Breaking and Entering Read Online Free PDF Page A

point, the situation had become hopelessly scrambled. Three days passed. The mothers went home with the wrong babies. This was not a Prince and Pauper-type story. Both mothers had nice homes and fathers and siblings for the baby. Four months later the hospital called and told the mothers they had the wrong babies. They had proof. Toe prints and blood types. Chemical proof. They had done the things professionals do to prove that a person was the person he was supposed to be. The mothers were hysterical. They had fallenin love with the wrong babies and now they didn’t want to give their wrong babies up. But apparently it had to be done. It seemed to be the law.
    Liberty put the paper aside, closed her eyes and listened to the rain. It rang against the glass like voices, like the voices of children screaming in a playground. Children’s voices sounded the same everywhere, a murmurous growth, a sweet hovering, untranslatable, like wind or water, moving.
    Liberty and Willie were wanderers, they were young but they had wandered for years, as though through a wilderness, staying for days or weeks or months in towns with names like Coy or Peachburg or Diamondhead or Hurley. Then larger towns, cities, still as though through a wilderness, for there was no path for them or way—West Palm, Jacksonville, Sarasota. There was always a little work, a little place to stay, and then there was this other thing, this thing that was like an enchantment, this energy that kept them somehow going, this adopted, perverse skill of inhabiting the space others had made for themselves. For they themselves were not preparing for anything, they were not building anything, they were just moving along, and Liberty was aware that this house thing, this breaking and entering thing—time for the thing, they’d say, let’s do the thing—became more frequent, accelerated, just before they left a town.
    The rain increased, it fell in shapes, its voice children’s voices.

     
    Liberty and Willie had not been in this town long, six months, she knew two children well, Teddy and Little Dot. In a way they were her children in this town.
    Tee, Little Dot called Liberty. There was always a scrapeon her cheek or a cut on her arm, for she hurt herself often and was unaware of it. Her eyes were deeply set and dark. “Tee,” Little Dot called, something glittering on her wrist, something shining that she loved, something cheap, bright and useless that Liberty had bought her from a gum machine. Little Dot had been brain-damaged from birth, for her parents had been heavy dopers, now reformed. Her mother, Rosie, had been junking up so long she hardly knew she was pregnant, and when she finally acknowledged that she was, she was twenty-three weeks along. The doctor said they probably had just enough time to slip in the saline, and that it was just as well since Rosie was so toxic that the baby would probably be a very unhealthy one. As Rosie lay on the table and the doctor was preparing to do the abortion, Little Dot slipped out. She just pushed her own way out, bawling, a little bigger than a lady’s hand. “She’s a keeper,” the doctor said. “Can’t do anything about this one now.” And no one could. Little Dot lived in world of her own, in mindscapes no one could know.
    It had been Liberty’s first night in town and she had been walking with Clem on the beach when she first met Little Dot. The child was all alone, a broken rope around her waist.
    “I like to pee on the sand and look at the stars,” Little Dot said.
    “Well, we all like to do that,” Liberty said.
    She wore a dog tag with her name and address stamped on it, and Liberty took her home. It was just across the beach in a rundown shopping center where her parents, Roger and Rosie had a pottery shop called
Oh!
They lived in their shop and in a van that was parked out front. Behind the shop was a kiln and a tepee, where Little Dot slept.
    “Oh,” Rosie said, “you must think we’re awful