Thereafter

by Anthony Schmitz

  “Hey,” Mag says. When he turns toward her she takes his picture. “Now take one of me,” she insists. That is what she really wants.

  She will need so many more. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Presents under the tree. Their home, restored and decorated. Their child. Children. There have always been a hundred reasons to delay. First, make something of her art. First, fix up the house. First, sell this house and move to another. There is never a good time. You have to make one. There is no point in discussing it.

  Fear stopped her before, she admits. Fear of being taken over by another living thing. Fear of responsibility. Any pair of fools can have a baby. No license required. There are millions of ways to do the job poorly. That much she learned as a child.

  Her father’s disappearance was like a death. Here one day and gone the next. Except that there was no way to know if his absence was permanent. The dead at least made a clean break of it. Or seem to, at any rate. For months — years! — Mag awoke wondering if this might be the day her father returned. Would he simply walk through the door, reclaiming his place as if the house and family were still his? Would he ring the bell, hat in hand, a petitioner? Mag would have had him back in a heartbeat. A smile, a wink, no explanation necessary. Her weakness embarrassed her. She should not forgive cheaply, having been abandoned so. But love is helpless. Mag knew that from the day he left. She saw it in all of James Brimsley’s pictures of Audrey. She saw it in Wald’s eyes, if not necessarily in her own. Love might turn bitter, or be scorched by anger, or become rueful, but it was so difficult to kill completely.

  Her mother was just one example. What did all her contortions prove, except that she was love-crazed? After deciding, finally, that Jack Marault had abandoned her for good, she began a systematic purge. The inferno of photographs was the start. She went over her clothing for strands of his hair. She deposited them in a plastic bag, which then went in the trash. She sorted out the records he favored — Sinatra, the Mills Brothers, Burl Ives — and hammered them to shards. Then she bundled up the hammer and the rest of his tools and gave them to a startled workman who happened to pass by.

  “You sure, ma’am?” he asked, smelling trouble. “These are awful fine tools.”

  “Believe me,” said her mother. “If you don’t get them someone else will. They will not stay in my home.”

  Her father became, in those few times when her mother was obliged to refer to him, “the man to whom I was formerly married,” or, “the man who abandoned us.” Never Jack, never your father. Among Mag’s memories of her own wedding was her mother in tears. Mary Marault could not conceive of a happy marriage in a world were she — she of all people! — had been abandoned.

  “He’s not like daddy,” Mag whispered, hoping that would shut her up.

  “For better and worse,” her mother sobbed, recognizing something of the truth.

  ≈

  “Look, our first customers,” Wald says.

  Three kids dash up the steps. Dracula, a ghost, a fairy. Wald clomps toward them, stiff-kneed, arms outstretched. The fairy bursts into tears and runs back to her parents.

  “Nice going,” Mag says.

  “Trick or treat,” the others chirp.

  Mag notices young Dracula staring at her breasts, exposed by my mother’s dress. She pulls her cape tight. “Hey, big eyes, want to get turned into a mouse?” Mag cackles.

  Dracula is speechless. “We just want candy,” the ghost whispers.

  “Give some to the fairy, too,” says Wald, dropping an extra handful into the plastic jack o’lantern.

  “What do you expect,” Wald says to Mag. “Wearing a get up like that?” He puts his arms around her from behind and slips a hand inside her dress. She looks down and sees her amulet, trapped between his hand and her breast. His skin glows red when the light blinks on.

  Snow falls, splattering heavily on the sidewalk. Wind knocks leaves from the trees. Kids keep coming. They are soaked and shivering but hardly seem to notice. Parents stamp their feet miserably on the sidewalk. Soon the yard is white, marked by the footprints of all those little monsters who bow their heads and trudge from house to house through the storm. They will march through anything to get what they want. They won’t stop until their parents haul them away screaming.

  Finally Mag says, “I’m going inside.” Wald does not argue.

  He blows out the candles in the jack o’lanterns and stands on the porch, briefly, alone. The wind, the dark, the grasping oak branches, nature’s deadly indifference: all this manages now to creep up beside him. He is surprised to recognize a prickle of fear. He hurries into the house and calls for Mag.

