Swell Zine: Born Again

A man leaves a baby unattended in a car. They're at a mall, a popular suburban mall, where Cathy's been parked for the last half hour in a state of lethargy, debating whether to actually go in. She's seen a man in a turban, presumably the father, walk away from the car never looking back as he headed for the entrance. And then the baby starts to cry. She thinks dot head, she thinks it, then she thinks of her poor son, Murray, and apathy morphs into energy as she prepares a rescue.

Peering inside the partially opened window, she sees the baby is maybe three months old and on closer examination, has a pink ribbon in its hair. She opens the door, unbuckles the car seat and lifts it out, baby and all, and carries it to her own car.

The baby stops crying, just stops, for reasons unknown. I've got the knack, thinks Cathy. Children love me, she thinks. She sets her radio to a retro station which has a Santana oldie playing. "Get ready to rock," Cathy says.

She lights a Pall Mall and blows smoke rings out the window. The father was probably in the mall looking for some sexy underwear or something, something interesting for his wife to wear underneath that sari crap the women had to wear. Too bad, thinks Cathy. Look what you lost while you got your wife some new American duds.

Cathy looks into the car mirror and catches her small, blunt features lost inside the wide, flat plains of her face; a pale, pasty face, like a bowl of mush. It's a face that reminds her of her mother's, which she hates almost as much as she hates her own, and the fact that it makes people think she's stupid when of course she's not. Stupid people didn't think they looked stupid, now did they? Nor did they read a book nearly every week, like the one she was reading now about an autistic woman who can't talk to people but can talk to animals, which was pretty amazing when you stopped to think about it. Plus, she was taking classes at the local college to learn about computers. How stupid was that?

Of course if her mother were to hear about this, she'd toss a fit like always. Like when Cathy told her she was pregnant with Murray. "Jackass," her mother spat at her. Her mother never visits or even asks about Murray. Why tell her anything? Why tell anyone?Let the stupid parent suddenly remember he left his kid in the car and rush from the mall in terror of not finding it, and rush to the security guards who will ask how come you left it in the car all by itself and have the parent live a lifetime of guilt and grief and never know who it turned out to be. A clerk in a video store. A gynecologist. A waitress in a downtown bar who does tricks on the side.

She adjusts the mirror so she can see it while she smokes. So when she talks to it, it will know it's her talking.

She backs the car up slowly, drives out of the shopping mall lot and manages to ease her old Merc onto Skokie Boulevard without pissing anyone off. Once out of the suburbs and into the familiar stop and go traffic of the city, Cathy stops to turn around and sees that it's sleeping.

She remembers when Murray was a baby, a soft sweet little baby who grew up like any regular kid grows up. Except at some point Murray stopped being a regular kid and started hearing the voices. It was the voices who told him to put the goldfish in the microwave and his little friend Joey in the clothes dryer. He was maybe eight or nine years old when he started doing these things. She thought about how she accidentally dropped him when he was two months old, always wondering if that had made him the way he was, even though the doctors said no. He had the bad genetics, they told her. That was what made him the way he was: an angry kid, a hostile teenager, a pothead, a meth user, the crazy guy on the bus who sees his self float up to the top of the bus, his body still planted on the bus seat.

"He's going to love this to death," she says.

The halfway house is on Sheridan Road by the lake. The building has an open veranda facing the water but despite the warm breezes drifting in from the shore, the entire first floor smells of greasy French fries superimposed by heavy layers of stale smoke. It is enough to make her want to hold her breath as she carries the carseat through the stinking first floor, rounds a corner and finally arrives at the elevator where she runs into Ray 42.

He's with a couple of others who like him, liked to hang around, waiting for something big to happen. Something bigger than the occasional elevator breakdown. She's used to ignoring their dumb comments, ignoring their pleas for money and cigarettes; she listens without hearing, pushes the UP button and prepares to wait. It's a slow elevator. She's waited sometimes for nearly half an hour.

Ray 42 notices she doesn't have a free hand to shake today but he comes over anyway, and then sure enough, out comes his hand. She knows what's coming. He's going to say, "Hi, I'm Ray, I'm 42," then insist on shaking her hand, while he leans in and whispers, "Got any change?" Then he does it, the whole spiel, and Cathy sets the carseat down and digs into her pocket, finds 50 cents and gives it to him because she always does - because if you don't, a look comes over his poor, screwed up face, and that's the one thing she can't stand, that look on his face - and then the elevator arrives and they arrive on the fifth floor and there at the end of the hall in a room with three other messed up guys is Murray.

