A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel (21 page)

Oh, Selina said, when she came out and saw the flowers, and for a moment Augustus thought he'd made a terrible mistake. But she swallowed, tried to blink away tears, failed. Sorry. It's my lady hormones. Don't surprise me with kindness like that. Sorry. She sniffed, had to go and get a Kleenex from the bathroom.

I had a twinge, she said, sipping her tea.

A twinge?

Like a cramp.

A period cramp?

Kind of. But it was just once, then I threw up and it was gone. I think it's from throwing up so much.

Around which hypothesis they knew not to leave too much silence.

Are you okay now?

Yeah, it was fleeting.

They had the flowers by the bed. Augustus confessed he didn't know the names of any of them, which she said made it an even sweeter gesture, as from a retarded person. These were irises, those crocuses, these big ones camellias, the red ones white ones and purple ones tulips. As a matter of fact, you uncanny
man, tulips are my favorite flowers. As they were falling asleep she said: Do you love me? He held her close to him, hypersensitive to the femaleness of her, the softness and curve and swell. He was full of pride that his child was alive inside her, that she was his woman after all. He felt archetypal, simplified, needful of very little, though his modern self knew that wouldn't last, started already conjuring up diapers and job interviews. He wished they were cave people, felt a memory of another life, fire, meat, stone, darkness beyond the flames, the shape and warmth of her body there in his arms. It was a wonderful thing to be a man. Yes, I love you, he said.

In the night she had a violent dream, whimpered, flailed, and before Augustus could grab her, sideswiped the vase with such force it smashed against the wall. He had to shake her to wake her up, and when he did she curled into a ball with her back to him. No, I can't tell you. It was horrible. I'm sorry. He made her stay put while he cleaned up the broken glass. There was no other vase so he filled the sink and put the flowers in there. It was getting light when he got back into bed and put his arms around her. Sorry, she said again. He held her, pressed his nose into her nape, kissed the soft hair there, whispered: Shshsh. Everything's going to be all right.

 

At the tail end of a confused dream he heard her say: Baby, wake up. Wake
up
—then he was suddenly wide awake and it was fully light and his first thought was he'd missed a piece of glass and she'd cut herself. She was standing a few feet away, holding her abdomen. There was blood on her fingertips. For a dreamy moment he watched as she bent her left knee and touched her
self between her legs and brought her hand away wet with more blood. The action had a ritual aspect, like a gesture in a Balinese dance. She looked up at him and said: It's going wrong.

 

Everything that happened in the hour after that was both blurred and studded with detail. Dialling 911 for the first time in his life a disinterested part of his brain registered it as a dreary rite of passage and wondered why start with a 9 since it took a precious second longer than a 1, why not 111? He spent an eternity impotently existing by the bed unable to do anything to alleviate the pain and the horror. She curled into the fetal position but kept having to move, make adjustments, none of which made any difference. He gave her a towel for between her legs in obedience to the instinct that says blood shouldn't just be allowed to run out of a person, brazenly. She clutched it there for a few moments but soon stopped bothering. He'd seen her cry before; he'd never seen her in misery. The face changed, revealed a version of the person you realized to your horror had always been there, waiting for the circumstances. The torment of being unable to do anything brought him to absurdity: he could laugh, smash crockery, do a little dance, jump through the window, maybe just calmly leave her and go to the bar for a drink. Helplessness yielded an exhaustive equalization: if there was nothing you could do you could do anything. There was a seed of hatred for the person who was doing this to you, rubbing your nose in your own uselessness. He imagined grabbing her and quickly breaking her neck. She couldn't look at him for more than a moment, her eyes moved away with disgust. He could see pain debunking her myth of him. She moaned low in her throat. You forgot we were animals.

