Run Away Baby

Chapter 18

“I don’t feel good,” Randall said. He turned off his alarm clock and coughed a couple of times into his pillow.

“What’s the matter?” Abby asked. Randall never called in sick. She was coming out of the fog of sleep into instant high-alert.

“Get me a glass of orange juice, Sugartitties.”

“Sure,” she said, sliding out of bed and going to the kitchen. She heard him calling Krissa, telling her that he wouldn’t be in, instructing her to reschedule appointments.

“Thanks,” he said to Abby when she returned with his juice. He was sitting up in bed now. He took the glass from her, drank it all in one long swallow, and handed the empty glass back to her. She set it on top of some magazines by her side of the bed.

“Do you have a sore throat?”

He nodded and made a small gurgling noise to prove it.

“That’s too bad. Do you want me to get you some medicine or something?”

“I’ve got medicine in the bathroom. I’ll take it later. I just need a little more sleep right now.”

“Okay,” she said. She got back into bed.

“Rub my back,” he whimpered.

“Sure.” Before long he was snoring. Abby kept her hand moving in circles across his vast, sticky back. His snoring turned softer, becoming the wheezing mew of a cat. With his mouth hanging open and his brow unfurrowed, he was entering the portal that turned him into the child version of himself. It happened only when he was sick. He morphed into that sad, pudgy boy Abby had seen in old photographs. An unsmiling child looking up from stickball games on the streets of Chicago or holding a small fish he’d caught. These pictures reminded Abby of scenes from The Little Rascals or My Dog Skip. How could that pathetic but loveable child have grown up to be Randall?

He’d thought he was an only child. Then one day when he was seven years old, two women showed up at his parents’ apartment, each carrying babies, telling his mother that they were sisters and these babies both belonged to Randall’s father, and somebody had better help them take care of them.

These women and their babies moved into the alcove off the dining room that Randall’s mother had once used for sewing. The women stayed with them, like aunts, or sisterwives. One of them had two more babies with Randall’s father.

And then one day when Randall was twelve his mother had simply disappeared. He came home from school and saw her sewing machine, long delegated to a closet, now out on the curb by the garbage cans. Some of her other belongings were there too. The things she liked that no one else cared for. She was gone and they were removing all traces of her.

“I knew when I saw her sewing machine,” he told Abby. “I just knew.”

“Did she run away?” she asked him.

“No. She wouldn’t have done that to me,” Randall said.

“She probably couldn’t take living in that tiny place with those other women and their babies. Who could handle that?”

“She wouldn’t have left me. Ever.”

“Well then, what could have happened to her? You don’t think your dad did something to her, do you?”

He could never say.

The mystery of Randall’s missing mother didn’t erase all loyalty between him and his father. Randall still paid for his father’s nursing home, and sent him a box of cheese and sausage every Christmas. Now and then he’d even visited him, once with Abby along.

“Why do you bother with him?” she wanted to know.

“We’re family. You’ll take care of me when I’m old, right Sugartitties?”

“Yeah. Of course, Randall,” she said. “Of course I will.”

Once when he was drunk he’d asked her that, out of the blue. They’d been on vacation, which sometimes turned him, temporarily, into someone almost human. His eyes were scared, and for a moment their relationship felt strangely naked and balanced. Abby had looked away, unable to lie to him that time, and for once Randall had had nothing more to say.

Luckily, he’d been too drunk to remember this.

Randall’s snoring had gotten louder again – Abby decided from the sound of him that he was actually sick and this wasn’t some elaborate trap – and he woke himself up with a start.