A Jeff Resnick Six Pack Read online

  “I will—I will,” he asserted, but I didn’t for one moment believe him.

  “Have fun,” I commanded and we said good-bye. I hung up and heard a gurgle from the baby monitor. CP was awake. I headed out of the kitchen and up the stairs to fetch her.

  By the time I reached the second floor, her gurgles had escalated to fitful cries. She probably had a wet—or worse—diaper. Sure enough, she needed a change.

  I picked her up and kissed her forehead and noted that she seemed warm to the touch—warmer than normal. Her little eyes scrunched up and she started to cry in earnest.

  “Oh, CP, don’t cry,” I told her. “I’ll change you.”

  I put her down on the changing table and gave her a clean diaper. Her sleeper was a little damp, so I put on a clean one and then picked her up and slung her over my shoulder. Her tiny brown fingers curled into the folds of my sweatshirt and I patted her back. “It’s just you and me tonight, kid. Aunt Maggie’s as sick as a dog.”

  As though in sympathy, CP upchucked all over my shoulder. Hot sour vomit soaked through the material. The baby had barfed on me many times before, but usually I’d had a cloth diaper or a towel slung over my shoulder, and usually it happened while trying to burp her.

  “CP,” I wailed and set her back in her crib, where she started to howl. I pulled off the sweatshirt and tossed it into the adjoining bathroom, then I grabbed some baby wipes to clean her face. She’d messed her sleeper, too, so I rummaged in the dresser to find another. It was the last clean one. If CP staged a repeat performance, she wouldn’t have anything warm to sleep in. I’d have to do a load of laundry. Brenda probably hadn’t anticipated her daughter might need two clean sleepers within the space of five minutes.

  “Come on, CP, calm down,” I begged as big tears cascaded down her chubby cheeks. She was still crying, but it wasn’t one of her usual wails. This was different; a long note of misery broken every few seconds by a hiccupping gulp.

  Richard and Brenda kept the house at an even seventy-two degrees, but I was cold without my shirt. I had figured I’d bring over a change of clothes once Maggie arrived—so I had nothing to change into. While CP continued to grizzle, I ducked into Richard and Brenda’s bedroom. I wasn’t about to rifle through their dresser drawers, so instead I threw open the closet door and pawed through Richard’s stuff until I found a flannel shirt. It wasn’t an article of clothing I’d associate with him, and I’d certainly never seen him wear it, but if the baby barfed on it, it wasn’t likely to get ruined, either. I donned it. Richard was almost six inches taller than me and the sleeves were miles too long, but the buttons at the cuffs at least kept them from hanging over the tips of my fingers.

  I ducked back into the nursery. CP’s cries had wound down to a whimper. I picked her up once more and she nestled her face against my shoulder. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I sat down in the glider where Brenda usually fed her. We went back and forth, back and forth, with me patting her back and her still whimpering.

  “Don’t take it so hard, CP,” I told her. “Everybody’s gotta puke now and then, but please don’t do it again. Neither of us has any more clean clothes to wear. It’s winter, and we’re not living in a nudist camp.”

  CP closed her eyes and we continued to glide back and forth. I kept talking to her, hoping the sound of my voice would keep her calm. It was time for her bottle, but I wasn’t about to feed her until I was sure her stomach had settled.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time in grade school when I puked all over myself and the floor outside the lunchroom? Aw, that was the talk of the third grade for weeks. Your grandma was at work and couldn’t come and get me, so Mrs. Sweeney, the school nurse, gave me a clean shirt, wrapped me in a blanket, and then put a cool washcloth on my forehead. She was such a nice lady. She took better care of me than your grandma did, that’s for sure. In fact, I came back to school the next day, still sick, ’cuz grandma couldn’t afford to take a day off of work, and Mrs. Sweeney not only took care of me, but she’d washed my stinky shirt. I don’t think I ever brought back the one she gave me, and she never asked for it, either.”

  For some reason, remembering the nurse’s acts of kindness filled me with a sense of sadness. How many other children had she comforted over the years? She must have provided hundreds of kids with not only exceptional care, but also clean clothes and warm comforting hugs filled with unconditional love.

