by Dan Chaon
Soon she is going to get up and walk over to the men and ask for information. But right now she just needs to sit here for a moment.
——
Her arm has stopped working. She tries to lift it and nothing happens. She stares at her hand and wills her fingers to curl and grip. They don’t. The arm rests on her knee, and she reaches out cautiously to prod it with her finger. There’s no feeling in it.
She tries to assure herself that it’s just stress, that it’s some odd psychosomatic reaction to the situation. If it was a stroke or a heart attack, wouldn’t it hurt?
If she tells someone, they will call an ambulance, she knows. She will find herself in an emergency room, tended by condescending nurses. Whatever is happening back at home—whether Loomis is found, or whether he is dead, or whether clues to his whereabouts are discovered—all of this will be kept from her as she is poked and attached to monitors, as she becomes a body that is being examined and cared for. They will turn her into a willful child—as a grammar school teacher, she knows all their tricks, all the things about her personality they will want to control and subdue.
——
What is happening? A thick, balding man walks past her, stepping around her and into her house without saying a word, without a simple “May I?” And then she hears him talking to someone on a walkie-talkie.
“I guess they’re bringing the father over right now. They don’t have any take on the whereabouts of the mother of the child,” he says. She can see his slacks, some kind of brown cotton with an ironed crease down the leg, made by an old-fashioned wife, no doubt, or a dry cleaner.
“No, it was just the grandmother who was watching him,” the man says, and glances at her without much interest. His shoes are black and shiny, slip-ons, with leather tassels hanging from the tongue.
“I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . .” the man says. His eyes turn sidelong at Judy, as if he is considering asking her a question. “No, they didn’t get divorced,” he says, and lowers his voice a little. He must believe that she is hard of hearing, or that she is too confused to realize what he’s talking about. “It sounds like she just up and left,” he says, in a judgmental voice that makes Judy stiffen. “Drug addict of some sort, apparently,” he says, and makes a short, snorting “heh” sound, as if the person he is talking to has made a snide remark. “No,” he says. “I don’t think so. I’m looking at her right now. She’s just sitting there on the step. She looks pretty out of it.”
She wants to respond to this, to glare at this buffoon and let him know she can hear his spittley voice, but she is afraid that her voice will come out slurred, like a drunk’s. She is staring at the unresponsive arm, thinking very hard at it. Her brain sends a signal to her index finger, to lift, just a little, and she imagines that she sees it shudder. But maybe not. For some reason, she thinks of that famous Israeli psychic from the seventies, who was said to be able to bend spoons with the power of his mind. She focuses all of her brain’s energy on the finger, and she can feel her face growing red, the flesh of her cheeks quivering a little. Go on, she urges it gently, Go on, she thinks, but nothing happens. A watery tremor trickles through her, and she closes her eyes.
——
She is struck by the premonition that Carla is nearby. There is, somewhere at the edge of the yard, the hint of Carla’s voice, and Judy thinks: Oh! Her mind clutches loosely at the sound, and she imagines that they have found Carla, or that Carla has simply appeared, joining the circle of men and dogs on the sidewalk, introducing herself, flirting. Judy can visualize Carla standing there with her hip cocked, drawing on a cigarette, her hard mouth and sly eyes. “Why do you always look at me that way?” Judy can imagine her saying, and there is the high, shimmering tine of insect music from the trees, the sense of something encroaching. A pattern of sun beats against her eyelids through the dappled branches.
——
She is aware of herself dividing. There is a reasonable self, floating above her perceptions, a practical mind that observes the sensual organism. She is aware of herself as muscle and fat wrapped in damp skin, aware of herself as a dry, yellow-tasting tongue, aware of the matrix of sounds that spreads out from the center point of her body, the interstate of blood moving, the grasping tendrils of the spirit, seeking purchase.
