The Cradle

by Patrick Somerville

  Another box opened up in front of Matt then. The picture, at first, was a number of small colored boxes blinking in and out, and only after several seconds did the boxes start to meld together into somebody’s face. Once the video settled, he saw the woman. She was squinting, and behind her he could see the blinking lights of other computers and machinery. She was wearing a bright red cap; her face was thin and angular, and she had a certain cold beauty to her. Matt thought of her as an Ice Queen, sitting high atop her throne in a faraway castle. Something flapped over her right shoulder.

  “Hello, Syl,” she was saying, but then she frowned. She appeared to be looking away from the camera. Then Matt realized she was looking at his picture on her end. “Who’s that?”

  “Hello?” Matt said.

  He looked at Brian, who nodded sarcastically.

  “Hello, Mrs. Landower?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Matt Bishop,” he said. “I’m sitting here at Sylvia’s house. I came here to ask her a question.”

  “You seem to be talking to me!” The woman was yelling.

  Matt realized now the wind was blowing on her end, and the wall behind her was rattling.

  “Well, the question—”

  “We have a storm coming!”

  “The question—”

  “Does this have something to do with me?”

  “It does,” Matt said. He found himself starting to talk louder, too. “My wife—my wife is the daughter of your sister Caroline.”

  The woman sat quietly for a moment on the other end of the line—her eyes ticked up and went to the camera, which made it seem as though she were looking directly into his eyes.

  The picture flickered for a moment. Then she said, “Marissa?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. Someone walked past then, behind her. Matt saw only a man’s torso, hurrying somewhere. Mary yelled, “Caroline has always had a problem with...staying in one place!”

  “So she’s alive.”

  “Yes,” yelled Mary. “She’s alive!” There was a loud bang, and Mary looked over her shoulder.

  “Where can I find her?” Matt said.

  “What?”

  “Where can I find her?”

  “You can’t. She’s too far away.”

  “How far away?”

  “She’s...do...nesia.”

  “What?”

  “Indonesia!”

  “I’m looking for a cradle,” Matt said.

  “A what?”

  “A cradle!”

  “A cradle?”

  “For Marissa! It’s—we’re having a baby!”

  “Is it something she used to have?”

  “Yes!”

  “Everything that...her...Darren...sota!”

  “What?”

  “Everything that she...with Darren in Minnesota.”

  “Darren?”

  “Yes! Her husband!”

  “In Minnesota?”

  “Yes!...Anything...take...that sonofabitch!”

  “Do you have an address?”

  “Hold on!”

  She disappeared. Matt looked over at Brian, who had stopped paying attention. Ancient Sylvia, behind him, was rapt. She nodded her encouragement to him. “You seem to be doing quite well,” she said. “If I speak to her for too long, she often switches to different languages.”

  Mary came back on the screen, now holding something in her lap and looking down at it. “If you go to find him,” she yelled, “do me a favor!”

  “Okay,” Matt said.

  “Tell him Mary says he’s an asshole!”

  Matt was halfway across Wisconsin before the night caught up with him and he decided he needed to sleep. He had a long way to go, and he wasn’t going to be getting anywhere near Walton, Minnesota, anytime soon. He didn’t want to go all night. A few miles after he decided, he came upon a rest stop. He pulled the truck in, found a distant parking spot, killed the engine, leaned his head back, and put his hat down, arms crossed. After a few minutes he opened his eyes. He opened the glove compartment and removed one Twinkie, unwrapped it, and ate it slowly. He looked at the Gazetteer, a dark shape on the seat beside him, then looked toward the bathrooms and saw a pay phone and thought of calling Marissa. She would know, however, that he was still looking. She wouldn’t be worried about him. He could call and say, “I’d like to come back now.” No. Through the windshield, in the distance, he could see the bright white glow of a light hanging above the bathrooms. Far away, there were a few other cars around and the cab of a semitruck. A woman, a lone hooker maybe, leaned against the cab of the truck and talked up to the window. Even at this distance, he could see the black spots of insects crowded around the huge light above it all. Thousands of them.

  5

  It was February. Adam had been gone for six weeks and he was there, on the ground.

  She didn’t know what he did day to day. Bill knew. As far as dealing with information went, she saw two paths—on one, she was demanding news, always, as though seeking some kind of omniscience or overhead view of the battlefields and the cities. She was scouring the Internet for articles and spending time looking at maps. She was trying to know everything.

  On the other, she was disconnected and blank.

  For the first month she’d chosen the godlike path and tried to look down from above. She read the news daily and chatted online with other mothers of soldiers late at night, did almost nothing with her long days, slept late. Wrote little.

  Now she’d gone to the other edge. Now she exercised, ate well, enjoyed Adam’s calls when they came, and with all her other time pretended there was no such thing as war. If he was in danger, Adam never told her. They talked about his friends, the weather, and the football games the soldiers played. For all she knew, he was either playing catch or napping on a cot somewhere, always. This is how she thought of him and this is how she planned to think of him until he came home. There was no other way she could deal with it.

