Sprinkle the Flowers
The little white dog yapped and the baby gurgled as Art mumbled “husha husha husha” walking in circles in front of the dusty house trailer. Dawn stood on the gravel driveway holding her overnight bag with the fake fur accents and looking at the two mothers. Her mother was old and grey behind the wheel of their square brown car. Vicki was youngish looking but fat in her shorts and was leaning through the driver’s side window. It looked like Vicki was chatting but Dawn knew she was really intimidating. Dawn knew how to do it. In the school parking lot she’d be the one to lean into the car staring down the trapped boys. Although she didn’t have the breasts she hoped to have one day, she still wore tight shirts to emphasize and tease. She liked to see the girls look away in disgust and the boys look away in embarrassed frustration as she moved in too close forcing them back. It was important to know where you stood, to have some power now that she was in high school. Always get out of the car, never let them trap you in the corners. She felt a vague sense of disgust that her mother didn’t instinctively know this and Vicki did.
The mothers both looked at Dawn as she posed on one hip in her short denim skirt and pink t-shirt. She was weaving from side-to-side because her new platform sandals hurt her feet. Vicki said in a loud voice, “Normally I wouldn’t trust a kid for the weekend but everyone else is out of town, y’know. You said she was the top of her class in that babysitting course and I believe you. Art said she’s a good kid at school.”
Vicki turned away as Dawn began to self-consciously twirl her short pink hair. “You check on her twice a day, right?” Vicki asked. Dawn’s mother replied but it was so quiet no one heard what she said.
Vicki stepped away from the car. “Okay, as long as we’re all on alert. Anyways, Miriam’s a good baby or else we wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave her for the weekend or, y’know, keep living way out here with a car that’s always in the shop. You know what I mean?”
Vicki finished by rapping on the top of the car with her knuckles.
“Good thing.”
A little too hard, Dawn observed.
“We’ll see you then.”
Dawn’s mother wiggled her fingers at he daughter as she backed the car up. She’s too pale without her lipstick, Dawn thought. Art held up the baby’s chubby arm and they all waved back. The dog stopped barking as the car moved off into the flat countryside.
Vicki immediately flumped into a green nylon lawnchair and said, “Jheeeezuz Christ it’s hot. Good for this weekend, anyways. Dawn—nice name by the way—help yourself to some drink in the fridge. Help yourself to whatever while we’re gone. The baby food is all in there. You’ll find it.” And then she said “Jheezuz Christ” again and sat in a lump of white flesh that leaked out the sides of the woven plastic of the chair.
There was a pause and Dawn wondered how long Vicki and Art would have to wait for their ride to the lake. She wondered if they’d ask her stupid questions about boys and school like her parents’ friends did. She looked around the overgrown but empty yard. There was a patch marked out as a garden at the back of the trailer and the little lot was surrounded by budding poplar trees acting as a rough curtain separating Vicki and Art from acres of fallow. It all felt a little claustrophobic, like an island. Across the road was a small house covered in tarpaper. It looked deserted. It was the long weekend in May and hot. No one was in town except her, she thought. Not that it mattered because she was grounded anyway—for smoking. Ironically, smoking outside the back doors at school had been where she met Art and how she got this job. At least she’d make some money, she thought, extra money for staying over the weekend and because the baby was only six and a half months old.
There was silence. Dawn suppressed a yawn as she watched Art pick up the dog with one hand and place it under the lawn chair all the while jiggling the baby in his other arm.
“Fine,” announced Vicki in a sharp voice. “I’ll get us something.” Dawn recognized the tone of accusation; at first she thought it was for her but then decided it was for Art.
“The baby’s cute.” Dawn smiled at Art hoping he’d see that she was on his side. The sun was right behind his head and Dawn closed her eyes and sneezed.
“Yeah,” he mumbled, “Takes after Miriam. Thank God ‘cause I’d hate to look into the face of that bastard she was with.” He spoke with a small tone of anger but without any conviction.
