Cradle Lake (32 page)

Sprinting down the hall, he skidded into the kitchen while simultaneously turning on the light. Harsh fluorescents burned his retinas.

The kitchen cabinets were open, the lower cupboard doors ajar. There were pots and pans strewn about the floor.

Something shattered behind him.

Alan jumped and spun around, his heart like a locomotive in his chest. The foyer behind was pitch-black, though he thought he spied the silhouette of something moving across one of the windows. He couldn't tell if it was outside the window or in the house. He couldn't tell what it was.

Steeling himself, he went into the living room and turned on the lamp. A glass vase lay shattered at his feet. He was sweating profusely now. It felt like his ears had been stuffed with wads of cotton.

At the opposite end of the house, he heard Heather cry out in her sleep. He turned and ran out of the room, sprinted down the hallway, and switched on the bedroom light upon entering the room.

She was still asleep, lying on her back, all the blankets kicked onto his side of the bed. Her cotton nightgown was hiked up past her hips, leaving her upper thighs and the vague cleft of her genitalia exposed to him.

There was something coming out of her.

He tried to speak her name, but it came out a petrified gasp, more breathy and indistinct than any actual utterance.

There was a little bit of blood on the mattress and a smear on one of her inner thighs. The thing coming out of her—elongated and flesh colored, horrifically wormlike in its appearance, maybe six inches in length—bent at an angle that suggested a knee or an elbow. It made a sound like a cicada. The appendage was grotesquely
footlike…
and then it retreated inside his wife. In disbelief, Alan watched
Heather's labia close upon it like stage curtains after an encore performance.

The mound of Heather's belly rose. It was obvious something was moving around in there.

What have I been chasing around this house for the past month?
he wondered … but could not bear to consider the notion for longer than a second.

Heather broke out in laughter.

He went to her side and spoke her name several times, but she would not stop laughing. Disturbingly, she still appeared to be asleep.

(they came out wrong)

(came out)

The sounds of cicadas echoed in the center of his brain.

When Heather awoke, it was still night. She startled him from his own slumber, where he slumped on the floor against her side of the bed, by standing above him, legs spread, hair tousled into a mop.

Groaning, still half-asleep, he blinked and scooted against the wall. “Heather, honey …”

She did not move. In the dark, he could not make out the details of her face, could not see if her eyes were open and she was awake or if she had gotten up in her sleep, a somnambulist.

“Hon … ?”

She said nothing. The silence was like the aftershock of a tremendous explosion. Then he heard the sounds of what he at first mistook for the crackle of a distant burning fire until he felt the wetness spray onto his bare feet, and he realized his wife was standing before him, urinating on the bedroom floor. Alan groaned and hugged his legs to his chest.

Once she had finished, she climbed back into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Two seconds later she was snoring.

And when Alan awoke, it was to the sound of running water in the bathroom down the hall. He sat up, his neck stiff, having fallen asleep on the floor with his back against the wall. Heather was no longer in bed. The room reeked of ammonia; the puddle of urine was a clearly visible pool on the hardwood floor between his feet.

She was soaking in the tub, a washcloth on the dome of her belly.

“We need to make another ultrasound appointment,” he said, standing in the doorway.

Heather wrung out the washcloth, then draped it over her eyes as she rested her head against the tiled wall.

“Are you listening to me?”

She made a
hmmm
sound but didn't remove the washcloth from her face.

“I'm calling Dr. Crawford's office and scheduling another ultrasound. Something isn't right.”

She threw a fist down into the water, splashing. With her other hand, she swiped the washcloth from her face. The expression there chilled him to the core.

“What's the matter with you?” She was practically seething. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“I'm not doing anything. I want to have the baby checked. Something's not right with the baby.”

“You leave us both alone.”

“Something isn't right. We need to see Dr. Crawford.”

“Lesbian cunt,” Heather growled.

“Something isn't right with you, either.” His mouth was dry and tasted like old tube socks.

She sat up in the tub, sloshing water onto the floor. Her hair was stringy and wet about her face, her eyes larger than he had ever seen them. “I know what you're trying to do.”

He shook his head. “I'm not trying to do anything.”

“You are. You're weak. You never wanted children. You were happy the other two died.”

Her words stung him worse than anything she had ever said to him. “That isn't true.”

“Isn't it? Your father was a criminal and a lousy dad, and your mother split before you were even old enough to stop shitting in your pants. You're weak and you think you'll be just like them. You never wanted children, and you were happy when the other two died. You were
happy.”

“Heather, baby, no …”

The mound of her belly glistened in the water. She caressed it. “Take your weakness someplace else. You are not taking this baby from me. Do you understand? I won't let you.”

“None of that is true. I've been heartbroken over all of this, just like you have.”

“You've been afraid I'd do something to myself, and you feel bad about what happened to me, but you never wanted to be a father. You never cared about our two dead babies. Where are they now? Ashes in a trash heap? The city fucking sewer? They were
babies.
You never fucking
buried
them.”

He took a step backward. Her eyes never left him. He could feel them piercing straight through to the core fibers of his being.

And just like that, her face went slack, expressionless. She dipped the washcloth into the tub water, wrung it out again. As she eased back down, resting her head against the wall, she draped the wet cloth over her eyes.

The glistening mound of her belly rose like a leviathan out of the water.

Alan spent the remainder of that day falling apart.

After her bath, Heather had returned to the bedroom wrapped in a terry-cloth robe and a towel turbaned around her head, humming softly and pleasantly as if nothing had ever transpired between the two.

