Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

“I worry about this little one,” the woman said.

Kirsten bit a corner of a Pop-Tart, feeling the hot cinnamon glaze on the roof of her mouth. On the mantel above the fireplace was a collection of ceramic owls. They stared steadily into the room with eyes so wide open and unblinking they looked blind.

“My owls,” the woman said. “I don’t know how it is you start collecting. It just happens innocently, you think one is cute, then all of a sudden”—she waved her hand in the air—“you’ve got dumb owls all over the place.”

“Keep them busy,” Kirsten said.

“What’s that?”

“April, here — and all kids — if they have something to do they won’t have time for drugs.”

“That makes sense.”

“People think of addicts as these lazy, do-nothing sort of people, but really it’s a full-time job. Most of them work at it harder than these farmers I seen in these cornfields. It takes their entire life.”

The woman cupped her hands over her knees, then clasped them together. Either her wedding band was on the sill above the kitchen sink, left there after some chore, or she was divorced. Kirsten felt a rush of new words rise in her throat.

“You know what it’s like to be pregnant, so I don’t have to tell you what it means to have that life in you — and then just imagine feeding your baby poison all day. A baby like that one on the pamphlet, if they’re born at all, they just cry all the time. You can’t get them quiet.”

It was a chaotic purse, and the woman had to burrow down through wadded Kleenex, key rings, and doll clothes before she pulled out a checkbook.

“I never knew my own mother,” Kirsten said.

The woman’s pen was poised above the check, but she set it down to look at Kirsten. It was a look Kirsten had lived with all her life and felt ashamed of, seeing something so small and frail and helpless at the heart of other people’s sympathy. They meant well and it meant nothing.

“And I never really get away from this feeling,” she went on. “Sadness, you could call it. My mother — my true mother, I mean — is out there, but I’ll never know her. I sometimes get a feeling like she’s watching me in the dark, but that’s about it. You know that sense you get, where you think something’s there and you turn around and, you know, there’s nothing there?”

The woman did, she did, with nods of encouragement.

“When I think about it, though, I’m better off than these babies. Just look at that little one’s dark face, his shriveled head. He looks drowned.”

Then the woman filled in an amount and signed her name.

“I wish I was invisible,” Lance said. “I’d just walk into these houses and they wouldn’t even know.”

“And do what?”

“Right now I’d make some toast.”

“Hungry?”

“A little.”

“Wouldn’t they see the bread floating around?”

“Invisible bread.”

“You get that idea from your cowboy brain?”

“Don’t make fun of the cowboy brain,” Lance said. “It got us out of that goddamn detention. It got us over that fence.”

“We’re ghosts to these people, Lance. They already don’t see us.”

“I’d like to kill someone. That’d make them see. They’d believe then.”

“You’re just talking,” Kirsten said. “I think I’m getting my period.”

“Great,” Lance said. “All we need.”

“Fuck you,” Kirsten said. “I haven’t had a period in two years.”

She turned over one of the pamphlets.

Seeing the baby’s inconsolable face reminded Kirsten of a song her foster mother used to sing, but while the melody remained, the lyrics were dead to her, because merely thinking of this mother meant collaborating in a lie and everything in it was somehow corrupted. Words to songs never returned to Kirsten readily — she had to think hard just to recall a Christmas carol.

“Little babies like that one,” she said, “they’ll scream all the time. Their little hands are jittery. They have terrible fits where they keep squeezing their hands real tight and grabbing the air. They can’t stop shaking, but when you try to hold them they turn stiff as a board.”

“To be perfectly honest,” Lance said, “I don’t really give a fuck about those babies.”

“I know.”

“We just need money for gas.”

“I know.”

At the next house, a man answered, and immediately Kirsten smelled the sour odor of settledness through the screen door. A television played in the cramped front room. A spider plant sat on a stereo speaker, still in its plastic pot, the soil dry and hard yet with a pale shoot thriving, growing down to the shag carpet, as if it might find a way to root in the fibers. Pans in the sink he scrubbed as needed, coffee grounds and macaroni on the floor, pennies and dimes caught in clots of dog hair. A somber, unmoving light in rooms where the windows were never opened, the curtains always closed.

“Some got to be addicted,” the man said, after Kirsten explained herself. “They never go away.”

“That may be so,” Kirsten admitted. “I’ve thought the same myself.”

He went to the kitchen and opened the fridge.

“You want a beer?”

“No thanks.”

The blue air around the television was its own atmosphere, and when the man sank back in his chair it was as if he’d gone there to breathe. He looked at Kirsten’s breasts, then down at her feet, and finally at his own hands, which were clumsy and large, curling tightly around the bottle.

“Where you staying?”

“About a mile out of town,” she said. She handed the man a pamphlet. “I’ve had that same despair you’re talking about. When you feel nothing’s going to change enough to wipe out all the problem.”

“Bunch of niggers, mostly.”

“Did you look at the one there?”

“Tar baby.”

“That kid’s white,” Kirsten said. She had no idea if this was true.

He didn’t say anything.

Kirsten nodded at the television. “Who’s winning?”

“Who’s playing?” the man said. He was using a coat hanger for an aerial. “The blue ones, I guess.”

“But isn’t it enough? If you can save one baby from this life of hell, isn’t that okay?”

“Doesn’t matter much,” he said. “In the scheme of things.”

“It would mean everything,” Kirsten said, “if it was you.”

“But,” he said, “it’s not me.” The blur of the television interested him more. “Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where’d you say you were staying?”

“With these old people, Effie, Effie and his wife, Gen.”

He dropped the pamphlet on the floor and pushed himself out of the chair. He swayed and stared dumbly into a wallet full of receipts.

“Well, tonight you say hi to them for me. You tell Effie and Gen Johnny says hi.” When he looked at Kirsten, his eyes had gone neutral. “You tell them I’m sorry, and you give them this,” he said, leaning toward Kirsten. Then his lips were gone from her mouth, and he was handing her the last five from his billfold.

When they returned to the farmhouse, their car was sitting in the drive and dinner was cooking. The kitchen windows were steamed, and the moist air, warm and fragrant, settled like a perfume on Kirsten’s skin. She ran hot water and lathered her hands. The ball of soap was as smooth and worn as an old bone, a mosaic assembled from remnants, small pieces thriftily saved and then softened and clumped together. Everything in the house seemed to have that same quality, softened by the touch of hands — hands that had rubbed the brass plating from the doorknobs, hands that had worn the painted handles of spoons and ladles down to bare wood. Kirsten rinsed the soap away, and Gen offered her a towel.