by Holly Black
“You’re not too happy about this.”
“It’s not just that she hasn’t been telling me things. She’s always been a little self-contained. And she’s sorry, I know that.”
“Then what is it?”
Gerald sighed. He dipped a finger in his drink and began to trace desultory patterns on the bar. “Our first baby,” he said at last. “The miscarriage. It was a close call for Sara. It was scary then and it’s even scarier now. She’s all I have.” Bitter laughter escaped him. “Her and Julian MacGregor.”
“Don’t forget Fenton.”
“Ah yes, the cockroach.” Gerald finished his drink, and this time the bartender had another waiting.
“Is that it?”
“No.” He paused. “Let me ask you this: you ever feel … I don’t know … weird about anything when Kaye was pregnant?”
Lake laughed. “Let me guess. You’re afraid the baby’s not yours.” And then, when Gerald shook his head, he continued, “How about this? You’re afraid the baby is going to be retarded or horrifically deformed, some kind of freak.”
“I take it you did.”
Lake scooped a handful of peanuts onto the bar and began to arrange them in a neat circle. Gerald looked on in bleary fascination.
Another drink had been placed before him. He tilted the glass to his lips.
“It’s entirely normal,” Lake was saying. “Listen, I was so freaked out that I talked to Kaye’s obstetrician about it. You know what she said? It’s a normal by-product of your anxiety, that’s all. That’s the first baby. Second baby? It’s a breeze.”
“That so?”
“Sure. Trust me, this is the best thing that’s ever happened to you. This is going to be the best experience of your life.”
Gerald slouched in his stool, vastly—
—and illogically, some fragment of his mind insisted—
—relieved.
“Another drink?” Lake asked.
Gerald nodded. The conversation strayed listlessly for a while, and then he looked up to see that daylight had faded beyond the large windows facing the street. A steady buzz of conversation filled the room. He had a sense of pressure created by many people, hovering just beyond the limits of his peripheral vision. He felt ill, and thrust half an ice-melted drink away from him.
Lake’s face drifted in front of him, his voice came from far away: “Listen, Gerald, I’m driving you home, okay?”
Opening his eyes in Lake’s car, he saw the shimmering constellation of the city beyond a breath-frosted window, cool against his cheek. Lake was saying something. What?
“You okay? You’re not going to be sick are you?”
Gerald lifted a hand weakly. Fine, fine.
They were parked in the street outside Gerald’s darkened house. Black dread seized him. The house, empty, Sara away. A thin, ugly voice spoke in his mind—the voice of the cockroach, he thought with sudden lucidity. And it said:
This is how it will look when she’s gone. This is how it will look when she’s dead.
She won’t die. She won’t die.
Lake was saying, “Gerald, you have to listen to me.”
Clarity gripped him. “Okay. What is it?”
A passing car chased shadow across Lake’s handsome features. “I asked you out tonight for a reason, Gerald.”
“What’s that?”
Lake wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel, took in a slow breath. “Julian talked to me today. He’s giving me the Heather Drug campaign. I wanted to tell you. I told him you were depending on it, but … ” Lake shrugged.
Gerald thought: You son of a bitch. I ought to puke in your car.
But he said: “Not your fault.” He opened the door and stood up. Night air, leavened with the day’s heat, embraced him. “Later.”
And then somehow up the drive to the porch, where he spent long moments fitting the key into the door. Success at last, the door swinging open. Interior darkness leaked into the night.
He stumbled to the stairs, paused there to knot his tie around the newel post, which for some reason struck him as enormously funny. And then the long haul up the flight, abandoning one shoe halfway up and another on the landing, where the risers twisted to meet the gallery which opened over shining banisters into the foyer below.
Cathedral ceilings, he thought. The legacy of Fenton the cockroach. And with a twist like steel in his guts, the memory of that nasty internal voice came back to him. Not his voice. The voice of the cockroach:
This is how it will be when she’s dead.
And then the bedroom. The sheets, and Sara’s smell upon them. The long fall into oblivion.
