with drool and stubble on my chin, wondering how I’d reproduced overnight. All I could do was gape in her general direction, and she kept smiling, and reaching out her finger for the baby to grab in its tiny fist. Finally, I cleared my throat and said Uhm, Karen? Who does this belong to?
I gestured in the general direction of the baby bundle, at that point. I didn’t want to make any unfair assumptions re: the sex of the thing, and ‘this’ seemed a safe, gender-neutral option, but Karen was offended.
-This? This? This is our baby, Robert.
-What.
-He’s a boy. Isn’t he beautiful?
-What.
-His name is Hector. Would you like to hold him?
-What.
-Stop saying that, Rob!
Well, I told her, what did she expect me to say? Thanks for the bundle of joy, stork-lady? I was officially freaking out. My girlfriend, my nice, sort-of-normal girlfriend, had just sat a baby (a fucking baby) down in our bed and told me it was Ours. Mine. I stumbled out of bed and headed downstairs. Where are you going, she says. To get a glass of fucking O.J., I say. I can’t handle mystery children on low blood sugar. Don’t swear around our baby, she says. Our baby, she says!
So, I’m pacing around in front of the fridge, drinking Tropicana out of the carton (because, you know, I’ve got a baby upstairs, and at this point, why not), when Karen comes down. She’s holding Hector, and the way she holds him, it’s obvious she knows what she’s doing. Like I said, Karen’s got this way with kids. The crook of her arm was supporting his head and she was rocking him and everything, and she kid was gurgling up a storm. Karen always wore a lot of rings on her fingers, and Hector seemed to love those, too. That, or he just liked to grab shiny things, which, you know, totally plausible. He seemed pretty small to me, even for a baby, but he had a thick shock of black hair that basically stood straight up on his little noggin.
Karen, I say. Let’s take a minute, here. Tell me again, because I don’t think I heard you the first time. Who. Does this baby. Belong to. To whom. Does this baby. Belong.
God, I didn’t think she’d ever stop staring at me.
Karen, I say again. This isn’t funny. Does this belong to the neighbors? Are we babysitting?
-Rob, she says, widening her eyes. His name is Hector, and he belongs to us.
-Oh my God, Karen, no he does not.
-Why are you so scared of this, Rob?
The phone rang just then, and I almost threw the orange juice across the fucking room. I was feeling just a little jumpy. But I ask you again: can you blame me? Can anyone blame me for any of this? I put down the white carton on the countertop and went for the phone, just like any normal person would. That is, until Karen started yelling at me. Wait, Rob, she says. Wait. Please. I looked at her like I was finally beginning to understand what had happened. Mind you, I most definitely did not understand what had happened, but the important thing was that Karen thought I did. The phone rang again, vibrating in its black cradle.
I put my hand on the phone, and Karen says Okay. Okay, Rob. Are you happy? I tell her that I am not even a little bit happy, and that I won’t be happy until she tells me where Hector came from. Just hold on, she says. Calm down. I can explain. Don’t pick up the phone.
Well, tell the truth, all this talk of Calming Down and Holding On and I Can Explain was not even vaguely relaxing. She was starting to look like a real crazy, all of a sudden, talking like hey Rob, for serious, I know that you think I stole a baby, but for real, it’s all good, and in my head it’s starting to sound like holy shit holy shit my girlfriend is insane. My woman. Has stolen. A fucking baby. The phone is still ringing, and just to grab on to something solid that might be able to lead me out of this den of funhouse mirror batshittery, I pick it up before Karen can say anything.
I say hello, just like I’m a normal person saying hello on a Saturday morning, and not at all like someone with a stolen baby in their house: Hello, who is this? Well, the voice on the other end is having none of that; she-and it is most definitely a she-says I’m sorry, who is this. I can hear a hum in the background on her end, but it’s all muddled to a warm buzz, like a dryer running.
-Um, this is Rob Fitch.
-Rob Fitch, is Karen Forrester there.
-Who?
-Karen Forrester. This Jackie Conrad, from Placentia-Linda Hospital. This number is on her contact card as her residence. We have been calling her cellular device for the last two hours.
Something clicks in my brain, right then. At least, I think it does. The hospital-nay, the Postpartum wing-is calling here for Karen. I mean, a part of me is ready to say Hell yes Jackie Conrad, Karen Forrester is standing right in front of me-in my kitchen, actually. You may talk to her as long as you please. Oh, and were you by any chance missing a baby? Because I happen to have an extra. You know, just lying around.
But there’s something else going on here, there, in my brain. I mean, this lady asks questions without questions marks. She tells questions. And I’m pretty positive that this lady, this Jackie Conrad, is the overlord Karen’s been talking about, what with the tone and the no, I’m sorry, who is this. And maybe Karen isn’t crazy, you know, and I have to think about that; maybe she can explain. I would really like to consider that option, Mr. Trebek, because I’ve been with this woman for what. Three years now, and I’d really rather not find out that she’s turned out, after all the house building and the sex and what not, to be a baby burglar. I could definitely be jumping to conclusions here. Yeah, definitely. And who on God’s green earth says ‘cellular device,’ anyhow.
Karen’s still looking at me, looking like I could sneeze and she would crack and shatter into millions of tiny bits of stained glass. Most people can’t tell when she gets like this just by looking at her, but I can see it in the little lines around her eyes and in the way her ears ride a little higher than normal on account of the tension, and the way she locks her knees when she’s standing, to keep herself from running, running the hell out of Dodge. Jackie C buzzes in my ear.
-Mr. Fitch. Are you there. Mr. Fitch. Excuse me.
-I’m sorry, Jackie, I think you must have the wrong number, there’s no Karen…what was it? Right, Forrester. No, there’s no Karen Forrester here. Uh-huh. Nope. I’m sure. Yeah. Bye now.
When I look up, Karen’s face is so bright that I think she might start leaking tears and sunshine, and she’s so beautiful that I can hardly see the way her hair is sticking out at strange angles, or that she has been biting her lip so hard that she’s started to bleed. They were going to give him away, she says. They weren’t ever going to see him again anyway. They’ll never be the wiser. And I just want her to be quiet, you know, so I don’t have to know that I probably just screwed myself over big time with the Matron Conrad by telling her Karen didn’t live here. I want to put my fingers over Karen’s mouth to make her shut up, so I can stop thinking about what she is telling me, about what she has done. But she just keeps coming closer to me, holding Hector out like I’m supposed to hold him. I feel the counter behind me. Hector is blinking in my general direction; he’s searching me out with his big brown unfocused eyes. Whenever he moves his head he overdoes it; he bounces a little as he tries to correct himself and his fat little arms shake; his tiny fingers clench. And Karen won’t stop whispering. She just keeps talking, repeating these things. Even later, when they tell me what happened, that her little screw-up at work the day before-the one that had driven her into the bathtub-had actually gotten her fired, and that she walked in to turn in her security card that morning and when she left there was an empty crib in the adoption ward, all I can hear is what she was telling me before, in the kitchen.
They didn’t even want him. They didn’t even want their own baby.