PART 2
Last dose of morphine is finally wearing off. I’m itchy and I still haven’t shit. Woke up at 3am from another night terror. I remember them telling me in my pre-natal classes that childbirth was so painful that your body makes you forget what it feels like. If we remembered, we’d never procreate. Humanity would cease to exist. I wanted to see if I could remember the pain. I wanted to know how long it would take me to forget how it felt. Three days. That’s how long it took me to forget. I wonder how long it will take me to forget this. Write it down. Don’t forget. Never forget. Back to business. Keep going.
Let me see, I think I conked out around the time I was typing about Rae and the makeup. Remember. Her weight is on my stomach. Remember. I’m hungry. I can hear that I’m hungry, or is she? My stomach is stuck to my ribs. My body is trying to eat itself. She takes her mask off and lets it drop off the side of the bed.
Her chubby little fingers caress the bangs out of my eyes, and she looks at me with a longing that plunges its way through my chest cavity, past my half-eaten ribs and swaddles itself around my heart, squeezing it so tight, too tight. So tight that I can feel my heart trying to escape through my jugular, my ears. The thudding. Please let go. Please let go of my heart.
“You look like my old mommy.” She says. It hits like a drunk husband. ‘Old mommy’. What happened ‘old mommy’?
And then I see it. The look that is all-too familiar. The one every parent knows. The look of fear and hurt that comes barreling out of a child’s face who has just been injured. The silent, wide-mouthed scream that occurs before the brain catches up enough to make sound, to make tears. The held breath. They don’t mean to, but they hold their breath and sometimes it goes on for so long that you think they’ll faint. Long enough for you to say, “Breathe!” and I did. My first word to her.
“BREATHE” She sees me seeing her and musters a stilted breath that brings the tears. Relief.
Now I’m the one shushing her and telling her to remember that we aren’t supposed to wake Lily. Who or what is Lily? I can taste her despair dripping onto my face. Warm, like salty bathwater. I ache to hold her. She sniffles back her sadness.
“Use my shirt” I say softly.
She burrows her face into the only part that isn’t sopping wet. Smushing into it. Inhaling me. She lays down next to me, head nuzzled into my armpit. She’s quiet now. Curled into me, sleeping. I hear a rattle in her chest. Second-hand smoke. Get your bearings. Where are you?
My arms and legs are tied to the bed posts with rope. I can see above me that my hands are turning purple, but I can move my fingers. They’re cold and feel like they belong to someone else. I hear a tv murmuring through a wall behind me. I can feel it too. The room is covered in top to bottom 1970’s synthetic wood paneling. I can make out some of the carpet by the door. Brown and beige smudged shag. Shit. I can see pieces of petrified shit stuck in the rug and now I can smell it. Cat piss. There’s a red, brown, and green, plaid Barcalounger in the corner. The arms are ribboned, and the feline culprit is slung over the top of the headrest.
I whisper to the tiny makeup artist. She stirs and then sits up with wide-opened eyes and in a voice too loud for someone who was just sleeping she crows…
“Want to see Lily? It’s about time for her feeding!”
No. I do not want to see Lily. Of this, I am sure.
“No no, honey. Let’s not wake her up.” But she’s already hopping off the bed gingerly and opening the bottom drawer of the bureau.
I can’t see over the edge of the bed. I don’t know what she’s getting into, but I can see her rustling around down there, her back to me. The TV still rumbling behind me, my heartbeat still thumping my ears. She stands up and turns around with a large bundle in her arms. And INSTANTLY I can smell it. And I feel my let-down kick in. No. Not now. Please.
Wrapped in a yellow crocheted blanket, an infant. The small child is holding an infant. She just pulled it out of a drawer like some acid-trip magic trick. Pulling a child out of a hat. Rabbit out of a drawer. Rabbit. Rabbit. Rabbit. Child. A child holding a child. Please let it be alive.
“Careful!” I say, as she places the baby next to me with care. I try not to move.
“This is Lily. She’s fragile. Don’t press the top of her head. That’s her reset button. She won’t remember us anymore.”
Oh god. I’m leaking. Lily is waking up and I can hear the fussing sounds I’ve come to know so well.
She smells me.
I remember going to Garfield Park a couple of months after Darby was born. I’m sitting there on the scalding, rubber, playground turf, rocking Darby in her carrier and this toddler crawls right up and onto me and starts rooting around my chest like he had lost something, desperate, searching. A truffle pig. Before I could remove the leach, a flustered mother comes running up and scoops the toddler into a one arm hold.
“Sorry.” She hisses at me. She wasn’t. She was embarrassed that her kid was a lech.
“I just weaned him. He can smell you.”
As if it was my fucking fault that her kid has a boob fetish. Nobody tells you that all mothers are defensive because we are just waiting around for the next humiliation to hit. Children are tiny, eating, shitting, humiliators.
The whimpering turns into a full out cry.
“Uh oh.” And I can’t hear the tv anymore because it’s being drowned out by footsteps coming down the hall and the mighty death screech of a hungry infant.
The door swings wide, knob hitting the wall, adding to the sizeable indent that was already there.
“RAE! Just what in the hell do you think yer doing, you little shit! I told you—” and she gets really close to Rae, a pretty name. I want to tell her she has a pretty name.
“I told you, you aint spose ta bring Lily out on yer own. Leave her be.”
Rae cowers on the floor while this skinny banshee wails at her wagging her furious finger.
“Now GIT!” and Rae scurries out of the room. I can see the back of her legs have recently met a switch.
“I guess yer up.” She says scowling at me.
I swear to God. I swear to God, if I get out of these ropes, I’m going to pummel her ass. She’s small. I could sit on her until she cried uncle. She’s the little shit! Pick on someone your own size! She steals Lily who is now stunned silent by all the commotion and sets her down in the bottom dresser door.
