She loved this picture, and reminded herself to take along a camera or two, because Cinda and Burt Chance would have bought their baby album, and now she, Kit, would take the first roll of film to fill it. What a gift!
Muffin could hardly believe that Rowen agreed to let her go along. Probably he thought it would be easier to explain to Mom and Dad than violent movies. Or maybe he was assuming he wouldn’t have to explain anything to Mom and Dad, and that was probably right, because Kit and Muffin and Sam the Baby would meet the new parents and then Kit and Muffin would drive back to Shea’s and none of their own parents would ever know anything about it.
Muffin tucked the disposable camera into the little front kangaroo pocket of her own pink sweatshirt.
She would take pictures of the new mommy and daddy meeting their new baby.
Kit brought the baby carrier downstairs. It seemed designed for a larger person, who would sit up and take notice. Sam the Baby just folded into a ball and slept in his carrier the way Muffin slept in her kangaroo bag.
“Why didn’t the baby’s new parents come to the hospital?” asked Muffin. In second grade, the teacher had read out loud a book about adoption. It was beautiful. But Muffin didn’t know anybody who was adopted. Now she did. Sam.
“I guess there was a mix-up,” said Kit.
Muffin hated this kind of answer. That was the trouble with being nine. People knew so much more than you did. What kind of mix-up? Muffin felt grumpy. Then she looked at Sam.
When you were nine, it was crummy to know nothing, but when you were new, like Sam, it was awesome and miraculous.
“I would love to have you for a brother, Sam the baby,” whispered Muffin. “I could be the older one, instead of Rowen always being the older one. And you would think I knew everything, instead of Rowen always telling me I know nothing. And I would make my mother change you, because you’re too disgusting for me. I would take care of you when you were clean and beautiful.”
Sam the Baby opened his eyes, which were very large for his face, while his nose was way too small, just a perky spot in the middle of his stare. He blinked his eyes, and long dark lashes swept his cheeks, and Muffin laughed at him, and she thought, His lucky, lucky mommy and daddy.
She could hardly wait to meet them, the way she loved to meet all her friends’ parents, because the dads would pick you up and pull on your ponytail, and the moms would listen to your stories and fix you snacks and fix your hair, and they remembered what vegetable you had not wanted to eat last time.
She hoped, and it was treason, that Sam the Baby’s new mommy and daddy liked all food, the way Aunt Karen and Uncle Anthony did, instead of no food, like Mom.
Kit seemed to have lost the camera she’d been using, which was annoying, but that was how disposable cameras were. They disappeared for months, but eventually turned up and the pictures were developed, and you had the additional treat of photos from a forgotten occasion.
Kit got another camera from the stack while Rowen hefted the carrier out to his car, so he could drive Kit to her car. Sam noticed nothing. He went right on snoozing even as they shifted his little body. He won’t know who changes him, thought Kit, or who loves him, or who his mother is, or who adopts him.
It was a strange, even terrifying thought: Sam the Baby had no thoughts about the things that were happening to him.
She took six photographs immediately, in case she never found the other camera, so that she would still have a memory of Sam to keep.
Rowen drove them to Kit’s house. Mom’s sporty red Miata and Malcolm’s heavy champagne BMW were not there. It was strange to think of all this happening and no parents knew.
Rowen transferred the carrier to Kit’s car.
“Where’s Shea, anyway?” asked Kit as she strapped herself into the driver’s seat of the Volvo and Muffin found a place in the back next to Sam.
“We had a big fight,” said Row, without the slightest interest in Shea or the fight. When you were cousins you could be casual like that. “She didn’t like the movies I picked out and said I was a slime and why didn’t I leave and I said I was not a slime —”
“He is a slime,” Muffin explained.
“— and Shea threw us out —”
“Call Shea back,” said Kit, “and tell her as soon as Muffin and I have delivered Sam the Baby, we will be there for movies and spending the night. Don’t eat all the food without us.”
Chapter 6
ROUTE 80 WEST.
