The Underneath

by Melanie Finn

  “Do you have a car seat for him?” Detective Polito stepped forward again. “And any clothes or comfort items he’ll need. Nothing of value.”

  Jake didn’t have a suitcase, so Ben put his clothes in a garbage bag.

  “We’d like to search the house,” she said. “We can get a warrant.”

  Ben shook his head. “You don’t need one. Go ahead.” And then, suddenly remembering, he led her to the trash and pulled out the Willow Bend Supplements wrapper. “I found this a couple of days ago. Do you know what it is?”

  Detective Polito tutted. “A way to pass drug tests.”

  Ben looked confused. “I thought she was clean.”

  “Sorry for your loss,” Polito offered as she stashed the wrapper in an evidence baggie.

  53

  I woke up in a hospital bed. It was not a clean bed—it was not a clean hospital—though I felt right away that this was not by choice. I could smell a harsh solvent. The room was neat, the beds aligned. Someone tried to keep order. But chaos prevailed: moaning, even screaming, from elsewhere; and in my room, a dozen women sharing eight beds, two women lying on the floor, which was filthy from mud. (The rains were beginning, those two distinct seasons of Africa, dust or mud.)

  There were no sheets, there were no pillows, there were no curtains. There were, however, babies and children, suckling, sleeping, playing with odd bits of plastic and paper with quiet preoccupation. I had the bed to myself and a blanket that I noted came from the hotel.

  As I stirred, the other occupants of the room turned their attention to me, grew silent, and stared. I regarded them back, the motley collection of women, some with patches of gauze on their faces or bandages haphazardly wound around limbs; they were grey-faced, pain-filled, anemic. They were waiting to get better or to die.

  I felt my belly intact and waited to feel the baby move. When he did not I shut my eyes again, could not face the bright daylight. Please, I thought, Please, the pusillanimous pleading of an atheist. Please? Who? What? The indifferent universe would not even blink if my baby was dead. But then he squirmed, a little flutter kick. My child, my child, my son is okay. I exhaled.

  “La Blanche.” The word flitted from person to person, an incantation, the white woman. “La Blanche, La Blanche, La Blanche.”

  A girl ran out of the room, her flip-flops battering the cement floor. I heard her shout something about the “La Blanche.” I was ashamed that anyone should notice me, the white queen in my bed with my blanket, and the doctor summoned. He never came in here for them.

  The women continued to stare at me as if I had horns or blue polka dots. Then one—a granny with a small child on her hip—stepped forward with a bowl of rice.

  “You.”

  I took it, suddenly hungry. As I moved myself to sit up, I felt dizzy and began to gasp for breath, as if I had just climbed several flights of stairs. The granny frowned and cooed, “oh oh oh oh.” She put the palm of her hand against my cheek, it was smooth and cool, and her cooing gained the rhythm of a lullaby. I felt like a child. I realized I could only take small shallow breaths.

  The doctor came and shooed the granny away, a fly or a stray dog. “She was helping,” I rebuked him.

  “She cannot help you, madam. You are very ill.” He sounded weary. His thick glasses were taped together at the left edge, his coat was white but stained with sweat under the arms. Sitting on the side of the bed, he took my pulse, then shook his head. “Very fast, very, very fast.”

  He checked my reflexes, knocking my knee, tapping my foot. More head-shaking, tutting.

  I had fallen in the bath, surely that was all. The baby was fine, he was kicking strongly now.

  “Do you know what is preeclampsia?” The doctor regarded me.

  Something that happened to other women, I vaguely recalled. An illness occurring only in the third trimester of unknown cause. “I know a little bit,” I offered, though I was certain it must be a misdiagnosis, easily done in a place such as this without modern equipment. “But my pregnancy has been very good, very smooth, no problems.”

  “The problem, madam, is that the blood of your baby is becoming toxic to your blood. Your baby is poisoning you. I have given you some magnesium sulfate which gives temporary relief. But there is only one cure, and that is we must remove the baby.”

  “But he’s too small,” I replied.

  “Then you will die. And the baby will die.”

