Page 47 of Goodbye Paradise
Somehow, he must have pried the baby out of her arms, because they both appeared downstairs. Chloe looked ridiculously small against Josh’s chest, her tiny fists balled up in rage as she cried.
Maggie sleep-walked into the kitchen, but Josh went into the living room instead. That’s when the singing started.
“Amazing grace! How sweet the sound…”
I got a chill on my neck. When we were kids, Josh loved to sing. I hadn’t heard his sweet voice in a long time. But it came back to me now—how wonderful he’d sounded. At some point before we were teenagers, Ezra had begun to tease him, and Josh had stopped singing out loud. During Sunday services, he mouthed the words like the rest of the boys.
“I once was lost…”
It took a couple of verses, and quite a few laps around the living room. But eventually Josh won. When he and Chloe passed me on their way into the kitchen, she was staring up at him with wide, newborn eyes, her tiny mouth making an “O” shape.
He was still humming, too. The deep, reedy sound of it stirred me so much that I had to stop myself from putting a hand on his arm as he passed by.
“Thank you,” Maggie whispered. “I’m at the end of my rope. You have no idea…”
“Anyone would be,” he said. “Besides, I like her. Nobody ever let me hold a baby before.”
Maggie smiled the first smile I’d seen in days. “That’s women’s work.”
“What other women’s work can we do?” I asked. “I could drive to the grocery store.”
“Oh,wouldyou? I haven’t been outside in days. But it’s so cold out, and the pediatrician said to keep her out of public places for a couple of weeks.”
I grabbed a pad of paper off the counter. “Let’s make a list, and I’ll go.”
* * *
So we all endured. Josh made many more trips around the house with Chloe, wearing out his repertoire of hymns. I did errands, and fretted about my lack of employment.
Daniel worked, and tried to keep tabs on the rest of us. I think it bothered him to come inside and find Josh holding the baby, which happened with some frequency. “I’ve got her,” he’d say, and Josh would hand Chloe over. But half the time this caused the baby to start screaming again, probably because she’d been comfortable and did not appreciate being disturbed. Daniel did not know to sing hymns and walk past the windows. So she usually kept right on screaming. Daniel would declare that she was almost certainly hungry again, and pass her to Maggie, who felt obligated to keep her.
There was tension in the house, and it made me uneasy.
The only excitement I had during those stressful weeks was using Daniel’s computer. He’d shown me how to use the internet browser to search for job openings, and I caught on quickly to the fact that I could search for information onanything. So I Googled “automotive jobs in Western Massachusetts” and “rules of football” and “polygamist cults.”
Nothing came up about the Compound.
When Chloe was two weeks old, Maggie and Daniel took her to the pediatrician.
“Is something wrong?” Josh had asked when Maggie explained that they had an appointment.
“No. In the civilized world, the doctor keeps tabs on a baby’s growth, to make sure that everything is going well.”
That sounded like overkill to me. But I was happy about it anyway, because it gave me ideas.
Daniel and Maggie drove away at nine. And twenty minutes later, I heard Josh come in from the morning milking, which he’d completed alone after Daniel had to leave.
“Josh,” I called out from the bedroom.
“Yeah?”
“In here.”
A few seconds later, Josh appeared in the doorway, his cheeks red from the cold. I watched him take me in.
I’d pulled the covers down on the bed, and was lying buck naked on my back, and slowly teasing my own rather ambitious erection.
Josh licked his lips. “How long have they been gone?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
