A Wicked Wish

I wish I hadn’t dressed him in black that night. He was too hard to see in the darkness. They keep telling me it wasn’t my fault, but of course they’re just trying to keep me calm. 

Luca wanted to be a wicked witch for Halloween. We had recently watched “The Wizard of Oz” and he’d been fascinated with that green-faced lady from the moment she set fire to that straw rooftop. I was sure he would be terrified- he was only three after all- but he couldn’t look away from the screen and couldn’t stop talking about her in the days that followed. He loved the way the words “wicked witch” rolled off his tongue, but with his speech impediment they sounded like “wicked wish.” 

“Mama, I want to be a wicked wish for twick-o-tweet,” he said, his big brown eyes staring up at me as I brushed his teeth, cupping his soft, round chin in my hand.

He insisted I get him both the pointy hat and a long black dress. Luckily, we live in a progressive part of town so nobody cared that my little boy was dressed as a female villain. On Halloween night, I’d really wanted to take him out myself, but the twins were on a rampage, screaming and crying and refusing their bottles. In hindsight, and I know this sounds crazy, but it was almost like they could sense what was coming.

“Lots of babies get fussy at this time of evening,” the nurse in the hospital had told me when they were first born. “We call it the witching hour.” 

“I can’t take you trick-or-treating,” I shouted to Luca on Halloween, my voice barely audible over the twins’ wails. “It’s the witching hour.”

“The wicked wish hour?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, pulling baby bottles out of the dishwasher.

I called Kayla at the last minute. My niece lives nearby and is always so good with Luca. “Want to make a few bucks hanging out with him tonight?” I yelled over the din.

“I wish I could, Auntie Mo,” she said, her voice muffled as though she was holding the phone with her shoulder, “but I’m supposed to meet my friends.”

“Luca goes to bed at 7:00,” I shouted, frantically dumping a scoop of formula into a bottle. “You’ll be back before your friends are even done getting ready. Just take him around the neighborhood for half an hour. Please? He’ll be so thrilled.”

“Well, okay.” She sounded distracted. “Let me just finish my makeup and I’ll be right there.”

When she arrived, Luca ran over and wrapped his pudgy arms around her long legs. “Kayla, I’m a wicked wish!” He stared up at her. “But what are you?” 

“I’m Cinderella.” she sang, picking him up and twirling. “Can’t you tell?”

Luca shrugged, wriggling out of her grasp and running off to get his broomstick. 

A blue miniskirt and sparkly belly shirt, white evening gloves and a plastic tiara. That’s what she was wearing. I wanted to make a snarky comment such as “ah, yes, you’ve reached the age when Halloween becomes an excuse to dress slutty,” but I didn’t. Instead I said, “Honey, you look like a million bucks,” and gave her a peck on the cheek. 

That was when I smelled the alcohol on her breath. Something fruity and cheap, like Smirnoff ice. I paused and stared at her, shocked. She was the family golden child. Straight A’s, polite, never in any trouble. I hate to admit it but a small part of me thought, “good for her! She’s breaking out of her shell!” A small part of me was even a little jealous, remembering long-ago nights dancing at the Cantina with Chris in college. Back when we were just kids ourselves with no responsibilities. Back before life hit. Back before the cancer took him.

She didn’t notice my surprised expression. She had picked up the baby from the bouncy chair and was giving him his bottle. This is why we all loved Kayla. She always jumped right in and did what needed to be done, often without being asked. Her mother, my sister-in-law, had trained her from childhood to be helpful and kind, obedient and useful. It seemed so out of character for her to be drinking. So I convinced myself I was mistaken about the whiff of booze (maybe it was lip gloss I had smelled?). She was acting normal enough. I chose to say nothing. I wish I hadn’t.

I just wanted so badly for Luca to have a nice night. Poor kid got the short end of the stick every day, with his dad dead and all of my time consumed by the twins. I guess it was guilt that made me ignore my instincts, made me pawn my child off on a drunk teenager. But she wasn’t a drunk teenager, I told myself that night, she was our Kayla, our responsible, helpful, golden Cinderella.

