The Cradle

by Patrick Somerville

  “It’s hard to forget an address like that.”

  “That address is so easy I’m surprised you didn’t just one day suddenly find yourself there.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Glen,” Matt said, “are you and Caroline still married, then?”

  “No. The papers came in the mail a few months later. Some lawyer in Minneapolis. I signed them all and sent them back where they were supposed to go, and that was the end.”

  “Why’d you sign them?” Matt asked. “Couldn’t you have found her that way? Gone to see her? Talked to her?”

  “I signed them—” Glen started saying, but he hesitated. Matt waited. “I signed them just because. Maybe this is hard to understand, but I signed them because I thought signing them would make three lives better. Every life inside of the family.”

  “What family?”

  “Ours.”

  “But it was gone.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  “Does Marissa know about the papers?”

  “Yes,” he said. “She knows.”

  In the morning Matt had cereal at the table in the kitchen. Marissa came down while he was eating, in her bathrobe. She’d called in sick. He didn’t think she should be working anymore anyway, but Marissa, up until now, had done everything she could to continue and seemed almost offended by the idea of changing her routine or her life. She didn’t want anyone to think she was taking advantage.

  “No one’s gonna think that,” Matt had said. “You work at the damned Planned Parenthood. They live for people like you. I’m surprised they haven’t bought you a new car for getting pregnant.”

  “I know,” she’d said. “I just don’t want to. After, fine. Then I’ll stay home. Before, no.”

  When he was finished with his cereal, Matt stood in the middle of the kitchen, hands on his hips, and said, “Okay. I’m going.”

  “You’re going where?” she said, surprised.

  “I’m going going,” he said, raising his eyebrows at her.

  “What?” she said, eyes wide now. “You know somewhere to go? Already? For the cradle?”

  He nodded.

  “How?”

  “You said you didn’t want to know.”

  “And what were you planning to do? Just disappear for a couple of days? Just slip out on me?”

  “Do you want the thing or not, Marissa? It might only take me a day. I don’t know.”

  “See?” she said, snapping her fingers at him. “You do know how to do it. Right away. Like the keys. You’re fucking magic is what you are.”

  “Call me a genius.”

  She stood up, and he gave her a hug, then rubbed her belly and knelt down and said good-bye to it. “Genius,” said Marissa from above.

  “See you soon, Tyrone,” he said to her stomach. He stood up. “See you soon. I’ll call.”

  She smiled the same smile she always smiled. Matt thought of the moment from the day in the park, when he’d met his wife. He had taken to going there that spring, for no reason he understood. What had been years of watching television in the evening suddenly morphed into a stroll down to St. Helens Park to sit on the bench, smoke, watch children play, or watch people have their barbecues on the old rusted grills provided by the city. Maybe it was something about outdoors versus indoors. Maybe it was just the garbage on TV. He even sat there alone in the snow one night—it was the middle of April, and the storm was unexpected, but the temperature was just on the edge of freezing, and the flakes came down fat and wet, so they hadn’t bothered him in the least. He sat alone, letting the snowflakes land on the shoulders of his jean jacket and watching them from the corner of his eye, melting. The evening he met Marissa was a Thursday. Someone had launched her green striped ball away from the field of play and toward Matt, and amid the hoots and hollers of the group, she’d begrudgingly followed it with her mallet, dragging the thing in the grass. As she waited for her turn and plotted out what direction to shoot, Matt tried to look off at something else, his heart pounding because of how close she was. He could feel her standing there. Before her shot, she looked at him and smiled and said, “Hello. I usually don’t find myself so far out of position.”

  As he moved north of Milwaukee on 43, Gazetteer resting on the passenger seat and open to the Door County page, Matt allowed himself to relax about not being at work. He’d been worried about it since the beginning of the week, calculating lost wages and subtracting them from his planned savings. All for a whim. Or something.

  At the very least, he was on a drive. At the very least, he could have a day or two to fall out of the typical and stretch. He had no real sense that he required such an escape, but again, these were the reasons he was telling himself it was okay.

  He looked to his left, to the west. Somewhat flat and green, somewhat flat and green, but also the yellow of the fields. Wisconsin rolled out to the west, and the sky above was calm. By feeling it through the truck, he knew the wind was blowing. No thunderclouds. Occasionally he’d go by a broken-down farm, the wood so old it was gray. Cows milling, even a few horses running up and down a pasture, chasing one another. Then there would be the newer farms, bright, what he imagined as productive.