“What’s the baby’s name?” Dawn asked.
“Miriam. Both. She’s dead, y’know that accident. Maybe you didn’t hear. There was a story in the newspaper. So, we like to call her Miriam. A middle name.”
There was a pause.
“Do you have a middle name?”
“No,” said Dawn.
“I don’t believe it,” he said and turned toward the door and yelled “It smells like diaper.”
From inside, Vicki yelled back, “Don’t bring that shit in here. Do it where you stand.” She sighed with exaggerated exasperation. “Just wait and I’ll bring you the diaper. I can’t do everything at once.”
Art backed down the one wooden step and continued to jiggle the baby.
More silence. Dawn looked at Art’s rugged face—thick black moustache, dark-eyes, pockmarked cheeks. There was a certain breed of older man, Dawn thought, that tried to look Mexican. Was that it? It seemed Mexican. Or like Elvis. Or a trucker. Where was the power in that? Art was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans, and a black belt with a large silver, embossed eagle buckle. There were dark sweaty spots under his arms and splattered across his chest where the baby was. Art worked as a part-time janitor at the school. He looked very strong across the chest and shoulders but sloppy below the ribs, his skin sliding downward and collecting around his belt loops. She often saw him swishing the mud of the halls around and around until it was time for a break when he’d smoke outside the doors with the kids. Laughing and sneaking little punches at the bellies of the older boys, he seemed like “one of us” but here he was definitely “one of them”. Dawn didn’t know much about Vicki except that she had a bad temper and a body like a balloon with a slow leak. She was a telephone operator in the concrete building downtown—the one with the tiny windows.
Dawn held the crumpled piece of paper with the directions out to the trailer. “Turn left at the 4th concession road . . . .” Dawn’s mother had insisted she take a babysitting course and then insisted that she join the babysitting pool. Now she was stuck out here. She was bored and tired; she was momentarily trapped. She took a deep breath in—her thoughts were so far away with her that she actually spun in a little circle to emphasize herself to herself—she would never be this old and poor and fat she decided. She would never scream like Vicki had screamed in the school office at the secretaries and the principal and then in the corridors looking for Miriam (everyone heard it, everyone knew, everyone talked about it after). Dawn’s parents had talked about the slapping episode—Vicki and Miriam slapping one another like a comedy show—for weeks. She knew that she would never let her kid smoke crack and then get herself killed in a car accident the same night she abandoned her baby at the Salvation Army. She would never be forced to move out of town because of all the gossip. And, as an afterthought, she decided she would never have a dog with wet eyes covered with white and a nose leaking runny brown snot. So, she decided as she swayed on her blistered feet, after this she wouldn’t even babysit for them.
Dawn remembered visiting her grandmother once when she was very young and the smell of the nursing home had scared her. Her father had sat with her in the parking lot. She’d figured that it was the smell of death that freaked her out (you shouldn’t force kids to smell that too early). It wasn’t that kind of smell here; Vicki and Art weren’t that old. It was more like the smell of too much life, too sloppy, too jumbled up. It was a bit surprising to find that she really hated them. She didn’t like being close to them, smelling them, possibly touching them. There was no way she would ever be like them. Was there? She started to think of all the boys she liked at school and tried to imagine if any of them were secretly Art-like underneath. How could she know if they were hiding Art and Vicki’s life underneath their smooth-skinned, brown-eyed, skinny-assed confidence? Dawn took another deep breath in and pulled her lips toward her teeth. She looked at her shoes and pulled at her recently dyed hair. She needed a cigarette, she thought.
