Tad Williams - The War of the Flowers (retail) (pdf)

by Tad Williams

  Theo's ancient Yamaha started on the first kick. It seemed like a good sign.

  ————— The bedroom light was out but the television was flickering behind the blinds, which meant Catherine was probably still up. Even though she hadn't tried to call him, he had a feeling she wouldn't be too happy with him coming in after midnight. Theo hesitated, then sat down on the porch steps to smoke the cigarette Johnny had given him. The streetlamps made little pools of light down the sidewalk that ran in front of the dark houses. It was a quiet neighborhood in the Western Addition, a working neighborhood, full of people who watched Letterman or Leno through the opening monologue and then switched off because they had to be up early. A wind sent leaves rattling and rolling up the street.

  I'm dying here, he thought suddenly. I don't belong here. He had surprised himself. If not here, then where? What was he going to find that was any better? It was true that he never felt quite alive except when he was singing, making music — he often had the disturbing feeling that in his job, his conversations, even sometimes being with Cat, he was just going through the motions — but he felt sure he was past the childish dreams of being a rock star. He would be happy just to play club dates in front of live human beings every few weeks. No, this was what he wanted, wasn't it — a house, a grown-up life? It was certainly what Catherine Lillard wanted, and he wanted her. He'd been with her for almost two years. That was nearly forever, wasn't it? Practically married, even before they'd received the test results.

  Theo walked across the tiny lawn to the sidewalk and flicked his cigarette into the gutter, then went inside. The television was on, but there was only a tangled blanket in Cat's usual curling-up spot on the couch.

  "Hey, honey? Cat?" The kitchen was dark, but it smelled like she'd been cooking: there was a weird, spicy scent in the air, something both sweet and a little sickening. The windows were open and it was a nice March night, but the air inside the small house felt as close as if a thunderstorm were moving in.

  "Cat? It's me." He shrugged. Maybe she'd gone to bed and left the television on. He wandered down the hall and saw that the light was on in the bathroom, but that was nothing unusual — Cat hated fumbling for the switch when she was half-awake or barking her shin in the dark on something left in the hall. He took little notice of the bundle on the floor against the far bathroom wall. It was the red smears on the side of the tub that caught his eye instead, weirdly vivid against the porcelain. He pushed the door all the way open.

  It took perhaps two full seconds to realize what he was seeing, the longest two seconds he had ever experienced, a sideways lurch of reality as disorienting as a hallucination. Blood was smeared across the bathroom floor behind the door, too, screamingly scarlet under the fluorescents. Cat's terrycloth bathrobe, rolled somehow into a huge lump and flung against the wall near the toilet, was soaked in it as well.

  "Oh my God . . ." he said. The bathrobe shuddered and rolled over, revealing Catherine's pale face. Her skin was like a white paper mask except for the bloody fingerprints on both cheeks — her own, as he found out later. But for a moment he could only stare, his chest clamped in crushing shock, his brain shrilling murder murder murder over and over.

  He was right. But he didn't find that out until later, either. Much later.

  Cat's eyes found his face, struggled to focus. A parched whisper: "Theo . . . ?"

  "My God, my God, what happened? Are you . . . ?" Her throat convulsed so powerfully he thought she was going to vomit — he had a terrible image of blood gushing out of her mouth like a fountain. The ragged sound that leaped from her instead was so horribly raw and ragged that he could not at first understand the words.

  "IlostitIlostitIlostit . . . !" He was down on his knees in the sopping fingerpainted mess of the bathroom floor, the slick, sticky scarlet — where had it all come from, all this red wetness? He was trying to help her up, panicking, an idiot voice telling him Don't move her, she's an accident victim, but he didn't know what had happened, what could have possibly have happened, did someone get in . . . ? Then suddenly he understood.

  "I lost it!" she moaned, more clear now that there was almost no air left in the cry. "Oh, Jesus, I lost the baby!"

