A baby girl was born, entering the world covered in a fine wolfish pelt that darkened her cheeks, shoulders, and back. When they lay the baby on her mother’s belly, the woman recoiled. The girl’s eyes were narrowed to canine slits, and even her cries sounded like subdued yelps. No one in the room, not even an elderly nurse who had seen thousands of births in her lifetime, spoke at first. Then the doctor handed the father gleaming surgical scissors and told him to cut the bloody cord. “Mein Gott,” the mother said when she found her breath.
“Go ahead,” the doctor encouraged behind his face mask, showing the father the bloodied clip where he’d pinched off the placenta. “Cut right here.”
The baby’s father nodded. He muttered some reassurance to his wife. Hearing her father’s voice, the baby stretched forth one tiny hand. Such ancient hands they seemed to him, all pruned and wrinkled. Old soul. It was as if his wife had given birth to a little furry old person now reaching to take hold of him. The baby squalled this whole time, raspy-sounding hiccups like it was drowning in its own fluids. The father reached out with his other hand, and the baby grabbed his pinkie and held on. This touch startled them both and hushed the baby. The father’s eyes filled, and he could not speak. Then a new calmness entered him, and he did what was necessary and cut the cord and let the nurse bundle the child away.
He reached for her in the shocking moment of her birth and would go on reaching until he breathed his last. The baby weighed only four pounds.
A little monster, that’s what her mother thought she had birthed. She was being punished; her sin had stained even her womb. She tried to breast-feed the thing and failed. Pale, exhausted, she would go on spilling bloody clumps between her legs long after the doctors sewed her up. It was as if the birthing had torn something out of her, something terrible and secret that she would never have again. And the baby reminded her of nothing more than a runt kitten, something too small and wounded to survive. Slate gray eyes and mewling. “Take it away,” she told the nurse. “I need my rest.”
If the child had been born with a caul instead, the mother might have known what it meant and not been so unnerved. She would have dried and preserved the caul and then pinned it to a wall above the bed to keep the child from changing into a werewolf when the moon fattened. But this glistening gray fur that covered the entire body, as fine as corn silk, disgusted her. The mother was frightened of wolves, and here one had come from her own belly.
She didn’t know all fetuses were furred for a time in the womb, and that babies born more than a month premature, like this one, sometimes still bore a vestigial reminder of humankind’s bestial origins. By the time the young doctor came to explain to the mother why her baby appeared so freakish, it was too late. He tried naming the condition, telling her it was called lanugo and that it would last a few weeks before the fur was absorbed into the body. “Your baby is small but fierce,” he assured her. “She is going to live.”
Much later that night, as the woman’s husband slept in an armchair beside her, the nurse wheeled the child and her cradle into the room and left again. When the mother awoke, it was waiting for her, and she knew what she had to do. Quietly, wearing only her hospital gown, she snuck her husband’s keys from the lamp stand and took the baby and walked barefoot into the snowy parking lot and was not seen again.
“She was crazy, wasn’t she?”
“She gave birth to the child, but she was no mother.”
“How come?”
At such moments his pretense fell away, and the girl knew he was picturing her mother as he had first known her and not this fairy-tale vision he had made up for her.
“She was from a faraway place, and she had seen terrible things. She was unwell. Sometimes, women will get really sad after a baby is born, even though it should be the happiest moment in their lives. Sometimes this sadness eats them up and they do something bad.”