Vicki came out of the trailer carrying three beers, a bag of potato chips and a diaper. She also had a small blue baseball cap that she handed to Dawn and said, “If it’s like this all weekend keep a hat on her or she’ll fry like a weevil.” Art dipped the baby down to Dawn and she saw the black hairs on his knuckles and a mushy blue tattoo on his wrist: it looked like it was once a word in spiralling letters. She awkwardly manoeuvred the cap onto the squirming head. She could already see a redness appearing on the baby’s cheeks and nose. Vicki put the beers on the picnic table and with one quick motion dissected the bag of chips down its inseam and placed that on the table as well. Art silently picked up his beer and took a drink and then put the baby on one side of the table and began to change her; his gnarled fingers—a line of dirt under each nail—fumbled with the unsinkable plastic white of the diaper.
“Let Dawn do that,” Vicki snapped, “she’s on the payroll.”
Dawn stepped over to the baby but Art moved only a few inches back. She could hear his breathing: a slight wheeze. As she quickly undid the Velcro and snaps and changed the wet diaper—just as she had been taught at her babysitting course—she could smell Art mixing with the shock of yellow urine; he had a kind of acrid banana odour and his breath stank of beer and ketchup. He was revolting: definitely “one of them”. Dawn tried to hold her breath. “Good job,” he said, and clamped her shoulder with a damp palm. “She’s good and fast,” he said a little louder toward Vicki.
“I’ll take her,” Vicki said and held out one arm. “Have a beer, Dawn. It’s the only one you’re getting. And take off those shoes. I can see the blisters from here and they’re disgusting.”
Dawn did as she was told and sat down at the picnic table, keeping her knees together.
“You know the drill: no drinking my booze, no boys, blah blah blah and stay off the landline because it’s long distance out here. Oh and like I mentioned we lent out the TV so don’t bother looking for it. I know all that sucks, so I thought you could have a beer on me. After all, it’s the long weekend.” She let out one huge, ironic “ha” for a laugh and then shook her head up and down, her mouth open. Her face wobbled a bit.
“You’ll be glad to see us come back, that’s for sure. Babies are a shit-load of work. But, the first one didn’t kill me and I don’t suppose this one can either.” Then, like Art had done, Vicki laid the baby across the sea of her chest and jiggled her around. “Husha husha husha,” she said but unlike Art’s soft baritone, Vicki’s “hushes” were sharp and insistent.
Dawn ate a couple of greasy chips and took a sip of the beer not sure whether she should try to look inexperienced or not. Innocence was an art and her friends at school said she did it best, something about her dark eyes and baby pink hair. It worked on Mr. Sanders in gym and Mr. Henderson in the office and sometimes it worked on Ms. Fennicks in math. It had obviously worked on Art getting her this job, she thought.
Vicki wasn’t looking at her. She and Art sat in their lawn chairs with their eyes pointed in the direction of the sunset. The light was changing and a slow flush of gold slipped into the yard. Vicki’s eyes were tiny and almost entirely enveloped in fat; her hair was thin and wispy brown; her eyebrows mere hints of shape. Her lips were thick and round, a watery red colour. Sexual. Dawn thought this and it made her uncomfortable. A little angry.
“Nice dog.”
“Pain in the friggin’ ass, that dog,” Vicki said without turning toward Dawn. “A helluva lot of work with the cleaning and the feeding and everything. The damn thing keeps turning circles in my garden and pissing on my nasturtiums.”
“Sprinklin’ the flowers,” Art said in a tone that suggested Vicki had made this comment before and he had lent this euphemism to it before. He grinned for Dawn’s benefit. His eyebrows went up and down in what Dawn supposed was meant to be a comical move.
Dawn nodded as if she might understand how much work dogs were although she only had a budgie named Fred who lived in the kitchen.
“You know the story, right?” Vicki turned toward Dawn.
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“Call the dog, then.”
“I don’t know his name.” Dawn didn’t really want to touch the leaking eyes and nose of the thing.
“It’s a purebred. Llahsu Apsu. His name’s Rat.”
“Yah, ‘cause of how we got him.” Art walked over to Dawn and smiled. His teeth were exceptionally white and perfectly straight. They must be false, she thought and secretly shuddered.
