The Last Neanderthal

by Claire Cameron

  Jacob got a little better but had to stay in the hospital another day. He had a bottle given to him by the nurse after every time I tried to breastfeed him. Between feedings, I worried about the next one. He had to eat every hour, as he needed sustenance to fight the jaundice. We were sent home from the hospital the next morning but told to report to the outpatient clinic the following day for a checkup. Simon started talking about missing the first week of his courses. I worried about money, but I also felt a deep fear about being alone to care for Jacob. Birth was supposed to be natural, yet I was clearly injured and needing help myself. I’m not sure if I said this aloud or if Simon sensed it but he picked up his phone to make a call.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “You need help, Rose.”

  Simon hired a girl named Marie who lived two doors away. She would cook and clean and make sure I got to the clinic. She was young. I watched Simon size her up with a worried look. We had talked at length about relocating to London despite the medical coverage, but Jacob’s health concerns made it seem too risky. In the end Simon decided that since Marie had opposable thumbs and could dial a phone, she would do. He gave her strict instructions on taking care of us and made sure she had the number of the midwife, the hospital, Anais, and Caitlin.

  “Ugh, don’t let Caitlin darken my door,” I growled to him.

  “She already called twice. She just wants to make sure you are okay.”

  “She wants to witness my ruin.”

  Simon reluctantly left. He must have called my mother too, as she phoned and offered to come right away. I convinced her to wait a month. I thought she could take care of Jacob when I returned to the dig, but as I limped to the bed, I doubted I’d ever be able to go back to work. My hips felt loose, as though the middle of my body might slip out from under me. I couldn’t imagine ever being strong or able to walk in a straight line again. I couldn’t crouch down to dig, lift heavy sample crates, or even make the hike into the camp. A new fear set in: I had lost my physical strength. I was vulnerable in a way I had never been before. And there was Jacob, solely dependent on me. When would the sweet maternal instinct kick in? The one that would help me keep my baby alive? My body shook with a deep terror that he would die because of something I did, or didn’t, do. I was filled with a black dread so strong that I found myself searching for ways to stop it.

  Marie made me an omelet. I somehow got Jacob and myself to the appointment at the clinic. A nurse sniffed around me in a way that made me feel like a dog, but in doing so she discovered the extent of my infection. It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed it; it was more like my own body seemed like a secondary thing that I didn’t have the energy to address. I was put on antibiotics for my wound, which wasn’t healing properly. I worried about the effect the medication would have on my breast milk and Jacob and I tried to explain my concerns to the doctor. He suggested that I should bottle-feed but everything I’d read declared that bottle-feeding didn’t give a baby the best start to life. I couldn’t just stop nursing.

  And the days went by this way, a blur of feedings, diaper changes, brief snatches of sleep, phone calls, checkups. Marie took a photo of me holding Jacob and sent it to Simon. I looked at her phone and it was odd to see the photo. A moment ago I had inhabited my own skin, but now I was outside of it. The woman on the phone looked tired and wan, like a giant leech had latched onto her skin and was slowly sucking her vitality away. All that remained was a bloodless face. I couldn’t eat any more eggs, and Marie didn’t have any other dishes in her repertoire.

  Andy called one day. He was installed in the other apartment.

  “Can I come visit?”

  “Soon,” I said.

  “Later today? Caitlin offered to drive me over.”

  “Is she using you to get to me?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “No, I just meant it’s not a good time for a visit. I need to rest.”

  “Is everything okay?” he said, taking a slurp of something.

  “Fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sleep is the most important thing. I hope you aren’t drinking too much soda?”

  “Nice deflection, Rose.”

  I didn’t want visitors. I didn’t need misplaced concern taking up more of my energy. Marie was there a couple of hours a day to give me a chance to sleep. Whenever I lay down and drifted off, she went about keeping herself busy and I’d wake to the sound of the water tap, a chair scraping on tile, or the mop swishing in a bucket.

