The Birthing House Read online

  With his blood, his hopes.

  No longer content, Conrad stretched out, not caring what funny tent shape his penis made as it unfolded like a miniature welcome banner. He rolled to one side, facing her. She smelled of earth and lavender and something otherwise herbal - new scents for her in this new place. Her belly was nearly flat except for the smallest of rolls just above the waistband, and he loved this, too. He called it her little chile relleno and she would slap him, but it didn’t bother her, not really. Her hips were womanly wide, but with her height she remained sleek, especially when prone, like now. She stood a little over six feet to his five-nine. His fingers grazed her fine brown navel hairs. Her eyes gleamed under heavy lids, glassy and black as mountain ponds at midnight.

  It was a beginning, and he was a man who loved beginnings more than middles or endings.

  ‘Come,’ Jo said. Or maybe Con, half of his name.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘. . . not ready.’

  ‘Not what?’ His hand found the elastic rim of her waistband, then moved into the open front of his boxer shorts on her.

  ‘. . . about behbee,’ she murmured.

  ‘What, Baby?’

  Not baby. Upper case, Baby. A nickname he used.

  ‘. . . owin me the behbee . . . be-ah-eye,’ she mumbled, which sounded like was going to be all right.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, like it was his idea too. He had no idea.

  ‘. . . bee woul’ go a father.’

  We should go farther.

  He pushed one, then two fingers lower to her mound, but her legs were crossed and he swerved off course, touching only her thigh. Just her thigh, but soft was soft and his excitement ratcheted up another notch.

  ‘- not ready,’ she squeaked, rolling away.

  Shit. Might not have been sleeping before, but was now. Snoring, too. Weird, he thought. Had she done this before? With the eyes open and the talking?

  Should he let her sleep or try one more time?

  Yes . . . no. He kissed her goodnight and rolled on his back, allowing the fan to push warm summer air over his fading, obedient hard-on. His mind dropped into that lower gear, the one that is not yet sleep but somehow dreaming already.

  In the half-dream he was in the house, beside her, finding the wetness and sliding in not for the first time but as if they had been moving this way for minutes or an hour. He was all corded muscle and arched away, feeling her soak him in her own undulations. The movement was soothing, almost non-sexual, like being rocked in a crib.

  Her grip on him strengthened and clenched, pushing back with legs and ass, drawing his ejaculate out in a sudden burst that ended too quickly, leaving him weak and sleepy all over again.

  Drifting . . .

  Until the dream, the same one or some new post-coital version, was split by the sound of crying. His body twitched itself awake, and he knew these were not Jo’s tears. This was the noise a newborn makes after sucking in its first violent breath as it enters this violent world. It was a sound that had skipped mewling and launched straight into wailing, and it was coming from behind a wall or far away.

  Faintly, under the baby’s hacking shriek, there arose another sound. This one did sound like a woman, and he imagined the infant’s mother, or the midwife, perhaps. This older cry in the dark was a trailing scream, as if something was pulling her away from her child and down a long corridor that narrowed to nothing.

  Panicked, he rolled over to shake Jo - why hasn’t she woken up and grabbed me? - and felt the cool stirring of air as she lifted off the bed. He could see only blackness, and with the drone of the fan he could not hear her feet padding on the wood floor. A flash of her silhouette in the doorway left a retinal echo, but the room was too dark to grasp any details. If he saw her at all, she was gone now.

  To the bathroom, he thought. There she goes, carrying my seed. The semi-sleep-molestation and abrupt ending made him wince with guilt, but he did not seek her out in the ensuing silence. Exhausted from the day of unpacking (and tossed dream sex), Conrad decided the crying was but a fragment of the dream, a lingering audible planted by her words.

  ‘. . . the behbee, the behbee . . .’

  The crying returned once, quieter and farther away, until like a passing thunderstorm it faded to nothing.

  He hovered on the edge of sleep.

  Something’s wrong.

  He sat up and rubbed his eyes. She had not returned.

  ‘Jo?’

  She did not answer.

  ‘Jo,’ he said, louder. ‘Baby, you okay?’

