When the baby came they named her Sarah. Sarah Jasmine Dean. Weight: seven pounds three ounces. She had a cute oval face and thin blond hair that wisped up from her head in a silken hook. She smiled constantly with her mouth open and her green eyes shining. She kicked her feet and laughed and laughed and laughed.
But then she stopped laughing.
Beatrice put Sarah into the bathtub and left the room to get toys for her-a plastic duck, a ball-and when she came back Sarah was under water. Beatrice told Henry that she was only gone a second or two, but he knew it wasn’t true. She had gotten distracted looking for toys and lost track of time.
After the funeral, after they lowered that tiny coffin into the ground at Hillside Cemetery, Beatrice did nothing but sit on the couch and cry. Henry wanted to fix it, to make her happy again, but didn’t know how. Sarah was gone and she was never coming back.
But then he got an idea.
He wasn’t sure how Beatrice would react, so he held off for a long time, hoping she would manage to pull herself out of the hole in which she was wallowing. She had stood by him for twenty-eight years, through drunken arrests and holes punched in walls, through fist fights with her brother, through slaps and punches that were the cause of the fist fights with her brother, but he didn’t know if she would stand by him if he went through with this, and if he went through with it it would be for her.
Beatrice only got worse. She stopped bathing. Sometimes she would urinate or defecate without getting up from the couch. She did nothing but watch TV and eat and cry. The dishes piled up in the sink and on the counter. The house started to smell bad. He took off her clothes as she sat passively, neither assisting him nor trying to stop him, and wiped her down with washcloths, but it didn’t help much, and soon she began to develop sores-small round scabrous holes in her flesh like cigarette burns. Some of them got infected. But still she would not move.
It was horrible. He knew he had to act.
So he spent several days driving around, looking for potential Sarahs. He sat in front of a couple daycare centers in Mencken, but all the kids there were too old to be proper replacements. He tried the Mencken Regional Medical Center, but couldn’t manage to get past the front desk. Finally he got lucky at an Albertsons. He wasn’t even looking for a Sarah at the time. He was there simply to get groceries for the week. But when he saw his opportunity, a baby sitting unsupervised in a shopping cart while her mother fought with groceries in the back of a station wagon, he took it. He walked by and scooped the baby up, walked around a gray Nissan, and made his way back to his truck. He walked briskly but did not run. Running, he knew, would give him away. He glanced down at the baby as he walked. She had an oval face and blue eyes, not green, and a pink ribbon in her hair. Her eyes weren’t the right color, but they were close. He slid the baby into the seat and buckled her in and was sticking the key into the ignition when the woman started to scream. He looked up at her through his bug-spattered windshield.
She was standing outside her car with her mouth hanging open and her eyebrows cocked and her eyes wide and glistening with terror. She turned in a frantic circle and said, ‘’Becca?’Becca!’ Then she said, ‘Someone took my daughter!’ Then she put both her fists into her hair and began to pull at it. ‘Help. Someone help. My baby’s gone. Someone took my ’Becca!’
Henry put the truck into gear and pulled out of the parking lot. He watched in the rearview mirror as a store employee ran toward the woman, then he made a right onto the street and drove away and could not see her anymore.
Beatrice loved her. Her face lit up and she held her and stroked her face and loved her. She insisted that Henry get rid of all Sarah’s ‘hand-me-downs’, stuff that they did not get for her, the things she was wearing when Henry took her, so he put them in a bag to throw them away, but because he didn’t want anyone to find them, he buried them in the woods instead. Life returned to normal. Life was good, even; they were simply a happy family living a normal life.
But six months later Henry had to put her into the ground next to her clothes. Bee had forgotten to feed her. She said she’d forgotten, but Henry thought she had stopped lactating after the first Sarah died and hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself; he’d seen the baby suck at her nipple but cry still hungry fifteen minutes later. Either way the second Sarah was dead.
Bee held on to the corpse for a week, refusing to let Henry take it away from her. She held it and rocked it in her arms and tried to brush its hair, but the hair peeled away with a flap of skin and she put the flap back, pretending to herself that it hadn’t happened. Finally when Bee was asleep Henry took it out of her arms and carried it out to the woods and dug a hole. He put it into the hole and tried to say a prayer, one he’d learned in church, but couldn’t remember it, so he made something up about children being innocent and please take this innocent into Heaven, amen, and scooped dirt over its face so he wouldn’t have to look at it any longer.
Two weeks later he found their third Sarah. She lived five years before Henry spanked her too hard. He felt bad about it, it had been an accident, but she’d misbehaved and she needed to be punished, and if he punished her a bit too much, well, that was as much her fault as it was his. If she hadn’t misbehaved in the first place he never would have lost his temper. He put her into the ground beside the last Sarah and went looking for the next.
That one screamed and screamed when he grabbed her and he put his hand over her mouth to silence her. She stopped screaming, but she stopped breathing too.
Then there is this Sarah. He spent a week fruitlessly searching before he finally decided to go up to the petting zoo. It was on the north side of town, near Interstate 10, and mostly people who visited were traveling through. They saw the signs,
BULLS MOUTH PETTING ZOO PUBLIC RESTROOMS
and their kids bugged them till they agreed to stop for half an hour. Since it was Saturday there would probably be a dozen Sarahs to choose from.
It was a pleasant April day with a breeze just strong enough to make the trees whisper.
Kids were running around looking at all the animals-pot-bellied pigs and rabbits and miniature horses-and reaching through the fences to pet them. Some of them were buying celery and carrots from a woman with a vegetable cart.
Everybody else was there with kids. Henry felt very conspicuous walking alone. He felt like he must stand out, the only giant at a midget convention. But nobody seemed worried by his presence. He was in public and behaved accordingly. A sort of dumb open-mouthed smile pushed up his cheeks, his eyes wide and bright, his hands in his pockets, legs doing a going-nowhere shuffle. Just a harmless old man probably there with his granddaughter who’d run off someplace, maybe to use the restroom.
‘Would you care to buy some vegetables to feed the animals?’
‘Not today,’ he said, pulled out his pockets to display them empty, and shrugged.
‘Maybe next time,’ the woman said.
Then he saw her, the Sarah he wanted, standing just behind the woman with the vegetable cart. She was standing beside her daddy and a teenage boy, looking through a fence at an alpaca.
‘Look it, Jeffrey!’ she said as the alpaca pulled a piece of celery from her fingers.
‘I am, dorko.’
‘You’re the dorko, dorko.’
She was the one. Beatrice would love her. Her face was a bright oval, green eyes alive with joy and humor. Beatrice would absolutely love her. He knew she would.
He followed the family around from a distance, waiting for his moment, but her hand remained within her father’s as they walked. Eventually they circled the entire petting zoo and headed for the exit.