WHEN BELLA LANDED BACK home, she snatched Connie’s Heywood-Wakefield wicker rattan baby pram. She squirted whatever milk was left in her breasts into a jar, capped it, and tucked it into the carriage along with her baby’s blanket and bracelet. Then she wheeled her way through the factory gates and ran it all the way to Krueger Place.
What was she going to say when she saw Francis?
What would she do if his mamma answered the door?
When she saw the house, she froze.
It stood gutted and singed on its small plot of land. Most of the windows were boarded up. Long smoke-licks snaked out from them. The mangled second story looked like a black crown.
Do you always disappear?
I don’t think so.
“Faulty electrical outlet!” a neighbor lady wrestling trash cans to the curb hollered.
“The boy is in a seminary up north!” another nosy lady yelled from her front porch. “I heard he’s studying to be a priest! The mother took off for a small town in Italy, I think!”
“That’s not so,” another lady called out of her kitchen window. “The boy joined the circus and the mother moved to Seaside Heights, New Jersey!”
Bella quickly wheeled around to the side of the roasted house. She parked the pram and stomped through the overgrown grass loaded with burned debris. It took a few strong yanks to wrench the singed kitchen door open. The room was dark and rancid with the stench of charred wood and rot. When she stepped inside, the mottled floor moaned beneath her feet. The wallpaper was wrecked and peeling. There was a hole in the floor where the icebox used to be. The stove was stained black, the oven door missing, but the picture of Mary was still hanging on the brindled wall, the old woman’s beady eyes still peering through the shattered glass, looking insane. Next to the rusted sink rested a single dumbbell. It marked the exact spot where Francis and Bella had made their baby.
Bella crouched down and touched the iron weight.
“Francis … oh, Francis,” she whispered. “What am I gonna do? Francis … oh, Francis. How can I get our baby without you?”