The Birthing House Read online

What if it was you?

  What if you’ve lost your mind for this girl and the stress and killing that kid and all the loneliness has finally driven you to the point where you know not what you do in your sleep? How about that, ’Rad?

  This possibility bit into him like a viper, poisoning all confidence that he was doing the right thing by trying to manage the situation alone.

  What have I done? What am I about to do?

  No, you wouldn’t be standing here thinking about it if you were that far gone.

  But you do need help. Quit fucking around and call someone.

  He needed to talk to Jo. He picked up the phone and tried to develop an explanation, a cover story to hide the panic.

  Just tell her -

  ‘Aw, shit.’ He sat down hard on one of the chairs at the two-top. All at once he was out of gas. As long as he covered his tracks, there would be no relief. The whole secrecy routine was eating his guts. He needed to end this before someone else got hurt.

  He made himself the same promise all over again. If she answered, he would tell her everything. Ask for her help. Be honest. Let her panic and scream at him if that’s what it took, but he would come clean.

  ‘You put your fate in her hands and cut Nadia loose and start over. With or without Jo, you start over like a man.’

  He dialed before he could change his mind. The line buzzed. Four, five times. Conrad’s knee did a little jig and he tried to smother it with his free hand. Seven, eight. The oven clock read 2.12 a.m.

  A throat rattled wetly. ‘Har-ugh. Uh-huh?’ The guy sounded like he’d been drinking Jack and cokes all night.

  ‘Ah,’ Conrad searched for the words. Was it the same guy as before? That voice had been softer. It didn’t seem like the same guy, but . . .

  ‘Hello?’ the guy said forcefully, waking up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Conrad said. ‘I’m looking for my wife.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My wife. Joanna Harrison.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘What do you mean, “nope”? She’s not there?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Why would I care?’

  ‘This is room three-four-one-eight?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m tired,’ the guy said. ‘Look. I just moved in. Your wife was, what, here on training?’

  ‘Yes. This is her room.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Did you know her? You one of her friends? Classmates?’

  ‘Don’t think so. They told me some woman from the last class left for a condition. Medical purposes, whatever.’

  ‘Medical purposes? What the fuck does that mean?

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She’s gone? She left training?’

  ‘Look, I didn’t get a name. I just started the new round of classes. And I have to be up in three hours, so good luck, ace.’

  The phone sounded like the guy was trying to bury it under the mattress.

  ‘Wait!’ Conrad said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You see her leave? She leave anything behind? Come on, I’m her husband. Help me out here.’

  ‘They just said this woman had to leave training early. It happens. ’

  ‘Who said that? What’s this medical shit?’

  ‘Davidson, the training instructor. There’s a few of them, so I don’t know if she was in the same group. Hey, it could have been a rumor. I don’t know. I asked if she got fired or couldn’t take the pressure or what. They said no, she had a medical thing. Hey, you think they were just saying that? You get that with a lot of these sales things. Fucking corporate. I really don’t wanna do eight weeks if the program is shit. I’m here to make money, you know what I’m saying.’

  It wasn’t really a question, and Conrad wasn’t really paying attention. He was too busy imagining bad things. Jo in a hospital somewhere, for Christ knows what. Or she’s on her way home. Or already here. Watching.

  ‘Fuck. Oh, fuck.’

  ‘Hey, take it easy, bro. You want me to call someone, have the company get in touch with you?’

  ‘Yeah, you think?’ Conrad hung up.

  He dialed her cell. Her voice crisp and professional, asking him to leave a message.

  ‘Jo? Sweetie? It’s me. Where are you? I’m sorry I yelled. Why won’t you pick up? Some guy answered in your room. Please, please call me as soon as you get this. I’ll keep trying. Why haven’t you called me back? I love you.’

  He clicked off and lunged out of his chair to check the windows—

  He never made it.

  Before he had taken two steps, he noticed that the door to the basement was ajar, a faint glow emanating from below. He knew damn well he had closed the door and turned off the overhead shop lights after finding Luther down there.

  ‘Conrad!’ Nadia said, startling him from upstairs. ‘Who are you talking to?’

  ‘No one. Stay there. I’ll be right up!’

  He grabbed a flashlight from the junk drawer and tromped down the stairs. By the time he remembered this was the sort of expedition you’d want to take with two dogs by your side, it was too late.

  In the basement he found what he was looking for all along.

  The air was moist with the scents of lime and mold. The basement was something between a crawlspace and a real basement. And yet there were signs the space had not been written off as uninhabitable. If one used one’s imagination, as Conrad did now, wagging the flashlight around, one could see where a man (doctor) with a load of guests (patients) might find the cooler, peaceful depths of the house suitable for short periods of recuperation (torture).

  It might have been a place to heal.

  Or a temporary morgue.

  The non-perimeter walls were covered with cheap walnut paneling, most of it bulging with moisture and splitting at the seams. The carpet was newer, but the cement beneath it might have been easier to clean, to disinfect. And what of this, the trough-like groove in the cement floor running out of the south-east room into the center drain? Was that routine flood protection, a gutter for water from a burst pipe or heavy rain? Or was it something else? Like, say, a place to wash the really bad ones down?

