The Better Mother (30 page)

—

Val dreamed of the baby every night. She saw the baby’s pale face, her small, elf-like body, even her round toes. Sometimes the baby cried, a quiet, barely there plea that ceased as soon as Val picked her up and held her, her small chin resting on Val’s shoulder. Other times, she sat on a sheepskin rug on the floor, clapping her hands as Val danced in front of her, a goofy version of the strip she used to do in the clubs with a towel on her head for a wig and an old sheet wrapped around her body for a satin gown.

When she woke up, she was warm and round and unworried. Through the window, she watched the birds flying between the downtown apartment buildings. She lay on her side until the sun rose past the railing on the balcony. She sometimes looked in the mirrors in shops, or in her own mirror at home, and was surprised by her bare, makeup-less face, which seemed, oddly, younger than it had in years. The flowers she planted on the balcony nodded at her through the window, and she nodded back. For once, she felt quiet, like an undisturbed, clear-as-glass lake.

One afternoon, Joan appeared at her door, her tweed skirt peeping out the bottom of her tan trench coat. She held up a paper bag filled with groceries.

“Fresh fruit and veggies for the baby,” she announced, walking straight into the kitchen where she began putting the food away in the fridge. “I bought you a nice steak too. You need to keep up your iron, you know.”

After Val settled Joan on the balcony with a cup of tea, Joan smiled. “This is really nice, Val. You’ve done a good job
of making this little apartment into a home. I can see you had some pansies over the summer.”

Val nodded and waved her hand over the yellow and red trees lining the sidewalk. “The summer was really great, but it looks like the fall might turn out to be even nicer.”

“You’re getting big.” Joan let her eyes linger on Val’s belly. “When’s the due date again?”

“End of December.”

“Like I said, the apartment looks very homey,” Joan said, her voice rising to a clear, precise pitch. “What are you doing to get ready for the baby?”

“I’ve been looking at cribs, but I haven’t found the exact right thing yet. I wanted something in a natural wood, you know, and everything these days is covered in white laminate or some such thing. I’ve started a quilt, in all different colours.” Val laughed, rubbed her needle-pricked fingers together. “I’m not much of a seamstress, but I try.”

“Are you prepared enough, do you think?”

“I think so. No one is ever really prepared, you know.”

“No, that’s true.” Joan paused. “What about afterward? What are you going to do for money?”

Val twisted a finger in her hair. “I’ll figure it out. I always do. I could waitress, of course, or I was thinking I could be an agent for other girls. You know: make sure they’re treated fairly and all that.”

Joan turned and looked into Val’s eyes so intently that Val had to look away. “Is that wise? If you waitress, who will look after the baby? And if you’re going to work with those girls again, aren’t you exposing the baby to that crowd? Do you want to do that?”

Val put her hand up to her hair. Below, a car with a mattress tied to its roof drove slowly past. Val thought she could hear a polka drifting from a building across the street. “I never thought of it that way, I guess. I’ll do what I have to do. We’ll get by.”

Joan tapped her fingers on her lap. “Don’t you think, Val, that the baby deserves more than just getting by? What about music lessons, or summer camp? Have you even thought about university?”

“That’s thinking really far ahead.”

“Yes, but that’s what mothers do. They plan. They make sure their children have everything they could possibly need.”

“What are you saying? That I won’t be a good mother?”

Joan leaned forward and gripped Val’s knee with a thin hand. Behind her, the sky seemed far too bright for morning, far too blue and sharp for the coming of fall. “No, of course not. But your baby deserves the best, that’s all. Now, Peter and I, we could give any number of children the best lives possible.”

“You and Peter?”

“You know how we’ve wanted children for years and years. It’s been the hardest thing, not being able to give him the family he’s always wanted.” Joan’s voice broke and her lips trembled. “When I told him about you and your pregnancy, his face went all hard and, that night, he didn’t even come home from work. Sometimes, I don’t even know where he is.”

“Joanie, I didn’t know.”

“It’s been so hard all these years, thinking about little Warren and what he might look like now. I’m going to love
your baby, Val. I really will. If I had one of my own, he or she would have everything and grow up in a real family with a father and a house in a good neighbourhood with lots of other children. It would be so ideal.”