He lies away from her on his side with his hand in his pants, and she sees what he's doing and turns the carseat away so it doesn't see him too.

"Murray," she says loudly. "Murray, cut it out, I've got something for you. Murray, you listening?"

Murray turns over and looks at her and an angry frown bunches up on his once handsome face, and she steps back.

He adjusts himself to a sitting position, and angrily stares at her, the whites of his eyes enormous.

"Hey, I brought you something. Look," she says, and holds the carseat out to him so he can see it better. "See? See its face? Whaddya think? Cute, huh?"

Murray just stares at her with the huge white part of his eyes, then suddenly his face breaks into a wide grin, and he lets out a laugh.

This is the moment that Cathy lives for, that widens her heart and fills her lungs with so much air she feels lightheaded. It's the moment that makes worthwhile the events that have occurred over the past twenty-two years of Murray's tortured life.

He was, as far as Cathy could tell, an immaculate conception. When she was sixteen, she and her girlfriend, Maggie, stole two bottles of gin from Maggie's parent's house. Holed up in Maggie's bedroom they dizzily polished off both bottles, only somewhat aware that Maggie's brother Frank and two of his friends roamed the basement of the house. Two days later, when Cathy was sober, she was pregnant with Murray.

Murray did not look like Frank or his friends, he didn't look like anyone. He did not even look like Cathy. No one in Cathy's family had Murray's curly dark hair, or his thin face and finely boned features. Nor could she remember the act that supposedly conceived him. Maggie swore it was only her touching Cathy, it was only her fingers, her exploring tongue inside of her.

She was seventeen when Murray was born. They lived with Cathy's mother, who did not relish being a grandmother, young or otherwise. Cathy went back to work at her job in a motel near the airport cleaning the rooms and changing the cum sheets. If anyone asked, she told them she was in hotel management. Only Maggie knew the truth. Sometimes, when the management wasn't watching, they would sneak into one of the freshly cleaned rooms and make love on one of the lumpy beds.

Maggie was now a Born Again, and if that wasn't bad enough, she was married. When Cathy thought about Maggie, which she did most every day, she remembered her as her one and only true love. Sometimes she drove by Maggie's apartment and sat in her car, waiting to get a glimpse of Maggie if she happened to walk by an open window. She dreamed about Maggie a lot too. Sometimes she dreamed the hole had closed from not using it. Since Maggie, she had been with only one other woman and that was maybe five years ago.

Cathy would be forty this month. A year ago, she moved back home to care for her mother who suffered from vague stomach complaints and spent a good portion of her day in the bathroom. Cathy now worked for a hotel chain, a big one, but the work was the same. Even the cum sheets were the same.

The baby awakens, starts to cry. Cathy looks at it, feels its diaper is wet. "We have to go now, Murray," Cathy says. "Be good now. I can't stay today. I'll come back tomorrow and we'll play cards, ok?" She kisses the top of his head, and he lifts one finger, which she takes as "Ok."

She stops at a Jewel, buys disposable diapers, baby wipes, plastic bottles, nipples, and formula - Similac, like she used for Murray. No breast milk for him, no breast milk for this one either, she thinks, and tries to remember how Maggie's lips felt on her breast.

At the three story apartment building, Cathy scans the bells and finds the one she wants: Watson. She sets the carseat down next to her inside the outer hallway, and presses the bell.

She bends over the carseat and adjust the baby's blanket. "She's going to flip," she whispers.

A moment later, she's buzzed inside, and Maggie's voice rings down from the second floor.

Cathy leaps up the two flights of stairs, and breathless, stands before Maggie, smiling foolishly. "Where's the husband?" she asks.

Maggie looks at her, and a smile slips out, despite herself. "At work. He's doing an estate sale."

Maggie hesitates for a long moment, then steps back, allowing entrance into the small but tidy apartment.

Cathy steps back and looks at her. It had been a long time since Cathy last saw her, but she still looked good. Good enough to eat, she thinks. "You used to. Remember?"

Maggie shakes her head no. Her long, reddish blonde hair swirls around her plain, pleasing face.

"Come on," says Cathy, moving in to kiss her. "Come on," she says softly and kisses her face, her neck, her collarbone, and moves down to the opening in her blouse.

