The Cradle (12 page)

About a minute passed after Darren stopped talking.

“You must go to see him, then,” Matt said. “At your mother’s.”

“My mother and I do not talk nor correspond.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“When I dropped him off.”

“When was that?”

“Year and a half ago.”

Matt paused. “Mind if I use your bathroom?”

“Go ahead.”

Matt got up and opened the screen door. Darren the Dog jumped all over him as he went to the bathroom. Inside, he peed, then
looked at himself in the mirror. He was feeling something he didn’t recognize.

It felt, in a way, like the good feeling, about the days rolling by—the gratitude.

Except it was turned on its head and reversed in some way, and felt powerful, and dark.

Back in the kitchen, Matt held open the door and said to Darren, “How about another one?”

It took a solid three hours to get him falldown drunk. Twice Matt went into the house to vomit. His other trick to keep up
with Darren was to just open a new beer whenever Darren opened a new beer and set his half-full beer down in the grass, as
though he had finished it. Darren’s final musings on the night came in the form of a huge piss beside his grill and a comment
about too many Hispanics moving into town. After that he sat back down in his chair, tilted to the side, and collapsed onto
the ground.

Matt considered helping him up and dragging him into bed, but he was drunk, despite his best efforts not to be, and besides,
since he’d learned about the kid, he’d been having more and more trouble holding back the urge to stand up and kick Darren
in the jaw and watch as every one of his teeth fell out of his face. So it was fine that he would spend the night on the slab
of concrete that constituted his porch. Matt let himself into the house and looked around for a desk or a file drawer. In
the dining room he stumbled about and found a shoe box full of receipts, but that didn’t help him. He went upstairs to the
bedroom. It was also neat—the bed was even made. Some bachelor. Matt looked through some drawers and again found nothing.
He went back downstairs, to the kitchen. Beneath the silverware he found a drawer that had papers and postcards in it, along
with a roll of outdated thirty-two-cent stamps. He shuffled through the cards; at the bottom, he found a birthday card, still
tucked inside its envelope. He pulled it out.

On the front there was a pig. Inside, the bold writing said oink. Beneath it, in a scrawl, the message said, “Happy birthday,
Darren. This will be a strong year for Pisces. Your mom.”

He slid the card back inside the envelope and looked at the return address. Rensselaer, Indiana. The postmark made it three
years old.

Matt copied the address down onto a blank envelope he found, then put the card back at the bottom of the pile, then put the
pile back right where he’d found it. Outside he looked disdainfully at Darren again, then went to the half-full beers he’d
had around his feet and emptied them out, one by one, into the grass. He put the cans back beneath the chair. Finally, he
turned out the light and left Darren in darkness, just a tangled curl of arms and legs. He walked around the outside of the
house, got in his truck, and drove away.

He took special care to drive well on his way out of town. He was not sober, not by a long shot. Once he’d gotten a few miles
east, he pulled over at a gas station and bought a thirty-two-ounce coffee and a bottle of No-Doz, ate three of the pills
in the parking lot, filled up with gas, drove off, and turned the radio up loud and zoned out, spending most of his mental
energy on aiming high and not weaving. The cradle was right there beside him, stable with the belt around it; once in a while
he found himself touching it. It was past midnight, but if he drove all night he’d be there before the sun came up, or at
the very least just as it was coming up.

And he was. Right at sunrise, he was parked three blocks from his house with the engine off.

It can be completely done right now, he said to himself. I can tear this envelope up, even, and walk inside with this in my
arms and be the hero. And then time will start.

He had, though, parked this far away from the house, and he knew the reason. The reason was the feeling. It was a fog, lighter
than it had been back with Darren but still there, absolutely still there, and it was not at all a joyful celebration of life.
It was the same rage.

He thought back to the answering machine, when he’d given up on it before he’d encountered this, and he thought of Darren’s
bullshit pontifications on the world and on life. That had been it. That man had been the conflagration of all wrong ideas
in the universe.