  “There must be something.”

  “There is nothing.”

  He held my gaze now. “A caesarean. It is the only way.”

  I looked around, as if I might find this was a hallucination induced by the preeclampsia. Surely I was still in the bath—it would make sense when I woke up. I caught the eye of the granny, but she looked down. There was no one to help me. I wrapped my arms around my belly. “I can’t do it.”

  “Let me show you.” He pushed the hotel blanket up over my knee and tapped the reactive spot under the knee cap. My leg spasmed. “Hyperactive reflex because your body is already in toxic shock.” He covered my leg. “Your blood pressure is too high; it will become higher. In a few hours you will begin to have fits as your organs shut down.”

  “But the baby.”

  He shrugged. “We can try. Keep the baby warm. It may be too weak to suckle but we try to feed it with a small syringe.”

  “I need to call my husband.”

  “Ah, sorry, there is no phone service. SPLIF, they blew up the cell tower.”

  “And General Christmas?”

  The doctor—his name, his name, I cannot remember his name, and I will never find it because he’s certainly dead now—the doctor regarded me sideways, “What about him?”

  “He offered to help me if I need it.”

  Now he laughed—this was the funniest thing, I was such a comedian. He laughed and laughed, his laughing so contagious that the women in the room joined in, tittering, yelping, and giggling. They had waited days, weeks, months to laugh, and here was laughter like a 4th of July fireworks over the Hudson. At last the doctor calmed himself, the room subsiding with him, the odd snicker igniting in a corner like a recalcitrant sparkler.

  “I will prepare the operating room.” He stood, moved heavily toward the door. “I will do my best.”

  *

  The grandmother—Tati—came with me. She held my hand as a nurse strapped me down. The doctor had padded the railings of the cot with towels. “With fits, a patient can hurt herself,” he explained. And of course, with the insufficiency of anesthetic, I needed to be restrained. There was a glinting, and then my memory fractures. I can feel the splitting of my belly, I can feel tugging, I know I was gritting my teeth. Tati was holding my hand. Tati kept her eyes on mine. She did not waver or flinch, she hardly blinked. “We are mothers,” she said. “This is what we do.”

  I remember the baby boy was wrapped tightly to my chest, skin to skin. He was silent, looking out with baby monkey eyes. Light came in the window, that particular powdery African light—I have never understood why it should be particular, perhaps the dust. I could hear voices out the window, two women chatting and laughing, and then Tati’s old face, a rare smile moved into view.

  Tati showed me how to feed the baby, who was too weak and small to suckle. She gently expressed the colostrum from my breasts onto a spoon, and with her pinkie, fed the baby. A few hours later, she produced a two-milliliter syringe; we filled this with my milk, then ejected it drop by drop into the baby’s mouth. Tati had also brought a bright pink knitted hat, but it proved enormous, so she came back with a white cotton sock, and this was perfect. The baby, little skinned rabbit-baby, little pip, slept between my breasts. I slept with him, escorted from the pain of waking hours by miracle endorphins.

  We floated through the days, tended by Tati, who took all care from me and provided all comfort. I learned her daughter was here because of a tumor in her womb. She and her two small children were awaiting ground transport to the refugee camp in Lokchoggio, but
everything had stopped because of Christmas. A Christmas holiday. There was a small boy in the ward next to mine who had burned his esophagus. His moaning came from deep inside and vibrated up his ruined throat like a cello with one taut string: the pure articulation of pain. I grew to loathe the sound, in part because my loathing was so shamefully selfish. And then it ceased.

  “They have taken him,” Tati told me.

  “Where?”

  “Home.”

  *

  We began to hear shelling, though it was still far away. I sensed an exodus, subtle, almost sneaky, beds emptying overnight, an increase in the sound of cars and bicycles—impressionistic, as I could not see, had no way to witness.

  “People are leaving,” I said to Tati.

  She raised her eyebrows. “SPLIF may come this way, SPLIF may go the other. As God wills.”

