Chapter 12: Lysa’s Lies.

Dante sat in the stroller, eyes blank. Time and feeling had decided to take a backseat yet again. His intellect though was already playing catch up. It all made sense, now: The baby instinctively reaching for Lysa’s breasts, Lysa’s death glare at the wet nurse, Jamal’s crack about maternal instinct. Lysa saying she would never lactate, get pregnant or have her period AGAIN. God, how could he have been so naïve? (To be fair, he thought the AGAIN only applied to her period.)

Even the Judy’s insistence on Caroline being Lysa’s baby “sister”, made some sense. The Judy’s were determined to baby everyone, and no matter what the figure of speech was, babies simply couldn’t have babies. That just wouldn’t go with their methods or programming or whatever it was that made them do what they do. So instead, the Judy’s created a lie, and Lysa went along with it. But why?

“Lysa,” Dante said, feeling an ache as his emotions thought to creep in. “why the hell did you lie to me about who Caroline was?” Lysa looked deep into Dante’s eyes, her pigtails framing her face. Her tough façade melted, and she became softer. Her lip quivered a little.

“I was scared to tell you,” she said. “I thought you would judge me. That you’d condemn me as some whore who got knocked up and not listen to what I have to say.”

“Really?” Dante asked.

“Really.” Lysa said. “I told Dori the truth about me, and she completely turned her back on me. She thought, she was better than me. She ignored everything I had to tell her; everything that Jorge had taught me before he finally ran for it.

“Without me, or anyone else, she slipped away. First she started wetting and not realizing it, then she started baby babbling. Then one day she went to sleep, and when she woke up, she was pretty much like you know her now. She’s a lot nicer to hang out with now, but I still miss the real her, even if she was a bit of a bitch.”

Dante couldn’t imagine Midori as anything other than a babbling kidfant. Had Midori once been a regular girl? A raver maybe, or a bit of a know-it-all catty bitch? The Midori he knew was such a simple creature. All she was concerned with was attention, affection, and what she could and could not put in her mouth. Little things like who you were before she knew you or what was going on in her underwear didn’t matter to her.

“I didn’t want that to happen to you, and it was still the first day,” Lysa told him, “so I lied to make things simpler.”

“Simpler?” Dante asked. “What do you mean?”

Lysa’s eyes remained sincere; honest. Her jaw set. “If I had told you that my parents had given me up for adoption when I was little, because they couldn’t afford me, AND that I was an unwed teenage mother, AND that my foster father and foster mother were the ones that were arguing that night…about me and my daughter. Would you have believed me?”

“Yeah…” Dante said. Lysa pinched his cheek a little bit and gave her sad smile as they were rolled back into the Limbo nursery. It was just after nap time, and so the nursery was opened up into a free for all; toys and babies scattered all over the place.

“Well then,” she said. “That means you’re either a horrible liar, or a really swell guy, Dante.” Her eyes darted down, the sad smile still on her face. She was glowing, really. Well, not literally…but…skip it. As soon as she was unbuckled from the stroller, she leaned over and gave Dante a peck on the cheek. Awesome.

He was about to reciprocate when the Judy lifted him out of the stroller and shifted him over to his hip; the front of his diaper squishing as she moved him. Oh yeah. That. Lysa was helped out of the stroller, and crawled away to go play. Dante was carried over to a nearby changing table and was laid on it.

As the Judy undid the tapes, Dante buzzed at having just been kissed. It wasn’t much of a kiss, just a peck on the cheek, really. Still, it felt amazing. With him figuring out how to use the potty today, and then feeling Lysa’s soft lips on his cheek today might be the best –

“Looks like someone likes having their diaper changed!” the Judy noted Dante’s growing erection at the thought of his playmate. Dante grimaced slightly at that comment, made worse by the cold wipes beings dragged across his groin. He was aroused because a girl that he liked had kissed him, not because he had peed his Pampers! (Wait, these weren’t Pampers. Not Huggies either. No diaper brand really looked like these things. Cherubs? Angel’s Choice? Cushies? Naw. Who would name a diaper brand that?)

“Wow, Dante,” the angel went on, “we made it just in time, bubba. You were THIS close to leaking.” She finished wiping Dante, balled up the used diaper (Bambino? Cuddlez? Comfies? Oh Skip it! A baby diaper is a baby diaper), and threw it in a nearby trashcan. “You must be dehydrated, mister.”

Hold on. Dante could have sworn that not twenty minutes ago, Judy had proclaimed Dante only “a little wet.” Had Dante really wet his diaper even more since he was checked? He hadn’t even noticed. Was everything he gained while around his grandparents leaving him already? He took his thumb out of his mouth when the Judy offered him up a bottle of apple juice. (When the hell did he stick his thumb in his mouth?!)

He sucked down the apple juice as his bum was lowered onto a fresh diaper. How do you use the potty? Remember. Remember. First you need to- his stream of thought was interrupted by another stream coming out of him. “Whoopsie!” the Judy giggled as she quickly and deftly yanked the diaper up to block the air born urine. Most of it was soaked up by the diaper. Just a little got on the changing table and the floor. None of it, of course, got on the Judy.

Dante giggled, then gurgled a bit around the nipple of his ba-ba. He was drinking juice-juice and going pee-pee at the same time. That felt good. And Mama Judy was so silly! She was making those faces at him while she held the front of the diaper down to cover him up. “Geez, Dante”, Mama Judy smiled sweetly down at him. “you could give me a little warning next time.” Dante smiled up at her. “You couldn’t have done that earlier? Or at least wait till I had the diaper all the way up? Oh well,” she smirked, peeling the sodden garment back, “here we go again.”

Something was wrong. Dante shook himself awake and yanked the bottle from his lips. He wasn’t even drinking milk, and was acting like a complete idiot. Going pee-pee while drinking a ba-ba…fuck…urinating while drinking, was something Midori would do, not Dante. He wasn’t even paralyzed on the changing table, he realized. He had had almost total motor control while the Judy was changing him. It seemed anytime he let his mind wander, babyish thoughts and tendencies came right in and made themselves at home in his brain. He might have had a brief respite by the gates of Heaven, but back in Limbo, he was still making negative progress.

The Judy finished changing him for the second time in a row, and sat him down on the floor. Dante quickly crawled over to a corner to sulk in peace. He didn’t want Lysa, or anyone seeing him like this. The fact that he was dressed like Tommy Pickles, and had no way to hide his diaper made him feel more self-conscious after what had just happened. If he had been wearing shortalls or even a onesie, he could have maintained some form of dignity. Instead, all he had on was a T-shirt that came down to his belly-button, and a bulky diaper on full display between his legs.

Speaking of which, the bulk between his legs seemed a little, well, bulkier. Was he wearing a thicker diaper? Were they padding him up because of his extra wetting? Or worse yet- Dante remembered something about newborn diapers being relatively bulkier- were they getting him ready for the…DON’T. EVEN. THINK. ABOUT. IT.