The Cradle (16 page)

Strands of his black hair peeked out from beneath his gray wool hat. He wasn’t very tall—he was shorter than she. He had on
a black sweatshirt and jeans, and his eyes were patient and calm but also piercing. She had seen him before.

“Hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”

“You’re Renee Owen, right?” he said. “I mean, I know you are. But I’m just asking anyway.”

“Yes,” she said.

“You don’t know me at all,” he said. “This is weird.” He held out his hand. “I’m Joe.”

It was early in the morning when Matt showed up at the house again, clean-shaven and rested. He’d ignored the mess of destruction
in the bathtub when he’d stood at the sink with his razor and shaving cream, both bought at the drugstore down the road. He
had the same clothes he’d been wearing since Thursday morning, but they weren’t too ripe yet. They weren’t not ripe, but they
weren’t too ripe. In the office, as he checked out, he told the man he’d slipped in the shower and had reached forward to
hold himself up on the showerhead. Good enough. The man had stared back, unconvinced, and Matt had turned away from him.

At the front door, Darren’s mother was also tidied up; Matt again thought of the masterful skill professional alcoholism required.

It was overcast today, not quite so orange and rosy. Matt sensed the air was pregnant with moisture, and above, the clouds
slid by too quickly and too low, lurking and nearly apocalyptic in their altitude. Darren’s mother looked better than she
had last night. She was dressed in some sort of business suit and had changed her hair; now it was down lower and wrapped
around in a few perplexing knots at the back, which he saw when she turned to look over her shoulder after she opened the
door.

“What did you decide?” she asked him when she looked back.

“This all seems very easy for you,” he said, holding his hand out, palm down. “Slow down. I just want to talk.”

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s that I knew you were coming.” She smiled and showed Matt her yellow-stained teeth. They did
not seem to fit properly with the rest of her.

“Right,” he said.

“When all is said and done, Matt,” she said, adopting a tone Matt found to be excessively familiar, “don’t you think this
is better?”

“I’m sorry. Do I know you personally?”

“No.”

“You’re talking like this has been an ongoing discussion.”

“I’ve certainly had this discussion with myself,” she said. “Although I don’t think that’s what you mean.” She smiled. Had
Matt not known any better, he would have said she was flirting with him. Her makeup now appeared cracked and grotesque on
her cheeks and her forehead, and he could see the lines of age beneath the creams and the foundation. The mascara, too, was
thick and gelatinous on her lashes.

“I met him last night,” Matt said. “In his underwear.”

“Well, that’s absolutely irrelevant,” she said. “He’s always in his underwear.”

“The point is, no, I don’t think it’s better. If you’re asking me if I think it’s better for him to live with me than you,
then no. I am a stranger. You are trying to give me a child. In a different life where I’d known him since the day he was
born, and when Marissa had known him, maybe that would be better. Like this—this would not be better. This would only make
it worse for him.”

“Why are you here?”

“What?”

“Why are you here?”

“I’m here because I just found out my wife’s mother had another baby.”

“Is that all?”

“I also found out his father and his grandmother don’t seem to give one shit one way or the other.”

“But you didn’t have to come,” she said.

“Of course I did.”

“No. You didn’t. You found what you were looking for at Darren’s house.” She nodded over his shoulder, toward his truck. The
cradle was strapped in the front seat. He looked at it, too, then turned back to her. He didn’t recall telling her about it
yesterday evening.

“You could have gone directly home and never said a thing to her,” she continued. “That’s not lost on you. Don’t pretend it
is—I can tell you notice these things. It’s not lost on me.”

“I didn’t have to go get the cradle, either,” he said.

“But you did anyway,” she said, smiling. “See?”

“No.”

“See?”

“How do you know this?”

“My psychic is very good.”

“You’ve been talking to your son on the phone.”

“Not true,” she said. “I’m sorry to say that my son and I neither talk nor correspond.”

“What you’re talking about now,” he said, “me driving away from here with a boy and bringing him back to my family—it’s not
the same. What about the documentation? What about the law? What about Darren? This is not pickles. This is not a cradle.
This is a life. This is a human life that’s going to go on for years. And remember everything. You can’t just pick up a kid
and walk away with him.”

