The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  “NO,” she manages at last to say. “No, no…” She listens and waits. “Please,” she says. “Come back,” she says. She whispers the words that sing in her mind down in this dark, spinning around and around and around her starving brain. “We are dying…”

  But there is no more sound or glimpse of light or movement above. Fighting a wave of nausea, which she knows will end in unconsciousness if she surrenders to it, she pulls the box across the ground to her lap.

  She can smell food.

  Is it only her dying mind, playing the same games with her stomach it does in her dreams? Is it real? Is there a box, even, and were those hands above, was there light?

  She shakes the thoughts away, and bends her head over the box, gnawing at the string that binds it, pulling at it with her fingers till she feels them bleed. It breaks at last and she pulls open the lid. Inside is a heavy steel jar.

  The top of the jar is blocked by a stopper her fingers can make no sense of. “No,” she whispers to herself, “no, no, no…” as she fumbles till it opens. She lifts it to her mouth.

  Water.

  “Eban!” she hisses. “Eban!”

  She cannot make him stir anymore, but he breathes, faintly. She raises his head and brings the jar to his lips. After a moment, he coughs, water spilling from his parched mouth, and when he has cleared the fluid from his lungs, she feels him straining in her arms to reach for the jar again. She lets him drink only a little, and then makes him wait before she gives him more.

  “Slowly,” she says.

  “Please…”

  And she gives him more.

  When he has drunk his fill, she forces herself to finish what remains as slowly as she can, and to save a little. For later, and however long it will have to sustain them.

  Then she returns to the box and lifts out a lidded pot filled with some kind of stew. She nearly weeps.

  “Eban…”

  This time he responds. She hears him shift in the bed, and she finds two spoons in the box, as well as a loaf of hard bread, and she brings it all to him. They eat together. And when they are finished, they sleep.

  * * *

  —

  With her first pregnancy, Judy was scarcely ill at all. Only once, her stomach turned, at the sight of Eban dressing a kill. But for that, there was no outward sign that she carried a child. Only Eban, and his certainty. Eban who knew the right thing to do, always, as he would know the right thing to do with this baby, and would tell her. Eban who knew everything about his body and hers, and who swore the baby lived.

  He answered each of her questions, and she listened with a humility that felt unfamiliar but not unwelcome. “My fathers didn’t like to speak of these things,” she told him stiffly, and he nodded, as if afraid to say anything that might cause further injury to her pride.

  He said that in the months to come, she would feel the baby move. That hands and feet would paddle in the deep pink dark within her. And she trusted him. And waited.

  In those first weeks, she found she liked to imagine life swimming like a fish in the sea of her interior. She wondered if the child would have Eban’s patience or her determination or his grey eyes or her black hair. She thought the child might drive out the loneliness that sometimes came over her. She dreamed of sharing her books with a son or daughter, answering the child’s questions as her fathers had answered hers.

  But she was frightened too. When she felt most uneasy, she tried to call up in her mind a vision of her healthy, growing child, to foresee the life that would be his or hers. And there her imagination began to fail.

  She would imagine reading to the child, and then, all at once, she would imagine reaching the end of her few books. She would think of the books left in the outland, too heavy to carry, and then of all the others her fathers had spoken of or recounted in the dark until she slept, books she would never read and neither would her child.

  She would imagine answering the child’s questions as her fathers had answered hers, but then she would remember how even her fathers’ memories of the time before were already threadbare. And how would she answer questions of a world she herself had never known?

  And she saw that Eban was the only thing between her and a world in which she was completely alone, and she saw how insufficient he was.

  She saw that when she and Eban died—a thing that might happen at any hour, if they ate the wrong root or came upon an animal in the dark or were found by the marauders that stalked the wood at night—the child would have no one at all.

  And then she thought of how very little she had to offer her child. Even less than what she had known in her small house by the allotment. All she could give her child was the shaking trees of the wood, and a few skills to try to survive beneath them. The child would have almost enough to fill its belly and slake its thirst. The tools to keep it sheltered. And an everlasting silence.

  She never felt that baby move. One morning, she looked down after relieving herself to see a red pit in the snow. That night, the cramps began.

  “Can you fix it?” she asked Eban, and he couldn’t. He only asked her if it hurt, a physician’s inquiry, because it was all he understood of pain.

  And when the other babies came, he didn’t tell her again about those tiny paddling hands and feet. She never felt them move. And they died without ever giving any sign they’d lived.

  Only now, with this pregnancy, which has stayed with her, which has fluttered and roiled within her, does she remember again that first one. How she waited. How she hoped. How she was afraid.

  And she waits to feel her baby move again. And hopes. And is afraid.

  * * *

  —

  The second time the door opens, they are ready, anxiously waiting at the base of the ladder to see what will be sent this time.

  “They wouldn’t feed us if…” Eban murmurs.

  But no rope or box or bucket appears. Instead, after a minute—a face, its features in shadow.

  Judy cannot even tell if it’s a man or a woman, but Eban whispers, “That’s her! The girl I saw in the hole. That was her!”