  I don’t know what happened to that wonderful woman, but I hoped she was happy and that somehow she knew that her loving care was still appreciated all these years later.

  My story must have bored my tiny niece, who’d fallen asleep on my shoulder. I needed to get that laundry done. I could have just eased her back into her crib, but I decided not to. Instead, I sat in the glider for at least another ten minutes going back and forth, holding on to that sweet baby girl, worrying what I would do if she got any sicker.

  #

  I was down in the laundry room when the phone rang at nearly eight o’clock. I almost killed myself running up the basement stairs to the kitchen and grabbed it on the fifth ring. “Hello!” I said breathlessly.

  “Jeffy?” Brenda asked, sounding worried.

  “It’s me.”

  “Why do you sound so winded?”

  “I ran all the way from the laundry room to grab the phone.”

  “What were you doing down there?”

  “Washing clothes.”

  “Oh.” She must have figured I was doing my own laundry, as I used their machines on a regular basis. “Is everything okay?”

  I hesitated before answering. “Isn’t the curtain about to go up?”

  “I saw a pay phone when we entered the theater’s lobby. You should see this place. It’s been beautifully restored to Art Deco perfection.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “I told Richard I was going to the Ladies Room, but I just wanted to see how my three favorite people back home were doing.”

  “Great,” I lied. I wasn’t about to spoil her evening. CP had low-grade fevers and puked on a regular basis. All kids did. I could handle her tummy upset.

  “Where’s Maggie?” Brenda asked.

  Again I hesitated before answering. “Probably in the bathroom.”

  “Again?”

  “Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go.”

  “Have you given Betsy her nighttime bottle?”

  “I was just going to. How’s the weather in Toronto?”

  “It started to snow as soon as we left the house and it hasn’t stopped yet, but tomorrow morning is supposed to be clear. What’s it like at home?”

  I looked out the window to the dark driveway beyond. Snow was still falling in big clumpy flakes. The plow guy would have to dig us out come morning. “Could be better,” I admitted.

  “Good thing you don’t have to go anywhere,” Brenda said.

  “Oh, yeah,” I agreed.

  “Uh-oh, I think I heard the orchestra start up. I’d better go.”

  “Enjoy the play,” I said.

  “Bye,” Brenda said, and the connection was broken.

  The baby monitor crackled to life once again. CP was back to her fretful cry. I grabbed one of the bottles of breast milk Brenda had left in the fridge, stuck it in the microwave for the precise time she’d indicated on a card she’d left on the counter, and retrieved the bottle. I tested it on my wrist—like I guess everybody does—found it more or less body temperature, and then headed up the stairs.

  CP had flipped over from her back to her belly—her latest trick—and was just as cranky as she’d been earlier. I picked her up and sat down on the glider, settling her against my left arm, but when I tried to give her the bottle, she pushed it away.

  “It’s suppertime. Eat, Betsy, eat,” I said, but she wanted nothing to do with the bottle. Instead, she shoved her hand in her mouth, chewing on her fingers.

  “Aw, don’t do that, CP,” I told her, pulling her hand away from her mouth. “You don’t know where t
hose fingers have been.” But she was not to be deterred. Once again she began to whine. Not a real cry, but a monotone of misery.

  I took the baby downstairs to the living room, picked up the TV’s remote and hit the power button, then switched to the local news channel for background noise before we began to walk up and down the hall between the grand foyer with its polished marble floor to the parquet floor down the hall to the other end of the house and CP’s daddy’s study. Back and forth and back and forth. The weather report recycled every ten minutes, telling me what I already knew before it segued into the same boring story about erosion along the shores of Lake Ontario. That got old fast, so I changed the channel and during the next two hours caught fragments of four different couples in various parts of the country searching for their dream homes.

  During that time, CP would doze off, drooling against my shoulder. But every time I’d take her back to her crib, she’d wake and begin her miserable cry once more.