“You can if nobody wants him.”

Matt’s look was grim as he stood on the doorstep, watching her. She was very casual. He felt like stepping back and slamming
the door in her face. She looked as though—well, as though she had known he was coming.

“Why don’t you come inside,” she said, “and have some cereal?”

“I want you to tell me when you plan to enroll that boy in school.”

She raised her eyebrows, tilted her head, and stepped back into the house. For a moment he thought again of walking away.

He followed her in.

When they came around the corner, he saw that the boy, Joe, was at the kitchen table, dressed now and eating cereal himself.
Beside his chair was a small suitcase and a colorful
Little Mermaid
backpack stuffed to the gills. He didn’t look up; instead he stared down at his Life cereal and slurped at it from time to
time.

“What is this?”

“This is Joe eating.”

“Why is he packed?”

The woman just rolled her eyes.

“I haven’t agreed to anything, lady. I can’t take him. You have a family. I have a family.”

She nodded, then went to the fridge and took out a sandwich wrapped in plastic, then crossed the room and put it into her
purse. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“You have to
go?
”

“I have to go to church,” she said. “You can let yourselves out.”

“Lady,” said Matt, “you are the absolute—”

“-Good-bye, Matt,” she said. She looked at Joe sitting at the table. “-Good-bye, Joe,” she said. Not even a touch on the shoulder
and a squeeze.

“I could be anyone,” Matt said. “And you’re leaving me with him.”

“We keep going around and around with this,” she said. “You aren’t just anyone. That’s the point.”

“If you go,” Matt said, “I will call the police on you.”

She ignored this and strode past them both and disappeared around the corner. Matt heard the door open and close, then he
heard the engine starting.

Matt looked at Joe, who kept eating his Life.

“Is she always like that?” he asked the boy.

Joe didn’t look up. Matt came across the kitchen and sat down at the table. He opened his mouth to speak again, but as he
did, Joe snapped a hand forward to the box of cereal and filled the bowl again. He put the box down and crossed the room—he
was wearing pants now—and at the fridge he got the milk and carried the big gallon container back to the table. Matt watched
him pour by levering the milk slowly, standing on top of his chair. “You got it?” he asked, holding a hand in the general
vicinity, waiting for a milk explosion. Joe didn’t look at him or say anything; instead he kept a careful eye on the pour
of the milk, then levered the jug back upright when he was through and popped the blue cap back on.

“Wait here, okay?” Matt said.

Joe started shoveling the cereal into his mouth. Matt doubted he was going anywhere.

He went into the living room and found the cordless phone. He poked his head in the kitchen to make sure the kid was still
at the table, then went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa. He dialed home. Marissa answered after a few rings.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

“You’ve got it!” she cried.

“I’ve also got something else.”

“You’ve also got something else!” she cried. “What? I’m the one who’s supposed to have the surprise for you.”

“I know that you said you didn’t want to know,” Matt said. “About anything. About where she was or what she’d done since then.”

“I don’t.” Now she was less excited.

“I have to tell you.”

“No, you don’t,” she said.

“No, Marissa,” he said. “I have to tell you.”

“You don’t
have
to do anything.”

“It’s too important. Your little magical-quest idea has to end.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then Marissa said, “I guess you’re the one who has to decide.”

“Decide what?”

“What’s too important. For my magical-quest idea.”

“I’m deciding, then,” Matt said. “Hold on.” He stood up, looked again at Joe, then walked past him, through the back door
and out into the yard. He slid the door closed.

“I’m in Indiana. Your mother had another child a few years after she walked out on you. An old woman who doesn’t want him
just gave him to me.”

