The Birthing House Read online

  ‘Drugs?’ Conrad asked, cutting through the quotation marks.

  ‘Not that I know of. But, you know,’ Gail frowned, ‘Eddie is sort of like a drug, so maybe you could say that.’

  ‘Young love can be that way,’ he added, ready to play sage to the hand-wringing parent.

  ‘You know she’s pregnant,’ Gail said.

  ‘It appears so.’

  ‘Obviously we wouldn’t be leaving during this time, but Nadia’s very determined to do this all on her own. She insists we go, and John really needs this vacation.’

  ‘Sure, she seems capable.’

  Gail finished with her vision of his role for the next ten days, fourteen if they got carried away. Conrad would ‘feel free to stay at home’, which made sense seeing as how he lived next door, ha ha. But Nadia was not to be trusted with the house. ‘One friend at a time . . . no Eddie, no parties, no loud music.’ It was to be a strictly pizza and Netflix affair. In addition to keeping one eye on Nadia, Conrad would need to mow the lawn, to water all the plants, check the mail.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I need the exercise.’

  ‘Actually, we also need our gutters cleaned. John’s worried all this rain’s going to start seeping into the basement.’

  ‘I can do that.’

  ‘The important thing is to be present at regular intervals. We’ll pay you, of course.’

  ‘I’m home all the time. I wouldn’t hear of it.’

  Gail touched his arm. ‘Just a few hundred dollars. John would insist.’

  ‘Then I won’t argue.’

  He didn’t need the money, of course. But at least he would be assuming some sort of responsibility. Helping the neighbors. Maybe a chance to learn something about the house through Nadia.

  Nadia. Pretty little pregnant Nadia.

  It depressed him that his new neighbors saw him as closer to their own level of maturity than Nadia’s. It suggested he was an adult, which he knew he was, on paper. He just hadn’t realized other adults saw him this way, too. He felt too young to be a father, too old to be Nadia’s friend.

  Stop whining. Have some fun. You’re still ’Rad, man!

  ‘I’ll be honest, Conrad,’ Gail said, the beer having its way with her. ‘We like you. And we just don’t know anyone else we can trust. Steve and Bailey offered, but if we had someone our age poking around, Nadia would fly off the handle. I think she relates to you. Maybe you can be the cool older brother she never had.’

  The older brother. Nice.

  ‘When do you leave?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Whoa - watch out, Kentucky!’

  ‘It’s like fate.’ Gail leaned in close enough that he could smell the garden and her sweet, beery breath. ‘Do you believe in fate, Conrad?’

  ‘I used to believe it was all in my hands. That we made our own choices and there was nothing else.’

  Gail nodded. ‘And now?’

  ‘I try to keep an open mind.’

  Jo again, back on the horn. ‘That’s great. It’s perfect for you, honey.’

  ‘Really? You’re not disappointed?’

  ‘Why would I be?’

  ‘I just thought maybe you’d want me to be out looking for a real job. There are sales jobs in Madison, temp work.’

  ‘Is that what you want to do? Sell advertising?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So our new neighbors offered you some easy work. Maybe it happened for a reason.’

  ‘Like fate?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. So far she hadn’t mentioned the pregnancy. He knew they weren’t ready to go into it, maybe not until she came home.

  ‘So the job is good? You’re confident this is the right thing?’

  ‘What? Oh, it’s good. It’s fine. It’s not really the kind of job I can see myself in for the next five years.’ She snorted, implying the ridiculous.

  ‘Sweetie?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why do I feel like you’ve made some decision and haven’t told me?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Jo.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re so “whatever”, like you had another brilliant breakthrough. ’

  She sighed and he heard the bed squeak like she’d just given up and plopped down to dig in for the inevitable.

  ‘I’m not going to turn this into a whole production,’ she said.

  ‘I just don’t want you coming to some big decision without me. Don’t tell me today it’s Detroit and tomorrow it’s Amsterdam or—’

  Somewhere in the room, a door shut. He heard a faint ‘Oh, hey, is this a . . . time?’ in the background. The voice sounded neutral, possibly male. There was a muffling sound and he heard his wife say, ‘Gimme one second.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Conrad said.

  The phone unmuffled. ‘You know what I think, honey? I think you need to remember I’m just not really there right now.’

  ‘No shit, sweetie.’

  ‘And we might as well get it over with. I’m not going to be there for another five weeks.’

  Stay cool, boss. ‘Heh heh. Yeah. Please tell me that was a joke.’

  ‘There’s a lot going on, for both of us. The move, the house, the job, and your father even though you weren’t close and I still think you need to see someone about that, but it’s your choice, so okay, and there’s everything else. And it’s too hard to do it all at once.’

  ‘So . . . ?’

  ‘So, I’m saying, we’re not going to do it, not now. We’re just not.’

  Anger, like whiskey in his belly, flaring out.

  ‘Conrad?’

  ‘I’m coming out,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To see you.’

  ‘Conrad, no.’

  ‘Why the hell not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want you to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t want to say it.’

  ‘Say it, or so help me I will drive there tonight.’

  ‘I can’t stand you right now.’

  ‘Nice, Jo. Real nice.’

