Maggie flew with a baby to Shanghai. The baby’s parents—Chinese citizens pursing doctoral degrees at the University of Arizona—had been murdered one night in their bed inside their cinder block apartment on Second Avenue, near campus. Both shot through the chest by someone who’d crawled through the window. A neighbor had found them this way, bloodied beneath their sheets. The baby, unharmed in her crib, waiting patiently for someone to lift her out (“eerily calm” one report read), was later brought to the social services office where Maggie had begun working the year before.
Some of Maggie’s co-workers speculated that the murder had something to do with an unpaid debt back home. “That’s how it is over there,” said Jerry Lebowitz, who had recently traveled to Beijing for the Olympics. “Unforgiving.”
There was some confusion as to the child’s citizenship, whether she had been born in the states or in China but eventually it was discovered that the child’s name was Su Yin and that she was American, born at the University hospital less than a year before. It took a few weeks to locate the relatives of the couple—Maggie wondered whether the debt had still not been paid and the family was hiding, fearful—but finally an aunt living in Shanghai came forward, offering to take the child.
Maggie worried for the baby, destined to grow up in such a seemingly brutal place. And for herself, having to take her there. She had been selected, despite her lack of seniority and experience, to escort the child. Among her co-workers, she was the only one who had no children of her own (“no children yet” her boss added, in case there had been any offense), the only one whose sudden and prolonged absence wouldn’t be a tremendous inconvenience at home. Of course, she had Robert, but he could take care of himself. Still, Maggie wished she didn’t have to go. She’d need to get a passport rushed. She didn’t speak the language. She’d only ever been out of the country once, and that was just to Nogales, crossing for a few hours with a girlfriend to buy pottery and have lunch.
“And what will you do for dinner?” she asked Robert.
“Just buy some of those frozen pizzas I like before you go,” he said.
They had been married five years but she didn’t like the thought of leaving him alone. But Robert thought that going to China was a good idea. “An excellent opportunity to advance your career,” was how he phrased it. But a person didn’t advance in social work like they did in pharmaceutical sales, Robert’s profession. Already, she could see that her only advancement would likely come in an increased load of casework.
When the day came, Maggie’s friend from the office, Linda, drove her to the airport, where she was supposed to meet up with the temporary foster family. Maggie was terrified.
“Don’t be,” Linda said, handing her a gallon bag filled with lollipops and Benadryl, a travel kit Linda used with her own three children.
But Maggie didn’t need it. The baby behaved well on the flight, making hardly a peep. She picked at the buttons on Maggie’s jumper and smeared the thick plastic windows with her fingers, bobbing her knees slightly as she stood on Maggie’s bony thighs. The child’s own thighs were enormous, indenting into themselves every few inches. She wore a romper, rainbow striped and tied at her shoulders and when she fell asleep in Maggie’s arms, Maggie stared into her face, wondering at the size of her cheeks, surprised and a little frightened, perhaps, by the instinct she had to squeeze the child closer to her as she slept. The sudden understanding of what it meant to want to eat a baby. It was all an attempt to stop time. She wondered how much a child remembered at this age, whether this trip with Maggie might come back to the girl in her dreams someday. She wondered, too, whether Su Yin’s subconscious would conjure the sound of gunshots, the tragedy tucked and dormant in the folds of her brain. Asleep in her arms, she imagined the baby was dreaming about the last thing she saw in wakefulness: Maggie’s face as she rocked her.
It was Linda who’d started Maggie thinking so much about dreams. She’d lent her a book about dream interpretation and told her to keep a journal at the side of her bed for writing down what she remembered when she woke up. This practice, Linda said, along with the book she lent to Maggie, had utterly changed her life.
She had bought two notebooks, one for her and one for Robert, and laid them on their night tables. She liked the idea of a dream journal, of thumbing through Robert’s innermost thoughts after he’d left for work—thoughts not even fully understood by him, coming to her coded through his dreams. He hadn’t scoffed at the idea like she thought he might, but his notebook remained empty. Maggie woke each morning and eagerly scribbled out what she could remember of the previous night but then, even with the book, had trouble knowing what anything meant. She thought she might give the journal to Linda after this trip and ask her advice.
