The Lit Report (12 page)

My heart started to pound as I thought about what had just happened and what had to happen next. Jane gave a tiny burp and I looked down at her pursed lips and the sweep of her eyelashes and I shuddered. It was so different from Boone's birth. There was no nursery all ready for Jane, no cute little bassinet, no designer baby quilts. Just a wicker basket lined with an old flannel sheet. It didn't seem right or fair, but it had to be done. We'd agreed.

“She's sleeping now,” Jonah said when he came out of Ruth's room. “She's pretty upset though.” He paused and I could see him take in the fact that I, too, was not exactly relaxed. “You okay?” he asked. “You look pretty stressed. I'll hold Jane if you like.”

The look on my face must have said it all. That's what it's like when someone knows you really well. You can't get away with jackshit.

“Julia,” he said softly. “It's gonna be okay. Jane will be fine. We'll make sure of that. Right now you need to get
some rest. Uncle Jonah will look after her.” He held out his arms and I walked into them, baby and all. We stood that way for a few minutes, swaying together in the kitchen, and then he gently prised Jane away from me, wrapped her in his fleece jacket and walked out onto the dark front porch. I could hear him singing “Summertime” to her as I dragged myself into the second bedroom and collapsed onto the bed. “Your daddy's rich and your momma's good-lookin'” my ass.

WHEN I WOKE UP
, it was still dark, Ruth and Jonah were arguing, and Jane was wailing. I staggered into the kitchen. Jonah was sitting at the kitchen table. Jane was snuggled into the crook of his left arm and a bottle of formula was poised over her open mouth. Her face was red and contorted, not unlike her mother's. Ruth was standing over Jonah. The best word to describe her was “drenched.” She was crying (could she possibly have been crying all the time I was sleeping?) and the front of her T-shirt was soaked—with tears and snot and something I knew was called colostrum, which is the super-nutritious stuff women produce right after birth.

“Give her to me,” Ruth yelled.

“We talked about this,” Jonah said calmly. “She needs to get used to a bottle.”

“No, she doesn't.” Ruth made a grab for the bottle and missed. Jane sounded as if she was in pain. Maybe she was.

“Babies pick up on emotions, you know,” I said. “Jane should be hearing laughter and lullabies. She should be eating and pooping and sleeping in a cocoon of love, not a hive of anger. The sooner we give her up, the sooner she'll have all that.

“Give her to me,” I said to Jonah. “Stop yelling,” I said to Ruth. “It's bad for Jane.”

“But, Julia...” Jonah started to argue with me, but something in my expression stopped him. He shrugged and handed Jane and the bottle to me. She stopped wailing as I wiggled the nipple into her mouth, praying that she would know what to do. Ruth collapsed into a rocking chair, sobbing and hugging her chest. The room was silent except for the squeak of the rockers. Jane wasn't sucking. She turned her head away from the nipple every time I put it near her lips. After a few minutes, she started to scream again. The more I tried to get her to take the bottle, the louder she screamed.

Ruth stood up and walked over to me. “She's starving, Julia. And I'm exploding. Give her to me. I never said I'd let her starve.”

“She'll get used to the bottle. It only stands to reason.” I looked at Jonah and he shook his head.

“Ruth's right, Julia,” he said. “Starving her wasn't part of the deal.”

I couldn't believe it—months of planning and sacrifice were going down the drain because my candy-assed so-called
boyfriend couldn't take listening to a baby cry? I shoved the baby at Ruth and turned to leave the room. “You guys are on your own, then,” I snapped. “I'm done.”

“Don't be like that, Jules,” Jonah said, grabbing my elbow as I stomped past him. “Just let Ruthie feed her, and we'll work something out.”

“Not with me, you won't,” I said. “I'm going back to sleep.” The last thing I heard as I left the room was the slurpy snuffle of a happy baby. I glanced back from the doorway: Ruth's eyes were closed and a small smile—the first I'd seen in a while—had crept across her face. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought she'd done this before. I'd read all about how difficult breastfeeding can be, and I'd seen it firsthand with Miki and Boone. Boone just couldn't get the hang of it, and Miki was going out of her mind. Jane, on the other hand, latched onto Ruth's nipple like a regular milking machine. Go figure.