It was a good thing Kit had plenty of gas. Cinda had given her the exit number, but she hadn’t said it was fifteen miles! Oh, well. At seventy miles an hour, which was the scary rate traffic was moving, it didn’t take long. Kit, who was new to driving, preferred speeds like thirty miles an hour.
It was a relief to get off the highway.
North on Dexter Mill Road. They were practically in Pennsylvania.
It was beautiful, hilly country. The leaves had just begun turning. Splashes and trills of scarlet and orange leaves flared in the sunset and then vanished. The sky deepened quickly from blue to slate.
In the backseat, Muffin sang songs she remembered from her own babyhood, not so long ago. “Ride a pretty little horsey,” she sang to Sam.
At a twenty-four-hour convenience store (convenient to whom? There were no houses!) Kit turned left on Hennicot Road. Hennicot Road was just there; it seemed to serve no houses, no schools, no stores, no population whatsoever. It seemed not to go anywhere except farther and farther away. Muffin’s earlier question, the one Kit had answered so casually, sprang back into her mind. Why hadn’t the new parents come to the hospital?
Kit had not done much driving in the dark, but then, where she lived, it never really got dark. Every road — and her part of the state was a solid interweaving of roads — was lined with streetlights, and every store stayed open late, glowing with light, so darkness was only an occasional pocket.
Here, the trees closed overhead and the road tunneled beneath them, and she no longer knew what the sky was doing. Hennicot Road had potholes. Not ordinary potholes from the weight of trucks and the convulsions of freezing weather. Old crumbling holes, as if so few people drove here there was no reason to repave.
Kit had never been any place that was not full of people.
The huge sprawl that was New York City, that extended deep into New Jersey, had vanished. She was in a country she did not know; had not known existed. They went past the kind of house where people married their relatives, and had snarly foxy dogs that bit, and used the insides of cars for porch chairs.
“Aaaaahhhhhh, Kit!” shrieked Muffin.
Kit’s fingers went into spasm on the wheel.
“He’s going to the bathroom all over the place. He stinks! He’s worse than the oil tank farms on the New Jersey Turnpike! You have to change him. Drive over there to that diner. We’ll use their restroom to wash up in.”
He did stink. His smell slowly filled the Volvo.
Muffin was right about the diner. Lenore’s Breakfast and Lunch, it said. Kit was sorry Lenore didn’t serve dinner. She needed human beings. She would have gone in and ordered anything, just to be among people. Gratefully, Kit pulled into the parking lot. When she turned off the motor, she realized the diner was boarded up.
Plywood nailed over windows had split with age. Long peels of wooden layers hung at angles. A padlock on the front door hung open. An abandoned Dumpster overflowed with trash. Weeds grew up through the gravel, and vines were lifting the shingles from the roof of the diner.
Muffin climbed into the front seat. “He’s icky,” she said. “I’m not touching anybody icky.”
“Some baby-sitter you are,” said Kit.
The silence of the car and the silence outside the car was too much. Kit turned the ignition, got the radio again, and clicked the all-door lock. Then she got herself out of her seat belt, hauled herself to her knees, and leaned way over the seat back to examine the damage Sam the Baby had wrought. “Oh, for a pair of glov
es,” she said. He had diarrhea all the way up his little back and halfway down his little legs. He smelled like a family of skunks.
Holding her breath, vowing that she herself would have babies who were neat and careful about this kind of thing, she had to use about ten of the baby wipes Dusty had tucked into the carrier. Now, what was she supposed to do with his disgusting clothes, his very used diaper, and all these revolting baby wipes?
She wrapped all of it up in one of his two blankets and looked out into the darkness. The entire property was one big garbage can. Kit, who recycled all things at all times, hurled her disgusting bundle into the chaos of old televisions, beer cans, and car parts. Then she rolled the window back up and turned on the heater to dry the baby’s clean bare body. Kit could not help bending forward and kissing his round tummy. She had not known that the nakedness of babies, the perfection of their little bodies, was so beautiful.
