The Used World Page 15

  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.

  “Sheesh, that’s it for me,” Hazel said, stretching.

  “Wait—what does that mean?”

  “It’s ten o’clock, it means I’m going home. To my house. And my sad sad cats.”

  “I don’t—” What she wanted to say was that she couldn’t possibly be left here alone with a stolen human infant. “You could stay, I’ve got all these empty bedrooms and—”

  “Claudia, you have to spend your first night alone with him sometime. It might as well be tonight.” Hazel looked around for her purse, headed toward the stairs.

  My first night alone with him sometime, Claudia thought, her head in her hands. Somehow this was really happening to her, even if only for a night or two. Hazel insisted and Claudia acquiesced, and where before that had always seemed like a relatively simple plan, now Claudia could feel the sinister undertow of obeisance, the lunacy in surrendering one’s will to another. “Wait!” she said, following Hazel down the stairs. “I have an appointment in the morning and I don’t want to miss it. You’ll have to keep the baby, and also we haven’t talked about work—tomorrow’s Monday and we both need to be there, have you thought about these things, Hazel?”

  “Indeed I have,” Hazel said, looking around the living room for her purse. “I’ll be out here tomorrow morning bright and early, and I’ll take the baby to my mother’s for the day.”

  Claudia swallowed. “Your mother’s?”

  “Do you have a problem with my mother?”

  “No! Of course not, it’s just that she’s…”

  “Old?”

  “Well.”

  “She’s eighty-three. I don’t know if that’s old anymore.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Mother is very healthy and strong, regardless of her age, and she adores babies, which is more than can be said for either you or me.”

  “But what if he…”

  “Listen to you!” Hazel looked up at Claudia. She wore an expression of such satisfaction that Claudia itched, momentarily, to slug her. “Worried about a baby you claim not to want! That is so cute.”

  Claudia crossed her arms, glared. “I would be worried about any infant I thought might be in jeopardy. That doesn’t mean I would want to steal him or dress him up and pretend he’s my own.”

  Hazel spied her purse next to the couch. “Yes, that’s fine. Keep telling yourself that. But I’ll remind you that earlier today—this very day—that same baby was a scant three feet from a box filled with gasoline-soaked rags.”

  Claudia felt the color drain from her face. “He was?”

  “He certainly was.” Hazel pulled on her gigantic sleeping-bag coat and a red hat trimmed with white fur. She looked very little like Tuesday Weld. “Bright and early,” she said, walking out the door.

  Claudia locked the dead bolt, the chain. She waited for Hazel to drive away, then turned off the porch light and the sodium lamp that lit her yard all the way to the road. She rested her head against the cold pane of glass at the top of the door a moment, and headed back upstairs.

  The baby was asleep in his crib, on his new yellow sheet, under his soft blanket and a mobile that played Brahms’s Lullabye while giraffes and elephants and koala bears danced around on strings. Claudia couldn’t imagine how much this had cost Hazel. For now the baby was sleeping and Claudia was alone again, on a winter night like any other, or she could pretend it was so. His bed was right there, only a few feet from her own, and between the sighs and ticks of the radiator, she could sometimes hear him breathing, or she could see the sad little swimming gesture he made with his legs, like a marine creature out of his element.

  Claudia sat watching him a long time, half afraid to move or leave the room. What if he awakened and she couldn’t hear him? What if he knew he had been kidnapped, and woke up afraid? What if Legion suddenly roared into her driveway, all of them fat and dressed in black, like a squadron of locusts? She’d brought this fear up with Hazel earlier in the evening, who had left behind not only an entire layette, but also a loaded, unregistered .38 she’d confiscated from Edie the year before, and which Hazel claimed to have forgotten to take out of her car. A simple weapon for street criminals. Claudia was not to use her own gun in the event of an emergency, Hazel insisted, because if the .38 was fired, Claudia would have no problem insisting that the gun belonged to the assailants, and that one of them had turned it on his brother, as such people were wont to do.

  “But I would have gunshot residue…”

  “Wash your hands, change your clothes,” Hazel had said, waving away the possibility of crime scene investigators.

  “But there would be—”

  “Don’t worry,” Hazel had told her. “They’re all too busy rubbing their itchy noses and listening to the ringing in their ears to wonder where that baby’s gotten off to.”

  “How did this happen?” Claudia had asked—asked herself as much as Hazel. “This morning I was one person, my normal self, and now I have an unlicensed handgun and a strange baby, and I’m actually talking to you about what statement I should give the police if I’m attacked by a motorcycle gang and shoot a couple of them? Explain
this to me.”

  Hazel had shrugged. “What a difference a day makes, huh?”

  Claudia studied the sleeping baby and sighed. She looked around her bedroom, her mother’s room, and it was filled with all this foreign stuff, these objects she’d never lived with before, had no understanding of. It was like a nightmare of proliferation, or time-lapse photography, one of those dreams where mushrooms grow too fast. In one scene: her life. Minutes later: her life teeming, unrecognizable to her.

  She stood up finally, and put on her pajamas. Her knees and hips ached, and her shoulder blades and neck, the places she carried tension, felt as if she’d been moving boulders all day. She got into bed, wishing she had hot chocolate, tea, something there beside her, wishing she’d remembered to eat. A Prayer for Owen Meany was on her bedside table, waiting for her. She picked it up and read the three epigraphs, the last of which was by someone named Léon Bloy: Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig. That was as far as she got before falling asleep.

  “Rebekah?” Peter didn’t look surprised to see her. He looked…wary? Sad? He held open the storm door, gestured for her to come in.

  She would have to work at keeping her thoughts straight; all she wanted to do was sit down in front of the woodstove, in which a fire was struggling to get going, and take in the room, the crisp cedar-and-woodsmoke smell that permeated the cabin. Rebekah used to carry that smell on her hands to Vernon’s house and to the store. She wanted to study Peter, the slight sunburn on his nose and cheeks, the way one side of his hair had been flattened down by his ski cap. Of course they needed to talk, she wanted to talk, but she would be happy just to be. For a little while, even if only a few minutes, she could pretend this was her cabin, as she used to pretend she lived here with Peter.

  “Sit—here, Beckah, let me move this stuff.” He walked past her and picked up his duffel bag, on which two chairlift tags were hanging by metal clips. “I was out of…”