The Stud Book (48 page)

There was a comfort in this evidence: It was possible to survive long enough to die of age. It looked like such luxury, to have lived. They’d dodged cancer, bullets, and nuclear war, radiation and disease, diabetes and poverty. He remembered a shirt Arena wore:
I
♥
OLD PEOPLE
. And he did, too! He hearted old people, or at least he aspired to be one.

Nyla would never be that old person her daughter loved.

The drunk guy farther down the bar said, “What is this talking heads bullshit? What are we, geezers?”

Humble sipped a Manhattan, his shoulders hunched against Nyla’s ghost hug, and kept the remote in his own thick hand like it had ties to a destiny he might control.

Hell if that loser would take Hum’s old people away.

The drunk punk in his skinny girl-jeans made one more squawk, and Humble thought,
I could kill him
.

He could.

He could make a second scrawny arm hold his neck and beg. No doubt. If the kid didn’t like old people? He could rob that hipster of his own old age. Humble put his money on the counter and finished his drink.

He walked back to the hospital. With booze in his bloodstream his legs swung easily. He walked like a machine. As he got close to the hospital, he saw his wife inside the lobby. She was there with Dulcet, Sarah, and Ben. He saw their shapes through the dark glass. The window ran from the ground to the ceiling, in one efficient pane of smoke-tinted glass. He saw his friends as though they were on TV.

He stopped outside. They moved like they might leave, might go to the sliding doors, but then they stayed pulled together, a tight orbit. Arena was a crumpled body sloped in a chair. Georgie bent to put an arm around her. His wife’s mascara was all over her face. She kept wiping her eyes with a tissue, then putting the tissue back in her pocket and pulling it out again. They took turns hugging each other, and Arena. Humble felt the bar calling his name. He wanted out of there. The last thing he wanted was to cry, with a pack of criers.

A TV in the waiting room showed the news. Who in an ER waiting room could care about outside news?

Humble went on in. In the lobby, he heard it, like adding a sound track: They were all crying and trying not to, blowing their noses and then crying again. Even Ben was in tears, and he looked like he had somebody else’s makeup all over his face.

Everyone was crying except the baby—that baby who always cried. Now Bella watched the world like crying was normal, like anything was normal.

Georgie reached down and took Bella out of the car seat. She lifted the baby to her shoulder, and she cried, and then she saw Humble. Her eyes widened.

He moved closer, took the baby from her. She let him take her. He held Bella in one arm and with the other rubbed Georgie’s back. Their baby was warm, and he laid her across his chest. That baby’s breath spoke to his heartbeat. Nyla’s ghost lifted her dead arm from his neck to make way for Bella’s soft head. The smell of her body was replaced by the scent of the baby and Georgie’s shampoo. Humble’s
family warded off Nyla’s dead weight. For a moment he could forget, in that circle of safety—a child, a wife, a future—and Hum didn’t want even one foot outside that circle. Maybe for the first time, he was committed to his own marriage. He wanted in. He wanted that new family to stop time; he’d be the father of a newborn with a full life ahead of them all, forever.

Nyla had died before the ambulance reached the hospital. The IV didn’t fill her bloodstream in time, her blood didn’t regenerate fast enough. Her veins collapsed. Internal bleeding, they’d say later.

She wasn’t alone when she died, and not only with Humble. She was with that baby lodged in her fallopian tube. Ectopic pregnancy.

Dulcet held Nyla’s dirty canvas bag and cried big burbling tears. Her broad shoulders shook, her face was red. She said, “We were all having such a good time.”

“Were we?” Sarah asked. Her words came out muffled and garbled. None of them could talk. Crying was their language now.

N
yla had been dead for three days when Ben came home from work with a plan. He slid his fingers over the slick surface of the photo in his jacket pocket.

Sarah was at the dining table looking over papers. She spent her days now watching the newest little mandrill.

“Are the beasts still mating?” he asked.

“Some more than others.” She stretched her arms over her head. A flash of pale belly showed. “Rats, cats, and coyotes.”

She couldn’t make herself say dog. She still had to stop herself from opening the back door at night to let in her dog, her Shadow, though the dog was dead.

“Cats and coyotes?”

“Not together,” she said.

He put his lunch sack down between the pages of her work and pulled out a battered banana. They’d been saving their money since before they got married, saving for a baby’s future and their own. Now that money might go to fertility treatments, if you asked Sarah.

There was a shuffling of feet. A woman came down the hall. It was Nyla, in their house. Her hair was wet. Nyla’s ghost had just
stepped out of a shower. She looked sad, but young and pretty, about the age Nyla had been when Ben first met her, right before Celeste was born.

She came through the front room and paused. She opened her mouth—Nyla had a message for them. She said, “I think you’re out of conditioner.” She nodded and moved up the stairs.