  “I’m in here,” she says.

  She has pulled the drapes and turned off the lights, knowing that as long as the monsters outside see any sign of life they will knock on the door. She lifts the down comforter. Wald slips in beside her on the sofa. The house creaks under the weight of the snow.

  Mag pours him a glass of brandy. Wind-driven snow hisses against the windows. “Take off those wet clothes,” Mag says.

  He nestles against her. She tugs at the bolts glued to his temples and throws them on the floor. He yelps. “Don’t be a baby,” she says. Wald starts on a story about a Halloween when he was a kid. His mom dragged him to a party at the local school. The guest of honor was a character in a local kids TV show, later convicted on the predictable charges. Mag has heard it before. “Shut up, Wald,” she says.

  “What?” he replies, hurt. She doesn’t care. Those kids in their costumes have gotten to her, the way they stumbled up the snow-covered steps, yelling “trick or treat” through their masks. Their eyes cast upward, expectantly. Chirping “thank you” because they had been browbeaten by their parents. But in truth they are hardly grateful at all. Everything is their due. There is nothing to which they are not entitled. They have no thought that the world might be otherwise.

  She pulls Wald closer. He settles his head against her shoulder. She runs her fingers through his wet hair.

  All of it seizes her—the kids in their costumes, the storm rattling the windows, the march of time visible in the decay of their house, in Wald’s vanishing hair. She wants a child not someday but at this very moment. She leans over to kiss Wald. He tastes like brandy. Good, she tells herself.

  It hardly matters. She might as well be sliding a quarter into a gumball machine. He reaches for her neck and holds her.

  Knowing so completely what she wants, Mag is unconcerned with subtlety. She pulls off Audrey’s black dress and drops it to the floor. She rolls Wald onto his back. A cautious sector of his brain remains, briefly, engaged. He asks, “Mag, should I…”

  “Forget it,” she whispers. She knows he will.

  “Are you…?”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Soon enough she hears that familiar catch in his breathing, that strangled gasp, the shudder in his hips. She settles down deeply to fix him in place.

  I suffer some brief thoughts about their privacy, about that so-called right. Of course there is no such thing. I remain where I am.

  The wind finds its way through a thousand gaps. The house seems to brace itself against the storm. Mag pulls the comforter over them again. Soon she feels a prickle of sweat rising on her back. Her plastic amulet pulses between her breasts, the only light in the room.

  “I can’t breathe,” Wald complains.

  “Hmm,” she says, shifting slightly. Mag hardly cares. She is certain she is pregnant. In this she is exactly right. In the dark, cold room I sense the first stirrings of what will be a consciousness.

  ≈

  Everyone expects the snow from the storm to melt quickly. Then the next day it snows again, another six inches on top of the foot that fell on Halloween. The temperature drops to single digits. Frost forms on the inside of the windows. Mag tells Wald she is sick. She stays in bed as he shovels a path from the garage to the street. She watches from the window as he drives off to a job.

  She feels drugged. She stac
ks some magazines beside herself on the couch but doesn’t bother even to look at the pictures. She might say she is lost in her thoughts, except that she doesn’t seem to have any. Her mind is deliciously blank. She sits on the sofa, the comforter pulled up to her chin. Every few hours she makes herself another pot of tea. She opens the refrigerator and loads a plate with whatever catches her eye. When she is finished she sets the plate on the floor and passes into that odd state again. She is satisfied, satisfied beyond happiness. She feels that she has unequivocally made something of herself. She has taken the first step to making herself a mother.

  She doesn’t tell Wald. There is nothing to tell him, not really. There isn’t any point in seeing a doctor yet. There is no reason to say anything to anyone. All she has to go on is her own deep sense of certainty. For now it is her secret.

  During the daylight hours the living room is flooded with light. The sunshine reflects off the snow and bursts through the big windows, illuminating everything, even the motes of dust carried by the draft that sweeps through all the rooms. None of the windows seal properly. The frames are old and loose. Another project on Wald’s list. They will never finish anything with a baby underfoot. She doesn’t care.

