“My father,” Hannah said simply, and her mother’s eyes dropped. A tear snaked down her face. Would her tears be salty and clear like her own, disappearing as they dried on pillowcases? Or would they be different—aromatic as turmeric, fading to brown?
“His name was Dylan, child, and he was a good man. You have his eyes, that same moss green. Then, after a while, they turned gray.” Christobelle leaned over and ran a finger along Hannah’s brow. “He’s here. Right in this haughty ridge.” She tapped Hannah’s chin. “He lives on through you. That’s what a child is: permanence.”
Hannah slapped her mother’s hand away. “Did he know? Did he understand what was happening to him?”
“Even I didn’t know. It began with terrible nightmares. His nose bled, his eyes sank into his skull. He wasted away. We took him to specialists who couldn’t find anything wrong, until suddenly everything was wrong and he was beyond the reach of medicine.” Her voice broke. “He wanted so much to meet you, to know you. He kept me up with his plans for you.”
Hannah shuddered at how similar this was to her life with Callum. She’d never imagined that her mother had once known such simple pleasures. “Was there nothing you could do?” Her voice rose. “So many people following you and this is all the power you have?”
“We all have certain gifts, but mine is not life.” Christobelle shook her head. “Your father was fascinated by physics. I remember one thing he told me: energy can neither be created nor destroyed.” She squinted into the candlelight. “The swamp is like flypaper. Nothing ever flies away.” She touched her temple. Her eyebrows were sprinkled with white. “It’s teeming in here.”
Hannah became still. She urged the blood in her ears to hush. They were coming up on the heart of the matter. Hannah could see it looming in her mother’s face, even as it began to dawn on her. “The men. The men you’ve used. They stay, don’t they?”
“All souls do. It’s what seduces the living, at first. But the men are different. They give permission, but it’s always, somehow, a surprise. Death always is. They pass and then feel cheated. Their rage is very nearly a physical thing. It occurs to them too late that they might have healed, that the true purpose of death is to remind the living of their fortune.”
“How do they die?” Hannah asked quietly.
Timothy yelped in his sleep, and Christobelle cooed quietly down at his sleeping form. “How do any of us die?” Christobelle shrugged. “The machinery slows, then stops. Organs cease their functions. Consciousness wilts. One night, the heartbeat stops and the silence is absolute. They visit death, come too close to it, and then topple over its edge.”
“Callum never volunteered,” she cried. Her fists struck her mother and hit hard bone. Each contact sounded a knell in her right wrist.
Christobelle caught Hannah’s hands and restrained them with surprising strength. No sign of effort showed on her face. “He volunteered himself. Love is tacit. Love is the ultimate surrender.” She held Hannah’s injured wrist. “They’re growing stronger with each passing day. They did this to you, through him.” Sensing Hannah tense, Christobelle raised her voice. “They were in him. I can feel their touch. I can recognize it. They go to break the right hand, always, as if a person’s power rests there.”
Hannah fell slack. The room seemed to drain of color, of sound. Her mother’s mouth moved soundlessly. “It’s my fault,” Hannah said. The words were perverse, unnatural. She looked down at her scuffed shoes, her swollen feet bulging out of them, but couldn’t feel the matted carpet beneath her anymore. Everything was suspended.
She saw Callum’s face, his eyes dry, his lips stale. The awful clicking of the inner workings of his jaw sheathed in the thinnest layer of skin. This was death. This was the slow decomposition that began it.
Christobelle’s shoulders were wider than Hannah had thought, her frame large and imposing. “They managed once before to get close to you, but I contained it.” When Hannah frowned, Christobelle went on. “A young girl, long ago. You loved her, too, in your way.”
Hannah’s breath stopped, heat taking her like kindling.
“Her brother’s mind was spoiled. Whatever locks we have against them were broken. They would’ve killed you if I hadn’t acted.”
“Help me now, then,” Hannah whispered, and tasted salt on her lips.