“Stay asleep, Sam,” she whispered. His breathing continued uninterrupted. He didn’t know she was talking to him. He knew nothing but the inside of his sleepy little world. He felt safe enough to sleep. He trusted her with his little self.
He trusts me, thought Kit.
He had put his little life into her arms. All his world was her choice. Either she would take good care of him — or she would not.
Oh, Sam the Baby! thought Kit. Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve made me your mother, or sitter, or sister. If I could choose, which would I be? I don’t want to be anybody’s mother yet. I’ve never liked baby-sitting. That leaves sister. What if you are my brother? I’ll be giving up my own brother to a pack of strangers.
I should have called Dad. I should have gone home and waited for Mom to get back from shopping, like Row said. Or maybe even called Malcolm. I can’t even tell if I’m taking good care of you, Sam. You look fine, but was that kind of diarrhea fine? And this is the last diaper in the package.
She wrapped him, bare except for his diaper, inside the remaining blanket, tucking the end in until he was a papoose: no arms, no legs, just his shining face.
She ordered Muffin to get in back with him.
“What if he gets stinky again?” said Muffin.
“Impossible. There’s nothing left inside him.” She scrubbed her hands with the last baby wipe and set off. Over and over, she muttered the directions. “Right on Swamp Maple.”
This whole day was a swamp. Where were these people? Where on earth did Cinda and Burt live? And why? There was no other traffic. In this very heavily populated state, hers was the only car on the road.
Swamp Maple wound among hills and through woods and next to silent still ponds.
At one-point-six miles, Cinda had said, on the left, you’ll see a broken white picket fence. Turn left and go down the drive in the center of the fence.
There was the fence, white, and very broken.
The fence pickets were sharply pointed like toothpicks, whole sections smashed as if some angry person had driven right through. Her headlights caught trees strangled by wild grapevines, and in one place the vines had hoisted a piece of broken fence into the air.
“This,” said Muffin, “is the spookiest place I’ve ever been in my life.”
Kit stopped in the middle of the road, staring at the driveway to Burt and Cinda’s. There weren’t many places in the state of New Jersey where you could stop in the middle of the road and not worry about horns blaring in your ears and cars ripping past you because you were delaying them five seconds.
“The woods are going to eat us,” said Muffin.
“Don’t be silly,” said Kit. “Probably when we get to their house, it’ll be this beautiful mansion with horses in a green field. This is Burt and Cinda’s weekend home, where they come for peace and quiet.”
Kit turned into the lane. She’d never driven on gravel and it seemed to talk under her tires, arguing with her. Little stones spit out the sides. The woods were dark, viney, and wet. She would have turned around, except the road was so narrow, there was no way to turn around. She hardly knew how to back up. She only went places where she could go forward.
“Or maybe,” said Muffin, “they’re witches and this is their coven.”
And now the gravel and the woods ended and became meadow, and it turned out that the sun had not finished setting, but just vanished behind the thickness of forest. A great swath of purple and rose sky welcomed them.
Silhouetted against the sky was a sweet little cottage with shutters at the windows, flowers in beds, and cars parked in the driveway. The drive made a little oval, so Kit was automatically facing home again and did not have to panic over how she was going to turn around.
Already people were bursting out of the house. Three people — two men and a woman — the woman way ahead of the men.
The woman had to be Cinda.
Cinda was thin in a lean strong way, as if she spent her life running toward something. She was maybe thirty. She wore a plain gray T-shirt, hanging down over khaki pants. She had chosen large black-rimmed glasses, as if her dream were to be mistaken for a computer geek. Cinda was pumped. It made Kit smile to see her. Kit adored Sam the Baby, and now here was his mommy, come to snuggle and hug for the very first time.
And yet… and yet…
Ed was chugging behind Cinda, and in the settling dusk he looked more civilized; his pockmarks didn’t show, nor his yellow gnarly hands. Had Kit misjudged him?
Behind them, walking slowly, almost dragging, came another man, who must be Burt. He wore blue jeans so new and starchy-looking they’d probably stand up on their own, but his pullover sweater was misshapen and the neckline was unraveling. He did not smile but glanced twice at his watch, and when he drew up to the car, it was not the baby he looked at, nor his wife, nor Kit, but Ed Bing.
