Chapter 4
THEY ARE ADMIRING Baby that night everything changes. They are quietly claiming things about her to the soundtrack of Adan’s cooing—in deference to the mystery of her mother’s name. Lala claims Baby’s nose, the way the little legs turn gently inward at the knees before repelling each other, the elegant triple-jointed toes. Adan claims her long torso, the flat, broad bones beneath her face, the way her upper lip retreats when she smiles.
“Just like Penny,” says Adan. “Penny daughter self.”
It is one of the things she protests that they have in common, in mental inventories liturgized at night, this habit of calling a mother by her first name. They are seated on opposite ends of the bed, and the baby is in the middle, in a space cleared of rumpled bedsheets, giggling at her father. She does not smile that way at Lala. She never has, and it is only now beginning to be something that Lala thinks about.
Adan does not have to do much to make Baby smile—a twitch of his head so the light catches his bald spot and a clucking sound, and baby is already in hysterics. Lala is content to stay in the shadow of their joy. The warmth that ripples out from those giggles is like the sunny spot in which a dog seeks to lie down and curl inward.
Neither of them anticipates the knock on the door. Adan misses the first one, coming as it does on the cusp of his clucking. He knows his voice can surprise even him sometimes, Adan does, and so he is not one for shock when he makes a sound he does not intend to. Lala, on the other hand, hears the knock the first time, and ignores it, trying to hold on to her spot of sun. But when the door raps the second time, and Adan still does not move, she goes to open it.
It is Rizla. And a woman. Looking for shelter from a light rain.
Rizla pushes his way past Lala as soon as the door opens and stands squeezing the water from his locks in the kitchen sink. He is panting from having outrun the rain up the stairs. He is one of those friends who does not need to be invited in or offered a glass of the alcohol kept for company. Rizla is not company, but he has never before sought to extend his privileges to people Lala does not know. It is only within the past year that Rizla has started knocking, something that Adan has, wrongfully, attributed to the expectation and then existence of Baby.
Lala watches the liquid dribble from Rizla’s matted hair and splash onto Baby’s newly sterilized bottles. Perhaps this is the first thing that irritates her, that plants that seed of anger, this little intrusion. She and the baby have made their peace over the breastfeeding by then, even though Adan still insists that she try Baby on her nipple first before each feed. Perhaps it is her anguish each time she draws milk that makes Baby turn away from the breast of her own accord, bewildered. Perhaps it is Lala’s anguish that causes Adan not to frown when she starts giving baby the store-bought formula they have to scrounge coins to buy.
The glass panes above the sink tremble in the wind, but Rizla does not close them. The woman is still standing at the top of the stairs, smiling in at them with the rain plopping down on hair Lala’s fingers itch to explore.
“Look, this rain going start pelting down just now,” says Rizla. “I tell this girl let we come here by you until it blow over.”
Adan looks away from Baby when Rizla says “this girl.” His eyes bore into Lala’s back and then rise above her shoulder as he stands and stops his clucking.
“Come inside, Jacinthe,” says Adan, “don’t stay outside and get wet.”
When he says her name, Lala looks at her again, properly, this girl on the step. Lala had dismissed her as one of Rizla’s girls, one of the ones who paid him, but such girls were never attributed names. Not by Rizla, and certainly not by Adan. A name, she knows, is often an explanation, a revelation of things that are hidden. It is only after Adan says this name that Lala sees the way the woman refuses to allow her feet to cross the threshold, even with the rain daggering her hair and back.
“I tell you come inside, Jacinthe.”
Jacinthe hesitates just for a moment before shedding her sandals and putting her foot on the welcome mat. She tries to pull the door with the Pepsi sign closed; it flies open again as soon as she closes it. She comes inside, sits down on the wrought-iron chair beside the bed and tucks the skirt of her neon Hunza dress beneath the spread of her upper thighs, as if she needs it holding her tightly in order to stay put. Adan looks at the smooth, beige thighs, Jacinthe smiles, and Lala’s fingers stop their itching.
