Dream Baby

He said his name precisely, as though he thought it held special meaning. She inclined her head toward him. “Welcome to the rehab shed, Charles. Don’t talk too loud and don’t move too suddenly. It frightens the animals. And if you want to hang on to all your fingers, don’t put them in the cages. All right?”

He nodded again. “So what’s a rehab shed?” he asked when he was about halfway through the chore.

“A place where sick wild animals get better. Every year a few run into trouble—cars, hunters with no sense, predators that beat them up pretty badly. If the problem is fixable, they’re brought here so I can nurse them back to health.”

“So they’re your pets.”

She thought of Marjorie and shook her head firmly. “No. A rehabber isn’t allowed to turn them into pets. They have to remain wild. Otherwise they won’t know how to survive once you’ve released them.” From the sink in one corner, she added a few drops of water to the medicinal base she planned to use on Bandit’s cuts. “Want to meet them?”

He nodded, and she led him to the cages while she gently stirred the yellow concoction into a paste. “This is Jeckle,” she said, inclining her head toward the crow, then the mockingbird. “And that’s Begger. They were both brought to me as orphans.”

Charles wrinkled his nose as he peered into Jeckle’s cage. “Why are you bothering to save him? He’s just a crow. They’re everywhere.”

“You see little boys everywhere, but wouldn’t you want someone to save you if you were in trouble?”

“I’m not a little boy,” Charles said in an aggrieved tone. “I’m nearly a teenager.”

“Well, Jeckle is important to me. All creatures ate.”

The kid looked up at her with sudden speculation. “Do they pay you lots of money to do this?”

“They don’t pay me at all. I do it because I want to.” She moved on to the raccoon’s cage. The animal looked at them with sharp, beady eyes. “This is Bandit.”

“Are you gonna cut his head off!”

“Good grief, no!” Nora stared at the boy, wondering what kind of horrid imagination this kid liked to indulge. “Why would you ask that?”

“You know,” Charles said in a seemingly earnest tone. “Rabies. Isn’t that how they find out if they have them?”

Nora frowned. “Bandit doesn’t have rabies. He had a run-in with a dog. I’m mixing up this paste right now so that I can put it on those cuts you see.”

“Oh. What if he bites you? Is there a chance you’ll get rabies?”

“Are all kids your age so gruesome?”

The boy opened his mouth to reply, then seemed to change his mind. After a few seconds he spoke. “I’ve just never seen many wild animals up close before. I live in the city. At least, I used to.”

“That explains a few things,” Nora muttered.

Charles asked a few more questions about the raccoon and its chances for survival. Unexpectedly, they were thoughtful, intelligent inquiries, and he listened closely to her answers. Nora began to suspect that he was enjoying himself.

“This is Marjorie,” Nora said as they moved on to the deer’s pen. “Her mother was killed on the road.”

“She doesn’t look like a Marjorie.”

“Well, you don’t look like a Charles.”

He jerked his head up to glare at her. “That’s what my mother always calls me.”

“You look like a Charlie to me. Do you mind if I call you that?”

“I guess not,” he said in a soft, sullen voice. He stared at the deer as though memorizing every detail. “Marjorie’s still a dumb name.”

“I named her after Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.”

“Who?”

“The woman who wrote The Yearling.”

He shook his head. “Never read it.”

“Too bad. It’s wonderful.”

The boy looked up at her again, one eyebrow raised in inquiry. “Any monsters in it?”

“Afraid not. No car chases or killer tornadoes, either. But there’s a young boy in the story. He lives deep in the Florida woods with his family, and he finds a fawn, just like Marjorie here.”

“Sounds exciting,” Charlie commented with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “When are you going to let her go?”

Nora frowned and looked down at the yellow paste in her hands. “Perhaps in a few days.”

“You don’t want to?”

“She has to be released,” she replied, more for her own benefit than his. “She’s probably stayed too long as it is.”

Charlie straightened, and Nora was aware that he was suddenly watching her closely. For a kid, he seemed very intuitive. She had the strangest feeling that he knew exactly how much the mistake she’d made with Marjorie was costing her.

“You could lie,” he said quietly and gave her a sly look, as though they were suddenly coconspirators. “Tell them you let her go, but keep her instead.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?” he asked. He seemed genuinely surprised by her answer. “’Cause you’d get caught?”

“No. Because then she’d be miserable instead of me. She’s a wild animal who wouldn’t be happy living in a pen.”

He seemed to give this thought serious consideration for a long moment. Then his shoulders rose in an elaborate shrug. “You should just do what you want, and the heck with what anybody else thinks, including Marjorie.”

“Surely your parents taught you that’s not a very good way to live your life?” Nora said.

The boy actually stiffened. With a quaint and somehow heartrending dignity he said, “My mom taught me everything I need to know, and she did everything right”

His eyes had taken on a militant sparkle, and Nora realized that he was waiting for her to dispute that statement. She didn’t. Instead, she said lightly, “Wow. A mom who doesn’t make mistakes. I hope she’s going to write a book on motherhood.”

“She’s a famous model.” Charlie’s expression turned to one of pride. “So famous that she doesn’t even need her last name anymore. Her name’s Thea. You’ve probably seen her. She was on two magazine covers last month.”

Nora never bothered to follow the news about the “beautiful people,” but even she’d heard of Thea. The woman—in her early thirties—was the latest darling of the photographers. Some perfume company—trying to woo the aging baby boomers—had just given her an ungodly amount of money to be the star of their multimedia ad campaign. There was some other reason Nora was familiar with the woman’s name, but for the life of her, she couldn’t put her finger on it.

She went to the sink and washed the spatula she’d used to stir Bandit’s medicine. With her back to Charlie, she said, “A mother who doesn’t make mistakes and is a supermodel. Your dad must feel pretty lucky.”