 

T
he ambulance took her to Beth Israel. She was put on a gurney and wheeled into a very small examination room with a curtain and a huge angle-poise lamp. Augustus was allowed to sit on the room's one chair. A Polish nurse said a doctor would be there in a minute. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Augustus had been high on relief when the ambulance appeared and two medics in peppermint green took charge. Then higher when they got to the hospital and she was taken in. Now, after twenty minutes of saying to himself, any second now, any second now, he was internally frantic again, at the edge of hallucination—then a doctor appeared and he got high on relief again. It wasn't until he was in the hall, where he'd been asked to wait, that he realized the whole time possibly since he first woke up and saw her standing there he'd been praying to God for her to be all right even if the baby dies she has to be all right in fact I'll make a deal take the kid if you want but leave her all right. If you really don't believe spit on it. Go on, right in Jesus's face.

 

He asked if I wanted to see it.

Augustus and Selina were in a cab on the way back to the apartment. They'd kept her in overnight. Augustus, having been told to go home and come back in the morning with clothes for her had in fact gone home, collected a bagful of things and returned to the hospital, where he'd spent the night in a waiting area chair. He'd wanted to call her parents but she'd said no. He knew what “it” was. But what was there to see at three months? He held her hand. The cab bounced over a welt in the road. When he'd stepped out of the hospital with her he'd thought: It's going to snow. Now sure enough the first flakes were falling. Selina said very quietly: It was a girl.

Storefronts were vivified. C
OFFEE
& B
AGELS
. B
REAKFAST
S
ERVED
. K
EYS
C
UT
. The cab stopped at a red light, overcoated pedestrians crossed, deep in their own details.

At least now I can graduate, Selina said.

Augustus realized he had his jaws clamped, forced himself to relax. He wanted to surround her, let her sleep in him for a long time. He thought of the place in her where the fetus had been now a little well of blood as when a tooth's first pulled and how she'd said: I had this twinge. The word “twinge” gave
him
a twinge somewhere, maybe his bladder.

It was about this big, Selina said, holding her thumb and index finger two inches apart.

Augustus knew he ought to be feeling some sort of grief but all he felt was throbbing relief that she was still alive, a person sitting next to him in a warm coat and scarf, Selina, with the little scar under her lip. The bleeding had seemed so bad. He'd thought he was watching her die. Now here she was with her hair tucked behind her ears, talking to him, his wife. God bless the sidewalks and the snow and cabs and everything he'd never take for granted again.

 

Her father was standing on their stoop when the cab pulled up. Oh my God, Selina said. I told you not to call them.

I didn't.

What?

I didn't call them. Augustus gave the driver his fare and rushed around the cab to get Selina's door but she was already out, standing at the bottom of the steps looking up at her father.

What is it?

Jack came down the steps and put his hands on her arms. He was a tall man and in the black overcoat looked monumental. His shirt cuffs were exactly the white of the snow. Selina had her fists clenched against her chest. She laughed, once, then shook her head, no, then said: No. She tried to get out of his grip but he pulled her close to him. She held her head away from him, writhed in precisely the way she would have when she was a little girl. She stopped and looked at him and there was his implacable face, at which point Augustus knew her father had come to tell her Michael was dead.

 

I
t's the second week of December and Calansay's under heavy snow. Trees are intricate with it. The stream's frozen. Indoors Augustus and Morwenna feel the new weight on the roof. The morning after the first fall they couldn't get out either door. She had to climb through the window in his boots and scrape away at the drift with anything she could find. Later in the afternoon Maddoch sent the boy over with a shovel.

Augustus's leg wounds are healing. Marle's GP, Goyle, came out to see to them a week ago, apparently at the connivance of the Maddochs. Antibiotic injection, sutures, fresh dressings, drugs. This might sound like a stupid question but did you
want
to have these amputated? Augustus had submitted, head hot and confused. There'd been a danger of collapse into something when he felt the care in Goyle's hands but it passed. We'll send you a practice registration form, the doctor said. If you've not had that hip X-rayed I can arrange for it. Augustus had observed Goyle noting conditions in the croft. Plenty of fluids and stay off the booze.
You've got to keep the dressing dry. Flannel wash or a plastic bag round it. Health visitor'll come out to look at it in a couple of days. Meantime no jitterbugging. Morwenna had leaned against the chimney breast and watched everything.

