Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [53]
“Yes.”
“Are there any clothes in it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Please check. It would be good to change her before we land.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I was going to give her a sedative. Is she allergic to any medication?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
“No,” David said. “I don’t … I don’t want to take anything.” He looked at her. “Don’t make me take anything.”
She smiled weakly and touched his arm. “I’m going to go back in and see how she is.”
“Do you know what happened?”
Chen shook her head. “No, I couldn’t say.”
“Not a single idea?”
“It would be irresponsible for me to guess.”
As she turned, he stopped her again. “What … ” he said. “What do we do with him?”
Chen squinted and shook her head. “You mean the child?”
“Yes”
“Let her be with him for now,” she said. “Just let her hold him.”
Thankfully, Alice’s carry-on had a dress in it. He also took out some clean underwear, and as he put her bag back, he could feel everyone in the cabin looking at him. The old woman who’d questioned him during the storm put a hand on his elbow, and when he turned she asked if his wife was all right. And what if she wasn’t, David thought. What would you have me say? She took his hand—this complete stranger, so thin she couldn’t weigh more than eighty-five pounds, the frames of her glasses seeming to extend beyond the perimeter of her face—and pulled him toward her. Kneeling down, David hated her for foisting this sympathy on him.
She clasped her other hand over his. “I have two daughters,” she said, “but I miscarried twice. It’s God’s way. It means your child was never to be of this world. It means He needed it in Heaven.”
But he was of this world, David thought. He thanked her, then went back to sit with Alice, down the aisle every passenger staring at him with an expression of unabashed fascination. He wanted to curse them all.
Chen and Green were standing outside the curtains talking, and when David approached they gently pulled them open. Alice hadn’t shifted from her position and was still holding the baby in her arms and talking to him, nodding her head and cooing, rocking the body softly. She seemed delusional, so utterly remote, so out of his reach, that it was like seeing through the wrong end of a telescope. He wanted to ask the doctors about her behavior, but his own horror was overwhelming enough and he didn’t want to add to it by learning anything new. And then Alice spoke.
“I know we’d talked about Henry, but now that I see him I like the name David better.”
When she stared at the small form, he felt as if he’d lost her permanently.
Then she looked up. “Do you want to hold him?”
He did not.
“He looks like you,” she said, and smiled as she held him out.
The body was so small—the size of a Coke bottle—that it seemed unnecessary to use both hands. Shaking, David got to his knees at the foot of her pallet and took the child, afraid he might drop him, might press too hard on his little body and somehow defile it, and afraid that if he looked at him he might turn to stone. He crossed his legs, holding the bundle before him, and there in the circular fold, the baby’s face was frozen midwhisper or midkiss, his skin pink, venous, nearly paper-thin, the body as small as a G.I. Joe. He already had a small patch of black hair. The limbs were still, yet David couldn’t help reaching into the swaddling to take one of his hands between thumb and forefinger, the small specks of his nails distinct when he pinched the hand lightly. He went on to look at the feet—the bones ship-in-a-bottle miraculous, the toes curled delicately—before carefully tucking the leg back into the swaddling. It seemed he was watching himself from above as he did all of this. What was the point of all this biological work? All these cells upon cells duplicating over and over again in this act of creation? In every aspect of proportion and disproportion he could see how as yet unmade the baby was. Was there any salvation or comfort in seeing this? He examined the face once more to be sure. The resemblance was uncanny, but he couldn’t connect himself to