“Whatever. Art named him.” Vicki took a swig of her beer. “Art quit bouncing around and sit down for Christ’s sake.”
“He used to be called Shelley,” Art said to Dawn. “He’ll come to either name so go ahead.”
Dawn said in a flat tone “Shelley, here boy” hoping the dog wouldn’t hear her.
“Say it louder. He’s a little deaf, too.”
Dawn said the name louder and the little dog sleeping under the lawn chair suddenly perked up and started to yip.
“Keep calling him,” Vicki pulled herself to a standing position to get a better look.
“Here, Shelley. C’mere boy,” Dawn said.
The dog whimpered and slithered into the open. Sitting up, it lifted its paws blindly toward the sky. Dawn kept calling until finally the dog burst into space; its tiny body with the stained fur twisted awkwardly a few inches off the ground. The dog landed and immediately started to run but made it only a few inches before—as if some great switch had suddenly been pulled changing the earth’s magnetic fields—he started to run around in circles.
“Keep calling.” Vicki insisted and laughed her huge punctuation marks—“ha!”.
Dawn called a few more times but the dog kept moving in tighter and tighter circles, whimpering and shaking its head. Vicki and Art were both laughing. Dawn stopped calling and Art took over—“Rat! C’mon boy, c’mere”—until the dog lost its footing and stumbled onto the ground. Art ran over and chucked Rat behind the ears as if the dog had just performed a remarkable trick. He was still laughing. The dog stayed on the ground to receive the pats. It was still whimpering.
“He’s famous, y’know,” Art said over his back to Dawn.
“Yeah, I’m surprised you haven’t heard. We were on the TV news and everything. They did a little write-up in the local paper but the national boys were out too. They got it all on tape,” Vicki said. “I put him in the garden and they got him pissing on the nasturtiums.”
“Sprinklin’ the flowers,” Art grinned.
Vicki told the story of how they had seen Rat on the local TV news a few weeks before. The dog wasn’t insane but damaged. He could only walk around in circles as if persistently attached to a central post. The report had shown Rat’s original owner who explained that he didn’t like the dog’s yapping. He lived on a busy street and the dog yapped at everything that went by the window. One day he had a migraine and the dog was going crazy “like there was a parade outside the front door.” He’d only meant to scare the dog or maybe move the thing out of the way, but he kicked it into the stone mantle of the fireplace about six feet off the ground and when the dog fell in a heap bleeding from the ears the man assumed it was dead. He put the body in a bread bag and tossed it out with the trash. Some kids looking for rats in the back alley heard the dog crying and then the animal society arrived and then the police arrived and then the TV news arrived.
“We had’a go through a whole lot of shit with them society guys before we could get it. We met the vets and everything. But we raised a kid and now we’re raising another making us worth something and, y’know, we live in some nice outside space,” Vicki concluded.
“Yeah, and we both love the little dogs.” Art said. “I don’t know why.”
“This fellow doesn’t shed at all. With the eyes he’ll soon be blind but the trailer will be easy enough for him to get around,” Vicki agreed.
“Only in the city do they do shit like that. That’s what I told those people,” Art continued. “Yeah, kill it or don’t, but in the city they are always trying to find a way to do both.”
“We tried to live there a couple of times but it didn’t work out,” Vicki said taking another handful of potato chips. “Join the party or don’t but don’t go putting in anonymous nuisance calls to the cops. So what? So we live a little large.” Suddenly Vicki stuck out her chin: “Yip. Yip. Yahoo,” she yodelled. “Can’t do that in the city.”
The baby woke up and let out a startled cry. Dawn jumped and spilled beer on her lap. “Fuck,” she said.
“Watch the mouth,” Vicki snapped. Art pointed and laughed; laughing a silent laugh. Dawn blushed angrily.
