Tad was sleeping in Auntie Mystique's room this time around. Auntie's room didn't have as many fun things as the other rooms (Auntie was always picking him up and telling him "No!"), but she had the rocking chair, and she always rocked him for a little while before putting him to bed.
It was morning now. Tad opened his eyes and looked around. Auntie was still sleeping.
A moment later, her alarm went off.
When she didn't shut it off right away, Tad added his own noise to the din, and finally she poked her head out of the covers. "What the--?"
She reached out and shut the alarm off. Then she hauled herself out of bed and went to Tad's crib. "Good morning, my sweet little squoozie-woozie," she cooed as she picked him up. "How's my little pumpkin? Huh? Who's a good little—"
The door opened a crack. "Uh . . . Mystique?"
"What do you want?" she snapped, in her normal voice.
"I, uh, need to tell you something." It was Pietro. "Number one: they cancelled school today. Broken water pipe in the basement or something."
"And where did you hear this?"
"Somebody called here looking for you."
"Well, why didn't you wake me up, if it was that important?"
"Uh . . ." Cause you would have bitten my head off? "Well, anyway, I took the message."
"Yes, thank you." She put Tad down on the bed to change him. "Grab me a Onesie and a diaper, will you?"
"Okay." He was back in seconds with both. "Should I go heat up a bottle?"
"No . . . I think we'll try giving him some cereal today."
"I'll get a raincoat." Tad, like most babies, tended to splatter food everywhere when they tried to feed him. The last time, he'd managed to score a direct hit on the ceiling.
"He'll be fine." If she had to, she'd tie his arms down. "What was the second thing?"
"Huh?"
"You said two things. What was the other one?"
"Oh." He looked almost ashamed as he told her, "Magneto's coming by sometime today."
"What?" The Brotherhood's supreme leader hadn't met with them personally for months. "Why?"
"He didn't say." For some reason, Pietro had trouble looking her in the eye.
Mystique did up the final snap on the Onesie, picked Tad up, and carried him out to the kitchen. It was only when she had finished strapping Tad into the high chair that she turned on Pietro. "What did you say to him?"
"Wha? Nothing!"
"You must have told him something to make him come all the way over here. What was it?"
"Nothing! I swear!"
"Bee gah dah!" Tad said, banging his spoon on the tray. It was almost as if he were trying to join in the conversation . . . but his pediatrician said it might be a few more months before he could put words together.
Mystique finished mixing up his cereal . . . but a funny thing happened when she tried to give him the first spoonful. Tad spit it out, and started chewing on the spoon.
"No!" She pulled it away from him and tried again. This time Tad swallowed the cereal, then chewed on the spoon.
"What's the matter? Aren't you hungry?" She tried to take the spoon away from him, and he cried.
"Okay, okay, I guess you are." When the cereal was all gone (divided more or less evenly between inside Tad and on the floor), she tried some applesauce. This went a little better, but the floor was sticky by the time she gave up the struggle.
Fortunately, the boys were up, and she pressed them into service wiping down the floor, the chair, and Tad, before giving them breakfast.
"Whoever doesn't have last night's homework finished," she warned them, "had better do it today. In fact, right now would be a good time."
"But it's only eight o'clock!" Toad protested.
"Exactly. You'll have it all done and out of the way. And I want to see it when you're finished."
"Oh, man!"
"Get to it." She turned to Pietro. "I know you already have your homework for the entire year done, so . . . you get to watch Tad."
"What?"
"Now! I'm going to get dressed. Put a clean outfit on him as well." She thrust the sticky baby into Pietro's arms, and disappeared, chuckling evilly, up the stairs.
Pietro looked down at Tad, who was chewing on his sleeve. "Yuck! No, Tad! You'll mess up my second-best pair of pajamas!"
"Dah." Tad didn't look at all worried.
Oh well, Pietro thought. It's just for a couple of hours. How much trouble can the kid be?
Six hours, two naps, a bottle, and three Teletubbies videos later, Tad was bawling his head off . . .
Pietro looked out and saw Magneto at the door. "Thank God you're here," he said. "He's been screaming for over an hour, and I can't get him to stop! What do I do?"
"What are you talking about? Who's screaming?" Then he looked down and saw the baby in his bouncer seat. "What is that?"
"That's Tad," Toad said. "My baby brother."
"Since when do you have a baby brother?"
"Since my loser dad dumped him on me!"
"Is there a loser mom?"