  She thinks of Audrey, raising her boys in this house. Any sign of children has long since been erased. No scribbling on the wall, no basketball hoop hung on the garage. All that is lost in time, even though Audrey herself had remained for so long. Mag can not imagine such an end for herself. She doesn’t suppose Audrey had, either.

  Mag thinks she should resist the temptation, the guilty pleasure, of the Brimsley albums. The Brimsley’s house, their children, their friends; they have become the substance of her dreams, a substitute for a life of her own. She will have to make her own place in the world. She will. She has dared, finally, to start. It is a question, now, of waiting.

  But in the meantime, what harm is there in taking another look?

  She wraps the comforter around herself and marches to the trunk. With a pair of albums tucked against her breast she returns to the sofa. At every step the floorboards creak, as if to complain that they are still called to serve. Let them grumble. She needs shelter, not just for herself but for her child-to-be. The house had better serve. She settles the album on her lap and opens the cover.

  There is my mother on a spring day. The leaves have begun to poke from the branches. She wears a lace-edged white blouse. James never seemed to pick up a camera except to take her picture. Lovestruck, Mag thinks, amused and touched. His feelings reflect from her. Mag can see it in Audrey’s easy confidence. She knows she has him. It makes her all the more beautiful, Mag tells herself, though Audrey has no need of improvement. There is a generosity to her, in the breast, in the cheeks, in her lips. There is a directness in her expression that says, You had best love me as much as I deserve. Looking at her, Mag feels the tug herself. She is a bit in love with Audrey Brimsley. Who could resist? This is what she hopes for herself. She touches the lips in that photograph and feels an odd thrill.

  The squirrels in the attic dash from one end to the other. Another project. She supposes she should mention it to Wald. They can’t be poisoning vermin with a baby in the house.

  She turns the album page. Audrey is pregnant. Pregnant in the long-ago, with one of those two boys. Those boys who abandoned her to a nursing home. If parents could foresee the treason of their children, how many babies would be born? Better not to think on it now, Mag decides. Neither she nor Wald are particularly doting themselves. She sees her mother now and then, when she can bear the anxious chatter. They see Wald’s parents only slightly more often. Not often enough. She doesn’t deny that. But like everything else, that will change with the baby. As grandparents, their parents will have a job description. Babysit. Buy presents. Establish a college fund.

  Audrey stands on the end of a rough wooden dock. The water shimmers around her. She wears a simple print dress. Her feet and arms are bare. She squints at the camera as she laughs and shakes her head. Her hair flies out around her shoulders. She looks pleasingly swollen.

  Good for Audrey, Mag tells herself. She will never have Audrey’s breasts, or her full hips. She is just slightly more than skin and bones, not so different than she was on that long-ago birthday and the march through the fog-filled woods. But that, too, will change with the baby. She will be transformed in so many ways. Her thoughts grow pleasantly thick. Soon she is dreaming, the album still spread on her lap. She wakes to the sense that she is freezing. The sun has set, the room is dark, and she wishes, for the first time all day, that Wald were with her, in their home.

  Chapter Eleven

  On a Saturday morning Wald climbs the stairs to his attic with Al Worth, my mother’s savior and nemesis. The attic stairway is so narrow that their elbows brush against the walls, so steep that it is like climbing a ladder. The walls were pink once upon a time. Now they are a dull smear.

  Having learned about the squirrels in the attic, Wald sees ruin dead ahead. Squirrels bedding down in the insulation, gnawing at the joists, dying in the walls. To him this world is defined by decay. Paint peels, wood rots, pipes clog, wire frays, caulk shrinks, steel rusts. A trickle inevitably becomes a stream. A seed in a crack becomes a tree that shatters concrete. To win this battle is impossible; the best Wald hopes for is to postpone defeat long enough to turn a profit. A different view from that of my mother, who hoped only to die a few days before the roof fell where her head otherwise might have been.

  “Nothing personal,” says Worth, breathing heavily behind Wald. “But this place is a shithole. Audrey really let it go to hell. Jesus, look at this paint. You gotta get to work. Seriously, I mean. Stop crapping around.”

