The Shelter Cycle

by Peter Rock

  Then, a pale band of light. Along the dark, wood-paneled wall, three feet from the bed. Colville thought of headlights, checked the curtains—they were closed; it was dark at the window.

  Careful not to wake the baby, he sat up and swung his legs around, put his bare feet on the floor between the two beds. He stood and walked around to the baby’s side of the bed, closer to the wall. As he turned, he felt and saw the pale light on his dark T-shirt, flickering across his chest. He checked the dark window again.

  The light was coming from the baby. She still slept, but the skin of her face, turned toward the wall, cast an even glow. He felt every hair on his head tighten, pulse. He pulled his hand out of the light, rubbed it against his shirt.

  “Colville,” a voice said.

  He froze, glanced toward the door, then crept along the carpet, moving on his toes, on his fingertips. He checked the dead bolt, the chain. Everything was locked. Pressing his ear to the door, he heard nothing. Had someone really said his name? He still did not stand up; he stayed low as he moved past the window, as if there were a gap in the curtains. There wasn’t.

  Once he reached the bathroom, he pushed the door gently open, leaned in, looked into the bathtub. Nothing, no one.

  “Baby food?” the voice said, everywhere in the room at once. “I can’t even roll over yet and you expect me to eat baby food?”

  Colville stepped back into the room. The dark shape in the mirror, his own body, startled him. The back of his hand brushed the television’s dark screen and it crackled, a sudden shock.

  “I’m surprised you hesitate to see,” the voice said, “you who believed your childhood friend came back to call on you in the form of a badger.”

  Colville stepped into the space between the two beds, closer to the baby.

  “Don’t look at me while I’m talking,” she said. “Not my face. Don’t look at my face.”

  Colville sat on the other bed, his eyes closed. He tried to slow his breathing, his heart.

  “Better,” she said, after a moment.

  “It was a raccoon,” he said. “You know that, you have to know that.”

  “A raccoon? Was it? You’re probably right.” The baby made a noise like a laugh, an intake of breath that sounded like tearing paper.

  “You have to tell me,” he said. “I know I’m not supposed to touch the top of your head. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to even hold you.”

  “There are exceptions,” she said. “How am I going to move anywhere if you don’t hold me?”

  Her voice was low, breathy, somewhere between a man’s voice and a woman’s voice. It didn’t so much echo in the room as appear suddenly in his ears, and as she spoke her words came more slowly, more softly, as if she were drifting off to sleep. Colville sat in silence; carefully, he opened his eyes. The baby still lay there, swaddled. He could not tell if her eyes were open, as her face was tilted toward the wall.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “Who have I been, or who will I become?”

  Without warning the baby let out a little cry, a rising squall. The surface of the blanket moved as she tried to get her arms free.

  “What should I do?” he said.

  “I have to sleep,” she said. “Don’t look at me while I’m talking. Remember that. My diaper’s wet, too. Change it, please, so I can sleep. I get tired so fast with this talking, it’s ridiculous.”

  He stood, his legs unsteady beneath him. Reaching into the packet for a new diaper—they were a little large, but his guess had not been far off—he began to unfold the blanket that swaddled the baby. He was still anxious about looking at her, afraid she might begin speaking again; this made the operation impossible. She began to cry as he fumbled, and he hurried, trying to stop the sound. Her lips curled back over her gums, her toothless mouth. She turned her head to watch what he was doing, and her dark eyes didn’t seem to quite focus on him. They drifted, cloudy, they rolled, and they closed again as he snapped the sleep suit back on, as he wrapped the blanket tightly around her.

  He laid her down, stretched himself alongside her, as they had been before. There was only the slight sound of her breathing. It sped up, it slowed down. She sighed in her sleep. The pale light still shone from her, a band of it glowing along the paneling of the wall.

  Colville tried to settle his body, his emotions inside it, and also his thoughts. This baby he’d been given, she was an honor and a responsibility at once. She seemed to know so much, and yet there would be so many things that she couldn’t do, so many things that could happen to her that she wouldn’t be able to prevent. In his notebook he’d copied a passage that the Messenger had written, how at her birth and in her early years she had been aware of the realms of Light from which she’d descended, had been able to recall her previous embodiments, but that this awareness faded as the soft spot at the crown of her head closed over and as the adults around her discouraged such talk, calling it fantasy. With this baby, he would encourage her to remember, to stay in contact with the Light so she could bring it more fully into the world. This he would do.

  He thought of the Messenger, her body still alive, walking and talking in Bozeman, and her soul adrift and traveling, perhaps finding a home, a return in this baby sleeping next to him. He looked down at her, tucked against his ribs, her skin so smooth and faintly glowing. The soul moved from one to the next, necessary shelters and vehicles on its path.

  “Colville? Are you awake?”

  Had he slept? The clock now read 6:20.

  “I’m awake,” he said.

  “You’re doing the best you can, I know that.” Again the tearing laugh, the baby’s body trembling slightly. “Jeremy didn’t tell you to steal me, did he? His ideas, sometimes—”

  “No,” Colville said. “That was me. I thought, after the girl—”

  “It’s all right,” the baby said. “It only complicates things—it wasn’t the simplest way to proceed. It’s not. Of course, you and I had to be brought together, to talk, so someone could tell you what to do next, where to go. You might say you don’t need instruction, but you know you do.”

