“Do you like it?” Callum asked shyly. He’d painted a faint question mark on the wall, large and confrontational, in yellow watercolors. “I was thinking yellow for the walls, if you decide you still want to wait until the birth to know its sex.”
Hannah ran her hand along the edge of the crib, imagining all the sleepless nights she’d spend in that exact spot, her feet guiding her to it blindly in the darkness. Then she noticed the rocking chair in the corner.
“That was Mae’s,” Hannah said, lowering herself carefully into it.
She’d spent countless hours in Mae’s lap being lulled by the ticking of the chair, the back and forth that always teetered under their combined weight without falling.
Hannah focused on the faint creaking as she rocked, fighting back tears. The carved armrests gleamed below her fingers. She imagined Callum bent over the chair, buffing and varnishing, with the single aim of welcoming their child.
The child that she’d recklessly, selfishly taken from the house. Put in harm’s way, and for what? To confirm what she already knew. Whatever forces surrounded her, those that had always been there and those that grew stronger in pace with her child, would not let her go.
At least now she had a definite answer. Tears trickled down her cheeks as the cicadas settled against the windowpane, each body another brick on her prison wall.
She beckoned to Callum and he came to sit beside the chair.
Even in the dim, there was a yellow cast to his skin that worried her. How much had he been drinking? Had the stress pushed him to pursue other vices? She opened her mouth, wanting to ask, then changed her mind. “I take it as it was intended,” she said, her voice choking. “Thank you.”
He smiled wryly. “Well, good. Reports of how easy this was to put together may have been exaggerated.” He dropped down onto his back and frowned at the ceiling. “Look, something’s wrong here,” he said. She tried to catch one of his bobbing toes, but he wiggled away. “I’ve never seen anything like that. Fuck, I’ve never heard of anything like that. A cicada swarm, fine. Weird, but documented.” He arced his neck to see her. “But they were focused on you. On the baby. It was like they were sentient.”
Hannah bucked her feet off the floor and rocked harder. “Of course they’re sentient. They’re insects.”
“It’s not just that. It’s this whole house. I love you, I love it, I love that you love it, but maybe we can talk about finding another place. Somewhere that will bring us more luck.” Hannah saw naked want on his face, and realized everything he’d given up. She’d been raised in the silence and was content to sit on the bank, watching hyacinth patches knit themselves into a lush carpet, then break apart. She saw now that he needed something very different.
“We can talk about it after the birth,” she said slowly, hating herself for hiding things from him. “A big move like that would be stressful for me and the baby.” Small thuds sounded behind her. She didn’t turn, knowing the cicadas were pattering across the glass, shifting then settling to make room for more. Light drained from the room as they covered the window.
“I need to sleep,” he said from the floor, and gripped the leg of the crib. “I could’ve sworn I saw them—” He stopped and shook his head. “I don’t know. It sounds insane. It looked like there was someone in the swarm. As if they were forming a person.” Callum laughed sharply. “Fuck,” he whispered, rolling his face into the floor.
Hannah tried to laugh, then rubbed her eyes. “Maybe all parents feel like this,” she said with a sigh. “The paranoia of everything that can go wrong.”
“There’s paranoia and then there’s justified concern.” Callum pulled his guitar from under the crib. “I’ve been imagining playing him to sleep when he comes, and this incredible peace settles over me,” he said. “Well, him or her.” His metal pick flashed like a razor in the growing dim. “How is it possible to love someone you’ve never even seen, someone who doesn’t yet exist, so fucking much? I would never do anything to hurt either one of you, so if you think we need to wait until he’s born to move, then we’ll do that. But Hannah,” his finger slipped on a fret, “after that, we start looking for somewhere safe to raise this child.”
She rocked back and closed her eyes on hot tears. “Sure,” she said, her voice breaking. What will happen then, she started to wonder but blocked the thought. She’d bought herself time to find a way out.
He set down the guitar and moved to hold her. She spotted the swollen spot on the back of his hand where the cicada had bit him and leaned over to kiss it.