  I had not considered the eventuality of the baby and myself. My world was this one room, the women in it, the occasional visit of the doctor, the sun and then, as there was no electricity, the seamless and ecliptic darkness. Every nightfall, the women sang, and somewhere else in the clinic, men sang back. They echoed each other, a sonic connection traveling through the atoms of the air. I felt the singing enter me and the baby, I felt it bind him to my heart.

  *

  Because of the war, I had not been able to reach Michael; he was anyway in Tibesti or Khartoum. I lay with the baby, suspended in a hammock of time, until finally, the heavy cat-gut stitches like black spiders on my lower belly began to weep infection. I did not want to die, so I played the one card I had, the Christmas card.

  Tati said she knew him, she knew his cousin’s wife’s mother. She waited outside his compound all day for three days to speak to him, to petition for a perfect stranger’s life. He came that night. I heard shouting, running, doors opening, and in swept General Christmas. He strode over to my bed in full camo fatigues, his beret at a jaunty angle, ho ho ho. He smiled, spread his arms wide. “Kay, my friend, why didn’t you tell me you were here?” He leaned in. “And this is your little fellow? Hello, hello!” He chucked my son’s cheek. “I have arranged everything. Permissions, truces, my own personal helicopter to fly you and your little one to Lokchoggio.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “Oh, Kay, this isn’t a question of money! No, no.” He wagged a finger, grinning. “I gave you my word.”

  Ah, yes, General Christmas, the man of honor.

  Tati hovered on the periphery of my vision, standing in front of her daughter’s bed. Her two grandchildren cowered under it. No one wanted to be seen by General Christmas. No one wanted to catch his eye.

  “Thank you, General,” I said—I said it softly, carefully. I said it with real gratitude. And maybe that was my mistake; he smelled the musk of my fear, his particular fetish. I said: “I would like another woman and her two children to come with me, please.”

  He opened his arms expansively. “But of course, Kay. If you think it necessary. Gol is in our hands; it will remain so. Your new friends have nothing to fear. But—” A warm smile “—but as you are asking, yes, there is room for them.”

  Now he tapped the end of my bed, a little drum roll with his fat fingers. “You will write about this. You will write about my kindness. I am a fair man. Not only evil.”

  In the morning, at first light, we heard the sound of the helicopter. Tati edged me into a wheelchair and wheeled me out, her daughter and two children drafting in behind us. Two of the general’s soldiers lifted us into the chopper. I looked back and saw the doctor. He was leaning casually against the door frame of the clinic entrance. I could not read his eyes behind his glasses, but he twirled his stethoscope and turned back into the dark maw of the building.

  We lifted up, the dream-sequence feeling of helicopters, that sudden blooming out of dimension. Above the clinic entrance, the scrappy compounds around it, roads, tracks, shacks, houses, huts, above the dirty war.

  Tati’s daughter grasped my hand, her children clinging to her dress, a boy, a girl. “Thank you,” she said, the only words of English she knew.

  Then the chopper tilted, moved away, away.

  54

  And it will happen, over the years, Kay dreams, the photographs of her will put themselves away. Gone from the mantle, gone from even Tom’s room. And Freya’s boyfriend, Sven, will be looking for a pen that actually works but instead he finds a photograph stuffed in the far back of her desk. A woman in her late 30s, she’s on a rooftop, possibly of an African city—something about the light, the dusty air; she looks happy, but who’s to say? We all smile for photographs. He asks Freya: “Who’s this?”

  Freya is on the bed reading The Importance of Being Earnest. She has a paper due tomorrow; she’s just begun the book. Typical. She scratches a mosquito bite on her ankle. Her toe-nail polish is chipped and she should really shave her legs. She glances at the photo. “My mother.”

  Sven looks at her, he looks at the photo. There’s a strong resemblance, same eyes, same hands, same slim build. “But I met your mother.”

  “You met Barbara, my step-mother. She’s basically my mother.”

  Sven is well brought up. He has sensitive and intelligent parents. He tries to have some instinct about where to go next with this conversation. He loves Freya—what’s not to love? She’s smart and pretty and funny. She loves to fuck. But there are these blind corners in her—she’ll be looking out the window and he can’t reach her, can’t follow her. She’s a happy person, but remote. It’s because he wants to know her better that he persists. “What happened to her? This mother?”

