The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  “Cats and coyotes?”

  “Not together,” she said.

  He put his lunch sack down between the pages of her work and pulled out a battered banana. They’d been saving their money since before they got married, saving for a baby’s future and their own. Now that money might go to fertility treatments, if you asked Sarah.

  There was a shuffling of feet. A woman came down the hall. It was Nyla, in their house. Her hair was wet. Nyla’s ghost had just stepped out of a shower. She looked sad, but young and pretty, about the age Nyla had been when Ben first met her, right before Celeste was born.

  She came through the front room and paused. She opened her mouth—Nyla had a message for them. She said, “I think you’re out of conditioner.” She nodded and moved up the stairs.

  Ben whispered, “Jesus.”

  Sarah said, “I know.”

  It was Celestial, home from school for the funeral and to manage her mother’s things.

  Sarah turned to the extra chair beside her at the table, and pulled papers from Nyla’s undyed canvas sack.

  She’d kept it. Arena had said she should.

  Arena’s shoes lay in the hall, one right side up, the other upside down. She’d been sleeping in their spare room. Nobody wanted to sleep in Nyla’s big empty house. Now Celeste would stay here, too.

  In a crowded city on a crowded planet overrun with seven billion people multiplying fast, they missed Nyla.

  One person.

  Sarah felt the loss of Nyla’s baby, too, a person she’d never met.

  Everybody mattered. Every last one.

  Ben went to the table and laid down the photo. He said, “Let’s buy it and move. We could cut back on work. All we need is each other.”

  It was a proposal as good as marriage all over again. Sarah picked up the glossy photo. “It’s a giant penis.”

  It was the silo house.

  He looked over her shoulder. “I hadn’t noticed that.” The house was virile in the way it jutted up from the flat land around it.

  Sarah held it to her own lap, a cock, then turned it sideways and pressed it against Ben’s crotch. He said, “We could sell our place and offer them cash.”

  “It’s so far away,” Sarah said. “I can’t move away from Dulcet and Georgie. Not now.”

  She couldn’t. Ben knew it. She said, “We can’t leave Arena.”

  “We could take her with us,” Ben said. “For what, another year? Maybe six months, by the time we move in.” Then she’d go off to college.

  Legally she’d be on her own, emancipated, and financially independent. They were her unofficial guardians.

  Weren’t they all unofficial guardians of one another?

  But theirs was the house she had chosen to come to. They had ghost girls to care for now.

  Ben took a drink from a glass of water on the table and swallowed. He said, “People like to visit a house in the country.”

  “One bedroom.” Sarah read the stats.

  “One big bedroom,” he said. Mostly, it was isolated, and it was near where Ben grew up. It would be like going back home. “We could have camping parties, in the summer. Set up tents. There’s nobody for miles.”

  He ran a hand over her hair. “You know, we might never have a baby.”

  She smiled, a nervous smile, with a tick on one side. “Round five.” She held up a hand, all fingers shown. After she said it, she was beaming, like the sun coming through the clouds, the first time she’d smiled since Nyla died. She tapped the eraser of her pencil against her paperwork. She swiveled in her chair. Ben sensed he was looking at two people at once. He actually was looking at two people: There was a baby between them. It was a risk. He said, “I can’t go through that again.”

  Sarah stood up. She said, “It’ll be okay.”

  He burbled then. Ben cried, and tried not to, and this, he thought, was what the makeup covered: his broken heart. He slid the silo house photo away from them on the table. “Our lives are good.”

  “They are.” She hugged him close.

  Ben sunk his fingers into Sarah’s shoulders hard, in a back rub that was more about holding on to his wife. She peeled his fingers off. He said, “Nyla was killed by a baby.”

  A deadly little unborn baby that’d taken up residence in her fallopian tube, death by overpopulation of one; there was no room for a growing embryo there.

  It was that misguided collection of cells with its will to live, two people who had come together to create one.

  She said, “We have health insurance. We have doctors, primary care physicians, I take vitamins—”

  Ben whispered to Sarah, “I can’t lose you.” He felt her blood warming her skin through its network of veins, arteries, and capillaries.

  Vitamins? There was no certainty.

  She said, “Shhh …,” and rubbed her body against his. She said, “A baby! It’ll be different for us.”

  I am deeply grateful for the support of so many amazing people. In particular: my writing crew, Lidia Yuknavitch, Suzy Vitello, Chuck Palahniuk, Andy Mingo, Mary Wysong-Haeri, Erin Leonard, Chelsea Cain, Diana Page Jordan, James Bernard Frost, and Cheryl Strayed; Mitch Finnegan, Christine Fletcher, Alicia Zambelli, and Ann Duncan, for their knowledge of animals and animal care; Mickey Lindsay, Cynthia Chimienti, Bellen Drake, Nirel, Lise Pacioretty, Djamilah Troncelliti, Sonya Schmick Carnes, Marne Lucas, and Joanna Berton Martinez, for their inspiration, support, and kindred spirits; Seth Fishman, Alexis Washam, Christine Kopprasch, for their wisdom; PNCA and the Sally Lawrence Award; and always, Barbara Drake, Albert Drake, and Kassten Alonso.

  MONICA DRAKE is the author of Clown Girl, winner of an Eric Hoffer Award and an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award). Her essays and short stories have appeared in a variety of journals, and she is a regular contributor to the Oregonian, the Portland Mercury, and the Stranger (Seattle). Monica has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently on the faculty at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.