I am Fabian MacComber he thinks over and over as the blackness bears down on him. I am Fabian MacComber escape artist extraordinaire. To mark the time, he goes through all the songs he and Bune sang in exactly the same order, but this time silently in his head. He has the little feather in his hand and though his heart pounds, it is with excitement more than fear. Finally, he gets to Midnight Special and slowly paces forward; he should be there any moment now . . . His outstretched hand touches something hard and rough. Whack! It gets slapped away. Fabian chuckles.
He inhales a few deep breaths. Now. He must do it now. He must be brave. His arm shakes as he raises the feather towards the wall. He leans forward until the feather makes contact. Nothing happens. Fabian holds his breath, leans forward even more. His arm nearly rips from his socket. The wall swallows him.
The three younger kids lean against Bernie on Lola’s bed. Moira on her left, Louis on her right, and Lola lying sideways with her head on her mother’s leg for a pillow. She closes The Wind in the Willows.
“Why is Toad such an idiot?” asks Louis.
“Short attention span, high need for stimulation, and too much ego, I guess. You guys did really well with that, I thought the language might be too hard.”
“Nah, I understood the feeling. Can you sing me ‘Freight Train’ now ,Mom? Like you used to when I was little?”
“You still remember that, Mo?”
“Yes! ‘Freight Train’ was my song and Louis got ‘I’ve Been Workin’ On the Railroad’.”
“What did I sing for Lola and Eben? Oh, ‘Good Night Irene’, that’s an old Leadbelly tune. But I’ll start with ‘Freight Train’. Do you remember the words?”
“Sing it all sad and quavery like Elizabeth Cotton,” says Moira.
Bernie begins, and her voice cracks as it eases into the melancholy longing of Elizabeth Cotton’s song of escape.
Fabian stands before the wall of sponsors. He keeps taking deep breaths to hold back the sensation of drowning in the sulpher stinking air. The holes go on endlessly in every direction. How can he choose? He keeps looking over his shoulder, expecting Bune to shoot through the wall at any moment. Quickly he puts his hand in a palm print, reads the name floating on the surface of the orifice. Jeannie Stapleton. The rounded clumsy handwriting disgusts him. What incredibly bland cooking. He tries another. A frantic schedule. No unstructured time, and a nanny to boot. Fish sticks and Froot Loops. No!
Fabian keeps trying. He wishes Bune were here to help him make his choice, but there’s no going back now. I just want to go home he thinks, and immediately, the column of orifices starts flashing downwards before his eyes. He blinks and reads the diagonal handwriting, “Sorry, just too fucking tired to accept sponsorships at this time . . . “It’s Bernie. Fabian stares hopelessly at the letters quivering there, then he steps forward. The writing looks so like thread. He stares at the ‘e’ at the end of much later date. Is it possible? He reaches forward and pinches the tail of the e with his thumb and forefinger. Yes, it rolls between his fingers. Very gently he starts to pull, and the letters come away like embroidery pulled from a cloth, pop, pop, pop, stitch by stitch, word by word. With the diagonal writing gone, the gateway pulses quietly. Open.
Fabian looks over his shoulder. No Bune. He looks back. “If you like to swim however, it’s a diving platform . . . ” He puts his hands together in prayer position, inserts them halfway.
“I took care of you last time,” he says to the hole in the wall named Bernadette MacComber. “Now it’s my turn.” Fabian closes his eyes and bends his knees. “I’m going in,” he says, and jumps.
“What a fantastic day!” Bernie lies on her back, chortling in the dark.
“Really? The hedgehog nearly died, Lola and Mo were close to homicide, Louis shit himself on the side of the highway, and you did the final cleanout of your dad’s house . . . ”
“Exactly!”
“It sounds arduous to me.”
“Nah, that’s nothing! I can handle anything they throw at me. Finally, I’m really done with my dad. I’m back on the job, ‘I’m back in the saddle again’!” She laughs, pauses for a moment. “No pun intended.”
Silence.