  Finally, Marie left for the day. The stink of lavender hung in the air and coated my clothes. I fed Jacob as best I could and put him in the bassinet beside my bed. It was warm outside, but I pulled the double doors tight to fend off the lavender. All I could think about was squeezing my eyes tight to sleep because at any moment Jacob might cry.

  I fell into a sort of half sleep, as if I were hovering somewhere over the bed, but the moment I started to sink down, I jumped up again. I leaned over to look at the baby. Was he alive? Still breathing? I wondered at his perfect lips, the curl of his ears, the rise and fall of his chest, and the small fingers wrapped into tiny fists. I had thought that after delivering a baby, I would feel invincible, but instead fear had filled me for days. The pull of him was so strong that it felt like falling. I had to keep him alive. I was so tired. I started to wonder how much more I could take.

  I needed to sleep. I checked once more that Jacob was breathing and lay down stiff as a board on my bed. If I slept, then my muscles would relax and I wouldn’t feel this urge to run. From what? I couldn’t quite say. That great fear had taken up my center and blotted out anything I had been or felt before. My body ached and bled just as the day bled into my dreams, and it was hard to tell what was real.

  The air in the room turned earthy, as though things could grow there. Thick vines sprouted around the edges of the old garage downstairs. They grew up through the old Peugeot and climbed out the windows. The shoots bit into a crack in the wall and burst through the windows of the flat. They grew up into tall trees and soon there were thick trunks that shot up through the ceiling. Branches ripped at the roof. They grew too tall and soon started to fall around us. The land lost its trees and opened into grassy plains. Jacob and I lay in our beds and were exposed to the sun. Our skin, too thin and white, began to blister. The light shone red through my eyelids.

  I heard something stir, but my body refused to respond. The sound pushed me deeper into the pillow. A tattered blanket of leaves and dirt covered my body. I sank farther and farther down. I was being buried and didn’t mind. With each clump of dirt that covered me, I felt a cool relief. Soon my head was dug in deep and the darkness soothed my burning eyes. At last I was underground. It was quiet. The dirt was thick over my body. Roots grew up through me and held me in place. And somewhere in the distance I heard a baby crying.

  The tiny cries seemed to come from far away. Now I was dreaming about a cat outside the window. It was meowing, going on and on, and I tried to shoo it away. I turned on my side and woke slightly and realized that the sound wasn’t coming from a cat. It was a baby in a bassinet beside my bed. It was a small baby. It was my baby. It was crying and no one was helping it. There was no one else home. Suddenly, the problem and the source settled in my mind. The baby was hungry. The baby was mine.

  The dream snapped into a crisp reality, the edges sharp. A baby, my baby, was screeching for milk and I had only just gotten to sleep, a heavenly sleep that could have continued for days. I felt dry. My nipples were bullets on my chest, sore from Jacob’s gnawing at me with tiny gums that should have been harmless. My body was weak. My mind was dulled to the point of uselessness. My hair was dirty. I smelled. The flap of belly lay empty and loose.

  I opened my eyes and waited. I hoped he would settle, but his cries only got louder. My nerves still felt tied to his and it was as though he were shouting into the end of my spine. My heart thumped and my blood raced and suddenly I stood up, quick and furious, as
though someone had stabbed me with a needle and I had leaped to my feet. My lips pulled back and my hands were in fists. From way up high, I looked down at the small body in the bassinet and willed it to stop crying.

  “Shut up!” I growled.

  He didn’t. Jacob didn’t even open his eyes, but his crying felt purposeful, driven by instinct. His body was doing things that were directly at odds with mine. My heart raced. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My shoulders rounded and my muscles tensed. There was only so much strength to go around and it wasn’t enough. I snatched him up. Only one of us could live.

  27.

  Winter continued to roar outside the burrow. Girl’s heart slowed. Her blood moved around in her veins like a thick sludge. She had eaten every last bit of food. With nothing to consume, her body continued to feed on itself. It was not love that drove a body to live, but hunger.

