No Good Asking

by Fran Kimmel

  Wilson, snoring now, posed no imminent threat, so Eric ascended the stairs, heavy footed, warrantless. She’d been exhausted. Maybe she was in a dreamless sleep, oblivious to the sorry excuse for a parent who had drunk himself stupid. Maybe she’d not heard him call her name.

  The top of the landing, at least ten degrees colder than the floor below, led to four closed doors, two per side. Eric opened the closest and switched on the light to Wilson’s room, immaculate, worn burgundy carpet, bed made military style, heavy oak dresser with bracket feet, a straight-backed chair, empty garbage can—like a cheap hotel room waiting for its guest. He backed out slowly, leaving wet tracks on the rug with his boots.

  The room beside made Eric’s heart lurch. The wooden desk in the corner was bare—no papers, pens, files, books, adding machines—nothing for an accountant to count. There was an ironing board set up just inside the entrance, and a metal coil strung the length of the room. Wilson had meticulously lined his shirts on hangers from wall to wall. There were dozens of identical white shirts, each pressed with military precision, collars turned down and buttons fastened. Each facing the same way like headless soldiers.

  Eric rushed into the hall and checked the bathroom. There was only one room left. He pushed her door open, hoping to find her asleep, that it was only that.

  “Hannah,” he whispered. “Hannah, it’s Eric Nyland. Your neighbour.”

  He flipped the light switch. If this was her room, there was no sign of her. There were no clothes heaped on the floor; no posters on the walls or stuffies on her small made bed; no cat on her pillow.

  Eric tore down the stairs, past the comatose Wilson, and slammed into the sour-smelling kitchen, the only other room on the main floor. He switched on every light he could find. There were remnants of supper, on the table, on the floor. A china plate had shattered to pieces, and peas had been mushed into the floorboards. If she’d left on foot, that would be the end of her; it was just too damn cold. He methodically opened cupboards and closet doors, sweeping aside brooms, flour bags, checking in corners, and under the sink. Anywhere and everywhere a girl might hide. The door near the mud room was bolted shut. It was one of those nickel flush door bolts that had been added after the house was built, the single addition to an otherwise untouched and outdated kitchen. Eric slid the bolt and pushed open the door to a set of sagging wooden stairs he’d never been down.

  He descended, slowly. He reached into the right pocket of his jacket and pulled out his flashlight, smacking it twice before the beam shone a foot in front of him. At the bottom, Eric took several deep breaths, trying to stop his heart from hammering in the cave-like space, barely deep enough to stand up straight. He could feel that familiar ball rising in his throat, his feet itchy to flee. He was afraid of cramped spaces—tunnels, elevators, airplanes. He had slipped an Ativan under his tongue before his one and only MRI.

  The bloated angry furnace in the corner groaned and heaved, but it was cold enough to see his breath, tufts of fog clouding around him. A decaying earth smell fanned off the sand walls and sand floor. Eric hunted for a light, found a bulb above him, and pulled the ratty string.

  Shadows darted like bats. It took everything he had to stay in this coffin. He could not get his voice to work to call out for Hannah. He turned in circles, pointing his beam toward the filthy furnace, along the empty wooden shelves, and between the vats lined up against the dirt wall.

  He missed her with the first pass. Only when he circled again with the beam, he saw a discarded blanket tucked up against a tall stack of metal pails. It was grey and splotched with holes. He patted along the blanket folds and then threw down his flashlight and unwrapped the small, still body curled inside. Don’t let her be dead. “Hannah, it’s Eric Nyland.”

  He kneeled in front of her and put his arm around her back, lifting her up out of her slump. She roused a little and took swats at his face.

  “It’s Eric Nyland. From right next door. I’m not going to hurt you.” Eric waited while she batted at him, repeating her name until she quieted. “It’s okay now. It’s okay.”

  She finally fell back into his arm, panting, blinking into the shadows.

  “Let’s get you out of here.”

  “You came back,” she said, barely above a whisper.

