Castle of Water

by Dane Huckelbridge

  Then it was time. Their eyes met, and they both knew. Barry repositioned himself into a catcher’s kneel between the capital M of her open legs. He steadied whatever remained of his nerves for whatever it was that was about to come. As for Sophie, she just wanted the being inside her to finally come out and end this thing once and for all. She howled straight up at the cloudless blue sky and managed one colossal push.

  And there was a head. A head coated in a mucousy caul and purplish blood, but definitely a human head.

  “It’s coming, baby! I can see it! Keep pushing.” Barry was ecstatic and terrified, proud and amazed. Parenthood was only moments away.

  A second gargantuan effort, producing a procession of little shoulders, little arms, little legs. Barry pulled while Sophie pushed, and then, at last, it was over. He found himself holding a newborn child. Barry squinted and held the baby close to his face, eager as a father has ever been to see it.

  In her premonition that their baby would be a girl, Sophie was correct. The infant she had given birth to was indeed that. In her assumption that she would see it grow, however, she was gravely mistaken. And, as Barry had hoped, the newborn cradled in his arms had been born with all ten fingers and toes. All that was lacking was a beating heart.

  The child was beautiful but ghostless. Born without life. The daughter they had both dreamed of was a tiny, frail gray body and nothing more, trailing a ghost-white cord that could not save her. At first, Sophie begged to see their little girl. But when a trembling and reluctant Barry brought the baby up for her to hold, she reared away with a long wail of pain. Barry whispered he was sorry as Sophie finally took the lifeless infant in her arms, their child, losing the only warmth that the womb had given it in the rapid pull of the island air. Sophie pressed its limp body to hers and quietly wept. Barry held Sophie’s one free hand, ran his bloody fingers through her sweat-soaked hair. He didn’t know what to say. Another lost life, another departed soul. At least to this one they could give a proper burial, although the thought of a doll-sized coffin was more than either of them could bear.

  Then, a sharp burst of pain, like a ripping. Sophie screamed.

  “What is it?”

  “Le placenta.”

  “What?”

  “The afterbirth,” she grunted out between clenched teeth.

  As gently and as quickly as he could, Barry took the body of the stillborn child, cut the umbilical cord with the utility knife, and laid her to rest in the coconut-wood cradle Sophie had carved for her. For decency or dignity, perhaps both, he placed a wide banana leaf solemnly across it. Then he reassumed his position between Sophie’s splayed legs, urging her on in encouraging tones.

  “Push, baby. It’s almost over. Just this, and then we’re done.”

  Sophie obliged in one heaving, screaming effort. There was a spurt of dark fluid, and then the afterbirth appeared.

  Only—and Barry had never seen a placenta before, so he couldn’t be sure—this afterbirth appeared puzzlingly like the crown of an infant’s head.

  Then he saw eyes. A nose. A mouth. The emerging portraiture of a human face.

  “Push, baby, push, push, push!”

  “What’s happening?” she shouted out, back arched and unable to see.

  The word left his mouth and seemed to hover above, a zephyr of uncertain promise.

  “Twins.”

  Sophie straining with a shrieking intensity, his own hands shaking at a violent pitch, Barry helped usher their second daughter into the world. She greeted it with a flurry of tiny kicks and a feisty little cry. It was the first human voice—besides their own, of course—that the two of them had heard in person in three long years.

  “Let me hold her,” Sophie pleaded, sitting upright, her face flushed with motherhood and tears. Barry severed the second cord with a careful flick of the knife, kissed the mucus-coated baby on the top of her head, and lowered her into her mother’s arms.

  “You did it, Sophie. She’s beautiful.”

  “Ma petite Persinette,” Sophie whispered into her daughter’s ear. “Ma petite chérie.”

  The two new parents shared a knowing glance, one of infinite caring and boundless love, and then Barry noticed that his knees, upon which he had been balancing for most of the delivery, suddenly felt sticky and wet. He looked down and his heart dropped.

  Flowing between them was a river of blood.

