Caleb's Smile

A child's smile.

         

         


         She gave him that pitiful look that said she wanted him gone, wanted it all to stop, but needed him badly to remain.  He gave her the furrowed brow of frustrated despair, followed by wide brown eyes set in pain and fury, the kind that can't be quenched by any healthy means.  The kind that lies awake at night and wants to scream into the deep dark but can't, fears breaking the solid silence.  And then she did a crazy thing: she smiled.
            He almost slapped her.
            "I don't want it," he whispered.  Almost trembled.  With fear, with rage, with sorrow.  With the sheer unfairness of it.  Her smile remained, false and ugly but firm.
            "Neither do I," she said, "but we've got it now.  It's our problem now."  Looked down, almost unconsciously stroked the tiny swell in her belly.  There were some stars overhead and a full thick moon, but it was mostly clouds.  The light from the street lamps slanted in the car windows, rolled down to let in the stuffy breeze.  Could use some damn air conditioning, she smiled, in my fragile state.
         "Erica," he said.  "I want...  I want you to end it."
Erica blinked her blue eyes, face slack and shocked like she'd been slapped.  The hot wind toyed with a strand of her deep brunette hair.  She didn't put it back in place.  She wanted to fly at him, could feel the sea of angry retorts welling up in her throat.  But she kept her peace.  She was too tired to fight.  She just shook her head and looked away, leaned her face against the warm hard vinyl seats of the truck that was his pride and joy.  She saw Trent bury his face in his hands--tough hands, like his father's, like leather--out of the corner of her eye.  He sighed into his hands.
         "I'm just..."  He paused, shook his head.  "Mad.  And freaked out."
         "Mad at yourself?" Erica asked tiredly, "or just mad at me?"  Trent's fingers touched her shoulder briefly and withdrew.  Shook his head again.
         "This is my fault," he said.  "This is all my fault."
         "It's both of our faults, and both of our problems," Erica said, still looking out the window.  Tracing a circle over her belly with her palm.  She imagined the pain, all the pain of what was coming and grimaced.  Imagined also them ripping into her and destroying it, and she almost cried.  No, she wouldn't do that.  Didn't want to do either.
         "Take me home, Trent," she said softly.  Trent brought his hand down on the steering wheel suddenly, making the truck shake.
         "Damnit Erica, this is our mess and our baby and we're gonna sit here and talk about it!  I don't want you going back home, back to that place when you're...  In this...  This state!  If it's gonna stay then I'm not putting it in danger like that."  Trent's voice lowered to a hiss.  "It's my damn kid too."  His brown eyes bored into hers.
         Face placid, emotionless, Erica replied: "Who said it was yours?"


Erica thought it was Trent's.  Hoped it was Trent's.  But it could just have or even more easily been her stepfather's, or her brother's.  Those two were great buddies now and sometimes they took turns on her and she didn't always know who it was doing it.  Sometimes she didn't know who she was.  Or where she was.  Trent put it in overdrive and his tired skidded carelessly down the pavement.  Maybe they'd wreck.  And then nobody would have to worry about the situation anymore.
         "Damn it, Erica," he said.  Must be your catch phrase.  "Damn it I thought you said he'd stopped that.  I thought...  That was over."
         "They did stop," she lied, "but-"
         Trent's brownish black eyebrows rose.  "They?"  Erica shook her head calmly.  Her hand was trembling.
         "Him," she said.  "He, I meant.  He stopped.  But he.  But one night he started again."  She shrugged.  "Just started.  Guess Mom wasn't giving him what he needed anymore.  Dunno."  Trent was still looking at her.  She wanted to say eyes on the road, but it didn't matter.
         "Shawn?"  Shawn was her brother, two and a half years her senior.  Trent's voice shook a little.  "Shawn do this to you?"
Erica nodded almost imperceptibly.  "Mostly Ed.  Mostly my step dad."