  He was halfway across the house to the phone when he realized his own cell phone was in his pocket. He called 911 and gave them the address while simultaneously trying to wrap towels around the outside of her bathrobe, as though she were some immense wound that needed to be held together. She was crying, but it made almost no sound.

  When he had finished he held her tightly against him, waiting to hear the sound of the paramedics at the door.

  "Where were you?" Her eyes were shut and she was shivering. "Where were you?"

  ————— Hospitals were like T. S. Eliot poems, somehow — well-lit wastelands, places of quiet talk that could not quite hide the terrible things going on behind the doors. Even when he went out to the lobby to stretch his legs, to walk off some of the horrible, helpless tension, he felt like he was pacing through a mausoleum.

  Cat's blood loss had not been as mortal as Theo had felt it must be. Some of the mess had been amniotic fluid and splashed water from the hot bath she had taken when the cramps first started becoming painful. The doctors talked calmly to him of premature rupture of membranes, of possible uterine abnormalities, but it might have been Byzantine religious ritual for all his poleaxed brain could make of it. Catherine Lillard slept most of the first ten hours, face pale as a picture-book princess, IVs jacked into both arms. When she opened her eyes at last, she seemed like a stranger.

  "Honey, I'm so sorry," he said. "It wasn't your fault. These things happen." She did not even waste her strength responding to such vacuities. She turned her face away and stared toward the dark television screen angled out from the wall.

  ————— He went through Cat's phone book. Her mother was there by breakfast, unhappy that Theo hadn't called earlier; her best friend Laney showed up just after. Both women wore jeans and work shirts, as though they were planning to roll up their sleeves and cook a church dinner or help build a barn. They seemed to draw a sort of curtain around his pale, silent girlfriend, an exclusionary barrier Theo could not cross. After an hour of manufacturing errands for himself, fetching coffee and magazines from downstairs, he told Catherine that he was going to go home and try to get a little sleep. Cat didn't say anything, but her mother agreed that was probably a good idea.

  He was only able to sleep three hours, tired as he was. When he got up, he realized he hadn't called anyone in his own circle of friends and family. It was hard to imagine who to call. Johnny? Theo knew what his friend's response would be, could even imagine the exact tone: "Oh, Thee, wow. That's such a bummer, man." He would run out of things to say in moments and then the inadequate guy-talk would hang, lame and awkward. Johnny would be sincere in his sorrow, of course — he really was a good guy — but calling him just seemed so pointless. And the idea of telling any of the other guys in the band was ludicrous. In fact, he needed to pass the news to Johnny at some point just so the drummer would do that for him, so that Theo didn't have to watch Kris and the other two pretend like they gave a shit, if they even bothered.

  Who else should he call? How could you lose a baby — his baby, too, he had to keep reminding himself, half his, not just Catherine's — and not tell anyone? Had it really come down to this, thirty years old and nobody in his life who he needed or wanted to talk to about the miscarriage?

  Where are my friends? I used to have people around me all the time. But who were they, those people? It had seemed exciting at the time — the girls who had flocked to his gigs, the guys who had wanted to manage him — but now he could hardly remember any of them. Friends? No, just people, and people didn't seem as interested in him these days.

  He wound up calling his mother, although he hadn't spoken to her since just after the beginning of February. It seemed unfair, to wait four weeks or so and then call up to deliver this sort of news, but he did
n't know what else to do.

  She answered before the second ring, as usual. It was unnerving, the way she always did that — as though she was never out of arm's reach of the phone. Surely her life wasn't that empty since Dad had died? It wasn't like the two of them had been party monsters or anything in the first place.

  "Hi, Mom."

  "Hello, Theo." Nothing else, no "It's been a long time," or "How are you?"

  "I just . . . I've got some bad news, Mom. Catherine lost the baby."

