THE POLICY

by Bentley Little

  “Don’t worry,” Hunt assured him.

  “Are you sure?”

  Half past a monkey’s ass, a quarter to his ba-wuls.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Maybe we should,” Beth suggested.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  2

  Jorge met Ynez at the obstetrician’s at lunch. She was sitting uncomfortably in one of the leather waiting-room chairs, thumbing through a women’s magazine whose cover featured the female host of a television talk show standing next to a bouquet of flowers. “Sorry I’m late,” he said.

  She smiled, squeezed his hand.

  The door next to the receptionist’s window opened, and a nurse holding a clipboard kept it from closing. “Mrs. Marquez?”

  Both Jorge and Ynez stood, following the nurse down a short corridor to a utilitarian exam room, where the nurse weighed Ynez and took her blood pressure and temperature. She’d gained five pounds from two weeks ago, and everything was normal. “Dr. Bergman will be with you in a minute,” the nurse said, closing the door behind her.

  Ynez remained on the cushioned examination bed, while Jorge nervously walked the perimeter of the small room, looking at the jar of cotton balls, the antibacterial soaps lined up at the back of the sink, the full-color poster of a woman’s reproductive system. “We could change doctors if you want,” he said. “There are a lot of other doctors in our group.”

  “I like having a woman doctor,” she told him.

  “I’m just saying.”

  After a polite knock on the door, Dr. Bergman entered. What worried Jorge wasn’t that she was a woman. It was the fact that she was so damn young. She looked like she’d just graduated from medical school, and though she might have graduated at the top of her class, in his book that was no substitute for experience. This was their first child, and he would have felt a lot more comfortable if Ynez’s obstetrician were an old white-haired gent with a bushy mustache.

  Still, he admired Dr. Bergman’s professional, no-nonsense attitude, and he had to admit that she seemed to know what she was doing. Besides, Ynez trusted her. That had to count for something.

  The doctor pulled up Ynez’s blouse and began to palpate her distended abdomen.

  “Everything okay?” he asked worriedly.

  “Everything’s fine,” she assured them. She finished pressing on Ynez’s abdomen. “Ready to hear the heartbeat?”

  Ynez smiled happily. “Yes.”

  This was the part of the visit she enjoyed most, but to Jorge it was nerve-racking. There was the miracle of life and all that, and technology and modern medicine were truly awesome—but he could not help worrying that there would be something wrong; that the doctor would hear an irregular heartbeat, evidence of a congenital heart defect, an indication that their baby would be born with severe and crippling medical problems.

  Dr. Bergman squirted a jellylike substance onto Ynez’s stomach—the stuff even looked cold—and then picked up the portable gadget that to Jorge still looked like a modified ohm-meter. Harsh static issued from the device’s small speaker. She moved it slowly over Ynez’s belly, and gradually a pattern emerged from within the white noise.

  “There it is,” the doctor said, smiling.

  Even after all these times, it still didn’t sound like a heartbeat to Jorge. It was too fast, for one thing. Kind of a whooshing, swishing sound that, at the same time, held a hint of the mechanical. Dr. Bergman had been through this often enough with them to anticipate his next question, and before he could ask it she said, “Your baby’s heart sounds fine. It’s very strong.”

  Jorge exhaled gratefully. Another hurdle cleared.

  They listened for a few moments longer, then the doctor turned off the machine, put it away, wiped the goop off Ynez’s stomach and began making notes on her chart. She flipped through a couple pages, then looked up. “I assume they called you with the results of the amnio, right?”

  “Yes,” Ynez said.

  That had been another nightmare. It had been bad enough to see that gigantic needle sinking into his wife’s abdomen, then to watch the ultrasound monitor and see the needle pause in its descent while the fetus moved so it wouldn’t stab the tiny head, but the waiting had been far worse. First, they waited twenty-four hours to make sure that none of the possible side effects of amniocentesis—like miscarriage—occurred. Then they whiled away the next few days waiting to find out if their child would be born retarded or severely deformed. Receiving the phone call from the lab three days later was like a reprieve from the governor.

  “And I assume they told you that everything’s fine.”

  “Yes.”

  She paused and looked from Jorge to Ynez, smiling. “So… do you want to know?”

  Jorge turned toward Ynez. That was the question. They’d discussed it many times, and they’d always decided that they did not want to know the sex of the baby, they wanted to be surprised. But the woman standing before them knew already. So did the technicians at the lab and probably a couple of nurses. And now that they were faced with the decision of whether or not to receive the knowledge or pretend it didn’t exist, Jorge was not so sure they should stick to their guns, despite all of their self-satisfied philosophizing. He looked questioningly at Ynez.

  She smiled, nodded, reached for his hand. “Tell us,” she said to the doctor. “We want to know.”

  “Congratulations,” Dr. Bergman said. “You’re going to have a son.”

  3

  The light in the guest room was on.

  It had not been on ten minutes ago, when Hunt left for work. Beth was sure of that. But it was on now, and the sight of that yellowish light seeping from beneath the closed door in the predawn darkness of the hallway made her blood run cold. “Courtney!” she called.