  They stare up at her, breath held as they wait to see what will happen next. And then the girl raises one hand and beckons them.

  Eban hesitates, but Judy already has her hands on the wooden rungs, hauling herself up towards that shadow face.

  “Wait, wait…” he pleads behind her, but she knows he’ll follow after.

  Only when Judy has reached the top of the ladder and laid one hand on the floor above does the girl lock eyes with her and then draw back. The girl, she thinks, is young. Maybe only fifteen, or even younger. She is much heavier than Judy was even before they left their hide to find this place. She is curvy at the hips and breasts, with dust-brown skin and swollen features—all cheek and lip.

  The girl steps backward, watching sullenly as Judy stumbles onto the floor of the black house and stands.

  Even the watery daylight cast through the single broken window is too bright, too much. Her eyes burn, and she squeezes the heels of her hands into their sockets before trying to look again at the girl.

  “I’m sorry,” she explains. “We were in the dark so long.”

  The girl doesn’t speak or nod or give any indication she has heard or understood.

  Behind her, Judy hears Eban scramble to the top of the ladder and onto the floor.

  “It’s you,” he says to the girl. “I knew it was you.”

  “Are you…” Judy hesitates. “Were you a prisoner like us?”

  The girl’s black hair blazes around her face, wild curls like Judy’s own twisting in every direction. When Eban spoke, she glanced at him, but otherwise, she stares only at Judy. After a moment, her gaze slips from Judy’s face to her belly. Her eyes widen and she points.

  Judy lets a hand slide to her stomach, and—she can scarcely b
elieve it—at that moment, her daughter kicks, with force. A smile bursts over her face, a radiant relief.

  The girl frowns and then smiles back. Only a single tooth is missing, and the others are white as bone. She grins wickedly, gleefully at Judy, but as Eban steps closer, the smile drops from her face like a stone.

  “She’s pregnant,” Eban says quickly. “You can see there? A baby. She’s having a baby. She will have.” He speaks to her not as if she is a child but as if she were an idiot or mad. Judy can’t tell if the assessment is fair.

  “She knows,” she whispers.

  “Tell us who you are,” Eban demands, as if to take charge of the room, but there is a shake in his voice. “And the woman. Who is she? What do you want? What will you do with us?”

  The girl studies him, pulling at her lip with her thumb and forefinger.

  “Please tell us. Please tell us anything. We’re frightened. Are we safe here? Will they let us leave?”

  The girl’s eyes narrow and she takes a step towards Eban. He cringes but stands his ground as she approaches.

  “Will they hurt us?” He asks again, “Are we safe? Will we—”

  Suddenly the girl seizes his head between her hands. He cries out and stumbles backward, but she holds him fast. And then she opens her mouth so wide, Judy thinks her jaw has come unhinged.

  “Oh my god,” he says. “Oh my god.”

  And then the girl turns away from Eban and shows Judy what she showed him. She is shyer this time, pulling down her jaw with one hand so Judy can look within.

  “Oh,” Judy says. Looking into that empty mouth, she feels understanding arrive. “I see,” she says. “I know. It’s gone.”

  The girl closes her mouth, so the root of what was her tongue, now cut like a peddler’s, is tucked out of sight behind her lips and teeth.

  “They took it from you.”

  Appearing satisfied to be understood, the girl returns her attention to Judy’s belly. She reaches her hands out and then her eyes flash quickly up to Judy’s, as if to verify permission. Nodding, Judy lets the girl place both outstretched hands on her belly. They wait together for some sign of movement or life, but this time none comes. The girl, however, doesn’t seem disappointed. She runs her hands over Judy’s belly in circular motions, with a deft, gentle pressure that is strangely soothing.

  Glancing up at Eban, Judy sees his expression of distress. He is staring at the girl, and hasn’t yet moved since she dropped her hands from his head. In the tightness at his jaw, in the line between his eyes, she sees that he is feeling her injury as if it were done to him.

  When the door opens, they are still standing like that, the girl stroking Judy’s belly and Judy receiving it, Eban watching them with a look of pained concern, and her wishing she could erase it from his face.

  They see first a lean, dark-skinned woman with a sorrowful mouth and heavy-lidded eyes. Behind her is the older woman who drove them down the ladder, underneath the floor. Neither of them appears to be armed. The women close the door behind them and stare at the girl, who shrinks into a corner of the room, waiting watchfully.

  The girl doesn’t budge from her corner, even as the older woman advances on Eban, and after protesting weakly, he allows her to back him down the ladder once again. Only when she shuts the door over him does he cry out. “Wait! Judy? Judy? Let her come with me—please! Please let us stay together!”

  The woman looks angry at the continuing wails from beneath the floor but makes no effort to answer or silence them. She has pale, pinkish skin like Eban’s, which seems ill-fitted to the bones of her face, like a slipped mask. She is the oldest person Judy has ever seen.

  They study each other for a moment, and Judy thinks at last the woman will speak. But then, without a word, she turns and leaves the black house, pulling the door closed behind her.