Val stood up, pushing her chair with so much force that it crashed against the glass of the patio door.
“My
baby, Joan, not yours.” She could feel Joan’s eyes travelling over her swollen stomach. Empty eyes. Eyes that could bore through skin and blood.

Joan grabbed Val’s sleeve. “No, that’s not what I meant. It’s just that I have everything, except a child. And you”—she choked and swallowed and deep frown lines creased her cheeks—“you have nothing, except this baby. Even you, without a husband, without even a real home, can have a baby while I sit by myself in the living room every day, staring at the goddamned lawn. Maybe I should have been a stripper too and fucked men whose names I don’t even know.”

As briskly as her belly allowed her, Val hurried through the apartment and opened the door to the hallway. “Get out, Joan. I’m not listening to you anymore.”

Slowly, Joan walked to the door, her eyes pink and wet. “I need to love your baby, Val.”

Val remained silent and watched as Joan made her way down the hall and to the stairwell. After locking the door, she went straight to bed, pulling the covers over her face until the heat from her breath warmed the pocket of air around her head. Almost buried by blankets, she fell asleep, her fists clenched, ready for the fight that might come to her in a dream.

—

In the hospital, Val held her baby in her arms, smelled the fine fuzz on her head and stroked her cheeks with one finger. It was when the baby was coming out (she wondered how she could stay whole while her body was sundered, push by push, and she was almost blind with effort and throbbing) that she realized the perfect name.

Dawn. For the morning and the transition from the dark dreams of night to the relief of day.

There was no surprise. Dawn arrived exactly as she should, looking as Val had always imagined—pink and white and blond. Val held a finger on a pulsing blue vein in her tiny forehead.

A nurse walked into the room, carrying a pile of diapers. “When is your husband coming, my dear?”

Val looked up. “There’s no husband. Just me.”

The nurse’s forehead wrinkled, and she looked away, peering into the closet. “Well then, you’ll need more washcloths,” she muttered as she hurried out the door.

But Val barely heard her, only watched as Dawn put out one small hand and fluttered it in the air.

“I promise you everything,” Val whispered. “All you need to do is ask.”

THE DEBRIS
1959 to 1980

The baby would not stop screaming. Everywhere Val went in her little apartment, she could hear the echo from her cries bouncing off the walls until it sounded like a dozen babies were trapped in the bedroom, shrieking for help. Her milk wouldn’t come in, and she was tired, so tired, of pushing her nipple into Dawn’s mouth and watching her suck until Val started to bleed. No milk, just oozing scabs.

She scorched the bottles, slept fitfully, her body tensed and anticipating the cries from the crib. Every sound, every change of light woke up the baby, until Val took the phone off the hook and kept the curtains drawn at all times. She was trapped in a stuffy cave, with nothing but this squalling child for company.

In the mornings, when Val crept up to the crib to see if Dawn was sleeping, her heart rose and swelled as she gazed at the purse of her mouth, the flutter of her eyelids as she dreamed in her sleep. This was the best time.

One evening, Dawn cried and cried, the wails consuming all of the air inside her small lungs. When she inhaled, she gulped and hiccupped and coughed. Her cries shuddered and skipped. Val walked with her from the kitchen to the living room and back again, whispering, “Shush now. Shhh. It’s all right.” But she knew that Dawn couldn’t even hear her over the screaming, or see her through those tightly closed eyes.
She was afraid to leave, afraid that wherever she went, the baby’s cries would alarm passersby until someone tried to take her away. There was no place where the baby’s cries would be muffled by the encroaching bush or the crash of waves. There was this tiny apartment and the two of them, their voices circling and rebounding into their ears. How long before she couldn’t stand it anymore? Before she thrust the baby underneath the sofa cushions until her breath shuddered and stopped? Val wrapped the still-crying Dawn in her homemade quilt, lay her down in her crib and shut the bedroom door. She hurried through the living room, a glass of sherry in her hand, and out onto the balcony, sliding the patio door shut behind her.

The smell of frost rose up from the grass, and Val breathed in deeply, savouring the nip of cold air in her throat and lungs. In the streaky January sky were the remnants of a sunset. On the bare maple in front, a crow sat unmoving, its wings held close, its shoulders hunched. Her glass was soon empty, and she stood up to refill it.

