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Eventually, I had a baby girl to take care of.

*

She lay safe in the middle of my big bed, far from any edge. I sat with her in my softest flannel pajamas. What I liked to do was touch the fleshy tips of her fingers and toes. I began with the hands, touching each tip. Then I did the feet, touching and counting every toe—always a perfect ten—and after, I began again with the hands. She didn’t seem to mind.

The baby was tiny and quiet, and so I called her Mouse. She slept and when her eyes opened, she looked calmly around the room at the pale, yellow walls, and the high, shadowy ceiling, and the white window shade pulled all the way down.

*

I was pregnant for a long time. The last two months, the doctors said I had to stay in bed, so James bought me pajamas—silk, flannel, cotton in all different colors—and every morning he helped me change into a new pair.

Are you comfortable? he’d ask.

I knew the pajamas were expensive.

You’re okay, James said before he left for work each day. He tried to tell me jokes. Other mammals, like elephants, had it bad, he said. Their gestation period lasted nearly two years.

He smiled and I smiled back. I wanted him to go and leave me in the quiet.

*

When I was eleven, I stopped falling asleep at night—I wanted to, but couldn’t. I remember the summer, on vacation with my family. I shared a hard, hotel bed with my cousin, Marianne. She was two years younger than me, and I tried to keep her awake at night by whispering scary stories in her ear; the problem was that the stories went on too long, and she drifted off before I could get to the scary parts. I watched her sleep, waiting for any small movement—a sign that she was still there inside her body that no longer reacted, even when I pinched her shoulders or pulled her hair. During the day, I was mean to her. I called her Stick, because she was so skinny, and I told her that boys only kissed girls who had a little meat on their bones. I thought she looked nice though in her white bikini, with her tan, skinny arms and legs, and her flat, brown stomach. Her bikini was very white in the sun, and her blonde hair was so blonde it was white too, and all the white, I thought, made her dark skin look darker.

*

I knew babies were supposed to cry sometimes, so I called my mother to ask if something was wrong. She laughed at me.

You’re lucky, my mother said, you have a happy baby.

I have a happy baby, I thought; and I pulled down on the white shade so that it rolled itself up.

That’s our window, I told Mouse.

I held her and we watched the birds line up next to each other on the telephone pole. Fat, black birds with puffed-out feathers. We watched until it started to get dark. One bird flew away, and the rest followed.

*

I used to sleep through all the movies James took me to. At his apartment, I rested my head on his kitchen table and fell asleep while he cooked me dinner.

Something’s wrong, he said.

I tried to explain that it was just so good to know him. I crawled into his bed and told him to please hold me. We fell asleep, and I didn’t wake up for fourteen hours.

*

Quentin came over and said, Well.

She wanted to see the baby, so I took her to where Mouse was sleeping.

Hello, Inga, Quentin said.

I don’t call her that, I told her. I call her Mouse.

Quentin wanted to hold her.

Okay, I said, be careful.

Please, she laughed. I know how to hold a baby.

Quentin has been my friend since high school, and I don’t remember her ever talking about holding any babies, but she did all right.

Why don’t you change into some clothes so we can go out, she said.

I don’t want to.

Come on, let’s just go for a drive.

I put on my shoes and told her that since we’d be in the car, I could go like this. I was wearing my pale blue, cloud-patterned pajamas.

Fine.

We put Mouse in the car-seat, which James had bought, and buckled her into the backseat of Quentin’s blue Toyota.

How are you? Quentin asked after we’d been driving for a while.

I don’t know.

I didn’t say anything more, so she turned on the radio, and I fell asleep with my head against the window.

Quentin woke me up in the city. It was dark and the buildings were all lit up. We were driving down a wide, one-way street; the traffic around us, a dull hum. I turned around to check on Mouse. She was awake, her eyes watching straight ahead.

I wanted to sleep some more. It had been hard to sleep since James left, but right now, in the car, it was easy.

So, Quentin said, here we are.

Uh huh.