Alan had cleaned up the urine from the bedroom floor with a wad of paper towels, then retreated to the backyard where, in the cold midafternoon air, he smoked an entire pack of menthols. Beyond the hedgerow that ran along the curb, he saw Landry's cruiser parked down the street. From this distance he couldn't tell if the sheriff was in the car or not. Then he lifted his gaze to the line of pines along the street's edge. He could make out the weighty black shapes weighing down the boughs, the hooked beaks and fire-flecked eyes of the great birds. There were more of them now. Many more. They had come out of the woods and were now nested in the trees lined up and down the street.
One of them was even perched atop a nearby telephone pole, surveying the neighborhood.

—You fucked up good, old sport,
Owen Moreland spoke up beside him. The man's words were garbled, and Alan knew it was because his face had been torn apart from the shotgun blast.
What now?

Alan shook his head. “I don't know.”

—I'm not part of it,
Owen said.
You may think I am but I'm not. I'm a casualty, just like you.

“I'm not a casualty.”

—Maybe not yet. Maybe you can still fix things.

“What do you mean you're not part of it? Part of what?”

—Doesn't matter. Only thing that matters now is that you fix your mistake.

“How do I do that?”

—I can't tell you what to do. You just have to think about it and do it.

He looked down. His hands were quaking.

—You're a good kid, Alan.

And it was then that he realized he'd been talking to his father all along.

Alan stood out there in the yard by himself—or seemingly so—for the next three hours. He hardly moved. He was watching the birds.

Only once did Heather poke her head out, and her disposition was one completely different from that morning in the bathroom. “My water jug isn't in the fridge.”

“I'll get you more water,” he told her, and she let him be
for the remainder of the afternoon.

Alan Hammerstun gave thought to a lot of things. By the time he went back inside, more birds had come out of the woods and gathered on the branches of the evergreens that ran up and down the street.

After Heather had fallen asleep, Alan got out of bed and padded to the bathroom. Opening the medicine cabinet, he rifled through bottles of aspirin, a tub of TUMS, ointments and skin cream, hair products, and various other hygiene products. When he found the bottle he was searching for, he didn't reach for it immediately. He just stared at it, listening to the whoosh of his heartbeat amplified in his ears. It sounded like the heartbeat on an ultrasound.

On the bottle's label in all capital letters: PREGNANT WOMEN SHOULD NOT INGEST.

He recalled the day he'd picked up his first prescription from the pharmacy and how, after reading the label, he'd let out a pained and ironic laugh all the way to his car. The pharmacist's eyes had gone as large as lightbulbs. Now Alan just began to tremble.

Misoprostol. Little white octagonal tablets that helped reduce the agony of his stomach ulcer.

He was thinking of Heather's words to him from earlier that morning. He was thinking about the mermaid and the sailor. He found he couldn't consider her accusation for longer than a few seconds. To do so meant to convince himself of its authenticity.

None of that is true,
he thought now.
I want to be a
father. I can be a good father.

Then what was he thinking? What was he about to do?

He thought,
Pregnant women should not ingest.

After his father's death, he spent the remainder of his life being self-sufficient. There hadn't been a family there to support or advise him. He had been utterly and completely alone.

Until Heather …

You never cared about our two dead babies. Where are they now? Ashes in a trash heap? The city fucking sewer?

He took the bottle of ulcer medication from the medicine cabinet and carried it to the kitchen. With the wall clock ticking overhead, he dug the empty water jug from the recycling bin and filled it with tap water. He listened as the house's old pipes rattled and chugged through the walls. After the jug was filled, he set it on the counter, then opened the bottle of misoprostol. He shook several tablets out into his hands and put them on a paper towel on the counter. From one of the kitchen drawers he withdrew a table spoon which he used to crush the tablets into powder. Then he poured the powder into the jug of water, screwed the jug's cap back on, and replaced it in the refrigerator.

Around three in the morning he awoke screaming, certain that something had been squeezing his genitals. Despite the scream, Heather never stirred beside him.

In the morning, Alan prepared his wife a large breakfast and pretended that everything was fine. He smiled a lot, and each time he walked by Heather he made sure to rub
her head and pat her stomach. She ate all her breakfast and never once remarked about the taste. She did the same with the lunch he prepared for her, which was tuna salad, and he knew she could not taste the things he had put in there. (He'd cut his hand opening the tuna can and it bled freely. He rinsed it under a stream of water at the sink. The cut did not heal.)

New Year's Eve, and there were fireworks in the distance over the trees. Alan and Heather went out on the front porch and watched the dazzling display.

Across the street, some neighborhood kids cheered, carving swaths of light through the darkness with twirling sparklers. Hank, Lydia, and Catherine were on their front porch watching the fireworks, too. Hank waved to him. Alan did not wave back. When he saw Hank rise from his seat, he rubbed Heather's shoulder and told her it was getting cold and they should get inside.

“It's probably not very good for the baby,” Heather agreed, hustling through the front door.

Alan had expected Hank to knock on the door moments later, but the knock never came.

Alan told the college to find a substitute once winter break was over—that there were issues at home he had to attend to, complications with his family. He hung up before anyone could ask any questions. When the phone continued to ring, he unplugged it.

Dinner that night, he lit candles on the kitchen
table and dimmed the lights. Outside, the wind was blustery; the nearest tree branches scraped against the windows and the roof. He cooked and placed the food on the table in large ceramic bowls. Yet he hardly ate.

Heather ate much of it, saying it was all very delicious. “What did you put in it?” she asked.

Something tickled the inside of his throat. He affected no expression and simply said, “I made it with love.”

Heather smiled and cleaned her plate. Then she retired to the bedroom, complaining of gas pains.

Alone, Alan cleared the table, then sat before the fireplace, a small fire cooking in the hearth, while he knocked off a bottle of red wine. Sleeping in the same room with his wife had become an exercise in mental torture; the thing inside her womb had found a way to work the tendrils of invisible fingers into his brain. It knew what Alan was doing. It tried desperately to stop him.