He stopped crying. I'm not making that up. Maybe it was the wool, or the weight, or that the blanket smelled like cedar, or maybe he was just tired out. But he stopped crying and looked up at me with his eyes going everywhere, the way new babies' do, and then he found my face and looked at it, and then he went to sleep, and he slept four hours straight with his fist in the crooked row.
After that he slept every night with that blanket, and he wouldn't sleep without it. He'd find the crooked row with his fingers in the dark, the bumpy line of it, and rub it, and settle. I'd look in on him and see his hand there and think, that's the night Katie died, and you're holding it. And it didn't hurt, somehow. Or it hurt in a way that was all right.
I took him to the grill with me in a basket when Len was on day turn and the sitter couldn't come. Helen put him on the back booth and the old mill men came in and made faces at him and Stosh made him mashed bananas on a saucer. The men called him the Mayor, because he sat up in his basket and received people. Pop called him that too. Pop, who had not cried at Katie's funeral, held Dougie on his knee at our kitchen table and sang him "Na Kráľovej holi" in his terrible baritone, and cried.
His mother did everything the judge told her to do. I want to say that, too, in fairness, because it took me a long time to be fair about it. She was sixteen and then seventeen. She went to a program. She got a job at a laundry. She came to her visits at the county office every Wednesday, and I would hand him across the table to her in his blanket and she would hold him like he was something she'd been told was valuable and didn't know where to set down, and I would go sit in the car in the parking lot and smoke, which I'd never done before or since. Her name was Tammy. She had long straight hair parted in the middle and chewed her fingernails to the quick, and she never once looked me in the eye.
In June of 1976, fourteen months after they put him in my arms, the judge gave him back to her.
Mrs. Ondrejka said it was better if I didn't contact them. A clean break, she said, for the baby, so he wouldn't be confused, and for the mother, so she could get her feet under her. That's how they thought then. I packed his clothes and his rattles and the little red stocking cap, and at the last minute I put the blanket in the bag too, because I knew he wouldn't sleep without it, and I knew that a seventeen-year-old in an apartment on the north side was going to need him to sleep. Then I handed him across the table in the county office for the last time, and he reached back for me, and I let go.
Len left about eighteen months after that. People said it was the mill. It was the mill. It was also that when I came home from the county office that day I went upstairs and lay down on the floor of the little room where Dougie had slept, and stayed there until it was dark, and Len stood in the doorway and didn't come in.
Once, in the summer of 1977, I drove up to the north side with an address I had read off a form on Mrs. Ondrejka's desk, and sat in my car across from a brick building on Ohio Avenue for an hour, and saw a young woman come out with a toddler on her hip, and couldn't tell from across the street if it was them. I didn't get out of the car. I told myself it was for his sake. I drove home and didn't do it again.
That was all of it. That was the whole thing I'd been carrying around for nine years. I'd thought it was put away. I sat at the kitchen table with my Sanka gone cold and the radio playing Billy Ocean, and I thought about a boy with clean hands who asked me what my real name was, and whether my house had a yard, and whether I had been sad, and I felt something start to come up in me that I didn't have a name for yet, and I pushed it back down, hard, because I was thirty-eight years old and I knew better than to let things like that up. They don't go back down.
He didn't come on Thursday.
At twenty to four I was at the window. At four I was refilling sugars that were already full, and Stosh said, "He'll come or he won't, Dodie," and I said, "Who?" and he gave me a look over his shoulder that I deserved. At four-thirty a bus stopped in front of the Isaly's and nobody got off it who was nine years old, and I went into the walk-in cooler and stood among the cases of eggs with the door shut and my arms crossed over my chest until I could breathe.