  “CP, sweetheart, tell Uncle Jeff what’s wrong,” I pleaded, but her little blue eyes would fill with big wet tears and she’d bury her face in my shoulder once again. Thanks to that damned erratic empathic ability I endured, sometimes CP and I were in sync and sometimes we weren’t. Today was one of those non-sync days. I couldn’t feel the pain of whatever was bothering her, but I did experience her confusion as well as a general sense of wrongness. She was just a baby—unable to communicate any other way than with tears.

  It was almost ten-thirty when we ended up back in the glider once again and CP finally fell into an exhausted sleep. I must have fallen asleep, too, and awoke an hour or so later with a start when CP began to wail in my ear.

  I got up, put her on the changing table and gave her a fresh diaper, and then we began to walk the floor again. I’d heard that some sleepless parents bundled their kids up in the back seat of their cars and drove them around for hours at a time, the constant movement helping to get the baby off to sleep. I thought I wasn’t prepared to go that far, but after fifteen minutes, CP’s cries had only gotten louder and more insistent, and I knew I was in over my head. I needed help—fast—and had no idea where to find it. I considered calling 911 when I suddenly remembered that I did know someone who’d had lots of experience with babies. She’d not only had three children of her own, but five grandchildren—me, among them.

  I bundled CP in her lilac-colored snowsuit, grabbed her diaper bag, locked the house, and walked across the snowy driveway to the garage. I unlocked the side door, turned on the light, opened the back door of Brenda’s car, then nestled CP into her car seat and buckled her up. CP stuffed her mittened hand into her mouth, squeezed her pretty blue eyes shut, and wailed.

  #

  I was never sure if the lights in the closed bakery on Main Street would be on or off when I arrived long after closing time. Sometimes they were, sometimes they weren’t. I parked on the side street, extricated a still-teary CP, grabbed the diaper bag, and started off down the sidewalk toward Main Street through ankle-deep snow. Damn. The lights weren’t on inside the bakery and I pushed the doorbell feeling more than a little desperate.

  CP began to cry again. Big, wet, sad, hopeless sobs of misery and I felt about ready to join her when the lights in the back of the shop snapped on and I saw the bulky silhouetted figure of my psychic mentor, Sophie Levin. Seeing me, she hurried to the door.

  “Help!” I said as she held open the door to let us in.

  “Is this baby Betsy?” she asked with delight. During the preceding months, I’d brought stacks of pictures of my niece to show her, but never thought I’d have the opportunity to show off CP in person. Unfortunately, the baby wasn’t at her best.

  “Richard and Brenda went out of town for the night. Maggie was supposed to help me babysit, but caught the flu. Now Betsy’s sick and I’m at my wits end. I need your help.”

  “Come in back,” Sophie said, her voice tinged with the hint of a Polish accent, just the sound of it easing my anxiety.

  “Get her out of that snowsuit and I’ll make cocoa for the two of us.”

  While she put on a saucepan of water to heat, I unzipped CP and took off her snowsuit, then tossed her over my shoulder, patting her back once more, but she continued to whine inconsolably.

  “How long has she been like this?” Sophie asked.

  “Since early this afternoon. She’s such a good girl. I’ve never seen her so unhappy. I thought about taking her to the emergency room, but I really don’t think she’s in any danger. She’s just cranky, which isn’t like her.”

  Sophie held out her arms and I passed the baby to her. CP seemed wary, but then Sophie kissed her forehead and she immediately settled down.

  “She’s got a bit of a fever,” I said.

  “Not much of one,” Sophie said and sat down on one of the folding chairs beside the rickety card table where she usually held court. “You make the cocoa,” she told me and bounced CP on her knee.

  By the time I returned to the table with two cracked mugs filled with instant hot chocolate, CP had calmed down, but still looked like she might erupt in tears again at any moment.

  “Brenda called to check up on the baby around eight tonight. I guess I should have told her CP wasn’t feeling well.”

  “You knew they needed some time alone and you thought you could handle her,” Sophie guessed, still bouncing CP on her knee.

  “Yeah, but how are they going to feel when I tell them that I lied? That Maggie couldn’t come over? That the baby was sick and I didn’t know how to help her? They’re never going to trust me again.”

