[Read Part 1 here : https://www.close2thebone.co.uk/wp/colic-part-1/]
I crept out of the kitchen, my sock sticking to the spot where the batter had spilled, and towards the sitting room, looking for something to do. Whenever I was at a big family gathering around the holidays, I could entertain myself by looking at all the photographs on the walls, imagining what the people in the black and white shot were like. So much life was captured in one frame, as if an electric current crackled through each person inside, ready to reanimate them before me. But here, there was nothing but the outlines made from where pictures had hung long ago. The walls were slowly forgetting what they once held as they yielded to a coating of soot. And so, after what I had deemed an appropriate amount of time, I quietly went upstairs, hoping again to find my baby doll.
Figuring it was trapped somewhere in my jumbled sheets, I started to make my way back to my room. But a grating, toneless hum called my attention to the door to my left instead. The pointed shushing sound that escaped through gritted teeth told of another unspeakable secret beyond the door, and I looked down to see the soft glow of ballerina pink dancing from underneath the door, undulating as if to absorb me into it. I pressed my ear against the door, alarmed by the early rumblings of an inconsolable sob coming from the other side. I was again troubled by what I thought to be another one of my great aunt’s irrational responses, but as I listened more closely, my heart stuttered as the cries morphed into those of someone younger. Of a baby. A startled yelp slipped through my lips, and I clasped my hand over my mouth. But the damage was done. A silence now brewed dangerously behind the closed door. I made for my room as quickly as I could, but the door burst open, wailing on its hinges as my great aunt loomed at the entrance. Her arms were empty. She stood with her legs spread apart to the edges of the doorframe, blocking her private shrine as much as her wisp of a body could. Her back curled into a fearsome arch, and her eyes rolled wildly in her head like those of a rabid beast. But as she canted her neck down to look at me, she looked at me more closely, and the adrenaline drained from her veins as she released her back from its ugly contortion.
“You might as well come in,” she sighed. And she turned back to her sanctuary, drawn like a moth into the room’s enchanting glow.
Just one step into the room, and I felt renewed. The air inside did not hang oppressively but kissed my face with its cool freshness. I curled my feet into the white carpet. It felt soft and creamy between my toes, like whipped marshmallow. In sharp contrast to the dull, lifeless walls that surrounded me for the past day, these were painted a gentle, blooming rose, and the chandelier hanging overhead scattered the color everywhere. And as the light embraced me, it traveled through my entire body, rising through my feet and into my fingertips until all of me felt invigorated. The vibrant smell of lemons rose from the dresser, and the delicate sheen and rag on top of it suggested that it had just been polished. It felt a bit cramped, though, and as I surveyed the walls, I realized that this was also the only room that was decorated. Needlepoint patterns of baby elephants, bears, and foxes lined the walls, and a mobile made of floating fairies twirled above a white crib. And beside the crib was a matching Windsor chair, one that a toddler might grow into, with odd, crusted splotches of white paint covering something written underneath.
The jack-in-the-box on the shelf and the stuffed hippopotamus tucked into the bookcase looked oddly familiar, though, and as I watched Great Aunt Mara shuffle about the room, shifting every item into its chosen place just so, I remembered where I had seen them all before. They had been with the fingerpaints I used the night before, forming the base of the massive collection pile that was supposedly a donation for the church. And yet, with each toy nestled into a deliberate spot, this nursery was not a waystation for the collection items but their final destination.
I often wonder whether my great aunt had any remorse for her veritable theft, taking presents meant for poor, sweet children and instead giving them to an irritable, ancient woman who had enough vitriol and stockpiled meals to last for decades. But I firmly believe that she believed her case to be just as worthy of charity, if not more. If anything, the world was paying her back for what it had taken from her prematurely, and it still owed her interest. But it was hard for me to stifle another cry of alarm when I realized that, sitting upright in a rocking chair still moved from when my great aunt stood up from it, was my very own baby doll, wrapped tightly in a frilly pink dress.
“Vita,” Great Aunt Mara crooned. The soothing atmosphere of the room had apparently stripped away her inhibitions, and she was finally able to say my name. And she repeated it, rolling Vita, Vita, Vita around her mouth like wine as she took in its rich flavor.
“You see, Vita,” she went on, “I saw your doll in your bed when I was with you last night, and she looked like such a sweet little girl. And that potato sack of a dress you had on her was not proper for her, not proper for such a sweet baby,” she pursed her lips, offended by my apparent neglect.
“And so I took her just for the night, only for the night, Vita, and I measured her and made a little dress for her, just a little dress,” she said as her breath wavered, tightened by a latent cough, “and she was such a good girl, such a good little girl, yes, but she got fussy just now, and I had to calm her.” Her tone flowed seamlessly from playful to serious to the point where it was impossible to determine whether she was playing a game or not.