  The cat’s responding meow came from far away—the kitchen or the laundry room.

  She had to go to work, too. It was her first day back after the honeymoon, and she couldn’t afford to be late. She should leave and come back later with Hunt, preferably when it was all over.

  When it was all over.

  Yes. Whatever was happening in there, it was still going on.

  She reached for the light switch and flipped it, but there was no response. The hallway remained dark.

  Except for the bar of light at the bottom of the guest room door.

  She hesitated for a moment, unsure of what to do. There was a noise coming from the room. Not knocking this time, but an eerie sort of low whistle, like the sound of a forgotten teakettle almost out of water. The whistle was barely audible, almost lost beneath her own frightened exhalations of breath and Courtney’s far-off meowing.

  Dawn was only a few minutes away. If she waited, light would come into the house through the east-facing windows, dispelling the darkness. But she couldn’t wait. Work traffic would be getting heavier by the minute and she needed to leave if she was going to make it to Thompson in time. Taking a deep fortifying breath, she walked quickly down the hall. She grabbed the knob to the guest room door, turned it, and pushed.

  And the door wouldn’t open.

  She leaned into it, pressing against the wood with her shoulder, constantly aware of the light spilling from under the door onto her shoes, but it would not budge.

  The noise within the room seemed slightly louder, and now it sounded less like a teakettle and more like the distracted tuneless whistling of a man waiting not so patiently for someone.

  A chill passed through her.

  And the door swung open.

  She screamed. In the brief second before the guest room light shut off, Beth saw in the dresser mirror the shape of a man standing beside her, a hulking figure with stooped shoulders and a broad-brimmed hat.

  And then she was running as fast as she could through the living room, through the kitchen, and out of the house.

  “How you feeling down there?”

  “What?”

  “If your dick’s not rubbed raw and damn ne
ar falling off, you’re not a man.”

  Hunt laughed and threw a stick at Edward. It flew end over end toward the big man’s face before he stepped aside and it clattered harmlessly on the gravel.

  “You were on your honeymoon, dude.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So that thing should be red and chapped.”

  “What’s the point? You want to pull down my pants and take a peek at my pecker? What exactly are you shooting for here?”

  “Details!” Jorge announced from his perch in the tree. “We want details!”

  “Well, you’re not getting any.”

  “My guess is you’re not getting any,” Edward said. He laughed his deep wrestler’s laugh, and the three of them paused while two moms pushing babies in sports strollers jogged by.

  “Seriously,” Edward said, “how was the trip?”

  “A week off, squiring my new wife around my old haunts? How do you think it was?”

  “It sucked?”

  Hunt laughed. “It was great. There were a few minor inconveniences, just enough to make the trip memorable—”

  “You need inconveniences to make your honeymoon memorable?” Edward shook his head. “Like I said: not a man.”

  “You know what I’m talking about. We got food poisoning at Olvera Street—”

  “Diarrhea’s always sexy on a honeymoon,” Jorge offered, climbing down.

  Hunt ignored him. “Then I got into a little fender bender at the beach.”

  Edward shook his head in sympathy. “What’d your insurance company say this time?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t tell them. There was no damage to either car, so we just left it as is.”

  “Probably a wise decision. You hear about Steve’s homeowner’s insurance?”

  “No. What?”

  “Canceled!” Jorge called out.

  Hunt looked at Edward, who nodded. “It’s true. I guess he filed what they considered a frivolous claim, and they dropped him.”

  Jorge laughed. “There he is with his half-built house and no insurance. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

  “You know, Steve may be a dickwad,” Hunt said, “but this insurance stuff is scary.”

  “I know where you’re coming from… but it’s Steve.”

  “I understand. But I don’t think you do know where I’m coming from. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and do you realize how much we depend on insurance? We need it for our cars, for our houses, for our health, for our lives. People stay at jobs they hate just for the insurance, especially if they have kids. It affects everything. I think more dreams are derailed because of the practical necessity of having insurance than anything else.” He faced Edward. “How many more people would be writing music if they didn’t have to make those car insurance payments, if they didn’t need homeowner’s insurance?” He looked up at Jorge. “How many more people would be writing the novels that are locked in their heads if they didn’t need to work a job that guaranteed them health insurance for their kids?”

  There was silence as the two of them digested this.

  “People don’t need more art,” Edward said gruffly. “They need their trees trimmed. Let’s get back to work.”

  “Yeah,” Jorge said. “Besides… it’s Steve.”

  Hunt got home before Beth and immediately went into the guest room to investigate.

  She had called him on his cell early that morning to tell him what had happened, had called him again at lunch to go into more detail, and while it had sounded somewhat ridiculous when he was out there in the real world, away from the house, it didn’t seem quite so unbelievable now that he was here.

  She hadn’t touched anything, she said, but the first thing he noticed when he walked into the room was that the covers of the guest bed were pulled down. That bedspread had remained unmoved and unchanged ever since Beth’s mother left, and the sight of it crumpled at the foot of the mattress along with the flat sheet underneath raised goose bumps on his arms. Nothing else in the room appeared to be disturbed. The switch was down and the light was off. There were no noises.