They rode in silence for a while, rode over flat long country roads under a sky of twinkling stars glimmering behind and between clouds.  A coyote called in the distance, then another called, closer.  They passed one car, headlights nearly blinding Erica.  Trent cursed under his breath but drove on, past run-down and also well-kept houses.  Passed manicured fields, messy forests and cornfields.  Passed Erica's street, too.  "Trent--" She said.  He turned down another road.
         "I don't care whether it's mine," he said softly, but gruffly.  He didn't look at her.  "Because it is mine.  I'm not letting you go back there.  I'm...  I'm not letting you two go back there."  With a dull shock Erica realized he was going to cry.
         "God, Trent," she said, touched his shoulder.  She didn't withdraw.  "What will your parents think?"
         "You know Mom and Dad," he replied.  Kissed her fingers briefly.  "Always the humanitarians.  They'll see it as their noble Christian duty."  He snorted.  “But they like you, Erica.  Really.  I’ve never told them about you past and your home but I think they know.”  He looked at her.  “They see it in your eyes.”
         “What will you tell them?  That my brother and stepfather rape and abuse me?  That I’ve run from home?  That I have your baby—or maybe theirs?”  Trent shook his head.
         “I’ll make something up.”  They were nearly there.  Erica could see the pointed white-trimmed gables between the trees.  “You’re eighteen,” Trent added.  “You’re not running away from home.  You’re allowed to leave.”  He sighed.  “God, Eric, why didn’t you just say something before?  Why didn’t you just leave?”
         “Because,” she said quietly.  “I couldn’t tell you.  I deserved it, for it to continue.  I’m filthy.  I’m disgusting.”  She buried her face in her hands, stoicism gone, and wept quietly.  “I’m filthy.”  Tires crunched asphalt; a wheeze of air as the old truck braked.  The engine rumbled to a stop.  Calmly, deliberately, Trent took her in his arms.  Held her against the power of her own misery.
         “You aren’t filthy,” he said.  “You aren’t dirty.  None of this shithole of a situation is your fault.  I want you to know that.”  He kissed her head and they went in.  She slept on the couch that night amid fine home furnishings so alien to her own house, but so comforting now that she knew this house so well.  She slept on his couch and his parents said nothing.
         Ed didn’t call.  A day later Trent sent someone back for her things—clothes, some jewelry, her books, her school stuff, a laptop she’d gotten for Christmas years back.  She got all but the laptop.  Shawn didn’t call.  She didn’t see theme except in her dreams.
She slept on the couch for two nights.  The third evening Trent’s mother, a kindly blonde woman named Sandra, touched her shoulder and said, “Come on, Erica.  You can have the guest room.”  Blushing her thanks, Erica followed her to the well-furnished guest bed with the yellow walls and faint smell of lemon.  Sandra lingered at the threshold, beholding Erica with sympathetic, but not pitying, eyes.  She blinked her eyes and nodded, as if she understood.
         “Thank you,” Erica said, not entirely sure what she was thanking her for.  For everything, she thought.  Startled by the woman’s kindness and her own sentimentality.

It was like that for months.  She put her few belongings in the room and it gradually became hers, furnished with queer little knick knacks she bought from yard sales with her summer job at the grocer’s.  By then her belly was big enough to cause stares.  Trent’s father, Henry, took it the worst.  She heard him mumble something about not wanting to be a ‘pop-pop’ to Sandra in their study.
         But all nice things, they end.  Sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly.  For Erica it was the latter.  She was sipping coffee in the kitchen, sun streaming in the big window and touching her face.  She hadn’t slept well that night—her dreams were plagued by dreams of her stepfather, her brother, and the turning-away of her mother’s—but it was still better than she used to sleep.  She was calm.  She wasn’t happy, not joyous, but she was profoundly and blissfully alright.  Until someone knocked on the door and interrupted her nearly thoughtless daze.
         Sandra smiled from across the table.  “I’ll get it.”  She got up and opened the big door and her smile faded.  Over Sandra’s head Erica saw the blue hats of two policemen, and heard Sandra scream.  Saw her stumble back and fall quite dramatically on the couch which had once been Erica’s bed.  She wanted to laugh.  She wanted so badly to laugh.
         “Trent?”
         “Dead,” his mother breathed.  Erica wondered vaguely why the policemen hadn’t come in and why they’d left so abruptly.  How they could do that.  Erica stood in the kitchen threshold.
         “How?”
         “That car,” she hissed.  “Always told him to let usget him a nicer one.  He insisted on buying that run-down piece of junk with his ownmoney.  Piece of junk.”  She lay back on the couch like she might faint.  Her voice was steady.  “Piece of shit.”  Took the crystal ash tray that no one used and hurled it at the wall, yelling it again: “Piece of shit!”  When Henry heard he yelled, too.  Then locked himself in his study.
         Erica just cried.  She lay in the middle of that bed and cried until it hurt, the smell of lemons in her nostrils.
         The funeral was on a Tuesday.
         Erica would never understand the inconvenient tradition of having funerals on weekdays.  Everything’s held on weekends.  Because people have time.  Maybe it’s supposed to show some devotion to the deceased, leaving one’s job, one’s life to come and recognize their death.  Funeral on Tuesday at 5pm.  It was absurd, it was unfair, it was nearly funny.  It was the way things were done.  Erica felt the swell beneath her blouse, plump and hard but so soft, so fragile.  This was one place where eyes didn’t immediately go to that.  They were too distracted by the big black coffin with the shiny silver handles.
         The whole time she expected someone to stand up, smile, and end the cruel joke.  “Okay, haha, you’ve had your fun.  Come on out, Trent.”  Because this simply could not be.  After everything this wasn’t possible.  He was just asleep in there, waiting for the right time to jump out and scare them.  But she saw him.  She saw his too-white face and felt his cold, still skin beneath her fingers.  She imagined the baby saying Mommy, why don’t I have a daddy?
         Because, baby,she’d reply.  Your daddy had to be a stubborn prick and buy a shitty car just because he paid for it himself and drive out at night and have a crash and get killed.  Luckily it spared his face, huh?  That way when he comes back to haunt me he’s not too ugly.  Then again,she’d say, maybe your daddy’s Uncle Shawn.  Or Ed.  You don’t know them.  Mommy doesn’t talk about them.
         She wondered if the baby would call him ‘Mr. Ed.’  She almost laughed, right there in the middle of the funeral that Tuesday.  Maybe she should’ve.  Then Trent would’ve come busting out of the coffin, laughing with her.  Everyone would laugh and it would all be over.  Joke’s over, we’re done.  Grab some potato salad and get on home.  But nothing happened.  People cried.  People stared.  A man said something about some God and some Heaven and some ash and dust and people put flowers on the coffin, then soft dirt.  She let the soil fall through her fingers onto Trent’s coffin, burying him.  Watched him go into the earth and tried to make herself understand that he wasn’t going to come back.
         Sandra put her arms around her.  Even in the cold winter of death she had some warmth to give.  To share.  Erica put an arm around Sandra’s waist.
         “How you holding up?”  She asked.  Erica just shook her head.
         “Fuck,” she said.  “Just...  Fuck.”  Sandra nodded.  Henry stood not far behind, dressed in deep black.  Erica’s floor-length black dress contrasted starkly with her blue eyes and matched perfectly the bruised rings around them.  They walked to their car, Erica to hers.  They returned home to an empty house and went to their respective rooms to stare at empty walls with empty faces and hearts too full of a similar emptiness.

