Daisy kept shoving bullets into
the cylinder as she ran, the steel revolver almost slipping from her grip
several times. Roy was a dozen yards ahead of her now, and she fell to one
knee, slid her index finger behind the trigger guard and took a deep breath.
Don't shoot the baby. She aimed high and fired a warning shot into the air.
The bullet punctured a shiny green leaf, making a perfect smoking circle.
He didn't stop.
She fired another round and hit a
silver maple, chunks of bark exploding into the forest canopy. Birds
sprayed into the air, crying out for order, while Roy veered off the path
and cut through the trees, their rust-colored buds just emerging.
Daisy hurtled after him, bounding
up and down the wooded hills and leaping over a toppled stone wall. She
scrambled up an incline where the land sloped sharply, using the branches
of a massive elm to help propel her over the rise.
Please don't hurt the baby
. She followed him down into a ravine,
where the rusted-out hulk of a John Deere tractor was slowly disintegrating
in the morning sun, its orange hood eaten away in places like a lace tablecloth.
She waded through a sea of brambles, her face and arms swelling from
small cuts and scratches, while flies droned in the early-morning sun
and a bird cawed high in the canopy-caw! caw!- sounding more like a poor
imitation of a bird than the real thing. She paused to catch her breath,
then realized she had lost them.
Oh no.
She twisted around, heart thumping
like a rabbit's hind legs. The path she'd been on had disappeared, and
she was standing alone in the freckled shadows amid the crocuses and coltsfoot.
"Noah?" she screamed, scalp bristling as she searched the woods.
A warm wind dispersed the shimmering seedlings and shook the new leaves
on their tender stems.
Daisy gripped her gun and listened.
She thought she heard something and cocked her head. No, that was just
the gray squirrels quarreling. Flies droned in the sun. Her breath caught
in her throat. Sap flowed from broken twigs as spring forgave winter. She
caught the faint sound of a baby crying and turned toward it. Was that a
baby? Or a bird singing? The sound was coming from somewhere to her east.
Yes, Noah was crying, each sob designed to get his mother's attention.
Please
don't hurt him, please don't hurt my baby…
She followed the cries deeper into the woods-legs
pumping, elbows
pistoning
. She went bounding up
and down hills, then burst through a thicket of blackberry bushes, and a
shock of swallowtail butterflies
geysered
into
the air. The earth had absorbed as much water as it could, and now dozens
of snow trilliums and marsh marigolds swelled up from the soggy ground.
Her slippers were a muddy mess-Anna's fuzzy tiger slippers. What had she
been thinking? Why hadn't she put on her running shoes instead? These
soggy gunboats were slowing her progress through the woods.
The land dipped sharply downhill,
and she found herself tunneling through a wall of undergrowth, fiddlehead
ferns brushing against her face like prehistoric fingers. She leaped
over a
meltwater
ditch and nearly tripped, then
paused again to listen.
Where are
they? Where are they now?
She tried to pinpoint the baby's location
by honing in on his birdlike cries. There. She tracked the sound with
her eyes, each new scream hitting her in the solar plexus. The air was warm
and clear, the birds were singing, and Noah was somewhere over there,
beyond the tall red pine trees and Canadian hemlocks. She cut northward
through the woods.
Twenty minutes later, Daisy got
a thick, curdled feeling in her gut as she held the gun in front of her, her
hands closing around cold steel. She couldn't hear the baby anymore.
All she heard were the birds, hundreds of them, singing in the canopy. A
thick mist rose up from the old lake bed, cool air pooling into the valley.
Now she heard a faint sob. There. She turned and headed west, the muscles
of her legs cramping as she ran. Shadows broke across the trail as the forest
began to thin out, and the land grew flatter and more tame as she closed
in on the park.
She could hear children shouting.
"Mommy, watch me! Push me higher!" She froze with the gun aimed-in
front of her, and it suddenly dawned on her that she may have been following
the sound of their voices all along. Not Noah's newborn screams, but the
sound of children playing in the park.
Squeak,
squeak, squeak
. Her heart grew caked with fear. What if the
swing-set chains creaking on their steel tube frame had lured her to
this place?
Drenched with sweat, she followed
an impenetrable wall-of-China hedge toward the sturdy wrought-iron gate,
pushed it open and entered a sunny clearing where the structured chaos
of the playground came into view. She knew this place intimately, since
she and Anna used to come here as little girls. She recognized the seesaws
and the trapeze bars inside their fenced-in perimeter, but the activity
gym with its crawl-through holes was new. Over a dozen mommies sat on the
park benches, coveting their unobstructed views of the playground.
Some were nursing and comparing notes, while others plucked toys from
the sandbox or pushed toddlers on red resin swings with yellow safety
bars.
Daisy lowered the gun and held it
close to her side. This was all wrong. She'd been chasing phantoms. Inside
the white fenced-in perimeter, dozens of stringy-haired little boys
and girls ran around in a blur. "Zap! Gotcha!" Some were having
imaginary ray-gun fights while others tunneled their way through the
redwood fantasy fort or rolled around on the wood chips and rubber mulch
designed to cushion their fall. Rolling and giggling, toes pointing
skyward.