He woke abruptly, clawing away a web of nightmare. He had been trapped in suffocating dark, while something—
—the cockroach—
—gnawed hungrily at his guts.
He sat up, breathing hard.
Sara stood at the foot of the bed, his shoes dangling in her upraised hand. She said, “You son of a bitch.”
Gerald squinted at the clock-radio. Dull red numbers transformed themselves as he watched. 11:03. Sunlight lashed through the blinds. The room swam with the stink of sleep and alcohol.
“Sara … ” He dug at his eyes.
“You son of a bitch,” she said.
She flung the shoes hard into his stomach as, gasping, he stumbled from the bed. “Sara—”
But she had turned away. He glimpsed her in profile at the door, her stomach slightly domed beneath her drop-waist dress, and then she was gone.
Gerald, swallowing—how dry his throat was!—followed. He caught her at the steps, and took her elbow.
“Sara, it was only a few drinks. Lake and I—”
She turned on him, a fierce light in her eyes. Her fury propelled him back a step. She reminded him of a feral dog, driving an intruder from her pups.
“It’s not that, Gerald,” she said.
And then—
—goddamn it, I won’t be treated like that!—
he stepped toward her, clasping her elbows. Wrenching her arm loose, she drew back her hand. The slap took them both by surprise; he could see the shock of it in her eyes, softening the anger.
His anger, too, dissipated, subsumed in a rising tide of grief and memory.
An uneasy stillness descended. She exhaled and turned away, stared over the railing into the void below, where the sun fell in bright patches against the parquet. Gerald lifted a hand to his cheek, and Sara turned now to face him, her eyes lifted to him, her hand following his to his face. He felt her touch him through the burning.
“I’m sorry,” they said simultaneously.
Bright sheepish laughter at this synchronicity convulsed them, and Gerald, embracing her, saw with horror how close she stood to the stairs. Unbidden, an image possessed him: Sara, teetering on the edge of balance. In a series of strobic flashes, he saw it as it might have been. Saw her fall away from him, her arms outstretched for his grasping fingers. Saw her crash backwards to the landing, tumble down the long flight to the foyer. Saw the blood—
—so little blood. My God, who would have thought? So little blood!
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
She dug her fingers into his back. “It’s not that.”
“Then what?”
She pulled away and fixed him with her stare. “Your shoes, Gerald. You left them on the stairs.” Her hand stole over the tiny mound of her stomach. “I could have fallen.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and drew her to him.
Her voice tight with controlled emotion, she spoke again, barely perceptible, punctuating her words with small blows against his shoulder. “Not again,” she whispered.
Clasping her even tighter, Gerald drew in a faint breath of her floral-scented shampoo and gazed over her head at the stairs which fell infinitely away behind her.
“Not again,” he said.
Gerald watched apprehensively as Dr. Exavious dragged the ultrasound transducer over Sara’s
belly, round as a small pumpkin and glistening with clear, odorless gel. The small screen flickered with a shifting pattern of gray and black, grainy and irresolute as the swirling path of a thunderstorm on a television meteorologist’s radar.
Sara looked on with a clear light in her face. It was an expression Gerald saw with increasing frequency these days. A sort of tranquil beauty had come into her features, a still internal repose not unlike that he sometimes glimpsed when she moved over him in private rhythm, outward token of a concentration even then wholly private and remote.
But never, never so lost to him as now.
“There now,” Exavious said softly. He pointed at the screen. “There is the heart, do you see it?”
Gerald leaned forward, staring. The room, cool, faintly redolent of antiseptic, was silent but for Sara’s small coos of delight, and the muted whir of the VCR racked below the ultrasound scanner. Gerald drew a slow breath as the grayish knot Exavious had indicated drew in upon itself and expanded in a pulse of ceaseless, mindless syncopation.
“Good strong heart,” Exavious said.