  The pause was long even by Anna Vilmos standards. "That's very sad, Theo. I'm sorry to hear it." "She had a miscarriage. I came home and found her on the bathroom floor. It was pretty awful. Blood everywhere." He realized he was telling it already like a story, not like something that had really happened to him. "She's okay, but I think she's pretty depressed."

  "What was the cause, Theo? They must know." They. Mom always talked about the people in power, any kind of power, as if they were a single all-knowing, all-powerful group. "No, actually they don't. It was just kind of . . . kind of a spontaneous thing. They're doing tests, but they don't know yet."

  "So sad." And that seemed to be the end of the conversation. Theo tried to recall what he'd thought when he called, what he had expected, if it had been anything more than a sort of filial duty — look, Mom, here's what's gone wrong in my life this month.

  It would have been a real baby, he thought suddenly. As real as me. As real as you, Mom. It's not just a "so sad." But he didn't say it. "Your uncle Harold is going to be in town next month." His father's younger brother was a retail executive who lived in Southern California. He had taken on himself the role of family patriarch when Theo's dad died, which meant that he called Theo's mom on Christmas Eve, and once or twice a year when he flew up to San Francisco on some other business he took her out to dinner at the Sizzler. "He would like to see you."

  "Yeah, well, I'll call you about that, maybe we can set something up." How quickly it had turned into the kind of interaction they always had, dry, faintly guilt-ridden. Theo wanted to say something different, wanted to stop the whole thing and ask her what she really felt, no, what he was supposed to feel about the terrible thing that had happened to him, but it was useless. It was as though they had to force their words across some medium less rich than normal air, so that only the simplest, most mundane things could pass from side to side without disappearing into the empty stillness.

  A quick and unclinging good-bye from his mother and Theo was alone with himself again. He called the hospital, wondering if Catherine was by herself and needed company. Laney picked up the phone and told him in a fairly cool manner that Cat was sleeping, that he didn't need to hurry over.

  "I took the day off work tomorrow, too," she said. "I'll be here." It sounded more like a threat to him than a favor to Cat.

  "How is she?"

  "How do you think?"

  "Hey, Jesus, Laney, you're acting like I pushed her down the stairs or something. This was my child, too."

  "I know that, Theo."

  "Don't you think I wish I was there when it happened? But I still couldn't have done anything about it. The doctor said so."

  "Nobody's blaming you, Theo."

  But it sure didn't sound like that. He stood in the living room after he had hung up, staring at the clutter untouched since the night before, the residue of normal lives suddenly interrupted by disaster and entombed like Pompeii. She had been sitting just there, watching television when the really bad cramps came. She had bumped the table getting up — a glass was still lying on the floor, a ghoststain of spilled diet cola visible on the shaggy, seen-better-days carpet. Was there blood before she reached the bathroom? He started to follow her track, then caught himself. It was too sick, too horrible. Like examining a murder scene.

  Only three hours of sleep, but he was buzzing like he was full of bad speed. He turned the television on. The images were meaningless. Where did my life go? How could something so small — it wasn't even really a baby yet, whatever she says — how could it change everything so much? But what kind of life was it, really, when you were only alive playing music, but you couldn't ever seem to find the right place to do that, the right people to do it with?

  Things came too easy for you, his mother had told him in a resigned way a few years back. You were so good at things when you were a little boy, the teachers made so much of you. That's why you never developed any ambition.

  Right now he needed to find something, anything, to keep himself busy. He wished Johnny were around so he could bum a cigarette off him, several of them, sit and smoke and drink cold beers and talk about bullshit that didn't matter. But he couldn't bear to call him and have to explain this weird, miserable thing, not right now.

  Cat's face was so pale . . . ! Like it was her heart that came out of her, not a little dead baby. He stood up and moved into their bedroom. They had boxes of things stacked there, waiting until he cleared out the spare bedroom — his practice room, as he sometimes called it, although he could count on one hand the times he'd actually spent in there with his guitar. The practice room was going to be the baby's room, and all those things would be the baby's things. Would have been. Now she wouldn't want to see them when she came back, the first few symbolic baby-clothes purchases, the books and stuffed toys she had picked up at a garage sale.

