was alive, and there was a “no pets” rule in her building.
It was alive. She had hated dogs all her life.
It was alive, alone, and helpless, about to die. She remembered that feeling.
It laid its nose down on the crumpled newspapers and sighed, just the faintest whisper of sound-colored air.
“Oh, hell,” she said, tossing her paper to the side. She reached out with mittened hands, plucked the little thing from its newspaper nest, and slipped it into her coat pocket. Maybe tomorrow she could take it somewhere—the Humane Society, or something—get rid of it.
Maybe it was crawling with parasites and they had just infested her coat. She remembered seeing a dead bird once, looking at it closely and seeing the mites crawling over its feathers. Maybe she’d have to fumigate her whole apartment if she took it up there. Whereas now, only her coat and mittens were at risk. She could toss them, puppy and all, into the dumpster and go upstairs, unpolluted.
It squirmed in her pocket, a tiny live weight against her hip.
“Oh, hell.”
She went back inside and took the elevator up to her floor.
Warm, not hot, the water she ran into the blue sink in her cluttered bathroom. She bathed the tiny thing with antibacterial soap, and realized that it wasn’t so very dirty. It smelled mostly of coffee grounds from the dumpster.
Warm, not hot, the milk she put into one of her pink rubber dishwashing gloves. The puppy suckled from a pin-pricked index finger, tugging with more strength than she had thought possible. Its tiny belly tightened and tautened like a tambourine.
She pulled the smallest drawer from her dresser and dumped her underwear in with her slacks. She lined the bottom of the drawer with torn brown towels, then snuggled the puppy in next to a hot water bottle, warm, almost hot. The puppy gave a satisfied groan and fell asleep.
In the morning, the puppy was gone. In its place lay a tiny curled human baby, its forehead and hands and knees pressed up against the now cool hot water bottle.
Staring down at it, Claire felt her throat constrict, her body freeze. What was it? Had she only dreamed the puppy? Why had her eyes seen it wrong last night? Was this some kind of psychological trick she was playing on herself? Like her mother had suggested, some unconscious longing for the children her husband wouldn’t give her? He had laughed when she talked to him about it. “Claire, you give new dimensions to the word ‘unfit,’” he had said.
Strangest of all, this baby didn’t look big enough to be born.
She knelt beside the drawer and watched it, saw its ribbed sides moving in and out. It was breathing. Breathing and naked, and, in some perverse way, beautiful, like a delicate mechanical nightingale.
It rolled itself over, as if sensing her, and opened pink mouth and milky blue eyes. “Uh, uh, uh,” it said, sounding like a grunting puppy again.
Maybe it had sounded like a puppy and been a baby all along. She had slipped it into her pocket so quickly…but during the bath she had taken a good look at it, enough to know that it was male. Which she could still tell; in fact, it made a little fountain that arched toward her and fell back to the rags.
Grimacing, she mopped off the little thing, moved it away from the wet rags it had just created, and lifted the water bottle away, too.
“Uh, uh,” the thing muttered, waving its arms and legs.
Most of all Claire wanted to wash her hands, literally and figuratively. If only she hadn’t taken the trash out after midnight, she would never have even seen the thing. It could have died unmourned and unnoticed, leaving her without any stain on her memory or conscience.
What she wanted was to be alone in her apartment, snuggled in a blanket, warming her hands around a cup of fragrant cocoa, the windows curtained against the cold, the TV tuned to American Movie Classics—something with Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn. Her own little vision of heaven, one she had almost managed to live out. She fantasized about it, but when she was actually on the couch, cocoa and remote in hand, there was always something missing, a restlessness stirring in her gut that told her this wasn’t right, this wasn’t enough.
Now she had to worry about Pampers and formula and God knew what else. It had been a long time since she had checked Dr. Spock out of the library, reading him on the sly, wondering if there was any way to sneak a baby out of her husband without him knowing. That was before she found out what kind of operation he’d performed on her when he had told her he was taking her appendix out.
Before she started reading his medical texts, paying particular attention to toxicology.
But all that was across state lines, left behind with her previous name and everything she had owned as a child. She had taken only some money and his diaries. Nobody outside the house knew the diaries even existed, so she figured no one would know they were missing.
The baby whined, reaching toward her.
“Oh, hell,” she said. She draped a dry towel over it to keep it warm, and went to heat some milk.
* * * *
At first she thought of giving it to some agency—the police, Social Services, whatever they called it. With her sleep chopped up, diapers to import and dispose of secretly, the drain on her meager secretarial income from providing for infant needs, the smell, the mess, the fact that she never really knew what it wanted but could only hope she was giving it something that satisfied, her thoughts were dark and terrible some of the time. She considered sticking pins into it, or gumming its mouth shut with duct tape so even the small whimpering sounds it made couldn’t come out, especially when she was having trouble getting to sleep.
But time passed; the little thing integrated into her schedule. She never got around to making those calls.
* * * *
She named him Rubio, “blond” in Spanish, though he had very little hair at first, and what he had was dark. He would swallow formula with ease, but he liked the baby food with meat in it most. After she got over her first hesitation, she enjoyed keeping him warm and dry and powdered, snuggled up, well fed.
Of course, there wasn’t much she could do for him while she was at work, but she did poke some holes through the top of the dresser with an ice pick so he could get light and air even when she closed the drawer he was in, which she had to; couldn’t have anybody hearing him cry, knowing she had something she shouldn’t have in the apartment. The thousand dollars she had discovered in her husband’s sock drawer and used as getaway money was all gone. She couldn’t afford to move, and the building was for singles only. Fortunately, Rubio didn’t make a lot of noise.
Now when she curled up in a blanket on the couch, he snuggled against her, at first a tiny weight with warmth and movement, gradually growing. Her stomach didn’t feel so hollow anymore.
She’d had him almost a month when he changed again.
* * * *
The sun set at 4:30, and cold air was clawing at the windows. She had rolled towels along the windowsills to catch the condensation drips before they mildewed. After peering out the windows at the frozen night, she closed all the curtains, the way she did every night as soon as the sky darkened and there was a chance someone could see in.