On the plane, people complimented her on the baby. The flight attendant said she’d never seen a baby so well behaved on such a long flight and brought cups of warm water for the baby’s bottles, the measuring and mixing of which Maggie perfected over the hours in flight. Su Yin would suck at the bottle vigorously for a few minutes before her eyes began to close, leaving the milk to pool and run from the corners of her mouth. Maggie took the bottle out then and the child would rouse and she’d repeat the process. The woman sitting next to them offered to hold the baby for Maggie if she wanted to rest but Maggie almost greedily kept the baby to herself. She was keenly aware of the woman watching her now. Fondly observing. She looked down at the child relishing her position—this private bond with a public audience.
Robert didn’t want children. He’d made it clear before they married. And Maggie, who was in love with him, and who had never been one of those women who fawned over babies anyway, agreed. It wasn’t that he didn’t like children. (That seemed to her an important distinction.) His two nieces visited for a week one summer and he’d taken them to the club pool and out for ice cream and asked about their boyfriends, which made them blush because they were much too young for boyfriends at the time. Neither girl even wore a bra.
“I know the hell my brothers and I put our own parents through and I’m just not interested in going through that same hell,” he’d explained to her. It had seemed perfectly reasonable to Maggie at the time. And as a concession, even though Robert wasn’t in the least an animal person, he promised they could get a dog.
As the plane descended, Maggie felt an overwhelming sense of attachment and pride in Su Yin. She relished the parental status she’d been given through no particular effort of her own. She wondered whether Robert might change his mind if he’d accompanied them on the long journey.
Then, because of an electrical problem with the plane in Tokyo, the connecting flight was delayed. The next flight out wouldn’t leave until the following day. Maggie was directed by the airline to a nearby hotel and she and the baby were re-booked onto an afternoon flight to Shanghai.
Exhausted from the trip, she debated putting the child into bed with her. But she’d heard too many stories at work of parents crushing their children. Instead, she spread a blanket onto the floor beside the bed and laid the baby down on it. But the girl immediately sat up and then began crawling away so that Maggie had to fetch her and set her back and then she’d crawl away again, and Maggie would fetch her and lay her back down on the blanket. This went on for an hour.
“You could have called down to the front desk for a crib,” Linda told her later.
Finally, she lay down on the blanket with the child, resting Su Yin’s head in the crook of her arm to feed her a bottle until she got sleepy. It was fascinating to witness the exact moment of unconsciousness in another person. Lately, Robert turned his back to her in bed. He said he couldn’t sleep unless he was facing outward.
When the baby’s breathing slowed, Maggie extracted her arm, bloodless and tingling, and slowly crept up onto the bed. That night she dreamed she was treading through shallow water, expending all her energy and never making it to the shore, despite being so close. When she woke in the morning, for a moment she couldn’t remember where she was. What day it was. What year. She lay awake staring at the ceiling, letting the present pour itself back into her: she was in a hotel room. On a bed in Tokyo. With a baby. She bolted upright and looked over the bedside; Su Yin was gone.
She felt a panicked certainty that criminals, the ones who’d killed the child’s parents, had broken into the room and stolen the baby while she’d slept. Then beneath her own loud breathing, she heard the child’s breathing. She peered beneath the bed. Su Yin was sprawled there, having rolled in her sleep. Carefully, Maggie pulled her out, trying not to wake her but she opened her eyes and tried to sit up, hit her head on the bed frame, and began to cry. Maggie looked over at the clock. It was past eight in the morning. She was desperate for a shower. She hadn’t had the energy for it the night before, after the long trip, and now she was reluctant to leave the baby alone for any amount of time. Instead, she bathed and dressed Su Yin. The diapers supplied by her office were nearly gone. She’d have to buy more before they boarded the plane in a few hours.
She carried the baby downstairs to ask the front desk where she might buy some and wished she had a stroller as she carried Su Yin, who was quite heavy, plus her purse down the street to the store. The Japanese diapers were strange—like hundreds of papery hospital gowns pressed together. She wondered how absorbent they would be.
