“Dahlia,” the doctor pleads, then more firmly, “Dahlia—this is your baby!”
She chuckles again. Her gaze skips across the half-covered faces of the nurses. She won’t look at the incubator. Where are the men, she suddenly needs to know. Where had they been when they’d planned this? She’d had a husband once, whose face she can’t remember, and a father who’s been dead for years. Somewhere is a young blond man equally responsible for the shriveled thing encased in glass. How easily she’d been abandoned—why had she been the only one dragged from the theatre?
“No!” Dahlia wrings the doctor’s hand from her arm. “Where’s the mother?” There has to be a woman, freshly purged, lying nearby, and Dahlia needs to find her. She backs through the steel door into a white hallway, which she hurries down. She passes several rooms with closed doors and stops before one marked “WOMEN.” The knob is cold through her latex glove, as is the lock she turns once she’s inside. Dahlia glimpses a sink, a toilet, and her own white-swathed reflection before she finds the switch and darkens the room. She pulls off her mask, and the air is cool on her face and in her lungs, comforting until the odor of ammonium stings her eyes. Dahlia knows she’s staring at a mirror, but sees nothing. Maybe on the mirror’s other side, through the wall, the awful baby’s true mother lies. She laces her fingers together at her waist—through the gloves they feel like cold sausages.
Dahlia sets herself in motion. “Blue Baby,” she says, swinging her arms. “Blue Baby . . .” On which rock-a-bye will she begin to feel the weight? “Blue Baby . . .” She shifts her blind gaze for a moment, guessing where the toilet must be. “Blue Baby . . .” She mustn’t fear the face in the mirror when it rises before her. “Blue Baby . . .” When the witch demands her child, Dahlia will yell, “Take it!”—eager to surrender her terrible mistake.
Blue Madeline’s Version
Eric pulls up short of his driveway. It’s eleven a.m. on what had begun as a work day, and his house doesn’t look right. He’s seen it catching the mid-morning sun on weekends, but this is different. Everything else on the block of modest homes seems switched off—no cars or hum of mowers, no kids on bikes. He doesn’t see a squirrel or a sparrow—and if he had seen a bird overhead, frozen in mid-flight as in a museum diorama, it wouldn’t have surprised him. But Eric’s Cape Cod glows: the bricks seem kiln fresh, the red door and shutters blaze. The hedges swell with vibrant green. His home seems lit from within, like a poorly timed holiday display.
Three hours earlier, he’d left for the office, passing his jogging neighbor, Larry Feldstein, the bachelor retiree. “DMJ,” Eric called—Dead Man Jogging. Twelve times around the block for Larry, like clockwork since his triple bypass five years ago. “DMW,” Larry responded, pointing at Eric. Dead Man Working. They share this exchange most mornings. DMW no longer, Eric hopes Larry hasn’t noticed his early return.
At 9:30, Eric had been called into the third-floor conference room and sacked. We recognize your contribution—the director of human resources said, smirking, as if the firing was a preliminary reading for an absurd play. Eric had never heard her voice until that moment. Kurt, his boss, didn’t lift his eyes from a document that could have been a script. But you haven’t met the agreed upon goals set at your last performance review. Performance review? Eric couldn’t recall such a meeting. At the water cooler a few months earlier Kurt had asked about Eric’s family, nodded, and encouraged him to get those numbers up. That had been a performance review? Up was a goal? He’d had thirty minutes to clean out his desk, then was paraded by security past his former colleagues.
Now Eric stands on the stoop of his empty home—Celia is at a three-day button convention in Buffalo. Nothing is familiar. He fumbles for his keys before finding them in the hand grasping his briefcase. He might as well have left that behind. All he’d shoveled into it was a staple remover, a box of ball point pens, and the photograph of Celia and his children, David and Eva, taken a dozen years ago on a Lake George beach. He’s thinking of that white beach and the deep blue water behind, the green Adirondacks humped in the distance when he stumbles over a package on the welcome mat.
Returning home to a package is a first. Celia would usually have claimed a delivery by the afternoon, and nothing ever came on weekends. Is this something from work? Recognition for his contribution. A gold watch? Or something, he can’t imagine what, acknowledging that a mistake had been made—please accept this token of apology and return to work tomorrow morning.
