Hush Little Baby (19 page)

“Not a bad idea,” said Cinda. Her tears were instantly gone, as if her emotions had faucets. She snickered. Her features settled themselves in creepy animal ways, as if she had turned feral.

Their light was red, but she paid no attention to it, or to the traffic that had the green.

She put her foot on the gas and accelerated, and her crazed laugh filled the car like dollars floating out of a cash machine.

She’s going to kill us, thought Kit.

She’d rather crush herself against a cement wall than go to trial and be proved stupid.

And I’m in the same car.

Muffin sat tight.

She pulled her tummy in and tucked her elbows around Sam. She tried to be the tiniest package there was. She looked out once, and could not look out again.

Ed had parked the car. He had gotten out of it, slamming his door so hard that the car actually rocked. He was so angry that Muffin thought he might try to tip the car over, and she and Sam would fall on their heads. Because fifteen minutes had gone by, and Cinda and Burt were not here with the fifty K.

Or else
was getting closer and closer.

They were not in a rescue place.

In her one look out the window, she’d seen nothing but a mean and scary night. The mist seemed thick and hot, as if it would burn. The night roared, like monsters, and even trembled, like a volcano preparing to erupt, while Ed circled the car, stomping at each corner of the car and smacking the hood or the trunk with his fist. Ed smoked one cigarette after another, sucking them down like Sam with his bottle, except Ed was not satisfied, and halfway through one cigarette would hurl it into the air and start the next, ripping a match down as if decapitating something.

They were alone in this terrible hot light place with its wet air and trembling earth.

Even though Cinda and Burt were not good guys, they weren’t as bad bad guys as Ed was. And Muffin had thought that she and Sam would go with Cinda and Burt, and somehow it would be okay.

But Cinda and Burt were not coming.

And Ed knew it, and he was stomping the bottoms of his feet into the asphalt, because he could do nothing but wait.

How long would Ed wait?

How long before
or else
?

Down on her lap, inside his tiny world, a tiny boy finished his supper.

He finished baby-fashion, falling asleep, so the nipple fell out of his mouth and the last of the milk ran down his cheek and soaked into the old sweater.

Muffin had nothing to wipe his cheek with.

Babies were supposed to have little shirts. And little teeny sneakers with little teeny Velcros. And little teeny bib blue jeans, like miniature farmers. Babies were supposed to have their grandmothers around, and the neighbors, and baby powder on the shelf. Babies were supposed to be sung to, and rocked, and have special wallpaper on the wall.

Sam didn’t know that.

He didn’t know a single thing yet.

But Muffin knew, and what’s more, Dusty knew. Ed knew. Cinda and Burt knew. They all knew.

And they didn’t do it.

They let Sam be a baby and they didn’t treat him like one. They threw him around like the six-pack of milk Ed had thrown into the backseat.

And Muffin knew then that the mommy can’t waste time being scared. The mommy has to take care of things. And there was only one mommy around.

Muffin.

Cinda found the bridge quickly.

It was not the kind of bridge she could drive off. It was the kind of bridge she could drive into. Arching, soaring cement supports lifted another highway over the one Cinda drove on. Cinda had reached seventy-five miles an hour. She aimed for the bridge and Kit could do nothing except cringe behind her seat belt and hope the airbag took care of her. At this speed, she doubted anything could take care of her. She had been too stupid all day to waste the Lord’s time praying for her own safety. In the split second left to her, she prayed for the safety of Sam and Muffin.

But Cinda was a coward.

She took her foot off the gas.

She continued to steer, the Cherokee lost velocity, Kit took the rim of the steering wheel, and said loudly, “Pull over, Cinda. Stop the car.”

Cinda obeyed.

Kit took the keys out of the ignition.

The doors on the right side of the big old Cadillac did not open, because of the dents Ed had put into it, so Muffin and Sam had to get out the door on the left side, where Ed was stomping. She slid her feet out first and thunked herself and Sam onto the pavement.

Ed stormed over. “Where do you think you’re going?”

She put Sam on her shoulder. For a lightweight guy, he could get very heavy, very quick. “We’re getting fresh air.”