  ‘I need space.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  She wasn’t crying. Not even close. She sounded like a woman he had never met.

  ‘I’m not coming home and I don’t want you to come here because I don’t want to see you. Do you understand?’

  ‘Ever? What the fuck? Jesus, who’s in your room, Johnny Depp? Does he have, a what, a fucking earring, too?’

  She didn’t say anything for fifteen seconds. Was she trying to make him suffer? Make him go off?

  So be it.

  ‘You don’t want to see me ever again. You’re leaving me, the dogs, the house? And what is this, “I can’t do this right now” shit? Are you thinking about having an abortion?’

  He’d never even thought of that until just this second and now it was like a neon sign in his brain - SHE’S GOING TO KILL YOUR BABY - while he stood here in a fucking birthing house. If she did not answer soon he would start screaming and not stop until someone jammed a needle in his arm.

  ‘You bitch—’ he started, and then she did scream. No, it was yelling. Like his father speaking at some terrible hoarse volume, controlled and therefore twice as scary.

  ‘You fucking asshole! Are you out of your mind? I’m pregnant with your child! I just moved across the country with you because you decided to buy a house without even asking me! I’m in training for eight weeks, I miss my home, I miss my dogs and, yes, until tonight, I missed you. I can’t deal with work and being pregnant and your insecure bullshit about one stupid night that I passed out after talking - TALKING - to your friend. So, no, not now, do you understand? ’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he croaked.

  ‘I’ll be home in five weeks and then we can worry about whether or not we have the baby, but right now I am trying to follow through on a commitment and I NEED TO GET THROUGH THIS ALONE!’

  The same sexless voice said, ‘Do you want me to go?’
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br />   ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s that—’

  ‘Night, Conrad.’ She hung up on him.

  So arrived the night that Conrad Harrison learned, to his utter amazement, that there are certain times you don’t want to see a young woman’s breasts.

  As Big John showed him the plants to be watered, the windows to shut when you ran the a/c, and the ladder and tools for the gutter repairs, Conrad felt something was eating the big man - something other than the hope his wife was packing in her Samsonite. Like, for instance, leaving his obviously troubled and not at all unattractive pregnant daughter with an older male he hadn’t had time to get to know over bocce and a six-pack.

  Conrad did his best to ask questions and nod his head with a vigor that suggested he was memorizing all this just fine, thank you, no need to write it down. The truth was, all of Big John’s directions were going in one ear and out the other. He was still obsessing about Jo. Someone had been in her room.

  ‘I want to be clear on the roof access here.’ They stopped at the end of the second-floor hall facing the street. Conrad was staring off into space when Big John slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You still with me, bud?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry, John. Been a long day.’

  ‘You got that right. Now, when you go out to clean the gutters over the porch, do not attempt to use the ladder from the yard. Because it is not long enough, and you will fall and break your neck and then Gail will never let me hear the end of it.’

  ‘Right. No ladder.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to do the top gutter - there’s only one and I’m pretty sure it’s clean - but if you do get a wild hair up your ass, bring the small ladder up here, use the ladder into the attic, open the front-attic window. Using a broom you ought to be able to reach anything on that last stretch of roof, but I repeat. Do not crawl outside of the attic. That little patch needs new shingles. Unless you want to do a Greg Louganis into Gail’s ferns, stay inside, got it?’

  ‘Of course,’ Conrad said.

  There was an unlatching sound as the bathroom door opened. Nadia exited wearing a navy blue towel around her waist like a man in a locker room. Her damp blonde hair clung in sticky whorls to her frost-white and drip-drying back. The curves of her wagging hips held the towel low, revealing the dimple above her butt cleavage as she crossed the hall to the linen closet.

  Conrad sucked air through his teeth.

  She didn’t see them standing in the hall until her father barked, ‘Nadia, for goodness’ sake!’

  Nadia did a half-pirouette, covering her breasts with one arm as she looked over her shoulder and scowled, her eyes darting to Conrad and back.

  ‘Daddy, you scared the crap out of me,’ she yelped, slipping through her bedroom door at the end of the hall.

  Conrad looked away . . . too late. Before the dewy daughter had made her escape, he’d glimpsed one heavy breast squeezed up in the hook of her arm. True, all he spied within the fold was pale flesh (by chance the nipple had been sheltered), but the exposure of the stretch-marked topography of her pregnant belly and milk-laden (bosom, they were called bosoms or teats back then!), breasts set off an uncomfortable male charge between father and neighbor.

  ‘She thinks she’s still living in her damn dorm room,’ Big John said.

  Conrad kept his eyes averted. He didn’t want Big John thinking he was a willing participant in this impromptu peep show.

  ‘They got steers and heifers sharing showers up the school. Can you imagine what that’s like?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, they do that now, I guess,’ Conrad said, legs literally shaking.

  ‘Well, that’s pretty much the whole shootin’ match, anyway. Let’s go see what Gail’s gone and zapped for ya.’

  As they moved down the hall, the soapy smell of the girl rode out on a wave of shower steam and settled upon his neck, mingling with the beads of sweat, and he entered the kitchen with a cluster of stubborn girl molecules working its way into his pores.

