third baby

first, let me say i have never attempted to kill the baby of the family. but if you are dad, you may want to skip this one.

the baby was born while the middle sister and i were at home playing with a new set of blocks santa brought us a few weeks before. brightly colored plastic blocks with a hinge on one end that opened the blocks diagonally like pointy pac-men. each had a tiny rubber-plastic figure in it- animals, mostly, but i loved the blocks themselves. they could be snapped together to form diamondy snakes with scoop heads that slithered about the house. so when she came home we were impressed, but there was a house full of christmas presents and i already had this other baby who could talk.

there wasn't much to the third child as a baby. she slept and ate but because she was an easy baby mom kept taking her to the doctor, sure she was dying of quietness or stillness. she cut her teeth on the tail of an old dachshund named heidi who had gone through an imaginary pregnancy of her own while the baby was resting in our mom. all our vacation photos from her early childhood show two sisters alone on the rocky beach of lake shasta or two sisters with dad at christmas or two sisters at the ocean. we told her we left her home on these trips. she may have believed this a while. however, once when the middle child and i refused to let her follow us around, she bit her own hand and blamed it on us. she was small, four or five. after that she was asking for it.

she was born unusual, with a port-wine stain birthmark starting at one hand and spreading up into her neck, back and chest. she was red on those parts of her and when she got cold or angry, those red parts at her edges, especially her thumb, turned purple. we used this as an indicator of when to go inside during winter. we'd pull off her mitten and hold up her thumb, discussing between the two of us whether it was purple enough to call it a day. i don't recall much discussion about this but always in stories we read, a mark of some kind meant someone was a princess or was magic, so the middle sister and i focused on what was more obvious about the baby- her overwhelming desire to please others.

we could get her to do anything. the middle child and i had an ever changing "club" with the only requirement for membership being that one was not our baby sister. we poured sugar and water into old soda bottles, pretended to get drunk as we swigged down bottle after bottle. when she asked for some, we bellowed, "you're not old enough!" while waving the sugary bottles in her face. but one spring we nearly killed her. well, i nearly killed her. i say we because i know the middle child was there, as were several other neighbor kids. i was eleven or so, old enough to know better. her five or six year old self wanted to do whatever we were doing. so she had to pass a test. in our town there's a creek that splits the local baseball park from the city park and there's a cement bridge poured around a large drain pipe set down into this little creek that connects paths on one side to paths on the other. we would walk down past the fence post and its coating of blackberry bushes, through the high grass, across the little bridge and over into the park full of swings and a swimming pool.

so i stood with her on the little cement bridge which dips down over the creek and is the lowest part on both sides of the trails. other children stood there, too. and i told her to swim through the bridge pipe. it was warm enough, probably summer, and the water wasn't moving too fast, but the upstream section flowed through what was probably an eight foot section of pipe just big enough around for a five or six year old to swim through. and she did. or at least she went in. from all our past experience throwing twigs and leaves in upstream we figured she'd float out the other side in seconds. she did not. we had been cheering, but now we looked at each other without sound. we looked in the upstream end of the pipe. it was dark and we could not see her small feet. we walked to the other end, downstream, and after what seemed like years, a small blond head popped into view, covered with leaves and twigs. she seemed completely unfazed by her own near death but i made her promise she wouldn't tell our parents. a few years ago, when all three of us were living on our own and she figured it wasn't a big deal, she brought it up. our dad still has not recovered. "she's clearly not dead!" i kept telling him. this did not help at all.

yesterday she called to tell me about her own firstborn and how he had excitedly grabbed for a huge grasshopper she was holding up for him and had squished it senseless. i wanted to tell her that's the least of it. i wanted to say wait until he's five and he's got a new baby to drag around. or any time before five, really. but there's no sense worrying her. besides, if her own children are anything like her, she won't find out about most of it.