“And I have to try out all the toys,” she added quickly, “every last one of them so that I know they are in good condition. The handle on the jack-in-the-box could use a little grease,” she asserted as my eyes landed on the contraband item, then added meekly, “but you could play with the baby a little now if you’d like.”
I looked over again at my doll, slumped lifelessly in that chair that refused to stop rocking. And I looked at my great aunt, who moved anxiously back and forth on the balls of her feet, keeping in time with the chair as if her entire body yearned to sit right back down before I had interrupted her. And as the raw desire simmered in her eyes as she stared at the doll, I knew it was no longer mine.
“No, thank you,” I whispered, and before I could even retreat from the room, she made for the chair with a feline nimbleness, something I did not know was possible for her brittle bones. She gathered the doll to herself, holding it awkwardly to her bosom, and as I walked back into the hot, airless hallway, a chorus of infantile cries and dry coughs hung in unholy dissonance as I shut the door behind me.
Dinner that night was frozen chicken and peas, but it was Great Aunt Mara who squished my meal into a gray mush that night. She was worried about my ability to chew, she said, and the mess I had made of my lasagna the night before did not help my case. I took a few tentative bites of the food. It clung solidly to my insides like mortar, but between each painful forkful of food, I remember her asking about what my father was like. She cringed when I told her about his late nights at the bar as if it were she who only knew her father by the lukewarm feel of his goodnight kiss on the forehead every night, long after bedtime.
She braided my hair again that night, and while her skill did not increase, her ferocity did. And as my scalp throbbed, she kept whispering something, the sounds grazing my ears too softly to be heard at first. But as she capped off her handiwork with the signature rubber band, I could just barely recognize the word, feeling it dribble into my ear like hot wax.
Baby.
***
It is a law of nature that tells us to cling more tightly to something that is slipping away from us. But it is also a law of human nature that desperation of that kind repels us the most. After a sleepless night, my mother was to pick me up later the next day, and it was this looming separation that cast a long, dark shadow over my great aunt’s mood. Attempting to water the poor orchid that now had only a few petals to its name, her shaking hand could not control the flow, and she smothered it, stomping her foot down in abject rage as the water gushed over the side. And when I tried to ask for water instead of the clumpy milk in the morning, she sneered at me, her lip curling as if I had rejected a fundamental part of her being. She snatched my glass and guzzled down the milk herself, wiping away the dribbling remnants with the back of her hand. She glared at the fingerpainting on the fridge, pulled it down, and tore it up feverishly into the trash can. She stormed upstairs, the fearsome drama of her tantrum spoiled by the feeble, panting breaths she had to take between each step.
But she must have realized that her self-imposed seclusion was only punishing herself because, within a matter of minutes, she came skulking back, her tail tucked between her legs as she brought with her what was now her baby doll. Her trembling arms maintained an uneasy balance with the infant. Stray black strings from her frayed shawl clung like ticks to the doll’s pink dress.
“What games does she usually play?” she asked in a steady—even sweet—tone, as if just a few moments in the fresh coolness of the nursery upstairs had extinguished the white heat of her anger.
“Games?” I asked, again confounded by the seriousness with which she regarded the preferences of a plastic doll.
“Yes, games. When you and the baby play games together, does she have a favorite?” Her obsession with the doll was becoming uncomfortable, but the excitement blooming in her face was preferable to malice, so I entertained the topic.
“I like—she likes—to play house sometimes,” I stammered.
“Play house?”
“Yes, where I am the mommy, and I take care of her.”
“Why do you get to be the mommy?” she shot back, bristling at the apparent injustice.
“Well,” I stammered, “you can be the mommy if you’d like, and I can be the older sister.” At that, the wrinkles dissolved from her furrowed brow, and so I proceeded to lay out the scene.
“Let’s pretend that the baby was just born and that we are taking her home from the hospital, and—”
“Where is the father in this game?” she interrupted, the sweat starting to drip from her forehead, the disdain already percolating beneath her skin.
“Your husband?”
“So, he’s still my husband?” she asked, as if we were not masters of the game but were subject to a cruel game of chance.
“Why wouldn’t he be?” I asked. She scoffed and hung her head down low, wagging it back and forth as if it might break off from her brittle neck. All I could do was to try to keep the game alive.
“So you’ve brought the new baby home, and I’ve just met her, and now you have to cook dinner.”
“Already?” she cried out, her breath tight with exasperation.
