Page 39 of The Wrong Track

“I can handle it,” I said, and I knew that I sounded annoyed.

“She’s the mother,” Lulu said. She smiled directly at Tobin’s zipper. “Don’t you think she’ll have to learn to take care of her own baby? Who else is going to do it once she moves out of here?” She managed to wrest her gaze away from his crotch to look at me. “I heard that you’re moving away and I thought you would have already. Aren’t you going to Kuwait?”

Why did everyone keep saying that? “I am moving,” I answered, and felt a terrible twist from my medical—no, that was just my stomach hurting at the thought of leaving this nice, safe house. “I’m not going to Kuwait, but I am leaving.” I reached and picked up the pink outfit that had been donated by Tobin’s cousin Luke. “We’ll go get dressed.”

“Yes, you’ll want to change out of your pajamas before you see Annie Whitaker,” Lulu agreed. “She’s, like, my style icon. Even though she’s so old.”

I hadn’t meant that I was changing myself, because I’d already put on what I considered to be my best clothes since Annie had already been over to see me. I looked down at myself but caught the baby’s eyes. They were so dark, just like mine, like you could hardly see where the pupil ended and iris began. “I can handle being with her,” I announced, and right on schedule, she started to cry. “It’s fine, I have it!” I snapped, and we marched toward my room.

I fed her quickly, changed and re-dressed her, then took the diaper bag that Hazel had gotten for me and put various things into it. I looked in the mirror and decided that there was nothing that could be done to improve myself besides an invisibility cloak, so there was no point in trying. When we walked out to the living room, Lulu was sitting next to Tobin on the couch, very close, but he’d put his shirt back on.

“Ok, we’re going,” I announced.

“The baby seat is in my car,” he said. “I can come with you, Remy. Can you wait—”

“I’m fine with her,” I interrupted. “If you hold her while I load my projects, then we’ll go. And we’ll be fine.”

Yeah, no—we were not fine. She started to cry again the moment I took her from Tobin’s arms. Nothing worked the way it should have, from me trying to get her into the car seat by myself, or when we got to Annie’s office and I realized that I had left the diaper bag in the garage and the baby needed a change, or when I finally managed to get her back into the seat again with the dirty diaper and also realized that she’d lost both her socks somewhere. They just wouldn’t stay on her tiny feet, and by that point she was wailing so hard I thought she would make herself sick.

I drove us home but stopped in the garage because Lulu’s car was still at the curb. I couldn’t go inside there, not with them together in his bedroom. And the baby still screamed, a hopeless sound like I was injuring her. I’d heard people cry like that because they were actually being hurt and I couldn’t stand it.

“Please,” I begged. “Please? I’m really trying. I’m doing my best.”

She kept at it. Why would a baby listen? I spotted the diaper bag next to the step where I’d dropped it as I’d tried to drape Annie’s café curtain over the seat without letting it wrinkle, and I got out and grabbed it. Maybe a clean diaper would get her to stop.

No, that didn’t make her stop. “I realize that you don’t care about how hard all this is,” I said as I fastened the million tiny, intricate snaps of her pants. “Why would you? You didn’t even ask to be born, and it’s my fault that you’re here. I’m sorry,” I told her. “I did something totally unfair to you.”

She wailed. I picked her up and sat again in the driver’s seat. “I’m sorry I did this. I’m sorry because I thought it was my penance, I thought that having to raise you was the price I had to pay for messing up so much, but you’re actually the one who’s going to suffer. I was thinking that you were my cross to bear but actually, I’m yours. I’m so sorry.” By that point, I was also crying.

I sniffled and stopped because somebody had to be the adult, and unfortunately for her, it was me. I took a bottle out of the diaper bag but she didn’t want that, either. Annie had made her happy by bouncing her gently and reciting some poem about saying goodnight to the moon, so I dredged up some lines of a poetry from my own memory.

“She should have died hereafter; there would have been time for such a word,” I said. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day…”Macbeth, sophomore year. No, that wasn’t going to work. “Baby, please?” I remembered Tobin’s trick. “Ok. We’ll try this.” I struggled for a moment but managed to yank my sweatshirt over my head, and then I unsnapped the pink outfit I’d just finished putting back together. I slid it off her and put her against my chest, then used the sweatshirt to cover her up. Maybe it was spring, as everyone kept telling me, but I still thought it was freezing. I tilted back the driver’s seat to recline us and gradually, her wails turned to snuffles.

“Are you better?” I asked. She seemed to be. “I guess I should talk to you.” I hadn’t done too much of that, besides my pleas for silence. “What should I tell you?” I asked her. I thought, trying to dredge up happy memories that wouldn’t cause her to cry harder. “I could tell you stories about Lily,” I suggested. Maybe I wouldn’t tell her that Lily was her aunt, though. She could just think of her as a magical princess from a book. That was a great idea! Lily would be a perfect role model, someone anyone should want to emulate. This baby could grow up and become just like my sister. I felt a brief spurt of hope that it could happen, that there could be another person like that in this world.

I looked down at the little head that rested against me, trusting me. “Once upon a time, there was a girl named Lily,” I said softly. “I don’t remember her when she was as small as you are. My first memory of her, I think, was when she was about two. She was wearing my rainboots and she was naked and she refused to take the boots off or to put clothes on. She was a funny kid, but she was very hard to argue with. She didn’t argue, in fact. She just did exactly what she wanted to do no matter what you said.” But she’d listened to me when I’d given her advice before I’d left. I hoped she had.

“Why are you going, Rem?” she’d asked me. She’d been crying, too, which my sister didn’t do very much of.

“I have to,” I’d tried to explain. It was for her, mostly, but also for my mom. I was going to ruin them both if I stayed. “Listen to me.”

“Remy—” she’d started to argue.

“No, listen!” And I’d told her a lot of things, all of them to keep her safe and healthy and successful, like how to be careful about drinking, the houses you didn’t want to go to, the guys to stay away from. I thought she must have heeded that advice because the last time I’d looked her up on the computer at the library, everything had been perfect in her life. I started to have the urge to look her up again, to find out more. Tobin had a computer that I could use…

I realized that I wasn’t talking to the baby anymore, so I started up again. “Lily was stubborn,” I said. “We liked to play down at the creek near our apartment building. It wasn’t a very nice place to play because there was a lot of trash there and once we saw a turtle struggling through everything. It made her sad that people would ruin it like that and so she decided to get our neighbors together to clean it up. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, not about anything, and you know what? They did clean up that creek! Everyone helped and it was all because of Lily.”

I told her more, everything I could think of until my voice got quiet with sleepiness, and she heard all about the wonderful aunt whom she would never meet. Then I closed my eyes and sat for a while, still thinking about my sister.

“Fuck! Remy! Remy!”

The car door, which I’d been resting my head on, jerked open and I almost fell out onto the garage floor. I would have if Tobin hadn’t caught both me and the baby, and she immediately started crying again.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”

Somehow, despite his leg, he also pulled me to my feet. We stood wedged between the old work bench and the car, the baby screaming between us, and Tobin gripped my arms.

“You’re fine,” he said after a moment. His voice was much calmer but still louder and angrier than I’d ever heard him before. “You were asleep.”

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