for a way in. Moonlight flooded in through the window. She pictured those claws, the gouges on her father’s face. It pressed against the door, but the latch held fast. She lay awake, listening to it. “Papa?” she said again, but whatever was out there was not him.
“WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?” CLARA asked. “That’s not the ending.” Her father coughed into his handkerchief. “This wet grass has soaked straight through my backside. Let’s get inside before we catch chill.”
These stories were less frequent now that Clara had grown older, and she feared the day they would stop entirely. Like the man in the story, her father was going farther away from her, or she from him. Clara let him lead her by the hand back to the apartment they kept above his store.
She had realized she could see her mother, this woman whose memory her father denied her, but only when he wasn’t near, so she kept running away. She didn’t consciously mean to hurt him. Each time she ran away, the weather changed, as if her father had the power to call down storms. And each time he came to find her, no matter what it cost him physically. He didn’t ask questions nor did he scold her. For a long time after he died Clara had the sense of him out there, still searching for her, trying to keep her safe. The dead carve out a space inside us, taking up residence like a man stepping under a willow tree in the rain to sit beside the ghost of our former selves. In this manner each of us is haunted, and who would have it any other way?
BEFORE SHE KNEW IT, school started on Monday, and Clara was back in the thick of things. The sophomores of first and second period came to class toting ten pound bags of Gold Medal flour wrapped in panty hose along with their usual notebooks and supplies. “How do you like my new baby, Mrs. Warren?” the first girl through the door asked Clara, swinging the thing in her arms. Foam-filled panty hose bulged out in the shape of pudgy arms and legs around the flour sack. She had sewn round blue buttons into the lopsided head for the eyes and mouth. This smiling head lolled on the neck when she balanced it on her hip.
“Baby?” Clara said, confused. It looked like a doll dreamed up by Dante. She struggled to recall the blonde’s name. Her chirpy voice, at 8:15 in the morning, hurt Clara’s ears.
“It’s baby week in home ec,” said another, a brunette who always had chewing gum packed into her chipmunk cheeks. She trailed behind the girl, lugging her own flour-sack baby. “We have to carry these around for a week, to learn what it’s like to have a baby. That way we won’t get knocked up.”
Clara smoothed down her blouse over her stomach. “Does the sack of flour wake you up six times a night?”
“Not exactly,” she said, sagging into her desk. What was her name? Tara? Tina? That was it: Tina. “We have to call Miss Drimble sometime between two and three in the morning and leave a message on her machine. Every night. Then we have to call back and tell her the baby is sleeping fifteen minutes later.”
“Isn’t that like the dumbest thing ever?” the first girl chimed in from her own desk.
Clara nodded. Like totally, but who was she to judge another teacher’s methods? The flour-sack babies were all the sophomores could talk about. They had to introduce Clara to them as they came in the door. Each baby had a name, a Crayola birth certificate, and a little book where the student recorded the times they supposedly changed diapers and administered feedings. Clara was walking the rows when she came across Lee Gunderson, the sheriff’s younger son. She’d forgotten he was in this class. Unlike his older brother, he kept to himself. He had long hair, his eyes slightly slanted. The taint the boy must feel was the same as any soldier or policeman feels after surviving bloodshed, family trauma. Clara knew that psychologists called this sense of always feeling branded the mark of Cain.
There was something mechanical to his smile. Clara paused at his desk. His baby had uneven eyes, a smile like a gash along the lower jaw. “Hi, Lee. What’s your baby’s name?”
“Billy,” he said without looking at her. It took her a moment to realize that Billy was short for