The Birthing House Read online

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You couldn’t stop it. If they want to take it, they will.’

  ‘Did you tell your mother? Anybody?’

  ‘Not my mom. Eddie didn’t believe me.’ She fell into his shoulder and cried. He didn’t know what to say, so he held her there for a few minutes until she slowed down and caught her breath. ‘What if I don’t deserve it?’ she said.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you deserve it?’

  ‘Because I’m not married. I don’t know how to take care of it.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said without hesitation. She wasn’t teasing him now. This was real. He still didn’t understand, but he was glad she let him in. ‘Whatever it takes. I’ll help you.’

  23

  He was back in high school, aware that he hadn’t been there for years. He was the older self but also the boy he had been. He was wandering through the halls looking for her. He found her in the cafeteria, sitting on a crackled brown leather couch in the corner. The lunchroom had been half-transformed into someone’s house, a house party. He waded through the other students, ignoring them as he pressed forward, thinking of what he would say to her. He knew he had to get it right. Had to say the right thing or else he would scare her away.

  When he arrived she looked up at him. She had the same flawless young face, all wide glowing cheeks and semi-flat nose.

  Holly. Holy Girl.

  He wiped his hands on his jeans. He was a mess, the older version. Wanted to hide this version. She wasn’t supposed to see him this way.

  ‘Holly,’ he said.

  ‘Shhhsh. Don’t say anything,’ she said in a whisper. ‘She’ll hear us.’

  Conrad thought of Jo, a stab of guilt pressing into his belly. He turned around and the cafeteria behind him was a black wall. A terrifying black edifice. His fault it was here. He’d brought it with him, let her down. Had to save her. His heart slammed as Holly turned and her face changed—

  He snapped awake in bed, in the house, blinking into the dark. He felt the blackness with him, in the room. He dared not sit up or move. If he did, it would come to the bed and devour him, end everything.

  His eyes adjusted to the dark and still he saw only different shades of black against black. The curtains over the window. The open closet a funnel of black going blacker. The wooden sleigh bed curling like a wave at his feet. A blanket draped over the sleigh frame.

  A shadow moved.

  He did not move so much as his eyeballs.

  At the foot of the bed, there was a body standing over him. She was tall. Not moving. She was watching something, looking down. Tall enough to be his wife.

  Not real, he told himself.

  Maybe she came home early.

  Could not open his mouth to ask her anything. Impossible to act. The terror so great he thought he was dying while she loomed over him, staring down, willing his heart to stop.

  Not real, he kept thinking. She’s not real. Not real, not—

  She moved.

  Or maybe she had been moving all along. For he saw now that her arms were rocking back and forth, slowly. Holding something in her arms, her head tilting forward, her face and eyes invisible while she looked down at the bundle in her arms.

  ‘Behbee,’ she whispered. Her voice hoarse, deep. ‘Ohmmma save the behbeeee.’

  It was a full minute later, another interminable minute of watching her arms rocking, when she turned. Her body moved stiffly with grief away from him, out of the bedroom.

  No footsteps in the hall. He felt rather than heard her departure and only then did he breathe. The bed shook as the tremors rippled through him. He almost began to cry, but he was afraid to make a sound.

  There is another woman in this house. She wants something, and she’s growing bolder.

  The next morning, Conrad found more packages on the porch. It was not the first batch, but it was the big one. He hauled them in with the others and opened them all, a summer Christmas he had been avoiding. All the invoices were made out to Joanna Harrison. The boxes disgorged drapes with zoo animals on them, rustic wooden shelving units that looked more like Lincoln Logs than furniture, and a designer trashcan designed to keep baby shit off your fingers when disposing of diapers. But it was this final item that kicked off the project and got him going full-tilt.

  ‘Okay, kids,’ he said to the dogs, opening a cold beer and thinking he was overdue for a good old-fashioned drunk. ‘Let’s do this.’