He looked at the cradle. Just walk inside with it in your arms, all will be well.

He was so tired—if he walked inside, he could lay his head down on the pillow beside Marissa, sleep in, eat a big breakfast
in the morning, then try to get a Sunday shift to start making up for what he’d spent on the cradle.

He reached into his pocket and looked at the envelope, crumpled now. The address in his wobbly drunken handwriting.

He looked at the cradle.

He started the car, drove past his own home, and got back on the highway, this time heading south.

He called Marissa from the motel just past noon and said, “Another day, I think. I’m close.”

“You sound tired.”

“I’ve driven a lot,” he said. “I’m going to get some sleep now, actually. I just got a motel room.”

“It’s noon.”

“My schedule is not quite a nine-to-five schedule at the moment.”

She told him about the movie she’d seen with her father, then talked about what it was like to feel the baby kicking when
he wasn’t around. She’d had a dream that she’d gone into labor early and had gone to the hospital. She’d told the doctors
the baby had to wait for Matt’s return, and then a nurse had come in and taken her hand and said, “But you are giving birth
to your husband.”

“Good Lord,” Matt said.

“I know. Thank God I didn’t have to watch you crown.”

“I’ll be back before anything happens,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

“All right. Come home soon. I’m missing you. And on top of that I’ve got a surprise.”

“What?”

“The purpose of surprises, Matt.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll look forward to it. I’ll be home soon. Promise.”

He took off his shoes, leaned back on the bed, and closed his eyes.

He didn’t wake for six hours. When he did, he shot up with a start and could feel immediately that much more time than he’d
planned had passed. Outside it was still light, but the angle of the sun wasn’t very high. His muscles were sore, his body
was still deep down inside itself, and he had a headache. The No-Doz, probably. His mouth was parched. He slid from the bed
and started the shower. He came back out into the room. The cradle was sitting in front of the television set, right where
he’d put it when he first came in.

He was ten miles past Rensselaer in a Motel 6. He’d assumed there wouldn’t be anything in the town itself and had gone on
just a little bit more after seeing the sign. Right across the street there was a Denny’s, so after his shower he crossed
and went inside and ate at least five heart attacks of eggs, bacon, and waffles, then ordered a chocolate milk shake and sucked
it down in the parking lot, sitting on the curb.

He did not know what he planned to do. He was here, though, and at the very least he’d go to the house and see the kid and
make sure he was real. From there, they’d talk, and he’d tell her. Then it would be difficult—tell her that her mother had
another baby, that she had a little half brother living down in Indiana, that Caroline hadn’t left because she hated children
but because she’d wanted more. Such things could introduce unexpected complexities. Part of Matt, even though he still felt
rage toward Darren for his speech about things mattering and not mattering, agreed with the man a little bit. It would be
as though he never found this out.

But then again, he was here.

Matt finished his milk shake, threw it in a trash bin, and walked back to the motel. It was evening now; the light was fading.
Suppertime was over. He got in his truck and got back on the highway.

The small streets of Rensselaer reminded him a little of Walton, Minnesota—the shops along the central avenue were run-down
and there weren’t many people about. The houses were much the same as well. The only real difference Matt felt was a difference
in light, in the feeling of the colors. Indiana had a special light. Minnesota had been gray—even the grass. Here there was
an orange hue to everything as the sun hung low in the sky and traced a burning line across the top of every structure. There
were more trees, and those, too, seemed to have a warm glow in the evening haze. He again used his driving-back-and-forth
strategy, looking for the right road. Rensselaer was bigger, and it took him longer, but eventually he found the house. On
one side of the road there was vast farmland with alfalfa in the field. The house was on the corner and had more grass than
the others around it, even though the structure itself wasn’t very big. It was made out of brick and had two big bay windows
in the front living room and a dilapidated basketball hoop tilting forward in the driveway. Behind the house there were many
trees—Matt could see the leaves and branches high up over the roof.

