SEVENTY

It was spring and the baby was coming.

Maus had been having contractions for days. She would be cleaning in the kitchen, or lying in bed, or watching Theo work in the yard, when suddenly she felt it: a quick tightening across her midriff that made her breath catch in her chest. Is this it? Theo would ask her. Is he coming? Is the baby coming now? For a moment she would look away, her head cocked to the side, as if listening for some distant sound. Then she would return her attention to him, offering a reassuring smile. There. You see? It was nothing. Just the one. It’s all right. Go back to what you were doing, Theo.

But now it wasn’t nothing. It was the middle of the night. Theo was dreaming, a simple, happy dream of sunlight falling on a golden field, when he heard Maus’s voice, calling his name. She was in the dream, too, but he couldn’t see her; she was hiding from him, she was playing some kind of game. She was ahead of him, then behind, he didn’t know where she was. Theo. Conroy was yipping and barking, bounding through the grass, racing away from him and tearing back again, urging him to follow. Where are you, Theo called, where are you? I’m wet, Mausami’s voice was saying. I’m wet all over. Wake up, Theo. I think my water’s broken.

Then he was awake and standing up, fumbling in the dark, trying to put his boots on. Conroy was up too, wagging his tail, shoving his damp nose in Theo’s face as he knelt to light the lantern. Is it morning? Are we going out?

Mausami drew a sharp breath through her teeth. “Ooo.” She arched her back off the sagging mattress. “Ooo.”

She had told him what to do, the things she’d need. Sheets and towels to put under her, for the blood and all the rest. A knife and fishing line for the cord. Water, to clean the baby, and a blanket to wrap him in.

“Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right back.”

“Flyers,” she moaned, “where would I go?” Another contraction surged through her. She reached for his hand and squeezed it tight, digging her nails into his palm, gritting her teeth in pain. “Oh, fuck.” Then she turned and wretched onto the floor.

The room filled with the tang of vomit. Conroy thought it was for him, a wonderful present. Theo shoved the dog away, then helped Mausami ease back onto the pillows.

“Something’s wrong.” Her face was pale with fear. “It shouldn’t hurt like this.”

“What should I do, Maus?”

“I don’t know!”

Theo raced down stairs, Conroy following at his heels. The baby, the baby was coming. He’d meant to put all the supplies together in one place, but of course he never had. The house was freezing, the fire had burned down; the baby would need to be kept warm. He put an armful of logs into the cradle, then knelt before it, blowing on the embers so it would catch. He got rags and a pail from the kitchen. He’d intended to boil water, to sterilize it, but it didn’t seem like there was time for that now.

“Theo, where are you!”

He filled the pail and got a sharp knife and carried it all up to the bedroom. Maus was sitting up now, her long hair spilling over her face, looking afraid.

“I’m sorry about the floor,” she said.

“Any more contractions?”

She shook her head.

Conroy was back at the mess on the floor. Theo shooed him out and got down on his hands and knees to clean it up, holding his breath. How ridiculous. She was about to have a baby, and here he was, flinching at the smell of vomit.

“Uh-oh,” Maus said.

By the time he’d risen, the contraction was upon her. She’d pulled her legs upward, drawing her heels toward her buttocks. Tears were squeezing from the corners of her eyes.

“It hurts! It hurts!” She rolled suddenly onto her side. “Press my back, Theo!”

She had never said anything about this. “Where? How should I press it?”

She was shouting into the pillow. “Anywhere!”

He gave an uncertain push.

“Lower! For godsakes!”

He curled his hand into a ball and pressed his knuckles into her; he felt her pushing back. He counted the seconds: Ten, twenty, thirty.

“Back labor.” She was panting for breath. “The baby’s head is shoving against my spine. It’ll make me want to push. I can’t push yet, Theo. Don’t let me push.”

She drew up onto her hands and knees. She was wearing only a T-shirt. The sheets beneath her were soaked with fluid, giving off a warm, sweet smell, like mown hay. He remembered his dream of the field, the waves of golden sunlight.

Another contraction; Mausami groaned and dropped her face into the mattress.

“Don’t just stand there!”

Theo got on the bed beside her, positioning his fist on the ridge of her spine, and leaned in, pushing with all his might.

Hours and hours. The contractions continued, hard and deep, through the length of the day. Theo stayed with her on the bed, pressing her spine until his hands were numb, his arms rubbery with fatigue. But compared to what was happening to Mausami, this small discomfort was nothing. He left her side only twice, to call Conroy in from the yard and then, as the day was ending and he heard him whining at the door, to let him out again. Always by the time he returned up the stairs Mausami was shouting his name.