“Hush baby,” Vicki jiggled Miriam a little harder, “It ain’t that bad.” The baby seemed to accept this and closed her eyes. “Anyway,” Vicki continued, “We’d always give notice. You go live small somewhere else for the night if you don’t like it. Some did. Remember that prick? The professor? He lived right across the street?”
“Yeah, his wife was a professor, too. They always waved to us as they left town for the weekend. See? They just found another place to go.”
“Mother’s.”
“Huh?”
“Mother’s,” she said impatiently. “They went to her mother’s house when we had a party.”
“Yeah, they never once came by for a beer or a burger.”
“Prick and a bitch and tiny flat-eared kid with a name from the moon—sounded something like a drug for impotence.”
“Hendrix?”
“No, asshole, I’d remember that name.”
He paused and then realizing his mistake, he laughed to himself, “Oh, Jimmy forgive me.” They both laughed. Dawn smiled although she didn’t know what they were saying.
As soon as they were gone, Dawn started to go through their things. It was almost dark now and the baby was gurgling quietly on the u-shaped couch at one end of the trailer. The dog was sleeping under a table bolted to the floor. Vicki and Art had opened a bottle of whisky before their ride came and Vicki grew belligerent because of the lateness. The young blond man who arrived in his black leather jacket was uninterested in Dawn or the baby and silently put the boxes of food, the duffle bags of clothing, and the cooler of beer into the trunk of his dirty yellow Mustang and watched as Vicki and Art squeezed themselves in. Vicki rolled down the window and yelled “Let’s see the baby wave!” in her shrill, demanding voice so Dawn pulled the baby’s sleeping arm up into the air.
“Ha!” Vicki cried, “Good thing.”
After a half hour of lifting up underwear and T-shirts and looking in the back of tiny closets, Dawn was bored. She had found nothing but thick gold bracelets and rings with huge purple opals in the sock drawer. There were photos in gluey plastic albums so orange or faded or out of focus that they held no interest. She did recognize Miriam, the daughter, in a recent high school photo. The face was a flat one with large, almond-shaped eyes and dark eyeliner. Her hair was very curly and black like Art’s and she was smiling a neutral photograph smile. She looked a little tired. And very old. Much older than Dawn remembered. The fact that she had done a lot of drugs or had been pregnant or was now dead seemed of little importance. She could not imagine what Miriam had looked like pregnant or dead. She knew only rumour.
When Dawn went to use the bathroom she was startled to find the pornography floppy in the rack of bathroom reading. Hidden behind a thin “Crochet Journal” and several water damaged copies of “Canadian Living” was a small, high-quality glossy magazine of grotesques. The pale bodies stretched into strange shapes, the women’s eyes lighted to show a certain confident superiority, the mouths exaggerated and shimmering, and the strange regions of her own body that she had never seen, never wanted to see, here displayed like medical photos. She was fascinated by the horror of it and the horror of connecting the images with Art as he swished the mud around the school floors in his black t-shirt, and even more horrified at the thought of Vicki, drunk and demanding on the white pages and under the bright lights, squishing herself inside out like some kind of jellyfish. But even this eventually lost its urgency and she carefully replaced the magazine in the rack, thinking they might have memorized the order of them. Instead she pulled her science textbook out of her overnight bag. The shiny pages glistened with row upon row of tiny black text and photographs of collapsing galaxies and mitochondria. She laid the book on her chest and stretched out beside the sleeping baby. The darkness of the night began to cover the windows and she dozed off in the quiet.
***
Miriam was screaming, her little legs and arms waving wildly in the air and Dawn sat up, dropping the book on the floor and causing the dog to start yipping. “What’s the matter, baby?” Dawn said and immediately felt the diaper, although a scream like this was more than a diaper.
“What’s the matter, baby?” she helplessly repeated.
She scooped the baby up and, in a weak imitation of Vicki and Art, she jiggled and hushed but Miriam continued to cry. Dawn looked at the clock; it was close to nine in the evening and she thought the baby must be hungry. In the fridge she found an empty bottle and in the cupboard she found the Simulac. Finally, in a crash of aluminium pots and lids and spoons jostled in a drawer by the stove, she put together the baby’s milk, warmed it and fed it to her on the couch.