  Colville was still waking up; he watched the baby speak before he caught himself. Her lips moved, her mouth jerked slowly as if she were chewing, sucked as if she were nursing, but the motion, the shapes didn’t match up with the words he heard. It was as if the voice had been dubbed, somehow, over the sounds a baby might make.

  “This morning,” she said, “first thing you need to do is go buy the maps. From the store where you went before, where you found those snowshoes and that ridiculous camouflage suit. You still have those things, I see. You’ll need them.”

  He looked away: at the open bathroom door, light spilling out; at the row of glass bottles and rubber nipples on the counter; at the painting of an elk, hanging over the television, bugling as it stood next to a mountain stream.

  “The maps,” she was saying. “That special kind of map, on the grid. What’s the word? The kind you had before.”

  “Topographic,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “British Columbia, a place called Monashee Park, especially the area near Bill Fraser Lake. Way out in the wilderness, deep snow, you’ll see. We’ve set up a cabin near there, and there’s money and weapons buried. I’ll show you on the map. You’re resourceful, I know, Colville. I’ve seen it.”

  A voice shouted outside. A horn honked. Somewhere a door slammed.

  “Isn’t there enough money at the Heart?” he said. “The shelter there?”

  “Perhaps that will be for later,” she said. “Twenty, thirty years from now, when I’m ready. It will take some patience.”

  “I can be patient,” he said.

  “The store’s not open yet,” she said. “In the meantime, I’ll tell you more, as long as I can stay awake. Your instructions, the future, how everything should unfold.” Her voice drifted off, and she cried out for a moment before settling, continuing. “Monashee,” she said. “There’re no roads at
Monashee. You have to walk in. There are bears, of course, though what is truly remarkable are the wolverines. We had some times with the wolverines.”

  “Thirty years?” he said.

  “Maybe not so long,” she said. “Maybe not. Prophecy is mercy and opportunity, after all. It’s not set in stone.”

  With that, she pulled one of her hands loose from the blankets and began to open and close her fingers, right in front of her face. He waited for her to say more, but she was finished, had returned to being a baby. She stared at her fingers, transfixed by the wonder of their opening and closing.

  25

  COLVILLE COULD FEEL the warm weight of the baby, now, between his shoulder blades, her calm vibration easing through him. She slept as he walked along North 9th Street, closer to the elementary school. The sidewalk had been shoveled in front of some houses but remained icy and slick in front of others. He took each step with care. As powerful as she was, she was still fragile, the skin of her ears so thin that light shone through, her eyelashes long and delicate, her wrists thin and awkward. The blue veins forked so clearly beneath the white skin of her chest, and her forehead, her skull, the soft spot pulsing there.

  Earlier this morning, when he had returned from the store, the baby was crying, hungry. She slept after drinking a bottle of formula; as she did, he whispered his way through a round of decrees, then organized the maps and snowshoes, the materials that he’d purchased. It was almost noon when she awakened. He spoke to her then, explaining his purchases, but she only cried. Her diaper was dirty; she was hungry. She didn’t tell him, she just cried without tears, her face going red—this was how quickly and completely she shifted back and forth from being only a baby to being something, someone else. He’d fed her, he’d changed her diaper, and only then, just as it seemed she was falling asleep, did she begin to speak.

  “Colville,” she’d said. “Turn on the television. Turn down the sound. Good. Now listen. And if you look at me again while I’m talking, you won’t hear another word.”

  There were a lot of instructions—some easy, some complicated enough that he had to write them down in his notebook; his eyes still fixed on the television, his words slanted away at all angles, overlapping each other. The coordinates on the map and the rest of the information, all the instructions he’d need to get from here to there. On the television screen, vans—news crews—were lined all up and down a snowy street. Newscasters talked into microphones, standing in front of Francine’s house. There was no sign of Francine, no sign of Wells. At the bottom of the screen, words said ANOTHER ABDUCTION ON “UNLUCKY STREET”: POLICE SAY TOO SOON TO ESTABLISH LINK. Next, a photograph of the baby who was at that moment in the room with him, talking, telling him that later this afternoon, when they went out, he could not wear his orange frame pack, that it might draw attention, might even be something people were looking for.

  That was why he’d made the pack, the carrier that held her now, still sleeping on his back as he stepped aside to let the mailman pass on the narrow sidewalk. The pack was from a diagram, some pictures in the Boy Scout Fieldbook, something he’d always wanted to try. He’d taken an extra pair of his long pants, tied a cord tight around the cuff of each leg, and then folded the legs up, bent at the knee, and tied the cuffs through the belt loops beside the zipper. That way, the legs became shoulder straps. He cushioned the seat of the pants with a fleece vest and the down liner of his parka, so the baby would be warm and comfortable. Another cord fit through all the belt loops; pulled tight, it cinched the top of his pack closed, over the baby’s sleeping face.

