The Cradle (22 page)

Matt took a longer time looking at the baby later, when Marissa was asleep. He stared down through the glass. He didn’t think
it looked like him. It was a pile of flesh. It barely had a face. How could it look like him? Maybe in the eyes. Maybe a little
bit. But beyond that he couldn’t tell.

“Matt.”

Matt turned. There was Glen. Standing beside him was Joe. The two were holding hands.

Glen smiled just a little and said, “Thank God everyone is safe. Is this him here?” He nodded at the glass.

“It is.”

Glen came up and looked down through the glass at all the babies, several straight lines of moving, defenseless life. Here
they were. And what would happen to them? Matt tried to push his mind to make them each grow, one by one, right before his
eyes. He imagined men and women expanding. He looked from one child to the next, wondered which would suffer most. Which would
die youngest. Which would cause the most grief for someone else. And he knew that amid all the children, one would love the
most, too, and one would sacrifice the most and be the most dignified, and so on. There were no answers to the riddle, but
what Matt did see, staring through that glass, was the hidden cradle, invisible, nevertheless trenchant. In it one could place
all manner of life and hurt, and still, no matter what, the human could grow with fresh eyes and enter into new realms almost
as if by choice. Do anything to it and the human could grow.

“Which one?” Glen asked, and Matt realized Glen had no idea.

“That’s him there,” Matt said, and pointed, and he stepped back.

Behind him he could see, just barely, that Glen’s shoulders shuddered as he looked down.

Matt stepped farther away to let him look at his new grandson, and then he put his hand down on Joe’s shoulder and said, “Hey
there, little man. Wanna see too?” Joe nodded. Matt squatted and picked him up and brought him forward, and all three of them
looked at the sleepy little thing.

“Did you name him?” Glen asked.

“I’m still pushing for Tyrone,” Matt said. “I don’t think I’m going to get my way.”

“No?” Glen asked, smiling. “You never know. Sometimes my daughter will surprise you.”

“Yes,” Matt said. “Agreed.”

In this case, she didn’t. Matt didn’t really care about what his name ended up being. They named him Chris, after a boy Marissa
had known in high school who’d died in a car accident. She said she had remembered him out of the blue. So this new Chris
was a healthy, robust young baby, and when they brought him home, they had a whole setup for him, a whole white, sparkling
new crib that Matt had found on sale at Target. They had blankets everywhere and toys above the bed, and they had electronic
noise monitors. They spared no expense. They turned the little storage room and office into a room for the baby, and they
turned the guest bedroom, for the time being, into Joe’s room. It was possible that Matt would have to do a little building,
as they were running out of space, but for now, and the fall, and the winter, what they had would be fine.

As for the actual cradle, Matt never had a clue. Where it had gone or what had become of it. He figured it had probably been
sold to some antique store for fifty dollars. Maybe one day it would end up at someone else’s yard sale.

The simple truth was that the cradle was gone. It didn’t seem to matter. Not to Glen, not to Matt, not to Marissa. Especially
not to Marissa. All that time he’d been away looking, all those things he’d done, all those thoughts he’d had in the meantime,
and he’d driven back home after telling her he had it when he did not. He’d found it and lost it. But it was the strangest
thing. Matt came home with no cradle at all, with Joe instead, and Marissa never once asked him where it was. In fact, she
never brought it up again.

Thanks, in no particular order, to Bridget Delaney, Tom and Sarah Grimm, Sara Prohaska, Lee Somerville, Steve Somerville,
Mark Rader, Maggie Vandermeer, Oliver Haslegrave, Brettne Bloom, Benjamin Warner, Jenny Jackson, Lucille Collin, and Ben and
Sarah Weyenberg. Thanks as well to my beautiful new wife (and shrewdest reader of character psychology), Alexis Jaeger. Special
thanks to Ann Buechner, true author of Renee’s poem and a wonderful poet herself. A warm hello and thanks to all my friends,
mentors, and colleagues from the Cornell writing program, who gave me many years of community and encouragement as a writer.
Such things are rare. And finally, thanks to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where most of this book was written.
The horses helped.

Patrick Somerville grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and later earned his MFA
in creative writing from Cornell University. He is the author of the story collection Trouble (Vintage, 2006), and his writing
has appeared in One Story, Epoch, and The Best American Non-required Reading 2007. He lives with his wife in Chicago and is
currently the Simon Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University. This is his first
novel.