The package is the size of half a shoebox and weighs almost nothing—no gold watch. Eric’s name isn’t on the label: “Training Facility, 232 Van Curler Road.” His address is 232 Verona. The police training facility is two blocks south. There’d been a mix up once before. On a Saturday afternoon, an officer had stepped out of his cruiser and presented Eric, who was wondering if he was about to be cited for an unmuffled lawnmower, with what turned out to be a box of copper buttons addressed to Celia. Never before, however, has something intended for the police been left at their door.
The return address on this package is for Atlantic Chemicals in Union, New Jersey. Clamping the box under his arm and sweeping the street with a wary glance, Eric unlocks his front door and steps in, calling, “Hello!” out of habit. A man should accept his dismissal stoically. He wouldn’t interrupt Celia’s pleasure trip with his bad news—she’d leave her convention to offer her unnecessary support. He can afford to retire, if they’re frugal. There’ll be severance pay, then unemployment, and before long his pension and Social Security. They’re mortgage free, and the kids are responsible for their own graduate school loans.
No one will expect him to complain; he’s gruff, not much of a talker. He’d run out of things to say to his children years ago, and, unlike Celia, who bemoans their absence, he can celebrate memories without a corpus delecti. Children move on; it’s the way of the world, and silence needn’t imply the washing of hands.
And Celia lives blissfully in her world of antique buttons. “Imagine the hearts that beat behind these bits of bone and horn and metal,” she mused once, stirring a cookie tin filled with her favorites. Eric woodworks, a pastime both physical and practical. It looks to the future. His wish for more time to pursue his hobby has been granted.
The couple has faced life placidly for years. Only once had Celia’s mask loosened: ten years past, when a beloved younger cousin died tragically of an aneurism. No father in the picture, her orphaned five year old had only her grandmother, Celia’s aunt, who, Celia fretted, was “nearly deranged, possibly an alcoholic. If we offer, she’ll let us have Madeline. We’ve got the guestroom.”
Romantic fantasies about buttons were one thing. Raising a stranger probably damaged by both nature and nurture was something else entirely. Eric and Celia had the one boy and one girl of the perfect family. A new, unplanned child would have subverted the mathematics. No noble gestures, he’d declared. The fire in Celia’s eyes flickered and died. “Impulse buying has messy consequences,” he concluded. His wife whispered her final accusation: “You are a hollow man.” They never spoke directly of the little girl again, though somehow Eric knew the grandmother had proven unsuitable, and the child had ended up in foster care.
From the folding chair beside his basement work table, Eric contemplates the mis-delivered package. If the police come looking, he’ll deny knowledge of it. He cuts the packing tape and opens the flaps. Nestled in shredded green paper is an ampoule of golden liquid. When he plucks it out and holds it up to the fluorescent light, a yellow streak runs down his wrist, as if the ampoule is leaking color. An invoice lists a single item: “Cadaver scent.” Neither the price nor directions are included, though a bold-faced statement cautions, “Simulated cadaver smells are available only to certified training facilities.”
Eric grimaces—on this of all days to have the smell of death delivered to his home. Artificial, yes, but death nevertheless. He’s seen �
�cadaver dogs” featured on TV—German shepherds digging through the smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers or the rubble left by an earthquake in a South American city. He’s seen them bounding through marshes on taut leashes, their nasal receptors stimulated by the smell of decaying human meat. What draws a dog so powerfully to a scent, Eric wonders. Does instinct feel like an emotion? He’d never have guessed these animals were trained in his own neighborhood.
Eric sets the ampoule on his work table, where it stands like a golden bullet. There are laboratories, he’s read, that concoct artificial scents and flavors: luncheon meats, French fries, and even the essence of death. When had they known they’d perfected “cadaver”? Maybe a caged dog drooled. The ampoule glows with cloudless purity. Would the essence be considered artificial if it had been distilled from a dead heart?