  Now he leapt an icy puddle, slipped between parked cars, moving toward a square building of pale reddish brick. Longfellow Elementary School, its two entryways held up by concrete pillars, took up most of the block. He walked past without slowing; people sat in parked cars, parents waiting to pick up their children. The school day was almost over.

  The baby sighed, shifted her weight, did not awaken. Along a chain-link fence, near some picnic tables, Colville slowed and turned, glancing back at the school’s arched windows, up high, and all the rows below. Through one of those windows the sister was sitting, waiting, perhaps watching a clock. He hoped that her parents, her mother or father, weren’t sitting nearby in one of these cars; he couldn’t blame them if they were, given everything that had happened.

  The bell rang, shaking the air, startling him. Almost immediately, children spilled from the doors of the school with their jackets half on or dragged along the ground, their high-pitched voices shouting. Horns honked. Car doors opened and closed.

  He was afraid he might miss her, but he didn’t want to move any closer to the children, to endanger himself. Voices shouted. He stood still. No one was looking at him. Cars swung slowly into the street, cutting through the slush, driving away. And there she was. Wearing a powder-blue coat and black snowmobile boots, a yellow knit cap over her messy dark hair.

  “Della,” he said.

  Her eyes glanced up at his face, then quickly down again.

  “Stranger,” she said.

  When she tried to walk past, around him, he stepped in front of her.

  “I’ll shout,” she said. “I’ll run away screaming.”

  “But I’m not a stranger,” he said. “I know your name. You know me. I’m Colville. We talked to each other, up in the hills behind your house, about your sister.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re not a stranger.”

  “I noticed your trampoline is gone,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said. “They might put it back up sometime.”

  Out in the playground, red plastic slides shaped like tubes, like hamster toys, stood out sharply against the snow, the empty basketball courts icy under bare trees.

  “We used to play a game,” she said. “Where I jumped and she was under the tramp so I could see her like a shadow and she tried to slap my feet when I jumped, where I landed.”

  “Let’s keep walking,” he said.

  “That game made us really laugh,” she said.

  “Della,” he said, “I need to talk with you, just a little bit, for just a little while.”

  “My mom’s picking me up.”

  Fields stretched, tracked with footprints. Children walked across them in twos and threes. Brothers, sisters. Neighbors. A girl shouted Della’s name and waved. Della waved back. Colville waited. The girl finally turned and kept walking away across the field.

  “We can come right back here if you like,” he said, slow to say anything now that Della had begun to walk alongside him.

  “You stole my neighbor’s dog,” she said. “I saw you.”

  “I brought it back,” he said. “I returned it to them just the other day.”

  “Are you wearing pants on your shoulders?”

  “It’s a backpack,” he said. “I made it myself, yes, from a pair of pants.”

  Della looked at it suspiciously, but didn’t ask any more questions. She scratched her nose with a bare hand, her right one; she wore a white-and-red knit glove on her left hand.

  “I’ve been thinking of your sister,” he said.

  “This coat’s hers, the one I wear.” Della held one arm straight, pointed to her sleeve. “Sometimes people think I’m her.”

  Above, the sky was gray, a constant pressure pushing down. They crossed an intersection onto a quieter street. No cars slowed. No one came running out of the houses they passed. No voices shouted. Colville glanced all around; he felt Della’s mother circling and circling, searching the area, winding closer.

  “I’ve seen your sister,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “She’s far away. She’s happy, very happy.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “She’s not coming back,” he said. “I have to tell you that.”

  “She’s not dead.”

  “No, she’s not dead,” Colville said. “You could think of her like she turned into another person, kind of.”

  Reaching
into his pocket, he took out the leaf. It had dried a little, gone brittle with new lines, but the words Hello Friend still showed darkest, words scratched in. Colville held the leaf out and Della took it. She held it close to her face, squinting, then put it away in her pocket without saying anything.

  “That’s from where she is,” he said. “The forest where she’s living.”

  “Okay,” Della said.

  They continued to walk. She slid her boots in the slush, a raspy sound when the soles hit concrete. She pushed her black bangs up under her yellow wool hat.

  “Did you hear about the baby?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your neighbor’s baby.”

  “Of course I did,” she said. “Everyone knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “That someone took that baby.”

  “I see,” he said, slowing, one hand on her shoulder before she shrugged it off. “Della,” he said. “Did you tell anyone about the dog?”

  “No,” she said. “No one asked me.”

  A mail truck circled past; was this the second time? Chains rattled and rang from its tires.

  “Where are you going to take me?” Della said.

  “What?”

  “To the forest?”

  “No.”

  “Take me to where my sister is. You said she’s happy, right? I want to go.”

  “I have the baby,” he said.

  “The baby?”

  “Your neighbor’s baby.”

  “You took it?”

  “I need your help with her.”

  They went through the gate into the cemetery; here pine trees provided better cover. Colville stopped walking and Della did not run away. She turned to face him, to listen.

  “It’s that I’m not equipped,” he said, “not really the person to take care of her. Not right now I’m not, anyway.” He stammered, trying to get the words straight. “What it is is that the baby needs her parents and they need her. So what I need is, I need you to do is take her back to them.”