I waited for the sound of footsteps in the hall, someone coming to quiet her, until I remembered that I was supposed to be the footsteps. I stumbled into Charlotte’s room and plucked her from the portable crib where she lay, sweaty in her footie pajamas. The blankets were tangled around her feet and her Pull-Up was sodden, so heavy that it sagged when I picked her up. She clung to me, tearful and dream-tossed.
I changed her Pull-Up and brought her into bed with me. I had visions of us snuggling up together spoon-style, her warm baby skin pressed against mine as we drifted gently back to sleep. Apparently she did not share this vision. She was awake and required entertainment. We lay there in the dark, Charlotte squirming against me, fighting me as if I were her jailer.
She sat up and tugged at my hair, clenched her fists, and yanked until my eyes watered. “Wan’ puffs,” she said insistently.
“Puffs?” Was this some sort of breakfast cereal I’d never heard of?
“Hungwy,” she said, her voice serious.
I puzzled through this for a moment. “Good idea, let’s go out for breakfast,” I said. “No way am I drinking your grandma’s coffee.”
* * *
—
There was a café not far from my parents’ house that served a decent pour-over and fresh croissants. We were the first in line when they opened the door at seven a.m., Charlotte wedged on my hip, greedily studying the pastry case. I bought a chocolate croissant for her and a coffee for me and we sat at an empty table, eyeing each other blearily, near-strangers.
What did one do all day with a two-year-old? My first instinct was to watch cartoons, but I’d already been warned off this path. “Elli doesn’t allow her to look at screens,” my mother had informed me the previous evening. I’d seen something in her eyes, a glint of sadistic delight. “Bad for brain development.”
I wanted to say, Elli and I spent most of our early years planted in front of a television set, and we turned out just fine, but then I reconsidered. After all, one of us ended up a junkie and the other one was currently choosing spa treatments over childcare.
Without TV to fall back on, what else was I supposed to do with Charlotte? The day stretched out before us, an empty horizon. My mother had helpfully provided me with Charlotte’s daily schedule the day before, an overwhelming grid of meals and naps and snacks and “activity hours” that I’d promptly tossed in the trash. Was this what parenting was supposed to be? The utter abdication of a personal schedule, the day instead dissected into individual units of time that had to be occupied with someone else’s food and entertainment?
“What do you want to do today?” I asked.
She stared at me with those big brown eyes, as if she hadn’t understood the question.
“The zoo? The park? Go for a walk?”
She stuck a finger in the center of her croissant and hooked out a chunk of chocolate goo, examining it before wiping it on the edge of the table. The expression on her face made me feel like she’d already sussed out my incompetence and had given up hope.
I thought of the one successful card I had played already: “How about the beach? We can bury more treasure? In a sandcastle!”
This got her attention. She bounced up and down in her chair. Her face was smeared with chocolate, brown fingermarks down the front of her strawberry-print T-shirt. “Tweasure!” she announced, as if she’d come up with the idea herself. I wondered how many times I could use the same ruse before she’d get tired by the repetition.
A woman in a jogging suit walked by our table and smiled meaningfully at me, eyes lingering a little too long on mine. I smiled back stiffly, assuming that she had recognized me from television; but then her eyes slid to Charlotte’s crumb-covered face and back to me, and then I noticed the diaper bag on her arm, and I realized that hers was actually a grin of solidarity. I had been initiated into a new club without realizing it: the sisterhood of caregivers. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this.
“Lala go poopoo,” Charlotte announced.
“Shit,” I said.
* * *
—
The beach had seemed like a good idea at the time, but as I wedged Charlotte into the car seat, I realized that I hadn’t thought it through. The kid would need a swimsuit, presumably, and a beach towel, and sunscreen. A pail and shovel. Sand toys. Floaties? Could she swim? A hat. So much to consider.
My sister had deposited Charlotte at my parents’ house with only a weekend bag, and in my foraging through the piles of toddler clothes that morning I hadn’t noticed a child-sized swimsuit. But surely my sister owned one. It dawned on me that we were only a few miles from my sister’s house. I knew where she kept the key, under a ledge near the garage; or that’s where she had kept it, back in the days when I had carte blanche to let myself into her house when I was in town or needed a place to crash. It had been a long time since she’d trusted me that way, though, and so as I drove up to her home I was mostly thinking that the presence of the key would be a referendum on my sister’s current state of mind vis-à-vis me.
My sister lived in a tile-roofed Spanish Revival, just like half the homes in Santa Barbara, except that hers had red trim and a red front door and a garden planted with matchy-matchy red roses. Mexican fan palms lined the street out front, looming up between the shaggy eucalyptuses and the orange-barked manzanitas. You could see the ocean from her house, just a fifteen-minute walk down the hill.
The house looked exactly as it always had, the curtains drawn open for the light, a trio of sparrows bathing in the fountain that burbled in the front yard.
I glanced in the back seat of my car, where Charlotte was squirming against her straps and whining to be released. I got out and unlatched her and watched as she ran across the front garden, weaving and wobbling like a drunk stumbling toward the bar for last call. She got to the portico and turned and looked expectantly at me, eyes bright with anticipation.
The key was no longer under the ledge. Its absence was a slap.
Feeling vaguely queasy, I walked the gravel path around the perimeter of the house, looking for a likely hiding spot for a key. It wasn’t under the entry mat, or above the door, or under the potted lavender on the rear patio. I grabbed the handle of the back door and wiggled it, but it was locked tight. The windows refused to budge. I peered through one and into the empty kitchen, where dead tulips flopped woozily in a vase on the counter.
“I think we gotta go back home, kiddo,” I said to Charlotte, but she’d found a sun-faded water table that was set up on the back patio and was splashing in it with a shovel. When I tried to take her hand and steer her away she flung herself backward, yearning back toward the toy. Already I could see the heat building inside, her neck going red with fury. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to go well.
I heard the sound of a window sash opening and turned around to look at the house next door, a shingled Cape Cod that had been recently renovated. There was a woman in an upstairs window, looking down at me. She waved frantically. “Elli! Where’ve you been?!” she called.
“Sam,” I called back.
“What?”
“I’m not Elli, I’m Sam. Her sister. I’m babysitting Charlotte.”
The face vanished from the window. A moment later, the woman appeared in her backyard and waddled over to the fence, stepping through her own flower plantings in order to get a better look at me. She was a young brunette, and so pregnant that the silk bathrobe around her waist wouldn’t stay tied over the mound of her belly. Underneath it she wore a T-shirt with an arrow that pointed to her stomach and read Spoiler Alert: I’m Pregnant.
She leaned on the fence and watched as I tried to wrestle Charlotte away from the toys, with little success.
“So you’re the twin sister,” she said, glee flavoring her words. She looked me up and down, hunting for the details that would differentiate me from my sister. “I’m Alice. I’ve heard all about you.”
“I’m not going to pretend that means good things,” I said. “You don’t have to be polite.”