He snorted. “There’s a truck stop right over there. Fifty semis idling. There’s no fresh air in this entire state.”

She turned, and now that she was on the outside of the terrible old car and was standing up, she could see the trucks. It was their engines making the roar; their engines making the ground tremble, making the night hot.

It was just trucks, and she had thought it was volcanoes.

Through the mist she could see the shapes of drivers coming and going from their trucks. The drivers were grown-ups. The drivers, thought Muffin Mason, would be daddies.

I’m here, she thought. I need you. Sam needs you. Come get us!

“Get back in the car,” said Ed roughly.

The truck stop was across the road.

The road had eight lanes.

She was marooned here with Ed as if ocean currents and sharks cut her off.

And fathers, daddies, were right there — within sight — to make things fine for Sam, and they didn’t know. They’d come if they knew.

Kit Innes was grateful for other people’s car phones.

No fewer than three drivers had telephoned in the description of Cinda and her license plate and suicidal driving. A police car arrived so fast that Kit didn’t even have to come up with a plan for how to reach them.

The officer was gentle with Cinda. Polite. Complimentary. He told her how smart she was, how sophisticated her programming had been, how she had kept agents in several states wracking their brains.

Kit would have vomited if she had to say that many nice things to Cinda.

The officer agreed with Cinda that it was terrible how Burt had abandoned her, a gentleman would not do that, Cinda had been meant for better things, Cinda with her extraordinary cleverness.

He said, “And where were you supposed to meet Ed? Where did Ed take Muffin and Sam?”

“You can’t blame that on me. I didn’t have a single thing to do with Ed snatching that nine-year-old. That’s his problem.”

“But it is a kind of big problem, Cinda,” said the policeman in a warm, affectionate voice. “Because after all, we have a newborn and a nine-year-old with a dangerous guy, a guy who might hurt them, and you can help. That’s a good thing for you to do. Because you’re in sort of a crummy situation here, you know, and helping would be a good thing to do.”

Cinda could no longer be swept up by the thought of her large brain. Her power to rob was gone. Her power to impress others was gone. But she had one power left. And she was keeping that power.

Cinda smirked at the officer. “I’m not telling,” said Cinda.

I
N SCHOOL LAST YEAR
, when Muffin had been in third grade (a grade Rowen said didn’t even count as school, you didn’t learn anything real in third grade), they had learned about the
Titanic.

A huge ship that sank years and years ago. Before her grandparents had been born. There were many many people on the ship, and most of them did not live, because there were not enough lifeboats. They sank in the icy icy North Atlantic. But that terrible night, when the
Titanic
went down, something had been done for the first time ever.

It didn’t help the
Titanic.

It might help Muffin and Sam.

I did so learn something, Rowen, she thought. And I remember it, too. So there.

“Sam and I are sitting in the front seat,” she said to Ed, holding her chin high. “We’ll listen to the radio.”

Ed opened the door for them, and Muffin’s teeth hurt from the squeal of the hinges. Ed took the car phone and fastened it to his belt loop. He laughed at her, to prove that he had known what she was up to.

Well, he had not known.

“Don’t turn on the radio,” he said. “Stupid car like this, it would run the battery down. You wait till I get my fifty K,
then
I’ll have a decent car.” He slammed the door on them, keeping the phone, but leaving the keys in the ignition, and then he sat on the car itself, he sat on the trunk, facing away from Muffin. He studied the roads, to watch who came. Even if he never looked back at Muffin, she and Sam could not sneak out of the car. The door would scream.

Muffin sturdied herself. She was nine. Nine was old enough to figure things out. Muffin studied the dashboard. She studied the wheel. She studied every button, arm, and lever.

She was too young to have thought much about driving, and she had never thought about this particular aspect of driving. But if you turned the ignition partway, the engine would not run, and no sound would give you away to Ed sitting on the car, but the battery would make power. You could use the headlights.

Across the sea of eight lanes of highway, in the huge truck stop parking lot, were four fathers. They had never met. They didn’t care about one another. They didn’t know one another’s names. They didn’t drive for the same company. All they did was come out of the cafeteria at the same time and head toward their trucks.