He wondered if it was always like this. He didn’t really know. It was horrible, endless, like nothing he’d ever experienced. He wondered if Mausami would have the energy, when the time came, to push the baby out. Between contractions she seemed to float in a kind of half sleep; she was focusing her mind, he knew, readying herself for the next wave of pain to move through her. All he could do was press her back, but this seemed to be helping very little. It didn’t seem to be helping at all.

He was lighting the lantern—a second night, he thought with despair, how could this go on a second night?—when Maus gave a sharp cry. He turned to see watery blood pour from her, running in ribbons down her thighs.

“Maus, you’re bleeding.”

She had rolled onto her back, pulling her thighs upward. She was breathing very quickly, her face drenched with sweat. “Hold. My legs,” she gasped.

“Hold them how?”

“I’m going. To push. Theo.”

He positioned himself at the foot of the bed and placed his hands against her knees. As the next contraction came, she bent at the waist, driving her weight toward him.

“Oh, God. I can see him.”

She had opened like a flower, revealing a disk of pink skin covered in wet black hair. Then, in the next instant, this vision was gone, the flower’s petals folding over it, drawing the baby back inside her.

Three, four, five more times she bore down; each time the baby appeared and, just as quickly, vanished. For the first time he thought it: this baby doesn’t want to be born. This baby wants to stay just where it is.

“Help me, Theo,” she begged. All her strength was gone. “Pull him out, pull him out, please, just pull him out.”

“You have to push one more time, Maus.” She seemed completely helpless, insensate, on the verge of final collapse. “Are you listening? You have to push!”

“I can’t, I can’t!”

The next contraction took her; she lifted her head and released an animal cry of pain.

“Push, Maus, push!”

She did; she pushed. As the top of the baby’s head appeared, Theo reached down and slipped his index finger inside her, into her heat and dampness. He felt the orbital curve of an eye socket, the delicate bulge of a nose. He couldn’t pull the baby, there was nothing to hold on to, the baby would have to come to him. He drew back and positioned a hand beneath her, leaning his shoulder against her legs to brace the force of her effort.

“We’re almost there! Don’t stop!”

Then, as if the touch of his hand had given it the will to be born, the baby’s face appeared, sliding from her. A vision of magnificent strangeness, with ears and a nose and a mouth and bulging, froglike eyes. Theo cupped his hand below the smooth, wet curve of its skull. The cord, a translucent, blood-filled tube, was looped around its neck. Though no one had told him to do this, Theo placed a finger under it, gently lifting it away. Then he reached inside Mausami and tucked a finger under the baby’s arm, and pulled.

The body wriggled free, filling Theo’s hands with his slippery, blue-skinned warmth. A boy. The baby was a boy. Still he had not breathed, or made the slightest sound. His arrival in the world was incomplete, but Maus had explained the next part well enough. Theo rolled the baby in his hands, bracing his skinny body lengthwise with his forearm and supporting his downturned face with his palm; he began to rub the baby’s back, moving the fingers of his free hand in a circular motion. His heart was hammering in his chest, but he felt no panic; his mind was clear and focused, his entire being brought to bear on this one task. Come on, he was saying, come on and breathe. After everything you just went through, how can that be so hard? The baby had only just been born, but already Theo felt his hold upon him—how, simply by existing, this small, gray thing in his arms had obliterated all other ways in which Theo might live. Come on, baby. Do it. Open your lungs and breathe.

And then he did. Theo felt his tiny chest inflate, a discernible click, then something warm and sticky, spraying into his hand like a sneeze. The baby took a second breath, filling his lungs, and Theo felt a force of life flowing into him. Theo turned him over, reaching for a rag. The baby had begun to cry, not the robust complaints he had expected but a kind of mewing. He wiped his nose and lips and cheeks and scooped the last mucus from his mouth with a finger, and placed him, the cord still attached, on Mausami’s chest.

Her face was exhausted, heavy-lidded and worn. At the corners of her eyes he saw a fan of wrinkles that hadn’t been there just a day ago. She managed a weak but grateful smile. It was over. The baby had been born, the baby was here at last.

He placed a blanket over the baby, over the two of them, and sat beside them on the bed, and let it all go: he wept.

It was deep night when Theo awoke, thinking: Where was Conroy?

Maus and the baby were asleep. They had decided—or, rather, Maus had decided, and Theo had quickly agreed—to name him Caleb. They had swaddled him tightly in a blanket and placed him on the mattress beside her. The air of the room was still heavy with a rich, earthy smell, of blood and sweat and birth. She had fed the baby, or tried to—her milk wouldn’t be coming in for a day or so—and taken a bit of food herself, a mush of boiled potatoes from the basement and a few bites of a mealy apple from their winter stores. She would need protein soon, Theo knew; but there was plenty of small game around, now that the weather had warmed. As soon as they were settled, he would have to leave to hunt.