Slowly then, he began to move the transducer again. A feeling of unreality possessed Gerald as he watched the structure of his child unfold across the screen in changeable swaths of light. Here the kidneys—“Good, very good,” Exavious commented—and there the spine, knotted, serpentine. The budding arms and legs—Exavious pausing here to trace lambent measurements on the screen with a wand, nodding to himself. And something else, which Exavious didn’t comment on, but which Gerald thought to be the hint of a vestigial tail curling between the crooked lines of the legs. He had heard of children born with tails, anomalous throwbacks from the long evolutionary rise out of the jungle.
Sara said, “Can you get an image of the whole baby?”
Exavious adjusted the transducer once more. The screen flickered, settled, grew still at the touch of a button. “Not the whole baby. The beam is too narrow, but this is close.”
Gerald studied the image, the thing hunched upon itself in a swirl of viscous fluid, spine twisted, misshapen head fractured by atavistic features: blind pits he took for eyes, black slits for nostrils, the thin slash of the mouth, like a snake’s mouth, as lipless and implacable. He saw at the end of an out-flung limb the curled talon of a hand. Gerald could not quell the feeling of revulsion which welled up inside him. It looked not like a child, he thought, but like some primitive reptile, a throwback to the numb, idiot fecundity of the primordial slime.
He and Sara spoke at the same time:
“It’s beautiful.”
“My God, it doesn’t even look human.”
He said this without thought, and only in the shocked silence that followed did he see how it must have sounded.
“I mean—” he said, but it was pointless. Sara would not meet his eyes.
Dr. Exavious said, “In fact, you are both correct. It is beautiful indeed, but it hardly looks human. Not yet. It will, though.” He patted Sara’s hand. “Mr. Hartshorn’s reaction is not atypical.”
“But not typical either, I’m guessing.”
Exavious shrugged. “Perhaps.” He touched a button and the image on the screen disappeared. He cleaned and racked the transducer, halted the VCR.
“I was just thinking it looks … like something very ancient,” Gerald said. “Evolution, you know.”
“Haeckel’s law. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”
“I’m sorry?”
“A very old idea, Mr. Hartshorn. The development of the individual recapitulates the development of the species.”
“Is that true?” Sara asked.
“Not literally. In some metaphorical sense, I suppose.” Bending, the doctor ejected the tape from the VCR and handed it to Gerald. “But let me assure you, your baby is fine. It is going to be a beautiful child.”
At this, Gerald caught Sara’s eye: I’m sorry, this look was meant to say, but she would not yield. Later though, in the car, she forgave him, saying: “Did you hear what he said, Gerald? A beautiful child.” She laughed and squeezed his hand and said it again: “Our beautiful, beautiful baby.”
Gerald forced a smile. “That’s right,” he told her.
But in his heart another voice was speaking, a thin ugly voice he knew. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, it said, and Gerald gripped the steering wheel until the flesh at his knuckles went bloodless; he smiled at Sara, and tried to wall that voice away, and perhaps he thought he succeeded. But in the secret chambers of his heart it resonated still. And he could not help but listen.
Three weeks later, Indian summer began to die away into fall, and Sara reported that the baby had begun moving within her. Time and again over the next few weeks, Gerald cupped his hand over the growing mound of her belly, alert to even the tiniest shift, but he could feel nothing, nothing at all.
“There,” Sara said. Breathlessly: “Can you feel it?”
Gerald shook his head, feeling, for no reason he could quite articulate, vaguely relieved.
Sara continued to put on weight, complaining gamely as her abdomen expanded and her breasts grew sensitive. Gerald sometimes came upon her unawares in the bedroom, standing in her robe and gazing ruefully at the mirror, or sitting on the bed, staring thoughtfully into a closet crowded with unworn clothes and shoes that cramped her swollen feet. A thin dark line extended to her naval (the rectus muscle, Exavious told them, never fear); she claimed she could do nothing with her hair. At night, waking beside her in the darkness, Gerald found his hands stealing over her in numb bewilderment. What had happened to Sara, long-known, much-loved? The clean, angular lines he had known for years vanished, her long bones hidden in this figure gently rounded and soft. Who was this strange woman sleeping in his bed?