  Conrad pulled the chain on the bulb hanging in the basement’s main ‘room’, and turned three hundred and sixty-five degrees, wiping cobwebs real and imagined from his face as he went.

  He tried the shop first. This room had the newer electrics and a wall switch and the fluorescent bulbs were on. He felt better having the extra light behind him while he worked up the courage to check the last room, the place where he’d found Luther sliced up and cowering. The shop was empty.

  He aimed the flashlight at the boiler room, swinging it in wide arcs over the stone walls and the sloping dirt mound under his front porch. The flashlight’s beam narrowed with each step, leaving more darkness in its wake. One of those dull whumping boiler noises would have been enough to send him running in a blind panic, but all was quiet.

  Had the dog been interested in this spot on the floor, or the wall? Enough to cut himself to ribbons trying to get in? Conrad looked for blood or teeth marks - anything that would confirm a dog’s persistent interest. The image of Luther gnashing his teeth on solid rock conjured the same kind of eerie screech you hear when the class asshole rakes his fingernails across the chalkboard, and Conrad cringed, stepping away.

  The thought wasn’t out of his head for two seconds when he heard another sound, equally electrifying.

  ‘Aaayyy-ay-ay-aaaaack!’ Just as before, the baby’s cry wormed its way into his head and fried his nerves. It paused, hitching in fits and starts, and then rose again in that same choking, raspy cry. The shop lights went out, leaving him with only the flashlight to illuminate his way.

  Oh Baby, oh Baby, what the fuck is happening in this place?

  It was an awful sound, but something in the urgency took hold of him and this time he heard it for what it had b
een all along - a cry for help.

  ‘Okay, okay, it’s okay,’ he babbled, moving out of the corner. ‘You want help? Okay, are you hungry? Are you hurt?’

  His hand shot out and flipped the switch. The lights flickered once and fell dark. In this half-second that lit the room like a distant lightning flash and left retinal echoes even as the room was plunged back into pitch-blackness, he saw a shape darting from the corner of his eye. He tried to track its movement, but it was gone. Two steps later his kneecap rammed into one of the workbench’s legs and he bit down on his lip to keep from shouting.

  The anger came back with the pain and he brought the flashlight up quickly. But now the infant’s wail had been muted, perhaps by his clumsy and clattering response. His breath became ragged, the beam moving in erratic swaths before it slowed and fell at last on the swaddled bundle resting on the workbench. A tremor ran the length of the beam even as it shrank, the diameter of its spotlight closing down until it was shining from less than eighteen inches above this tiny package. He held the beam still and everything under its cone became the world.

  He was aware that something larger than his own fear was at work here, and that he was powerless to stop himself, forced to watch the rest happen as if to someone else.

  Under the beam a dirty hand appeared and patted the soft fabric grayed with the indifferent passage of time. The beam swept from one end to the other until it found an opening and the dirty hand peeled back the layers with the grace of a florist stripping petals from a dried rose. With nothing left to stop its progress, the beam shone deeper, revealing the face of a doll burnished and painted with all the color and detail of a proud toy-maker whose principal calling is to animate what can never be. All the maker’s love was evident in the way the thin strands of hair had been combed and made glossy over the tiny painted brows and suggestion of a nose. The beam stilled over this creation and for a lingering moment the illusion achieved its goal; its beholder regarded the doll with some reluctant swell of his heart and returned the smile. And then his heart broke. The only hope for a lasting art vanished as all life’s likeness fell away, revealing black holes where once were eyes, tiny blackened nubs of teeth, and the decaying, bird-like ribs, spine and pelvis of a newborn.

  32

  If it was a sin to keep a woman not his wife in the marriage bed, then it was also a sin to leave the child in that dark forgotten corner of the basement.

  As he climbed the stairs with the bundle in his arms, that which weighed no more than the balsa model airplanes he and Dad had labored over on those endless summer nights of which you can never grasp the fleeting nature until you have grown sad beyond your years, he thought of death. Not only how it seemed to prefer the young and unprotected, but how you can see it every day all around you and never understand it until you are holding it in your arms.

  How death was final, yes. But also how something lived on, trying to communicate with the living. How, too, it was all the sickening secrets revealing themselves, finding depths you did not know you possessed, giving birth to some new you both loathed and welcomed.

  Someone wanted him to know her secret. In delivering hers, she had forced his own to the surface. He had been chosen to share it because she knew, somehow, that her secret was safe with him. That he would understand. That she might rouse his empathy to an act of faith.

  He placed the bundle the only respectful place he knew, a place it would be safe until the rest of it had played out. Setting the swaddling on the natural fiber pad inside the crib, he pulled the blanket over the older, rotted cloth. He would return when she had made clear the rest of her wishes.

  He left the safari lamp on, fearing he would not again be able to make the approach in the dark, and shut the door.

  He had to deal with Nadia first. Something here was testing them. Something had brought them together, and he would need her to go all the way with him. Their survival required a different confession.

  He went to her and rested his tired body next to hers on the bed.