  “Are you hurt?” An asinine question. She was a little girl who’d been thrown into a cellar. God knows what else. Eric had left his phone in the car. He’d left Dan in the car too. He needed to move quickly to get back to his son, to get this girl warm. She wore only thin pajamas, bare toes white as paper. He bent closer and scanned his flashlight along her body, hunting for broken bits, and signs of blood. She had one arm squeezed around her middle, something hard hidden under her pajama top. He untangled her fingers, raised the corner of the flimsy cotton, and sucked in his breath. It was her cat—Mindy, Mandy—rigid as cardboard.

  Hannah tried to sit up, crying now, more a gravelly mewing, as if her mouth had filled with dirt. Eric lifted the dead cat from under her shirt and laid it beside them on the floor.

  “I c-c-couldn’t get her to breathe again,” she stuttered, hoarse.

  “I’m so sorry, Hannah.” Eric whipped off his coat and wrapped it around her. “I’m going to lift you up now. You need to tell me if it hurts.”

  He grabbed the flashlight and scooped her into his arms, pressing her muffled sobs close to his chest. Then he sidestepped the dead cat and ascended the creaking stairs, whispering assurances. As he brought her into the light of the kitchen, he could hear Wilson’s slurred yelling in the next room. Hannah tensed in his arms as he whispered the mantra, It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.

  But it wasn’t. Gripping Hannah tightly, he stepped into the living room to see Dan, eyes wide with fear, staring back at him. Dan had waltzed into this madhouse, right through the front door. He’d even taken his boots off, for God sakes. Wilson was up, right in Dan’s face, clinging to the bannister to stop from slithering to the rug, yelling incoherently about Eric being a good-for-nothing loser. The damn clock was striking the hour.

  Eric said, “Dan, I want you to back away.” Dan bit down on his lip. He didn’t move. “Look at me, Dan.”

  Wilson turned toward Eric, howling, “Get outta my goddamned house.”

  Hannah quaked in his arms. Eric carried her to the couch and put her down. She cried in his ear and kept on crying as he pulled away.

  “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.” Wilson lunged forward, his fist grabbing a handful of Dan’s jacket, shaking him like an animal.

  Eric flew across the room. He slammed his body against Wilson and drove him to the floor, smashing his fist to his cheek, once, twice, more, until Wilson lay motionless under Eric’s knee on his chest, Eric’s fingers wrapped around his throat. He stayed on top of Wilson like that until his own breathing slowed down, until he could hear nothing but the sound of the clock and the wind sweeping along the empty road.

  When he looked up, Dan was backed against the wall, rocking from foot to foot, toque in his hands.

  “Are you all right?”

  Dan nodded.

  “This wasn’t your fault. This would have happened even if you’d stayed in the car.” Eric stood stiffly and approached his boy, who moved away slightly.

  “Is he dead?” Dan wanted to know.

  A weary regret flooded through Eric. Please state your name for the record. Daniel James Nyland. Please walk us through the sequence of events? Had Mr. Wilson asked you to leave? What was Mr. Wilson’s condition at the time? Did Mr. Wilson strike first? Strike ever? And how many times did Eric Nyland strike Mr. Wilson?

  How many times? Eric’s knuckles were swollen purple. “He’s not dead, Dan. He’s drunk. That’s all.” Hannah had disappeared into the couch. “We have to help her. Can you do that with me?”

  Daniel’s eyes darted from the couch to Wilson’s inert body, back to the couch. “What’
s wrong with her?”

  “She’s hurt. Will you help?”

  Daniel nodded.

  “Good. I’m going to phone the police. You go upstairs. Find some blankets. As many as you can carry. And some of her clothes. And bring them to us. We’re going to get her out of here.”

  Four

  Ellie curled into Myrtle’s mohair velvet chair and stared into the distant night beyond the window. The fields looked overexposed, white on black. Eric and Danny were still out there searching for the damn tree. They should have been home hours ago. Neither one would answer their phone. She tucked her knees to her chest and buried her toes under her housecoat, which was so worn now, she’d be hard-pressed to describe its colour. Muddy grey, perhaps. Like her thoughts.

