New Life

Rita drew a picture of the miscarriage. There was Rita on the page, naked like a Botticelli Venus, with one hand cupped at her breast and another at her belly. With a black crayon, she carved out her womb to show the internal clockwork, the dark space where the baby should have been. On the ground at her feet, she drew seeds, split apart like empty promises. At the side of the page, she sketched a picture of a fetus, blind and incomplete, torn from Rita. In the picture, tears streamed from Rita‘s eyes. Above her, the moon had a face and the moon was also crying. 

At the coffee shop, Rita gave the picture to her friend Liz. “This is terrible, but you get what I mean,” Rita said.

Liz studied the picture, frowning. “Rita,” she said, reaching for her friend’s hand. “It’s been a year. You have to get over this. At least trying to get over it. You need to put this derailment aside.” Liz bit her lower lip. “You can’t go on like this,” Liz repeated. 

Rita’s eyes widened as much at the word “derailment” as at an operatic wail that suddenly filled the coffee shop. The girl at the counter hastily changed the station and a folk singer’s serene voice took its place. Rita, distracted, nodded at Liz. It was always easier to agree with her. When they finished their coffee, the two old friends walked outside, hugged each other and Rita waved stiffly as Liz’s car sped away from the parking lot. A lackluster wind stirred leaves and litter at Rita’s feet. More and more cars began to fill the lot until it seemed to Rita that she had been standing there forever, that she had turned to stone and could only watch the movement around her. Behind her, people went into and left the coffee shop and still Rita could not move. 

After some time, only minutes really, Rita managed to urge one foot, then another forward, and through a series of repetitions of these events, she found her car. She had a purpose, she told herself as she watched her feet acting of their own accord. She had to deposit her disability check and report in to her social worker. This was something Rita had not told Liz - that she reported to a social worker monthly. Because she had done something crazy. 

It had happened on a day much like today. A day with a soft sighing wind and an otherworldly gravity that kept Rita anchored to her sorrow. She’d been walking through a park trying to take a short cut to the office. It was lunchtime and the jangle of laughter and conversations rippled around her. She was almost through when she came upon the stroller. A woman sat on the bench by it, chattering on a cell phone, her body twisted away. After awhile, the woman turned and her face contorted in a grimace to see Rita standing there with the baby, taken as easily from the stroller as Rita‘s own baby had been taken from her womb. With one hand still gripping the cell phone, the frantic mother reached out the other hand to Rita, who found herself unable to move. Unable to relax her grip on the small, pulsing bundle. Even when the woman began to shout, Rita had just stared at her. She’d watched the woman’s lips frame panicked words that moved soundlessly through the air, obliterated by the thrumming of the baby’s heart. 

Then the police came. They’d taken the baby from her arms, put her into the police car, and spoken into their radios with insect voices. She was handcuffed to protect her from herself, they’d told her later. 

Because they’d taken pity on Rita, they had not incarcerated her. They set her on this regular schedule with a therapist, where monthly, she lied as best she could and accepted prescriptions for drugs designed to make her less sad. She moved through a regimented schedule of hours during which she did nothing but think about the baby who never was and who would always be.

Rita got into her car and nosed it gingerly down the street as if every parked vehicle might suddenly veer out in front of her. She fully intended to go to the social worker, but then realized that she was in the wrong lane, the lane going left instead of right. Cars blocked her on the right and she could not safely switch onto the right path. She moved when the light changed and went left. She decided to drive a bit, her appointment could wait.

After a time, the act of driving started making her anxious. She was being pulled farther and farther from her original destination into an area of the town she wasn’t familiar with.  She saw a sign in front of a small wooded area announcing a community center and pulled in. The gravel driveway led to a small group of parking spaces. She saw to her dismay that to her immediate right, a group of children and their parents held court in a small sand park. It looked like a lunar terrain and she felt the need to sit suddenly, nearly collapsing on a chipped green-slatted bench.

Taking a deep breath, she watched children of various ages clamber on plastic dinosaurs and monkey bars. She tried squinting her eyes to blur their faces, as if by doing so, she might place her own child there. She felt the bench she was sitting on creak and looked up, startled, to see an old woman clutching a bundle to her breast. The old woman’s face was creased; a mole on her chin sprouted a single long hair.

“Penny for your sorrow?” she thought she heard the old woman say.

“What?” Rita stammered.

But the old woman did not reply. The woman rocked on the groaning bench for a time. “One of ‘em yours?” the crone asked suddenly, nodding in the direction of the children. The coarseness of her voice scraped inside Rita.