  When the meat on her body was close to gone, the once-thick trunks of her thighs were thin twigs. No leaves could grow. The roots couldn’t reach soil. Outside the cave, the sun was weak and far away. The meadows would stay sleeping under the thick blanket of snow. There would be no bison, no hooves, and no sweet stink. The fish would live under the ice with no bears to catch them. A barren, empty land lay all around with no family. She imagined that she was on the moon.

  Girl knew she was close to death and it tempted her. As Big Mother had, she felt that there would be great relief in the long dirt nap. She would finally rest. But she knew something else. There was no one else to benefit from her body in the dirt. She was the only one who could live to breed again. She was the family.

  While Girl appeared to the naked eye to be dead, her thin body—like a pile of twigs under the tree where only the dead go—was still making heat. The careful observer, one who could notice very small things, one who would bother to lower a cheek to her lips, would be able to feel the faintest breath, which still held a slight trace of heat. A sharp eye might catch the twitch of her nose, just a wiggle of the fine hairs that stood up to feel the air.

  A shaft of light hit her skin. She cracked one eye open and thought that she was looking up from under the earth. Maybe a badger had dug up her body, or the hyenas had come to pick at her carcass. For a moment, the light flickered. Her vision was blurry, but she realized that she was looking at the flap of the door. The sky had been the color of the snow for so long. Clouds had kept the sun away. Now the light came from the sun. And the sky outside was blue.

  Girl pushed herself up to sit. Her body, now freed from the demands of the baby, could supply itself more efficiently than it had before. She didn’t grow strong exactly, but something returned—a small spark, a will, like the light from a torch in the distance. And she felt a heat. It was a turn in the weather, and it provided a final chance.

  Quietly and with careful movements, she reached for the horns her mother had worn. She tied them on her head. Girl became the Big Mother.

  Instinct

  “Rose?”

  I was standing at the bassinet in a rage when I heard a sound. A voice I couldn’t place. It came from behind me, somewhere in the flat. I was holding Jacob out in front of me and he was wailing. His small shoulders were bunched up. A slick of sweat came to my skin; my teeth were clenched tight. I thought only about making the sound stop.

  “I’ll take him.” A voice sliced through my anger. I felt a cool hand on my shoulder. It seemed dark in the apartment. Was it night or day? I turned around. It was Caitlin. She was gentle but firm.

  “You rest.”

  I let the baby go, allowing her to take him from me. All I felt was relief. I thumped down on the bed. As my breath started to even out, somewhere in the depths of my mind I realized that my baby had stopped crying. I was so grateful that he was out of my care, away from me, and away from what I had wanted to do. What I might have done. My body felt heavy. I slipped into a deep sleep.

  What seemed like much later, I sat up with a start and looked around. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw her again, Caitlin. A moment before, I had been sure that I had only dreamed her. She sat in the rocking chair in the corner of the room where I slept. Her T-shirt had a streak of dirt across the front, like she had been at the dig site. Her gray hair was pulled back. She looked at me but didn’t smile. She held the baby softly in her arms and was giving him one of the bottles of pumped breast milk that I kept in the fridge. I guessed that she’d warmed it just right, as Jacob’s eyes were rolled back and he looked drunk as he gratefully chugged it.

  Caitlin nodded. She meant that it was fine to go back to sleep. Jacob drank the whole bottle and I watched. Caitlin held him close and burped him with the confident movements of an expert. I watched her gray ponytail sway. She put him on the desk I was using as a changing table and cleaned him up, then settled him into his bassinet.

  I sat at the edge of the bed. My legs were shaking and I had tears in my eyes. I felt loss in the air, maybe the one that had so nearly been mine. The ceiling in the bedroom seemed lower, as if it would soon press on my head. The walls lurched and blurred around me. The floor heaved. I put my hand out to catch the bed frame and struggled to stand. Caitlin stayed by the door. She watched me carefully, as though looking for signs.

  “Why did you come?” I asked her.

  “I wanted to tell you,” Caitlin said in a quiet voice, “about the site. That things are fine.”