“Ready to go?” she asked Luca, giving the baby, bottle and all, to me. I was holding both the twins in my arms then- one screaming, one spitting up milk. Somehow I managed to give Luca a quick kiss and remind him to take his plastic pumpkin bucket. He was so short the thing almost scraped the floor when he carried it by the handle. Kayla said, “we’re just going once around the block, Luca. I really am supposed to meet people.”

“Okay!” My boy sounded so agreeable. Too sweet for his own good. He took her hand, positively vibrating with excitement. 

They made it down to the corner. That much I know for sure from speaking to the neighbors. They stopped by Mrs. Yang’s and even took a picture next to that blow-up ghost at the park. But then they turned down Willette. I’ve been saying for years that street is too dark. There was even a petition last election cycle- some local moms’ group trying to get the city to put in more streetlights. 

“Why did you take him that way?” I howled hours later, as the three patrolmen stood, arms crossed, around my kitchen. Kayla, hysterical, sobbed and snotted all over my ghost-patterned tablecloth, her blue eye liner streaming garishly down her cheeks. 

“What were you thinking?” I screamed, my hands shaking as I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. 

“Easy, m’am,” said one of the deputies, stepping between me and my niece. “Try to calm down and let’s just hear the rest of the young lady’s story.”

“Tell it then, you little shit!” I barked at her, for once feeling no guilt whatsoever. She deserved it. She’d done this.

“Can I wait till my mom gets here?” she wailed, wringing her hands. “Please, Auntie Mo?”

“She’s on her way,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “Tell it now.” 

“My friends were down there,” she blubbered, unable to meet my eyes, “at the vacant lot.”

“Doing what?” asked a red-haired officer with a pot belly.

“Smoking weed,” she cried, pulling off her evening gloves and scrubbing her face with them. “Please don’t arrest me!”

“No one’s under arrest at the moment,” said another cop, hooking his thumbs through the armpits of his vest. “Please go on.”

“They were waiting for me!” She finally looked at me, her expression pleading as though she was desperate to make me understand. “They’d been texting me nonstop! I just wanted to run over there and tell them I had to take Luca home and that I’d be right back!”

“So?” I asked, my fingernails digging into my palms.“What happened?”

“I made Luca wait at the corner,” she said quietly, her red eyes welling up with tears again. “I didn’t want him to see people smoking. I just had him sit on the curb. I ran to my friends, told them what I was doing, and ran back. But when I got there . . .”

“He was gone,”  I said. 

I can’t remember much about the rest of that conversation. I think I blacked it out. The cops asked Kayla a bunch of questions. Her mom came, seething, and picked her up, throwing a jacket over her shoulders and dragging her back outside to help look for Luca. The neighbors formed a search party, everyone from our street abandoning their candy bowls and heading out into the night. I couldn’t go. I had to stay home with the twins who were, ironically, finally asleep. I saw the flashlights dancing through the blackened windowpanes, heard them yelling my little boy’s name. I called and texted everyone I knew, anyone I could think of who might know where he was, but no one did. Kayla and her mom stopped back over about one in the morning. They told me they would stay the night with me, but I sent them away. I said I didn’t want Kayla around me anymore. “Get her out of my sight,” were the exact words I used. I haven’t seen her since. 

We still haven’t found Luca. I see his lifeless body a thousand times a day, in my mind’s eye. Ding dong, my wicked witch is dead. Those thoughts come with a burning nausea, and I vomit in the kitchen sink when they appear, the guilt and grief too much to hold in. 

He was so little, so hard to see in his black clothes. A driver could have hit him and barely noticed, assuming he was a small animal. Or someone could have taken him. A quiet, dark-robed toddler, so easy to snatch from the darkness. 

I try to keep my hopes up. We’re looking. All of us. Every day. I bundle the babies in the double stroller and join the volunteers, walking up and down the streets, peering into drainage ditches, behind dumpsters, under cars. The police are widening the search area now- officers scouring the surrounding counties, divers combing the lakes and rivers.

Every moment, I wish to find him, my round-chinned boy with the speech impediment. I wish with all my heart that he was back in my arms. I wish a lot of things. Sometimes, in the darkest hour of my insomnia, my witching hour, I wish the situation were reversed. I see Kayla, my sweet niece, our golden child, dead in a ditch instead of him. Sometimes I imagine putting her there myself. I even plan out how I would do it. But this is a wish I know I must suppress. It is a wicked wish.