“No,” Rita replied, but then she flushed, wondering if the old woman would think her a pedophile now that she’d admitted this. 

 “I just needed to stop a moment,” Rita said.

The old woman nodded. “Most people do,” she said.

Rita heard screaming and twisted in the direction of the sound. It came from a little girl pushing at a wooden carousel, spinning another little girl, who gripped the rickety wood, chortling with glee. No one was being injured or maimed or mutilated. The screams were screams of excitement - she just had not been able to tell the difference.

 “I thought someone was hurt,” Rita murmured, turning back to the woman. But the old woman was gone, though she’d left a bundle of rags behind on the bench. Rita tucked her arms under her armpits, trying to fight off a sudden chill. She looked away from the bundle, scanning the horizon for the old woman. How fast could she walk? How far could she have gone? 

Rita heard a rustling sound coming from the bundle. She began to be afraid that it was swaddling rats. Then she heard a mewing sound and inched closer on the bench. She gingerly pushed aside the folds of the cloth that made up the bundle, discerning finally that it was really a fleece blanket and that there was a baby nestled inside. A very strange baby.  A baby shaped like a bread loaf. 

It had no arms or legs, just head and torso. When she nudged it with her finger, its skin was amazingly tough, like a resilient plastic, but also warm, hot even, like the infant had an engine for a heart, thrumming away. When she touched the side of its head with the back of her finger, it lifted eyelids she had not noticed it had and pursed together folds of flesh to create a mouth. It smiled at her. It was hideous. Rita’s heart swooned with love for it.

“Here,” she whispered. “I’m here.”

Its smile grew wider and touched its coal black eyes and Rita smiled back. “She didn’t want you, did she? Well, I do. I know a gift when I see one,” Rita said. She scooped the baby into her arms, darting her eyes right and left to make sure there was no one around to witness her theft. As she held the baby close to her breasts, it moved its head and wriggled its body, as if in yearning, and she felt strangely proud.

Then she realized she had nothing at home for it. And she had an appointment to keep. She wasn’t ready for this. A cold panic suffused her. But she held the baby tighter and walked to her car. She tucked the baby in her lap, between her legs - it was squirming now, perhaps sensing her anxiety. “Ssssh,” she whispered to it, almost angrily. “I’ll get you the things you need.” 

She stopped at Target on the way home and purchased a car seat, baby food, blankets, diapers - though she wasn’t sure that was a real need - the baby’s bottom half was smooth, like a plastic doll baby‘s, with no discernable openings or genitalia. She decided the baby was a boy nonetheless, from the set of its brow, the purse of its lips, the way it fought its way to her when she momentarily put some distance between it and her body. She spent a good portion of her savings at Target, though the next aid check was a ways away. She felt a thrill of guilt and spite - she deserved these things. Her baby deserved these things.

Back at her apartment, Rita laid the baby on her bed and dragged the unused cradle she had never discarded from the closet, her head canted towards the baby to make sure it did not roll off the bed. She grabbed blankets, still in their plastic wrappings on the closet shelf, and took them out, laid them in the cradle. She added a small, furry teddy bear - something for the baby to sleep next to. She wondered suddenly if he was too young to have such a thing in his bed. Could he asphyxiate himself, twisting in the blankets and pressing against the bear? She looked at him uncertainly and watched him wriggle on the bed as if he were a snake. She felt a shiver of revulsion, but then he turned the upper portion of his body, twisting it to look at her, and smiled. She sighed with relief to feel her love for him again.

 “Your name is Jonah,” she said. “That was what I was going to call my first boy. I’ll take care of you. Never mind what you look like. I’ll take care of you.” 

She called the social worker. She told him she was sick. She promised to reschedule. 

Rita threw herself into tending the baby. When she left the house, it was to buy more things for Jonah with her dwindling savings. She tried to slip into this new life as if it had come to her naturally, as if she were like any other mother. She bundled Jonah into a second-hand stroller and tried to take him out for fresh air and because she herself felt starved for air. But it was always such a struggle. From the moment she picked Jonah up from his crib, he knew where they were going and resisted her. He‘d coil his body away from her and she became afraid that she would drop him before she ever got him to the stroller. If she managed to get him outside, he’d make high-pitched keening noises that made people turn to stare at them. When she put him back in the crib, he became a loving baby again, gurgling and cooing at her. 

