The Book of Baby Names Read online

  Becca again imagined her child being born dead. She cringed with each sudden stop or turn of the car. She slouched in the passenger seat, placed her free hand on her stomach, and hoped to feel her baby’s healthy kick. She couldn’t be sure: was it the baby, or had the car only hit a bump in the road?

  Becca faded in and out, delirious from the pain and the dread. And then she was on a hospital gurney, curled up on her side. The attendant was a worse driver than Edward, she thought: the gurney jolted and bumped around corners, then into the elevator. Becca recalled stories she’d read online about women who miscarried, women who hallucinated in the delivery room and swore they heard the cries of their stillborn babies.

  She didn’t hear anything.

  If she had heard an infant voice, she’d have recognized it. Even in a crowd of a million babies, all crying out, she would know the sound of her own child.

  Becca heard nothing.

  Afterwards, she couldn’t bear her husband’s pitying look. He was trying to support her, working at it. But he was not (she didn’t think) registering sufficient grief of his own.

  * * *

  She hated that Edward hadn’t let her look at her baby, said it would upset her too much. The baby was small and peaceful, he told her, as if that was all she needed to know.

  Becca imagined taking her child’s body from the hospital. She could bury it in their backyard, beneath the tree where they had planned to hang a tire swing. But there was no official memorial. Becca lied and said she didn’t want one.

  Edward could decide to grieve in his own way, however he cared to.

  There was another ceremony she couldn’t share with her husband, one that waited until he slept:

  * * *

  She handed the doll through the truck window to the seated driver. She also brought a small yellow dress that they had received as a gift from Edward’s mother. Becca turned to the wooden boards rising from the truck bed, all covered with scraps of doll or child clothing.

  In the truck cab, the driver began his work. She heard the pop of plastic as the doll’s head, legs, and arms snapped from their sockets.

  Becca found an empty space. She fastened the dress to a board with two safety pins.

  * * *

  Edward stayed home with her for a few days, to help with her depression. They had trouble talking to each other. It was a relief when he decided to return to work.

  Against Edward’s advice, she would not see a therapist. “I just need time,” Becca had said.

  Sometimes, usually when she was alone during the day, Becca heard the motor of the truck. She would pull aside the living room curtain to look out. The yellow child’s dress was now mostly covered by another scrap of clothing; the visible patch of yellow had faded.

  At night, if the motor sounded above the even breaths of Edward’s calm sleep, she would slide from bed, rush to the window, and press her face to the cool glass. Becca searched the gray sea of plastic limbs, certain that part of her child was there on the truck—not the doll, but her actual child.

  The man never looked at her as he drove past the house. She hadn’t called to him.

  * * *

  Eventually, Becca had to return to the world. Everyone thought so. Three weeks was long enough away from work, long enough to be alone with her disappointment. She wasn’t ready to face everyone at once, though, so she called Doreen.

  “I’d need to bring Katie,” Doreen had said. “Will it hurt you to be around her?”

  Bring Katie. Of course. (Similar things she’d expected to be able to say herself, someday: “I couldn’t get a sitter.” “It’s hard to make sudden plans when you have a child.”).

  And it wasn’t as difficult as she thought, putting on a brave front. Katie, now four years old, could occupy herself fairly well. Doreen had brought some crayons and a sketch pad. Becca had loaned the girl a copy of Pat the Bunny to look at, borrowed from the bookshelf in the empty nursery. Katie sat quietly on the carpet while her mother and Becca drank herbal tea in the living room.

  Doreen opened her mouth, then shook her head. “I guess I don’t know what to say.” They’d talked on the phone several times, of course, but it was different in person. Doreen leaned closer on the couch, reached out her hand and patted Becca on the knee.

  “Your card was lovely.” Becca put her hand on top of Doreen’s for a moment. “I knew you were thinking of me, and that helped.” There was another awkward pause after they broke contact. Becca ended the silence with a short laugh. “Honestly, I wouldn’t know what to say either if I was in your position.”