  “Your pills,” Bill said, his toast in hand. “You have your sleeping pills?”

  “I do,” she said. She’d decided not to bring the whole bottle and had simply shaken six of the tablets into a baggie for the flights. No need to be tempted to sleep the entire vacation away.

  The doctor had told her two would knock her out for the duration of the flight. She planned on taking three. Bill didn’t know this and she wasn’t going to tell him. He would be concerned, but he had always been afraid of doctors and what they advised. She was not that way. She was the kind of person who altered doctors’ suggestions when it seemed like the right idea.

  What she wanted from the pills was this: they’d drive to O’Hare, park, move through security, read the newspaper, and board the plane. She would close her eyes as the engines warmed up, there would be a darkness, a lifting feeling, and when she opened her eyes, it would be nine hours later, and they would be in beautiful Hawaii.

  Bill had convinced her the trip really was, after all, a good idea. A week on the beach, bright sun, far away from the depressing muck landscape of the dark Midwest.

  “There is nothing more deadly,” Bill liked to say, “than February in Illinois.”

  And there was something to this, she had to admit. She had been thinking of all the green they would see. Even though there were more deadly things.

  Bill held out the second piece of toast toward her. “Do you want it?” he said.

  The first part of her plan went as scripted, and she waited until they were seated at the gate before digging into her purse and finding the pills. The doctor said about twenty minutes after she took them. She looked at the screen to be sure there would be no delays; everything appeared to be right. The two gate clerks in their red vests and white blouses tapped busily and happily on their keyboards as though they were Muppets, and behind them, the red dotted lights of the board spelled out honolulu, 12:15. As Renee watched, one of the Muppet clerks picked up the black phone and announced they would begin boarding
in only a few moments.

  “I’m going to take the pills now, I think,” she said to Bill.

  Bill glanced up from the paper. “Don’t you want to wait until we get on the plane?”

  “I want as little plane as possible,” she said. “We’re going now anyway.” Bill looked up and watched the people milling about in a quasi-line chunk. “They take a few minutes to kick in.”

  “All right,” he said, shrugging. “Whatever.” He folded his paper. “If we have to make an emergency landing, I’ll do my best to drag you into a raft.”

  “Don’t joke.”

  “Not a joke,” he said.

  She spotted a water fountain across the wide concourse and stood. The airport was not busy, something that seemed almost impossible for Chicago. Most of the gates were sparse; there were seats everywhere. She saw a family all sitting together in a circle at a nearly empty gate. They were playing UNO.

  Across the concourse hallway, she placed one pill on her tongue and sipped the water. What dreams will I have? she wondered. Probably none at all. Probably a black curtain. The last time she had taken sleeping pills, it had been just as she hoped it would be. A big fuzzy God hand reaching down out of the sky, taking hold of a lever in her mind, pushing it down into the total shutdown position, some more severe setting than even sleep. false death, she thought. Whatever it was that Juliet had, whatever fake poison that had been. That’s what she wanted now. When I wake up, she thought, I will be somewhere else. I will be almost as far away as Adam.

  She looked over her shoulder at Bill, still seated across the way, waiting patiently, watching her, legs crossed.

  She smiled at him, then found herself waving. No reason. He gave a funny smile back, shook his head, and waved as well. His wave plus his funny smile said: why are we waving across the concourse at the airport?

  She turned to the water and took two more pills. She thought of the sun, and of Hawaii, of being somewhere else. The baggie was still in her hand. She reached into it and pulled out one more with the tip of her finger. It stuck there, and she held it up, then placed it on her tongue. Just to be sure.

  Renee had been in love two times in her life and had slept with only two men. The loves were very different—one winter, one summer. Had Jonathan not been killed, it would have been only one love and one man, and her heart would be impressed with only one imprint. Her landscape would be something easy and traversable—she would be something like a flat prairie, like the farmland in Wisconsin.

  She sometimes wondered: would I be simple, then, if he lived? She thought of her heart as a fractured and complex thing, some cratered mass of treacherous slopes and sinkholes, not at all something simple and easy. On the far side there was the flat prairie, the original open place, that was Jonathan. On the other side, past the enormous divide, there was the luxury hotel that was Bill, safe and stable, even though on that end it was always winter. The in-between landscape was the shattered land.

  She thought of the burning factory she’d seen on television with Bill that night. It was the perfect kind of structure for this in-between: it was just what you’d come to as you were making the journey from one to the next. That first love was so long ago, thousands and thousands of years, and yet he was still there in her mind, she still knew him, she still felt him. One night she’d been drifting off to sleep and she heard him yell her name from downstairs; her head shot up, and Bill looked at her, and she said, Oh, it’s nothing, and then went into the bathroom and cried. She saw him all the time. There he was, for example, at the Foster Avenue Beach in 1968, dripping as he came up out of the water in his blue trunks, coming to lie down beside her in the sun, his dark hair flattened down on his head, his lean muscles tan. He was so young. Adam’s age. Was that possible? The two long blue veins running up each of his forearms, meeting together at the underside of his elbows. And they reappeared along the biceps and ran up along the fronts of his shoulders and disappeared as they snaked beneath the skin and flesh of his chest. That image, the image of him walking toward her, was both false and true. It had happened over and over again for one entire summer, so who could say whether her mind made it by piecing all the perfect parts together? It didn’t matter. Besides, it was only the entryway into her thinking. That picture was the first page of Jonathan. On the last page he was lying alone in a jungle, half gone.

