Sally's Empty Baby Book

There was a pause in the conversation, and Catherine asked “Do you ever think about Sally?”

Her father looked up from his sirloin tips. “Who?”

She let her fork clink heavily on her plate. “Dad.”

He frowned and nodded. “Sally, right. Yes. Sometimes.”

“Who indeed.”

Her father shrugged. “I never thought of her as ‘Sally.’ We only ever called her ‘the baby,’ and talking about her after she died was... well, it was far too difficult for your mother. The only time I heard her called ‘Sally’ by someone other than you was... huh. It was at the funeral.”

Catherine Jessup’s heart ached to see her father’s eyes focus on something in the distance and know he was going back to that time. She reached out and covered his hand. “I’m sorry.”

He smiled. “It’s okay pumpkin, it’s an old wound. It doesn’t hurt much anymore.” He took another bite and chewed. “Have you written anything new lately?”

“Not lately.” This wasn’t entirely true. She’d written a 5,000 word story for an online erotica contest, but the last thing she needed was dad asking to read it.

“Come onnn, I need something else to read. I need another The Prevailing Colour Of The Day. That one was pure gold. Pop another one of those out, eh?”

“I’ll write when I’m ready! I just haven’t felt inspired.”

“Well get inspired, huh? Maybe another one about that space pirate queen. You know, that one could be a great series.”

“Thanks daddy. Maybe.”

They ate for a while longer, and her father asked “Do you think about Sally? I mean, obviously you do, but... what do you think?”

“I just think about what life was supposed to be like. I mean, there’s this whole other person in my- in our lives that we never even met. Everything should be different. She’d probably be here with us right now. I just think about what she may have looked like, talked like, acted like, done with her life.”

Catherine’s father smiled softly at her. “She looked just like you, before they took her away.” That didn’t help much, but she thanked him all the same.

They talked and got dessert and then coffee, the way they always did. At ten thirty Catherine kissed her father goodnight and drove back to her apartment.

They met again in one month. The second Sunday night of every month was a set date between Catherine and Daddy at The Copper Room. This tradition went back to just after Catherine’s mother’s wake, and it had become one of the most treasured happenings in either’s life.

In fact it almost ended a relationship, when a boyfriend had booked a two-week vacation to Bermuda without consulting her, and it overlapped with Daddy date night. After the fight, Catherine admitted to herself that she and Daddy could have rescheduled, but she was mostly miffed about not being consulted on the matter. The fight had had to happen. Sometimes in a doomed relationship, you make trouble, Catherine would later write in a short story based on the events of that day. You send a few tremors through the earth to help everyone understand that the big one is coming.

She hugged her father as he rose to greet her, and they sat at their usual table.

“Written anything yet?”

“Nope.” This time it was the truth. The erotica story had failed to place in the contest and she’d been completely unmotivated since.

“Got anything going?”

“Nah. I’ve just been keeping my head down at the office.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Not seeing anybody?”

“Just you!”

“Lucky me.” She whacked him in the arm and he giggled. “Oh, hey, I’ve got something for you.” He reached into his satchel and took out a large white hardcover book.

Catherine squinted at the cover. It was blank, save for an oval shape that was die-cut into it, showing a glossy white. Beneath this were three words in a thin-lined script.

MY BABY BOOK

“This was going to be Sally’s baby book. I found it the other week in a box in the attic. We gave away everything else after the birth, but we couldn’t bear to get rid of this.” He slid it over to her.

Catherine’s eyes traced over the lines of the book. Its white had gone a creamy gray-yellow, and it bore the deep dirt and dust stains of forgotten things under a pall of cobwebs. The oval in the center was, she saw, a frame. The parents were to insert a photo of the child. She opened the book. The aged plastic creaked and crackled under her fingertips. The first few pages were filled in with details of the pregnancy. Known pregnant Oct. 21 1990, any siblings Catherine (3), how father found out called him from the doctor’s office immediately!!!, first trimester appointment heard the heartbeat. Plastic partitions for photographs were everywhere, interspersed with the text. A few were filled with photographs of Catherine’s increasingly pregnant mother. She was grinning wildly in some of the photos.

Catherine flipped through, reading the entries. At my delivery story the entries stopped. “Jesus,” she whispered. She turned page after empty page until the book ended at 2 years old. She turned back to the beginning. “Her name isn’t even in here,” she said. “There’s a line on the first page for the baby’s name.”

“We didn’t know if she was a boy or a girl so we were keeping the name bit blank until she was born. After the birth we never opened it again.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

Her father reached out and touched her shoulder. “I didn’t want to sour your night, pumpkin. This is your sister’s only remaining possession. I thought you should have it. I mean, you know, after our talk last time.”