It seemed obvious, suddenly, that they would never be departing this place. They had everything they needed to make a life here. The house had stood the years, waiting for someone to make it a home again. He wondered why it had taken him so long to see this. When Peter came back, that was what Theo would say to him. Maybe there was something on that mountain and maybe there wasn’t. It didn’t matter. This was home; they would never be leaving.

He sat awhile, mulling over these things, full of a quiet amazement that seemed to lodge in the deepest part of him. But eventually exhaustion overcame him. He crawled in beside them and soon was fast asleep.

Now, awake, he realized he’d forgotten all about Conroy. He searched his memory for the last time he’d been aware of the dog’s presence. Sometime late, close to sunset, Conroy had started to whine, asking to be let out. Theo had done this quickly, not wanting to leave Maus’s side for even an instant. Conroy never wandered far, and as soon as he was done with his business, he’d be scratching at the door. Theo had been so preoccupied that he had simply slammed the door and raced back up the stairs and forgotten all about him.

Until now. It was odd, he thought, that he hadn’t heard so much as a peep. No scratching at the door or barking from outside. For a period of days after he had found the footprints in the barn, Theo had kept a watchful eye, never venturing far from the house, keeping the shotgun handy. He had told Mausami nothing, not wanting to worry her. But as time passed, with no other signs, he had let his mind turn toward the more pressing matter of the baby. He’d found himself wondering if he had misread what he’d seen. The footprints could have been his own, after all, the can something Conroy had fished out of the trash.

He rose quietly, taking the lantern and his boots and the shotgun from its place beside the door, and descended to the living room. He sat on the stairs to put on his boots, not bothering with the laces; he lit a piece of kindling off the coals of the fire, setting it to the wick of the lantern, and opened the door.

He had expected to find Conroy sleeping on the porch, but it was empty. Raising the lantern to spread its light, Theo stepped down into the yard. No moon or even stars; a damp spring wind was blowing, bearing rain. He lifted his face into the gathering mist, a light spattering on his brow and cheeks. The dog, wherever he’d run off to, would be glad to see him. He’d want to get inside, out of the rain.

“Conroy!” he called. “Conroy, where are you?”

The other houses stood silent. Conroy had never shown more than passing interest in these structures, as if, through some dog sense, he knew them to be of no value. There were things inside, the man and the woman made use of them, what did it matter to him?

Theo advanced slowly down the trace, the shotgun clenched under one arm while, with the other, he swept the area with the light of his lantern. If it started to rain in earnest, he didn’t think he’d be able to keep the thing lit. That goddamn dog, he thought. Now was not the time for him to run off like this.

“Conroy, damnit, where did you go?”

Theo found him lying at the base of the last house. He knew at once the dog was dead. His slender body was still, his silvery mane drenched in blood.

Then, coming from the house—the sound traveling with an arrow’s swift assurance to pierce his mind with terror—he heard Mausami scream.

Thirty steps, fifty, a hundred: the lantern was gone, dropped on the ground by Conroy’s body, he was racing through the dark in his unlaced boots, first one and then the other launching off his feet. He hit the porch at a leap, ripped open the door, and dashed up the stairs.

The bedroom was empty.

He tore through the house, calling her name. No sign of a struggle; Maus and the baby had simply vanished. He raced through the kitchen and out the back, just in time to hear her scream again, the sound strangely muted, as if rising toward him through a mile of water.

She was in the barn.

He entered at a dead sprint, bursting through the door, spinning his body to sweep the dark interior with the shotgun. Maus was in the backseat of the old Volvo, clutching the baby to her chest. She was waving frantically, her words muffled by the thickness of the glass.

“Theo, behind you!”

He turned and as he turned the shotgun was knocked away, slapped like a twig from his hands. Then something grabbed him, not any single part but the whole of him, Theo entire; he felt himself lifted up. The car with Mausami and the baby in it was somewhere below him and he was flying through the dark. He hit the hood of the car with a crunch of buckling metal, rolling, tumbling; he landed face-up on the ground and came to a stop but then something, the same something, grabbed him, and he was flying again. The wall, this time, with its shelves of tools and stores and cans of fuel. He hit it face-first, glass exploding, wood splintering, everything falling in a clattering rain; as the ground rose to meet him, slowly and then quickly and finally all at once, he felt a crunch of bone.

Agony. Stars filled his vision, actual stars. The thought reached him, like a message from some distant place, that he was about to die. He should be dead already. The viral should have killed him. But this would happen soon enough. He could taste blood in his mouth, feel it stinging his eyes. He was lying face-down on the floor of the barn, one leg, the broken one, twisted under him; the creature was above him now, a looming shadow, preparing to strike. It was better this way, Theo thought. Better that the viral should take him first. He didn’t want to watch what would happen to Mausami and the baby. Through the murk of his battered brain, he heard her calling out to him.

Look away, Maus, he thought. I love you. Look away.

XI

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 458