  They met at a party. She was a freshman at Northwestern, he was someone’s cousin. He had not been bothered about knowing no one, about not being a student. She remembered closing her eyes and leaning against a table and swaying back and forth to the strange music filling the house. It was foreign and had scales she didn’t know and a drumbeat with no changes, just pounding, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da daa. When she opened her eyes, she saw him across the room. He was holding a joint and talking to someone, speaking emphatically, moving his right hand up and down to illustrate his points even as he moved the joint slowly to his lips. Stoned, and high on some pill she’d taken with a girl in the bathroom, she found herself staring at him for what felt like five minutes. Whatever part of her brain that kept telling her not to look at someone forever had either stopped working or made a special exception for this person.

  Finally he saw her looking. How could he not? When he crossed the room and approached her, she stood up straight.

  She felt as if her eyes were barely open.

  He said, “Hi. You look like you’re about to die.”

  The music was loud, and he had to lean close to her. Even then, it was a yell.

  “I just can’t understand what this music is,” she yelled. “It’s so funny.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Renee,” she yelled. “That is my friend Steven over there,” she yelled, nodding in one direction, “and that is my friend Sheila over there,” she yelled, nodding in another. “What are you?”

  “What am I?”

  “I mean, who are we?” she yelled.

  “Who are we?” he asked. “I guess you’re Renee and I’m Jonathan. Hi.”

  She introduced herself to him again.

  “You already introduced yourself,” he yelled. “I’m Jonathan. Hi. Honestly, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Jonathan,” she said, tilting her head. “I was just looking at you. Did you see me looking at you?”

  “That’s why I came over here.”

  “Do you want to know what I was thinking while I was looking at you?”

  “What?” he yelled back.

  “I SAID, DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT I WAS THINKING WHILE I WAS LOOKING AT YOU?” she yelled.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “I do.”

  “I WAS THINKING,” she yelled, “THAT YOU LOOK LIKE A PRINCE.”

  “A prince?” he yelled. “That’s nice. I actually think my family comes from peasants.”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” she said, shaking her head, smiling at him. She slapped him on the shoulder. “You glow,” she said. She looked up at the ceiling then, thinking. When she looked back at him, she said, “I know exactly who you are.”

  “Who am I?” he said.

  “Why?” she said.

  “Uhhh,” he said. “I don’t know?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I don’t go to your school. I’m just here, living with my uncle and my cousin—”

  “You are Charles Martel.”

  Jonathan stopped talking, leaned back, and stood up straight. “Thank you very much, Renee.” Someone was dancing right behind him, she saw, a blond-haired girl. She was shaking her head. Another student was nearby, a boy she knew from class, and she looked at him and looked at his mouth moving and could see by the way his mouth moved that he said the words Tet Offensive. It was sometime near the beginning of 1968, cold outside but unbearably hot in this apartment. The music was loud. She turned away from the student and looked again at this Jonathan.

  “I don’t feel tired, Bill,” Renee said.

  “They probably just haven’t kick
ed in yet.”

  “It’s been forty-five minutes,” she said. “And I feel awake.” It didn’t feel like the fuzzy God hand had reached down and turned her brain off. Actually, it felt like she’d been struck by lightning.

  “Very awake,” she said.

  “Where are the pills?”

  “What?”

  “Where are your sleeping pills?”

  “In my bag,” she said. She reached down for her purse and began digging for the baggie. “I just brought a few.”

  “Let me see them.”

  She found the baggie, looked at it, and handed it over to him. He adjusted the overhead light and squinted at the midsize yellow capsules. He held them close to his nose.

  “Problem,” he said.

  “What?” she said.

  “These aren’t sleeping pills,” he said.

  “What are they?”

  “These are Adam’s,” he said, twisting his wrist to show her. “These are the ADHD pills.” He glanced at her. “You just took amphetamines, dear.”

  “That’s not possible,” she said, snatching the bag. “I just—he stopped taking those two years ago.” She stared at the capsules. There it was, in tiny white writing.

  adderall

  “We still had a bottle in the cabinet,” Bill said. “The refill? It was still there. He quit and we kept them because we didn’t know if he’d want to start again.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “You must have picked up the wrong one this morning.”

  Renee stared straight ahead at the back of the seat in front of her. Bill was smiling. “Look, you’ll be fine. You’ll just be a little focused for a while. You took two, right? It’ll wear off in a couple of hours. Read your book.”

  She turned to him. “I took four.”

  “Four?” he asked loudly. He looked around and then said, more quietly, “Why in God’s name would you take four?”

  “Because I wanted to sleep well.”

  “Are you trying to overdose?”

  “If I wanted to overdose, I’d take thirty.”