  46

  In the world that Barry and Sophie had left behind with that first dip of their Cessna, postpartum hemorrhage was a relatively common and treatable condition. But on the island that had sheltered them since the plane hit the water, there was simply no way to repair that which had ruptured. Whereas a quick dose of oxytocin spiked with a dash of methylergometrine would have been promptly administered in any delivery room in New York or Paris—resolving the bleeding in just a few minutes—all Barry could do was pray and hold on tight as he made futile attempts with the first-aid kit gauze to stop the unstoppable flow of deep red blood. And as for Sophie, all she could do was weep, hold her living daughter to her breast, and beg for the life that was slipping steadily out of her. It was clear that something had gone terribly wrong and that something desperately needed to be done. But there was nothing to be done, and both of them knew it. For Sophie, the sensation of helplessness was a familiar one, nearly identical to that which she had experienced when the life of Étienne had ebbed out in her arms. For Barry, however, it was horrifically novel, and that unique form of helplessness was … well, there are no words for that sort of thing. If there was mercy in any of it, it was in the fact that it was over quickly. Barry managed to tell Sophie that he loved her a final time before she lost consciousness; she was unable to respond, but she seemed to acknowledge it with a final tight squeeze of his hand. After that, there was a minute of shudders and rasping breaths, followed by a single bursting gasp of sentience—her eyes shot open, looked imploringly at Barry, begging for the salvation that was not there to give. And then her brown irises drifted upward, higher than the palms that bowed above them, higher even than the peaks of the Pyrenees in the Cirque de Gavarnie.

  And then she was gone. Sophie Caroline Ducel, daughter and mother, age thirty-two, quietly ceased to be.

  The need to scream welled within Barry—only his new sense of fatherhood prevented him from doing so. He didn’t want the first sound on his newborn daughter’s ears to be one of anguish. Instead he bit his own bicep, hard enough to bleed, teeth cutting through skin and down into muscle. He let the tears pour hot down his face, but he somehow held the sobs and despair captive, deep and congealed in the pit of his chest. Sophie’s arm was still around their living daughter, suckling quietly at her still-warm breast. Barry lay beside them both, his body racked with the agony of the moment, and allowed the child to drink her fill—he did not know if there would be another meal. When she was finished, he wrapped her in the freshly cleaned remains of his threadbare dress shirt, rocked her gently to sleep in his trembling arms, and set her to rest, so he could bury her mother and her sister.

  47

  The love of his life buried beneath the palm tree where they first had kissed, his living daughter now sleeping in the coconut-wood cradle, Barry at last found himself alone on the beach, expelling the sobs he had stored for so long. Keening of the sort one hears only once or twice in a lifetime. The splitting heartache, the indescribable sorrow, the crushing guilt of being unable to save her—those would stay with him for quite some time. A lifetime, in fact. But the gagging, chest-rattling sobs came pouring out, until at last, depleted, he had nothing left to give, and in the void, his thoughts regained some semblance of clarity. The reality of the situation, and the responsibilities of a father, began to take hold. His vision may have bordered on legal blindness, but his options were clear.

  Two paths, white and shimmering as a summer day in Macoupin County, appeared before Barry. Amid his immense terror, depthless loss, and visceral sadness, a choice took shape. Suddenly his life was a fork in
the road, a binary system both horrific and beautiful in its simplicity. One path was as follows: He could close his eyes, cease his struggle, and let his body go limp. He could stay on the island and watch with horribly compromised vision his child—their daughter—wail in pain and waste away without breast milk or formula, and then finally cease to breathe altogether. He could linger on, slowly succumbing himself to starvation or madness, until the day came when he no longer had the energy or will to rise from his sweat-stained pallet and face the growling incertitude of the day. At which point he, too, would give up the ghost.

  Or he could gather up his child, stock the canoe, and paddle like a motherfucker.

  Bartholomew Bleecker chose the latter.