  At the sound of the footsteps and the shut door, Eban renews his cries. “Judy, are you there? Judy, where are they taking you? Is anyone there?”

  Turning her gaze to the second woman, who stands watching her, impassive, Judy raises her foot and brings it to the floor twice, decisively. Stamp, stamp. There is a long pause, as Eban tries and fails to understand what she is telling him.

  The woman with the long, sad face points to the desk at the far end of the room. Quickly deciding it is better to be compliant, Judy takes a seat at the desk, and the woman slides open a drawer and takes out a stack of pages. From the bottom of the stack, she withdraws several sheets and spreads them before Judy on the desk. Then she produces a pencil and, frowning, twitches it in the air, as though to imitate the act of writing. Judy understands and nods, accepting the pencil from her. She is unnerved by the silence and wonders if they have all been muted like the girl, but she senses that in any case it is better not to speak yet.

  Looking content, the woman steps back and beckons to the girl to follow her outside. The door closes, and Judy is alone in the room, with only the sound of Eban repeating her name beneath the floorboards, until at last, he falls silent.

  Then she looks at the pages spread before her, at the simple drawings of faces on the first page, and then the ink-sketched scenes of mother and son, the shadowy images of men and women bent over in laughter, crying out, brandishing injuries. Again and again, she shuffles through the pages, trying to make sense of what she sees, of what these people want from her. Beside each image is a series of empty lines. She is meant to fill them with something, but what? At last she takes the pencil and begins to write.

  He always wanted her to look at him, she writes beside the mother and the son. But she never would. Beside the man whose face is contorted in pain as he clutches his stomach, she writes six paragraphs, fitting the sentences in the margins around the drawings, a scrawling chaos that stretches up, over and around the edges of the page. He began his life expecting nothing, it starts.

  A long time later, when she has filled every page with all the words she can think to write, the sad-faced woman enters the room again. She takes the pages from Judy silently, and indicates that she must now return under the floor. Judy is halfway down the ladder when the door is closed above her, and then she lowers herself to the ground and waits.

  X

  That little bit of food and water seems not only to have restored Eban’s health but to have charged him with a new, feverish energy she has never seen in him before. The moment she steps from the last rung of the ladder to the ground, he begins to question her. What did they want from her? What was she doing, so quiet for so long? Where have they gone? How many are they? What will happen next?

  “I don’t know,” she says. And again, “I don’t know” and “I don’t know.”

  He continues to batter her with questions until at last she shouts at him to leave her be, and then he falls into a reproachful silence. In that dark quiet, she feels relief, and her thoughts begin to assemble themselves, one after another, until she has made sense of things as best she can.

  “There were drawings,” she says at last. “The woman made me sit at the desk, and then she gave me drawings to look at. I was meant to write something on them.”

  “She told you to?”

  She shakes her head. “They never speak. None of them.”

  Eban hesitates, and she guesses they are both remembering the open mouth of the girl.

  “Do you think they all—”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Sitting beside her on the bed, he asks, “Were they the drawings from the desk drawer? One of the tests?”

  He surprises her. “I think you’re right,” she says slowly. “I think it was a test.”

  “The simple faces or the pictures of people together?”

  “Both. What do you know of it, Eban?”

  “I saw while you were sleeping. That first morning. When I came here alone. And…and I’ve seen those tests before
.”

  “Before?”

  “When we were children. My mother tested us. My brother and me.”

  When Judy first met Eban and his mother, she and Alphonse still bore Dan invisibly between them. He was everywhere, and he was lost, and it marked them: the missing lover, the other father.

  But Eban rarely mentioned his brother or his death, and carried no artifacts of that loss. Eban and his mother were bound together like a single being. Like a sum that yielded an indivisible number.

  It intrigued Judy. Between them they had exactly and only what they needed to survive. She found in herself a desire to penetrate and dismantle their bond. To take them apart. To become necessary.

  In the first weeks of knowing each other, Eban mentioned his brother to Judy only once, casually, as if he were someone already known to her. When she questioned him, he grew vague and looked unhappy. He didn’t mention him again for nearly a year, while his mother never once spoke of the second son she’d borne and raised and lost.

  “What do you mean, she tested you? What was she testing for? What was I meant to write?”

  Before Eban can answer, the door over the ladder opens again, and when they creep into the puddle of light, they see the sad-faced woman looking down. She beckons to Eban to come up, but when Judy attempts to follow, she shakes her head, and the door closes behind Eban. And there are no more sounds from above.

  * * *

  —

  When Eban returns, it’s Judy’s turn to torment him with questions, but he seems reticent now.

  “Was it the same?” she asks. “They gave you the test?”

  “Yes. Both tests.”

  “And they were the same tests you took as a child?”

  “Yes.” And then, “I think so.”

  She thinks she should leave him be, but she wants to know more. What do those women mean by playing with this childish puzzle—those crude drawings and facile faces, which each seemed to say only a single thing, feel only one way, when no one Judy has ever seen has had such a face, a smile or frown like a letter that makes only one sound?