“No pun taken. Although I have to say, it’s been a while, I mean, almost five weeks . . . ”
“Hmm.” Bernie rolls towards him, squidges across the pillow and sticks her nose in his hair. “I really appreciate,” she mumbles “how you’re always so clean.” She works her way around to the skin behind his ear, starts biting him gently down the side of his neck with her lips pulled over her teeth, like an old guy with his dentures out. She pauses. “You’re right actually, what an arduous day. I think I’m sleepy.”
“In that case you need to be careful.”
Bernie rubs her cheek into the hair of his chest, breathes in how he smells.
“How am I to interpret these mixed messages?” asks Peter.
“I’ll leave that to you.”
Later they listen to the rain pelting down, branches flailing against the walls.
“The funny thing is, we didn’t find them,” Bernie murmurs.
“Find what?”
“We couldn’t find my dad’s gun collection.”
“Maybe he sold them, to pay for his habit, you know?”
“I guess so,” says Bernie, and in a little while they both burrow into sleep.
The morning dawns rinsed sunny and clear. Brushing her hair at the bathroom window Bernadette pulls up the blind and surveys the destruction of the night. What a storm. Branches strewn everywhere. Pine cones litter the hood of her car, and puddles of rain steam, warmer than the October air.
She tries to remember her dream, so distinct it woke her in the early hours of the morning. An immense bell tolling in a steeple, and then that funny scene, standing on a railway platform with that very resolute man. She’d said to him, “I wasn’t thinking of going on a trip,” and he’d replied, “Don’t worry, I’ve packed everything you’ll need in this duffle bag.” She’d unzipped the bag and it was stuffed with immaculate cream-coloured doll clothes, she could barely close it with the big brass zipper. Bernie looks at her watch. So late! She pulls on her jeans and runs to wake up the kids.
Bernie walks across the wet grass to her studio, picking up the branches the wind flailed off the birch. She snaps them into shorter lengths and piles them with the firewood against the garage. When they dry out, they’ll make good kindling. Heading for her studio she stops. What is that? Something silver flashes above the lawn, she blinks. The wind vane her father made, the arrowhead impaled in the dirt and the sun and moon quivering in the breeze. The copper pipe that it spun on sticks out sideways.
“What a crazy storm!” Now she doesn’t have to take it down at least. She grabs the shaft and with some effort pulls it out of the turf. She props it beside the studio door and goes inside. Bernie studies the painting and can envision a whole series based on these family images. When she completes four or five, she’ll call Iraj and see if he would represent her again. She imagines a show at his gallery in the spring, like old times, before the clincher of the twins engulfed everything. Bernie decides she has something good going on with Evelyn in the hollyhocks. She’d stuck with a monochromatic pallet, the olive green of the leaves implied in the grey. She’d painted the hollyhocks in bud not letting them flower, like she imagined her father’s mother, thwarted and on hold. The enigma of Evelyn Mary Eddy MacComber.
Bernie picks up the yellowed newspaper clipping from the counter and looks at the twisted wreck of the Model T. “Miss Evelyn Eddy in a dangerous condition following an accident involving the washed-out bridge on range road seven . . . remains unconscious . . . right leg, left collar bone and hip, and four ribs were broken . . . Four other occupants of the car received minor injuries . . . ”
To the left of the clipping lie all her childhood and ebullient college photos, and to the right the pictures of Grammy and little Fabian, the wedding pictures of Evelyn and Herbert
. Under her wedding dress Evelyn wears the ugly prosthetic shoe to even out her legs. Once Grammy told Bernie that the doctor didn’t think she’d make it. How he’d laid her on the kitchen table and only tried to get her straight enough to fit in a coffin.
Bernie sees a tiny print. Fabian, all of six months, sits on a porcelain throne made even higher by a pristine training seat. Gleaming tile surrounds him, his blond hair stands up askew and his plump silky legs stick straight out. With her phone she takes a picture, but before she texts it to David she zooms in on Fabian. Tears glisten on his puffy confused face. Even for 1930’s parenting this is amazingly premature potty training. Little Fabian.