Jacinthe is the colour of building sand, with a small-boned frame and a wary, restless manner that makes Lala think of the pigeons on the bridge, approaching jerkily. When Jacinthe can be coaxed to the very edge of the chair, closer to the side of the bed, Adan shows off the baby, lifts her and pulls back a bib to show a birthmark, displays the navel, lists the features he has claimed are gifted from his side of the family, seeks Jacinthe’s agreement. Jacinthe nods. Says that smile is just like Penny, Penny self, and Adan grins in a way that Lala does not often see—a sort of mirthful idiocy.
She searches her memory for mention of a Jacinthe but comes up empty.
Perhaps her trace of anguish grows.
When Jacinthe reaches out to hold the baby, Lala strides over and says she must feed her first, it is past time for her feed. She lifts Baby, pulls down the skirt of her smocked dress and obscures her navel. The baby, startled by the sudden loss of admiration and the sound and sight of her father’s fawning, threatens a cry, but Lala pays no heed. Perhaps it is the tenderness with which Adan retrieves Baby from her arms and proffers her to Jacinthe, perhaps it is the maternal madness that epilogues a recent birth. Perhaps it is everything that came before or nothing in particular, but whatever it is that makes Lala not understand what she is starting, it is a costly omission.
Everything deteriorates. Adan lowers his eyes from Jacinthe’s but does not look at Lala. He looks at the ground as the sound is sucked out of the room.
“Gimme back the baby” is what he says.
Rizla stops squeezing his locks, closes the window from the rain.
“It getting ready to clear up,” he says. “We gone, hear, Adan?”
“Gimme back Baby,” Adan says.
Jacinthe jumps up, relieved to have received the signal from Rizla to go. She says to Adan that it is OK, she will come back to visit some other time, she will see Baby again then, let her have her feed, she look hungry in truth, is OK, Adan. Lala holds Baby closer, feels her stiffen and start to claw, refuse to be drawn into her bosom.
Adan tugs Baby back while sucking his teeth. A custard-coloured bootie falls on the hard wood floor and does not bounce. Lala is holding on to one little leg, maintaining her claim to miniature, slightly knocked knees. The baby wails again.
Adan is twisting the baby's leg away from Lala. Jacinthe is heading towards the door, Rizla is approaching Lala and Adan as they start to move with the baby suspended between them. Lala has reclaimed both legs; Adan tries to lift the baby out of her arms. Jacinthe has reached the door, is putting on her shoes. Rizla stands behind her, takes up much of the space in the doorway, keeps the light out.
Thunder grumbles and barks. The baby jumps and both parents realize, at once, that this rite of possession is scaring her. Neither wishes to scare her. Perhaps this is why Lala lets go of the legs at the precise moment that Adan lets go of the torso and Baby plummets in a flailing plumage of pale yellow and chocolate and lands on the floor with a soft thump and is silent. The rain pours down. Rizla’s eyes widen, but his voice remains calm for Jacinthe, who is behind him putting on her shoes and has not seen the baby fall.
“We going now,” says Rizla, watching Adan stoop to pick up the baby, “come, Jacinthe.”
He looks at Lala and his eyes are wide and fearful, but he steps outside, closes the door so the Pepsi sign rattles, ushers Jacinthe down the stairs in front of him so that she does not get the chance to look back inside, to see the baby being grabbed from the floor. The thunder roars and Adan roars with it. Lala is crying. They both lunge for the baby, they pick her up together, Adan’s large hands cradling its head, Lala’s fingers laced under its back. They place her on the bed, start running their eyes and hands over her, checking for anything broken. The baby is in that state of open-mouthed astonishment, breath caught in that build-up to awful shrieking.
“You see now?” yells Adan. “What the fuck you had to do that for?” All the while his hands are running over the miniatures of his own head and hands.