A routine's established itself. Augustus wakes early, washes, dresses (or rather adds to the clothes he's slept in) and steps over her to light the fire. In the first few days she'd wake with a start, shocked, face pouchy, hair full of static, and sit up in the bivvy bag, blinking, a look of complete bewilderment that sometimes took an hour to fade. But by the end of the first week her animal self had adapted: now at the sound of Augustus stirring she struggles awake, moves her legs so he can get to the fire, then falls asleep again. He makes instant coffee, rolls a smoke, takes his stick and goes outside to look at the weather. She wakes up much later, has trouble summoning the will to leave her plastic cocoon and the fire's warmth, to concede it's another day. If they're low on supplies he gives her money and she goes into Marle. Otherwise she stays by the fire with
Hello!
and
OK!
and
Cosmopolitan
and
Elle
. He's made her buy clothes against the cold, a fleece, jeans, a woolen hat, a pair of hiking boots. Cash. (Marle inferred the obvious transactional relationship but Maddoch—bizarrely as if his own honor was at stake—put the idea down. 'S'no like that. Lassie's had a tough time of it an Mr. Rose is helping her out. There's nothin like that goin on. 'Sides which, fella can hardly
walk
. He doesnie need to walk, Ade McCrea in Costcutter said. He just needs to lie back and enjoy!) They eat the same tinned junk diet, more or less, though lately she's been coming back with a few fresh things, bananas, tomatoes, a cauliflower, carrots, zucchini they call courgettes here. The only thing she can cook is chili,
which done by her is vegetables, tinned tomatoes and excessive chili powder. Mrs. Maddoch, aghast at the amount of Heinz she knows they're consuming, has sent down with the logs a cooking pot, a sharp knife, a colander, a set of tea towels. Also once or twice, a winter vegetable pie. Bit late for housewarmin' Maddoch had said when he brought them, peering around Augustus in the doorway to see if the girl's presence had domesticated the croft.

It hasn't. She's not interested in what the place looks like. Its existence between her and the outside world is enough. Not being moved on is enough. Paulie's the dark matter her talk surrounds. Augustus doesn't need the details—or so he thought, until after she mentioned being in hospital for the second time and he said, Why didn't you go to the police? and she'd looked surprised and said, Did I not say? Paulie's a copper. Plainclothes.

The snow sanctions postponement. There are questions (all resolvable into one: What is he doing?) but this unexpected beauty pushes them aside. He's used to city snow, the hush after the first big fall, someone opens a canned drink a block away and it sounds so close—this is different. Clear days look enameled, white land and turquoise sky. Dull afternoons are moody daguerreotypes. He might be on an alien planet. Aesthetic amnesia dictates big things are every time almost new: snow, thunder, moonlight, cloud-shadows, frost, constellations. He's twice struggled up the hill, leg plastic-bag-wrapped, to get the bigger view and both times felt close to final dissolution. The first time the blue of the sky invited it. He wouldn't have been surprised to see his atoms trickling upward, could've sat down and let himself go. The second time the same effect from dusk light on the sea. The water was a peach-tinted mercury he was convinced offered a portal to oblivion. For
a moment he felt sure this was a great gift humanity had yet to discover, the ability to gently volunteer oneself into nonexistence. Harper had said we were antsy for the next paradigm shift. What if it was this, the knack of dying peacefully? Experimentally, Augustus had lain down in the snow and waited. But there was interference. He remembered the small pleasure he'd experienced when Morwenna had pulled the new woolen cap down snug on her head. Which memory called up his inner Harper. We see this. The obvious script is she gives him the will to live. Harrowing but uplifting. You're working with this—otherwise why let her in? So the woolen hat, the flicker of fatherliness. There's a lost child back there after all. And a fifteen-year-old's maidenhead blasted to the devil. O Rose, thou art well, or at least trying to get better. The flip-side script is you do something horrible to her, true to the universe's grotesque equalizations and benign indifference. It's the familiar story: for better or worse all that stands between you and the void is the durability of the habits. And yes that is snow melting through the calves of your jeans. The senses are the most durable of the habits. We see this. You know this is true.