BABY FEVER

The morning after my daughter dies, I drive her to an IHOP. The road is scabbed with filled, worn-down, then refilled potholes so by the time we pull into the parking lot the old station wagon is shaking like a wet dog and Marnie’s left cheek is plastered to the vinyl back-seat. Cornsilk hair wreaths her tiny head, lips parted in sleep, pink fists only starting to grey at the knuckles. She looks so much like a porcelain doll that it makes my chest ache.

Morning hangs a little lower with empty streets; sun scalds the asphalt, leaving dimples of pure white light in the dried-up gutters. Faded skid marks loop the ground, the building swelling up from the sidewalk like a cyst out of place; a mound of vein-blue bricks. This is where we go when times get tough, scrape together enough change for two plates, watch as she colours in the margin of a kid’s menu with a crayon, both our mouths sugar-slicked. 

Mommy, look. 

I kneel in the backseat, palms nested between apricot bar wrappers and dollar-store markers. Her wrists are still bound, knotted with a soft blue sweater. She hadn’t put up a fight, she’d always been a good girl. Early to sleep, late to wake, cries more akin to pathetic gurgling than anything resembling infantile violence. My labour had only lasted ninety minutes; she was kind to her momma from the get-go. I brush a strand of hair away from where it's fallen on her cool forehead.

“We’re here, baby. Easy now.”

She shoots up like a Jack-in-the-box, eyes glassy as marbles, drool lacquering her chin. My baby girl, yellow teddy t-shirt. My baby girl, skin only slightly off-colour. My baby girl, still half of a human.

When I plaster the duct tape to her cornflower-blue lips she only tries to bite at my wrist twice, teeth gnashing, head snapping forward. When I pull the pink sun hat from our trip to Cancun onto her head, brim so large that it flops over and masquerades her face entirely, she only beats against my chest with half-force. The kind of force reserved for tantrums: no ice cream before dinner, 7pm bedtimes, weekends sheltered inside from the rain. The kind of faux force reserved only for a mother.

Marnie’s good to her momma like that; she’s always been a good girl.

***

Strawberry jam over flapjacks, three pillows of whipped cream, black coffee that’s more grain than liquid. Our usual, ordered from a twenty-something waitress wearing enough hairspray to ignite a small forest fire. She finishes writing our order down with a flick and then snags the pen onto the spaghetti strap of her tank top. A toothy smile pressed into the mouth of someone with too much to say. She picks up the laminated menus, fingers grazing the aluminium tabletop before Marnie. Marnie twitches, lurches forward a little. Her face is still concealed, her hands beneath the table, but the muscles strain beneath her greying skin. Unseen elements in motion.

The waitress shoots her a bubblegum-smile, dead-oblivious.

“It sure is good of y’all to be out! I was starting to think I’d have another nothing-day.” She laughs, an annoying, jagged thing.

“Right.” I want her to leave. Marnie is near-churning on the other side of the booth, moving her weight from hip bone to hip bone, tied hands twisting in her lap. 

I’m sorry, baby. I think, so sorry, baby.

“I mean, hell, I ain’t even believe half the hoo-ha the newspeoples be spewing! We’re the sane ones right? Life doesn’t stop just cause some crazies overseas have deluded themselves into thinking they living a Walking Dead episode! You ever see that show? Big fun.”

“Oh sure.” 

Her’s is a story that tells itself, and it’s nothing to do with sanity: the only people who are working are the people who have to be. Everyone else may as well be on house arrest; splayed out on beds of canned produce and 9mms, boarding off their bedroom doors with snapped broom handles. News travels fast, bounces from country to country.

She seems to expect more, but I don’t have the patience to humour her. When she leaves, it’s with a sigh and a glitter-glossy pout, hips swaying like a pendulum. 

When she returns with our plates, I can tell Marnie is ready to jump the table. She’s breathing hard, her skin a mottled blue-grey, the colour of a developing bruise. The waitress slams the plates down, oblivious to the way Marnie is struggling. I grab her tiny wrists beneath the table, dig my thumbs in between her veins. Marnie tries to whimper, muffled. The waitress starts to walk away, a blown-out tattoo of a cherry peeks out from the hem of her mini skirt. Then she stops, turns around, her eyes settle on Marnie. She shoots off another toothy smile.

"You're a cute little thing, little fashionista."

Marnie doesn't eat her flapjacks, but I lay them out in front of her anyway. 

***

I wait in the parking lot for twelve minutes before I go back inside, knees tucked under my chin in the driver’s seat. Little-tree air freshener bobbing in the rearview mirror, radio spitting out a piss-poor cover of ‘Yesterday’. Twelve minutes to let it set, twelve minutes to make it seem real. A faulty engine, a frazzled single mother; this is a picture-book tale.

She’s got her rouged bunny-nose in a paperback when I push through the glass pivot doors. 

“My car won’t start.” I say it like an apology.

She perks up, 

“Well, my daddy sure knew his way around a car, want me to take a gander at it?”

There's a certain intoxication in needing to be needed.

“Yes.” I nod, “Please.”

In the parking lot she leans over the popped engine, hands all twisted in the station wagon’s guts. Her pencilled-on brows furrow in concentration. 

“Nothing seems wrong.” She says, Dolly Parton hair quivering as she rises.

“Huh,” I say, “My mistake, I suppose.”