Mystique said, "We can't seem to reach her."
"Well, keep trying! I'm not happy about the way you dropped the ball on the Hill girl. We don't need to become a day-care center on top of that!"
Tad stopped crying and looked up at this strange intruder. He was sure grumpy. Maybe he needed huggle-wuggles to cheer him up. He reached up . . .
"What's he doing now?" Magneto demanded.
"I think he wants you to pick him up," said Lance.
"Oh, no you don't! Not after what happened to me the last time I picked a baby up! He threw up on me!"
Pietro winced. "Are you gonna hold that against me for the rest of my life?"
There were barely-surpressed giggles, which Magneto ignored. "We need to get this child into proper day care. This isn't the proper place for a baby."
"We don't have any other place to put him!" Toad insisted.
A watch alarm beeped. "Well, that's it," said Lance. "We gotta go or we'll be late for the movie."
"Movie? What movie?" Magneto inquired.
"We're going to the movies," Fred said. "I want the Super-Large popcorn!"
"Aren't you forgetting something?" Magneto held the baby out towards them.
"We can't," Pietro said hurriedly. "The movie's rated PG-13 and anyway little babies aren't very good at movies soyougettowatchhimbye!"
"Wait!"
But they were already in the car, pulling out of the driveway at a dangerous speed. It was just as well that Tad wasn't in the car.
Which left Magneto holding him. "Great," he muttered under his breath. "I am not a babysitter!"
Tad began to cry.
"Wonderful." Magneto tried to remember what his wife had done when the twins were fussy. Something involving jiggling them up and down, or something. He tried to think of what to do . . .
Something dripped down onto his face.
"Ugh!" The kid was chewing on his helmet! "I am not a chew toy! Get off of there!" He attempted to disengage the wriggly little Tad from his helmet, but it only made the baby cling harder to it. Finally, he took the helmet off and put it and the baby on the floor.
He sat down and rubbed his temples, feeling a headache coming on.
Okay, the movie's two hours . . . then there's travel time . . . so they should be home by—
He suddenly became aware of a bonk! sound from behind him. Turning his head carefully, he saw Tad, in the helmet, crawling into the wall. Just what he needed, a hole in the wall and a dent in his helmet! Not to mention the drool.
"Give me that." Magneto pulled it off the baby's head and sat down to wipe the drool out of it. Tad just crawled away on his own. He was so quiet that Magneto completely forgot about him. All he could think about was Two and a half hours, no more than that, and how long has it been already?
Tad crawled around the first floor for a while, picking things up and chewing on them for a while, then putting them down and going off in search of something else. He wondered why this Uncle Magneto was such a grouch. Didn't he like Tad? All he did was yell at him!
He came to the foot of the stairs. Okay, this didn't look so hard. Like climbing up on Uncle Fred's tummy—one hand and one knee at a time, pulling himself up . . .
He got to the seventh step before he slipped and tumbled back down to the bottom.
Magneto was polishing the inside of his helmet when he heard Tad cry.
I forgot all about him!
He rushed into the other room and picked up the baby from the foot of the stairs. Looked like he'd been trying to crawl up and had fallen. Fortunately the stairs were carpeted, and he wasn't seriously hurt. Just a little bump on his head.
"Ssh . . . ssh . . ." Magneto tried the jiggling thing again, and this time it worked. Tad's sobs tapered off to little sighs and sniffles within a few minutes.
Then Tad tried to chew on his finger. Though his kids hadn't been babies since the Reagan administration, Magneto put two and two together and figured it out.
"You're teething, aren't you, baby?"
"Gah," Tad said.
"Do you have some kind of a teething ring somwhere?" The twins had had blue donut-looking things, he remembered.
"Gee bah doo!"
"Right, that's my fault for expecting you to understand me." Magneto shifted Tad to one hip and began looking around for anything that looked like a blue donut.
It wasn't in the living room. So he tried the kitchen. He found some very old Chinese food in the back of the fridge, but no teething ring. Meanwhile, Tad was starting to fuss again.
Wait a minute—hadn't his wife kept them in the freezer? The cold helped their gums, or something. He looked, and sure enough, there it was.
He started to hand it to Tad, then remembered that the baby hadn't been fed yet. Should probably do that first. He found a bottle in the fridge (next to a pizza with green stuff on it that he hoped was some kind of vegetable), but had no idea how long to heat it for.
Rather than experiment, he called Mystique's cell phone.