“Thanks.” She closed the book and stared at the empty photo frame. “You know, when people ask if I have any siblings, I always say yes, a little sister. If they ask about her, I tell the truth, and then they always get really quiet and act like they shouldn’t have asked at all. Like she’s some terrible bruise in our lives. I like to think about her. It doesn’t hurt me. I wonder what she’d be.”

“I was thinking about that too, and I had one of my lame ideas. You should write about her.”

She laughed. “Yeah, okay.”

Her father rolled his eyes. “Listen to me! You never listen, you rotten brat. No, I was thinking- write about you and her. Make up little stories as if she’d lived, and you’re telling about an adventure you’d gotten into. It might be good for closure, and it might shake the cobwebs off the ol’ writing pen.”

She smiled. “I type, Dad.”

“You know what I mean. It was just an idea.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” She put the book on the seat beside her. “Thanks for this, it means a lot. I love it.”

They ordered.

Catherine dropped the baby book on her dining room table as she walked into her apartment. She didn’t think about it for another two weeks.

She came home from work one day, tossed her coat over a chair and saw the book lying there on the table, untouched. She opened the book to the beginning and wrote on the line for the baby’s name.

Sally Jessup

She flipped pages randomly and landed somewhere in the middle. She stared at the blank rows of lines beneath the header.

MY FIRST TIME AT THE CIRCUS

An empty photo partition was beside it. This was an event that should have happened for a person, for a whole family, and didn’t. A stillborn memory. Suddenly it seemed criminal that this space was empty, and that this circus trip had never occurred. Everything about it was a shame. Catherine pulled out a chair and sat. She clicked a pen and wrote on the lines provided.

Catherine and Sally went to the circus. They met the monkeys and introduced themselves. They did a high-wire act for a dazzled crowd. They tamed a mighty hippopotamus. They tumbled with the clowns and had a marvelous day.

She put down the pen and sat back. It hadn’t felt profane, like she’d thought. It felt like a release of some pent-up breath. It also felt dumb, but she could deal with that. She rubbed her eyes. When she opened them again, the muscles in her neck jumped with surprise.

There was a photo on the opposite page.

It hadn’t been there just a moment ago. Catherine slowly leaned over the book and stared. It was a sepia-toned photo with a crimped edge. In it, she and a younger-looking woman were on either side of a hippopotamus in front of a train car. It looked like this might be a part of Cranes Circus & Zoo, downtown. The women wore circus costumes- Catherine wore a vintage-looking tutu, the sort of thing a high-wire performer might wear, and the other woman wore the baggy motley and pointed hat of a clown. Both were smiling at the camera. The other woman was crouching beside the hippo with her hand on its back. She looked very much like Catherine, with a slightly larger forehead and goofier eyebrows, but it was her. It was Sally.

Almost immediately getting over the disbelief, Catherine leaned closer to study her sister’s face. Their smiles were very similar. Sally’s eyes turned down at the edges more. Boys might have been more cruel to her in high school, but maybe that was just the effect of the clown costume.

Catherine grabbed for the pen so quickly that it almost skittered out of her grasp. She turned the page and began writing.

One day in high school, Mike Rollings thought it would be funny to invite Catherine to the April dance and then show up with Jenny Bigelow. He and his friends laughed as Catherine slunk out, trying not to cry in her new dress. The next day, Sally loaded his locker with moldy goat cheese, overripe dog food and creamed trout preserves. When he opened the locker, it dumped all over him and everyone laughed. He smelled so bad that no one ever dated him again. The Jessup girls had won again.

She put down the pen and waited. It didn’t take long- within seconds a photograph faded into view, looking very much like a special effect. This photo was of Mike Rollings, face and chest covered in the awful vomit-looking concoction, lying on the ground before his open locker. In the background, Sally and Catherine were high-fiving.

Catherine wrote twenty more stories that night, each time taking pains to include more detail. Before long she seemed to be getting a sense of Sally’s personality. She was feisty and jealous. She laughed a lot and always found a way to win, in the end. Writing challenges for her was a joy, because Sally seemed to find her own way out of them, and she always seemed to spike the ball. “Ha ha, now I get to play with them!” she’d yelled at one enemy in a story wherein she was seven. The enemy had stolen Sally’s bag of marbles, only to discover that the bag was a decoy and that during his theft, Sally had stolen his action figures and then locked her foe in his treehouse until morning. Sally was turning out to be quite the crafty little spitfire. Catherine took to calling her “you booger” in the stories. Having a nickname for her little sister, as well as a sense of who she was after all this time, was intoxicating. She collected the photos with great relish and stared at each, soaking in any new details about her sister’s face, hair or body type. By the time she went to bed at 3 AM, she finally had a pretty fine idea as to who her sister was.