  Doreen smiled and shook her head. “I’m sorry, Becca. I mean it.”

  “Thanks.” Becca smoothed the front of her blouse, then reached for her mug of tea and took a sip. She felt self-conscious, in a way she never had before. She’d barely had the energy to straighten up the living room before Doreen’s visit; her own appearance, she felt, was sloppier than she would have liked.

  Doreen found her voice. “Has Edward been helpful? And your family?”

  “Well, they try. My mother had two miscarriages herself long ago: she insists she knows what I’m going through. And Edward, he says all the right things. But it got to where we were just talking in circles.”

  She feared she would slip back into depression, feared she would start to cry. Becca needed to be herself again, briefly, just have a normal conversation with her best friend. She quickly changed the subject. “Enough of my problems. Tell me about work, tell me about you. Any exciting gossip? Anything going on at home?”

  Doreen blanched at the last question. “Oh, Becca. I feel just awful.” She covered her face with her hands.

  “Doreen, it’s all right. I’ll be fine.” Wasn’t this always the way? In the middle of your own tragedy, you end up having to comfort others.

  “It’s not that. Oh, I wasn’t going to say—”

  “What? What is it?”

  Doreen dropped her hands and looked sideways at Katie. The girl turned the cardboard pages of the book, oblivious to the adults.

  In a whisper: “Katie doesn’t know yet—”

  —and Becca could tell. It was so obvious, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it right away—

  “—she’s going to have a little brother or sister.” Doreen broke down into tears.

  “Oh, no. No.” Becca grabbed a tissue to wipe Doreen’s tears away, then slid closer on the couch to hug her. “I’m happy for you.”

  After a minute of shaking sobs, Doreen pulled back and tried to compose herself. “God, I feel so ridiculous. So guilty.”

  “I’ll be okay.” Becca smiled. “You give me hope. I’ll try again.”

  * * *

  The driver came to her the next night Edward was out of town. Their bedroom meeting was the same, but this time Becca knew what to expect. She let him lower her to the bed, flinched as he entered her once again. Becca thought about her treatments at the fertility clinic: intrusive, unnatural, uncomfortable (at the physical level, and at the level of hope).

  His voice in her head was rough, yet soothing. “The next one will be yours to keep.”

  She really needed to believe him.

  * * *

  Adam

  Albert

  Alice

  Amanda

  Amber

  Andrew

  The Albright Sextuplets

  -1-

  I think they’re down to only three authentic Albright sextuplets.

  Reminds me of the bands people used to like: The Platters, now on tour with maybe one original member, and even that guy’s voice doesn’t sound the same. For my generation, my group of stoner friends who smoked on high school steps in 1980, the better example is KISS, briefly reunited for one troubled, money-making tour in ’98, then half the band replaced with imposters in Ace or Peter makeup. What a travesty.

  So, I’ve been keeping track of the sextuplets.

  Not every
body can tell the difference between adult twins, but I can. I dated a twin once, for three months. Never was afraid they’d try any kind of switcheroo, Shaina dressing in one of her sister’s outfits, sneaking into my bed on a lark to see if I’d notice. Wouldn’t work. I’d be able to tell them apart, even in the dark. Got a sixth sense about that kind of thing.

  Six.

  That’s the magic number where babies are concerned. What we call multiple births, I mean. Any more than six, the whole batch is kind of runty—and a few are probably gonna die. Any less than six, after these new fertility drugs, falls a touch shy of miraculous. Four or five together is plenty to make a show at the work picnic or cause a cooing over in the shopping mall, and you’d be recognized in your little community, but quadruplets or quintuplets aren’t gonna make you world-famous. Check the Baby Town website: you can order extra-wide strollers, and the pull down menu lets you click for up to five seats. No option for six, though. That’d be a custom job.