“This picture is extraordinary. Freud would be so pleased to have his theory verified!” she writes Peter, and hits send. She looks at the photo of Evelyn on her first day of school. Poor Grammy too, poor Mary Evelyn MacComber.
Two weeks later Bernie studies her kitchen calendar. She unpins it from the wall and flips back to September. The red dot she draws every month is located on September first, Labour Day. The day before the policeman came to tell her about Fabian. Now it’s October 15th. She goes to the computer and Googles “reasons for missed period” before she heads out the door to get the kids.
Peter phones while she’s driving and the Bluetooth kicks in.
“Where are you?”
“Just going to get the kids, uhm, but something’s funny. I’m late. Two weeks.”
“How’s that possible?”
“Well it’s not possible. I Googled it though, and it makes sense. Stress can delay a period, and God knows I’ve been stressed. But I’m going to stop at the drug store just in case.”
“I guess so, but I can’t imagine. The vasectomy was three years ago. I’ve probably nailed you every month since then right on your ovulation date.”
“Probably.”
“So, I can’t see how, I mean if they botched the vasectomy this would have happened sooner. Anything on tonight?”
“Piano lessons for Lola, and Eben’s going to his friend’s house after school. A social studies project I think.”
“Okay, see you soon.”
Peeling off her socks in the bathroom Bernie looks at the True-Blue Easy pregnancy test laying on the counter. She opens the box and reads the instructions. A blue line in the second window indicates a positive outcome. Sitting on the toilet she holds the white absorbent tip under the stream of her urine for ten seconds, and watches the capillary action pulling the stain of pee up through the window. She lays it on the counter again and gets into her pajamas and starts brushing her teeth. Glancing down she pushes the toothbrush too far back on her tongue and gags. She leans over the sink, rinses her mouth and looks again. A little blue horizontal line. Bernie stares, picks up the box and rereads the instructions.
“No” she whispers, “please no.” She opens the door to the bedroom where Peter lays in bed reading his iPad. “Peter?”
“What’s up?”
“Peter. It’s positive. I’m pregnant. Fuck! Positive means pregnant right?”
“What? Show me that thing. Where are the instructions? “He scrambles out of bed and goes to the bathroom, reads the box. “Wow! I mean, how do you feel about that?”
“I feel like I’m going to be sick.” Bernie turns and loses her dinner in the toilet.
Twenty minutes later Peter sits with his knees drawn up to his chin as he watches Bernie pace at the foot of the bed, tears soaking her face.
“I just can’t believe this. Six weeks ago, I was driving home from dropping the kids off for school. The first day of grade one for Moira and Louis, and such sadness and also joy filled me at the same time, you know? But so much satisfaction too. I thought, I’ve done it, I pulled it off, I did a really good job with them, and now I get my reward. Now I can pursue all the parts of me I had to put in cold storage.”
“You have done an amazing job with them.”
“And then that very day, the policeman showed up about my dad! Finally, I thought last week when I gave the key to the realtor, I’m done with that, I’m really done . . . ”
“You were amazingly tough, through everything.”
“And now I can’t believe this. Why am I being punished? Why are they telling me I have to choose between killing a baby or killing myself?”
“Well that’s a little dramatic. First of all, it’s just a tiny ball of cells at this point and . . . ”
“I mean the part of me that’s been on hold for fourteen years Peter. I just, I can’t. I just can’t do this!”
“Come, get into bed,” says Peter. “You figure out what you need to do, okay? Whatever it is, I’ll back you up.”
After dropping the kids off for school, Bernie walks to her studio with a cup of coffee. She pauses at the door and sees the wind vane propped against the wall under the big window. She opens the door and steps inside, stares at her paint brushes standing on end in the Mason jar by the sink. In a moment she turns and goes outside and looks at the wind vane. It winks in the sun. She steps inside again, sits on her stool and looks at Evelyn.