“Mama,” he said softly.
CHAPTER
NINE
From the ridge, the marsh looked like a robin’s egg. Blue water broken by tussocks of yellowing grass. A long-limbed bird stepped gingerly through the shallow water.
Hannah drew her knees under her chin, her sunburned legs scaled as bark. Beside her, Jacob cupped his hands to his mouth and let out a single, mournful note. The bird raised its head and spread its wings. It regarded them, eyes black and unblinking.
“What did you say to it?” Hannah asked.
Jacob shrugged, smiling vacantly. There was something strange about the marsh, all the trees cracked in half and crowned in jagged spikes of their own bark. The sun had blanched Jacob’s face and hair to the dry white of a skull. He seemed to fade into the landscape.
“Where’s Sarah Anne?”
Jacob’s eyes clouded. Confusion spread across his face.
“Your sister,” Hannah added.
“Not my sister. Me.” In the flat silence, she thought she heard a rustle of wings behind her. “I saw you together.” His face was wavering, changing so slowly that Hannah had the urge to rub her eyes, but she felt unsure that she could move her hands.
“I saw you with your mother. The dark one. I saw her alone once, too.” His mouth opened and she saw the quaking pink tip of his tongue. On either side were nine black teeth, rotting and caked in mud. The smell of dead tissue and briny gator eggs rolled from his mouth.
“Jacob,” she whispered, trying not to cover her face.
“I’ve been screaming underground,” he said without closing his mouth. His tongue flailed like an earthworm.
The bird cried out below them.
“What did the bird say back?” she asked in a smaller voice.
His body began to convulse as a scream built all around them.
Sunlight stabbed her eyes as she woke. Callum sat on the edge of the desk in their bedroom and stared out at the water with deep concentration. Graydon watched him sleepily from the windowsill.
“How long have you been awake?” Hannah asked, rising stiffly from the bed. She paused to stretch out her lower back before walking over to him and laying a cool hand on the nape of his neck.
He flinched from her touch. “I couldn’t sleep. I kept dreaming about swarms of birds, or insects. It was hideous.” He cleared his throat as she gathered scrawled notes from the desk and eased herself beside him. “They were attacking you. I can’t shake the sound of them chewing. It was wet.”
Hannah followed his gaze to a black spot amidst the green leaves, some black carrion bird watching her from a branch. The bird opened its beak in a soundless squawk and pattered away in a dainty spread of plumage.
“You were dreaming, too, I think. You were making little sounds and kicking in your sleep,” Callum said.
Hannah nudged his toes with hers. “I don’t remember.”
“Dr. Merrick called this morning with the results of your blood tests.”
Hannah rolled her shoulders. “Oh, I forgot all about that. I’m doing so much better, don’t you think?”
“Toxins.” The word hung in the air, confounding. “He found a whole host of animal and plant toxins, all in trace amounts. He said, and I kid you not, that they amounted to poison.” Dark circles shadowed Callum’s eyes. Hannah plucke
d at the loose skin on his elbow, noting that it remained extended for a few moments.
“Mae’s spices,” Hannah began, but Callum shook his head and spoke over her. “Your mother, Hannah. That goddamn woman made you ill.”
“I don’t think she was trying to. It was my own fault. I asked her to help.” The lies were difficult to speak, leaden in her mouth.
“Help with what?”
Hannah held up her palms. “I thought she could offer some protection, something to ward off what’s been happening.”
“What, Hannah, poor man’s witchcraft and cure-alls?”
“Mae’s done the same before, relying on herbal remedies. They can be more powerful than pharmaceuticals in some combinations. I’ve been messing around in the kitchen, looking through Mae’s old recipes and spices, and I found a few that are pretty strange. One called for menstrual blood.”