  From outside, he heard Beth’s Saturn pull into the driveway, the slamming of her car door, then the opening of the kitchen door. “I’m in here!” he called when he was sure that she was within shouting distance.

  Her footsteps sounded hesitant on the floor, but a moment later Beth was standing beside him, looking at the unmade bed. “I’m assuming you didn’t do that,” she said.

  “Nope.”

  She glanced around the room, searching for something else out of order but apparently not finding anything. “I really did see something in the mirror,” she said, and he could hear the fear in her voice. “A big man, standing right beside me. Only no one was there.”

  “Did you feel threatened by him? Did you have the sense that he meant you harm?” Hunt could not believe he was talking this way. There was no getting around it, though. Not after what had happened. The room was haunted. It was as simple as that.

  Beth shook her head. “I didn’t feel anything specific, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t have the feeling that his purpose was to harm me. But I’ve never been more terrified in my life, I can tell you that.” She pointed to her arms. “Look,” she said. “Goose bumps. They’ve been there all day.”

  Hunt pulled up the flat sheet, pulled up the bedspread, half-expecting that at any second they would be ripped out of his hands and go fluttering across the room. But nothing happened. He remade the bed and the bed stayed made. Inwardly, he breathed a sigh of relief. “People live with ghosts, don’t they? Give them cute names like ‘Georgie’ or ‘Louie’ and tell everyone that they’re friendly and don’t mean any harm? Maybe that’s what we should do.”

  “A haunted house,” Beth said, echoing his thoughts. “We live in a haunted house.”

  “Yeah.” He looked at her. “What do you want to do? Sell it and move somewhere else?”

  “No,” she said. She paused to think about it. “At least… not yet.”

  NINE

  1

  Steve had been riding their asses all week, and Hunt was grateful when Friday finally rolled around. On the way home, he stopped for gas at a Circle K. Across the street was a Waffle House, and as he pumped the gas he looked over at the restaurant, wondering what kind of people ate waffles at this time of day. Night-shift workers, he supposed. Truck drivers and train men. His attention shifted to the homeless man selling newspapers from the concrete island dividing the northbound and southbound sides of the street, and then to the bus stop in front of the Circle K. He frowned. Two women were waiting for a bus, and one of them seemed very familiar. He didn’t recognize the clothes or the hair, but there was something about the set of her shoulders, the positioning of her head…

  The woman turned to the left, giving him a profile.

  It was Eileen.

  He had not seen her since the divorce, had not even considered that she might move back to Tucson, too. Yet here she was, in one of the downscale areas of the city, using public transportation.

  She looked old and unhappy, and that depressed him. He would have been depressed as well had she been looking fabulous, with a new husband and a young baby in tow, but somehow this was worse. He hadn’t thought he had any tender feelings left—not after the bitterness of the breakup—but obviously he did. Once intimate always intimate, he supposed, and he could not help dunking back to when they’d first started dating, their senior year in high school. They’d been voted “Couple Most Likely to Last the Longest” in the yearbook and had literally spent every spare moment in each other’s company. She’d been beautiful and smart, he’d been popular and high-achieving, and they’d both been young, with their entire futures ahead of them.

  Now she was middle-aged and all alone, and he could not help wondering if her life would be different today had they stayed together. Or had they never met. It was impossible to say how much of an influence one person had on another, and perhaps everything
would have turned out this way no matter what. But he had his doubts. He saw in his mind that bright young girl, filled with promise, and there was an ache in his heart so painful he felt almost like crying.

  The bus arrived just as his tank filled and the pump nozzle cut off. Hunt watched her stand, climb listlessly up the bus steps, disappear into the vehicle, and he remained unmoving as the bus pulled into traffic, heading east. It was only when the bus was finally lost from sight that he hung up the hose, screwed on his gas cap and got back into the car.

  He went home to Beth.

  And held her close.

  They awoke to the sound of thunder and the drip-drip-drip of water somewhere in the bedroom.

  The roof was leaking! Hunt sat up in bed, opening his eyes wide to clear them and looking toward the digital alarm clock on the dresser, trying to make out the time. Two-thirty? Three-thirty? Next to him, Beth was turning on the lamp atop her nightstand. He got up to flip on the light switch—

  —and nearly slipped in the water that had puddled on the hardwood floor. “Jesus Christ!” he yelled, grabbing the bedpost to steady himself. He tiptoed through water that seemed surprisingly deep—this must have been going on for some time—and was about to turn on the ceiling light when Beth told him to stop. He turned and looked where she was pointing. Even in the dim light from her lamp, he saw that rain was soaking through the ceiling in two places, one above the high-back chair in the corner, the other next to Hunt’s side of the bed.

  “That means the attic’s wet,” she said. “I don’t know if that affects the wires, but I don’t want you to short out the light or electrocute yourself or anything.”

  He didn’t know enough about electricity to know if that was a possibility, but he didn’t want to find out firsthand, so he backed away from the light switch.

  Beth was already out of bed and pulling the chair out from under the leak. “Check the living room,” she ordered. “Make sure it’s not leaking in there.”