Lullaby for the Rain Girl (36 page)

She looked down at herself—the moon provided a hard white half-light—and was shocked to see blood soaking the lower half of the sheets and blankets. She gasped, pulling herself up to a sitting position.

What in the world?

It couldn’t be a menstrual accident—it wasn’t the right time, and there was so much
.
She could never have produced this flood. This
ocean
.

She pulled herself out of the bed and stood, switching on the little lamp on the side table. Looking down at her nude body she saw that she was covered in blood below her pelvis. It was heavily streaked on her thighs, gradually thinning down her legs to random spatters on her feet, like one might see in a Jackson Pollock painting.

It was then that a dull, throbbing pain began to radiate through her, beginning at her pelvis and pulsating out through her legs and arms and head. Her breath came fast. She wondered if she was about to pass out. Looking at the bed, she thought she should call someone—but who would she call? She lived alone. There was no one else within ten miles of the house. Though technically she could ring 911—she paid taxes for such services, after all—it would take a very long time for any ambulance to come all the way out here. Yet she feared she might be dying.

But how? Why? She could see no injury anywhere on her body. It
had
to be menstrual. And yet she wasn’t leaking now. Had she suffered some sort of hemorrhage?

Then, for a single insane moment, she believed that she had grown a tail.

There it was, between her legs. Perhaps two feet long, slick with blood and clots of gore. Of course it was not a tail. It was an umbilical cord.

But she wasn’t pregnant.

Heart hammering in her chest, she reached down and took the end of the cord in her hands. It was slick, knotty, bumpy. She could see a big blue vein running through the middle of it.

But what she noticed most of all was the end of the cord. What she saw—what she
thought
she saw—was impossible, so she turned to the lamp and held the cord close to the light.

The cord terminated with what were unmistakably teeth marks.

# # #

They’d told her she was crazy, of course: Mina Lynn Greenwood, the
celebrated
Mina Lynn Greenwood, pitching away her tenure-track position at the university, her control of the nationally famous Summer Writing Institute, her fantastically popular courses in Victorian Women Poets and Modern English Verse, pitching away
New York itself
in order to go cultivate her talent in some shack on the High Plains? Nebraska, wasn’t it? North Dakota?

Judy Epstein, her office mate—they were the same age, thirty-eight, and sometimes team-taught courses—would have none of it. “Mina,” she said, gulping coffee in that hurried way that she had even when she had no reason to be hurried, “you must be
mad.
No, you can’t.” She shook her unkempt red curls. “You’re on the ladder now—there’s nowhere to go but up. You’ll be the chair of the English department eventually. My God, you’ve already written three books, and you
started
with the Yale Younger Poets Prize. You’ll get a Pulitzer one of these days.”

“I still can,” Mina said, smiling indulgently.

“You know better than that. If you jump off this particular ladder you’re gone forever. You can forget about the big prizes. To get one of those takes
clout.
You know as well as I do that you didn’t just
get
the Yale Prize. God knows you deserved it, Mina. I’m not saying that. But you had some powerful people in your corner.”

“Well, maybe I won’t win any more of the big prizes, that’s all.”

“And for what? Why are you doing this?”

“It’s my home, Judy.”

“Your
home,”
she spat. “Home is the place you visit for a week over Christmas. Take a sabbatical and live there for half the year if you want. Don’t just
leave.”

But she left. When she’d learned that her childhood home was for sale, she knew she would. She’d made an offer—quickly accepted—and informed the Department Chair that she would not be renewing her contract for the following year. She had no particular money worries. Her income would be reasonable from her essays and criticism, if not from her poetry; an annotated edition she’d prepared of
Aurora Leigh
brought in a small but steady stream of money, having been adopted in countless university courses. She could guest-lecture occasionally here and there. Financially she would be all right.

She couldn’t explain it—this irresistible urge to go home. She hadn’t been back in twenty years; her parents were long dead; she knew no one there. The house had passed through two subsequent owners since her father died (she herself had never had a chance to possess it before; the bank had taken it to pay Papa’s back debts). She wondered vaguely if the later owners had been like Papa, broken would-be farmers.

Well, that was unfair. There was nothing would-be about Papa’s farming. But the land had shattered him. The vast plains, the wind, the hard stubborn soil, the endless buffalo grass, the silence, the isolation, the loneliness. For a few years, when Mina was young and her mother was still relatively well, it looked as if they might make a go of it. But then Mama died, a long drought hit, and her father was never the same. He kept on, raising wheat and cotton as best he could. (And sunflowers! Those were Mina’s favorite, the giant sunflower fields, hundreds of happy yellow heads bursting with seed, just the right place for girls and goldfinches.) But each year there were fewer crops. Each year Papa employed fewer men; the great irrigating sprinklers dampened less land. Piece by piece he sold it off, until by the time he became ill there was only the house and a scrubby acre or two left. Mina was in New York, on the first semester of her undergraduate scholarship, when he passed away.

No, she couldn’t explain this urge to return home. All she knew was that when she looked in the mirror, at her celery-thin body, her sallow, even ghostly features—the big dark eyes, the hair as straight and black as a waterfall at midnight—she felt hopeless, lost. They were
good
features, she knew—she was pretty, even beautiful in an odd, off-kilter sort of way. (Some had gone so far as to suggest that her books succeeded as much for the author photos prominently displayed on their back panels as for their actual content.) But she hated what she saw.