  ‘Did you see anything?’ she said, breaking the ringing silence in his ears.

  He nodded.

  ‘Was someone here?’

  ‘Someone was here,’ he said, closing his eyes. ‘We don’t have much time.’

  ‘Conrad. I want to go home.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Can we go now? Why can’t we go now?’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, inching close to her on the bed, taking one of her dry hands in his. ‘I have never told anyone what I am about to tell you. I think you need to see how we got here. Me to this house. You in this room, with me.’

  If she could see his face, she would not have been able to stay, the pain be damned. He was grinning like a child fascinated by some enormous and just-grasped scheme: the sound of his mother’s car arriving in the driveway at midnight, the orbit of the planets, conception at the cellular level.

  ‘What happened?’

  He leaned over and kissed the exposed white space just below the wound.

  ‘Conrad?’

  ‘Her name was Holly. You remind me of her. Sometimes, when you are with me, it’s like she never went away, Nadia. And that’s strange, I guess, but it’s beautiful, too.’

  His heart filled with something beyond blood as he remembered her face, her eyes full of hope and trust.

  ‘No one knows what we did, Holly and me. No one knows anything about it.’

  Nadia’s grip tightened around his fingers. ‘Did you hurt her?’

  ‘What we did was, we made a baby.’

  HOLLY

  That night in the house we had entered as children and left as something else; we exchanged much more than cells and fluids and the physical particles that transmit. We created a third entity that depended on the two of us, a spirit that was made of the part of myself I had willingly abandoned inside her, and she in me. Having given this, we were never whole again, together or apart. This is something else I say without the benefit of sarcasm. There are days when I wish we had died there before it ended, but end it did.

  Eventually we dressed, packed up the candles, remade the bed and cleaned our dinner plates. We folded our single blue sheet and took it with us out the door, locking everything up the way we had found it. The sheet was Holly’s idea, after I suggested we wash it.

  ‘No,’ she said with territorial authority. ‘They can’t have this one. This one we keep.’

  Later we would refer to it as ‘our night’ or ‘the night’ but we never discussed what had passed between us.

  We both knew she was pregnant.

  We never talked about what we had wished for. The words, the promises, the vows. They were there. But we could not square them with the rest of our seventeen-year-old lives. The secret we carried was about to blow up and we had no way of knowing how much destruction it would leave behind. We wanted to prepare, I think, but we didn’t know how or where to begin.

  Like everything else that had been our secret - the long walks at night, the shoplifting, the drugs, the sleepovers - we wanted the conception of our child to remain ours and ours alone. To tell our parents, our friends, would somehow diminish it.

  Of course we were terrified.

  Looking back, I still believe that if some twist of fate had dropped a million dollars in our laps, killed off our parents or in some other catastrophic way destroyed the rest of the world for us, we would have made it. We would have emerged stunned but ultimately glad, free to live out the secret life we had made together.

  How did it finally end?

  I thought that would be the hard part. But now that the rest has been told I find that everything that came before was the pain. Seeing myself with her has always been the hard part. The end is easy. The end, unlike Holly and the five years I knew her and loved her, is not alive. The end is easy because it has no life, no soul. It is easy to tell because it is death.

  When Holly’s mother found out her daughter was pregnant and that we wanted to have the baby and m
ake a go of the life we had imagined together, she was almost freakishly supportive. But there was the other half. Holly begged her mother not to, but eventually Mrs Bauerman had to tell Mr Bauerman.

  Mr Bauerman had more money and therefore more power, and he did not take it well. He sent Holly away.

  To a private school? A town? Another country?

  I searched for two years. When I would not stay away from her father’s house, he had me arrested. I wrote letters, talked with lawyers and worked on Mrs Bauerman until I was a weeping, vengeful menace that even she had to turn her back on. The family moved to be with her, or so her friends told me.

  Eventually my mother wore me down. She said she would support me as long as it took, but I had to let go.

  The reason I quit was pretty simple, actually.

  I realized, reading some book or another at three in the morning on my mother’s threadbare sofa, that if Holly really wanted to see me, she would have found a way to write or call. She had done neither. I knew that whatever she had gone through to get to the point where she didn’t want to see me or talk to me had also killed her. Everything between us had been real. But whatever forces her father had marshaled, whatever people or doctors or hospitals he brought in to dissolve her wishes and render her speechless, whatever world she lived in now, well, they were stronger.

  I was just a kid. I tried to be a man, but in the end I was just a kid.

  You think of them living somewhere with some other guy. Maybe he is an executive, or owns his own company. You see them standing on a porch, holding hands. Your love is now a woman and your unborn child is now a son. He’s ten. He rides a skateboard. He needs a haircut. You think you will be upset by this, but you are wrong. Seeing this would make you happy, because then you would know.

  I never knew where she went, or if she kept my child. That is the sucking black hole of it. I never knew. I let go, but you never let go.

  I moved, worked, tried college a few times, and then my mother died. I never saw my father, but someone told me later that he had been there, at her funeral. He went back to his life and the last time I saw him he was burned and dying of a stroke in Chicago.