My daddy knew his way around a knife and a shotgun. My daddy knew his way around the flesh of an animal, wine-red sinews on display, hide slackened over the kitchen counter. Sparrows on the weekend, plucked down to the gooseflesh. Deer bones splintering between fingers with a thorny snap. This isn’t all that different, not really.

The hardest part is getting her into the trunk in one piece.

“Let’s get out of here, baby.” I muse to the backseat, palming the stick-shift, “Let’s get out of here.”

***

It’s six days on the road before we happen upon someone else. Marnie grows antsy, spitting up bile, the waitress’s bleach-white thumb bone between her lips like a pacifier. Her food is done before day five; my baby’s a growing girl with a healthy appetite. 

We make pit stops on the side of the red-soil road, sun dipping behind blousey clouds. Bring her out, tie her down, let her eat until her chubby neck is veined red. Radio signals, dinged up cans, the pleasant memories of family dinners over TV. In the first few days of her life, Marnie refused to feed. Lips suckled around my nipple, unmoving, instincts betraying her. Doe eyes looking up at me blank, no movement beyond the rise of her rib cage against her skin. I worried myself so sick in those early days that I gnawed my nails down to the skin; left my fingertips bald and pink, left my mouth tasting of iron and sweat. This is the scales evening out, the way in which she hunches over her meals, teeth bared, eyes rabid. This is penance. Each time I bundle her into the backseat it’s with a reluctance, a restrained sadness at the way her body pulls away from me. I am not a bad mother, anyone could tell you that.

I don’t recognise at first that he is a man; that far off, hazed shape, thumb stuck out like a signpost. I stop a good half-mile from him, pull the car off into a shallow ditch. Marnie fusses from the backseat, kicks and gurgles, but the way her voice shuts off as she hears the engine sputter out tells me all I need to know. She is smart, my baby girl. Not a fool in sight here. She barely even tries to bite as I wrap her into the blanket, move her to the trunk. Two petite snaps, jaw only half-opened.

“Just a second baby, just give momma a second.”

I kick the car into drive and roll, slow, steady. Only enough movement to get the engine warming, tailpipe hacking up grey. My foot is as heavy as a dead man. The man turns at the sound of the engine, the crunch of tires against ruby dirt. He’s a big man, bellied out at the middle, slapped with sweat. Half his face is obscured by a long, matted beard, eyes hidden by a pair of dirty spectacles. I slow down to a crawl, let the engine tick. His hand comes up, waving me over. I pull up beside him, roll down the window.

His mouth is moving and the air tastes like a dirty penny, that distinct undercurrent of iron.

“Morning miss,” He says, words slow and drawn, and I have to remind myself to smile, prick up those cheeks, perk up those lips.

“Sir.”

“Travelling alone?

He glances into the backseat and I smile again.

“Yes, sir.”

The man bounces back on his heels, 

“That ain’t too safe these days. Ain't you heard? There’s monsters about.”

His laugh is deep and low. Sunlight straps the hood of the station wagon with pale tangerine and lilac, the sun a yolk in the deep-orange sky; easy side up.

“Are you needing a ride, sir?” I have no desire to hear him talk about monsters. He’s got nothing to him but sinewy rags and a face like a kicked hound dog. Us? We’ve got love.

When I pull her out of the trunk, Marnie’s wearing the closest thing to a smile that I’ve seen from her in days.

***

Flesh shattered between baby teeth, the hollowed flames of a makeshift fire, nights under saintless night skies; carbonated with constellations. Fed until she’s full, fed until her decaying eyelids flutter shut, her blue-black thumb in mouth. A two-person Sunday night roast for the new age.

***

The funny thing about petroleum? It doesn’t last. The jugs kicked under the passenger seat dry up, ghost-empty. We make it just over three hundred miles before the tank coughs and sputters, then begins to choke. The funny thing about syphoning fuel? You need something to syphon from. We find a half-empty gallon in a truck, but that runs out fast, too, and after that, there's nothing. Just the sound of a dead engine, the stench of hot plastic and the grind of Marnie's teeth from behind me. I try to coax her out of the back seat, but she's a wall. A child's tantrum. Hungry

The tank runs dry, and I pull off to the side, a sloppy parking job, one tire flattening a tumbleweed against the soil like dough. The land spreads out into nothing, we are somewhere; but nowhere known. It takes a big woman to admit when she’s lost. The sky is an open, festering wound, a sore that won't heal, maggotted with stars. 

I try to coax her out from her backseat cell again. She's quiet now. Her lips are a flat, ragged line, eyes dark and wet.

“Come on, baby. It's just us, you know that.”

There’s enough tinned food on the car floor to feed a small army; kidney beans, maraschino cherries, dubiously ingrediented meats, and dime-store chicken noodle soup. Of course, that all means jack shit. 

Marnie’s head is hung over, the loose peg neck of a forgotten puppet. She twitch-shudders, her whole body a hiccup. I reach out, curl my fingers under the duct tape smothering her mouth, and rip it off in one swift move. Her head snaps up, yellowed teeth bared. A flash of incisors.

Marnie coughs and hacks, throat clicking. She’s the colour of snow; white sworn through with blue, the veins in her eyes and cheeks a webbing of bloodied broken glass. She doesn’t blink, pupils two dark pinpricks. I’m a good mother; anyone would tell you that. I keep my baby fed. The real monster is the bitch who would let a little girl go hungry.

“Come on baby,” I say, unwrapping her wrists, “Come to Momma.”