And yet, despite all, her beauty seemed to Gerald only more pronounced. She moved easy in this new body, at home and graceful. That clear light he had glimpsed sporadically in her face gradually grew brighter, omnipresent, radiating out of her with a chill calm. For the first time in his life, Gerald believed that old description he had so often read: Sara’s eyes indeed did sparkle. They danced, they shone with a brilliance that reflected his stare—hermetic, enigmatic, defying interpretation. Her gaze pierced through him, into a world or future he could not see or share. Her hands seemed unconsciously to be drawn to her swollen belly; they crept over it constantly, they caressed it.
Her gums swelled. She complained of heartburn, but she would not use the antacid tablets Exavious prescribed, would not touch aspirin or ibuprofen. In October, she could no longer sleep eight hours undisturbed. Once, twice, three times a night, Gerald woke to feel the mattress relinquish her weight with a long sigh. He listened as she moved through the heavy dark to the bathroom, no lights, ever considerate. He listened to the secret flow of urine, the flushing toilet’s throaty rush. He woke up, sore-eyed, yawning, and Dr. Exavious’s words—there are many pressures, you understand, not least on the kidneys—began to seem less like a joke, more like a curse.
In November, they began attending the childbirth classes the doctor had recommended. Twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, Gerald crept out of the office early, uncomfortably aware of Julian MacGregor’s baleful gaze; at such moments, he could not help but think of Lake Conley and the Heather Drug campaign. As he retrieved the Lexus from the garage under the building and drove to the rambling old Baptist church where the classes met, his thoughts turned to his exhaustion-stitched eyes and his increasingly tardy appearances at the office every morning. Uneasy snakes of anxiety coiled through his guts.
One afternoon, he sneaked away half an hour early and stopped by the bar on Magnolia for two quick drinks. Calmer then, he drove to the church and parked, letting himself in through the side door of the classroom a few minutes early. Pregnant women thronged the room, luminous and beautiful and infinitely remote; those few men like himself already present stood removed, on the fringes, banished from this mysterious communion.
For a long terrible moment,
he stood in the doorway and searched for Sara, nowhere visible. Just the room crowded with these women, their bellies stirring with a biological imperative neither he nor any man could know or comprehend, that same strange light shining in their inscrutable eyes. They are in league against us, whispered a voice unbidden in his mind. They are in league against us.
Was that the cockroach’s voice? Or was it his own?
Then the crowd shifted, Sara slipped into sight. She came toward him, smiling, and he stepped forward to meet her, this question unresolved.
But the incident—and the question it inspired—lingered in his mind. When he woke from restless dreams, it attended him, nagging, resonant: that intimate communion of women he had seen, linked by fleshly sympathies he could not hope to understand. Their eyes shining with a passion that surpassed any passion he had known. The way they had—that Sara had—of cradling their swollen bellies, as if to caress the—
—Christ, was it monstrous that came to mind?—
—growths within.
He sat up sweating, sheets pooled in his lap. Far down in the depths of the house the furnace kicked on; overheated air, smelling musty and dry, wafted by his face. Winter folded the house in chill intimacy, but in here … hot, hot. His heart pounded. He wiped a hand over his forehead, dragged in a long breath.
Some watchful quality to the silence, the uneven note of her respiration, told him that Sara, too, was awake. In the darkness. Thinking.
She said, “You okay?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
And this was sufficient for her. She asked nothing more of him than this simple admission of weakness, she never had. She touched him now, her long hand cool against his back. She drew him to the softness at her breast, where he rested his head now, breath ragged, a panic he could not contain rising like wind in the desert places inside him. Heavy dry sobs wracked him.
“Shhh, now,” she said, not asking, just rocking him gently. Her hands moved through his hair.
“Shhh,” she whispered.
And slowly, by degrees imperceptible, the agony that had possessed him, she soothed away. Nothing, he thought. Of course, it had been nothing—anxieties, Lake Conley had said.