Cinda was tugging at the back door to get her hands on Sam, but all four doors were locked.
Cinda and Ed, but not Burt, stooped to look inside the Volvo, peering and squinting, and again Ed cupped his hands to see better, and his eyes surrounded by his fat fists were red and glaring. Kit clicked the locks undone, and Cinda opened the back door.
Row tuned the radio to an all-news-all-the-time station. There had been every kind of crime, from the new ATM scam to the old drunk driving tragedy. But no kidnapping.
He was ill with worry.
This had never happened to him before. Even the night before his SATs, even the hour before his first varsity game, he had not felt this sick roiling in his gut.
At first he thought he might actually be sick, and Mom would expect him to go home, take an aspirin, and go to bed early. But if there was one thing Row hated more than being sick, it was giving in to being sick. All his life, he’d hated going to bed.
What were his choices, here, now that he’d let Kit and Muffin drive away without him? He could go to Shea’s and twiddle around, waiting to see if they got back safely. But this would involve explanations to Aunt Karen and Uncle Anthony, and although his aunt and uncle seemed flaky to strangers, it was a facade. Messy, noisy, chaotic, and wacky — but they were very very careful of their children. Shea, who was the youngest — her two brothers were in college — did not do anything without supervision.
He, Rowen Mason, age sixteen, with an IQ many points above Dusty’s had been just as much of a jerk.
He had let Kit drive off into the unknown— truly unknown! He himself had said that these people are seriously hiding from their fellow humans — and he’d let his nine-year-old sister go along! All they knew of Cinda, Burt, and Ed was that Kit was afraid of Ed, and Ed expressed himself by driving over flower beds.
Rowen comforted himself with the fact that Ed Bing really was Dusty’s cousin. Therefore the whole thing had a certain in-the-family safety net. But why had Dusty disappeared? Why hadn’t the adopting parents gotten the baby at the hospital? Had Dusty changed her mind about giving up Sam the Baby? She had certainly made up her mind fast enough when she had a chance to give the baby to Kit.
Rowen
had not even wanted to touch the baby. It was too little. It didn’t look like babies in ads for tires or insurance. It looked all red and sunken. Even its little sob was scrawny. Had he ever been that little?
And when he was, had Mom and Dad tossed him here and there, driving away, forgetting to tell people his name?
Mom and Dad were out.
But Aunt Karen and Uncle Anthony were home.
He wanted to ask them what they thought, but he knew what they would think. They would be furious and appalled. They would not even waste time yelling at him. They might actually call the police. He might have to admit to the police that yes, his nine-year-old sister, an unknown baby, and a teenage friend of his had driven off into the back of beyond because of one phone call from a strange voice. And he, Row, had said huffily, you’re being dumb — and then let them do it. He should have insisted on an adult’s advice before Kit took off, and if Kit wouldn’t change her mind, he should have gone, too.
He had had them all in his own car, and he could have done the driving, or simply driven to a better destination — Aunt Karen and Uncle Anthony’s.
He changed radio stations, hoping to be distracted by some decent music. But it was news hour everywhere. The ATM scam was big stuff; events were unfolding at this very moment. Police were expecting to make arrests shortly. Things, said the spokeswoman importantly, were happening fast.
If something happens, thought Row, and I’m not there …
But what could happen?
What was he afraid of?
He drove aimlessly.
Usually Rowen found this totally satisfying, exploring every road, testing every intersection. Now he circled near Kit’s father’s house, trying to remember the directions Cinda had given over the phone. Route 80 West — and then what?
Route 80 went all the way to California.
Muffin was pleased with the new family.
The house was the kind that would be full of happy dogs and sleeping cats and stuffed teddy bears and baskets of rose petals. There would be a refrigerator jammed with nibbly things; and the new mommy would want them to sit down and have something yummy to eat and get to know the baby together and talk about everything, but none of this mattered.