Waiting for Christopher by Louise Hawes

plow, leaving fat wavy tracks behind.
    “Want,” Christy said, yearning toward the pail, wiggling his fingers like an acquisitive spider. “Want pay.”
    Feena stared at the pail, which had a circus seal painted on it. Her hand tightened on Christy’s, but he only tried more furiously to escape. In her mind, Feena saw another pail, a metal one, with the same seal balancing a ball on its nose. And another baby, with less hair than Christy had. A baby who looked at her with eyes lit from behind, a sun in each, shining just for her.
    She glanced up toward the benches, noticed that a second woman was sitting next to Dale, talking. In the instant she turned back to the sandbox, before her brain recognized what was wrong, her body knew. Suddenly, she couldn’t get enough air and her pulse was beating in her ears. When she looked up again, she understood why. The woman beside Dale, the woman smiling and smoking, was Christopher’s mother.
    Without explanation, before he could see the woman, Feena picked the baby up, turned, and raced toward the woods. She remembered the other baby, the one she’d given the pail to. She remembered how he’d vanished, just like that.
    She ran out of breath quickly, stumbling along the dirt path that led through the woods. But it wasn’t until the trees had closed around them, until the sun winked on and off behind the branches overhead, that she slowed down. It was the day she’d found the three pinecones. That was the day the baby had disappeared. She could still hear the grown-up voices, telling her how babies die in their cribs, how they stop breathing and no one knows why.
    It was too late to tell whether Christopher’s mother and Dale had watched them leave. All she could do was stand, sweating, and try to catch the sound of footsteps over her sharp, painful panting.
    Feena held him tight, this new baby. Even when she was sure they weren’t being followed, she started running again. Leaving behind all those quiet, reasonable voices. The ones who told her babies disappear and there’s nothing you can do.
    Christy?
She was shaking when she collapsed onto the booth. The shadowy carcass of the restaurant seemed damper, more threatening than it ever had. She noticed a crumpled soda can on the steeply angled table. Was this a hangout? Did people come here all the time? Her arms and legs were stiff, as if her veins had filled with water—heavy, sloshing.
Where’s Christy?
    “Don’t worry,” she told him, though he didn’t seem to be in the least upset. Now that she’d set him down, in fact, Christopher brightened. He reached across her for a book, opening it onto her lap. He moved his hands over the painted keys of the piano in the picture. “Ma.”
    Feena couldn’t bear the thought of Christy’s mother, of her arms, her voice, her small, pretty features lost in the center of that wide face. “No,” she said, too sternly. “Not now.” She pushed the book away, and his eyes clouded. “Ma,” he repeated. “Weed Ma.”
    “I don’t want to read,” she said, harsh and breathless as if she’d walked for miles. That was when she saw the shine gathering on the lower lids of his eyes, like rainwater spilling over, and she knew she wasn’t the only one who was tired, who wanted to stop running. “How about we get changed,” she said in a quieter, even voice. “And I’ll tell you a story instead?” She eased him into a lying position, got the package of diapers from her backpack. “A special story with lots and lots of blue things in it?”
    “Bwu,”
said Christopher, somewhat mollified.
    “Uh-huh. Blue water and blue starfish and a great big blue octopus.”
    “Bwu.”
Christopher picked up the skirt of Flopsy Jo’s jumper, studying it where he lay, looking, she realized, for the blue square she’d shown him that morning. She changed his diaper, again wrestling with the tapes that seemed to have been put in the wrong places, then pulled his rabbit from the pack and