Hush Little Baby Read Free

believe it.
    Mom and Dad had spent a ton of money on their house, and their wallpaper, and their chairs and table, and their house was going to stay clean and sparkling and beautiful — and it did. If you played a game on Mom’s dining room table, you cleaned it up and counted the pieces.
    Whereas at Shea’s house, you couldn’t find the game. If you did locate it, it was missing the board.
    Vaguely Muffin heard her brother continue his argument that a nine-year-old would absolutely ruin an evening of three sixteen-year-olds.
    But in the Mason household, Dad always won. It was remarkable. One year, Row kept score. But there was no score. Dad was the only player. It was like living with the weather. If Dad rained, you got wet.
    So when Dad said Muffin would go with Row to Shea’s house for the evening, she was going with Rowen to Shea’s.
    Kit Innes heard herself laughing in a peculiar detached way, like a recording behind a television show.
    The sun was glaring on the translucent skin of the tiny baby. The baby was not actually bald, but had a fine down of almost invisible hair. When Kit brushed her cheek against the baby’s, it was like brushing velvet.
    She went into the house, closing the front door with her foot.
    The stuffy dark of the house had disappeared. Dusty racing through and the burble of the water cooler and the warmth of the baby had taken care of that.
    Kit looked down. Perhaps this was a very lifelike doll. Dusty did collect dolls. Dusty loved the full-page magazine ads where you pulled the card from the magazine and ordered a beautiful shelf doll for $59.95 a month for four months. When Dusty had lived here, one entire bedroom had been filled with dolls. Dusty never played with them, though, and her reasons for collecting them had never been clear. Dusty liked the act of buying things, and once she’d bought something it had no use; she was bored and had to go buy another.
    It was clear that this was not a doll.
    With no warning, its little chest heaved. It made a croaky sound, not the soft coo Kit would have expected. More like a frog. Its little back arched, and its miniature feet pressed down on Kit’s waist, not as if the baby were trying to stand, but as if a convulsion were coming on.
    Kit was terrified. What was she supposed to do?
    What if it died? What was that horrible thing babies got, that sudden infant death thing? How did you know? Should she call an ambulance? Why was its little chest jerking around, both getting air and not getting air?
    “Come on, baby, take a good breath. You can do it,” she crooned, hoping that babies did not sense fear the way attack dogs did.
    The baby breathed deeply. Its little head sagged so fast that Kit had to catch it in her palm, so it wouldn’t snap off. It seemed to lose its spine, and turned into a Beanie Baby, all sag and no bone.
    Kit felt the same.
    Cradling the baby very carefully, so it would not notice that anything was happening and react by suffocating itself, Kit walked into the family room. Here the decorator had gone huge: huge furniture, huge shelves, huge jugs and baskets, and a huge collection of duck decoys, although Dad had certainly never hunted a duck. Dad hunted movie concepts.
    The wall of windows was high above the seventeenth hole, with a view of water hazards, artfully planted trees, and a sweet little curve of bridge. If a golfer was going to behave badly and swear at his game, it was here.
    To Kit’s right was a stretch of long thin glass cabinets — the romantic British butler look that some people might refer to as a kitchen. Dad did not cook. He hardly ever had food around. If Kit stayed over here more than a day or two, Mom packed a picnic basket. Sometimes she would send a thermos of Dad’s favorite coffee, which was when Kit wanted to know why they hadn’t just stayed married, and Mom wanted to know why Kit had to bring that up again, and it took all Kit’s self-control not to develop an attitude.
    Anyway, Dad was