He was born May 12, on a rainy day in a hospital.  The only thing Erica recalled more than the pain was the sound, the song of rain hitting the windows.  In the end he came, and he was healthy.  At first she wanted to scream.  It would be Shawn’s.  It would be Ed’s.  But those eyes spoke of another man.  Shawn’s were blue and Ed’s were cold gray and hers were blue.
         Trent’s were full, wide brown.  Just like the baby’s.  Just like Caleb’s.
         They told her she had PTSD.  She didn’t know much about that.  All she knew was she saw Trent’s face staring up at her every second of every day.  All she knew was that she was tired and spent and Caleb was too often left uncared for because she couldn’t do it.  She couldn’t do it anymore.  Sandra gave her hateful, judging stares.  “You should be happy,” she said.  “The baby’s healthy.  He loves you.  He’s yours.”  Her voice croaked.  “He looks…  Just like…”
         The baby didn’t love her.  The baby was her atonement for Trent’s death.  The baby was Trent’s dead face staring back, accusing her, blaming her, asking her why she didn’t love him enough.  It was thecar,she would think.  I didn’t kill him.  I had nothing to do with it. But of course she did.  She could’ve stopped him.  No, it was more than that.  If she’d never told him about the baby, never dragged him into it he wouldn’t have brought her to his home.  He would’ve been carefree and unstressed and wouldn’t’ve crashed.  His head would’ve been clear.  He would have lived.  If it wasn’t for her.
         Caleb’s eyes reminded her.
         His hair was coming in a deep, full brown now.  It was soft in Erica’s fingers as she sat, stroking it.  No, Caleb didn’t love her.  But a huge part of her loved Caleb in an unexplainable, irrevocable way.  That was why she had to do it.  She couldn’t take care of him, couldn’t make him happy.  Make him love her.  She wanted him to be happy.
         The light danced on the yellow lemon walls as she held Caleb.  He frowned, about to cry, but stopped when he saw her calm, placid countenance.  For the first time he had something akin to a smile on his face.  Erica kissed him once on the forehead.  “I love you, Trent,” she breathed.  “I love you, Caleb.”
         It was Sandra who found her body, saw her feet first and then the rest of it hung limp from the threshold.  Caleb smiled at her.  He didn’t scream, he didn’t cry.  He just smiled and gawked, a wonder-filled, calm expression on his small white face.