When the cry comes, it is so deep and loud and long that it eclipses even Lala’s, makes the claps of thunder seem like the buzzing of insects. Adan sucks his teeth, looks around wild-eyed, feels again the same bones his hands have already examined. Nothing appears broken. The baby is passed to Lala, submits to her breast and then, when the wailing has softened to a snotty whimper, is patted on Adan’s shoulder.
“You think we should take her Baxter’s General?” asks Lala. Adan sucks his teeth. He
does not answer. He confirms again with his fingers that there are no large lumps on her head or back, no gross angles of arm or leg to signal that something is seriously wrong. He makes deals with God, who gives no sign of a weakness for gambling. He lays Baby gently down on the bed again, watches her nestle into sleep.
“Baby,” he is cooing, “sweet girl, my sweet, sweet girl.”
Lala is about to ask him again whether they should go to the hospital when his big fist finds her throat and she goes reeling into the chair, slapping her hand to her own mouth so she will not wake the baby with her surprise.
Adan is about to lift her from the chair when Rizla runs back up the stairs and through the front door. Lala imagines that he has hustled Jacinthe to the bus stop and waved her into a bus with the assurance that everything is OK at the house. She knows that he has returned to reassure himself.
*
Rizla feels the air crackling with something he cannot prove with his eyes. See the baby asleep on the sheets? See Lala start to make their bed around her? For a moment, Rizla considers that this is strange, her thinking to straighten the bed when the baby could be hurt, but the thought escapes him as Adan relays the story of the fall, a story in which Lala is the villain who refused to hand over Baby until the very moment that Adan decided, like the woman in the bible story, to let Baby stay, and Lala therefore caused the fall. Rizla does not comment on this story, he does not counter it with what he has seen. Instead, he and Adan begin to whisper about the baby and how close they came to disaster. He talks to Adan about lucky children he’s known, children who survived falls from great heights, serious diseases and gory accidents, unscathed. Lala listens, but she does not look at either of them. She does not want to test her throat in Rizla’s presence, but it stings so much she thinks it would be incapable of sound if she did. Instead, she takes one of the sterilized bottles from the sink, washes it again just to be safe, puts a small pan of hot water on to boil and watches it, mesmerized, until it is just beginning to bubble. She retrieves the store-bought formula standing open by the sink and levels a scoop of vitamin-enriched white powder that trembles in her grasp.
Rizla does not stay long. He says he does not want the baby to wake up on account of his presence, so he says his goodbyes again and says he is going back to the beach, where he has promised to meet a middle- aged woman with a night’s worth of weed. Adan tries to convince him that it is OK to stay, Baby good now. He isn’t going on any jobs tonight, says Adan, a fella from St Christopher coming to see him bout a little job he think maybe Rizla could help him with. Rizla shakes his head, no. He is not looking at Adan, he is looking at a deepening purple mark near Lala’s neck. Lala turns away, covers the bottle, shakes it fast, too fast. When she releases the nipple, newly made formula foams out of the teat and onto her hand and she howls.
Adan sucks his teeth and shouts something that Lala cannot hear.
Rizla asks her something she believes means if she is OK, so she nods and puts the bottle in a container of cool water and sets about cleaning up the few drops of spilt milk from the floor.
“A man want to bring in a little food,” Adan explains to Rizla. “That way you tell me about, that is a boss way, Rizla. The man serious, we could make something. He coming here just now.”
Adan doesn’t understand why Rizla still wants to leave, Lala doesn’t understand why he doesn’t stay. She wonders if he does not know that by staying he will spare her.
“I going check you tomorrow, Adan,” says Rizla, “take good care of Baby. We going talk bout it tomorrow.”
“She alright now,” Adan assures him, dismissively. “The man is a serious man, Rizla, we could make something good.”
But Rizla is out the door before Lala wipes the last of the milk from the floor and Adan’s forehead furrows at the door for too long after Rizla has closed it.
The baby is so soundly asleep that she cannot be coaxed into taking the before-bed feed.
The next morning, Baby does not wake up.