The baby fell asleep after her bottle. So much for that, Dawn thought and yawned. She listlessly sat down at the ancient computer in a desperate hope for a game of some kind. When she turned it on, however, there were no games, not even solitaire, and when she opened the internet a page began to slowly populate the screen as an electronic harpsichord played the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The background was black with small white candles flickering around the edges of the screen. The banner read “Vicki and Art’s In Loving Memory.” Miriam’s high school photo was there—still looking tired—and a small amount of text in orange type:
We love you like we always did. See you when we get there. Mom and Dad
In small type underneath it read: Created by Crock-a-doodle-doo Website For Memorials.
The baby shrieked. Dawn looked back at the exploding face, the little tongue extended like a root from the toothless mouth. This time the diaper was wet and she roughly handled the baby’s legs in one hand as she removed it and shoved another one under the clammy buttocks. The baby stopped crying and looked steadily at Dawn in silence for a few moments before her face slowly collapsed into an expression of horror and she shrieked. It wasn’t a whimper or a sob it was a harsh, angry sort of noise. Bright red. She put the child—wheezing and coughing in its fury—lie on the couch while she assembled another bottle. Soon the dog added a counterpoint in a series of questioning yaps from under the table. Dawn dropped things in her frustration; she bobbed back and forth in front of the stove and looked over her shoulder explaining to Miriam, “One more minute. I’m coming. One more minute.”
The bottle soothed and annoyed in turns. Miriam would wrap pink lips about the nipple for a moment then change her mind and let the formula slop down the side of the mouth, her lips trembling with the effort to scream. “Husha, husha, husha,” Dawn said over and over. She tried turning on the radio but this only added to the confusion. She tried turning off all of the lights but kept banging into the furniture as she joggled the baby through the trailer. Finally, she opened the trailer door and stepped out into the warm black night. She was afraid of the dark and embarrassed that the baby was crying in her arms. Afraid of being caught. Like this. She strained to see if there was someone in the tarpaper house across the road, but she could see only the blackness. Black on black the sky scattered with stars. Dawn held the baby closer, her heart beating in confusion in her chest, and walked around in circles near the open door. “Husha, husha, husha.”
The baby changed her tones in the tepid air. She was no longer screaming in raw anger but kept a steady rhythm of loud shouts that would descend into a long desperate wail that ended in a moment of silence before beginning again. Dawn remembered reading that babies might cry the first time their parents leave them with a babysitter but she didn’t think that it would be like this. Miriam was already too heavy in her arms and she felt angry and bored by turns. She wanted to go home. She wondered when her mother would call to check up on her. Dawn couldn’t call because then it would sound like it was her fault, her mistake, but if her mother called that would be different. Her mother would call and her dad would come and pick her up, that’s the way it would happen.
The white dog was still inside the trailer under the table and suddenly let out several fearful, high-pitched howls. Dawn jumped just like she did when Vicki had imitated the dog earlier in the afternoon. “Fuck,” Dawn said again and looked down at the baby. As if prompted by a signal from Dawn’s panicked look, the baby returned to her steady siren. Dawn clasped Miriam a little tighter and closer into her chest. “Husha husha husha,” she said a little louder now, the jiggling a little bigger. Why hasn’t her mother called? She was like that, Dawn accused. She never does things like she should, like Dawn expected her to. It took her parents so long to get married and have a baby. “Quiet quiet quiet,” she used to say when Dawn had nightmares: “Quiet quiet quiet,” she used to say in her own quick and quiet quiet quiet voice.