“Uncle Irk—” Because the voice is feather light, it doesn’t shock Eric. He turns to find a young woman—a girl?—sitting midway up the open basement steps. She’s thin, her arms and legs sprawling from her black tank top and cut-off shorts, every inch of her visible flesh a silvery blue. Her face is lost in the shadows, but when she pushes back dark bangs, her eyes gleam. “That’s what I would have called you, when you lectured me about, I don’t know, not doing my homework, or spending too much time on the phone, or not helping Aunt Celia with the dishes. I’d have pretended to be miffed, but it would have been playful. ‘Uncle Irk.’ It probably wouldn’t have stuck. Maybe I would have left it at ‘Eric’ and ‘Celia.’” She pauses, as if counting breaths. “Surprise! I’m Madeline!”
No surprise. Given the unsettled state of his thoughts after the morning’s firing, it’s no wonder he’d forgotten to lock the front door. If not the police looking for their cadaver scent, why not this girl? He’s been thinking about her, hasn’t he? “Of course,” he says. It’s Celia who would have been shocked. She would have cried with joy to see her cousin’s child. But the idea of hosting is exhausting; he gestures toward the floors above them.
“The guest room is the second door on your right after the kitchen. The bathroom is the room before that. Towels in the bathroom closet, and take anything you want from the refrigerator. Have a glass of milk.”
“Un-hunh.” Madeline’s voice tickles his ears. “What’s that you’ve got there? Is that a pee-sample? You don’t need one for work anymore, right? You would have threatened me with one, and we would have had a fight about it, but you’d have believed that I was clean, I think.”
Eric picks up the ampoule. An air bubble shifts through it. “It’s scent,” he says, “for training dogs—it smells like cadavers. So they can rescue dead bodies.”
Silence. Across the basement the hot water heater ticks. If he closes his eyes, he might be alone, the stairs unoccupied. A giggle: “You don’t ‘rescue’ dead bodies. I mean, it’s a little late for a rescue once you’re a body, isn’t it?”
“Not ‘rescue.’ I meant ‘recover.’ Sorry—tough day.” Eric suddenly sees himself as his coworkers must have, trailing the security guard past their cubicles. Had he really held his briefcase like a lunch tray?
“And what are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t know. It was delivered by accident.”
“Are you sure it was an accident?”
“It had the wrong address. It was supposed to go to the place where they train the dogs.”
“Mmm—” A thoughtful pause. “Maybe it got there. Maybe one of the dogs brought it over. He thought you needed it. Did you check the box it came in for teeth marks? Saliva?” The girl shifts on the steps, crosses her legs, and there’s a shimmer like bubbles released underwater.
“Maybe.” Conversation and concentration are impossible to maintain. He feels the weight of his house on his shoulders.
“So—what are you going to do with it?”
“Tomorrow,” he murmurs as his eyes close. “I’ll think of something tomorrow.”
“Okay if I look at it?” the blue girl might have asked.
It’s morning, and Eric sits at his kitchen table with a mug of coffee he doesn’t recall brewing. “Late for work,” he mutters, then remembers, as if stepping into a cold rain, that there isn’t any work. Routines will change. Time will unfold differently. He can read the paper now instead of waiting for the evening. It had been his daily custom to pull it from the box at the end of his driveway and toss it toward the front door for Celia, giving himself a mental fist pump if it reached the stoop. If Larry was jogging by, Eric would wave: “DMJ!” “DMW!”
But what if Larry passes by this morning when Eric—who still wears a sweatshirt and flannel pajama bottoms—is fetching the paper? He leaves his coffee and hurries to the front door, where he squints through the small, chin-high window. His eyes rove the street and adjacent lawns, alert for movement—if not Larry, maybe a dog, a trotting German shepherd with a lolling tongue. He remembers the package, the cadaver scent, and Madeline.
How odd, he thinks. On his way back to the kitchen, he checks the guestroom. The door is shut. He peers into the hall bathroom, and there’s a rumpled towel on the rack. The faucet drips, and he tightens it. His reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror startles him: his cheeks are raw red, frosted with silver stubble; brown stains pollute the whites of his eyes. His lower lip sags to a frown at the thin hair pasted over his crown. There’s a new toothbrush in the holder, wet.
