Innocent Foxes: A Novel. Torey Hayden
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eyelids and see if his eyeballs were still there. She didn’t know why this insistent thought had come to her but she forced it away before it spoiled the moment.
Very gently she reached into the coffin. When she picked Jamie up he felt … odd, almost slippery; she hadn’t expected this so when his head lolled lifelessly to the side, she nearly lost hold of him. And he was so cold. Not that she hadn’t known in her head that he would be, but there’s a big difference between what your head knows and what your heart expects.
In the corner of the room was a white rocking chair. When the funeral director had shown her into the room the first time, he’d explained how sometimes mamas and daddies liked to hold their babies one last time and that was what the rocking chair was for. Taking Jamie Lee over, Dixie sat down. ‘I got you some nice new clothes.’ She laid him on her lap and reached into the carrier bag. ‘Look at what I bought you. Lookie here at these little jeans. See? Aren’t they cute? And this little shirt. It’s just like Billy’s rodeo shirt. And see these, Jamie Lee? These sweet little baby cowboy boots Auntie Leola got you? You’re going to look all snazzy when you meet Jesus.’
Tears came and she let them. It was safe here. No one to tell her not to get upset, to say how Jamie Lee had been going to die anyway, so it was better he didn’t have to suffer any more. No one to tell her she shouldn’t feel so bad, because with the kind of defects he had she should have been expecting it. No one here except the funeral man, and if he did this job every day, he had to be used to crying.
As she removed the babygrow, faintly stained with the funeral parlour make-up, Dixie thought how she had cried, too, when she’d found out she was pregnant. The last thing she’d wanted was Big Jim’s child. The relationship was already over; in fact, if it hadn’t been for Daddy making such a big deal out of saying ‘I told you so’, and how she only ever attracted trash, Dixie would have finished with Big Jim long before that. Then there she was, carrying his bastard baby. Sitting in the bathroom, with little splashes of pee still gleaming on the plastic pregnancy indicator, Dixie had stared at the thin blue line and cried so hard.
Mama, of course, had said there was no need to tell Daddy about it to begin with. You could fix things, she said, and men didn’t even have to know. But Dixie couldn’t do it. The baby was alive, and killing was killing. Maybe ordinary men wouldn’t know what she’d done, but Jesus would know and that’s what she told Mama.
Mama got angry when she’d said that. ‘You been born again or something?’ she said scornfully, ‘because this family’s not so churchified that we can give Jesus as an excuse for our own stupid behaviour. We accept ugly things need doing sometimes. That don’t make them right and that don’t mean we won’t have to pay on Judgment Day, but they still need doing. And it ain’t Jesus who’ll do them. You, of all people, should know that.’
Dixie cried then because she knew what Mama was referring to, but she still stayed firm. As ashamed as Mama and Daddy said they were of her for having a baby when she had no man, Dixie refused to get an abortion.
She’d cried again the day Jamie Lee was born, as the doctor stood over her explaining what Down’s syndrome was and how this meant Jamie Lee’s heart wasn’t made quite right and they might not be able to fix it. ‘You just done nothing but make me cry, little man,’ she whispered as she dressed his small, cold body.
Chapter Three
Spencer fiddled with the espresso maker, trying to get it to work. As always, it produced enough steam to power a locomotive, followed by a trickle of dark, murky liquid that looked like engine oil. He had been absolutely assured this was the best-quality machine around and yet it routinely turned out sludge that even Starbuck’s wouldn’t call espresso. ‘Sidonie!’ he shouted angrily and bashed the side of the machine in frustration.
When there was no answer, Spencer turned around. ‘Where the fuck is she?’
The boy, who was sitting at the kitchen island, shrugged. ‘How should I know?’ Cereal fell out of his mouth when he spoke.
‘What are you eating? You sound like a pig at the trough,’ Spencer said and came over to pick up the box of cereal.
‘Coco Pops.’
‘How the fuck did you get hold of them?’
‘The store,’ the boy replied derisively. ‘Sidonie bought them for me.’
‘Yes, well, that was a waste of money then.’ Spencer turned on the garbage disposal and emptied the contents of the cereal box into it.
‘Hey! What did you do that for?’
‘Because we don’t eat crap here. And I can’t imagine your mother lets you eat this junk either,’ he said, crumpling up the empty container. ‘She’s still in her vegan phase, isn’t she?’
‘As far as I know, they don’t kill anything to make Coco Pops,’ the boy replied.
‘Watch your mouth.’
The boy’s eyes went wide with fake innocence. ‘How am I going to do that?’ he asked and tipped his head as if trying to look down at his mouth. ‘Because my eyes are up here and my mouth is down here and I can’t see it.’
‘Cut it out.’
The kid leaped off his chair. ‘OK. So where are the scissors?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘You said, “Cut it out,” so I’m just going to get the scissors.’
Angrily Spencer threw his espresso cup into the sink. There wasn’t the satisfaction of its breaking. It just clattered noisily against the metal. Coffee splashed everywhere. ‘Where the hell is Sidonie?’ he shouted at no one in particular. ‘Sidonie? Sidonie!’
The boy, his expression placid, watched Spencer storm across the kitchen.
‘I’m going out on the deck. When Sidonie finally turns up, tell her that’s where I am.’
The boy picked a bit of Coco Pops out of his teeth and flicked it off on the floor. He shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, whatever. Just don’t yell at me. It’s not my fault I’m here. I don’t want it any more than you do.’
Spencer had only two children: Thomas and Louisa. They had been part of his ‘Life Before’ – that period of struggling early in adulthood when he was still nobody. He and Kathryn had been high-school sweethearts. Two kids in two years and a basement apartment followed, while he did Shakespeare in the Park and worked the night shift at the warehouse. His big break had come from the ignominious fact that he had been willing to play second fiddle to a ten-foot python in an experimental Off-Off-Broadway production. What that snake was getting up to with the scantily clad girl in the lead part proved so outrageously controversial that the play actually garnered an audience, although perhaps not for the reasons the playwright had intended. Spencer, seeing his chance, managed to successfully upstage both the girl and the snake.
Despite being so supportive during those lean years when Spencer was on the theatre circuit, Kathryn didn’t enjoy success when it finally came. She had liked being married to an artist but she saw herself as intellectually above being a movie star’s wife. Hers was an old Connecticut family and they didn’t ‘do Hollywood’, as she put it, which was OK with Spencer, as by that point he was no longer doing Kathryn. He had, however, taken seriously his obligations to her and to the kids, so when the divorce came, he provided well for all three of them, even in the later years, long after he and the kids had drifted out of regular contact. He paid for their braces, their private schools, their summers at camp. He paid for Thomas’s business degree at Harvard and Louisa’s long-drawn-out doctorate in ancient Persian culture, which seemed mainly to involve spending years in remote Arabian deserts peering into archaeological trenches; and he had done it all simply because they were his kids.
This boy wasn’t. Spencer didn’t care whose DNA the kid had. Phoebe had been just another of the countless good-looking girls who made it their life to follow fame. A groupie, elevated to a fuck-buddy, but nothing more. That was how the game was played,