  Sophie frowned. “You are a worry wart.”

  Didn’t she understand how deep in do-do I’d buried myself?

  “It’s obvious to me what’s wrong.”

  “Tell me,” I begged.

  She shook her head as though perturbed. “Come here.”

  I got up from the table.

  “Give me your hand.”

  I stared at her. “What for?”

  “Give me your hand!” she demanded.

  I shoved my hand forward. She folded three of my fingers down then guided my index finger toward CP. “Put your finger in her mouth.”

  “What for?” I again asked.

  “Feel her gums. This baby is teething.”

  I ran my finger along the hard ridges in CP’s mouth. There was no sign of a tooth. Her jaws clamped shut and she ground her gums against my finger. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant sensation.

  “Does Brenda have any teething rings?” Sophie asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. I didn’t even know what a teething ring was.

  “They don’t cost much. You could get one at the store tomorrow.”

  It already was tomorrow. “There’s an all-night pharmacy just down the road. I might be able to get one there,” I said as CP continued to chomp on my finger. She seemed less fretful, although she still whined quietly.

  “Don’t look so worried,” Sophie scolded me. “Everybody cuts a first tooth. Maybe by the time Betsy’s mama and papa come home tomorrow she can show off hers.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. I retrieved my finger and went back to the sink to rinse my hands. As I wiped them dry on a linen towel, I looked over my shoulder to take in the sight of Sophie beaming at my tiny niece. Waves of pure happiness seemed to radiate from her.

  I sat back down. “When was the last time you held a baby on your lap?”

  Sophie’s smile was crooked. “When Patty was little.”

  Patty was my half-sister. Unlike Richard and me, she and I weren’t close and I wasn’t sure we ever would be. But the mention of her name reminded me that maybe I should at least call her every so often. I owed her that small effort. After all, she had saved my life. Twice.

  Sophie held CP’s hands and the baby wobbled to raise herself on unsteady legs. “Good girl,” Sophie encouraged, her eyes wide with pleasure. CP had no biological connection to my long-dead grandmother, but she was connected to me, and that seemed to be enoug
h for Sophie.

  I sipped my cocoa and watched as the old lady played peek-a-boo and other silly games with CP, who actually managed a few brief smiles.

  “She’s got her daddy’s eyes,” Sophie commented.

  “Yeah,” I said. When I looked at that little girl, I sometimes thought my chest would burst from the overwhelming gush of emotion she inspired. I loved that kid as though she were my own. She was an amalgam of the two people I loved most on the planet, and I felt lucky to be a small part of her life.

  CP yawned, her eyelids growing heavy.

  “Time for you two to go home to bed,” Sophie said, her voice tinged with sadness.

  “Maybe I can bring her back to visit you some time,” I said.

  Sophie sighed, but shook her head. She looked across the table at me. “Thank you so much for bringing her here tonight. I never thought I’d ever have the chance to hold a baby again. It’s a memory to cherish.”

  My throat constricted and I looked down at my empty cup.

  “Let’s get this girl into her snowsuit. You need to get to the store to get what she needs,” Sophie said.

  Together, we zippered CP into her snowsuit. She looked like a big purple marshmallow. Sophie walked us to the door. “Come and see me again soon,” she encouraged.

  “I will,” I said, and leaned forward to kiss her and we made a sandwich with CP as the filling. The baby giggled, and I knew then that though her gums were still sore, my sweet niece was going to be just fine. “Thanks for being here,” I told Sophie.

  “I am here for you. I am only here for you,” she reminded me once again. She clasped my shoulders and turned me and CP toward the door. “Go to the store, then go home and put that child to bed.”

  “I will,” I said once again. “See you soon.”

  She closed and locked the door after us and then waved from the window.

  At least an inch of new snow had fallen since CP and I had entered the bakery. I walked back to the car, buckled her into her car seat, and climbed back behind the wheel. Minutes later, I pulled up to the pharmacy’s drive-up window. The woman on duty suggested teething tablets and a couple of teething rings which could be frozen to help numb tender swollen gums. I handed her my Visa card and a minute later we were good to go.