A grove of shade trees shielded
the play area from the strong sunlight. Some of the mommies stood around
in groups, slathering suntan lotion on their arms or munching protein
bars. One of the mommies was taking pictures with a Polaroid camera.
"Smile!" she said.
Daisy's heart almost forgot to beat.
Across from the trapeze bars was Roy
Hildreth
,
seated on a park bench.
He was smiling at the camera, and
in his arms was the squirming baby. Anna's baby. Daisy's baby.
"Say cheers!" the mommy
said, and the baby reached for his father's face with tiny grasping fingers.
Daisy could feel the sweat evaporating
from her body as she watched this nightmare unfold before her horrified
eyes. The air grew electric, brilliantly illuminated, as she circled
the trapeze bars and crossed the blacktop. Pointing her gun at Roy, she
said, "Give me the baby."
The mommy lowered her Polaroid
and gasped.
"Please, lady," Roy
Hildreth
said in a trembling voice. "Put the gun
down…"
"Give me the baby!"
There was silence all around. Terrified
faces.
"Lady, you don't want to hurt
anyone…"
The play activity had ground to a
halt behind her. Daisy glanced back at the mommies and realized that
every single one of them was reaching for her cell phone.
"He took my baby!" she
screamed.
"I don't know what she's talking
about," Roy said, sounding vastly more reliable. He was sitting
in a beam of sunlight, holding the baby close, and Noah was no longer
crying. "Please, lady. You don't want to hurt anyone."
Her adrenaline spiked. Her eyes
fixed unwaveringly on him. "You're the one who wants to hurt the
baby!" She aimed the gun between his eyes, wanting him to understand
exactly how serious she was. "Now put him down!"
"Please… point that thing away
from me…"
Mommies gasped and snatched their
babies off the glide slide. A dozen cell phones were out now, fingers
dialing frantically. A toddler on a tether got reeled in.
Roy shifted the baby into a football
hold. "Nobody wants to hurt you, okay? Just put the gun down, lady."
The mommies were all watching
them, and Daisy suddenly understood what it was they saw. How strange
she must look in yesterday's rancid T-shirt, her dirty gray jogging pants
and pink terry-cloth socks with the holes in them. She had a serious case
of bed-head, and her arms were scratched and bleeding from running through
the brambles. Worst of all were Anna's fuzzy tiger slippers-the footwear
of a crazy person.
"He's lying," she told
them. Her head whipped back and forth hysterically as she realized that
none of them believed her. "He escaped from prison! He's wanted by
the police. That isn't his baby. It's my sister's baby!"
Roy held Noah close, as if to protect
him from her. "Whatever you do, lady… please don't hurt my son."
Your
son?
The gun felt warm and alive in her hand. "Don't listen to
him!" she screamed. "He's lying!"
She could hear the women whispering
among themselves. "… Anna Hubbard's sister… schizophrenia… runs
in the family…"
Something skirted her field of vision,
and Daisy was suddenly hit in the face with a toxic mist. She couldn't
see. Her eyes burned. Her lungs were on fire. Several people descended
on her and wrestled the gun from her hands.
"Quick!
Grab it!"
Daisy dropped to her knees and
screamed in pain. She couldn't see. She couldn't breathe. She released
the gun and cupped her stinging face in both hands.
"Got
it! I've got it!"
The gun went off by accident. The
shot went high and wide. Mommies jerked back, their kids in a contest to
see who could scream the loudest. There was no clear winner.
"Oh my God!" Daisy wailed.
Her eyes were on fire. She stretched out her T-shirt and wiped her face.
She couldn't stop coughing. Somebody handed her a bottled water, and
she rinsed out her eyes, then drank greedily. When she finally parted her
swollen lids, a thin clear light poured in through the trees. She blinked
away the tears and saw that Roy was gone. The baby was gone. The park bench
was empty.
She turned to the mommies in abject
disbelief. "He's got my baby!" she screamed. "What is wrong
with you people? Why'd you let him get away?"
The mommies just stared at her
and clutched their children to them protectively. A woman in UV-resistant
glasses was holding a canister of pepper spray in her hand, and a skinny
dark-haired woman with a baby strapped to her chest had the gun.
"Give it to me," Daisy
pleaded, reaching for the revolver.
"Calm down. The police are on
their way."
"Do you have any idea what you
just did?" Daisy shrieked.
One of the mommies pointed.
"He went that way."
"Shut up," another one
hissed.
Daisy staggered to her feet and,
without the gun, ran off into the woods.
Roy jogged through the woods with
the baby in his arms. Whenever it opened its mouth to scream, big round
sounds came from its lungs. "Quiet, baby." He touched the soft
pink cheek, and it gazed up at him, unafraid.
Roy remembered the day his daughter
died. Her casket was just this big. It rained the whole time. He found
the rain comforting. Now he broke through a
spiderweb
spanning the trail and brushed bits of web and leaf debris off his face.