Callum’s mouth clamped shut. He squinted as if trying to make out familiar contours in her face, then took her hand. His lips ran an arpeggio along her knuckles. “Do you promise you’re alright? I honestly don’t know what I’d do if—” As his voice trailed off, a gust of wind rose off the water. “No more messing around, though. Promise me. It’s not too long now,” he said, hooking his arm around her shoulder. He nuzzled her ear. “I wonder what he’ll be best at. Think we’ll go fishing together?”
“Don’t forget that it could very well be a she. I’d bet she’d cast a line with you.” Hannah tried to smile. She felt brittle inside. Hatred was an unfamiliar sensation and though it left her dizzy, she embraced it. Her own mother. “There’s been only girls on my end,” Hannah added, and immediately tightened her hands into fist, her nails pressing deep into her palm, one by one. It was a private rosary, a prayer for protection, that whatever broken gene might have passed to her would end with her.
“You’re sure you don’t want to have it checked?”
“I’d rather not know.” Hannah mapped his spine with her thumb. Those same ridges were materializing in her belly, a slender ladder whose rungs leaned ever so slightly to the left.
Callum gave her a thorough, plumbing look. “Momma’s choice, I guess.” He hopped off the desk and knelt in front of her, laying his head against her belly. “I always hoped I’d be here,” he whispered. He sounded young, a little boy telling the story of his day as he drifted to sleep. “My own father was such a deadbeat that I hoped I’d get the chance to do it right with one of my own. My poor mother. I’d get mad at her sometimes, as though by staying with him, she was rewarding him. Like, her presence was saying, ‘It’s okay. You’re still within the limits of okay.’” He paused, then craned his neck to gaze up at her. “But now I’m happy, and it feels like more than I could’ve asked for.” His brows were bowed with vulnerability. “Are you?”
“Of course I am,” she cooed. “This is it. The thing we’re meant to do. The goal of everything.”
He shuffled down so his head was resting against her thighs and looked beyond her, his eyes echoing the deep, uncanny blue of the sky. “What will we do?” he asked, “When it comes, I mean. What if,” he swallowed hard, “I get sick and can’t be around. How will we take care of the baby?”
Hannah chuckled. “Oh, you know,” she said lightly, “the best we can. I’ll mourn for a little while, then trade you in for someone younger.”
She was still surprised by the sensation of something moving inside her, turning slowly through the snug confines of her womb. It didn’t feel tethered, held in place by sinewy cables. She could tell by the way her belly bulged differently from day to day, by how the heaviness shifted and bundled itself in the night. A slow-motion game of cups was taking place underneath her curve.
You can’t hide from me, she thought at it. You can try to swim down to my ankles, or flatten yourself under my ribcage, but you are always in me.
“I was thinking we could invite James over tonight. After all, it’s Halloween. We’ve been so wrapped up in our own problems here, and it’d be good for us to socialize a bit.”
“Halloween,” Hannah repeated dumbly. Locals claimed that the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest around Halloween, but the elderly blamed unusual occurrences on local kids who used the night to try their unskilled, drunken hands at voodoo.
One Halloween, Hannah had dressed in an elaborate witch’s costume, complete with a silver pentagram necklace she’d bought from an antique store in town.
“What are you playing at, child?” Mae had studied the synthetic black wig, the skintight black bodysuit, and the cheap nylon cape tied at the neck with fragile cobwebbed lace. “You can call it superstition, but do me this favor. Take it off. It’s a game of chicken, impressionable children goading the other side.”
“So, what do you think?” Callum asked.
“The house is a mess, and do we even have enough food for a proper dinner?” Hannah immediately began listing excuses. Then, “Will he bring Leah?”
Callum sat up. “Of course not.”
“If you want her here, then go ahead,” she said quickly and slid off the desk, trying to pick a fight.
“I don’t. I swear it. I just need a bit of a break.” Her throat closed. “Never from you,” he added. “But it’s been stressful here. Living in town, all I learned is drunks are drunks from sea to shining sea. That, and crazies are sane enough to work a lock. Living here, by the water, is a very different beast.”