She goes for something in her back pocket.
“Now, just so’s ya know, I got this here baby cattle prod and I ain’t got no shame in using it.”
And with a sweeping gesture she shoves that taser right into the side of my thigh and LIGHTNING. I’ve been struck by lightning. I’m stiff and vibrating. Seething pain, and then it stops.
“You feel that?”
She grabs my face in her boney hand and squeezes me into a pucker and whispers—
“Don’t you forget that feeling. That’s what it feels like when Shelby bites ya.”
Her breath is beer and dust, old things. Cellar, stale smoke, cat piss. Her teeth are yellow and encrusted with plaque and God knows what else. I can feel the bile rising in my throat. She throws my head down onto the bed and begins to untangle my bindings. Who the fuck names a taser? Once she’s done with my hands, she motions for me to do my ankles.
“Don’t try nuth’n. I aint fool’n. I’ll fry yer ass crispy”
She slides the top bureau drawer open and flings something at me.
“Here! It was big Mama’s when she wasn’t so big.”
She stands there facing me. Sizing me up and I’m doing the same to her. She’s about 5’4 to my 5’7. She seemed taller on the path. All elbows and knees. She’s what my sister would refer to as skinny-fat. Probably lives on beer and codeine. No muscle, I could snap her like a twig. Use her as kindling for when I burn this hellscape down.
“Put it on.”
And I know what she means. She means, ‘do it in front of me.’
I strip off my yoga pants which stink, Jesus. I pull my oversized, sopping, shirt over my head. I look down at my sports bra, all out of shape, grey now, and stained through with milk.
“Take it off. You won’t need it.”
Fuck me. This is how it starts. What weird shit are these people into? I remember being 6 or 7 years old and my daddy saying to me, “If someone tries to grab you, you bite them as hard as you can.” He gave me his arm and he told me to bite into it as hard as I could. So I did. I drew blood that day. He was proud of me. He told me to fight and scream but whatever you do don’t get in the car. Stranger Danger. A flash of my husband and I sitting on the couch watching NCIS. “Never let them take you to a second location.” I’m fucked.
I peel the sports bra off and hand it to her. I can see she’s trying not to look at my breasts. That’s right, you heinous bitch! They’re huge! You’ll never have ones as big as these! I’m leaking onto the shag. Fuck her shag. They’re heavy. They’re so fucking heavy I want to just lop them off and leave them with the other checked baggage.
I pick up the – what is this? A kaftan? Mumu? I throw the parachute on.
“DIGGER, SHE’S UP!” she shouts down the hall.
“Hell, woman. Why you gotta be holler’n.” He gets a load of me.
“Damn, girl! What happened to yer face?” he cackles.
I remember the clown makeup and how well it must go with my circus tent.
“Oh, will you just shut it! Go git the thing.” She nags.
Digger comes back in with what looks to be an electric breast pump. Hospital grade. One of those big honking bastards that makes you feel like a resident at a dairy farm. She hands Digger the baby and takes the pump.
“Shoo. Let the women talk. Give Lily her bottle.” She points to the Barcalounger dusted in cat hair. I sit. Now this is where shit gets kind of fucked up.
“I’m gonna tell you a story. Don’t you speak while I tell it or I’ll zap you again. Digger and I been in love since we was in primary school. He don’t got no family left to speak of and all I gots left, really, is Big Mama so we knew we’d be wanting to make our own little family right quick. I lost one at school. Seventh grade in the girls toilets. I sat on that pot and I cried and prayed to baby Jesus to give me another one. Got pregnant again when we was fourteen. That’s Jacob.”
She points to a photo on the wall next to me of a very young couple holding a baby. But something’s off. They aren’t smiling. The baby looks too small. Grey. Oh god.
“Stillborn. He was just too sweet for this world so Jesus taked him back up to be with the angels.” There are tears in her eyes but this devastating gratitude as she looked towards the heavens when she spoke the word ‘angels’. I can’t help but feel for her. The photo. Just a child holding a child. Rabbit. Hat. Jesus. Angels. She’s cradling her stomach now.
“They had to take it all out with Jacob. I wasn’t made right. They told us we wouldn’t have any of our own. We was waiting for Jesus to send us a miracle and that’s when we found Rae.”
“Found.” I said under my breath.
SMACK. My bottom lip blooms open again and my ears ring.
“FOUND!” She demands.
“We FOUND her! She was in her little floaties.” I could see her remembering.
“They had too many. More than enough. They weren’t paying her no mind. They’s all splashing in the water and left her on the shore by herself. If they had cared for her any, they’d have been paying more attention. Anyhow. We was happy about Rae but we really wanted a little bundle that was new. The bigger ones, they already set in their ways, ya know. That’s when the lord gave us Lily.”
“How?” Waiting for the next slap but she was in some sort of memory trance. Humming a little to herself. She gazed off with a soft smile on her face.
“I was so gentle. I was gentle when I freed her from her cage.” She looks down at her arms like she’s lifting a baby up from an invisible womb.
A shotgun goes off in the distance snapping her out of her reverie.
“GODDAMMIT DIGGER, YOU BEST BE DONE FEEDING THAT BABY IF YER OUT SHOOTIN!” she shouts.
My mind is racing.
“Lily came a little too early. She aint gaining weight the way she spose ta. She needs milk. Won’t keep the formula down. You got plenty. Best get squirting. I’ll be outside the door waiting to collect. You can have some supper when yer done.”
I’m a little stunned as she gets up to go.
“If you try anything, I’ll have Digger shoot buckshot clear through those utters of yers. Easy enough to find another cow.”