Ahead of us was the glass movie theater I hadn’t been to since I was a little kid. I remember I’d gone to see Cinderella there with my parents’ friends. I’d been staying with them—two strangers, really— while my parents went on a private vacation. Years later, my mother told me that these friends had been trying to decide whether or not to have children.

What did they decide? I asked then.

Children were not their cup of tea, she answered; and I felt like a total failure.

I watched the movie theater until we drove past, and then it was gone. Quentin turned down the radio, like she was going to start talking to me, and I didn’t want to listen, so I told her about the movie theater and my parents’ friends.

I think their names were Dominic and Ursula, I said. They lived in a tiny apartment with an old Siamese cat called Ghost. I slept on the couch with the creepy cat; and one night, it meowed at me and woke me up. I remember, I ran down the hallway into the bedroom and got into these people’s bed— and they were hot and sticky. It was gross. They were naked, I knew, but I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just stayed there in bed with them and pretended not to know. My eyes were wide open in the dark; I kept thinking I wasn’t supposed to be there.

*

I had dreams about being pregnant even when I was too young to actually have a baby. In the dreams, I was always floating in water, and it was my big belly that made me buoyant. I drifted smoothly down cool streams. There was the sound of water, and all around me, the quiet of trees.

*

Mouse used to push against my stomach— a gentle push, not a kick. She would push with her hand, I imagined, and I would push back in the same spot. Like a game; she would push again and I would push back. We did this for a while sometimes. I think she wanted to remind me that she was there, in my stomach, and she needed to know that I was still around, waiting for her to come out.

*

My husband, James, drove away in the middle of the night. I found him a few nights before he left, sitting out in his car in the garage. I knocked on the window, and he jumped.

Sorry, I said.

He opened the door.

You should be in bed, he told me. He reached out to touch my stomach, then got out of the car and grabbed my hand.

We picked out a name that night. We knew the baby was a girl. James liked the name Inga.

Inga, Inga, Inga, he said.

I decided I liked the name Inga, too.

*

The doctor had to hit Mouse on the back to make her cry. I was crying already. When the doctor let me hold her, she was quiet again. Her face was red and swollen from being born. I was crying so much it was hard to see, and I wanted to see her face. I was leaning forward trying to see; my tears were getting all over her. The doctor asked if I was all right— I said yes, but I couldn’t stop crying. A nurse gave me a shot then that made me fall asleep, and they took Mouse away to the nursery. I woke up and she was gone.

*

That summer, I sometimes fell asleep during the day. I liked to lie on my stomach on the hot cement by the side of the pool. It felt good to lay there with my wet hair and wet bathing suit drying in the sun. I was sleeping when Marianne poured water on my back.

You stupid bitchface, I said and chased her against the fence.

That night we didn’t sleep in the same bed. My mother rolled out a sleeping bag for me on the floor, and I remember sitting in the dark on the scratchy, dirty carpet, waiting and waiting for nothing. Then I got up, slid open the glass door, and sat outside on our little hotel deck. I fell asleep with my head resting against the bars of the railing and my feet dangling down in the air. We were twenty-three floors up.

What the hell has gotten into you, my mother said when she found me in the morning. She shook me, but I didn’t answer.

Please, just stop with this crap, she said.

When I looked in the mirror, I saw the bruise on my forehead and cheek. I had a dull ache behind my eyes, and the rest of my head just felt like empty space.

*

The woman Ursula, who’d taken care of me that one, long ago weekend, was missing a fingernail on her left hand from a farm accident. She was good at hiding it, though, the way she moved her hands fast and held her fingers in just the right way. She used to catch me staring, trying to find the ugly finger, and I knew then I was not a good person. Still, Ursula was nice to me. I could tell she liked me anyway.

Maybe she thought that at some point I would get used to her ugly finger. I don’t know what she expected, but I could feel her expecting something.

I remember the way she tucked me in those nights when I slept at her house; she covered my whole head with the blanket, and I thought she might suffocate me.

*

Mouse stayed awake all afternoon, and we looked at each other. I wanted to get to know her, and I wanted her to know me. The way she stared, I thought, she has my eyes.

Yes, I told her, you are my baby, and I knew then that she was mine.

© 2007 Kiara Brinkman