“I’ve lived here my whole life. If you reject this, you’re rejecting me.” Hannah looked around the room. There was the dresser she’d picked out on her sixteenth birthday, which they’d moved into Mae’s bedroom. She’d dreamt of filling it with beautiful clothes, opaque black stockings that would close tight above her knees. There was Mae’s strong mahogany bedframe, which had withstood Hannah’s jumps toward the ceiling and her acrobatic somersaults into a fort of pillows against the headboard. The memories murmured from every corner.
“I don’t mean that and you know it. I’m saying,” Callum said in a sigh, “that I’ve followed you into the goddamn murk and would keep at it into the deep bowels of the earth. I will even stay in the goddamn murk if you need us to. But we’ve been living in this dankness and it’d be so good to clear it out. Just a bit.”
She picked at the cat hair on her nightgown, trying to keep hidden how his words affected her. “Fine. James can come to dinner.”
“That’s it?” Callum crossed his arms. “That’s all you have to say to that?”
“I love you,” she muttered, crossing her own arms. “Happy now?” He stepped toward her and angled her face up with the crook of his thumb.
“Say it again.”
“I love you, idiot.”
“Happy now,” he agreed and kissed her deeply. His tongue dipped between her lips and swirled hypnotically. She felt everything mute around them and, for a moment, the calm pacified her.
Then her eyes burst open. “I need to get ready. What will we feed him? I can’t believe Halloween snuck up on us like this.”
“When you didn’t mention it, I thought you’d forgotten. I took the liberty of outfitting you for this evening.” Out of a nondescript cardboard box overflowing with peach-hued tissue paper, Callum pulled out a dress. He’d brought home elastic-banded cotton pants and skirts to house her growing belly, but this was something else. “I’ll admit,” he said, hovering over her as she fingered the low-cut bodice, the empire waist, and the pleated silk skirt. “It’s not much of a costume per se, but a job took me into Baton Rouge last week and I thought you’d like it.”
“It’s too much.” She could almost smell lilac and forsythia in its sheer purple folds. It was a perfect bloom, born from fabric. “It’s not really me.” Callum’s face fell, and she shook her head. “No, I just mean, where would I wear it?”
“Tonight, of course. You can be my princess.”
Licking her lips like a ch
ild before a dessert platter, she pulled off her nightgown and carefully slid the dress up over her naked body. Where the chiffon brushed against her nipples, it felt like a kitten’s tongue. “Zip me.” It fit as if it had been custom made, stretched around her belly and snug against her chest. “How do I look?”
“Beautiful. Do you like it?” Callum asked.
“I love it, but what will you be?”
“Your gallant prince,” he said wryly and pointed to a starched white shirt, “who will look suspiciously like a waiter.”
“You’ve done,” James paused and did a theatrical turn around the living room, “absolutely nothing with this place.” He handed Hannah a bottle of red wine and kissed her cheek. “That’s quite the dress,” he added in a whisper.
“Well, we’re not really sure where we’ll be settling down just yet,” Callum said, avoiding Hannah’s eyes.
“Nothing’s quite been decided.” Hannah smiled tightly. “We have enough change coming down the pipeline without adding to the stress.”
A loaded silence fell over them, and Hannah smoothed the silk dress over her stomach.
“You’re getting huge,” James changed the subject. “And glowing. My God, how far along are you now?”
Hannah and Callum looked at each other and spoke at the same time. “Nearly eight months.”
“That’s a lot of baby.” James sat down on the couch. Graydon lifted his head from Mae’s old chair, surveyed the room, and curved into himself like a touched fern.
Hannah stood back against the wall. Being a hostess was not in her repertoire. Mae had fashioned a world from books in homeschooling her, and taught her to be whole in herself. Friends had rarely visited and she’d rarely wanted them to. Even around James, who had no expectations and would’ve been happiest with beer and cream cheese on crackers, Hannah found herself adjusting herself and her home. A strand of loose hair was immediately tucked. She moved the lamp in a senseless shuffle back and forth by centimeters.
Cauchemar Page 17