"What?" she snapped, when she finally answered.
"How long do I put Tad's bottle on for?"
"You called me out of a movie for that?" Someone shushed her, and she lowered her voice.
"I haven't had to take care of an infant for years! You went off and left me without any sort of instructions, so it's your job to tell me what to do."
"I'll tell you what to—"
"What was that?"
"Nothing." She sighed. "Thirty seconds on high. Make sure you shake it before you give it to him. Sometimes all the hot milk settles on the top, and I don't want it to burn him."
"Thirty seconds on high."
"Don't forget to burp him afterwards, and then you can change him and put him to bed."
"Change him?" Magneto froze at those words.
"Yes, change him. Change his diaper. I don't care how long it's been, a diaper is a diaper! The tapes go in back, and the thick part goes between his legs. His pajamas are in the top drawer of the bureau in Toad's room. He likes his green blanket, and his stuffed frog. Anything else you need to know? Can I get back to my movie before it ends?"
"Yes, all right."
She hung up.
"Well, that wasn't very nice," Magneto said to Tad, who was sitting on the kitchen counter. "Thirty seconds on high, she said."
While the bottle heated, Magneto planned how he was going to get back at Mystique for sticking him with babysitting duty without any instructions. The diaper-changing alone was worth an extra training session or two . . .
The feeding went well, although when it came time to burp him, Magneto forgot to put a cloth on his shoulder. Actually, he remembered too late—right after Tad spit up down his back.
"Twice in one lifetime," he sighed. "I don't believe it. What am I, a baby-barf magnet?"
The only thing he could find to put on was one of Lance's grunge rock T-shirts, and a pair of sweatpants that had seen better days. It would do until his uniform finished the wash cycle. Thank goodness it didn't have to be dry-cleaned.
He found the baby's pajamas, and the diapers, and set Tad down on the floor. Tad didn't make it any easier by squirming around and trying to get away. "Oh, no you don't."
Finally, Magneto worked out a system that allowed him to unsnap Tad's overalls with one hand while holding him down with the other. See, this isn't so hard . . .
Then something squirted him in the eye.
Why couldn't you have been a girl? Girls don't do that!
Just when Magneto thought this wonderful evening couldn't possibly get any worse, the doorbell rang. He couldn't leave Tad alone on the floor, so he picked him up, bare bottom and all, and went to answer it.
Two teenage girls were standing there holding a stack of papers. "Um," the closer one said, "is Ms. Darkholme in?"
"No, she isn't." As he shifted Tad from one hip to the other, he became aware that he really should have finished putting the diaper on first.
"Well, can you give her these when she comes home?"
"All right," Magneto sighed.
"Are you her father?" the second girl asked.
This was the straw that broke the camel's back. "No, I'm not!" Magneto snapped, and slammed the door.
By the time Mystique and the others came home, Tad was safely in bed, and Magneto was back in his own clothes—and not a minute too soon, he felt. He was just beginning to recover from the trauma of being barfed, peed, and drooled on, all in the same few hours.
"How was he?" Mystique asked.
The look Magneto gave her was cold enough to freeze an open flame.
"That bad?"
"Not bad, exactly . . . can someone explain how a little baby can produce so much . . . mess?"
"What mess?" Mystique asked.
"WHAT HAPPENED TO MY SHIRT?" Lance shouted from the laundry room.
"Minor diapering accident." Magneto had a headache the size of Jupiter right now. He just wanted to go home and sleep it off, although traveling in his present condition was probably not a wise idea.
"He's not that bad," Mystique said. "I'll admit I wasn't crazy about the idea when he showed up here, but he sort of . . . grew on me."
"I've noticed," Magneto said, pulling a ball of blue yarn out of the knitting basket. He stood up and put on his now drool-free helmet. "I've never had a night worse than this one. I'm just glad it's over."
Mystique looked at the phone. "Why is the message light blinking? Did someone call?"
"No," Magneto said.
"Oh," Toad said, "that's from this afternoon. Some guy called from this hospital with a weird name—Short Hills or something . . ."
Magneto froze. Oh, no. Please, God, no.
"He said they were ready to release somebody named Wanda. We can pick her up tomorrow."
Pietro looked terror-stricken. "Wanda? Oh, no!"
Magneto had sat back down on the couch. Somewhere, someone was laughing at him. This made baby drool look like a day at the beach.
Next: Wanda comes home for the holidays!
