Chapter 31
every small creature

Dear Blessed Mother. So I guess you’ve decided not to get involved.

Wanda and I got sent to the Principal’s office, but for once, I didn’t cooperate. I didn’t tell them anything about why we were fighting; it was none of their business. We were both crying and neither of us wanted to make it any worse. By the time we were sent home, it was already noon.

I usually walk home from school, and by the time I opened the back door, it was quiet in the house. Everyone was at school, and the stillness gave the afternoon a sad quality. I listened to the sounds of the day that I normally don’t hear at all: a dishwasher sloshing in the kitchen in the distance, a bird fluttering around outside my window on the branches of the bougainvillea. Jude and the twins must have been napping in their beds.

I tiptoed down the hall. Mother was having her nap. Either that or she just didn’t get up this morning at all. I peeked through her door. The room was dark. I could hear her breathing. So I got my $11.65 from my top drawer and my heavy sweater and quietly went up the steps, straight into Paul’s room. Because I was his PX last year, I knew where he kept everything, and I knew right where the $26 probably was. I hoped he hadn’t spent it yet. I was right. It was in the corner of his bookshelf behind some science fiction paperbacks, in a wooden box with some keys. The bills were stiff and new, folded up. I counted it and left $1 for his contribution to the sale of the Ambassador. I had never stolen anything before in my life. But at the same time, it was my money. Daddy made the wrong decision giving it to Paul. Daddy made the wrong decision banning Clara to the convent. Wanda’s dad wanted to buy the car from me. Wanda used to be my best friend. Everything was totally out of control. I was going to take that money for Clara and no one was going to stop me. I stuffed it into my pocket. Maybe I was on the path to sin, and maybe Daddy was going to belt the living daylights out of me, but I didn’t care. The other path just seemed wrong to me. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In every way.

I went back to Mother’s room one last time. Not that I wanted to tell her where I was going. I wanted to return the photograph of her and the disappeared baby, and I just wanted to know how she could do it, going along with Daddy about keeping Clara up at the Mission. Clara didn’t want to be up there, and they were forcing her. I peeked in. Mother was sitting at the side of her bed, staring at the floor.

“I’m getting up,” she said, as if she were talking to Daddy. “I’ll be right out to get going on the dinner. Just give me a minute here.”

“Mom?” I said. “It’s Annie. I don’t want to bother you. I just wanted to ask you a question.” She didn’t answer me. “Just one question,” I said.

“I have a migraine, Annie,” she said, unmoved.

“Mom, what happened to your first baby?” What was I doing? How could my voice be forming these words? “The one that disappeared?” I reached my hand out to her with the photograph. “You dropped this picture of you in the hospital holding a baby. At Cardinal Stefanucci’s funeral when your missal fell apart.”

Mother looked over at me quickly. My hand was still stretched towards her. She grabbed the photograph out of my hand and looked deeply into it like she was trying to read the fine print. She took a breath in, and my heart beat fast, like a hamster on the wheel. Immediately, I wished I hadn’t said anything.

“Leave me alone,” she said in a clipped tone, straightening up. I heard the way she said that. It twisted something inside me. I pressed her further.

“I just don’t see how you can make Clara stay up there.”

But Mother was ignoring me. Her head was bent over the photograph, like she was the only person in the universe. This was one of the things that Mother did. She turned the other way, like I wasn’t even there. She was so practiced at this, and I was so tired of it. She was deliberately not hearing me! I knew she heard me, I knew she was ignoring me, and I felt like screaming my head off.

“Why are you and Daddy forcing Clara to give up her baby?” I could hear my voice going up in volume. “It’s so mean! Clara wants to keep her baby!”

I was still angry about Christopher Feeney, but I felt like taking it out on Mom. She was such a target, sitting in the dark. The outrageous words had tumbled out of my mouth, and now I was like a speeding train with no brakes. “Mother,” I said, pushing the knife in, “did Daddy make you give up your February, 1944 baby, like he’s making Clara give up hers?” I felt cruel and powerful, and I knew this would get her. She raised her voice, a tone I recognized from just before getting spanked. This time, I wasn’t scared at all. She stood up.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about!”

But I knew the photograph was the only clue left about that baby. She and Daddy had hidden the whole thing, like the baby didn’t even exist.

“You’re trying to hide Clara’s baby, just like you covered up your disappeared baby. It’s a real baby! You can’t make it just go away forever!”

“This is none of your business, Annie,” she said, pushing herself up from the bed.

“You say a new baby means there is more love to go around? How can that be? When that baby gets given away to a stranger, where’s the love in that?”

“Annie!” she snapped at me, her voice even louder. “That baby could ruin Clara’s life. She hasn’t even graduated from high school! She can’t afford to raise it.”

“Why should she have to? Why can’t she just move in with us? That baby is just one more tiny mouth to feed. You were going to have another baby yourself, until the miscarriage—you weren’t worried about how big its mouth was.”

I stood in the doorway, waiting for another touché phrase to leap into my mind. Mother came right up to me, gathering strength into her body. I could almost see her straighten up from inside. I was just about as tall as she was. I pushed my shoulders back and tried to grow.

“Get out of here, Annie,” she said firmly. “Before you say something you’re going to regret.”

“You just pump ’em out so Daddy can brag about how great he is to have so many kids!” I blurted. Instantly, her hand flew at me; I felt a sharp pain across my cheek.

“Don’t you ever talk to me this way!” she said, and pushed past me out of the room.

I stomped out of her bedroom like a two-year-old, slobbering and sobbing, my face beet red, my chest heaving. Mother had never slapped me before, but at least she heard what I said. The fight had given me power; I walked as fast as I could down the block to the corner and turned right, up Orange Grove Boulevard. Finally, I was running away from home! I walked quickly so as not to lose my nerve.

It took about a half hour to get to the Greyhound bus station at the pace I was going, and all the way, I stared down at my feet on the sidewalk, having imaginary conversations with Mother where I just shut her down with cutting phrases and witty retorts. I was the poster kid for the debating team, until a creeping feeling of remorse seeped into my consciousness for what I had said. Suddenly small things, like how pale Mother looked and the tone of her desperate sigh, came back to me. You have no idea what you’re talking about, rang in my head. Why wouldn’t she tell me about that disappeared baby? Maybe it wasn’t hers after all. Or maybe it died.

But by that time I had already bought my ticket and boarded the bus. I sat in my high-backed seat by the large window for a long time as the bus went on the freeways and stopped in the towns on the way to Ventura. For some reason I noticed the small creatures hanging around the stations, like birds, hopping around. A lady walked up the aisle holding a box with a handle, and there was an animal in it. She sat across from me. Once the bus started up again, she took a dog out of its cage. It was the strangest looking creature, really small and skinny and shaved to within an inch of its life, with grey and pink skin and bangs that hung over its face between its pointed ears. It sat on the lady’s lap, shivering, and I instantly liked it even though it was making a small rumbling sound in its throat like it was going to erupt into a sharp bark. I saw a couple of mangy kittens at one stop, hanging out in the weeds and prancing on things. In Ventura, big, white seagulls dipped on the breeze and that’s when I had the thought that before each being comes into the world, its number one job is to get born. A lot of people and creatures seem extremely desperate to get born. We’re all pretty desperate in our family, and our Mother was willing. So birth is probably something that’s not super complicated, when you have those two factors lined up—desperation and willingness—because a lot of people and creatures have gotten through it.

In order for us to be here, millions of years later.