Christobelle’s eyes, always possessed, always elsewhere, were wet and present. She was remembering, Hannah realized. A muscle hammered in her cheek. “They’re patient, unfortunately, and bitter with me. Bitter, in some small part, with all who live. The dead are never satisfied.”
Christobelle picked up an alligator head from a shelf, shellacked and preserved. So small, its black eyes were plain, its teeth smaller than a house cat’s. “This is just a baby. If you look here,” she tapped it between the eyes, “there’s no bullet, no knife mark. The man stunned it with a blow, held its body, and carved right through the living, writhing neck. Most wouldn’t be so stupid, but they’d killed the mother that morning. This small creature was anyone’s for the taking.”
Hannah flinched at her mother’s words. “Why can’t we leave?” she asked in a small voice.
“They won’t let you. Not while it’s inside you. To the dead, a gestating birth is the purest light. It is—sublime.”
The woman turned to Timothy’s sleeping form a second before he jolted awake. The boy looked like a drowning man breaking the surface. He raised his arms as if to defend himself, panting audibly.
“You have a choice. Ask yourself what it’s worth.” Christobelle peered into the alligator’s mouth. There were no more answers. Christobelle threw Timothy his shirt. “You’ll take her home.” The boy nodded and turned away to dress himself.
Hannah picked up the bag that held the knife and wondered what she’d hoped to accomplish by coming here. “Who do you see?” Hannah asked her mother as Timothy held the door open for her. “Who’s your loved one?”
“My punisher,” Christobelle answered and turned her back.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Time began to toy with Hannah. The clock ticked erratically, the minute hand stood still for hours as Hannah watched. Her face should’ve been full and flushed, but instead, all she saw were jaundiced cheekbones in the mirror. She’d never seen her clavicles so clearly.
She and Callum slept well past noon, sometimes waking and lying silent side by side, as if speaking and rising were beyond them. Alone with her thoughts, she repeated a mantra to the baby: Live. In private, she searched Mae’s scribbles for more answers, but there were only prayers that granted Hannah nothing, no matter how feverishly she spoke them.
The plumber came, a bald man whose pate bore an old scar. He took a single look at the damaged house, shook his head, and ordered a clean-up crew. For two days, the house was filled with the sound of drilling and cutting.
Callum called a carpenter and pulled out his own tools, insisting that he help, but soon resigned himself to watching from a chair. The carpenter’s crude jokes were met with hollow chuckles.
Hannah massaged her stomach as she watched them work. If she pressed the skin, she could make out the crossed lines on her belly, etched where she couldn’t erase them. The baby had been still for the last few days, hibernating, and she woke sweat-drenched from nightmares of birthing a stone, gray and dry. She worried that there had been something in the scent of Christobelle’s house, some destructive fume burning from the candles. Christobelle’s feelings toward the child clearly hadn’t changed.
“What happened here?” the carpenter asked her, nodding his head in thanks as she handed him sweet tea one afternoon.
“Really, we were hoping you could answer that.”
He grimaced as he sipped. “Could I add some sugar to this?” Hannah gestured to the ceramic sugar bowl on the counter. “I’m not sure, ma’am. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” The ma
n gave it serious thought for a moment, then shook his head. “It’s like something broke the house from the inside. Sometimes with the newer subdivisions, you’ll get a really weak foundation that’ll collapse in on itself. People just don’t have the same workmanship that they used to, but this place, old as it is, is built to last. Well, was.”
“We don’t have a lot of money,” Hannah trailed off, but the man held up a hand.
“And you’ll be keeping most of it. I’ve put some band-aids over the worst, some cosmetic touches, but the foundation work is too big for me. It’s real unfortunate, this happening to such a beautiful old place.”
Hannah looked away.
The morning after the men left, she ran her hand up the frame of the kitchen door. The nicks in the wood that marked her growth over the years were distinct, a corresponding age jotted down in Mae’s rough script. Thirteen had been her spurt. First breasts, then long limbs as if someone had stretched her out overnight. She’d imagined that her own child would stand obediently, heel to wall, then marvel at how he sprouted.