  The preparations took the better part of the day but passed like a strange and floating dream. It was as if he were outside of himself, watching these events unfold despite his imperfect vision. He watched as he inflated the life raft, his aching lungs bringing the craft to life. He looked on as he loaded it with bananas and bags of freshwater—except the one bag he filled with coconut milk, knowing an infant could not survive upon it, but hoping it might keep his child alive just a little bit longer. He gazed with bleary eyes as this other, more certain version of himself placed his sleeping daughter, bundled in a threadbare Charles Tyrwhitt dress shirt, beneath the small survival blanket tent he had made for her in the Askoy III. And he stood silent witness as this man hitched the supply-laden raft to the back of the canoe with a six-foot length of salvaged nylon rope.

  All that remained was to say good-bye. Barry had no flowers to leave for Sophie and their stillborn child, buried together in the same shallow grave; he brought bananas instead, the freshest, greenest bunch he could find. He spoke to them quietly for some time, his tears leaving a cluster of wet dimples in the upturned sand. He told them how much he loved them, how much he already missed them, and he begged their forgiveness for having to leave them. But he had made his decision—and he knew that Sophie would understand. When he was finished, he laid the kindest of kisses on the driftwood cross, wiped his eyes, and rose to his feet. But before he left, he made two promises:

  That he would take care of their living daughter until his dying breath, no matter when that day came, and that one day, god(s) willing, he would come back for them both and take them home.

  Ready at last, Barry stumbled and tripped his way back to the beach. It was time. He did one final scan of the radio to search for nearby transmissions, and just as he had expected, there were none to be found. There were no more ships, there were no more flares, and there was no turning back. He had to go all the way. He would make it to the islands or he would die trying. There was no other option. They were leaving for good.

  Barry peered inside the canoe’s foil blanket tent to check on his daughter, kissing her gently and whispering in her ear. He prayed quickly and calmly, hoping but not certain that a compassionate deity might be in earshot. And finally, although it was nothing to him at that moment but a blur, he took one last, lingering look at the island he had once cursed but now knew had saved them: the frayed hedge of palms, the silent skirt of sand, the inscrutable stone core that rose from the waters like a castle—

  One in a million.

  And then he pushed off.

  48

  What began on the chilly side has turned into a lovely spring day—the man decides to walk home from the cemetery instead of hailing a taxi. He takes slow, deliberate steps, soaking it all in, still enraptured by the city that surrounds him. The cars whirring by, the old men feeding pigeons, the sanitation fellows with their green plastic brooms—he passes through them with the amazed expression of a tourist, despite having lived here for more than a decade. The streets and their contents are still as brimming with wonder as the day he arrived, and he suspects they will stay that way for some time to come. He hopes so, anyway.

  He’s very nearly home when he gets caught in a rain shower, of the type seldom encountered in New York but endemic to Paris—the short stacks of cloud that drift in from the Channel, darkening the pavement with their brief, black bloom. He ducks under an awning beside the Saint-Denis arch, where he is quickly joined by others seeking refuge from the rain. There is an elderly woman draped in fine furs, a café waiter on cigarette break, three Chinese prostitutes in smart-looking pantsuits, and a nun walking a dachshund called Dijon—all joined together in that small island of dryness. The waiter offers him a cigarette, but the man politely declines, telling him in French that he quit years ago; the nun, on the other hand, accepts his proposal, and she leans over in her habit to bum a light. The woman in the furs checks her lipstick in a compact mirror, while the three prostitutes share a joke in Mandarin, or perhaps Cantonese, the man doesn’t know which. They wait patiently for the shower to pass and then disperse when it finally does, back to their own respective callings. Surely an unremarkable moment for most, but for the man, it is a parting tinged with a tender sadness—he has noticed over the years that even the briefest and most incidental interactions can, with the appreciation of time, take on far richer shades of meaning. It is a realization for which he is eternally grateful.

  From there, it’s just a few short blocks to rue du Château d’Eau, a few flights of stairs, and he’s home. He closes the door as quietly as possible, thinking that she might still be sleeping. The muffled strains of French pop music leaking from her bedroom assure him that this is not the case. He sets his keys on the counter and takes out his phone, seeing that at some point during his walk he acquired a message. He lifts an apple to his teeth and the phone to his ear, both at the same time.

