I drew in a hissing breath. To deliberately drive a wedge between me and Hardy, when we had done nothing wrong, seemed an ugly hypocrisy coming from a woman who'd just had a fatherless baby. I wanted to say that, and worse things.
Hardy spoke before I could, his bleak gaze locked with my mother's. "I think you're right."
He left the trailer.
I wanted to scream at my mother, to hurl words at her like a shower of darts. She was selfish. She wanted me to pay for Carrington's childhood with my own. She was jealous that someone might care for me when there was no man in her life. And it wasn't fair of her to go out with her friends so often, when she should want to stay at home with her newborn. I wanted to say those things so badly, I nearly suffocated beneath the weight of unspoken words. But it has always been my nature to turn my anger inward, like a Texas skink eating its own tail.
"Liberty—" Mama began gently.
"I'm going to bed," I said. I didn't want to hear her opinion of what was best for me. "I've got a test tomorrow." I went to my room with swift strides and closed the door in a cowardly half-slam, when I should have had the guts to do it full-out. But at least I had the mean, fleeting satisfaction of hearing the baby cry.
CHAPTER 8
As the year went on I had begun to measure the passage of time not by the signposts of my own development, but by Carrington's. The first time she rolled over, the first time she sat on her own, ate applesauce mixed with powdered rice, the first haircut, the first tooth. I was the one she always raised her arms to first, giving me a wet gummy grin. It amused and disconcerted Mama at first, and then it became something everyone accepted matter-of-factly.
The bond between Carrington and me was closer than that of sisters; it was more like that of parent and child. Not as a result of intention or choice... it simply was. It seemed natural that I would go with Mama and the baby to her pediatrician's visits. I was more intimately acquainted with the baby's problems and patterns than anyone else. When it was time for vaccinations, Mama retreated to the corner of the room while I pinned the baby's arms and legs down on the doctor's table. "You do it, Liberty," Mama said. "She won't hold it against you like she would someone else."
I stared into Carrington's pooling eyes, flinching at her incredulous scream as the nurse injected the vaccines into her plump little thighs. I ducked my head beside hers. "I wish it could be me," I whispered to her scarlet ear. "I would take it for you. I would take a hundred of them." Afterward I comforted her, holding her tightly until her sobbing stopped. I made a ceremony of placing the I WAS A GOOD PATIENT sticker on the center of her T-shirt.
No one, including me, could say that Mama wasn't a good parent to Carrington. She was affectionate and attentive to the baby. She made certain Carrington was well dressed and had everything she needed. But the puzzling distance remained. It troubled me that she didn't seem to feel as intensely for the baby as I did.
I went to Miss Marva with my concerns, and her answer surprised me. 'There's nothing strange about that, Liberty."
"There isn't?"
She stirred a big pot of scented wax on the stove, getting it ready to pour into a row of glass apothecar\'jars. "It's a lie when they say you love all your children equally," she said placidly. "You don't. There's always a favorite. And you're your mother's favorite."
"I want Carrington to be her favorite."
"Your mama will take to her in time. It's not always love at first sight." She dipped a stainless steel ladle into the pot and brought it up brimming with light blue wax. "Sometimes you have to get to know each other."
"It shouldn't take this long," I protested.
Miss Marva's cheeks jiggled as she chuckled. "Liberty, it could take a lifetime."
For once her laugh was not a happy sound. I knew without asking that she was thinking about her own daughter, a woman named Marisol who lived in Dallas and never came to visit. Miss Marva had once described Marisol. the product of a brief and long-ago marriage, as a troubled soul, given to addictions and obsessions and relationships with men of low character.
"What made her that way?" I had asked Miss Marva when she told me about Marisol. expecting her to lay out logical reasons as neatly as balls of cookie dough on a baking sheet.
"God did," Miss Marva had replied, simply and without bitterness. From that and other conversations, I gathered that on questions of nature versus nurture, she was firmly on the side of the former. Me, I wasn't so sure.
Whenever I took Carrington out people assumed she was mine, despite the fact that I was black haired and amber skinned, and she was as fair as a white-petaled daisy. "How young they have them," I heard a woman say behind me. as I pushed Carrington1 s stroller through the mall. And a masculine voice replied in patent disgust. "Mexicans. She'll have a dozen by the time she's twenty. And they'll all be living off our tax money." "Shhh. not so loud." the woman admonished.