She hated her voice, too, which sounded to her too high, too shrill. And she hated how her clothes hung on her. But most of all, she hated her
work.
Not her classes—those were all right, she could drift through them easily enough on what others called “charm” and “charisma” even if she was unaware of possessing either—but her poems. She could scarcely bear to look at any of them after they’d been published; what had seemed vital and real as it poured out from her pencil onto the yellow pad seemed, in the cold light of print, false, artificial, ridiculous. Someday they’ll find me out,
she would think.  Someday they’ll realize their mistake and take back their awards, burn all the copies of the books. As well they should.

Yet this disgust hadn’t harmed her career; in one way it enhanced it. Her readings, of which she’d given hundreds by now, all over the East Coast, were something of a minor sensation—not least because of her adamant refusal to read from any of her published work. She couldn’t. She felt she would quite literally die if she had to utter any of the wretched things aloud. When someone went to a Mina Lynn Greenwood reading, they were guaranteed to hear nothing but new poems, read in her quiet but intense style (intense because she was terrified), usually while she had on one of her long white dresses (which were the ones that covered her body the most completely). She was “ethereally electrifying,” one newspaper reported—a clunky phrase that had nonetheless stuck.

Impassioned letters came from readers, usually young female college students. Some of them created websites honoring her and her work. She understood that someone at a university in Canada was even writing a full-length study of her poems.

Somehow, she was a hit.

She found it all bizarre. They were celebrating someone else, it seemed. Certainly not
her:
not little Mina Greenwood, the farm girl from the High Plains who’d spent her time running around barefoot in her father’s bright sunflower patches, who’d worn overalls all summer and had to be bribed into ever taking a bath. No, not that girl. That girl was gone, long dead.

But now she felt that the Mina Lynn Greenwood she’d created since, the poet and scholar, the
presence,
was dead too. She had nothing—classes to which she was indifferent, books she couldn’t bear to look at. Over the years there had been two major relationships, painful and debilitating affairs which ended badly. Flirtations and brief encounters that ended badly as well. She was alone in the world.

And so there was nothing for it. With nowhere else to go, she went home.

# # #

When she opened her eyes again it was morning. The blood had mostly dried on her legs, making them brittle and sticky. The sheets had crisped in places. The umbilical cord had fallen off: there it was on the floor, dry and dead.

She had apparently collapsed across the bed; she was lying diagonally on it, uncovered. She tried to sit up. Her head ached and she felt exhausted, but at the same time she somehow perceived that the crisis had passed. Checking between her legs, she understood that whatever had caused the river of blood the night before had stopped. Her hands, probing, came away dry, merely flecked with hard particles of red matter. There was no specific pain. But she did sense a dull ache everywhere in her extremities, as if someone had been punching her vagina and thighs. But there were no bruises, as far as she could see. Of course there wouldn’t be; she’d given birth, that’s all.

She shook her head. She had
not
given birth.

But looking down at the wan little cord on the floor, she began to piece together what must have happened. A miscarriage. Calculating back, she realized it was barely possible that she could have been pregnant and not known it; her periods were notoriously unreliable, anyway. It seemed unlikely, but it was the only explanation. And it had the advantage of being
possible.
She had miscarried, and had some sort of hemorrhage while doing it.

Yet…a miscarriage with a fully developed umbilical cord? And a placenta? (She saw it next to the cord, what she’d initially taken to be a dirty sock.)

And: where was the fetus?

She looked around the bed. Nothing.

Finally she reached down and took the umbilical cord in her hand, remembering the nightmarish vision she’d had just before passing out. Teeth marks! It seemed absurd now. Looking at it, she could tell nothing; it was blackened, deflated, almost unrecognizable from the living thing she’d held in her hands the night before.

She felt a terrible sorrow then. She had been carrying a child and not known it. It had miscarried and she’d not understood.

Yet she still didn’t see anything in the room that could be the fetus. She stripped the bed, crouched under it. Again nothing.

Sighing, groaning a bit, she decided that what she needed more than anything was a long, hot shower. That would clear her head. Perhaps she would make some coffee. Then she could return to this room and come to a final understanding of what had happened here, to her, what this bloody holocaust meant.

She would have put on her robe, but didn’t want blood on it. Instead she simply walked naked to the kitchen—the bottoms of her feet were clean— and started up the automatic coffee maker. Then she crossed back toward the bathroom, stopping for a moment to look out the front window. It was a beautiful spring day, sun-washed, with immense clean skies, unbroken pale blue everywhere she saw. She felt she would be all right then. What had happened was over, and she was intact.

A few moments later she was standing before the bathroom mirror, contemplating her rather horrifying appearance while waiting for the water in the shower to grow warm, when she heard what she quickly decided she had
not
heard. No.

She had not heard footsteps upstairs. Tiny ones, moving this way and that.

She had not.

# # #

“I hope you understand,” the real estate agent had said, “that there’s nothing out there. Nothing at all.”

“I know,” she said. They were in the woman’s office, nearly twenty miles from the house itself. “I used to live there.”

“Well, yes, you told me that,” she answered, scowling a bit. She was perhaps fifty, defiantly gray-haired, with that intense, underfed look lifelong occupants of the High Plains often had. “But, you know, it’s gone downhill since your time. The area. There’s no town out there anymore.”

“There wasn’t much of one when I was here. The population was about a hundred, I think.”

“Maybe, but now there’s
nobody
. Nothing. The last shops closed up ten years ago. The town of Hartlow no longer exists, except as a name on old maps. You’ll be the only resident. For your groceries—for everything—you’ll have to come here.”