  It’s his art dealer in New York. He wants him to call back, so he does. About time you called, the dealer chides him playfully. Are you ready for some good news? The man swallows his bite of apple for the sake of politeness. Certainly, he says. I’m always up for good news. Well, he says, the museum wants to know if they can keep one of the pieces for the permanent collection. They’re opening a new wing, and they really want a Bartholomew Bleecker. The man takes another bite of apple, realizes his faux pas, and swallows quickly. Wow. Tell them thank you, and that I’d be honored. They can have any one they want. You sure? asks the art dealer. The man thinks about it for a moment. Except one, he says. Let me guess, the dealer replies. Yes, that’s the one, says the man. But any other painting is fine. Perfect, says the dealer. And what about the canoe? I just got another call from the Explorers Club about it—they’re persistent, I’ll give them that. But they promised to take good care of it, and they said it can be on loan if you prefer. The man sighs bittersweetly, his mouth full of apple. His gaze passes over the yellowed newspaper clipping still tacked to the refrigerator, of that wild-eyed man with the baby in his arms, standing halfway between the graves of Jacques Brel and Paul Gauguin. I’ll talk to my daughter, he finally replies. I know she mentioned taking it down to Portugal again this summer. But if she’s okay with it, then so am I—although I probably should take all those fishhooks off first.

  He thanks his art dealer, tells him he’s stopping by New York next month on the way to the farm and that he would love to catch up. Thank you again for everything, we’ll talk soon, and he pauses just a moment before hanging up the phone. He smiles and shakes his head, a smile that’s bewildered and content and still pursed by that same tender sadness that visited him by the arch, that trails him as doggedly as his gratitude and his guilt … the wonder of it all, the unknowable mystery, to serve as fleshy custodian to such a fragile flame. More than anything, though, he just misses her—far more than oils and canvas will ever express, often more than his old heart can bear. He still dreams of her, the island as well, and in those dreams he holds her and tells her about their daughter. She’s wonderful, he says to her, beautiful, just like her mother. But when he tries to tell her that she should have been the one to make it home, not him, when he starts to ask if she can ever forgive him, she silences him with a smile. The waves roll, the palms whisper, and they continue to d
o so, even upon waking.

  But enough of that for now. The man cocks his ear toward the bedroom; the shortwave has gone quiet, there’s no more French pop music, and he suspects she knows that he’s home from his walk. He pads across the carpeted hallway and raps gently at her door. There’s a stutter of socked footsteps and the door swings open.

  Bonjour, Papa, she says, and gives him a hug.

  Bonjour, ma chérie, he says, and he kisses the warm part in her chestnut-brown hair.

  What’s in your jacket?

  Oh, that? It’s just a tartine.

  Papa, you can leave the leftovers on the plate. You don’t have to always take them with you.

  Yes, I suppose you’re right. Old habits die hard.

  Did you go to see Maman et Petite Sœur? she asks.

  Oui, he says. I went to say hello.

  And they are well?

  They are wonderful.

  Can I go to see them with you next week?

  Of course you can, my love. We can go whenever you’d like.

  Are you painting today?

  He considers it for a moment, furrowing his brow and pinching his chin through his beard. It is a Sunday, and a glorious morning to be at work in his studio, but he can do that anytime. His daughter, on the other hand, won’t stay twelve forever. No, he says finally, I have something else in mind. Quelque chose de plus américain.

  She grins mischievously. Le baseball? she asks.

  Oui, he answers, le baseball.

  Comme les Indiens de Cleveland? she asks.

  Oui, he answers, comme les Indiens de Cleveland.

  She claps her hands and rushes to retrieve the gloves and the ball from the closet, trundling down the stairs and urging her father to follow. Allons-y, Papa! she calls up to him from the front door. He starts to tell her that it’s cold and she needs a jacket but remembers those first spring days from his own childhood and the futility of that request on a day such as this.