Hush Little Baby (14 page)

“No. She’s holding him. And she didn’t put her seat belt on, either.”

Rowen turned to Kit, and immediately knew that she just wanted them out of the house. The whole thing was so unpleasant, so hard to understand, and Sam’s little life looked so difficult — Row was abruptly embarrassed that he had trepassed on this nasty little soap opera episode of her father’s divorce.

He watched the car turn left.

The golf course development had only one real exit; Ed had to leave by one particular road. He’d turned the wrong way, and would have to wander down another dead end before he got himself facing out again.

“I’m staying here, and I’m calling my father,” said Kit.

“We’ll keep in touch,” said Row, moving his little sister toward the door. “Keep the house locked. I’ll call from Shea’s, okay?”

Kit nodded.

His sister took his hand, which surprised him. Muff must be feeling as sick over this as he was. He squeezed her fingers gently and she squeezed back. They went to his car and got in and belted up and he started the engine and Muffin said, “Row? Do you think Sam the Baby will be okay?”

He couldn’t bear to tell his baby sister how far from okay Sam’s life looked. His eyes were racing, trying to find Ed. They couldn’t be far ahead. He’d been counting seconds in his head; forty seconds had passed since Ed had turned the wrong way.

“Did you have any supper, Muff?” he said casually.

“No.”

“Want to stop at McDonald’s before we go to Aunt Karen’s?”

“Yes.” Muffin loved Happy Meals. She had saved every single toy from every single one she’d ever had.

Row scanned all traffic, all everything, and then he doused his headlights and waited on the cul-de-sac, unmoving, invisible, his little sister not noticing what he had just done, because she was thinking about her Happy Meal. Ed Bing came out of the wrong cul-de-sac and drove right in front of Row, and Rowen Mason was hot with triumph: He could follow them.

Part of his mind said: What do you think you’re doing? Part of his mind said: Way cool. Following cars! Part of his mind said: I’m starving, too. Hope we do pass a McDonald’s.

He turned on the radio. A person needed music to follow by. Naturally he got news.

Ed and Dusty stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts and a moment later, Ed was driving along with a cruller in his left hand and a large coffee in his right. This slowed him down. Dusty was sitting in the passenger seat with the baby on her shoulder, a coffee in one hand, and no shoulder strap visible. It occurred to Row that Ed might never have installed seat belts; the Caddy was so old it had not come with them.

There was one car between Row and the Caddy. Neither Ed nor Dusty would notice Rowen and Muffin. They were not the types to check rearview mirrors.

The divided road became an intersection with so many turn lanes you would expect the choices of destination to be Washington, D.C., and New York; but it was just a regular old crossroad, and Rowen, instead of staying in the center lane and heading for Aunt Karen’s, lined up behind Ed in the outside left turn lane.

Muffin said, “Are we following them? Good. Let’s take Sam back. I think we should adopt him, Row. Don’t you think Mom would be a good mommy for Sam?”

Row tried to imagine himself bringing a baby home for his mother to raise. He said, “I don’t know, Muff. I think Mom may have other plans for her life.”

“
What
are we doing, then?”

“I don’t know. I’m just doing it. It’s cool, and what can happen?”

The light changed.

Ed stuck his cruller in his mouth and turned left using one palm and the edge of the coffee cup. Row had to follow; all New Jersey would honk at him if he delayed a split second.

“Where does this road go?” Muffin asked her brother. “Do you think we’re going to pass a McDonald’s? I was going to order at Dunkin’ Donuts, but then you never really drove in. I’m starving, Row. I still say we should call 911.”

The road started out four lanes, narrowed quickly to two, and left behind the stores and the lights. Rowen’s mind flitted around like his sister’s, from food to baby to 911 to left turns. He was crawling with unease. It reminded him of a truly awful sweat suit his mother had acquired: plain gray fleece, but covered with a sprinkling of ants! They were extremely well drawn, so that you wanted to rush up to her and brush her off. Row’s skin felt like that, and his brain. He needed to brush himself off.

“This is so stupid,” he said to his sister. “I have absolutely no idea what we are doing this for.”

“We love Sam,” said Muffin.