  “Thanks, Al,” Wald says, refusing to rise to the bait. “You okay there?”

  “I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?” Worth’s breath comes in a wheeze. He has a gut like a mail sack. His hair is teased into a combed-over pompadour. Thirty years ago he was a tough guy. He hasn’t lost his knack for picking a fight. His first words to Wald were, “You called for the bulldozer yet?”

  Since then they have made a peace based on mutual self-interest. Seeing Wald struggle to improve the long-neglected Brimsley place, Worth has developed a grudging, unspoken respect. He lends Wald tools, which are useful, and dispenses advice, which generally is not.

  Regarding the squirrels in Wald’s attic, Worth says, “Just shoot the bastards. Show ‘em you mean business.”

  “What about the windows? What if one crawls into the walls and rots?”

  “Yeah, yeah, but you get those traps you’re carrying them out one at a time. Hell, they crawl in twice as fast. Next thing you know they chew through the wires and you’re grilling weenies over what’s left of your house.”

  Though Worth has a point, it hardly matters, since Mag won’t allow him to butcher squirrels in the attic. “Let’s start by taking a look,” Wald says.

  “I got a pellet gun,” Worth counters. “The wife won’t hear a thing. We toss the dead ones out the window. What she don’t know don’t hurt her.”

  Which brings them now to the door at the top of the attic steps. Wald holds a crowbar. Worth has a Luger-style pellet gun tucked into his waistband. He pulled out his shirttails to get it past Mag.

  When Mag and Wald first toured the house, Gloria Taberna informed them that the attic door was nailed shut.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Wald said then.

  “Look,” Gloria answered, “it’s a mess down here, it’s a mess up there. Why torture yourself with the details?”

  There was something to be said for ignorance. That was what he thought at the time.

  Now Wald sticks the crowbar under the trap door. He puts his weight against it. Slowly he works the spikes loose.

  “What the hell was Brimsley thinking?” Worth asks. “Who nails his God damn attic door shut?”

  “I might want to nail it shut again,” Wald says. He has more than enough projects on his list. He ha
rdly needs another.

  The door pops open. A cloud of dust falls on them. Wald coughs and blinks. “Jesus,” he says.

  “Go on, go on,” Worth whispers, pulling out his pellet gun. “We don’t want a gang of fucking rodents jumping on our heads.”

  Wald moves slowly forward. Light comes from a pair of grimy windows, north and south. The ceiling and walls are bare planks, stained with water marks where the roof leaks. They can see their breath in the cold. A few dozen boxes are stacked against the walls. Dust, thick and undisturbed, trembles in the draft from the open door.

  Worth sneezes. A dust storm blows across the floor. “Shit,” he says. “You’re hearing things.” Worth slips his pellet gun back in his waistband. “Nothing’s been up here in fifty years.”

  He is right. Wald knows that. But Mag will believe him only after she has seen for herself. Then she will notice the boxes, which he will be obliged to carry downstairs. Though he doesn’t understand exactly why, he knows his wife will not ignore any of the treasures hidden by Audrey Brimsley.

  ≈

  Later they stand together on the attic steps. “But you can hear them so clearly,” Mag says. “From one end to the other.”

  “I don’t think so, Mag.”

  “Maybe they’re under the floor.”

  “Most likely on the roof, outside. You’ll get used to it.”

  She stops to consider that. He puts a hand on her hip and waits.

  “What are those boxes, Wald?” she asks.

  ≈

  He brings down a half-dozen to start. He sets them in her studio before he goes to sleep. Mag says she isn’t tired.

  The boxes can wait, should wait. She could watch the news, or read a book, or crawl into bed beside Wald and let his warmth lull her to sleep. She could, except that this new cache of boxes excites her. They are carefully tied shut, untouched for who knows how long.

  Wald proposed that they open the attic window, toss the boxes into the yard, and stack them next to the garbage can. As if that were the most sensible approach. As if that were even the most remote possibility. No, she has to go through them. What if…