Bought Baby

After all Jack and Ann’s trouble conceiving, it seemed like a miracle that the Wilsons wanted to sell them their baby. The Wilsons had three children already and the burden of a fourth with an alcoholic father was too severe. Jack had known the Wilsons for years but only in a neighborly sort of way. He’d occasionally shovel Trevor Wilson’s driveway with his pickup, and Ann would leave notes at Christmas for good tidings.

Those were the days when it seemed like everything could be bought and sold with ease, even by ordinary people. Though in the case of baby Jack Jr.—who was four months old when they procured him—they did establish a simple contract. A friend-of-the-family lawyer who was beginning to lose his memory reviewed the document and charged his hourly rate for fifteen minutes of work, which included five minutes of chitchat.            

Then Jack Jr. (whose name changed in the space of that single transaction) became theirs. Ann and Jack’s. From caretaking that baby their relationship was born anew, spared from the iniquity of multiple miscarriages, and they devoted themselves to a kind of fevered domesticity. Jack Jr. consumed much of the attention: the late evenings full of soporific bliss, as Jack tended the fire and Ann hummed songs from her youth.

It was during this time that Ann told Jack the strangest story. She too had been bought. This was all before adoption became an institution, and her parents had procured her from another family on the rocks. She was born Catholic, Ann said, though the parents who raised her were Jewish. Her Jewish parents rarely celebrated the holidays, their own or anyone else’s, though they put an electric menorah on their windowsill around Christmastime. She longed for ritual during much of her childhood, and once she was out of her parents’ grasp converted back to Catholicism, baptizing herself for the second time. There was something blissful about the water, she told Jack, like being in a womb.

The fact that Ann herself was a bought baby made the welcoming of Jack Jr. a kind of redemptive act, Jack believed, a paying it forward so to speak.

Jack worked as an engineer on the freights that crisscrossed the northeast carrying lumber, steel, and dry goods. He loved everything about the trains, and enjoyed fixing them when they broke in novel ways. He was strong, gifted at his job, and well-liked with jokes that tended to be bawdy but not too much so. Though he worked long hours, he treasured the mornings with his baby, and at night before kissing his wife would kiss his son on the forehead.

When Jack Jr. turned a year old, they threw him a party and invited the whole neighborhood, including the Wilsons to whom they still felt a deep gratitude. Trevor came in a paisley shirt, hair slicked back like an old-time film star, but over the course of the evening spiked his punch one time too many. He slurred something about oranges, a desire for a warmer place.

The week after the party, Trevor Wilson filed a motion with the courts to have his son back. He’d made a mistake, he argued to the judge, and was not in his right mind when he’d signed that flimsy piece of paper.

Jack pled his case: Trevor Wilson had not held a job for more than a season and could barely feed his three other children. Ann and Jack were providing this baby with a good life, not to mention their love. But the judge was unmoved: the law was the law, and the document they’d drawn up was not legally binding.

Jack Jr. was gone from their life in a moment, but his objects remained. The crib where he’d learned how to roll over, then stand. The wool mittens Ann had crocheted. The pale green lovey he’d clung to night and day but which he’d left behind. Then even these disappeared; one day Jack stored them deep in the garage when Ann had left home.

Still, they mourned their baby’s departure, and like parents who’ve lost a child often do, Ann and Jack split up and both left town. Ann found a job at the laundromat in Kingston and soon after married a bank teller, though they too struggled to have children. Jack moved across the river, but continued to work the trains and found a rhythm with his single life, which included a game of cards on Wednesday evenings, boxing practice with his friends two other nights a week, and a can of tuna and sourdough for most meals.

Years later, when Jack had become a senior engineer, he saw Trevor on a freight. Trevor had been called in to do odd jobs. They were alone in the driver’s cab. Jack had the controls and had invited Trevor in. Trevor seemed to be doing better; at least he wasn’t drunk. At the time Jack Jr. had returned to his biological parents, big Jack had carried ill will toward Trevor and the Wilsons, but over the years this had lessened. He’d tried hard not to think of Jack Jr. or those evenings by the wood stove, Ann’s quiet humming, Jack Jr.’s coos, which were bird-like and precious.

Now with Trevor in the small cab, all those emotions returned, and in a short while he asked how Jack Jr. was doing. Trevor said he’d had to let Jack Jr. go, given the boy to his mother; turned out he’d had too much on his hands, and Grandma was better suited.

The cab cars had doors you could open to get in a smoke or to peer outside as the train lurched. Jack opened the door wide, gripped Trevor by the neck and pushed him off the train. He didn’t think it through. A rage came upon him. One moment Trevor was in the cab with him and in the next Trevor was down by the crabgrass, the train hurtling away at forty miles an hour.

For days afterward, Jack imagined a police officer would come knocking to inquire if he knew anything about Trevor Wilson’s demise, but no one came. Over time the memory of that incident faded, though a nightmare would wake him occasionally where he’d fall off the train along with Trevor. Though less often a dream would come too, where Jack Jr. was back in his arms, and he’d awake with a shooting pain in the darkness of his own room.