When I lifted the tablecloth I couldn’t believe what I saw.

“Look at that,” I said. I kept lifting the tablecloth and looking under the table until Tina did the same.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Is that a baby?”

It was a rhetorical question.

The next question was: Who was going to touch it first?

We were too old to have a baby, unless by a freak accident. We didn’t even like babies. We’d pretend to, when other people brought their babies around, because no one trusts someone who doesn’t like babies, but they made us squirmy.

“Well, are you going to pick it up?” she said.

“It seems perfectly fine under there.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

We lowered the tablecloth for a while and left it down there. I tried to do my crossword puzzle on my phone and she tried to keep online shopping on her laptop, but now that we knew there was a baby down there it exerted a pressure we couldn’t resist.

The obvious thing to do was call the authorities, but we were both antiauthoritarians.

Maybe if we left it down there long enough it would dry out like an insect. Then we could brush it into the trash.

“I do not want a baby,” she said.

“Sometimes you get things in life you didn’t ask for,” I said.

I picked the baby up and set it squirming on my lap. Out of the darkness it seemed more animate, its little toothless mouth opening and closing like a birdling’s.

“This is too much,” I said.

When the lady from the adoption agency arrived, I was still holding the baby. By that time it was as big as a Maine coon cat, almost too heavy to hold in my lap.

“That’s no baby,” she said.

When I looked down I realized it wasn’t a baby. It had become a toddler. Tina got a large white t-shirt for it to wear.

Before we knew it the toddler was wandering around the house getting into all our things. It was fast. It opened the cabinets beneath the sink and started drinking Drain-o. It brought all of Tina’s Hummels down on the hardwood floors. It jumped off the couch.

The lady from the adoption agency was long gone, and by noon the toddler was a kid. We were doing the best we could to raise it, but it was a little prick. It didn’t listen to anything we said. It ate all our food. It wrote on the walls. It swung from lighting fixtures.

When it ran out the back door it was probably thirteen. It was still wearing the t-shirt Tina had given it and a pair of my old pajama bottoms. Barefoot, it ran out into the woods, jabbering.

We were relieved but worried. There were wild things in the woods.

Once in a while we still hear it. Laughing, mostly, but sometimes crying too. We’ll check under our feet while we eat our breakfast. We’ll touch toes and look at each other with wistful smiles.