  Freya doesn’t look up; nothing in her voice changes. “She died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Freya shrugs. “It was a long time ago.”

  Sven looks again at the pretty woman in the photo. Death is so weird, he thinks. You keep thinking they’ll come back or they’ve just gone on vacation. His dog was hit by a car a few years ago, when he was 15, and even though he knew that Sparky was dead—he’d seen the body, and they’d buried him in the back yard—he went out in the evenings calling for Sparky. Spark, Sparky, Spaaarrrrkkky, until he mother told him to stop it.

  He sits on the bed, he puts his hand on Freya’s impossibly soft thigh. “How?”

  Freya shrugs. “We don’t really know. We just assume.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “One summer. In America.”

  “So you don’t know if she’s dead or what?”

  Freya puts the book down. “Look, I’m trying to read this, okay?”

  Then Kay woke and she was buried alive and she hit out with her hands, her feet, screaming, floundering, attacking, her limbs on fire with cramp. She howled and raged at the blackness of her tiny coffin, unsure even of gravity.

  At last she remembered where she was. The cupboard. Her breathing deepened, she began to calm. Her chin was damp. Christ, she’d dribbled in her sleep. The bandage on her hand had come unraveled, bits of plastic wrap slipping off, but she couldn’t find them. It hurt, raw, pink fleshed pain. She grubbed along the walls, searching for the latch. In her panic she’d completely turned herself around. Finding it, she clicked it open. Cool air hit her face. She inhaled deep, and dragged herself out onto the linoleum. The bathroom was awash in moonlight.

  She lay, face up, her arms and legs stretched out, wriggling her fingers and toes, the blood moving freely into her veins, gushing into the capillaries. Somewhere they’d kept prisoners in boxes, for years and years. A North African country? Or was it slaves in the Caribbean? Her mind always came to these horrors, a butterfly alighting on an oozing, dark flower.

  Putting her injured hand on her chest, she felt her heart, insistent and indifferent to whether she was good or bad, mother or un-mother, indifferent as the stars to what she thought and felt and did. It would beat on if she never saw her children again, if Michael left her for Barbara, if school girls were rape
d, if boys were made to kill.

  Now she got to her knees, stood, shook herself out like a dog. The house around her was still, moon-filled. How alone she was, a condition neither peaceful nor alarming; but particular. She hadn’t been alone at night for a very long time. She saw her phone on top of the toilet’s tank, the message light blinking.

  55

  THE ROOM SMELLED LIKE A nursing home, that piquant mélange of urine and cleaning solvent. The linoleum floor was tacky underfoot, his boots sticking, squeaking. Easier to clean than carpet, though. The kids who came in here had problems controlling their bladders and their bowels. They ate with their hands. They probably had lice, worms, and possibly fleas. They had asthma and allergies. They had wet dreams. They had nightmares. They had medical records and psychiatric assessments, broken bones, lacerations, cigarette burns. They had eczema, stammers and ADHD and prescriptions. They carried their belongings in garbage bags.

  Jake was sitting on the floor with Lacey, staring at a pile of interlocking plastic bricks. Lacey glanced up, acknowledging him with a nod.

  Ben squatted down beside Jake, his voice soft. “Hey.”

  Nothing. Jake did not move, not even his eyes.

  So Ben sat down and began to pull out pieces and fashion them together. Jake continued to ignore him but began to sneak peeks at Ben’s concoction, which was growing exponentially with wheels and wings, a crazy heli-plane.

  Sitting there, in the quiet room, the boy beside him, Ben maintained his focus on his construction, carefully selecting pieces, making adjustments, as a more extravagant vision took hold of him. He was so intent, he hardly noticed Jake was mirroring him. When they went to grab the same piece, Ben caught the boy’s eye.

  “Go ahead.”

  “No.”

  Ben leaned in close. “I don’t really want it. I need a shorter piece.”