  Gail handed him a plate of angel hair pasta with home-made pesto that burned his sinuses. Conrad ate standing over the kitchen counter while Gail wrote down the emergency phone numbers. He saw Steve Bartholomew’s name and another he did not recognize. As he was leaving, Gail gave him at least three more hugs and thanked him.

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said, light-headed from the meal, the girl.

  ‘What for, putting you to work?’

  ‘For making me feel at home.’

  ‘Aw.’ Gail tilted her head in sympathy. He hadn’t meant for it to come out that way. ‘You miss her.’

  ‘I don’t know what I was thinking letting her go.’

  Nadia Grum.

  MySpace. Her space.

  Pink and black frames, looping cursive text for font. Blank spots popped to life while cell phone snapshots of the girl next door looking younger and not yet pregnant filled the screen: with her friends in the woods, standing on a car, on the football field, in her bedroom, sitting on the bed, a bandana on her brow. Hugging various girlfriends, their faces plastered with clown make-up. Nothing gratuitous, nothing revealing, but he was transfixed. The candor with which she displayed herself and the details of her life made him feel like a creep. He learned more about his neighbor in fifteen minutes than he learned about high-school classmates he had known for three years. No wonder parents the world over were terrified.

  In a box decorated with flowers and hearts, guitars and guns, her profile:

  Her cliché answers and trumped-up confidence were empty calories, leaving him hungry for more. The most pressing questions - Who is the father of your baby? How has the pregnancy changed your life? What are you going to do now? - would have to wait.

  Question: Have you ever been in love?

  Answer: No.

  He returned again and again to one photo. She was sitting in a slat-backed wooden chair at a small desk in someone’s bedroom, her hair pleasantly ruffled as if it had been wet and then slept on. She wore masculine black reading glasses and she was looking up in surprise, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open, as if the photographer had crept up and caught her in a private act.

  HOLLY

  If every love needs a home, then theirs was each other. And if every couple needs a home to shelter their love, Holly’s mother’s house was their sanctuary. Holly’s father lived on the other side of town, and he was busy rebuilding his life, building a new brood. Holly was allowed to choose where she lived, and her mother played cool to keep her daughter in her camp. Soon our boy was spending all his time with Holly - including nights, weekends and even the taboo school nights - and together they lived as a new family.

  His mother was tired after work and relieved to have him on someone else’s watch. Better for her son to be at Holly’s than running with boys who didn’t have girlfriends and spent their time wrecking cars, stealing CDs and burning cats. He always told his mother the truth - I’m going to Holly’s - and then forgot to call home to say he was staying. Nobody seemed to mind.

  In her mother’s home snuggled up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains there was a finished basement made up like an apartment for a real adult (kitchenette, living room, full bath, spare room and Holly’s cocoon-like bedroom). They lived like a real couple and forgot about school until the alarm went off and they had to commute, sore and feeding each other fruit and listening to The Smiths on the way to class.

  The sex had evolved things, but the basement house below the real house was the thing that made it real.

  They took baths, cooked five course meals, watched movies and became like newlyweds. They dressed alike in shirts and jeans purchased with Holly’s mother’s credit card. They ate magic mushrooms, smoked good pot, sipped wine. They ate grilled shark, large salads and entertained cleansing fruit diets together. They had small parties with close, chosen friends from school, but they never lasted, the friendships. There wasn’t room for anyone else. People grew bored of them, spiteful of their closeness, and drifted away.

/>   Holly always had fresh money in her account. But when they got bored they shoplifted clothing, bedding, lunch, seafood dinners. They walked out on hundred-dollar meals and no one cared enough to stop them. They grew daring in their dalliances, monstrous in their self-absorption, reckless in their search for new thrills.

  His grades went down as far as they could go. Hers dropped too, though not enough to alarm her parents. Holly was better at school and talked of college and how they might go to the same one. He did not dwell on the future. Now was all that mattered; it was all he could see. Things were perfect, and he knew she felt the same way. College, no college. He would drive a truck or major in physics or both if that was required to keep them together.

  That their separation was already imminent was his denial. That she could thwart it without planning was Holly’s.

  Sometimes they saw Holly’s mom’s face on the realtor signs. Holly’s mother had the combinations to key boxes to the best homes on the market. They went with her mother to a Sunday afternoon showing and hid in the bathroom. They noticed how the other couples were not much older than they were. They decided it would be more fun to have the whole house to themselves. In her mother’s home office they found the filing cabinet and the real estate listings and the combinations.

  They took the list of combinations and went to the house that Friday after school. They parked down the street and walked around to make sure no one was inside. They entered before the sun went down. They did not leave until early Sunday morning.

  The house was well stocked with fruit, fresh pasta and pre-made sauces, gourmet meats and cheeses and wine. Friday night was a fit of giggles and exploring the house, crashing early in front of the TV. Saturday they slept late, watched movies, made up stories about the owners. The sex was on hold as if they were saving for this night. In the evening, he cooked while Holly turned on the stereo and set the table.

  It started gradually, over dinner.

  ‘More wine?’ he asked, pouring for her.

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ she said with all the proper weight.