He went to the door and rang the bell.

Nothing.

He rang again, and again there was no answer. He took a few steps back, then walked into the yard and tried to look through
the window. The curtains were all drawn. He crossed his arms and looked back at his truck and could see the cradle through
the windshield, his passenger waiting patiently. Without really thinking about it, he meandered around the side of the house
and walked along the low wooden fence that defined the backyard, letting his hand skim across the ancient twisted 4x4s, looking
casually over his shoulder as the rear came into view.

He could see nothing through the back windows—the house looked empty. He stayed where he was anyway, hands on the fence. I
could leave, and this would never have happened....

There was the boy.

It was a little white circle in the upstairs window. The face was looking out at Matt just as the cat had in Sturgeon Bay,
unmoving, ghostlike. Matt could see his arms hanging straight down at his side.

Then the boy’s hand came up. He was waving.

After a moment of watching this, he looked over his shoulder at the rest of Rensselaer, looked again at the window and the
waving boy.

Matt waved back.

Marissa, usually rock steady, changed on the day of the wedding. She was a rock before and she was a rock after, but she became
a different rock, shaped with different edges. She never cried before. Not once. But that day in Glen’s backyard, with her
all in white, fifteen people sitting in collapsible chairs watching them, Marissa’s grandma and grandpa sitting in the front
row, she’d wept. The whole damned day. The morning, the hours before, all through the ceremony, then at the reception, and
even on the dance floor. For the entire day she was occupied by some degree of crying. It was at its peak as they stood before
the minister beneath the floral trellis. She held both his hands and looked into his eyes, hers red and puffed up, with tears
pouring from them. She had a Kleenex stuffed into the top of her dress. Through the morning Matt had smiled along with it
and had not thought too much about it, but there beneath the trellis, he’d begun, for the first time, to get worried. He knew
what tears of happiness looked like; he knew how smiles broke through them here and there. And maybe some of Marissa’s tears
were tears of happiness that day. But certainly not all of them. He saw so much pain that day. And holding her hands there,
as the minister spoke, he realized that love was making him into far more than he ever could have been on his own. He could
have sailed around the earth in a hot-air balloon or been a scientist inside a laboratory solving cancer and still those things
would have been nothing compared to what she needed him to be, compared to the vessel she was turning him into. It was as
though she had held all her pain and her anger deep inside herself until the day she was certain she’d never be alone again.
Once that was confirmed, she’d been able to let go.

Had it all been beautiful, Matt would have wept, too. The truth was that it scared him. Her in her white dress, unable to
talk, had been frightening. Later he’d had too much to drink and had just barely avoided doing the chicken dance. That he’d
even considered it was as sure a sign as any that he had not been himself.

She finally stopped crying late that night, when they were both in bed. Out of the dress and in her pajamas, Marissa smiled
at him. They’d already made love, and Matt, exhausted, was looking through his tuxedo, trying to find his wallet.

“It’s two in the morning,” she said. “What do you need your wallet for?”

“I think I lost it.”

“Why did you have your wallet in your pocket for your wedding, Matt?”

“I have no answer to that question,” he said, throwing the pants down onto the floor.

“Come here.”

Matt looked at her. She had her arms out. He went to the bed and lay down beside her, and she put her arms around him.

“What was all the crying, baby?” he asked. “You scared me up there. It didn’t look like you were feeling joy.”

“I don’t know what I was feeling. I feel joy now, though.”

It was nine o’clock when the boat of a car pulled into the driveway, and the light was almost totally gone. Matt was waiting
back inside the truck, beside the cradle. He left it immediately and approached the driveway before the woman had a chance
to get to her front door. There, from a few feet behind her, he said, “Excuse me, ma’am,” and she turned and put her hand
up to her throat, startled.

“Good Jesus,” she said after a moment. She shook her head, not entirely relaxed, and adjusted her big, bubbly glasses.