Matt tried to imagine the course of Marissa’s thoughts after he said it. Most times he was wrong when he tried to predict
the paths in her mind—she seemed to have an unpredictable sense of direction when it came to thinking. You could be talking
about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with her, wait ten seconds, and she would turn and ask you whether you had ever been
to Kansas. And there was some sort of reasoning, some chain that led her from this to that. Now, as he waited, he thought
that maybe the paths were leading her down to the night her mother had come home, then past that to a picture of the cradle
in the sanctuary she’d found for it. Then past that to other places, dark grottoes where her mother slept with strange men,
or past that and into sterile rooms where the women screamed in the throes of labor. Perhaps there was war, too. Perhaps she
found herself all the way back, at Gettysburg, the cradle in the center of the battlefield as both armies, insectlike, converged.

“What does ‘gave him to you’ mean?” she said. “Where is my mother, Matt?”

“She’s not here,” Matt said. “She left. Again. She must have had him...a few years after she left you and Glen.”

Marissa thought a little more, and again Matt waited.

“So who has this boy been living with?”

“With the father, for a time,” Matt said. “Then he gave him away to his mother.”

“Why do you keep using the word
gave?
”

“Because that’s what all these people have been doing,” he said. “I’m in some other goddamned dimension.”

Matt looked back through the glass doors. Joe looked up at him for a moment, then returned to the cereal.

“He looks like you,” he said to Marissa.

“Oh Jesus Christ, Matt,” she said. He could hear that she was crying. “Don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Matt said, “but he does.”

“That bitch. That
bitch
.”

“Mare.”

He heard sniffling. She didn’t bother to take the phone away from her face when she blew her nose loudly. Matt held the phone
away from his ear, thinking that the snot might come through the holes.

“Matthew,” she said, “why are you standing around in Indiana?”

“Because I’m—”

“You get him,” Marissa said. “You get that boy, you put him in your car, you get his things, and you bring him home to me.”

Don and Lucille Kincaid had not been angels, mind you. Matt remembered swimming in the lake and the songs, but there was another
story from that time. As the bad stories of his childhood went, it was not particularly horrible, but it was one that had
stayed with him more than the others, probably because his time with them was so mixed, so equivocated. Once, they’d left
him at the house. For a vacation. Lucille had sat down with him at the kitchen table and had given him a long list of chores
to do. She told him that he was not allowed to leave the house, and was not allowed to call anyone, and was not allowed to
answer the door if it rang, and was to do his chores and read his books and play and they’d be back in four days. She showed
him all the food and the cereal and she showed him the sandwiches in the fridge for him, each one marked for a particular
day. She said, “You’re a big boy now and you can do this on your own.” Sometimes, now, as an adult, Matt wondered whether
Lucille had been insane. Once, he found her standing in her bedroom, dressed up in one of Don’s business suits, holding his
briefcase and looking at herself in the mirror. She’d shooed him out. Another time she served him a salad with piles of ranch
dressing. When he got to the bottom, he realized that in among the lettuce there were clippings of grass, too. She smiled
and told him that she’d gotten them from the big bag attached to the lawn mower and had put a bowl in the fridge. “Just to
try,” she’d said.

He didn’t wonder. Lucille had been insane.

What he couldn’t figure out was why Don, too, had been so okay with leaving him for that vacation. No one was that stupid.
Was anyone that stupid? Matt supposed it was too complicated and not something he could understand by tracing through his
memories alone. That would require Don back alive, explaining. Whatever the reason, however, they said good-bye to him in
the front room, patted him on the shoulder, and walked out with their luggage. He remembered the feeling of watching from
the living room window as they pulled out of the driveway. Excitement. Then. Only later, on the second night, after the nightmares
and a long thunderstorm, was it simple dread.

His dread took the form of tigers for those next days. He had hours and hours to envision their plans for him and to work
out their exact paths as they circled the yard and slowly closed the noose. First they were up in the trees only—he saw them
through the windows, saw the beads of their eyes glowing. Then they were more aggressive. They would come to the windows and
stand all the way up, like cats, their great paws on the windowsills, their breath steaming the glass with a low purr-grumble.
They even tried to break in through the door, but Matt had buttressed it with furniture and had stayed awake all night, in
the center of the dining room, sitting upright on the table, twisting and making sure that every single sound he heard was
something that he understood.