I MUST HAVE
slept for twelve hours. When I got up, the sun was shining, and Jane was asleep in the basket I had prepared for her to be given away in. It was the kind of huge basket that hotels fill with fruit and chocolate and booze for celebrity guests. Jane deserved better, I thought; she was infinitely more precious than any bottle of hundred-year-old champagne. Her price, as they say in the Bible, was above rubies.
And yet she was a gift we had to give away. This was taking re-gifting to a whole new level.

JONAH AND I
slept together the next night. And I mean slept. We didn't even take off our clothes, and I hardly thought at all about having hot monkey sex. I was still pretty pissed at him for siding with Ruth. When I woke up, he was snoring gently into my right ear. I started to get up, but he reached for me and pulled me back down.

“Ruth wants to keep her, you know,” he murmured.

I nodded into his chest. “And you don't? Coulda fooled me.”

He sighed. “I know all the reasons for giving her up, but...yeah. It seems wrong to give her away. Really wrong. I mean...she's blood, Jules. My blood. Ruth's. Mom and Dad's.”

“But they won't let Ruth keep her. You know that.”

“I know,” he said. “But I don't think Ruth's going to give her up without a fight. And maybe not even then.”

He rolled onto his back and stretched. I laid my head on his chest and listened to his heart. When Jane started to cry in the next room, his heart speeded up. So did mine. He'd fallen in love—with a baby. I wondered where that left me.

FOR THE NEXT
ten days, Ruth and Jonah worshipped the mini-goddess they called JJ—for Just Jane, I guess. I still called her Jane. They followed her rhythm of sleeping, waking and eating; they marveled at the fact that her poo didn't stink; they sang the praises of her magnificent appetite and her ability to burp on demand; they made her a crown of wildflowers and a shrine of candles in empty formula bottles. Jonah fashioned a cool baby sling out of a blanket and took her for walks by the lake while Ruth slept. Every three hours, like clockwork, Jane ate. At night Jonah was with me, but he was too tired to do much more than kiss me before he fell asleep. I read and slept and took solitary swims in the lake while Jonah cooked, washed dishes and did the laundry.

There was a lovely dreamy quality to those days, even though Ruth and I weren't actually talking. I knew none of it would last—my anger, the silence between me and Ruth, the nights with Jonah—but it was summer and we were teenagers at a lake without our parents. Ruth went swimming, her belly and boobs exploding out of her bikini as she cannonballed off the dock. She bathed Jane in a dishpan and dried her with a sun-warmed towel. When Jane's little umbilical cord stump fell off, Ruth made a necklace out of it with a piece of string.

I knew there was no way Ruth was giving Jane up. She adored her. So did Jonah. So did I, for that matter, but it didn't stop me from trying to convince Ruth to change her mind.
I finally gave up when Ruth tossed the van keys to Jonah and told him to drive me to the nearest town so I could catch a bus home.

“Stop being such a bitch, Julia,” she said. “I'm keeping JJ, and I don't need you telling me what a bad idea it is. I know this isn't what we planned, but it's what I want. So either suck it up or fuck off.” She glared at me. “Did it ever occur to you that this isn't about you? You can walk away any time you like. So do it. Go make other plans, ‘cause I'm done having you make mine. Yeah, I know everything's gone sideways on you, but that's when the fun begins. When things get interesting. But that's not the Julia Riley way, is it?”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get it. I don't happen to agree”—Ruth rolled her eyes—”but I'd still like to stay, if that's okay with you.”

Ruth and Jonah exchanged glances and Ruth nodded. “On two conditions,” she said.

“What's that?”

“You let me give JJ a middle name.”

I nodded.

“And you take the pole out of your butt.”

RUTH HAD A
few days when she was restless and irritable, but her baby blues didn't last. She couldn't get enough of
Jane, and Jane, in return, was the most contented baby on earth. Ruth sang to her—”Hush little baby, don't say a word, Mama's going to buy you a red T-bird”—and told her weird stories about a talking gopher named Dr. Ramos. Jane seemed to love it all. Ruth was a natural-born mother. Who knew? I still didn't think she should keep Jane, but I kept my mouth shut and the pole out of my ass. I was surprisingly comfortable.