She thinks about her dream. The bell tolling. Her bags were packed, but by someone else. A warning. The bell. It tolls for me, and that dark-haired man so determined and oddly familiar, just the feel of him. Evelyn watches her from behind the shade of her hat, and Bernie suddenly knows. That would be enough time for him to reincarnate wouldn’t it? It’s him, her father. He’s come home to roost.
Peter walks to his office door and looks through the glass partition. He watches the guys in the tech department, everyone busy making changes for the Terminal D construction drawings. He has an hour before the engineers show up for the consultant meeting. He locks his door and goes back to the desk, sits in his big black rolling chair. Has he got the number on his cell phone? Yes, that’s a relief. Usually Bernie’s the one who phones David but here is the contact. He presses the mobile number and waits.
“Peter?” David’s surprised voice.
“Hi David, yeah, it’s me. Look, I’m really sorry to phone you at work. Have you got a minute?”
“What’s up? Is Bernie all right?”
“Well that’s just it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bernie’s fine don’t worry. It’s just a weird development that’s occurred. We just found out she’s pregnant.”
“Seriously! She’ll be forty-five! Well I don’t know what to say. Is that good news?”
“No, it’s not. She doesn’t want to do it. She says she’s done. I can totally understand that. Bernie thought the next chapter of her life was about to open up. She’s done a fabulous job with the four of them. But what worries me is this crazy idea she’s come up with.”
“Mmm?”
“She’s convinced herself that the baby is Fabian. She thinks because of a dream, and some notion of Hindu timelines for reincarnation. Oh yes, and something about her father’s wind vane falling off the roof, she thinks she’s pregnant with her late father.”
“Wow!”
“Fucking hippie ancestry, I guess. You don’t seem to fall prey to that. But I’m just worried for her. Should I go along with this? Bernie’s so maternal, I’m just worried she might regret it later on.”
“Do you want another baby?”
“Hell no. The twins are finally old enough to actually do stuff, ski and hike. No more diapers. But this is just such bizarre thinking on her part. She’s convinced that somehow Fabian’s pulled a fast one. That he ‘reversed’ my vasectomy and has weaseled his way in. It’s crazy.”
“Hmm. I don’t know. All I can say is it must be hard being female. I guess I’d say go along with this, humour her. It’s a form of denial, but maybe it’s protective.”
“All right. You think so?”
“Yeah. Like you say, for someone like Bernie it’s a tough decision.”
“Thanks man, that helps.”
“No problem. Phone again if you need to. I hope she’ll be all right.”
&
nbsp; Bernie waits with the other mothers and fathers outside the red door. She tries to avoid eye contact. Annette will want to pin her down about volunteering for classroom rep. The position hasn’t been filled yet. She listens to Lisa and Rick discuss the logistics of hockey practice. All these normal parents, with their normal, healthy lives, and here she stands, pregnant. Oddly enough, pregnant with the reincarnation of her late father Fabian McComber. The procedure is booked for Friday. The bell rings and the kids stream out. She gathers them up before their friends can distract them.
“Sorry guys, we’ve got to run. Umm, a delivery is showing up soon, so I have to get home.”
In the van their voices immerse her. If she focuses, she can forget everything but the logistics of Moira and Louis’ playground politics, Lola’s next science project. She imbeds herself in that world.
“After dinner, who wants to go to Michael’s? Lola needs plasticine and poster board for her diorama.”
“Yay!” they all shout. They stop at the grocery store on the way home for whipping cream and berries. Lola has been watching Nigella Lawson YouTube videos, and the idea of trifle consumes her.
Walking in the front door she sees Eben’s size twelve high tops.
“Eben?” she shouts. No answer, so she starts to climb the stairs. Bernie knocks on the door, waits a moment, and then opens it. He sits on the side of the bed his elbows on his knees and his head hanging. He looks up, surprised to see her. He takes in her face.
“Hi, bud. How was your day?”
“Uh, okay.”
“Are you sure, you seem kind of worried.” He looks back at her, studies the black circles under her eyes. The familiar haggard expression.
Corridor Nine Page 15