She can hear Maggie's jagged breathing, and moves her other hand down the seam of her jeans, slides open the zipper, and slips inside. How long has it been, wonders Cathy. All those cum sheets, she thinks giddily.

She can hear Maggie's soft protests, but her body says otherwise. When Maggie comes, she cries out and moments later, when Cathy recovers, she suddenly remembers what she left in the hallway.

"Oh my God, I almost forgot. I brought you something. Wait here."

"What is it about you that makes people forget you?" Cathy asks. The baby cries, its little face grossly twisted, a bad smell filling the close air of the hall. "Okay, I didn't mean it. Come on. I'll change you and you can meet Maggie."

"Where did you get that?" Maggie asks. "What are you up to, Cath?"

"I know that. Don't you think I know that? Now give me a towel or she'll get poop all over your couch, girlfriend."

Changed and fed, rocked and cooed to, the baby finally falls back asleep. Maggie and Cathy lean over, watching her.

"Come with us," says Cathy suddenly. "We'll get our own place and raise her like our own and we can have sex whenever we want to, with our clothes off next time."

"I know you don't, but you just did. Come on Mag. Let's go for a ride. You, me and thiskid. Why not? What could the husband possibly mean to you after what we just did?"

"You don't know nothin," says Maggie, and puts her hands in her face and starts to cry.

"Oh jeez, oh man." Cathy pets Maggie's hair, and tries not to listen to her noises. "You think I want to work at that stinking hole all my life? And come home to my mother sitting on the pot and cursing me out, and on the weekends go to Murray's and watch him wank off in front of his roommates like he's some kind of retard? This is it, Mag. This is the start over I've been waiting for."

Maggie stops crying and for a moment looks at Cathy as if she might be thinking about it all.

"Maybe, maybe not. You in or you out? We need to get out of here. When does the husband arrive? I don't care to meet him, if you know what I mean."

"No, I ain't. I'm not. Time to start speaking the King's English if she's ever going to learn how."

"Well I ain't doing this with you, Cath. I ain't screwing my life up anymore than it already is."

"I'm going to call you Dottie," Cathy says. "If Murray was a girl, that's the name I would have used. No offense, see?" She touches the baby's face, and baby smiles. "Ok then. It's settled. Dottie."

"What do we do now, Dottie? I haven't eaten anything. Maybe we should go to a drive through." Backing the Merc out of her space in front of Maggie's apartment, she heads for the McDonald's on Broadway. On the radio, R.E.M. plays Losing My Religion, and Cathy turns up the volume. "Listen to this guy," she says, "he knows what he's talking about. 'That's me in a corner, that's me in the spotlight, losing my religion.' Ha! I love it. I know just what he means."

She orders a Big Mac and a milk shake, finds a shady parking spot in the lot, then settles back with a Pall Mall. "You need clothes," Cathy says, thinking. "I've got twelve hundred bucks in my checking account, enough to buy you some real American duds and get us all the way to L.A." She looks back and sees Dottie's asleep again.

"Maybe we could get us a hotel room," Cathy says and blows out a smoke ring. She thinks about the first motel she ever worked at. Beachem's was a regular No-Tell Mo-tel. "No scumbag place. Only a first rate place for my girl."

Her first boss was Mickey Beachem himself, a gold-chained, fat man with a fat cigar in his mouth, a cliché of a man who used to tout the wonders of the mirrors he had installed on the ceiling of the rooms. "What are you reading there?" he'd ask her whenever he'd catch her with a book. "Poetry, love? What'll that get you? Let me tell you about life, kid. You want love? Money buys love."

Well she has some money now. And Dottie. They could go where they want and do what they want. She'd raise Dottie like her own child. Better than her own. It was a fresh start.

"Let me tell you something, Beachem," Cathy says. "I do know something about life, and you get a second chance maybe once."

She takes a long look at the sleeping child in her back seat, its dark eyes closed, its beautiful black hair framing its tiny, perfect face. This was a normal child. A beautiful, regular kid some fool forgot about. Well too bad. His loss, her gain. The possibilities were endless with such a child, she thinks as she stubs out her cigarette and puts the car in drive.

S. J. Powers' stories have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Facets, Mississippi Review, StoryQuarterly, Happy, West, SWELL, and elsewhere. She's received two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships and Grants in Prose, and two of her stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives with her partner of eleven years.