LITMIR.BIZ

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pamper. I felt guilty about having trampled all over his feelings by having waited so long to tell him about the baby. I felt bad about my stubborn intention of staying in the cabin. I hadn’t had a chance to show my sympathy about his father’s death—and I wanted to make him feel loved and appreciated. We may have been in disagreement about a few things, but I did care about him and about our relationship. I had made a splendid beef stroganoff, with sautéed baby vegetables and crusty homemade bread. To top it off, there was an apple pie to die for. I can be quite the Suzie Homemaker when I put my mind to it.

      I had been nesting, in my own modest way, and as well as wanting to soothe Becker’s feelings, I wanted to persuade him that my home was a perfectly reasonable place to care for a newborn. It was a place in which I could whip up a wonderful meal. A cozy, homey cabin that may have lacked electricity and running water, but was still a haven of peace and domestic delight.

      I had insulated the roof, for one thing, in a burst of energy following the news about the Canterbury Conference. There was a small crawl space between the ceiling of the cabin and the roof, which had previously been filled with a mixture of sawdust and mouse droppings. I’d cleaned it out and replaced it with RU2000 pink insulation—not a huge job, really, and Eddie had helped. I was hyper-aware of the fact that I appeared to be doing more physical activity than usual, the kind that normal people would consider inappropriate for a pregnant lady, but I didn’t regard it as a deliberate effort to piss anybody off. It was just that I was not interested in being treated like a china doll and wanted to remain as independent as possible, for as long as possible. Aunt Susan had uttered dire warnings about climbing up the ladder to get into the crawl space under the eaves, the kind of warnings that, if you heeded them, would render you completely useless, lying in bed and shivering with fright, not risking so much as a paper cut, in case it harmed the baby. So, against all advice, I’d insulated the roof, and the difference it made in terms of cabin-coziness was significant. I wanted Becker to take note of it and approve. I wanted him to change his mind. I needn’t have bothered.

      “There’s still a small matter of hauling wood inside and keeping the stove going,” he said. “What happens if the fire goes out during the night, and it’s thirty below outside?”

      “The baby will be sleeping with me,” I said. “It’s not as if it’s going to be stashed in a crib on the porch, Becker.”

      “What if you roll over in the night and squish it?” Oh, please. I knew then that we were diametrically opposed in terms of the most basic child-rearing theories, and we probably always would be. I hauled out my binder full of the notes I’d taken over the past while—the results of my “baby research” at the library, some downloaded off the net, some taken from Dr. Spock, others from more modern sources. I flipped to the stuff relating to studies about the benefits of infants sleeping with their parents and read out a paragraph or two. It didn’t help much. The major problem was that he had experience already, and I didn’t. Therefore, every opinion he held carried more weight with him than any theory I’d found elsewhere.

      “Anyway, Mark, the baby’s not due till the end of April. It’s hardly likely that we’ll have thirty below temperatures that late in the year.” And on and on it went.

      What complicated the evening’s discourse was the fact that I was, as I had promised, babysitting Eddie’s automatic baby. I hadn’t planned it that way; in fact, I had forgotten all about it and invited Becker over with the assumption that it would be just me and him, and the dogs, of course. Eddie had sprung it on me that afternoon, lugging the carrier-seat it came with, plus a list of instructions and a diaper bag all the way up the hill, where I had been in the planning stages of a new puppet.

      “Polly—hi,” he had called in a singsong voice which I knew meant a favour was about to be asked. He had a wrestling tournament that night, he said, and I had no reason to disbelieve him. Eddie was doing well with his wrestling, getting advice and coaching from Constable Earlie Morrison, Becker’s partner. Earlie had been a pro wrestler once upon a time and was now a kind of big brother to him. A wrestling tournament, with all its out-of-town testosterone blown in on a visit, would not be a wise milieu for a baby doll, however significant the Family Studies unit might be on Eddie’s educational vector. I’d said I would look after the creature for the evening, provided he came and picked it up again after he got home.

      The instructions were simple. If the doll cried, I was to pick it up and walk with it. If it was wet (it had some sort of computerized pee-release inside its belly, apparently), I was to change it, and at certain times I was to give it a bottle of formula. The computer would be able to analyze what was put inside it—there was a powdered mixture of stuff I was supposed to prepare and administer four times throughout the evening. Eddie told me that some of the guys had fed the baby beer. The computer took note of the fact, and the Family Studies teacher had not been amused.

      “No weird stuff, okay, Polly?” Eddie said, quite seriously. “I need this credit to graduate.”

      “I promise I won’t feed your baby beer,” I’d said.

      “And be careful when you pick it up—support its head, I mean. My buddy Grant got nailed for child abuse that way.”

      “I promise I won’t shake it senseless,” I’d said. However, the creature proved itself to have rotten timing, and later in the evening I could have shaken its little microchips loose, if my temper had won.

      Needless to say, Becker was not thrilled when I told him about my plans to travel to the U.K. in February to go to the conference. In fact, he went kind of postal.

      Most of his distress, it appeared, came from the fact that I was preparing to board an airplane. Becker had received a new assignment upon his return from Calgary, a kind of secondment from his regular duties with the OPP, and though he was vague and mysterious about the details, I gathered it had something to do with airport security. The September 11 th terrorist attacks were still fresh in everyone’s minds, and Becker wasn’t the only person who was voicing a mistrust of air travel. I knew that the airlines were reeling with the shock of the thing and that the numbers of people flying anywhere at all were alarmingly low. Everybody knew that governments worldwide were stepping up airport security measures in the wake of the tragedy, and Becker apparently had some background in the field, previous to his career as a provincial police officer, which led to his new assignment. “Research and Development”, he called it, funded by the Canadian government. He wouldn’t say much more than that.

      “I know about these things, Polly,” he said. “You have no idea how easy it is for people to board an airplane with weapons, explosives, you name it. You couldn’t pay me to board a plane at the moment, and I’m sure as hell not going to let you do it either. Especially when you’re carrying my baby.” My Baby. Not Our Baby. Sigh.

      “But if you’re working to improve security, you’d think that you, of all people, would have more confidence in the whole thing than the average person, not less.”

      “That shows how much you know,” he said. “You’re not going, Polly.”

      “Wanna bet?”

      It was at that point, of course, that the wretched automatic baby started howling. I’d stashed it in the bedroom at the back, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t have to explain it to Becker, who, I knew, would not regard it with delight.

      “What the fuck is that?” he said. I explained as succinctly as I could as I went to get it. It would not shut up. Becker’s face darkened. “You need this?” he said. “Like you want to practice dealing with a screaming baby? Polly, I have been there—I know what this is like. I don’t need reminding.”

      “I don’t have this thing here to remind you of anything,” I said. “This is a favour for Eddie.”

      “And how does it feel?” he said. He was looking at me with profound curiosity.

      “You just have to walk it,” I said. “It will stop soon.” It didn’t. So I went through the drill, referring to the printed instructions the thing had come with. I changed it. It still screamed. I heated up some water on the propane stove and mixed up its formula and

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