“I'm really good at this, aren't I?” she said a few days before we were due to leave the cabin in the second week of August. We were all sitting around the kitchen watching Jane blow bubbles. I highly recommend it as a way to pass an evening, by the way. Beats reality television, for sure.

“So, what's the plan?” I asked. Ruth shifted Jane onto her shoulder and patted her back. Jane obliged with a belch that would make a frat boy proud.

“Go home. Face the music. See how Pete and Peggy react,” Jonah said.

Ruth snorted. “Wow. Awesome plan. Wish I'd thought of it myself.”

Jonah got up and went outside, where we could see him pacing the porch.

“What do you suggest, then?” I asked. “You can't just disappear with her. You have to go home sometime.”

“I'm not giving her up.” Ruth glared at me and I held my hands up, palms out.

“You're preaching to the choir, sister.”

“I'm not so sure,” Ruth said. “At least Jonah loves JJ. He's even been talking about delaying going to cooking school.”

My eyes widened. “He'd do that for you?”

“Yup,” she said.

“Wow. No way you should let him, but wow.”

“Yeah, but he doesn't go for another month anyway, so he'll help me out with Pete and Peggy. Maybe they'll surprise me.”

I gave a short bark of a laugh. “Only if you tell them it was an immaculate conception.”

“Where's Papa going with that axe?”

—E.B. White,
Charlotte's Web

I have read
Charlotte's Web
once a year, on my birthday, since I was eight. I never get tired of it. If I ever have a son, I'm going to name him Wilbur. Okay, maybe not his first name, but his second for sure. At first I loved the pictures almost as much as I loved the story, but mostly I love the way it's written. E.B. White never uses more or bigger words than he has to. He writes about really important things like birth and death, the love between true friends, the value of imagination, but he's got a sense of humor about it all. For a while I went around saying “Salutations!” instead of “Hello,” until my mother threatened to take the book away. I learned the names for the seven sections of a spider's leg from
Charlotte's Web
. I also learned the meaning of the words
languishing
and
spinnerets
and
gullible
. Charlotte saves Wilbur's life
with words:
Some Pig, Radiant, Terrific
and finally
Humble
. As Ruth and Jane and Jonah and I drove back from the lake, I wondered if there were any words that could save Ruth from the wrath of her parents. I didn't think a sign over Jane's head that said
Some Baby
would work, but we had to do something—Ruth, Jonah and me. We'd talked of nothing else for days, but short of a miracle—like Pete and Peggy suddenly becoming decent, loving, sane parents— we hadn't come up with anything more original than presenting a united front.

“Maybe they'll see her and fall in love, like we did,” Ruth said dreamily from the backseat, where she was nursing Jane.

Jonah and I glanced at each other; he raised his eyebrows. I shrugged and crossed my eyes. Ruth was obviously in some hormonal la-la land. We were twenty minutes away from her house, and I wanted to puke. We planned to go in together and, if necessary, protect Ruth and Jane from the axe of Pastor Pete's sure-to-be-biblical judgment. Unlike Fern's father in
Charlotte's Web
, I couldn't see Pastor Pete's eyes brimming with tears at the sight of this brand-new miracle. I couldn't see Peggy welcoming Jane into her house the way Fern's mother welcomed Wilbur. Jane would be an embarrassment to them, a betrayal of their beliefs, a source of shame and ridicule. Pete would act like Ruth was a whore, and Peggy, good Christian wife that she is, would back him up. Our plan was to give them a chance to do the
right thing, and if they didn't, we'd go to my house. That was it. The grand plan. I had called my mother to let her know I was on my way home. I had neglected to tell her I might not be alone.

We pulled into Ruth's driveway and parked behind Peggy's old beige Toyota. Pete was mowing the lawn.

“Shit,” said Ruth. “They're home. We're screwed.”

She looked ill, as if she'd only just that minute realized what we were about to face. Jane was in her basket beside Ruth on the backseat and she started to stir and whimper. In a couple of minutes, her siren wail would cut through the sound of the lawn mower, and the shitstorm would rain down. Jonah started to unload the van, and I got out to help Ruth with Jane. The front door opened, and Peggy came out just as Pete turned off the mower and bounded over to the van. Their collective double take was priceless, like a cartoon. They literally recoiled when they saw what was in the basket. Pete almost fell on his ass.