  This Christmas she’d promised herself she would be different, less broken, yet here she was making an unforgivable mess of it. She’d given herself countless deadlines over the years—by spring you will be done, by summer you will have forgotten, by fall you will have moved on. There were days, weeks, when she felt almost normal, like there was a chance she could be a good wife and mother again. Then Christmas came along. It’s as though it pulled a trigger that caused her to careen backward, leaving her chest so clamped in pain she thought she was having a heart attack. She wouldn’t blame Eric and Danny if they simply kept on driving and never came back.

  She listened for the crunch of tires on the driveway, or the sounds of thudding down the hall. But Walter had been blessedly quiet this evening, and Sammy had gone down at 8:15 like always. Each night was the same. She would enter his small bedroom and close the heavy curtains, turn on the air filter with its reliable hum, turn down the plain brown bed covers that were neither scratchy nor fuzzy. Then together they would work through the steps on the bedtime chart over his dresser—put on pajamas, eat cheese string, use toilet, wash hands, brush teeth, drink water, read book, hug mother, go to bed, go to sleep. She would sit beside Sammy on the bed, careful not to touch him or his pillow, and read the now dog-eared book Are You My Mother? She turned the pages, the words blurring in front of her. Sammy should have long since outgrown the story—he was happy to thumb through a stack of library books when he got home from kindergarten every afternoon—but he wouldn’t have any other at bedtime. He liked the repetition, Are you my mother? Are you my mother?, and the predictability of the baby bird’s questions as he tried to find his way home. Sometimes she skipped pages, but Sammy would make her go back and stick to the script on a search she now thoroughly despised.

  Don’t think about them, Ellie said to herself, digging her fingernails into her thighs through the pockets of her housecoat. She felt herself sinking, collapsing in upon herself. Shifting in the chair, she tapped her forehead as hard as she could. She hated when she got like this, when she couldn’t muster the strength to push them away.

  Lily had been the hardest. Ellie could pinpoint the exact moment of her conception. It was their second month of trying. She was just twenty-four, madly in love with her new husband. Danny was madly in love with him too, four years old and following him moon-eyed from room to room. Once Eric and Ellie started talking about making a baby together, a baby with his genes, his Scandinavian ancestry, he tripped through his days with gusto, his excitement an insatiable, palatable living thing that filled the corners of their home. She’d never been so sure of anything. How lovely to say the words, well, yes, we are expecting, isn’t it wonderful. She would wear maternity clothes with sayings like made with love to highlight her baby bump, her perfect choice. There would be no hiding this time. No teenaged tears.

  Ellie felt like she’d willed Lily into being.

  “You can’t go to sleep now,” she whispered to Eric, rolling onto his chest and resting her chin on her crossed arms. “We’ve just made a baby. I can feel her already.”

  “That would be some kind of world record. You took health class, right?” He rolled her to her side and wrapped his arm around her.

  She moved Eric’s hand to her stomach and held it there. “She’ll look just like you, Eric. Your eyes. Your wonky baby toenail. She’ll have everything that’s good in you.”

  After unsealing the Clearblue box, with its promise of “confidence when you need it most,” she took her first pregnancy test in the early morning on the day that her period should have come. Her pee collected in the blue china cup, she dipped the stick like she was stirring a cup of cocoa. Within three minutes, it confirmed what she already knew.

  Eric had left for work just moments earlier, so she called him on his cell phone. When he picked up, he said, “What did I forget?”

  “You forgot to say goodbye to your baby.”

  “Ellie?”

  “Special delivery.”

  She could hear Eric’s deep sucking-in of air, his fist thumping on the steering wheel, then the piercing sound of the siren.

  “You’re on a call? Go, we’ll talk later.”

  She’d barely hung up, and Eric was back in the driveway, at the door, and in her arms. Danny stumbled out of bed. Not known for bursts of enthusiasm in the morning, it had taken the siren to wake him. When he heard the news, he looked baffled at first, then embarrassed. I guess that would be all right, he said. He would give the baby Mr. Chuckles but not blue bear. He asked if he could tell his grandma. Eric thought it too early, but Ellie said you go right ahead. When Grandma Myrtle got on the phone, she yelled, Don’t tell me that, don’t tell me that, and then she slammed down the phone on the counter and bellowed for Walter to come hear this. Before the day was done, between grocery runs and a trip to the dentist with Danny, Ellie told everyone she knew and many she didn’t.