  His eyes adjusted to the dark. The dogs were standing at the master bedroom door facing the hall, whining, tails stiff like the hairs on their shoulders. Conrad flattened his body and counted to ten. It’s rational, he told himself. When something so unexplainable and real (the dogs made it real) as a crying baby in your childless home wakes you, it is normal to ignore it and go back to sleep. So back he went, as deep as a man can go, until he forgot all about the crying sounds and her cold departure, her absolute absence. He did not think again about the sleep-slouched shape he’d glimpsed through the window, fading into the house.

  Even when, in the morning, waking to a half-empty bed, he padded downstairs and found her where he’d left her before he stepped out for a smoke at dusk, sleeping on the sofa.

  Alone.

  5

  Well, not really alone. The dogs looked up at him but did not abandon their mistress. Jo was curled around a body pillow, arms above her head, eyes open but unmoving.

  ‘Morning, kids,’ he said. ‘Morning, Mommy.’

  Jo blinked and her mantis arms folded down. ‘Coffee?’

  After waiting for the pot to fill, Conrad brought her a cup the way she liked it - strong, with milk and a heap of non-dairy creamer. Had to have it both ways, did his wife.

  She sat up and accepted the mug, leering at him over the steaming brew. ‘Are you mad at me?’

  ‘Why would I be?’ He was thinking he should have made iced tea.

  ‘I fell asleep on the couch.’

  Conrad shrugged. ‘Waiting makes it better, right?’

  ‘We’ve been waiting a long time. You must be going out of your mind.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s funny. I think the move sort of tapped me out. All this work. It’s good for us. I feel good.’

  Jo sipped her coffee, unable or unwilling to pursue the topic of what was good for them now. He guessed she was going to do the safe thing and wait for him to bring it up, and that was fine. He could postpone that forever.

  ‘So.’ He heard a wet lapping sound and looked at the dogs. Luther was licking the small flap of skin where his balls used to be. ‘What’s on deck today?’

  ‘I thought I’d do the unthinkable and go to Wal-Mart. We need trashcans, sponges. House stuff.’

  ‘I have a little project going in the garage. Mind if I stay here?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. I keep forgetting we have a garage.’

  ‘The doors don’t work. It’s a mess.’

  ‘Are you turning over a new leaf, becoming a handyman?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It’s kind of a surprise, something I wanted to do with a little of the money left over. So don’t go in there for a few days, ’kay?’

  ‘Ooh, a surprise.’ Jo studied him a bit, then lost interest. ‘When I get back I think I’ll tackle the garden, get my hands dirty.’

  ‘Save some energy for me.’ He offered a lame and hopeful smile.

  ‘Not so tapped out, after all.’ She slapped him on the ass and went up to change.

  He had knocked down all but two book boxes forming the massive pyramid in the library when the phone rang. Her voice echoed up the servants’ stairs, excited.

  ‘Oh, hi! Yes, we’re great. Everything is just beautiful.’ A long pause ensued. Jo punctuated the beats with a series of ‘Uhhuhs’. His stomach lurched when he heard her say, ‘Donna! Sudden is right.’ And then in a lower voice, ‘Of course I’m interested. ’

 
Donna was Donna Tangelo, Jo’s headhunter. Calling from LA, already.

  Conrad folded up more boxes and continued his eavesdropping for another five minutes.

  ‘Yes, Donna, we’ll talk it over and I’ll call you back tomorrow, I promise. Thanks for thinking of me.’

  Before he could ask what the hell that was all about, Jo bounded up the stairs and announced, ‘I’m hopping in the shower, honey.’

  He flexed his mouth for another thirty seconds, turned away from the closed bathroom door and went to the kitchen for a beer to celebrate the completion of the unpacking. It was the time a cold beer tasted best, especially a Coors Light on a hot day.

  Upstairs the shower stopped hissing. He thought about her up there, covered with nothing more than water droplets in the humid afternoon. She would apply lotion to every inch of her skin and then dress quickly, throwing her hair into a ponytail before it could dry. The window to spontaneous post-shower sex narrowed with the age of the marriage. He did not want to lose her to another job that made her a basket of stress, but running up there with a boner wasn’t going to change that.

  Ah well, there was the cold beer.

  They were eating pizza over the little two-top, a rusted wrought-iron thing they had purchased at the Rose Bowl Flea Market for twenty dollars and decided to call quaint. After a month of pretending school was out for the summer, the prospect of yet more change lent the meal a first-date feel. He was alarmed by how difficult it was to read his wife as she set her pizza slice down, eyeing him cautiously.