The reasonable self knows that nothing at all is happening. She is just an old fat lady, sitting on a stoop with her eyes closed. Carla is not here, and besides, even if by some miracle Carla suddenly arrives on the scene, even if Judy opens her eyes and Carla is staring at her from across the lawn, there will be only enmity between them. She has known for a long time now that there will be no resolution or last-minute deathbed reconciliation; she has known that their relationship is a closed casket, sealed and buried and irretrievable. It doesn’t matter if she opens her eyes or not. Carla, her real daughter, won’t be there.
And yet there is still the hint of a voice, still the thick flutter of illogic, and she finds herself picturing Carla not as she would be today, but Carla as she was, Carla, aged fourteen or fifteen, her hair teased and moussed, her makeup overdone, wearing a shimmering silver shirt and faux leather pants. A silly, reckless girl, Judy thinks, a girl without qualities, a girl who needs a stern hand. Her child, and yet so different from her that it seemed as if a mistake had been made.
“Do you know how much it hurts me when your teachers call to complain about your behavior?” Judy used to say. “Do you like humiliating me, is that it?” And when Carla had said nothing, Judy had continued, as if to herself. “It really makes me feel so depressed,” she said. “A lot of these people are my colleagues, do you know that? People I work with, people I’m friends with, and then to have you behaving in such a way in their classroom! It’s so disrespectful, Carla, and you know, I don’t feel like you love me very much, when you act this way. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t keep embarrassing me.”
Carla used to cry a little, after these incidents. She would go to sleep with her stuffed animals encircled in her arms, a blanket pulled over her head. Quick to blame others. I never did anything. It’s not my fault. They’re lying. They’re trying to get me in trouble. And then shortly afterward, there were the drugs, and the arguments about that, and the concealment of the drugs, and the drug rehab clinic that she’d finally decided on.
“Mom,” Carla said, “please don’t make me go.” That was the last time Carla had called her Mom, Judy thinks. “I’ll do better,” Carla said. “I swear I’ll listen to you from now on.”
——
Judy can say nothing now. She just sits there on the stoop with her eyes closed, with her arm motionless, pressing her tongue between her teeth, remembering that drive to the clinic—Carla in the passenger seat, her face turned toward the window, occasionally making the small, froggy sounds of swallowed weeping. Judy had believed, at the time, that the treatments at the clinic would remove the drugs and the alcohol and the recalcitrant desire for them the way chemotherapy burned away a cancer. She believed that her daughter would be returned to her, whole and clean and grateful, and thinking this she had hardened herself to Carla’s whimpering.
She never would have expected that her daughter would, instead, become worse. In rehab, Carla would meet a new friend, a girl who’d teach her easy pathways to new types of drugs; in rehab, Carla would stubbornly refuse to admit that she was “powerless” against addiction, and the therapist would call Judy in, and they would both sit there, explaining and insisting and steadily beating her with their words, until she admitted, at last, her eyes blazing and puffy with tears, that she was “powerless.”
For a flash, Judy can feel Carla’s fingers against her wrist, her flushed face against Judy’s neck. She holds a three-year-old Carla in her lap, reading to her, singing to her. Television is limited, in their house, to educational programs. They drive all the way to Denver, to go to art museums, listening to tapes of classical music in the car. Her IQ was tested—well above average, not quite geni
us level but close.
“You can be anything you want,” Judy said. “I just want you to be happy.”
And Carla, perhaps age ten, had gazed at her suspiciously. Even then, Judy had known that things between them would end badly. “You’re capable of so much,” Judy said. “That’s what I don’t understand about you. Why do you enjoy sabotaging yourself?”
——
“Mrs. Keene?” someone says. “Are you all right?”
——
She doesn’t say anything. Admit that you are powerless, Judy thinks, and even now it is not something she could bring herself to do. She will get up, she thinks. She will tell them that Loomis’s disappearance has nothing to do with her daughter, or, for that matter, her worthless son-in-law, who they are discussing in the living room, just at the edge of her hearing. She will open her eyes, she thinks. And maybe Carla will be standing there.