Callum sat at the kitchen table and stared dreamily out the window. His spoon dripped cold milk over his bowl. She’d taken to serving him cereal throughout the day, encouraged by the litany of nutrients listed on the side, but Callum downed water and nothing else.
“Baby, you need to eat,” Hannah urged him, pouring herself a cup of tea at the kitchen counter.
He pulled up another spoonful of soggy cereal and it hovered below his chin. “What do you think of John?”
Hannah fingered the handle of her mug and considered the toast she’d buttered for herself earlier. Even though her stomach felt hollowed out, the bread looked like corrugated cardboard. “Who?”
“No, for our baby. We should name him John.”
Hannah fidgeted. “You should eat,” she reminded him and watched him stir his cereal again, his movements erratic.
“Do you see him?” he asked softly. “He’s crawling in the grass.”
“Who?” Hannah asked. She followed the line of his staring eyes out the window but saw only lighted trees.
“My father.” Milk sloshed onto the table. It was laced with red.
“Callum,” she whispered, and her hand fisted shut around a napkin.
He put a knuckle against his nosebleed. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a migraine all morning.” The blood streamed in rivulets down his hand.
She collected the bowl and tilted his head back as she passed him, pausing to stroke his hair. The gray was becoming endemic, shooting through his golden strands like a sickness.
“Maybe you should go back to sleep,” she said, leaning on the counter. She willed herself to spoon out some orange marmalade, but her tongue only tasted spoiled rinds. Graydon was lapping the milk from the bowl, his eyes frenzied. She lifted a hand to wave him away, then let it fall. Everything seemed immutable.
“I don’t want to sleep anymore,” he said, fear plain to hear in his voice. “I want to help you.” He blotted the wet table with his bloody napkin. “You’re so pregnant and you’re taking care of me. It’s not right.”
“I’m beginning to think that’s a stupid idea,” she said, and hated the bitterness in her voice. “Rightness, I mean.”
He looked chastised. His expressions were unguarded now. Pretensions were an extra effort. She searched him for a sign of the old bravado, the chest-pounding self-confidence of a musician onstage, but all she saw was dripping sweat, an ashen face. Deep lines were being etched on either side of his mouth, trenches manifesting along his forehead by the minute.
He reached for her and nuzzled into the taut skin of her belly, stretched like a gourd’s. “I want you to stay right here.”
Hannah stared blankly over his head. She was beginning to understand true loneliness. The solitude that came from being alone was incidental, par for the course. But the loneliness that surfaced in the presence of a loved one pierced much deeper.
“I’ll finish the porch,” he insisted. A fresh red squeezed through the drying blood and trickled into his beard, untrimmed for days. He looked almost feral.
Hannah moved to stand behind him and massaged his shoulders. She could feel his shoulders click, the bones sliding like a paper doll hinged with tacks. “Don’t worry so much about the porch.”
It mocked her. It was long enough for a single chair, a single miniature wicker table to hold a single glass of lemonade. He’d put down the frame for it, wooden spikes lining the sides of the house like a medieval moat. The planks that had been set down wavered whenever weight was put on them, and Hannah only sat there when Callum was outside, when she could be seen to enjoy the fresh air on the porch.
She’d look up and Callum would be smiling at her, leaning on the handle of his spade. Every moment between them was strained, choreographed poorly.
That night, Callum pulled a book for expecting mothers from her hands and lifted her from the couch. “I want to show you something,” he said, smiling like his old self. He buried her in a sweater and scarves and led her outside.
Frogs croaked and she could hear the distant singing of grasshoppers. The sound was beautiful, lulling. She closed her eyes and loosened a scarf. “It’s too hot,” she said, when he gave her an admonishing look.