  It was a daughter she carried, her name Lily for the flower. Ellie knew this from the first moment, not a mother’s wishful thinking but a deep and mysterious knowing.

  The family expansion planning encompassed all three. Eric and Danny spent hours in the basement with the Rolling Stones blaring. They banged and sawed and sanded. Their first project was a child’s step stool, simple butt joints reinforced with screws. From there, they built a kitchen set: a small table and two chairs.

  “She’ll need a crib first, Eric. Before she can invite you to tea.”

  “A high-up bed with a ladder,” Danny suggested.

  Ellie bought baby magazines and parenting books by the dozen and kept them on the night table beside the bed. She took her prenatal vitamins religiously and stopped drinking coffee. She felt remarkably strong, with little of the nausea or headaches she remembered with Danny.

  The end started at twelve weeks, six days, with a small smear of brown. It was the Friday before Christmas. Ellie ignored it. She’d read about just such a thing in her baby books. Her breasts felt so un-tender and un-swollen that she opted for an underwire bra she’d been avoiding for weeks. With happy energy, she raced through her chores before heading to the ultrasound appointment. “It’s your drill training day, Eric. You’ve got a lifetime of listening to her heartbeat. You can come to the next one.”

  But the technician, who was very quiet, could not find the heartbeat. And neither could the obstetrician.

  “No. You’re wrong. I’m fine. She’s fine. We’re fine.”

  “You’ll have to go to the hospital now. It’s best to get this over with.”

  Ellie covered her betraying body and fled the clinic. She drove in the opposite direction of the hospital, not knowing how she got home without cracking up her car. When Eric found her in their bedroom, he knew something was wrong. He drove Danny to his friend’s house to spend the night and then cobbled together a dinner of soft foods that could be easily chewed, as if that would make it easier. Ellie sat at the table and played with the food on her plate. She didn’t take a bite.

  “Why didn’t you call me? I would have come. Was it horrible?”

  “Was it? Like it’s over.”

  “The procedure, I mean.”

 
“Procedure? I just left, Eric.”

  “But the baby? What’s happened with the baby?”

  “I won’t have them sucking her out of me, tearing her to pieces.”

  Eric took the phone into the bedroom and closed the door. He had remarkable tenacity and didn’t stop trying until he reached the doctor. When he came out of the room, his skin was the colour of child’s glue.

  “Ellie. We have to go to the hospital. I’ve talked to the doctor. You need a D&C. You can’t do this alone.”

  But she did do it alone. She carried the dead body inside her for four days. There was brown blood at first, then black. By Monday night, she felt wet and sticky, something running out of her, contractions coming in waves. She left Eric sleeping fitfully and padded down the hall, dragging an old sheet from the closet and into the bathroom, where she ran herself a bath. She hauled scissors from the drawer, fingers shaking, and spread the sheet across the cramped floor space, covering everything. Then she sank down in the tub and waited. Not knowing what else to do, she reached under the red water, and pulled out the tiny sac, connected to the tiny chord, her baby floating inside. She stabbed with the scissors, the sac as strong as plastic, until it tore open. Her baby was beautiful. Translucent. Arms reaching straight ahead, legs curled under, ribs showing. She had a faultless little head, bumps for ears, a line for a mouth, and huge eyes. She was smaller than a calling card, a perfect fit for Ellie’s palm.

  Ellie dizzily stood and reached over to the soap dish on top of the counter, and rested her daughter in it. Then she got back into the tub and carried on.

  The afterbirth came eventually, an ugly horrid thing. Ellie dumped it into the garbage can. She waited until the cramps subsided, then got out of the tub and stood on the sheet, dripping blood. She scooped out the clots, like saskatoon berries in a sink of water, slipping and sliding from her open palm. She drained the water, a river of red, and ran cold from the shower to get rid of the rest. A sound behind her made her jump, and when she turned, Eric was standing in the bathroom doorway. She couldn’t shield him from the mess in the garbage can, so she reached for the soap dish, her daughter resting inside, and passed it to her husband. Their baby was already starting to shrivel, not as perfect as she was just a moment ago.