  Which is why, when people try to pull some scam, they usually go for sextuplets. Six will make people reach for their wallets, and probably take up a collection at church, too. Latest scam was this couple in Iowa, I think: had their picture on the front page of the local rag, holding up three pair of blue booties, three pair of pink; another picture of weary mom lying on the bed, dress swollen up over her stomach like Jiffy Pop on the stove. Man, they got an SUV donated by the county’s Chevy dealer (used, but still), a brand new heavy-duty washing machine, gift certificates for Baby Town and K-Mart—and a crapload of diapers, literally. Trouble was, babies have to be born somewhere, and no nearby hospitals had records of a sextuplet delivery. The family tried some lame-ass excuse for why nobody ever saw pictures of the babies—the wife’s previous husband had threatened to kill the kids or steal them or something, so they had to keep them under wraps—but eventually the whole story was exposed as a hoax.

  Pretty humiliating. And it must have sucked to have to give back all that donated stuff.

  People go to a lot of trouble with some of these hoaxes. Reminds me of a joke Carl Willis pulled for our Senior Class picture, twenty-some years ago. They took us to the track bleachers, used a special camera that panned across the group to capture us all in the same shot. Carl knew how these cameras worked, and he stood in the back row on the left side, smiling in an argyle sweater vest. While the rest of us posed still as statues for the long exposure, he waited until the camera panned to the middle group, then he ducked behind the row and ran like a son-of-a-bitch to beat the camera to the other side. In the finished picture, Carl’s “twin” stands like a book end on the right; he wears a bright yellow T-shirt and his hair’s messed up from pulling the sweater over his head and ditching it as he ran. That quick-change of his outfit is my favorite touch. Lots of people didn’t even notice, until you pointed it out in the printed photo. A great, goofy trick.

  A multiple birth scam, though—that goes beyond this kind of harmless fun. Like when people steal online baby photos to pass off other people’s kids as their own. The Adler family in Wisconsin had a webpage of their legitimate quintuplets, but those kids turned up all over the ’Net with different names, often with other moms and dads and uncles Photoshopped into the background. It’s not just stealing pictures, it’s stealing sympathy—messing with people’s emotions in message boards designed to support parents or pregnant women. Not cool to pull a hoax about such a sensitive issue.

  The Albright sextuplets weren’t a hoax, though. At least, not at first.

  -2-

  The instant their story hit the news, everybody loved the Albrights. Jean-Marie had sisterly good looks, with puffy cheeks great for smiling. Not a model with twiggy legs that looked ready to snap in the seventh month beneath the weight of a pregnant belly. A real, regular woman. Her husband Sam worked for the Baltimore County Humane Society and was a volunteer fireman on weekends. Kittens and puppies, babies, saving people’s lives and homes—how perfect is that?

  When they thanked God for all their kids being born safe and sound, it wasn’t in a sanctimonious or crazy-religious way. More general, like the way anybody screams “Jesus!” when they’re angry, not just Christians.

  And the babies were cute as could be, born with tufts of blond hair that swirled faint golden lines around their rosy scalps, tiny hands flexing, their eyes closed as if shy of the photographer’s flash. Sure, they all had a kind of sallow, under-fed look to the face, as you’d expect from sextuplets—but that just made them look more sweet and poignant.

  You couldn’t help but wish the family well. Hell, even I put a couple dollars in the glass jar next to our microwave at work, the week after the sextuplets were born. That was before they got the product endorsements, of course; these days, the Albright’s don’t need anybody to take up a collection for them.

  -3-

  Let’s examine a few advertisements. In last year’s “Spring Fresh” campaign, you see all six babies rolling on an assortment of soft, freshly laundered blankets. The blankets are vivid colors, of course, to capitalize on the happy accident of the Albright name. “Keep your colors All Bright with Diamond Detergent—Powder or Convenient Liquid.”

  But one of the kids is clearly a double.

  Not like Carl’s trick for my high school photo. Commercial photographers use different tricks. Did you know that ice cubes in an advertisement are really chunks of glass? Sure: ice would melt under the studio lights. A hamburger patty might be painted with clear nail polish to make the meat look juicy. Or an artist could airbrush a curb-side bum right out of a New York City street scene. These days, with computers, you can do almost anything. A mouse click will bring out the sky blue of a blanket better than “Color-Safe” bleach ever could.

