Mrs. Hill was having a pretty good day. Her skin was its normal coffee color, not overcast with greyish yellow tones, and we had spent some up time before her nap, clowning around while the radio played a tribute to the Supremes. Mrs. Hill and I could do all the appropriate hand gestures for every song, and we agreed that Diana Ross was too skinny and bossy for her own good. We preferred Flo Ballard, who looked a little like Vivian, or even Cindy Birdsong, who was obviously dumb as a tree but good-natured.
I was skinning the chicken breast and then I was not.
Huddie made his deliveries and found me curled up on the floor, my cheek on the red and grey speckled linoleum, my hands pressed to my belly.
“Are you okay? Liz, sweet, I’ll take you to the clinic. Elizabeth?” I could hear him and I could smell him and the pain was not so bad but I couldn’t speak. A cold rising river closed in on me, running through me, carrying only me and my baby — all of a sudden my baby, wrapped in my arms. Naked, swept over sharp, half-hidden rocks, stones scraping my feet, icy grey sprays chilling our cheeks, stiffening her soft body, pulling her fine hair with rough fingers.
My baby is dying, I thought, and I pounded on the floor, terrifying Huddie. The blood had begun to seep through my jeans. I reached inside my underpants and looked at my red-streaked palms. I crawled to the bathroom, and he pulled off my jeans and my underpants and sat at my feet, crying for me.
Cry for her, I thought, and I told him to leave me alone. He looked at my smeared hands and legs, my bared teeth, the bits of blood drying in my black hair, and he sat down outside the bathroom door and waited.
I sat and sat, feeling clumps of blood and tissue sucked out of my bright veins, pulled out of my young body, into nothing, leaving nothing. I would be old when this was over, a shell scoured clean by the waves. Huddie would be young and I would be old, as tired as Mrs. Hill. Just lay me down next to my little baby, leave us be. I’m sorry, baby, I will never think of having an abortion ever again, no matter what, I’m sorry, God, don’t take my baby, don’t take my baby. The cramps were almost gone, just the smallest waves now.
I asked Huddie to bring me a pair of his jeans and to take a box of sanitary napkins from his father’s store. I stood up to wash myself off quietly, amazed that my banging and crying hadn’t woken Mrs. Hill. I didn’t recognize my own face, smudged with bad Halloween makeup, my hair twisted into dry red tips, my cheeks chalk grey. I looked away, down into the toilet bowl, and fell back on my knees, my spine broken one more time. Little curl, little baby bud, floating in our blood. I couldn’t go outside in only my spattered T-shirt, and I couldn’t flush the toilet. I would never flush my baby away.
Huddie came back, and I finished washing myself and put on his faded jeans, smelling of Huddie and the industrial detergent Mr. Lester used on everything. We started cleaning up the mess, Huddie wet-wiping the kitchen floor, me tackling the bathroom. Then I took a jar from Mrs. Hill’s kitchen collection. A little six-ounce jelly jar was all I needed. I went back into the bathroom.
“I’ve got to bury the baby.”
Huddie looked at me, too kind, or too scared, to argue.
“Where do you want to go?”
I wanted to go to Wadsworth Park, but I couldn’t leave Mrs. Hill. I wanted not to abandon anyone ever again. I wanted to be good.
“Get a shovel from the garage. We can go into the woods behind the church.”
“Behind the church?”
Well, it wasn’t my church. I didn’t care. There were tall pines and soft ferns and no one there on a Thursday afternoon.
“Get a shovel, okay?” All I wanted was the sweet clean smell of pine and a safe place for my baby.
Well into the woods we dug a deep, fast hole, Huddie sweating through his shirt in the afternoon sun. We laid the jelly jar down, wrapped in plastic, wrapped again in tinfoil, and we covered it up and smoothed out the dirt.
“We ought to tamp it down more. So it’s solid,” he said, not looking at me. And we stamped on it with our sneakers and threw pine boughs and decomposing leaves over the space.
When Mrs. Hill woke up, I was sleeping on the couch, my feet in Huddie’s lap. He wouldn’t leave, even though he had other deliveries to make.
Mrs. Hill, who couldn’t remember the day of the week or whether or not she’d eaten, looked at my face, at the sheets of newspaper I’d put under me to protect her ugly blue brocade couch, at Huddie’s hand on my leg, and knew.
“That you, Horace Lester? You delivered my groceries already, haven’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Huddie said, not moving.
I don’t think my mother knew Huddie existed. Huddie’s father knew there was someone, but he didn’t know it was me. Huddie delivered to Mrs. Hill once a week, but I didn’t think Mrs. Hill had ever caught a glimpse of us together. I was the one who was blind, thinking we were invisible. Huddie and I sat there, watching our fates juggled by a crabby old lady with bad eyesight and severe self-righteousness.
The doorbell rang, and I could hear Mr. Lester’s rough voice calling for Mrs. Hill. She shuffled off to the door and he bowled in past her, his round face hard and black, his leather apron shiny and tight over his big chest.
“Horace, you are planning on finishing your deliveries, aren’t you? I’ve been looking for you for the last hour. Miz Hill, do you need any more of Horace?”
“No, Gus, I don’t. I do appreciate his coming by and all. It’s a big help.”
Huddie had taken his hand off my leg at the sound of his father’s voice, and I had thought of jumping up, but we stayed on the couch, frozen, committed. I wondered if we were all going to pretend I wasn’t there. Mr. Lester’s eyes were red pin dots in his black, pitted face, and I wondered how anyone so butt-end ugly could have produced someone as perfectly formed as Huddie.
“You know Elizabeth Taube, the girl that helps me out on Tuesdays and Thursdays, don’t you?” Mrs. Hill sounded like my mother at a bridge party, gracious and wary and ready.
“No,” said Mr. Lester, clearly knowing, right then, who I was. “Sorry to have barged in, but I do need my boy back at the store. Horace?”
Huddie rose like a six-foot puppet, and I saw Mr. Lester’s big hands come down on his shoulders. I winced, and Huddie made two fists and put them in his pockets.
“Say good-bye,” whispered Mrs. Hill.
“What for? He didn’t even say hello to me.” I was not showing off my good manners for Mr. Lester.
“To Horace, say good-bye to Horace.”
“Good-bye,” I called out in confusion, and I saw the gold-brown tips of his fingers waving, his left thumb and forefinger forming the letter L, for Love, for Liz, as he walked beneath the kitchen window, picking up his bike. I knew he’d heard me.
Mrs. Hill fell into her recliner as I sank back on the couch, keeping my muddy sneakers propped up on more newspaper. She looked at the clock and picked up the phone. I was amazed to hear her tell my mother that I seemed a little unwell, that I was welcome to spend the night, and that she would enjoy my company. Her voice was smooth and bright and almost accentless, and I wondered how she turned it on and off.
Mrs. Hill shut her eyes.
“I said say good-bye because he’ll be going away. Gus has family in Alabama. You see Horace again this year, pigs’ll be flyin’.”
Mrs. Hill couldn’t palm-read worth a damn, and her predictions about the weather were completely cockeyed, but she was right about this. I didn’t see Huddie again for seven years.