Baby

The stench was unbearable. It followed Marley through the dingy, cramped hotel room like a specter. She wanted to leave, but she knew it was too dangerous. She might get caught. She would be sent back home alone, and worse still, someone might find out about Bets and her poor, dead baby.

She gagged, then vomited onto the floor, adding another smell to the barrage on her raw nostrils. She sat in a ragged armchair, her bloody clothes rubbing stiff and dry against thin limbs, helplessly watching her older sister decompose.

It wasn't supposed to be like this! The voice in her head shouted. Bets had taken Marley while their mother was out. She promised her a wonderful life away from the misery. But now Bets was dead, her baby was dead, and her boyfriend was long gone after Bets caught him with Marley in his lap.

She startled awake, and Bets was where she died, in that same awkward position up against the opposite wall. She stared at Marley with what seemed like pity, her lifeless eyes apologizing where her slacken mouth failed. But the baby was gone.

She turned in her chair, eyes on the shell of the girl she had idolized. They had been best friends since the day Marley was born, Bets told her--since their mother brought baby Marlene home from the hospital, five-year- old Betsy claimed her. Bets kept her safe, cradling her sister in her arms late into the night in the bedroom they

shared--she whispered promises that Marley would be a strong girl who would be saved one day.

Then, one day after Bets took Marley across the country and away from their parents, a boy named Bobby flashed Bets a bright smile and bought Marley a candy bar. Bets told her--after he'd been gone a few months and her belly was swollen like a tick--she'd fallen for the oldest line in the book. And now, they would have a baby.

"It's not like it walked out on its own," she said to the empty room; it was one of Bets' favorite lines. Grief burned deep in her belly.

She glanced again at Bets, and her eyes fumbled over a slight movement. She had what Bets had called a wild imagination. Bets always told her to pretend it wasn't happening; if you don't pay attention to it, it'll go away. But then it happened again. Bets shifted somewhere deep inside.

Marley took a few steps toward her sister, her breath held. She stopped when she heard it. She tilted her head toward her sister's body and... She would tell herself later that it was more the crunch than the blood that made her jump. She was sick of blood; after the first chunky squirt, it trickled steadily under the stained, old gown. The movement drew her eyes--the slow rhythmic undulation of her sister's bloated torso as her eyes stared.

Bets fell over and her head struck the floor with a sick thump. Marley turned away again, and fought down the bile in her throat. She had to get out. And she had to get the blood off. It was everywhere.

After it all, the blood and Bets' screams into pillows, the crushing grip on the chair that had given way under all that maternal strength, the baby was dead--stuck inside the slim hips of a fourteen year old girl.

Bets is dead, she told herself, and the baby's dead. It had never been alive, not since she had helped pull him out of her sister, not after she cleared his mouth and breathed for him like Bets had told her.

But it was crying--her nephew was crying. What had Bets called him? Darlene for a girl, Liam for a boy. "Liam." Marley clutched the towel at her chest and stepped toward the door.

The cries turned to ragged, mournful hiccups. She turned and grabbed the baseball bat that Bets kept for burglars. She padded on bare feet through the congealed gore and poked the bat into Bets' bloated stomach. It deflated like an old balloon, and Marley shuddered.

She fought a strong urge to vomit, moving to avert her eyes, but they lit instead on the tiniest movement under Bets' nightgown. The baby, she could see now, lay nestled between his mother's legs, hiccupping around the tiny, bloody hand in his mouth.

Marley stepped forward to pick him up, then frowned and faltered. It had been so long. Her mind shrieked as she stared, mouth agape, into his eyes. He had Bobby's pale green eyes.

The baby lay in her sister's blood, silently assessing her, two days dead. She walked over and picked him up,

cradling his cold, little body against her. She smiled at him while she walked him into the bathroom and drew a bath. He sucked his thumb and frowned, but didn't cry, as she dipped him in the water and wiped away the blood. The water was the color of ruddy earth, but the baby was the same white as the icing inside a Twinkie, from his puff of hair to his tiny, wrinkled toes. "You look just like your mother, do you know that, Liam?" she cooed, drizzling water over his head. "And you have your father's eyes." The baby stared up at her, and she fought to keep a smile on her face. She pulled one hand out of the water, and lowered the other, shifting him gently down to the bottom of the bathtub, one hand holding his head under water, the other making the Sign of the Cross over and over as she whispered the only prayer she knew, until he stopped struggling and went limp in the filthy water. Adan Ramie