She wrote every night. The photo trick only worked if the text was written in the book, but it worked whether she was writing on the lines or in the margins. This was good, because she was going to run out of space eventually. She took to scribbling her stories out very small, to the point where she could barely read the letters, to save room.

She noticed that the photo frame under the oval on the front of the book had filled in. A sepia photo of Sally, whom Catherine recognized even in her infancy, now, smiled from the cover of MY BABY BOOK. Catherine kissed a finger and planted it on the baby’s nose whenever she opened the book.

In their stories, they did everything together. They went on adventures in space, on sea, by car and, in one instance, magical flying steam train. Sometimes they just talked. These stories told Catherine the most about Sally and were the most fun to write.

She was writing when the phone rang. “Hi, pumpkin!”

“Daddy!” She grinned widely. “I’m so happy to hear from you!”

“Oh yeah? Sounds like you’ve got something to tell. Spill it!”

Catherine looked at the book, and to the growing pile of sepia photos. He wouldn’t believe her at first, of course. She decided she wouldn’t tell her father about Sally. Not now. She’d save it for their dinner, and she’d bring everything. They could read it all together and go through the photos. She was a little ashamed to realize that she hadn’t considered her father in any of this at all. She’d been writing so blindly, so determinedly, that nothing else about the real world had entered her head. “Nothing I want to tell you now, but I do have good news.”

“What?? Oh, come on.”

“You can wait for tomorrow night! I promise you, it’s worth it.”

When they hung up, Catherine wrote a story for Daddy.

One day, Daddy told Sally and Catherine not to disturb him because he was going to take a nap in his hammock. “Aww, this isn’t fair,” Catherine said. “It’s such a lovely day.” “He didn’t say we couldn’t play outisde,” Sally winked, “he just said we couldn’t DISTURB him.” They crept outside and began to quietly play in the yard as Daddy snored. Little girls will forget themselves quickly, though, and before long they were arguing. Sally picked up a water balloon to hurl at Catherine, and Catherine tried to wrestle it away. “GIRLS!” a voice bellowed. Yelping, the girls flung the balloon up into the sky and whirled around. Their father was awake. “What did I say? I didn’t want to be disturbed, and now you’re both going to be puni-” SPLOOSH! The water balloon came down right on Daddy’s head. He stared at his daughters, not believing what had just happened. The girls pointed at one another. “She did it!” each said. Daddy snickered, then chortled, then they were all laughing. “I love you two,” he said. They shrieked happily as a very wet Daddy hugged them.

Catherine sniffed at the page. It was cheesy, but he’d love it. The photo faded in to the right- Catherine, eight, and Sally, five, beginning to argue in the foreground while their father lay on the hammock in the background. Yes, this was just his sort of thing.

The next night, Catherine strode into The Copper Room with a gift box under her arm. The photos rustled pleasingly inside the box. Daddy wasn’t here yet, so she took a seat at the table and placed the box on the seat beside her and watched the door.

A voice said “Today, a memorial was unveiled for Belasco.” Catherine turned to the TV over the bar. What was that? Where did she know that name? On the TV, a reporter was solemnly standing before a zoo enclosure. “Belasco the hippopotamus, a beloved fixture in the Cranes Circus & Zoo, passed away earlier this month. Distraught patrons and staff rallied together and funded this bronze monument to...”

Catherine turned from the TV, frowning. She opened the box and dug through the photos until she found the photo of herself and Sally at the circus. Their hippo looked like the hippo on the TV screen. It also looked, she realized, to be dead. Catherine and Sally were alive, but she’d never really looked at the hippo. It may well have been standing, but its eyes were closed and its head leaned on the ground.

Catherine took out other photos and laid them on the table. In each, if it had a third character, that character appeared to be dead. Mike Rollings lying on the floor of the high school. Mrs. Flinkhy from third grade, seated behind her desk, eyes looking at nothing. Kevin Terliher floating in the swimming hole. A quick search showed that Mike Rollings had died of an aneurysm. Mrs. Flinkhy had passed in her sleep and Kevin Terliher was hit by car. All of this in the past two weeks.

Catherine called her father. The phone rang and rang.

Putting the phone down, she remembered what Sally had said in one of her stories, the words seeming to fly out onto the paper.

Ha ha, now I get to play with them!

Catherine watched the door, whispering, praying, her sister grinning up at her from a dozen photographs in her peripheral vision.