“Well—”
“This would be much easier if my husband were here to help. Where is he?” she pleaded, looking fretfully at the doll in her arms.
“I—I think he’s at work, and—”
“Oh, and I’m sure that is much more important than helping me,” she said, hobbling around the kitchen table now as he paced, “because men never understand how hard it is with these things, do they? How could they? They never carried a child! They never—”
I looked on silently as she circled the table like a bird of prey, closing in on some unspeakable misery that I could have never understood.
“They never could know what it is like to be that close to something,” she asserted, speaking more vehemently with every revolution around the table, “and so they hide. They hide behind their work because they do not take the time to try to understand the pain. And then,” she wheezed, her lungs crying out for the air they needed to speak her peace, “they leave. They leave, but they make sure to tell you before they go that it is your fault, because you are being—”
She cut herself off with a tremendous cough, her whole body writhing as she leaned over a chair, nearly vomiting as she choked out the word, “irrational.”
Her knees wobbling beneath her, my great aunt pulled the chair out and sat down. Her frail body was before me, but behind those blank eyes I could tell her mind was somewhere—or some time—entirely different.
“We can play a different game,” I tried after a minute or two, and she looked up at me with such hesitant hope, like a dog that had been hit too many times to trust an outstretched hand.
“You mean there are other games?” she asked, a fresh coat of tears painting her cheeks.
“Of course there are. There are lots!”
“Like what?”
“Well, sometimes we play doctor.”
“Well,” she sniffled, using her shawl to scrape away the snot crusting beneath her nose, “how do you do that?”
“Maybe…maybe the baby is sick, and—”
“Sick?” she asked warily, covering her mouth with her claw of a hand.
“Yes, but not too badly” I said, trying to pick my way out of the snare in which she placed me, “and the doctor will help.”
“No…no…no,” she kept repeating, squeezing the doll tightly to her chest, nearly popping off the baby’s plastic head under the pressure.
“But the doctor will make the baby better.”
“I already asked him to!” she hissed, trying to stand back up but yielding to her quaking knees.
“But how?” I asked meekly, “if we haven’t even started the game?” I braced myself, listening early, throaty rumblings of her scream, but she just sat there, clutching the doll even more tightly, burying it deeply into her shawl.
“I already asked him,” she repeated, with regret rather than poison in her voice, “but all they ever do is give you bad news. And they blame you, too. One week you have a baby in you. You even picked out a name. And then the next week they say it’s gone, and you start shaking and sobbing—” and she had that faraway look in her eyes again, their glassy films like reflecting pools as I watched my look of alarm grow within them.
“And your husband,” she continued, rocking her body back and forth, her thumb brushing roughly against her chapped lips, “he tells you to stop crying so loudly, that you’re embarrassing everyone. And all the doctor can tell you is that you did not eat the right things, you did not take care of yourself or the baby, but you didn’t know, you just didn’t know.” I held on to a chair across from her, not daring to get any closer.
“And then he just tells you to try again. Try again, like it was all just some little experiment. So you do, and you’re terrified, but soon enough you’ve got a name again, a new one, and then you dare to get a room all nice and ready, and you get to the very end. But just as soon as you dare to be happy—just as soon as they tell you it’s a girl—they say that she’s all blue and gray and…and—”
Her shoulders started to shake violently with each strained breath.
“—They tell you that she’s not breathing.” And then Great Aunt Mara’s body went numb. Her already rigid body became catatonic, frozen in the misery that isolated from all the life that grew beyond her cloistered life of despair. As her grip weakened, she could not sustain the baby doll, and it tumbled in slow motion towards the floor, sliding out from under her shawl, landing on its head and bouncing halfway across the room. The hollow sound of the collision roused my great aunt from her stupor. She looked down at her arms, felt the enormous weight of emptiness inside them, and followed my gaze toward where the doll was splayed out on the floor.
“Oh God, oh God,” she uttered, the terror mounting in her wide, anguished eyes, “oh God, not again!”
She fought through the wincing pain in her knees, holding onto the counter as she neared the lifeless form. Then she collapsed before it, speaking some inscrutable gibberish as she knelt beside the doll. She wrapped the body against hers in her black shroud, hunching over it so that their silhouettes made one form. Then she struggled again to her feet and shuffled way upstairs, her socks unsettling years of caked-on dust with each despondent step.
She would not be coming back down.
to be continued…. Part 3 on 14/03/2025
[Image Credit : Photo by Amit Rana on Unsplash]
Marlene Elaine Brasco is an undergraduate student at the College of William & Mary. She seeks to highlight the rich nuance found within everyday life in her work. Aside from writing, she loves reading, baking, and spending time with her family and her chocolate Labrador retriever.