  Using a painter’s razor, he slit the plastic manifest and inspected the packing slip from the largest box. TOTAL: $2845. He sucked at his beer. The invoice was the yellow copy torn from a generic three-layer pad. At the top, the pressed ink stamp read

  Karl Stobbe Carpentry

  Wisconsin’s Finest

  Amish Carpentry & Woodcrafts

  He arranged the contents in an exploded view across the living room floor, taking extra care to keep the dogs from running off with the sanded pegs and support beams.

  There were no instructions, and Mr Karl Stobbe, fine crafts-man that he was, had not left a phone number or web address on the invoice. Conrad knew the usual stereotypes about the Amish - most were in Pennsylvania but plenty had settled in Ohio and Wisconsin, too - living without telephones. Maybe Stobbe was the real deal. Conrad stared at the contents for almost half an hour before he packed it all up and carried the box upstairs.

  He set the kit in the library, tuned the radio to NPR’s classical station, and began ripping up the carpet. Avoiding the stain on the floor as best he could, he pulled staples from the wood and chipped away the dried, stuck padding. He dragged the mess to the garbage cans on the side of the house. He returned to the fridge for more beer three times - he was sweating the stuff out as fast as he could drink it - and lost himself in honest labor.

  He swept the floor, scraped paint and then used Jo’s Ryobi belt sander to strip the wood of blood and blood dust in an attempt to restore its natural color. He swept the floor again and when he saw that the stain was not going to go away without replacing some of the boards, he decided, to hell with it, let’s keep the blood and spill some paint. He did not stop to eat and eventually he forgot about the beer.

  When he ran out of paint he returned to the porch and unwrapped the pallet. She had ordered gallons of the stuff delivered from the local hardware store a week ago. Quality, custom-mixed latex in peach, lavender and sea green. A gender-neutral palette, very progressive. Finished with the floors, he started on the walls. He inhaled sweet fumes and remembered moving to new apartments with his mother. New beginnings. He was a man who loved beginnings. The way he left a job before giving it time really to learn something new and get promoted. The way he had started a new screenplay before finishing the old one. The way you met a girl and had no idea what comes next. The way he avoided cleaning up the old mess. Moving. Always a fresh start, never a permanent home.

  He brought in the throw rug she had sent a week ago, the one with the sailboat braving indigo waves under gold stars and a smiling silver moon. It took Conrad the rest of the night to peg and glue the oak slats in place, set the natural fiber bed pad in the tiny fortress center to the room so that the moonlight would catch it the way (the house showed him)

  he saw it in his head, and sweep everything clean once again. He brought in the lamp she had chosen, an ivory-colored ceramic beast with lion’s feet at the base and winged shoulders above, a safari motif on the shade. When everything was in its place, he sat on the floor and stared at the crib, alone in a transformed room the dogs still would not enter. In the dark with the lights off and the moon on the soft carpet, ashamed.

  The crib was the thing. Even empty it changed everything. Made the future real, a thing to hold on to.

  He fell asleep on the floor beside the crib and awoke hours later in his bed. She came to him before dawn, as if preparing the room had been an act of penance and she were his reward.

  He was in high school again. Some event setting up and waiting to be played out. He felt like a
king. His friends were all there with him, the best ones from the days when they were all kings. He was wearing his favorite pair of Adidas basketball shoes, the orange and blue Knicks colors, his Ewings. He felt unstoppable. A cool can of regular Budweiser in his hand. He was glad to be back with the Budweiser, the choice of kings and Beastie Boys back in 1989.

  It was the buoyant feeling of prom night, of having an infinite life ahead of you and the right girl by your side. Then his friends were calling to him - let’s get out of here, dude. But he wanted to stay. Holly standing over him, where they’d left off the night before.

  Holly was neither as tall and formidable as Jo nor as short and full as Nadia. She had the build of a cyclist. Her legs were sculpted and thick through the thighs and calves, her ass as firm as two volleyballs. He smiled into her waist as she leaned against him. Her smell was familiar and somehow also new, the smell of jasmine blossoms and another herb, nettles perhaps. The little new age bohemian even then, before it had become fashionable to go natural in high school. He remembered her thing with iced tea.

