Libby took her clothes off. She took the baby’s little jumpsuit off, the baby’s pilly harness. The baby’s skin was chaffed underneath the harness, and flaking. Libby scraped off some of” the flaked-up skin with the squarish nail of her thumb. She shut the faucet off and stepped into the tub, holding the baby against her. Its thin, bowed legs, when she sat down, hung between Libby’s legs. She dipped the baby into the water.
Rose swung the top down on the toilet bowl and sat on it to watch. She scratched behind the dog’s ears as she watched. The mirror rattled, and little ripples came up in the water in the tub whenever Big Bear drove a nail into the eaves with his hammer. He was working his way toward the bathroom, stopping to cut the soffit boards and then hitting in nails again.
“Here,” Rose said, “I can help you.”
Rose washed her sister’s back for her, soaping it up and rinsing it with a cup she had brought from the kitchen.
Her sister’s skin had gotten smoother. Libby’s hair had gotten thicker, shinier than it used to be. Her breasts were bigger than Rose’s now.
Rose slipped her hand under her sister’s arm, turning the soap in her armpit. She moved the soap over her sister’s ribs, which used to show underneath her skin. Libby lifted the baby away from her chest and held it propped against her legs, holding her arms away from her sides to let her sister wash her. Rose soaped up Libby’s belly, her breasts, her nipples split and raw. She pushed into a nipple with the ball of her thumb. A little milk came out.
Libby felt her sister’s hands shake.
“Rose, Rose,” Libby said.
Rose had started very quietly crying. “I kept on letting the days pass so I could feel it move,” she said. “I wanted to feel it, what that feels like. I know it’s stupid.”
Libby kissed her sister’s fingertips. She handed her sister the baby.
Libby let Rose wash the baby — its bottom, its skinny legs, its little curling feet. She let Rose lather the dark hair whorled on the baby’s funny head, Rose keeping the soap away from its face the way Libby had shown her. The baby jerked its little arms around. It poked out the little white callus on its lip it already had from sucking.
“Look,” Libby said. “She likes it.”
She stepped out of the tub to give them room to move and pulled a towel off the towel rack.
Libby’s husband ran a saw through a board. He stepped up onto the ladder. With the claw of his hammer, he scraped at the mud that was left of the nests the swallows made.
Libby swung her hair up over her head to dry it.
Rose dipped the baby’s head into the water. She turned the baby onto its belly, held it there, let go. The dog got up, barking. The baby started to swim. Only its little bottom, and the misshapen plate at the back of its head, stuck up out of the water. The baby lunged — jerky, froggish — paused, trailing its little crooked leg; it swam over half the length of the tub before Libby saw what her sister had done and knocked past her, screaming, and snatched the baby out of the water.
“What are you doing?” Libby screamed. She held the baby against her. The baby was quiet. She hit her sister across the mouth. “What did you think you were doing?”
“She was swimming,” Rose said. “She liked it.”
It was true that the baby was quiet. Its little mouth was open, it was waving its little hands — a baby newly enough from the womb that it could still do that, hold its breath and swim like that. It had not forgotten yet how to do that.
When it was dark outside and the wind had quit and the baby was in its crib asleep, Libby’s husband came in. Rose heard him, big as he was, walk down the hall with his toolbox.
She tried to get the dog to sleep with her, tried to trap it underneath the covers. Rose patted the sheet, and tugged on the dog’s collar, but the dog, when it jumped on the bed, only jumped right off again. She gave up. She swung the door shut to keep the dog in her room, and flipped the light off.
The beds the one that Rose was in, and the one where Libby and her husband slept — were side by side, pushed against opposite sides of the wall. Rose listened for them through the plaster. She waited until they were quiet, until Libby and her husband seemed to be asleep, and then she went in to look at the baby. The baby was sleeping. It was making little sleeping sounds. The dog sat beside Rose and whimpered.
She went into the kitchen. She got Big Bear’s plate from the dish rack and toasted four frozen waffles, heaped them with ice cream and chocolate sauce and ate them in the dark in bed. She let the dog lick the plate when she had finished. This time, when she patted the covers, the dog jumped up in the bed.
She dreamed: they were with the dog, she and Libby, among the mountains. There was snow still, in patches, and moss that grew over their knees. In the snow was an overturned pickup truck she and Libby climbed out of. Their clothes were torn. They looked for wounds, for broken bones. They found the baby — not Libby’s baby, but the tiny thing that Rose felt drop into the toilet in the hospital — beginning to grow on her tongue.
Rose waked, and Libby and the dog and the baby waked, all at once before the sun: Big Bear had burned his toast. The dog got up. Rose lay in bed, listening, remembering she had turned the toaster to High to toast her frozen Eggos. She pulled her robe on, and let the dog out. She stood in the doorway, watching, in the light from the house, the dog following its nose.
It was dark still; the wind had not started to blow. Smoke was rising in columns from the concrete plant and drifting out over the plains, over a band of cottonwoods bent over a path of stones that had once been the bed of a river.
The boat was gleaming, bottom-up in the grass in the yard.
Rose tried to remember her dream. She remembered, instead, that she walked in her sleep for years before she moved from home, when home was a lush, dampened place, a county of hills and fences. In her sleep, she buried her family’s shoes in the sawdust pile beside the barn. She waked herself in shopping malls, on roadways, in neighbors’ yards — in places, some nights, she had never been and did not know how to go home from.
One night she waked, lying in a dew, in grass so tall she saw only leaves, threaded and sharp, and limpid stems, nodding their glossy heads. Something was eating toward her: she had fallen asleep in a field of cows. When a few of them found her, others came. They stood above her, flank to flank wide, wet, eyelashy eyes and dished cow faces, waiting to see what she would do.
She went in to look at the baby. “Hey, pretty girl. What you doing?” she said.
She shook the crib for the baby. She pinched a piece of lint from its mouth.
“Mkgnao,” she said. “Hulululu. Wakey, wakey, Baby.”
The baby lay there. Rose picked it up, cupping its head the way she remembered seeing her sister do. She remembered the place where the bone had not met on the top of the baby’s head, the dent you could press your thumb against and count the heartbeats through. She counted to twelve, or seven, and started to count again.
When they were five and six, the girls, when they were of an age for dolls, they loved the same blonde limbless thing until a day they fed it, set it to sit in the high chair where the girls themselves had used to sit, with the spoon they had learned to eat from. When Rose pulled the doll’s hair to bend back its neck to dribble ice cream into its mouth, the doll’s eyeballs had dropped from their sockets and fallen into its head. It was something she had nearly forgotten.