The dog scratched and yowled in the trailer. Dawn lay the baby on the picnic table so she could bring the dog outside. It’s soft fur was warm and its dirty skin slipped over its ribs as Dawn put it on the picnic table and picked up Miriam. As soon as Dawn touched her, the baby let out a shattering wail that shot out into the black trees. “Husha husha husha.” She tried dancing and twirling, she tried lifting the baby high into the air but still she cried. And cried. Dawn looked at her watch. It was midnight now and she was hungry and tired. She wanted to give up but she didn’t know how.
She told herself that she would try one last thing. She ignored the punctuated stabs and howls and began to talk to the baby as if nothing unusual was happening. “See Miriam,” she said, “All that is the Milky Way. There is the Big Dipper.” Dawn sat down in the grass and then lay down—cold against her back—so she could see the stars. She held Miriam up in her two hands; up into the night she went, up into the sky. “That is Cassiopeia and that is the moon, of course.” In mid-scream, Miriam coughed once and stopped crying. After a moment Dawn lowered her down onto her chest. “Go to sleep, Miriam. They’ll come home soon.”
***
The baby was screaming again. Dawn’s eyes opened in the dark and she felt her mind trail behind her like a shoelace. She was shivering in the damp grass. For a moment she didn’t know where she was. The damn kid was punching her fists into the air, squealing, screeching. What started it this time? She wanted to shake the baby like an alarm clock, just find the button that would stop everything. She had such an urge to shake the kid to silence that she could only put the baby back on the picnic table and step away from her. They stared at one another. Why wouldn’t she stop? What kind of horrible puzzle was this? It was impossible. What could a baby want except food and jiggling arms? “Husha husha husha.”
Dawn decided that she had done everything she could do. She’d call home. Her mom could deal with it. There was some trick to this and it was her mother’s idea that she take the damn babysitting course. It was really her failure. When Dawn opened the door to the trailer, she heard Art’s web site twanging away the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dawn ran over to it and tried to close the site but it was frozen. She suddenly felt criminal, sneaking around their dead daughter’s digital tomb. Miriam was screaming outside, the dog was yipping.
“Shut up!” she screamed and smashed both fists into the keyboard.
The letter “Z” flew off. Dawn burst into tears. She shouldn’t care, she told herself; it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t do anything wrong. Finding her phone made her feel better, but then there was no service. She picked up the receiver on the landline and dialed the number for home: an hour from now she’d be in bed.
There was no one at home.
Dawn couldn’t believe it: they’re always at home. It was almost 2 o’clock in the morning. The machine kicked in: We’re not home—No shit, Dawn thought—but if you leave a message we’ll get right back to you. Dawn, if you need to find us we’re playing cards with your uncle and aunt, the number is . . . .
Dawn put down the phone. They never go out. She should call them at her uncle’s on a landline! (serves them right). The world was made of phones, they couldn’t hide from her. She was searching through her contacts to find their cell numbers when she realized the baby had stopped crying. Her whole body turned heavy and electric; she didn’t think she’d be able to pull herself out of the chair. From where she sat she could clearly see the picnic table and from where she sat she could clearly see the smelly dog’s backside jiggling frenetically as it leaned over the baby.
“What the fuck?”
Dawn tripped on the step and fell hard onto her knees. She would throw that stinking dog into the highest tree. When she pulled herself up, however, she saw the baby smiling and reaching out as Shelley licked her sunburned cheeks.
Car lights suddenly appeared in the far distance. Dawn took a step toward the road in anticipation. Vicki and Art were coming back or maybe her mom had tried to call and when she couldn’t get through she got worried. The lights grew a little brighter but then the white turned to red and eventually disappeared behind some trees. Miriam began to sob again. With her tiny lips pressed together as if pushing the sound through her nose. Her face was awash with anger and surprise as if she, too, hated the crying but she could only express her frustration by crying more.
Dawn’s throat closed up in pain and her nose and eyes filled with water.