Ben whispered, “Jesus.”

Sarah said, “I know.”

It was Celestial, home from school for the funeral and to manage her mother’s things.

Sarah turned to the extra chair beside her at the table, and pulled papers from Nyla’s undyed canvas sack.

She’d kept it. Arena had said she should.

Arena’s shoes lay in the hall, one right side up, the other upside down. She’d been sleeping in their spare room. Nobody wanted to sleep in Nyla’s big empty house. Now Celeste would stay here, too.

In a crowded city on a crowded planet overrun with seven billion people multiplying fast, they missed Nyla.

One person.

Sarah felt the loss of Nyla’s baby, too, a person she’d never met.

Everybody mattered. Every last one.

Ben went to the table and laid down the photo. He said, “Let’s buy it and move. We could cut back on work. All we need is each other.”

It was a proposal as good as marriage all over again. Sarah picked up the glossy photo. “It’s a giant penis.”

It was the silo house.

He looked over her shoulder. “I hadn’t noticed that.” The house was virile in the way it jutted up from the flat land around it.

Sarah held it to her own lap, a cock, then turned it sideways and pressed it against Ben’s crotch. He said, “We could sell our place and offer them cash.”

“It’s so far away,” Sarah said. “I can’t move away from Dulcet and Georgie. Not now.”

She couldn’t. Ben knew it. She said, “We can’t leave Arena.”

“We could take her with us,” Ben said. “For what, another year? Maybe six months, by the time we move in.” Then she’d go off to college.

Legally she’d be on her own, emancipated, and financially independent. They were her unofficial guardians.

Weren’t they all unofficial guardians of one another?

But theirs was the house she had chosen to come to. They had ghost girls to care for now.

Ben took a drink from a glass of water on the table and swallowed. He said, “People like to visit a house in the country.”

“One bedroom.” Sarah read the stats.

“One big bedroom,” he said. Mostly, it was isolated, and it was near where Ben grew up. It would be like going back home. “We could have camping parties, in the summer. Set up tents. There’s nobody for miles.”

He ran a hand over her hair. “You know, we might never have a baby.”

She smiled, a nervous smile, with a tick on one side. “Round five.” She held up a hand, all fingers shown. After she said it, she was beaming, like the sun coming through the clouds, the first time she’d smiled since Nyla died. She tapped the eraser of her pencil against her paperwork. She swiveled in her chair. Ben sensed he was looking at two people at once. He actually was looking at two people: There was a baby between them. It was a risk. He said, “I can’t go through that again.”

Sarah stood up. She said, “It’ll be okay.”

He burbled then. Ben cried, and tried not to, and this, he thought, was what the makeup covered: his broken heart. He slid the silo house photo away from them on the table. “Our lives are good.”

“They are.” She hugged him close.

Ben sunk his fingers into Sarah’s shoulders hard, in a back rub that was more about holding on to his wife. She peeled his fingers off. He said, “Nyla was killed by a baby.”

A deadly little unborn baby that’d taken up residence in her fallopian tube, death by overpopulation of one; there was no room for a growing embryo there.

It was that misguided collection of cells with its will to live, two people who had come together to create one.

She said, “We have health insurance. We have doctors, primary care physicians, I take vitamins—”

Ben whispered to Sarah, “I can’t lose you.” He felt her blood warming her skin through its network of veins, arteries, and capillaries.

Vitamins? There was no certainty.

She said, “Shhh …,” and rubbed her body against his. She said, “A baby! It’ll be different for us.”

I
am deeply grateful for the support of so many amazing people. In particular: my writing crew, Lidia Yuknavitch, Suzy Vitello, Chuck Palahniuk, Andy Mingo, Mary Wysong-Haeri, Erin Leonard, Chelsea Cain, Diana Page Jordan, James Bernard Frost, and Cheryl Strayed; Mitch Finnegan, Christine Fletcher, Alicia Zambelli, and Ann Duncan, for their knowledge of animals and animal care; Mickey Lindsay, Cynthia Chimienti, Bellen Drake, Nirel, Lise Pacioretty, Djamilah Troncelliti, Sonya Schmick Carnes, Marne Lucas, and Joanna Berton Martinez, for their inspiration, support, and kindred spirits; Seth Fishman, Alexis Washam, Christine Kopprasch, for their wisdom; PNCA and the Sally Lawrence Award; and always, Barbara Drake, Albert Drake, and Kassten Alonso.

MONICA DRAKE is the author of
Clown Girl
, winner of an Eric Hoffer Award and an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award). Her essays and short stories have appeared in a variety of journals, and she is a regular contributor to the
Oregonian
, the
Portland Mercury
, and the
Stranger
(Seattle). Monica has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently on the faculty at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.