  She pressed her weight fully against his lap, pinning him to the couch. Her wheat-thick hair was soft against his cheeks and over his face. Her skin was cool and smooth. He heard himself whispering in her ear, ‘missed you so much . . . missed you so much . . .’ over and over, stuck in the lingo of the adolescent and unafraid to plead with her.

  Under her rocking movement and warmth and sweet spicy scent, his body responded and he tried to lift her up but her thighs were iron-clad, holding him down. Her hand closed against his crotch and squeezed. Her hand was cool, her grip exquisite. Her breath childlike, scented with milk.

  He raised his hands to touch her neck and breasts and hips, but his fingers kept slipping through her hair. She was all hair and gossamer cloth, a shifting wisp he could not grasp.

  She leaned back and maneuvered him inside. He sighed in surprise at how she was wet but somehow cool, even down there. She warmed with him inside and fell heavily back down upon him as her hips pushed forward and back, rolling, the fullness of her bush - different, thicker than he remembered - scraping his waist and the tops of his thighs. The physical sensation brought him another level closer to consciousness and she fucked him this way for a minute longer. The whole experience was a reminder of some recurring dream he had come to expect but never taken this far.

  But thinking it was a dream always killed the dream and so he tried to deny himself further awareness.

  She rode him, bringing him closer in a hurry and then paused, adjusted herself on top of him, grunting in anger and all at once he was awake, at home, in his marital bed. Fear like electrified water shot through his legs and snapped his back straight, but her hands pinned his arms to his sides and her full breasts pressed against his chest. The fear amplified the sensations - good and bad - tenfold.

  He tried to see her face but her head was down, monitoring the point where they met, a triangle of black that opened and closed with a wet slapping sound he found erotic and disgusting. She gained substance before his eyes. Her dark form shifted from the ethereal to the clumsy and mechanical, driven by something other than love or even lust.

  He struggled beneath her. She yanked his wrists up and planted his palms against her breasts, which were heavy and sheathed in white lace. They were fuller than he remembered, and her entire front was wet, hot with her sweat. He thought her injured; he thought of accidents and blood.

  She moaned, winding him tighter. His mind bounced between fear and escape for another thirty seconds while inside her the muscles contracted and pulled. Her walls closed in. To this tension she added a rocking movement, forward and back, repeating the dual motion until he lost control. The sensation conjured a rope with twelve knots at six-inch intervals pulling out of him from his legs and spine through his cock, each knot detonating white flashes of blinding pleasure in his reptilian brain. Only when she was climbing away from him like a spider in the dark did he hear himself screaming.

  She scurried out the door with one last fretful moan and her feet padded staccato-like down the hall.

  Footsteps. This time he heard her footsteps.

  Or thought he did.

  Conrad sprang forward and heard his lower lumbar pop in at least three places. He tried to stand and was greeted by pins and needles from the waist down. He fell back into bed, his penis still lost in its own delirious spasm. Muscles shot, cold and shivering wet with her residue, he felt like a freshly shucked oyster, soon to be eaten.

  ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ he shouted, trying to laugh after.

  No one answered. He sat on the bed listening, turning it over in his head, until he had nearly convinced himself it was another bad dream or a hallucination.

  In the morning he thought of Nadia. Nadia had been here before. She even said she did not remember being here the day he bumped into her while Roddy was downstairs having a smoke. But she was just a kid. Would she really come to him in the middle of the night? Not likely.

  The only other possibility - that it had been Jo, that she was watching him, toying with him - was so ridiculous that he convinced himself all over again it was a dream. He was lonely, sex-deprived. He had been through a bad couple of months. He might be having a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t real. It was only a—

  It was like before. When he had woken up on the floor of the bathroom. The skin of his penis was chaffed, stinging and sore in the right places. What did that leave? A nocturnal emission? Fucking the pillows?