Rowen had let quite a bit of distance get between himself and Ed because even Ed might sense something odd about this car on his tail; even Dusty might turn and recognize them. He thought he would just let the distance increase and increase, until he could not distinguish the old Caddy anymore, and then they would turn around and go by way of McDonald’s to his cousin’s, and from there he would call Kit and make sure she was okay.

He had the bad guy in his headlights, so she had to be okay.

Way up ahead of them, Ed pulled his Caddy over onto the shoulder of the road.

It was a vacant stretch. No stores; no houses.

Rowen thought Ed was going to swing a U-ie and go back to the main road; probably Ed had taken a wrong turn here, busy with doughnuts and arguing. Rowen, too, slowed down, and then put out his headlights, so Ed wouldn’t notice the car idling behind him, and came to a full stop. He was pretty far away. Maybe the length of a football field. Rowen would wait for them to make a U-turn, and then he would, too, but he and Muffin would go to McDonald’s and then to Shea’s, because this was lasting too long and he was sick of feeling sick about it.

Dusty, baby in arms, got out of the car.

She opened the back door. She set the baby in the back.

Muffin cried out, “Row! She doesn’t have the car seat, she’s just setting him there! If Ed brakes hard, Sam will fly up into the air and go through the windshield!”

Because Ed’s car doors were open, the interior lights were on, and Dusty was a clear silhouette in the night. Row lowered his window and turned down the radio. Across the long distance, he could hear Sam, crying steadily.

Dusty stepped back from the car and then closed the rear door.

“She’s sick of holding him,” whispered

Muffin. “He’s crying and she doesn’t want to hold him when he cries.”

Ed drove away.

He drove away while Dusty was still outside the car.

Dusty screamed.

Ed slammed the accelerator to the floor and his car spurted forward, tires screaming. The passenger door, still open for Dusty to get back in, looked as if it would just snap off, but from the leaning of the car as Ed speeded up, it slammed itself shut.

Row had been right about the U-turn.

Ed was leaving Dusty on the side of the road and driving back the way he had come with the baby.

Dusty was running after the Caddy, screaming and shrieking.

Ed floored the accelerator.

Oh my God, thought Rowen. The baby isn’t fastened to anything! He isn’t safe in anything! He’s just lying on the seat.

But probably not now.

By now he would have fallen to the floor, and in what position? Where was his little mouth? What about his little neck? Where had his little head hit?

Ed raced past them going back the way they had come. In seconds he would be out of sight. Rowen put on his headlights, slammed his foot to the floor, and followed Ed in a tire-screaming turn.

“What about Dusty?” shrieked Muffin.

“She can take care of herself,” said Rowen. “Why don’t we have a car phone? What are we going to do? Ed’s going to hurt Sam.”

Muffin put the strap of her seat belt in her mouth and chewed on it, a habit for which Muff was always getting screamed at. Row didn’t scream. He’d like to bite something himself right now.

“We can’t lose Ed, Row!” said his sister, beginning to cry. “You’ve got to stick to him. We’ll catch him, we’ll call the police, we should have called 911 already, we were wrong to decide everything was okay, he’s kidnapping the baby now, plus he’s going to hurt Sam.”

Row did not know how he was going to contact the police at the same time he had to stay on Ed’s tail.

A
S SOON AS MUFFIN
and Rowen were out of the driveway, Kit picked up the phone to call her father. What a relief it would be to hear his sturdy decisive voice. She did hear his sturdy decisive voice. Unfortunately, it was his answering machine.

“Dad,” she said onto the tape, “call me at your house. It’s an emergency with Dusty.”

She shouldn’t have said that. Everything was an emergency with Dusty. Dad would cringe and not call, hoping Dusty’s emergency (a grass stain on her tennis skirt, perhaps) would solve itself.

So she called back and left a second message. “Really, Dad, you’ve got to call me. The situation is extremely serious. It involves her cousin Ed and a baby-selling scheme. They’re terrified of the police and I think something else is going on. I believe the baby is in danger. Call me, Dad!”

She left messages everywhere she could, including the Seattle hotel.

Then she called Mom and Malcolm and got their answering machine.

Oh, good grief! thought Kit as there was another series of knocks on the front door. She set the phone down and ran to the door, calling, “Who is it?” and Muffin said in her high flute voice, “It’s me, Muffin!” and Kit opened the door.