Across that sea of highway, through the misty night, they could see a single car parked alone in an empty lot that by day would be filled with thousands of cars. It was too foggy to make out details. But in the fog, the light from the parked car’s headlights expanded, shivered, and hung in the night air.

Three short blips of light.

Three long blips of light.

Three short blips of light.

And then dark.

One trucker shrugged. “Kids,” he said, and got in his truck and drove away.

One trucker said, “Some woman with a flat. I’m not changing it for her. They want equality, let ’em change their own tires.” He drove away.

The third trucker said, “Let’s check it out. I’ve never seen an SOS before.”

“Yeah, we’ll walk over,” said the fourth trucker. “Be a pain to drive.” He opened the door to his own cab and his German shepherd leaped out. It was a huge beautiful dog.

“Your dog safe?” asked the third trucker. The two men headed for the eight-lane highway. Not much traffic. They might have to pick up the pace a little, but they’d run across without trouble.

“Nope. She’s basically pretty mean.”

“You use a leash?”

“Nope. Defeats the purpose.”

They were both laughing as they walked toward the beat-up old sedan. When they got close, they could make out a skinny guy sitting on the trunk, smoking.

The guy was shocked to see them come straight toward him, and he jumped down to the pavement and saw the dog, and saw how the fur on the dog’s shoulders and neck was standing up, and saw that there was no leash, and he got back up on the trunk.

“You rang?” said one trucker to the skinny guy.

“What are you talking about? What are you doing here? Leave me alone. Get out of here!” The guy looked around the parking lot in a frenzied way, but nothing had changed in the parking lot except that the two truckers and the dog had arrived, and all of a sudden the guy put out his cigarette, grinding it down into the hood of his own car like he was killing something, and he began swearing, and screaming about his fifty K, and the truckers thought it must be a drug deal they’d interrupted, and inside the car, huddled against the far passenger door, they saw the little kid with her doll.

“There’s our SOS,” said the dog owner.

The skinny guy vaulted off the hood, yelling what he was going to do to the little girl.

The truckers were not slow. They were used to stupid little cars burping in front of them. They were used to deer crossings and hitchhikers standing too far out in the driving lane.

“Get ’im, Jaws,” said the dog’s owner, which Jaws did, because Jaws liked doing that, and the other trucker opened the car door and picked up a little girl who was not, after all, holding a doll.

By the middle of the night, at the police station there were enough parents to go around.

Muffin’s mother and father hugged her constantly, crying, “Our poor little girl! Our poor baby!” until Muffin was thoroughly annoyed. She had not been a poor little girl. She had made the right decisions and handled things well, especially Sam the Baby and the very first SOS from a superstore parking lot in New Jersey.

It just kept on being true. When you were nine, they didn’t give you credit.

Aunt Karen and Uncle Anthony and Shea arrived with armloads of baby gear, because Aunt Karen had meant to pack Shea’s baby things for fifteen years now, and had only gotten the boxes as far as the fourth step of the attic stairs, so she had easy access to all the blankets and terry jumpsuits Sam the Baby might need.

Shea rushed over to Kit. She seemed a total stranger to Kit: The people Kit knew were Rowen and Muffin and Sam. “How could you leave me out of this?” cried Shea. “Why didn’t you call? I would have loved this! I was watching movies and feeding gerbils while you were having car chases! No fair.”

Kit’s mother and stepfather alternately hugged her and yelled at her. “Why didn’t you tell me when I phoned your father’s house?” demanded her mother. “Why didn’t you tell me you had this baby there? I would have come straight over! None of this would have happened! It was — so —”

“Stupid,” agreed Kit, who had had time to consider brains. “You’re right. I was stupid.”

She felt that Shea wanted to get into this discussion, and motioned her to stay silent.

“Nothing got you out of this nightmare except pure good luck, Kit,” said Malcolm.

Muffin narrowed her eyes at Kit’s stepfather. “
I
got Sam and me out of it,” she said pointedly.

Rowen stood on the sidelines. He had played a lot of games as star this and best that and most valuable something else. He had never expected to be on the bench when the real action occurred. He had certainly not anticipated that his baby sister would be smarter than he was.