He spread a towel on the grass and waited for her to sit before he lowered himself behind her. “See that?” he said, pointing. The full moon sat above the trees, streaming a clear white runway through the water. “That’s gumusservi.”
“Gummy what?”
“Gumusservi. It’s Turkish for moonlight shining on water.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
Callum wrapped his arms around her chest and pulled her closer. His wet breath tickled her ear. “I’m a very worldly man,” he said, putting on a vague accent. He chuckled. “Actually, it’s embarrassing. When I first started boating, one of the perks of the job was taking out girls after hours. I memorized all these obscure sayings in different languages, and pretended I’d visited all these places. Indonesia, Japan, Turkey. I made the whole business of gutting fish on the boat sound very glamorous. I didn’t last long in that job, though. They don’t have a wealth of expression, but fish eyes are eyes all the same, and they fix on you as you’re slicing them open.”
So closely attuned was she to him that she felt him grow serious behind her. “Hannah, I don’t feel well,” he said, and her heart broke at hearing the apology in his voice.
“I know,” she said, and covered his hands with hers. Neither of them had said a word about the sour smell of the sheets when they woke or the smell of elemental iron coming off his clothes, as if blood were evaporating from his pores.
Hannah looked out over the water, where a traipsing heron was scribbling a black line through the white moon. She remembered her mother’s words, and felt the night’s chill grip her feet. “I want you to see a doctor. Tonight. This has gone on long enough.”
“You too,” Callum said, and Hannah looked up at the stars. She wondered how high up their prison went. She pitied butterflies, their wings providing no promise of escape, tearing against the glass.
Dr. Merrick palpated her belly, a slow revolution with her belly button as the sun. “You’re just about due. What’s your birth plan?”
“We’ll come here, I think,” Callum said. “I’ve spoken to the obstetrician.”
Dr. Merrick nodded, then frowned at Hannah. “You’re much improved since the last time I saw you, but the heartbeat is on the quick side. Do you want to know the sex?”
Hannah peered at the ultrasound screen, trying to see a Cupid’s bow mouth. The curled creature inside her betrayed nothing.
“We’ve been discussing that,” Callum began.
“And we’ve decided against it,” Hannah finished. Her instincts told her to wait. It wasn’t hers yet, not until it was in her hands, squealing with eye
s unfocused. “The knowing will dull the surprise. This way, it’ll truly be a gift when it’s born.”
“It’s a gift either way,” Callum grumbled.
Dr. Merrick closed his chart and his brow furrowed. “Alright then. It’s you that worry me. The two of you.”
Callum stepped forward and squeezed Hannah’s ankle. “I had some tests done last week,” he explained, averting his eyes.
“What do they say?” Hannah asked, sitting up. The frozen image of her sonogram distracted her, her belly like a cave coated in ice sheets, the frozen child inside huddled for warmth.
Dr. Merrick held his pen up to Callum and addressed Hannah. “You’re extremely anemic, for starters. It’s common during pregnancy as the amount of blood in your body can double, but …” he hesitated, and tapped the chart, “it’s unusual to experience such a drastic decrease in hemoglobin. Has your diet changed?”
“My appetite hasn’t been very good.”
The man nodded to himself as his eyes moved clinically over her body. “I’d like to weigh you before you go. Have you been experiencing fatigue or weakness?”
She met Callum’s eyes. “We both have,” he answered quietly.
“Stress and nausea can affect a woman’s appetite, but you need to eat properly for your baby’s health, as well as your own. You’re also running a low-grade fever and your white blood-cell count is rather high. I’d like to see you again next week to monitor it.”
Hannah peered beyond the men to the posters of pregnant bellies, warning about the effects of alcohol. There were brightly colored cross-sections, the baby swaddled in layers of flesh like a bean in a pod.
“And you, Callum, are also severely anemic.” Suspicion entered the old man’s voice as he scanned Callum from head to toe. “I asked the nurse to weigh you twice. I thought for sure the first number was off. One hundred and twenty-three pounds, Callum.”
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