On the other side of the door stood Joan, meticulously dressed in a cashmere sweater and plaid skirt, holding the baby and gazing evenly at Val through the glass. Val pulled her milk-stained robe closed and slid her left slipper behind her right to hide the hole over the big toe. She patted the tangle of hair at the back of her head but there wasn’t anything she could do to fix it. She dropped the empty sherry glass behind her onto one of the chairs.

When she opened the patio door, Joan smiled at her. “The door was open, so I walked in. You should lock that, you know.”

Val stared at Dawn, whose eyes were wide open and fixed on Joan’s pearl necklace. Dried tears stained her cheeks, but she appeared calm, happy even, as Joan rocked her slowly from side to side. “She settled right down when I picked her up. It’s like she already knows who I am.”

In the shadows of the living room stood Peter, his doughy body skulking and blending with the gloom so that he seemed to be a more substantial shadow than the ones surrounding him. He nodded at Val, his face unsmiling.

“I tried calling, but I think you must have ignored the phone,” said Joan. “Understandable, of course, when you have to deal with this new baby all by yourself.”

Val couldn’t move or speak. Her palms rested on the cool glass of the patio door behind her.

“What did you name her, Val? You never phoned when she was born.”

“Dawn,” she croaked and then flinched at the unused sound of her voice.

“Dawn? That’s a modern name, isn’t it? Don’t you think, Peter?”

Peter nodded again and clasped his hands behind his back.

“You look tired, Val. How about I stay for a few hours so you can get some rest?”

Val slumped a little. Her bones felt so full of exhaustion that they were threatening to buckle under the weight of her skin and flesh and hair.

“I can even spend the night, and Peter can pick me up tomorrow on his way home from work.” Joan watched as Val dropped onto the sofa by the window. “It’s settled then. Peter,
why don’t you run to the grocery store and pick us up some baby formula? And get a couple of pork chops and maybe some bread and broccoli as well. I’ll make supper before he has to drive home, Val. Don’t you worry.”

That night, Joan arranged extra sheets and pillows on the couch and moved the crib to the living room. She tucked Val into her bed, pulling the covers right up under her chin and smoothing Val’s hair away from her face before silently backing out and closing the door softly behind her. Val waited for the sounds of Dawn’s crying to burst through the wall, but heard only the padding of Joan’s stockinged feet as she moved through the apartment. Slowly, she fell into a dreamless and unmoving sleep.

When she woke up, Joan had cleaned the apartment and dressed Dawn in a pretty little pink dress with a white collar. “I brought it with me,” she said proudly. “Of course, I didn’t know if she was going to be a girl or a boy, so I brought a little blue sailor outfit too.” Joan laughed and the trill filled the room; Val winced.

But she felt good. Better than she had in a month. Her joints didn’t feel as if they were grinding together, bone on bone. She was aware, again, of her whole body—the way her legs moved and her neck swivelled—instead of just the soreness in her breasts. At Joan’s suggestion, she drew a hot bath and soaked until lunchtime, when Joan made sandwiches. Dawn slept peacefully, cried out briefly when she was hungry or wet, and settled down again as soon as she was satisfied. Val watched Joan, her serene face, the light way she caressed the baby’s cheeks, the brightness of her eyes when she held her. She was suspicious, but forced herself to think
Joan knows
how much I did for her baby, and now she’s trying to make up for it. That’s all it is
.

The next week, Joan came again. Peter held the baby, and even Val could see that his face softened when he looked into her blinking eyes. Peter—that hard-shelled, incomprehensible man.

Joan made Val a pot of tea and sat with her on the balcony, even though a cold wind was beginning to swirl around them. Inside, Peter sat with Dawn. Val could hear him singing to her, a strange, off-tune version of “Rock-a-bye Baby,” but she didn’t turn to look.

“You’re alone here too much.” Joan’s voice, as always, cut through the air—unmerciful, unlovely. She continued, “I’m alone too, most days.”

Val looked down and pulled at the fabric that bunched over her stomach.

The teacups rattled as Joan shifted in her chair to face Val. “Come home with us. I can help with the baby and we can be company for each other again. It’ll be fun, like when we were little girls.”