  Look at the blanket in the middle, the peach-colored one. See that odd ripple along the left edge, a kind of stair-step effect? That’s from a cut-and-paste, one image moved on top of another and off by a pixel or two. Amanda’s on the peach blanket—she has a thicker bridge to her nose, compared to her two sisters. But on the upper left, fetal position on the canary yellow blanket? That’s Amanda, too.

  The boys are all there: Andrew, Albert, and Adam. But they used Amanda twice, with Amber completing the six.

  Where’s Alice?

  There’s any number of explanations for what happened. Marketers don’t care about the truth. They’ll print a mirror image just to change where an athlete’s head is pointed, then reverse the Nike logo on his shirt so nobody can tell. Some magazines got in trouble a while back for pasting Rosie or Oprah’s head on some skinnier chick’s body. So maybe, just maybe, Alice blinked when the camera shuttered, looked the wrong way or didn’t smile brightly enough during the day’s session, so they pasted her out of the picture. Who’s gonna notice? Who besides me would know Alice’s eyes are slightly closer together than her siblings’?

  Just a photographer’s whim—nothing more serious.

  I’d buy that theory if Alice showed up again in more recent advertisements. She doesn’t.

  If you remember the television spot the month before “Spring Fresh,” Alice had an odd hobble, and her head tilted slightly to the side. She looked like she wanted to crawl in a straight line, but couldn’t help but veer in a circle.

  Something went wrong with Alice, and the Albrights covered it up.

  Think about it: your family gets showered with gifts, and a soap company picks your miraculous, perfect sextuplets for a lucrative modeling job. In the short term, the family might get fresh attention if a kid turned seriously ill—lots of “Get Well” cards; cash donations to cover hospital expenses; toys for the sick kid, plus five more of each item so the others don’t feel left out. But sick doesn’t sell laundry detergent. You need sanitary.

  And what was the next product endorsement they landed? That’s right: baby food. Nobody’s putting a sick little girl’s face on a jar of applesauce or creamed spinach.

  Remember all those sit-com kids, the Partridge
or Brady or Huxtable tots, adorable season after season, then one summer growth spurt and the jokes aren’t so funny anymore? Child actors have a “sell-by” date; once they pass it, they curdle and spoil faster than hot garbage.

  Babies change even quicker than adolescents. Maybe Alice got sick; maybe she just lost her infant cuteness.

  Either way, Alice went spoiled.

  She wasn’t the only one.

  -4-

  The six faces are tiny on the Health Mart baby food labels, but do you see Andrew in there? I sure don’t.

  I see Albert twice, though. He’s been doubled, just like Amanda.

  And more recently, with Baby Town’s new line of clothing? If you order through the website, you can type in your kid’s name in a drop-down, and they’ll have it specially printed on the shirt fronts. On the TV spot, Jean-Marie smiles her puffy smile at her fireman husband and jokes: “I’d never be able to tell my kids apart without this option!”

  And who’s that wearing the pink shirt, “AMBER” ironed in white cloth letters beneath the frilly collar? I’d understand if you guessed Amber, but you’d be wrong.

  It’s Amanda, who should’ve earned triple her paycheck that day.

  Notice, there’s only one quick flash with all “six” kids in the same scene. The camera doesn’t move in that shot: it’s easier to do a split-screen effect if the camera stays still.

  Maybe you think I’m imagining things. That I’ve Tivo’d and rewatched these commercials, scrapbooked so many magazine ads that I can’t keep them straight in my head any longer. But it’s like I said, I can tell with these so-called “identical” siblings. Adults or babies, two or six or six-hundred—doesn’t make a bit of difference. Consider this: from your own experience, don’t you know that twins or regular brothers and sisters start to look different as they get older, as they fall into personality quirks, and their faces and bodies develop? Babies certainly don’t become more identical as they get older.