“Think of it! Me, worrying about diaper absorbency!” she imagined saying to Robert. He hadn’t answered when she called him from the hotel phone the night before. She’d left her cell at home, worried about international charges. But she’d managed to leave a message at her office to tell them to let the baby’s aunt know they’d be a day late. She’d thought to email Robert this morning from the computer in the business center but now there wasn’t time. She’d have to wait until they reached China.
Su Yin was wild on the flight to Shanghai and wouldn’t take a bottle. The flight attendant asked about the last time the baby had pooped and recommended a glycerin stick. More vegetables in the child’s diet, perhaps. By the time they landed she was tired and frazzled and had expected to be taken to the aunt’s home for some tea (“They’re crazy about tea over there,” Jerry Lebowitz had told her) so they could go over the papers Maggie had brought: the child’s birth certificate and passport, a newspaper article she had clipped about the shooting. She thought the aunt might be interested in the details of their long journey. But the aunt spoke no English. She made no gesture of invitation. Weeping in the baggage claim of the airport, she took Su Yin (also weeping—exhaustion, another of the flight attendants had suggested) into her arms and Maggie almost had to force her to take the child’s bag and the folder of important documents.
Her flights had all been changed because of the delay in Tokyo, and then that night she became violently ill. The fish she’d eaten at the hotel, she thought. She had planned on walking around Shanghai and getting a short, English-guided tour before flying back home, but instead spent the day vomiting in her room. She couldn’t muster enough energy even to take the elevator down to the lobby to use the computer to email Robert, who must have thought she was dead, though it gave her some satisfaction to think of him worrying about her.
As the night went on, she worried that she wouldn’t be able to crawl out of her room to make the flight the next morning. That she might not make it through the night alive. Her one comfort (an absurd one, she realized even then) was thinking how much Robert would miss her. How she’d calcify in his mind as an idealized version of herself until no living woman would be able to touch her memory.
But Maggie lived.
A doctor at the airport gave her a shot in the buttocks and she slept all the way to L.A. Robert had been worried and the dog—a miniature schnauzer named Benny— greeted her, spinning in frantic circles so that Robert had to hold him away with his foot so she could walk through the door. She had spent the last leg of her flight, from L.A. to Tucson, trying to imagine Su Yin in her new life. Was her aunt warming the bottle enough? Were the Chinese diapers much different from the ones she bought in Tokyo? The garage door opened onto the kitchen and she could smell the odor of condiments solidified on dishes piled in the sink. It was normally something that would have annoyed her, but she was too tired—too hopeful—to care. She set her bag down and turned to Robert.
“There’s something I want to ask you,” she said.
Several years after her trip to China, when they moved to a house on the east side of town to be nearer to Robert’s ailing father, Maggie found her dream journal in a box on the closet shelf. She had put it aside after her trip, never consulting Linda on its meaning after all. The last entry was from the night following the food poisoning episode in Shanghai, something she didn’t remember having written:
The baby came to me. She poked me in my nose. Kept poking me until I bled from both nostrils. And then I saw her parents in their beds. With blankets pulled up to their necks to hide their blood from her. But the blood was mine. From my nose. The baby asked me where the milk was. I looked everywhere and I found it under her parents’ bed in that awful cinder block house in Tucson. Her diaper was soaked through into the mattress and then I left the baby in the room and went out to tour the city and saw only empty streets and then remembered about her and panicked and woke up just as I was opening the door to check on her.
Maggie read this passage, remembering Su Yin. In the years that followed, when she’d see Asian women on buses or in restaurants, she’d wonder if it was her— the baby grown up, returned. Wondered if there was a chance, however small, that she might recognize her. And yet even on that last night, violently retching over the side of her bed into the hotel laundry bag, Maggie understood that she would never know what would become of the girl she carried to China. She threw the journal into the trash bin and continued packing. What was the use anyway of writing down—of remembering—things that hadn’t actually happened?
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Lacy Arnett Mayberry’s stories and essays can be found in swamp pink, Washington Square Review, The Pinch, and Phoebe Journal, among others. She won Boulevard Magazine’s Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers and received AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize for fiction. She writes at lacymayberry.substack.com.
Book of dreams originally appeared in Cababi Art & Literary Magazine.