She attributed Jonah’s behavior to his sensitivity. He didn’t like being stared at by people as if he were a thing, some sort of freak. Finally, it just did not seem to be worth the struggle to go outside when there were so many reasons not to. Jonah might catch cold and then she’d have to take him to a doctor who might ask her for a birth certificate. The neighbors might grow curious about how she suddenly found herself with a baby.

After a while though, she began to tell herself that this baby did come from her, that after an extended gestation and a disappearance, she’d merely found him again. Even if she’d created him from ill-considered wishes, he was hers now. Her boy. If the old woman came back for him, she would kill her.

These thoughts astounded Rita, but then lost their power to surprise. One day she ran into Liz. She saw her from half a block away, too late to turn around, though she did try to duck into a doorway. Liz hallooed her. “Rita, it’s been ages, have you been ill?” 

Rita who had twisted her mouth into a smile grew instantly annoyed. How like it for Liz to assume that the worst had befallen her. “No, I’ve been great. Really busy,” Rita said somewhat spitefully. Too busy for you, she mentally added.

Liz knitted her brow, but then dismissed the slight. “I ran into Sarah Mills, the other day,” Liz said. “She said she saw you at Toys R’ Us…” Liz let the sentence trail off, inviting Rita to explain. Rita just continued to smile. “Well, I have to go,” Rita said, tapping at her wristwatch without looking at it. Liz looked a little hurt, but she recovered. “A bunch of us are getting together for dinner on Friday. Just girls from the book club. You should come. It’s all people you know. It will be good for you.”

 “Does sound fun, though I’ve plans on Friday, maybe some other time, got to go,” Rita said breezily as she walked away - confidently, she hoped. 

She really had to go home and check on Jonah. She was deathly afraid of baby sitters who might report her to the authorities. And she didn‘t want to expose Jonah to anyone who might react to him with a look of horror that might make him sad. And she was afraid to take him outside with her, in case she ran into people she knew, people like Liz, who might comment on his strangeness.

So she’d leave Jonah in his bassinet, feeling guilty and afraid. She’d heard of SID deaths and felt that Jonah was more likely to roll himself into his blanket and stop breathing than other babies. This fear warred with a deep suspicion that Jonah was extremely tough: Rita was not even really sure how he managed to stay alive - he barely ate. Her attempts to diaper him were mere formalities, a maternal twitch. She wanted to offer him her breasts, though her milk was long gone, but she’d grown afraid early on that he would latch on like some alien parasite and never let go. Tapping into this fear made her realize she could leave him for at least short periods of time: He was not like other babies, that was clear. 

Still, she never liked to go outside now for more than an hour at a time. When she arrived back at the apartment, she ran into the bedroom, struck with self-loathing by her non-maternal thoughts. He was just a baby, a helpless infant. He asked for nothing of her but her love.

She hurried to the bassinet and peered into it. “Jonah,” she murmured. “I’m back. See, you know I could never… would never leave you for long.” The baby twitched -that’s how he turned his head - and he regarded her with merry, coal black eyes, as if to say, “You never could leave me.” Cold rivulets of sweat trickled down between Rita’s breasts and she smiled hesitantly. She heard the phone ring in the living room. She ignored it and let it ring into voicemail. She picked up Jonah and held him against her heart. She moved to the rocking chair she’d bought for him and sat with him, rocking slowly back and forth until the day passed.

It was good that Jonah did not need much in the way of food or diapers, because it grew increasingly difficult for Rita to leave the apartment. She began to call for her own food to be delivered from the grocery store, ordered almost everything she needed to buy online. She tried to find employment online and was moderately successful. Here and there she managed to accumulate a hundred dollars, paid through her PayPal account. Her life became very small, constrained to her dimly lit bedroom with the scarred desk where laptop perched. The cradle was feet away and the small swaddled form of the baby rustled and made occasional sounds that resembled the cries of a cat or a bird. 

When Rita moved to the crib, as she felt compelled to every fifteen minutes or so, Jonah barely looked at her. But on those occasions when he did, he smiled, and she felt then as if she was doing something right. As if this shutting out of friends and basic human interactions, was necessary to protect him. And wasn’t that a natural, proper mother’s instinct – to protect her child? 

She went to him, even at night, barely sleeping in stolen moments, her boy’s tough, resilient body clutched to her breasts, the small form pulsing in her arms. She grew grey and thin, her hair hung in limp strings about her gaunt face, her eyes always feverish-looking, her teeth yellowed. She had to make concerted efforts to order food, to feed herself. Every job she took on to provide for Jonah seemed incredibly burdensome. Sometimes she made commitments and did not follow through, ignoring angry phone calls and increasingly hostile e-mails. Liz would call and Rita would let her voicemail pick up. Replaying the message later, she found Liz’s voice to be a stranger’s voice, someone she could never have imagined a friendship with.