——
“Mrs. Keene?” someone says again, and she tries to pull her eyelids open.
——
She grimaces: a terrible headache. She is touching her left tricep with her fingers, and when she lifts her eyelids the light hits her in a sharp, painful flash. She is aware that her eyes are beginning to leak tears, blurring her sight. The left eye appears to be blind. A large black dot grows over her vision like an iris, dilating and dilating, a thickness of spots, like a swarm of bees. She shuts the eye and it seems to go away.
She can feel her body listing, slipping into the empty air beyond her shoulder.
What if she’s dying? she thinks.
What if she never knows the end of the story? She shudders, and her mind continues to lurch forward into the future, that simple expectation of time passing—another moment, and another moment. It seems impossible that it will abruptly cease. It seems impossible that you will never know what happens next, that the thread you’ve been following your whole life will just . . . cut off, like a book with the last pages torn out. That doesn’t seem fair, she thinks.
PART THREE
25
June 1966
Despite herself, Nora can’t help but imagine names for the baby. She likes boys’ names—old-fashioned, heroic ones: Agamemnon, Pyrrhus, Octavion, Aristedes. She has been reading a book about the ancient heroes of Greece and Rome, and it makes her sad that people can’t be given such names anymore.
Octavion Doyle, she thinks as she walks down to the cafeteria for supper. Jupiter Doyle, and she smiles vaguely to herself. Zeus.
She is aware of the other girls moving with her down the hallway but she doesn’t acknowledge them. They are dressed as she is in cheap smocks, their old perms and hairdos now growing limp and fading; they smell of sleep and old cigarettes, and the acrid musk of their private parts.
She has watched the girls who have gone before her; she has seen how it works. They fade and fade, until at last they begin to go into labor, and then they are never seen again. She knows: They give birth to babies, babies that childless parents are already waiting for. And then, pregnant no longer, they are returned to their former lives, or to new lives in distant towns, where they can forget. She knows this is what happens, but it’s becoming harder and harder for her to believe. Once they’re gone, it feels as if they are dead.
As they close in on the cafeteria, her baby tells her that he is hungry. She puts her hand to her belly as he lolls, moving his limbs inside her; she feels the anxious urgency of his squirm, his eagerness, and she whispers under her breath: shhh. For a moment, he quiets, though he continues to send tingles of anticipation through her, eager for the food.
She can’t say why, but she knows that it’s a boy inside her. Hector? Alexander? Theseus? Whatever his name, he is a clearly masculine presence, and in some ways that is a comfort. She wouldn’t want to have a girl, she thinks. There’s too much trouble, too much sorrow that goes along with it.
——
She eats in silence at the end of the table, not even thinking about the food, really—a patty of meat in gravy, a side of canned green beans, a dollop of whipped potato, applesauce—she shovels it in, automatically, and the baby’s urgency calms. At the other end of the table others are chatting, something about rock bands, but she sits there with her face lowered, steadily spooning the potato whip and applesauce into her mouth, making small involuntary sounds, muted sighs of satisfaction.
Across the table one of the newer girls regards Nora warily, with a reserved air of disapproval. Table manners, Nora thinks. She’s been making sounds in her haste to get the baby satisfied, smacking and chewing and grunting: disgusting. She lifts her head long enough to give the new girl a direct, baleful stare. She watches as the girl twitters silently, unnerved, but she doesn’t maintain eye contact. The new girl looks down at her own food deliberately, her lips pursed, and brings a small spoonful of applesauce to her mouth as if she is eating a pearl.
Nora doesn’t care. She has given up on even the simple basics of social contact. After Maris vanished, after Dominique had gone into labor, after the baby itself had become her primary human connection, she didn’t feel the need to engage in the empty rituals of greeting and polite time-passing. It seems pointless, she thinks. She can spend her time more fruitfully reading, or simply communing with the developing creature inside her—its movements, its pleasures and displeasures, the early rudiments of its thoughts traveling through her body. It says, I’m hungry. I’m restless. I’m happy. She can feel these things as clearly as if it had spoken to her directly.