  There were, he reflected, only three feelings in his heart’s repertoire: worry about money, love for Marissa, and a somewhat more mysterious attraction to the simplicity of one single day. There were the typical day-to-day somethings, the colors that turned his head here and there, the annoyances, the reliefs, but those were not the central three. Everyone had those little ones. But then, everyone had a few more that were larger, and their own. Or at least the arrangement was their own. The central three were much larger. Money was money. The Marissa feeling wasn’t complicated either; he’d loved her after knowing her for nine days, and ever since then, the feeling had been the same: he would die for her. He would lie down in front of a train and allow himself to be sliced in half for her. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and that part was simple. The feeling about the days was farther away but there were times when it approached him in its abstract glory and nearly brought tears to his eyes. What was it? Life? He had no idea. The simple beauty of how the earth rolled and the sun came up and then went down and the sun came up again, how they were allowed to keep doing this, over and over again, thousands upon thousands of times. Asleep awake asleep awake. What he felt was gratitude. He had no interest in poetry or art or music. Something in him, though, told him that whatever the reasons for their existence, it had to do with this same feeling. Gratitude. He didn’t need to look at anything or listen to anything to bring on the feeling. Instead, it usually found him. It would come to him at work, and he would take a break; it would come to him when he was driving, and he would even tear up and sometimes even pull over to the side of the road; it would come to him at home, in front of a bad movie or a bad television show, and he would excuse himself and go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet and breathe, leaning forward until it passed. Not that he did not enjoy it. He was embarrassed by this side of himself but he did enjoy it, he did. When it came, it was as though he had one special connection to the world that other people didn’t have, so he welcomed it. No one will say no to that.

  It wasn’t coming now—it was nowhere near. In fact, there was nothing. The only things nearby were the silver chick silhouette tire flaps on the truck in front of him and the bumper and license plate of the little Toyota behind him. Both annoyed him. The Toyota was too close, and the truck in front of him had been altering its speed for the last fifteen miles, first blasting by everyone at seventy-five miles an hour, then slowing up and doing fifty-five in the right lane. The wind was getting it, too, and the trailer was moving with menace to and fro. Matt had passed and then been passed by this same truck at least five times. He wanted to escape it, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t. If he slowed, it eventually slowed with him, and if he sped up, it was there. Matt would not have been surprised to pull up alongside it, look up, an
d see a skeleton driving.

  He decided to end the problem completely and get off the road in Sheboygan and eat at an Arby’s. Sturgeon Bay was an hour and forty-five minutes away. If he ate now, it was possible that he’d find the sister, find Caroline, and find the cradle all before he was hungry again. He’d be back driving almost immediately and would be home before dark. It felt like he had, in the last week, fallen into a well where time didn’t work properly. When had she had the idea? He didn’t know. What was the idea? What was it beneath what it appeared to be? He didn’t know. How long had she been planning to send him to find it? He didn’t know. He didn’t know if she’d come up with it on the spot, that day, or if she’d known since she was a girl what she’d send her husband out to do at the last minute. She was capable of either thing. Now, though, for the first time, it occurred to Matt that the request was far more than a whim or an impulse. That Marissa’s greatest fear in life was the dissolution of family. That she could not possibly bear to see it happen again. That for her to know it wouldn’t, it would take this absurd string of duties accomplished in the eleventh hour. Was she capable of that? He didn’t know. Yes. He did know. She was. So now the result was that he felt as though he were inside a well, one without time, where regular life couldn’t happen. To get the cradle with miraculous speed—that was the best-case scenario. Of course, it was possible that he wouldn’t find anything at all. If he didn’t, though, he would just go home and say he’d done what he could, and it was possible that this would satisfy Marissa.

  Maybe possible wasn’t the right word, but it was something.

  Inside the Arby’s, there were ten or fifteen people at tables here and there, and a few in line, waiting. Matt looked over the menu without paying any attention to it, then looked at the two women at the front of the line, both in their sixties, both upset at the young kid behind the counter. “Does this look like cheese or something else?” one of them said, peeling back the top of the bun of her sandwich and showing the boy. Matt couldn’t see what was there. But he did see the boy look down at whatever she was showing him, nod his head slowly, then turn to his manager, a pimple-stained middle-aged woman, and say, “I need another one, and quick.”

  Matt filled the tank when he was finished eating and veered northeast before Green Bay, heading up toward Sturgeon Bay, listening to talk radio on the AM station.

  Seventy-eight 9th Avenue turned out to be a white house with blue shutters and flowers everywhere. Out front, there was an iron bench that looked uncomfortable sitting dappled in sunlight, surrounded by rough beds of wildflowers. The grass had not been mowed in weeks. The yard gave off few signs of interested human control. There was a car in the driveway, and Matt had been sitting in his truck, across the street, for fifteen minutes, looking at the windows and waiting to see whether any shapes passed by. So far he had seen none. All he had seen was a cat in the window staring back out at him, sometimes disappearing for a moment, then reappearing in the same spot. It sat upright, its ears extended, as though straining toward him and probing him with the best of its senses. From time to time, Matt stared straight back at it and tried to send it mental signals: I am not your enemy, I am not your enemy. Then, later: meow.

  It was colder than it should have been. It was June, and Matt doubted it was much more than fifty-five degrees. He knew both the lake and the bay were capable of blasting this town, but it surprised him that the difference was so noticeable. His recollections of Door County, which were fuzzy and came from a field trip he’d taken in the eighth grade, didn’t fit properly with where he was now. He remembered blazing white homes and condos and small roads; he remembered somewhat confused-looking families of six wandering down the sides of streets in Ephraim, each member holding a plastic bag filled with whatever shopping bounty they’d come away with that day. He remembered sailboats and a feeling of money and he remembered thinking, It’s only farmland. Why has this become what it is? It was different here. This was more like a little town where people lived, and it only had a few of the signs that signaled tourist destination. Most of the homes along the road were small and simple, like 78. The only structure noticeably different was a tall, lean bed-and-breakfast across the road, painted orange and red and white, a little gaudy but also grand. A man wearing a straw hat was mowing the lawn, and had been ever since Matt had been parked. In the rearview mirror, Matt took a look at him, then at the roof of the big house, then at the white balcony on the third floor.