  Probably. Yes, definitely.

  But when he lifted the plastic cup of warmed-over tea from the nightstand to his nose, he could smell her. He remembered feeling the warm blood on her breasts. Then he saw the evidence. Not blood. In the morning light his fingers were chalky, dry, crackly white. He put two in his mouth without thinking and the texture was brittle, sweet. You don’t remember, but you know.

  A mother’s milk.

  24

  ‘So what’ve you been up to?’ he said, filling his coffee cup from the Bunn machine in the Grums’ kitchen. The coffee was thick, as if it had been sitting all morning, the way he liked it. Nadia was sitting on one of the stools at the kitchen island, flipping through the paper, sipping from a Winnie-the-Pooh mug and pretending he wasn’t there. ‘You feeling all right? Nadia?’

  ‘Sleeping a lot. I feel like shit.’

  Her flannel shirt and shorts clung to her plump curves and he searched her body for something that would affirm his suspicions - a scar, a line, the coarser hairs at the tops of her thighs - something to jar his foggy memory of the flesh he had cupped and caressed some thirty-six hours before.

  ‘Everything okay with the baby? Did you call your doctor?’

  She winced but did not look up from her paper. ‘I can handle it.’

  ‘Your parents would want me to ask. When are they due back, anyway?’

  ‘Four or five days.’

  ‘I’m behind on my chores.’

  ‘I got the mail,’ Nadia said, the sarcasm blatant. She slipped off her stool and went around the corner to the living room.

  Conrad sipped his coffee. This didn’t fit. She was not acting in any way clever or seductive. If she was playing games and sneaking into his house at night, she was one messed up girl. He went into the living room. Nadia was tucked under an orange Ralph Lauren blanket. He could see the little man on the horse near her feet. She unpaused the DVR.

  ‘What’s on?’

  ‘March of the Penguins.’

  He looked at the TV. Hundreds of the fat little birds were huddled together while the frozen wind whipped around them. Close-ups of the birds squatting on their eggs on the ice. It looked impossible.

  He said, ‘If I was a penguin I would leave. Go to Mexico.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass. This is amazing.’

  ‘What part is amazing?’

  ‘All of it.’

  He watched their fat bodies hunker down, a community under the dark wind. They appeared miserable.


  ‘What part do you like best?’ he said.

  ‘They share responsibility. They take turns until the baby is hatched.’

  ‘Is that the one—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  He shut up and watched the penguins tough it out. Morgan Freeman explained how, when the mothers are away getting more food, the fathers take over and sit on the eggs. The fathers did their best, but sometimes they fucked up and the eggs rolled away and died. The mothers returned with food to feed the fathers, and they traded places. Sometimes, when one of the mothers returns and finds out her egg has died, she tries to steal another mother’s egg. But the community won’t let her. She is grief-stricken, inconsolable and ostracized.

  ‘That’s so sad,’ Nadia said, sniffing.

  He watched the broken egg on the ice, the little dead bird inside. ‘What happens when the mother goes away and doesn’t come back? What does the father do with the egg then? Find another mother, or just take care of it on his own?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, looking up at him with glassy eyes. ‘What happens?’

  He was still formulating his answer when the phone rang. She looked away, wiping her eyes. After three rings he said, ‘What if it’s Mom and Dad?’

  ‘Knock yourself out.’

  Conrad went to the kitchen. ‘Grum residence.’

  ‘Yeah, where’s Nadia?’ The guy on the other end sounded startled, out of breath. His was the panting of a wired, anxious little man.

  ‘Who’s calling?’

  Nadia padded in and poured orange juice. The carton said NO PULP! 50% More Calcium!

  ‘I said who’s calling, please?’

  ‘Chuh!’ The spitting sound of incredulity. ‘Who’s this, the neighbor guy?’

  ‘My name is Conrad.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘If you tell me who’s calling, I’ll see if she’s home.’

  ‘Eddie. I know she’s there.’

  ‘Okay, Eddie, please hold.’