Tiny Death Page #2

• Fiction

								

	By December, Danny’s outfit was almost too small for him to wear, and my mother crooned to him, “You’re Mama’s big, big boy.”
	I liked to talk to him, and would visit him in the morning before I went downstairs to eat my corn flakes. I’d tiptoe into his blue room and poke my finger through the bars of the crib to stroke a flannel arm or knee.  “Hi, baby. Hi, baby,” I said as I patted him. “Hi, baby. Remember me?”
	He almost always stopped turned his head when I spoke to him, and he would smile back at me when I made faces. When he got fussy, I liked to sing to him in a little soft voice, “Don’t cry baby, don’t cry baby…”
	The neighbors got used to seeing Daniel pushed through the neighborhood in his buggy, and the neighbors smiled at each other when my mother rearranged his blankets. Harriet next door said one time, “Honestly, Angie, you’d think the child was made of crystal.”
	When diapers were drying on the clothesline, I loved to walk through the tunnels of damp, clean white that smelled like sun and soap. It was a cozy, happy sensation and seemed to make up for having to check the toilet for soaking diapers before I sat down.
	I was careful to be quiet under Daniel’s window when I played outside, and I kept our old dog Peaches from taking his toys or licking his face. I was so careful – always so very, very careful.
	When the day came that my grandmother silently took down Danny’s bed and put away his clothes in the cedar closet, I still didn’t know what I had done wrong. Nothing that morning had seemed any different at first.
	I had tiptoed into his room as usual, but when I touched his arm, he hadn’t turned his head to look at me. I poked his forearm gently once more, but he had slept on. His skin felt a little cool, so I pulled his blanket up over his shoulders and left him to sleep. I looked back at him once as I left the room, and I could see that his head was turned the usual way and his dark curls were pressed against his sheet. 
	I went to my room to color, and that is when the screaming began. I put down the blue crayon I had been using to color the sky and waited. I was afraid to look behind me to see why my mother, who was usually so careful to keep the house quiet when Daniel sleeping, was raising her voice. I was worried that her noise would frighten him and make him cry. In an instant, I heard my father’s feet running down the hall, and I looked over my shoulder and saw him hurtle past my door. I got to my feet, and followed behind him as he leaned over Daniel’s crib and shouted, “Oh God no, oh God no, oh God no.”
	For a long time after that, I thought my parents’ loud voices had scared Daniel away. I didn’t ask where he had gone, and he was only spoken about in whispers after my mother came home again from the hospital. She looked so sad sitting in her bathrobe in the chair on the porch that I didn’t feel like asking her questions. I didn’t want to make her feel bad again. So I tried to find him myself.
	I spent hours crawling around the honeysuckle bushes looking for him, and calling him in a low voice. “Hi, baby. Hi, baby. Remember me?”
	I hoped to find him hidden under a branch, or cuddled in a nest of grass like a bunny. I didn’t believe he could have gone far, and I hoped he’d forgive my mother for making so much noise because now she was unhappy all the time.
	I was afraid he’d be hungry, so I filled my doll dishes with milk and put them under the bushes at night so he would have something to drink. On the mornings that I would find the dishes empty, new hope would fill me and I’d call for him with a throat tightened by excitement, “Here, baby. Come here, baby.”
	When the weather got too cold again for me to play outside, I knew Danny wouldn’t come back. I sat in the window and watched the birds at the bird feeder, and wondered why he had gone too far away to hear me calling him.
	That Christmas, I got two dolls and an electric train. I wouldn’t touch the doll that drank from its own bottle, but I let the bride ride around the little track on the back of the engine. My mother watched me from the easy chair and smiled, but nobody said very much.
	In January, my Sunday school teacher asked me about the picture I had drawn of my house. “Where are the doors and windows?”
	“There aren’t any,” I told her. “Nobody can get out and not come back.”
	The following summer, we moved to Indiana and I started kindergarten. Birthday parties and Halloween costumes came and went, and I was an angel in the Christmas pageant at church. When school let out again, we went to Springfield for a visit and my mother asked to go to the cemetery. My dad nodded, and stopped at the hardware store on the way to buy my mother a pair of garden gloves. “Just in case there are weeds to pull,” she had said.
	The grass seemed perfect, and the little bronze plaques were immaculate. Mom dropped the new garden gloves on the back seat, saying, “I guess these weren’t necessary.”
	I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t say a word. I was motionless as I tried to take my eyes off a word written on one of the plaques. “Howard.” It was the same as my last name. I could guess the other two words that came in front of it. “Daniel William…”
	My mother looked at me and asked, “Are you okay?”
	“He was here all the time,” I whispered. “You knew where he was.”
	“What on earth do you mean?” she asked me, puzzled.
	“He was just a baby,” I told her. “How’d he get all the way out here?”
	“Why, the car from the funeral home brought him out here. Don’t you remember? You were so upset, we didn’t make you come. You stayed home with Grandma.”
	“Why’d they bring him way out here? He was just a little baby. He couldn’t get back by himself.”
	We both stood looking at the perfect expanse of green grass, and the little bronze plaques. My father walked over to us. “Something wrong with my girls?”
	“Kitty needs some lunch,” my mother told him. “She’s a little tired.”
	We drove back into town and ate at the Howard Johnson’s. I had a hamburger and some French fries. My parents ate tuna salad and drank iced tea from tall glasses that the waitress refilled. We didn’t say much, and soon we were driving away from Springfield towards Indianapolis. My mother said, “It will be good to be home again.”
	My thoughts returned to the present, and I was aware of Mr. Cranfield straightening a stack of papers on his desk. I tugged my skirt a little farther down on my knees, and leaned forward to sign where he pointed. “There we go,” he said. “Everything is ready. Will you be at the cemetery in Indianapolis?”
	I nodded as I put my pen back into my purse. “I’ll be there.”

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