On his way back to the kitchen, he pauses outside the guestroom door, but hears nothing. He’s about to sit back down to his coffee when he notices the blink of the answering machine. It’s a message from Celia he’s somehow missed: “Hello, Eric. Everything’s fine, the convention is fine, I’m fine. Lots of networking and trading. I’ve got a bid in for a Czech unicorn turquoise. And Eric, unless there’s a problem, I won’t be coming home Sunday. Some of us are going to Toronto. There’s an exhibition there, too. International buttons. Three more days. So carry on without me—I’ll call again soon.”
Eric is in the basement, where he’s spent most of the day, forgoing lunch. He’s been measuring and sawing long white pine boards for a built-in storage bench for his work area. He doesn’t remember when he bought the wood, but the pine smell reminds him of the camping trips the family had taken in the Adirondacks. Now and then he catches a golden wink from his work table—the cadaver scent—and he listens for footsteps overhead. Taking a break from sawing, he picks up the ampoule, shakes it, and watches the froth of bubbles fizz out until the liquid is again clear and golden. It’s only half full. Is this all there was?
“I’d have shared a tent with Eva when we camped.” Blue Madeline has returned to the shadowy basement steps. “David would have shoved toads and newts under the flaps, and we girls would have screamed and held each other’s hands, even though we weren’t really scared. Eva’s how much older than me, Eric?”
“I don’t know—how old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Then ten. Ten years older.” Eric has been staring at the white pine so long his focus won’t adjust; the figure on the steps wavers like a blue flame.
“So she would have been like I am now. We would have gotten David back, though—maybe we’d have stolen his shorts from the shower building. Swimming in the lake would have been good enough for the rest of us, but David always wanted a shower. Celia would have said he was ‘preening for the ladies.’”
“He was older—”
“—And used to drink beer with the boys down at the boathouse when he thought everybody was asleep. But Eva and I would have sneaked down and watched from behind the trees. The boys would be swimming without their suits. I would have thought their bare bottoms were as white as the moon, and I’d giggle—and the boys would have pulled their shorts on and called us out—mostly for Eva, she was so pretty. And we’d have toasted marshmallows at a campfire while the boys drank more beer and Eva tried so
me. When we all got back to our campsite just before dawn, we’d hear you snoring, and it would have made you seem harmless. Oh—I took care of things for you.”
Harmless? “Took care of things?” Before Madeline’s last words, Eric had retreated with her to the Adirondacks—crisp air and sunshine, campfires and boggy soil, mildew waft of camping equipment used once a year. The kids—just his boy and girl, younger than Madeline’s version, slick and wet, slipping through black inner tubes into the blue lake. And Celia, in cuffed jeans over her swimsuit, her face unavailable to his memory—as featureless as one of her copper buttons.
While he’s listened, Eric has framed his bench and measured the seven-foot planks he’ll use for its top. He’ll fix it to the wall perpendicular to his work table. The top will be hinged for storage. Why had she said “harmless”?
“You took care of what?” he asks again.
Madeline’s voice floats like a gull in an empty sky. “You’d have said, ‘This isn’t real camping—showers and RVs and paved roads.’” When the girl imitates his voice, Eric feels the weight of each word in his throat. “What I took care of is that lady from your office—the one who had the pig-faced grin when she fired you. Did you know she just finished putting in a pool?”
“I didn’t, no.”
“Um-hmm. Hadn’t filled it yet. I guess they were waiting for it to set. But imagine all the work . . .”
“Work?”
“To dig it up. Underneath it, when they’re looking for the body.”
Eric wipes sweat from his brow with his wrist. The girl shimmers like a leaping fish. She drops her hand from her smile, and her teeth shine.
“You’d have gotten me braces when you saw the big space between my front teeth. I imagine the police are still at that lady’s. A little of that cadaver stuff down the pool drain, and a call to the police—not from here, don’t worry. An ‘anonymous tip.’ You know that kidnapped baby they’ve been looking for? From Pittsfield? Missing a few months? Imagine if someone told them it was buried under that pool. They’d have to dig the whole thing up, just to check it out, wouldn’t they? Especially when a cadaver dog sniffed out something down that brand new drain. It would sure make a mess for that lady. Lots of questions, and, well, she won’t be using that new pool for a while after they chop out the whole bottom. Can’t you just see it? It only took a few drops of that scent.”
Women of Consequence Page 12