  Enough, Matt thought, and after rubbing his face, he opened the door of his truck and went to the house. There is a cradle inside this house, he thought.

  Weeds came up in the cracks of the walkway, and up in the corners, beneath the roof’s overhang and gutters, were whole civilizations of spiders. The webs were layered. Matt got the feeling that if he were up on a ladder and passed his hand through them, he might go all right for a moment but eventually would find himself stuck, along with the insects.

  A woman was standing behind the screen door, looking at him.

  “You like spiders?” she said.

  Matt just barely kept himself from jumping back and falling down the stairs. She was a short, round woman, her hair gray and cut almost like a young boy’s. She was wearing dark blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt. Her face was gnarled—not wrinkled, exactly, and not from age, exactly. Perhaps from many years of frowning.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said.

  “Okay. Who are you?”

  “I was just coming up here to talk to you and I got distracted, looking at the webs.”

  “Trust me,” the woman said, voice smoke-grizzled. “They’re not there because they’re pretty.”

  “My name’s Matt Bishop,” Matt said. “This is a little bit strange. In fact, I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “Go on,” she said, still behind the door. “I do strange.”

  “I’m looking for somebody. A woman named Mary Landower.”

  Matt waited to see if it was her. So far there had been no reaction at all. Behind the woman, the cat wandered out into the screened-in porch and sat down at her feet. Matt and it stared at one another for a few seconds; the cat looked pleased it was getting a better look.

  “Why’d you sit out there for so long?” said the woman. “In your truck.”

  “I was collecting myself after the drive.”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “St. Helens. Near Milwaukee.”

  “And why do you want her?”

  “It’s a long story,” Matt said. “I’m happy to—”

  “You seem to like spiders, however.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You looked at ’em like you liked ’em.”

  “I was only looking.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said the woman, pulling the door open and stepping out onto the small porch with him. She looked up now. There was one mean-looking spider in one of the front webs, perfectly still. Matt thought that if you took it down and trained it, you could probably ride it.

  “You clean up those webs for me, and I’ll tell you where you can find Mary Landower.”

  “Ma’am.”

  “I’d say that’s a fairly straightforward deal. Are you about to tell me you’ve got questions?”

  “You’re not her, I take it.”

  “No, I’m not her. I knew her when she lived here. I bought this house from her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “You’ve already used up your questions,” said the woman. “There’s a broom and a Shop-Vac in the garage. I now have to go get more birdseed.”

  Okay. Matt cleaned the spiderwebs out while the woman was gone. No matter how out of the ordinary it was, he guessed this would lead somewhere. At the very least, it was easy. It made him think of living alone, about not being able to do the simplest tasks yourself. What would this woman do were she to fall down a flight of stairs? She would lie there, alone.

  Just as he had seen the webs as a civilization when he fi
rst walked up, now it was as though he were a god, coming with a cataclysm. This cataclysm was in the form of a long black plastic tube that sucked up the webs and the spiders and the spiders’ caches of bug meat with great force. He found a stepladder in the open garage as well, and to finish the work he stood on it and got the highest corners; where the oldest, grubbiest webbing was, there was a white gluey paste. So old even the spiders didn’t go there anymore.

  When the woman returned fifteen minutes later, he’d already put the Shop-Vac and broom and ladder away. She looked at him from the driveway, still seated in her large brown Pontiac, and Matt heard the thoomp-pop of the trunk, and the woman said, “Will you get that bag outta there for me?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I’m not playing any tricks on you,” she said. “I’ll tell you where Mary is. I can’t carry the damned thing. I only went to get it because you were here. Otherwise it would sit and rot in the trunk for a month.” She smiled.

  “I really would like to know,” he said, standing in her backyard with the thirty-pound bag in his arms. “I promise you I’m not pretending.”

  “Mary left Sturgeon Bay about three years ago,” said the woman. “Tear that open.”

  Matt lowered the bag to the ground and ripped at the corner of the plastic. As he did this, the woman went on. “To tell you the honest truth, I don’t know where she went. She was a strange girl.”

  “But you do strange.”

  “I do strange.”

  “Strange how?”

  “Restless.”

  “Did you ever know her sister?”

  “Which one?”

  Matt remembered that she was only Caroline’s half sister. “How many has she got?”

  “I don’t know,” said the woman. “Thirty. Forty.”

  “That’s a joke, I assume.”

  “I never laugh when I make my own jokes,” said the woman. “To me that’s ridiculous.”

  “Her name’s Caroline,” he said. “For a time her name was Caroline Francis. I’m not sure what it is now.”