Mike Wells: Baby Talk

Baby Natasha , it said, in Grammy’s precise little script.

“Holy Christ,” he said, half-choking on the words. All at once, his legs felt rubbery.

“You allright, son?” a deep voice said from behind him. It sounded far away. Neal teetered, dropping the entire stack of delivery slips on the pavement.

Old man Snell watched closely as Neal scrambled to collect the slips before the wind got hold of them. Neal snatched up the pink one and pushed it into the middle of the stack.

“I thought you were going to keel over there for a second,” Snell said, with a casual chuckle. But when Neal looked up at him, he could see that the big man looked genuinely concerned, and suspicious.

“I lost my balance, that’s all.” Neal shoved the stack of papers back into the pocket of his jacket, then managed a relaxed laugh and patted his stomach. “I guess I ate a little too much at lunch.”

“That’ll do it sometimes,” Snell said, but his pale blue eyes told Neal he didn’t believe the excuse.

Neal turned back to the van, but Snell remained behind him.

“You aren’t on any kind of...medication, are you son?”

“No sir,” Neal said quickly, turning to face him again.

“You know it would be very dangerous for you to operate a ve-hi-cle like this under the influence of any kind of drug.”

“I know. I’m not on drugs.”

“Well, I didn’t mean to say you were,” Snell said, though he seemed glad that Neal had been so direct. “I just thought you might be takin’ anti-histamines or somethin’ like that.” He paused. “See, I’m an ex-athlete, and I know somethin’ about this sort of thing...”

“I’m not taking any kind of drugs, prescription or otherwise.”

“Well, that’s good, son. Drugs don’t do a man a bit of good. Not one bit.”

“Yes, sir.”

Snell gave one of his fatherly nods. He eyed Neal for another short moment, then walked back into the shop.

Neal finished loading up the van as quickly as he could, avoiding eye contact with anyone. He became more and more angry. By the time he finished and drove the van away, it took all his self-control not to screech the tires at every turn. That goddamn Annie! Her stupid joke had almost cost him his job! Not to mention making him look like an idiot, having his little girl calling him at work, leaving gooey messages. Thank God they didn’t know much about his family—he had only told the old man that he was married and had a child, nothing more specific than that. If they knew Natasha was a five-month old infant, Annie’s little joke would have blown up in her face. He was sure that the Snell’s weren’t the type of people who would approve of telephone pranks, especially coming from an employee’s wife.

Boy, Neal would let Annie have it when he got home!

* * *

Annie sat up with a start. She was still sitting at the dinette table, a small puddle of drool where her head had been resting. She reached up and touched her forehead—it was slick with sweat.

The dream she had been having came rushing back at her. She was working in some huge, futuristic factory, and there had been some kind of emergency (a radiation leak?) and everyone was in a panic. An alarm was blaring throughout the massive complex, but she couldn’t escape—thousands of faceless male workers (was she the only female?) were jamming up all the exits, not pushing or shoving, but just pressing hard against each other, so hard that she couldn’t breathe.

Now that she was awake, she could still hear the alarm in her mind.

She turned her head towards the bedroom, realizing that the sound might not have just been in her head—she knew it well. It was the raucous beep-beep-beep tone that the telephone makes after you’ve left it off the hook for a couple of minutes.

She rushed into the bedroom to check on Natasha.

To her relief, she found her daughter alive and well. The baby was staring up at mobile above her crib, her tiny fingers slowly wiggling back and forth, as if she was trying to grasp the plastic, multicolored fish that were slowly circling above her head.

“Is my baby o-tay?” Annie said, scooping Natasha up in her arms. She was wracked with guilt over falling asleep and neglecting her child. That was how crib death happened!

Natasha just grinned back at Annie, completely unaware of any danger, past, present or future. A rivulet of spittle ran down her chin and onto the orange baby jumper that Annie’s mother had given her, with Natasha’s name embroidered across it.

Annie kissed the child’s little forehead, then glanced at the telephone. It was, of course, still off the hook, just the way she had left it.

Cradling the baby in one arm, Annie picked up the receiver and listened. It was completely dead, just like it always was after the beep-beep-beep noise stopped. The sound must have just been in her dream, only—she had been leaving the phone off the hook almost every day since Natasha was born, and it had never made that raucous beep-beep-beep noise twice. It only did that for a minute or two after she took it off the hook, and then became silent. Like it was now.

Annie placed the receiver back in its cradle and carried the baby into the kitchen. When she saw the time, she gasped. It was almost one o’clock! She thought she had only been asleep for a couple of minutes, and it had been almost an hour.

As she prepared lunch, she decided that her unconscious mind had created the sound, as well as the dream surrounding it, to wake her up so she could go check on Natasha. Some part of her knew she had slept too long and decided to get her attention, and with a sound that she associated with the baby.

Wasn’t the human mind interesting?

* * *

It was almost 6:15 when Neal got home from work—it took him over an hour to drive what should have been a half hour commute, maximum, from the flower shop in Buckhead to the apartment on Roswell Road. The Atlanta rush hour traffic was appalling, and fighting his way through it, after spending an entire day on the road, always worsened his mood.

When he came in the front door, he found Annie sitting on the couch, reading some women’s magazine, and, as always, munching on potato chips and drinking chocolate milk. Natasha was asleep, sitting beside Annie in her baby seat.

Neal slammed the door shut behind him. “What you did today was very, very stupid, Annie.”

The baby’s eyes opened. She immediately started crying.

“Neal!” Annie hissed. “Why did you have to slam the door? You woke her up!”

Annie quickly set the potato chips and chocolate milk down beside the couch, out of Natasha’s sight, and then picked up the wailing baby. “There, there sweetie...shhh...everything’s o-tay.”

Natasha was soon quiet, looking up at Neal, her eyes locked on his face.

“I don’t appreciate it, Annie,” Neal said. “I don’t appreciate it one damn bit!”

Natasha made some gurgling sounds, but Neal ignored her.

“What in the world are you talking about, Neal?”

“As if you don’t know,” Neal laughed. “You’re on my fucking back all the time about getting a good job, and then you do something that could get me fired!”

“Don’t use language like that around Natasha.”

Neal motioned angrily to the baby. “She can’t understand a damn thing I say.”

Natasha made another gurgling noise.

Neal slung his jacket and the afternoon paper into one of the easy chairs. The paper slid off the plastic covering and onto the floor, which only made Neal more furious. Annie didn’t want to remove the protective plastic from the shoddy furniture they rented, afraid the company wouldn’t take it back later, when she and Neal had enough money to buy their own furniture. That was a laugh! Neal was certain that all of the rented junk would be worn out—plastic and all—long before then.