Sometimes she will open her eyes at night and she will be aware that it is awake.
You wouldn’t really give me away, would you? it thinks, curled up inside her, its limbs moving softly.
And she stares into the darkness.
Why are you so stubborn? it murmurs, plaintively.
——
She doesn’t know the answer to such questions. Only a few months ago she would have wished this thing, this baby, out of existence without a second thought. She remembers punching herself in the belly; she remembers tasting bleach, which she had heard could induce a miscarriage; she remembers how adamant she’d been with her father, who’d argued with her, gently, sorrowful, befuddled. He thought she should get married, and he’d wept when she admitted that she hadn’t told the baby’s father. “Honey,” he said, “that’s not right. That’s not right. Believe me, he’d want to know what’s going on. You just have to give him the chance.”
And she’d looked at him sternly. Didn’t he get it? What would the future be for her? Married at age sixteen, two high school dropouts, stuck forever in Little Bow, South Dakota, everyone’s lives ruined. She felt her teeth clench. Why would she choose that for herself? Why would she force anyone else to accept that life? I want what’s best for the baby, she’d told her father, and that’s not having me for a mother.
——
But now, sitting in Mrs. Bibb’s office, less than a week before her due date, she is less certain. She watches as Mrs. Bibb looks at some papers on the desk, and then up, frowning.
“I’ve been concerned about you, Miss . . . Doyle,” Mrs. Bibb says. Nora sits in the large wing-backed chair across from Bibb’s desk, where once, long ago, Nora and her father had listened to Mrs. Bibb’s recitation of the rules of residency. “There’s been some concern about your comportment lately. Do you know what I mean by the word comportment?”
“Yes,” Nora says. She lets a thick lock of her hair obscure one of her eyes like a patch, and lowers her head.
“You’re a very bright girl,” Mrs. Bibb says. “I’ve always known that. And I felt that I ought to talk to you, because these next few weeks are going to be extraordinarily difficult.” She purses her mouth, folding her hands deliberately on the desk, left hand on top of right, so that her own, real golden wedding ring glints. “Your body is changing, Nora,” Mrs. Bibb says. “You’re going through a lot of physical changes that can also affect you . . . psychologically. And when that happens, very often girls will begin to have s
econd thoughts.”
“Well,” Nora says.
But Mrs. Bibb clears her throat. “I wanted to say, Miss Doyle, that I admire your spirit very much. And I wanted to affirm once again that you are doing the right thing. I’m not at liberty to say much, but I can tell you that there are several very loving, childless couples who are waiting to give this child a real home. It’s such an act of generosity, Miss Doyle. Such a gift for this child. But I know that it must be a struggle for you.”
“Well,” Nora says again, and her throat constricts. “What . . . what if I’ve changed my mind?”
Mrs. Bibb smiles, benignly. “You haven’t changed your mind, Miss Doyle,” she says. “You may be going through some changes in your body’s chemistry, but that is natural, and it will pass, I can assure you. You’ll be able to get on with your own life, and you’ll have given this child you’re carrying an opportunity that it simply couldn’t have if it were being raised by an unwed teenager. We agreed on these points, I think, when you first came to the Mrs. Glass House. Didn’t we?”
“Yes,” Nora says at last, and the baby shifts reproachfully inside her.
——
Even though she has sworn to herself that she wouldn’t, even though she continues to make a concerted effort, she has been thinking about the boy again.
Wayne. She lets his name pass through her mind, and his face comes trailing after, unbidden. Wayne. His dark curly hair; his long face, handsome for a farm kid—the prominent nose, the earnest brown eyes, the uncertain mouth—each detail emerging from the darkness like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
