Annie’s baby was almost two weeks old. She was a happy, satisfied infant, the kind of baby that was forever making contented little gurgling sounds, as though talking to herself; she never cried. Annie herself was a nervous wreck.
“I’m scared,” she told Jilly when she came over to the loft that afternoon. “Everything’s going too well. I don’t deserve it.” They were sitting at the kitchen table, the baby propped up on the Murphy bed between two pillows. Annie kept fidgeting. Finally she picked up a pencil and started drawing stick figures on pieces of paper.
“Don’t say that,” Jilly said. “Don’t even think it.”
“But it’s true. Look at me. I’m not like you or Sophie. I’m not like Angel. What have I got to offer my baby? What’s she going to have to look up to when she looks at me?”
“A kind, caring mother.”
Annie shook her head. “I don’t feel like that. I feel like everything’s sort of fuzzy and it’s like pushing through cobwebs to just to make it through the day.”
“We’d better make an appointment with you to see a doctor.”
“Make it a shrink,” Annie said. She continued to doodle, then looked down at what she was doing.
“Look at this. It’s just crap.”
Before Jilly could see, Annie swept the sheaf of papers to the floor.
“Oh, jeez,” she said as they went fluttering all over the place. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
She got up before Jilly could and tossed the lot of them in the garbage container beside the stove.
She stood there for a long moment, taking deep breaths, holding them, slowly letting them out.
“Annie ... ?”
She turned as Jilly approached her. The glow of motherhood that had seemed to revitalize her in the month before the baby was born had slowly worn away. She was pale again. Wan. She looked so lost that all Jilly could do was put her arms around her and offer a wordless comfort.
“I’m sorry,” Annie said against Jilly’s hair. “I don’t know what’s going on. I just ... I know I should be really happy, but I just feel scared and confused.” She rubbed at her eyes with a knuckle. “God, listen to me. All it seems I can do is complain about my life.”
“It’s not like you’ve had a great one,” Jilly said.
“Yeah, but when I compare it to what it was like before I met you, it’s like I moved up into heaven.”
“Why don’t you stay here tonight?” Jilly said.
Annie stepped back out of her arms. “Maybe I will—if you really don’t mind ... ?”
“I really don’t mind.”
“Thanks.”
Annie glanced towards the bed, her gaze pausing on the clock on the wall above the stove.
“You’re going to be late for work,” she said.
“That’s all right. I don’t think I’ll go in tonight.”
Annie shook her head. “No, go on. You’ve told me how busy it gets on a Friday night.”
Jilly still worked parttime at Kathryn’s Cafe on Battersfield Road. She could just imagine what Wendy would say if she called in sick. There was no one else in town this weekend to take her shift, so that would leave Wendy working all the tables on her own.
“If you’re sure,” Jilly said.
“We’ll be okay,” Annie said. “Honestly.”
She went over to the bed and picked up the baby, cradling her gently in her arms.
“Look at her,” she said, almost to herself. “It’s hard to believe something so beautiful came out of me.” She turned to Jilly, adding before Jilly could speak, “That’s a kind of magic all by itself, isn’t it?”
“Maybe one of the best we can make,” Jilly said.
How Can You Call This Love?
I just pay attention to things, I told her. I guess that’s why, when I got off my shift and came back to the loft, Annie was gone. Because I pay such good attention. The baby was still on the bed, lying between the pillows, sleeping. There was a note on the kitchen table:
I don’t know how long I sat and stared at those sad, piteous words, tears streaming from my eyes.
I should never have gone to work. I should never have left her alone. She really thought she was just going to replay her own childhood. She told me, I don’t know how many times she told me, but I just wasn’t paying attention, was I?
Finally I got on the phone. I called Angel. I called Sophie. I called Lou Fucceri. I called everybody I could think of to go out and look for Annie. Angel was at the loft with me when we finally heard. I was the one who picked up the phone.
I heard what Lou said: “A patrolman brought her into the General not fifteen minutes ago, ODing on Christ knows what. She was just trying to selfdestruct, is what he said. I’m sorry, Jilly. But she died before I got there.”
I didn’t say anything. I just passed the phone to Angel and went to sit on the bed. I held little Jilly in my arms and then I cried some more.
I was never joking about Sophie. She really does have faerie blood. It’s something I can’t explain, something we’ve never really talked about, something I just know and she’s never denied. But she did promise me that she’d bless Annie’s baby, just the way fairy godmothers would do it in all those old stories.
“I gave her the gift of a happy life,” she told me later. “I never dreamed it wouldn’t include Annie.”
But that’s the way it works in fairy tales, too, isn’t it? Something always goes wrong, or there wouldn’t be a story. You have to be strong, you have to earn your happily ever after.
Annie was strong enough to go away from her baby when she felt like all she could do was just lash out, but she wasn’t strong enough to help herself. That was the awful gift her parents gave her.
I never finished that last painting in time for the show, but I found something to take its place.
Something that said more to me in just a few rough lines than anything I’ve ever done.
I was about to throw out my garbage when I saw those crude little drawings that Annie had been doodling on my kitchen table the night she died. They were like the work of a child.
I framed one of them and hung it in the show.
“I guess we’re five coyotes and one coyote ghost now,” was all Sophie said when she saw what I had done.
In the House of My Enemy,
In the visitor’s book set out at the show, someone wrote: “I can never forgive those responsible for what’s been done to us. I don’t even want to try.”
“Neither do I,” Jilly said when she read it. “God help me, but neither do I.”