  "It doesn't count if you buy it used," she had told him, only half-joking. Or maybe not joking at all. "It doesn't jinx the baby."

  But it had. Or something had — Theo felt like he had been the jinx, somehow, although he couldn't say why, was drenched in guilt that he couldn't explain, like a mysterious stain on his clothes. In any case, here he was and there stood three big grocery-store boxes full of things that would make her cry when she got home. He could do something with them — that would be something useful he could manage. He could put them in the garage where she wouldn't have to see them right away, wouldn't have to walk in on her first day home and find a cute little stuffed dog looking back at her with button eyes.

  It wasn't all that easy to find a place for the baby things in the garage, where Theo's boxes of secondhand science-fiction books and other miscellaneous crap stood in tottering piles like the ruins of an ancient city, where unused exercise equipment and unbuilt packaged bookshelves left so little room for Cat's car that once the warm weather came for good she wouldn't even attempt the difficult task of parking in there again until late autumn, at which point all the new crap that had found its way in during the summer would have to be relocated so the car would fit in the garage again.

  As he was trying to squeeze the last box onto the narrow shelf above the workbench it toppled over and caught him a good shot on the temple; when he reached up, he came away with a spot of blood on his finger. The children's books had spilled out onto the steps leading down from the kitchen. Theo's head hurt. He lowered himself onto the bottom of the short stairway like a geriatric case so he wouldn't have to bend as he picked them up from the floor — old, well-thumbed and clearly loved copies of the Pooh stories, of Dr. Seuss and Where the Wild Things Are, all bought secondhand to fall within Cat's exemption. He picked up his own contribution, one that he'd bought new in a store just because he couldn't imagine raising a baby without it, and because even though he never made it up early enough Saturday mornings for Cat's garage-sale runs, he had wanted to contribute.

  Was I the one who jinxed it? In his bleak state, he couldn't even laugh the thought away. He flicked the book open. The strange, flat images, crude and almost childish at first glance, caught him up as they always did. Had his mom really read this to him? It seemed impossible to believe now that he'd had a mother who held her child in her lap and read him Goodnight Moon, but the words were as familiar as a catechism, the little rabbit in his great green room saying goodnight to all the familiar nursery objects, to the mittens and kittens, the comb and the brush, and of course, strangest of all, to "nobody."

  Goodnight nobody. He had never understood that
— in one way it was the most magical part of the book, and in another, the most frightening. All the other pictures, the rabbit-child in pajamas, the fire, the old lady rabbit reading, all made sense. The catalog of items, chairs and cats and socks, goodnight, goodnight, then just that blank page and "goodnight nobody." But who was Nobody? It was childhood zen. Sometimes he had thought in his little-boy way that he might be the book's Nobody, Theo himself, an anonymous presence — that the book knew he was out there watching the bunny get ready for bed, looking into the warm, cozy room from outside, as through a window. His mother had contributed to that: whenever they reached that part of the book, she had always said, "Goodnight, nobody. Say goodnight." And Theo had done so. Perhaps she had only meant for him to say goodnight to the little someone known as Nobody. But he had always believed she was calling him Nobody, telling him it was his turn to say goodnight now, and so he had dutifully obeyed.

  In this last winter, since the pregnancy test had come back, Theo had sometimes imagined a little girl sitting on his lap — Cat had been certain from the first that it was a little girl, even though they hadn't had an ultrasound exam yet — her head against his chest as they leafed through the book together. In his offhand dreams he had never quite been able to imagine what she looked like, had pictured only a head of soft curly hair, a warm little body pressed against him. Nobody. She had looked like Nobody. And that was who she had turned out to be.

  He flicked through the pages, the drawings with their strange, dreamlike perspective. Then at the end, the final little catechism, saying goodnight to the last things — the stars, the air, and to noises everywhere.