  I stared directly at her. “That’s not true, is it?”

  The kitchen light shone behind her, and I could see her outline, both of the older woman she was and something else: the younger woman she had once been. For a moment, the younger body stepped forward, slightly taller, a robust frame and skin taut over sharp cheekbones. A shock of red hair and pale skin. She looked so strong and broad, as if she could do anything. Then the vision faded away and it was just Caitlin again, standing by the door and looking at me.

  “No, it’s not,” she said.

  “Why did you come?” I asked her again. I moved toward her. There were so many things that felt impossible to put into words. We were close enough that I could see the shine of tears in her eyes. I heard a breath come out from her lungs, rough and unsteady.

  “I saw signs in you—”

  “I’m going crazy.”

  “—that I’d felt in myself. I’m sorry I didn’t do more to help you, Rose.”

  “I’m so tired.”

  She cupped a hand over her mouth. A tear leaked from the crease of her eye.

  “I nearly…”

  “I know. It’s okay now.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I lost my baby.”

  I let myself cry then, flooded with both sadness and relief that she’d stepped in when she did. I put my arms around her and held her close. The warmth from my body melted into hers. I let myself go. I cried and when I managed to calm down enough to notice, I realized she was crying too. Her shoulders shook and I held her tight. Even through my exhaustion, I knew that her grief was greater than mine.

  “What happened, Caitlin?”

  She answered in the softest whisper, “I was alone.”

  28.

  Girl unfolded her body in the sunlight. Out of the burrow she came and stood to her full height, the last of the family. She was tall with a shock of red hair and muscles that, once fed again, would regain their strength. Her skin would once more gleam in the sun. She stood and tilted her face up. It was not the warm of a family, but it was something.

  It was the sound of water that got her moving. While a body needs food, water is more immediately essential, and her body needed much more than she had been able to melt. Girl didn’t know the movement of the season yet, but she did hear a small trickle of water running down the side of the tree. Any farther away and it might have been too far. She dropped to her knees and drank, and this cleared the clouds from her eyes.

  The red squirrels chattered among themselves. They had been the first to notice her stirring. Perhaps she had a secret cache of food, and
now that she was awake, she would reveal its location. They were excited about something else too, but she couldn’t quite understand what. The chatter of the squirrels alerted the sparrows, who responded by calling to one another from the trees. That spread the news of her movement to all the other beasts.

  Girl listened to the sounds of life around her. She dozed and drank and dozed and drank, and the sun warmed her skin and soon she could stand again. She walked slowly toward the hearth at the center of the camp. It took her a moment to focus, but there was something odd in the middle of it. She blinked and looked. A structure had been put there.

  Three tall sticks were stuck solidly into the packed snow and tied together by a dried vine at the top. One red squirrel darted excitedly around the edge of the hearth. Its urging prompted Girl to look more closely. She soon understood what the squirrel chirps meant. The sticks had been stripped of their bark and smoothed so that squirrels couldn’t get a good grip. In the middle of the sticks, hanging down, was a pouch that the squirrels hadn’t been able to reach.

  Inside the pouch were strips of meat, some hazelnuts, and something else. A shell. Around the area, she could see footprints in the snow, like someone had been searching. But because of her lack of movement, she hadn’t left any marks in the land for them to find.

  Girl ate the meat. It wasn’t bison. It was another herd animal of a kind that the family didn’t really have a taste for. Not even caribou, but the meat of a lean deer that ran too far and too often to keep good fat on its back. Maybe it wouldn’t have been her first choice, but it was meat. She sat and ate. Then, digesting, she placed the shell to her ear. It was the Sea.

  And not just any sea; it was the faint sound of the Sea. This was the shell that she had given Runt. Where was he? She looked around and sniffed. A scent came from the shell. Runt’s hand had left a smell on the pouch, and there was the scent of another body on it too. She stuck her finger in the old coals of the hearth and felt the warmth of past fires. The family was alive.