“No way,” she said and with defiant and exaggerated motions she took two huge steps onto the picnic table and straddled the baby and the blind dog. They looked so small trapped between Dawn’s blistered feet. She scooped Miriam up and then, breathing with a determined hiss through her teeth, she sat on the wood cross-legged. Her pink shirt was drenched in nervous sweat as she placed the baby squirmy and cranky in the basket between her knees.
No baby would ever look like a Miriam. Dawn decided. She felt sorry for her. It was a used name, a dead name, a lousy second name, middle name, extra name, she thought. In the frail light from the door of the trailer, the baby’s features blurred as it squirmed and wailed. Art hadn’t said what the baby’s first name was. There were no pictures of her in the trailer.
Dawn had practiced pushing herself to tears in her room. She’d practice in front of the mirror: her eyes filling with water, the tears wetting her cheeks and dripping into the corners of her mouth. She wanted to be pretty and pathetic when she looked up into the face of the person who was watching. And her practice was all in the service of being watched by someone who thought they could save her. Adults like saving kids. Boys like saving girls. Sometimes she thought she was so good at pretending she actually wanted to be saved but she didn’t know from what. But most of the time she just enjoyed her success with the sensation of blood pumping under her skin and the scraping tones in her head and the satisfying feeling of tears dripping out of you.
“Yip yip yahoo!” Dawn screamed in the night air. “Yip yip yahoo!”
Then again, in an arpeggio of a song in her thin soprano that she never used because someone had once told her it was off-key. She let herself blush even though there was no one to see her and she leaned all the way back onto the table, her arms behind her head, the baby still screaming and struggling between her crossed ankles.
The Big Dipper had moved. Years of dying light, she thought, outrunning its own death in a fearful dash across the universe; always looking over its shoulder for what was following. Somewhere sometime there would be the last particle, the last wave chasing all the other particles and waves down. Never catching them? The others. Dawn didn’t know the science. She didn’t care. Maybe it all did catch up, bunch up into a group, or maybe it was alive only to itself, running down the dark alleys of endlessness. Or maybe, she thought, a last particle from one of those stars would hit her eyes and then disappear forever: right now, no, now, no, now. The stars looked the same. Dawn spoke into Miriam’s weeping air, “Cry all you want because no one is coming.” She pulled herself into a sitting position, leaned over the perfect white shell of the baby’s ear and whispered, “Keep it coming. Good thing.” The dog nudged its way over to Dawn and put its leaking nose on her bare foot.
“We are too young to be left alone for the weekend,” she said in a mock serious voice imagining how she would tell the story of this night to her friends. How she would make her mom feel guilty and blame her for the lack of cell reception. Dawn laughed and picked up the baby. She absently jiggled Miriam on the ladder of her ribcage and her hard-nubbed breasts. The stark refrains were muffled as the baby found some solace rubbing her gums on the white skin of Dawn’s bicep. Dawn looked down into that brand-new face which now seemed untouched by the hours of tears. Her eyes were as huge and as brown and blue-white as they had been that afternoon. Dawn remembered now how she had noticed Miriam’s beautiful baby eyes right away. New eyes. Maybe this was the first time she’d ever seen stars. Dawn smiled with all her teeth showing which, for some reason, she did only when she was alone.
“No one is coming.”
She said the phrase with tenderness, repeating it over and over as an answer to each questioning, exploring baby gurgle and snort.
“No one is coming. No one is coming. No one is coming.”
Dawn found that she had comforted both of them. Miriam had let go of Dawn’s bicep and stopped crying, squirming instead with her face awash in silent, wild contortions moving from total despair to a contented blankness. Dawn looked down at the little white dog and she pet its dirty dog body. In her best imitation of a little girl voice, whipping her pink hair to one side and pouting her lips she said, “No one is coming, Shelley. Whatever will we do?”
She laughed and took the opportunity to bounce the baby—one, two, three—as she laughed an exaggerated, goofy chuckle—“ha, ha, ha”—and then she leaned down to the dying dog and gave it one good kiss on the head.