He crashed through a thick wall of vines and came upon a clearing, where
the glittering trees spread their awkward limbs. The field was littered
with automobile carcasses-a Volkswagen Beetle listing in the weeds
like an art installation, dozens of airless tractor tires, a bubble-fender
pickup truck, its candy-apple shine gone. He sprinted across the field
and strode up another hard-muscled hill, then came upon a river twisting
like a silver ribbon through the forest.
He took a deep breath. The air here
was sweet. The sound of rushing water was thunderous. The downhill
climb was slippery with moss. He steadied his hand on a yellow birch tree
that had lost its grip on the earth. The rotting roots reached down into
wet rock, where the crashing current masked the sound of his footsteps.
Roy hopped from boulder to boulder, then landed on a marshy bank where
deer tracks peppered the soft dirt. He tossed a stick into the stream and
watched the current take it. It was swift.
The baby was gazing up at him now.
It almost hurt to look into those eyes. Roy tapped his fingers on the gorillas
and bananas all over the little shirt and could barely comprehend this
tiny life-form in his arms. It had come from Anna's body-from the blood in
her veins, the food in her stomach, the hope in her heart. Roy knew this
baby was a carrier because he was a carrier. Anna's brother had died
of
Stier-Zellar's
disease, and that meant that
she carried the mutant gene, as well. Carriers passed on the disease
to their children. Roy couldn't let that happen. No. "Sorry,
baby," he whispered, and the baby cooed back. "Sorry."
He hurried along the marshy bank,
crushing stalks of skunk cabbage underfoot, his athletic shoes sinking
into the muck while he looked for a good place to ford. The fetid aroma
of skunk cabbage competed with the earthy smells of the wood fungus.
Roy's left hand supported the baby's head, and this tiny motion sent him
reeling back-into the past. Suzy had been such a healthy baby, you never
would've suspected there was anything wrong with her. But then on her
first birthday, she couldn't roll over anymore. When she turned two,
she couldn't grasp objects with her fingers. Suzy never learned to crawl
or talk, but she knew how to laugh. She liked butterflies and sitting in
the sun. When she was three, the doctors drilled holes in her head and introduced
foreign substances into her brain in an effort to slow the progress of
the disease. When Roy saw his three-year-old girl with her head completely
shaved, it reminded him of the day she was born.
To his left, the river crashed and
gurgled; to his right, the forest teemed with life. Ravens raided the
berry bushes, swallows dive-bombed for insects, caterpillars rippled
along plant stems, tiny black bugs slowly drowned in tree sap. He stopped to
adjust the child's blanket, and its little feet popped out.
"Oops." He tickled the
baby's soles. "Yes, yes." Its toes spread wide apart, and it followed
him with its dark blue eyes. Anna's blue eyes.
"You know me, don't you? You
know who I am?"
The baby made a cooing sound.
Roy's brain hurt. He woke up doing ninety
miles per hour into a concrete wall. He hadn't meant to kill Anna. Anna
and Roy were supposed to be together forever. He hated this baby. This
baby had stolen Anna away from him. He folded the blanket over the child's
legs and lowered his tired arms until the baby was just inches from the
roiling water.
Drown him. Get rid of
him
. A green leaf fell out of the sky and landed directly in front of
them. He read the leaf before it floated away; he read the child's future.
This child would not live past the age of three. He would get the defective
gene. He would have Suzy's floppy head and those rheumy, suffocated
eyes. He would die prematurely. His coffin would be only so big. It would
rain at the funeral. Roy would find the rain comforting. The bottom would
fall out all over again. He couldn't let that happen.
Drown
him now. Drown the soft, soft baby.
Roy jiggled the child from side to
side. "You understand what has to be done."
This powerful creature crumpled
its tiny face. It howled with indignation. It waved its tiny arms.
"Be quiet, baby. Don't
cry." Roy heard a voice.
"Noah!"
It was distant but distinct.
"Noah!"
Anna's sister was coming. She was
coming after them, and she had a gun. Roy needed to cross the river now. He
raised the baby high overhead and waded into the swift-moving current.
After a few steps, he began to shiver. The water was freezing cold. He leaned
forward and forced his legs to take short, deliberate steps. Soon he
was waist-deep in the strong current, the child riding high in the saddle
of his hands. He moved sideways like a crab, fighting for stability,
but the stubborn force of the water nearly buckled his knees.
The baby responded to the mysterious
change in brightness by swinging its arms wide, then crashing its hands
together like cymbals. It gurgled and cooed while Roy probed the bottom
of the riverbed with his foot, hunting for submerged objects and loose
rocks. He moved through the water like a slow, difficult dream, sliding
his feet along the bottom until he was almost up to his chest in the thundering
river.
Then something happened. He couldn't
move forward. He couldn't go back. His feet were numb. He could no longer
feel his legs. His testicles had shrunk way up inside his body, and his
clothes had absorbed about twenty pounds of water. The current held him
fast. He was stuck in the middle of the raging river. He girded himself
against it. It took every ounce of strength he had just to keep from floating
away.