 One morning, waking guiltily to a wan light streaming into her room, Rita looked down at Jonah and saw a change. Overnight the baby had grown hands, like little paddles, with fused fingers and impossible smooth palms, unlined with future or past. The hands waved about on small stalks that barely resembled arms and reached for Rita. She shivered and nearly dropped him, immediately stricken by the revulsion she’d felt. The baby grabbed onto a lock of her hair and pulled, burbling in his strange little voice. Rita smiled at him, feeling the falsity of the expression on her face. 

She got up stiffly and placed Jonah carefully into his crib. She walked to the door, thinking to go outside and buy some food. But she stopped, her hand frozen mid-air above the door knob, unable to turn it, unable to move forward. She walked back to the cradle to look down at Jonah, glancing up to see herself in the mirror above her small dresser.  Her emaciated, depleted appearance shocked her. She looked down again at Jonah and smoothed the blankets on the baby who regarded her with watchful dark eyes. She began to know then that the baby was a monster. That he would never let her leave him, unless she took extraordinary measures.

She scooped him into her arms and took him out to the car. “Let’s go to the park, Jonah,” she said brightly, falsely. She tucked the baby’s squirming form into the car seat, struggling with the restraining straps and pushing blankets around Jonah to keep him secure. She glanced away from Jonah’s glance. 

She drove aimlessly, scarcely remembering how she’d found the park that day. She saw one playground and then another, but neither were right. Neither had the precise arrangement of trees, the graveled lot, the fringe of plastic dinosaurs abutting the terrain of monkey bars. Then in a haze of sunlight that made it almost dangerous to drive, she saw it. The graveled parking space by the brick-face of the community center.

She veered sharply to the right as a car honked behind her and sped past and Jonah made a high-pitched keening sound. “There, there, baby. It’s alright,” she said. She got out of the car, feeling light-headed and faint, aware of her unkempt appearance, her unsightly hair. 

She got Jonah out of the car seat to legitimize her presence in the park and looked around her. “We’ll wait here, Jonah. We’ll wait for your grandmother.” She said this with more certainty than she felt, making her way to the bench that she hoped was totemic. The bench where she’d taken Jonah, vowing to herself to defend him against all others.

“I’m shit,” she whispered to herself. She hunched over Jonah who was squirming on her lap. “Forgive me,” she said.

She felt as sudden change in temperature and her skin prickled from the coolness. When she looked up, the old woman stood before her, tall and rectangular like a tree trunk. “Ah, there you are,” the old woman said to Jonah, as if it had been minutes and not weeks since she had abandoned her bundle on the park bench. 

“I took care of him for you,” Rita stammered, as if she’d only ever meant it to be temporary. 

The old woman regarded Rita, her eyes as dark and watchful as the baby’s. “For me?” she said. “Are you happier to be grief-stricken then, than burdened with responsibilities?” 

Rita gasped at the punishing words. She tried to turn the table on the old woman, “But he’s yours, isn’t he? How could you leave him here?”

 “I’m an old woman,” the crone grinned. “My memory is not what it used to be.” She extended a wrinkled hand to move aside the blanket from Jonah’s face. “I suppose you want me to take him back, poor thing, just when he was starting to look more like your kind, too.” Jonah grinned and giggled, making a surprisingly human sound. 

 “Is that what you want?” the old woman asked again. The words thrummed in Rita’s ears as she felt the memory of the pulse that had signaled her miscarriage deep inside her womb. She wanted to contradict the old woman, to prove her wrong, to prove that she could be a mother first and foremost, even to a changeling child.

 “Take him back,” she said, pressing cold fingers to her lips as the words escaped her. 

The old woman nodded. “There’s nothing to replace him with you know. He’s the only one of his kind. And the way this works is that we bring back the human babe when there’s one that’s taken. But here,” the old woman gestured with a hand that looked young suddenly, “there was nothing taken. We gave life for death.”

Rita looked up into the woman’s imperiously beautiful face, youthful now, her skin alabaster and traced with light blue veins, her hair long and lustrously black and sweeping across Jonah’s own healthy pink skin. “Wait,” Rita said, for Jonah too seemed beautiful now, cooing happily in the woman’s arms. 

 “Wait,” Rita sobbed, alone on her park bench, the Doppler cry of children echoing inside her.

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