It was easy to tell which car was Ed’s. His right red rear light had been damaged and not repaired, so a streak of white zapped through the broken red glass. Ed went back to the divided road and took the entrance ramp to Route 80.

“We’re going to Cinda and Burt’s,” said Muffin. “Kit and I drove here already. He’s delivering Sam. I even know what exit to take.”

Row passed a semi and a Jaguar.

“We don’t have to drive this fast,” said his sister, thus losing her status as a sweet little kid after all and becoming a nag.

He didn’t lift his foot from the gas. It was fun. He’d never even approached this speed. He was actually chasing a car, in the dark of night, in the thick of traffic. No parent, no aunt, no cousin knew where he was, and nobody could tell him what to do. Especially not his nine-year-old sister.

“If you hit somebody, we’re grease spots on the road,” said Muffìn. This was a frequent comment of their mother’s when Dad drove above the speed limit.

Eighty miles an hour was a quick way to cover ground.

In no time, Ed was on an exit ramp, and Muffin was saying she and Kit had already been here today, and they went a mile here, a mile there, so deep in the country that Rowen could not imagine how he’d find his way home. They flew by a twenty-four-hour convenience store (convenient to whom? Nobody lived here!), but he hardly had time to mark it on a mental map and they were on another road.

He lost Ed.

The car was just gone.

The road was straight and empty.

He slowed down, listening to crickets. He could hear no engine but his own.

Muffin said, “This is the turn. Right here, Row. Go through where that fence is broken.”

Burt and Cinda were in the house before Kit could stop them, locking her door behind them and separating, so that Burt was between Kit and the rest of her house, and Cinda was between Kit and the door.

The extent of her stupidity struck her like a slap. Over and over she had had a chance to do what Muffin wanted to do: Call 911. Over and over, Dusty had said, You don’t know how much trouble I’m in. Over and over, Kit had not listened.

Cinda had imitated Muffin’s voice. Piped out a high-pitched lie to get in the door. That was not how you adopted a baby! That was not how you did anything, ever, at all!

Cinda and Burt were so ordinary-looking. They had ordinary glasses and ordinary features. But they had been knocked out of the ordinary. They were crazy.

“Please get out of my house,” said Kit. If she had ever needed her Dullness Training, it was now, but she had lost it. Terror collapsed her voice like a old tent, and they knew it.

“The baby,” said Cinda, trying to smile. She held out her hands and turned her wrists at angles, as if an invisible baby lay cradled there. “We’ve changed our minds. We can still take the baby. You need to understand that I have waited for this baby for so long, and I had never seen him, after all that waiting, and he was so beautiful, and you drove away, and that wasn’t fair after all! We did arrange to have him! He really is ours. So I’ve come for my son. Our son. We’re taking him with us.”

“The camera,” said Burt softly. “We’ll take the camera, too.”

“I don’t have the camera,” said Kit, “and I don’t have Sam.”

“No!” said Burt, grabbing her arm and shaking it. “We have to have it! You get it for us!”

I have to slow them down, thought Kit. Either get explanations or get them out. What do I do? What do I offer, since I don’t have the baby or the camera?

At Mom’s there would be food. Mom believed in food. Food helped with new neighbors, funerals, arguments, celebrations — and, presumably, craziness.

“No,” whimpered Cinda. “No, I know you have the baby. You were taking such good care of him, I know he’s here, I know we got lost trying to find you, but we did find you, and I know you have the baby. Please, please, he’s my baby.”

“How about a cup of tea?” said Kit, although there were no tea bags, no sugar, and no lemon. But if she could get into the kitchen by herself, she could run out the back, disappear into the dark of the golf course, and surface on another road — namely, her own — and call the police.

“I only drink herbal tea,” said Cinda. “What kinds do you have?”

“Stop it!” said Burt. “Cinda, don’t be a jerk. We’re not here for refreshments! We have to get that camera film.”

“I am not a jerk! The whole thing was your idea, anyway. I just went along with it. I didn’t know—”

Burt smacked her.

The sound of his flat hand against Cinda’s cheek and mouth was a sound Kit had never heard before. She had never seen a woman stagger back from being hit. Never seen the shock that crossed Cinda’s face; nor the acceptance. And she had certainly never seen that amount of fury; the fury on Burt’s face.