  And they’re off!

  ‘So, you think I should take it?’

  ‘It’s very flattering.’ He could tell she wanted to take it, so he spoke slowly, carefully. ‘Maybe a little soon? Like maybe you want to keep your options open before you jump back in?’

  ‘Yeah, no, I love it here, sweetie,’ she said. ‘I really do.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, if I took this, we wouldn’t have to touch our new little nest egg.’

  ‘So it’s purely a money thing?’ The old sales routine: ask questions, put them in a box. Yes or no. Shut down and close.

  ‘No, but there’s less than we thought,’ she said, her face tightening. ‘Of my share, anyway. I took what you gave me and paid off the rest of our debts.’

  Conrad set his pizza slice down on the paper plate and patted his lips with a paper towel. ‘And?’

  Up until the insurance from the accident, Conrad’s income from the bookstore and various dubious writing assignments had been so small Jo had handled all of their finances except for pocket money and a few small bills: DirectTV, his cell phone, the lone credit card in his name only with its laughable $700 credit limit. After he paid cash for the new house, he’d given Jo half of the remaining two hundred and change to pay off her MBA ($43,000) and told her to ‘Set up some IRAs or something.’

  ‘And we have to be careful now.’

  Then she explained exactly how fragile their new little nest egg was.

  Another twelve thousand went to her father, who’d loaned them the moving and deposit money on the LA property. Somehow Conrad had managed to forget about this. Another four thousand for the movers to get out. It had only cost sixteen hundred to move from Denver to Los Angeles, but that had been metro to metro. LA to the middle of Buttfuck, Egypt, or at least Black Earth, Wisconsin, cost a lot more because ‘there aren’t a lot of Cheeseheads heading west,’ she said, and Conrad laughed. In pain.

  ‘There were other debts,’ she said.

  ‘Other other debts?’ He really had no idea. He’d always assumed the bulk of their lifestyle, furnishings and vacations had come straight from Jo’s income, which had been north of eighty thousand last time he’d asked.

  ‘The credit cards were pretty bad.’ She winced.

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘Thirty-four thousand.’

  He winced back. ‘We had thirty-four thousand dollars in credit card debt?’ He could not keep his voice from rising. ‘For what?’

  She sighed. ‘Conrad, I was pretty much paying for everything. Rent was twenty-two hundred alone. Utilities, the cars.’

  ‘I sold my Maxima a year ago.’

  ‘I know, honey, but you were upside down on the equity by almost three thousand.’

  ‘Still, thirty-four thousand? Jo, Baby, c’mon! Maybe ten thousand went to furniture and stuff, but—’

  ‘I wanted to have nice things, okay? I wasn’t working my ass off to live in an empty house. Your TV was two thousand.’

  ‘Jesus! If I had known—’

  ‘Conrad, stop. I wanted to get you something special for your birthday. Don’t be difficult.’

  ‘Is that -’ He tilted his beer and suckled. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Need another beer, honey?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She fetched him one. She knew this was harder for him than it was for her.

  ‘Thanks, Baby.’

  ‘Where were we?’

  ‘I was about to ask, is that all?’

  She patted his hand. ‘And I was about to say in a hesitant tone, well, not exactly. I took a pay cut a year ago.’

  ‘A year ago.’

  Jesus, wasn’t this something you talked about with your husband, even when you kept separate checkbooks?

  ‘David sat me down and asked me if I liked my job. I lied and said yes.’ David Donaldson was the VP of Sales at her former company, PrimaPro Pharmaceuticals. Jo’d called it minddestroyingly boring work for a merciless boss, but it paid well. Or had paid well. ‘He said I was talented and worked hard, but he couldn’t really afford a director of marketing and another for sales, that whole bullshit spiel. “We’re a sales firm, not a marketing firm.” Like it was my fault he hired me before the class action bullshit tanked the stock.’

  ‘Jo, why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Oh, you didn’t really want to hear about it. I don’t blame you.’

  ‘I did too want to hear about it.’

  ‘Conrad Harrison. You’d just gotten laid off. I was scared. And you were never home. Nights at the bookstore while I worked days. We hardly ever saw each other. That was the deal we made until something better came up. I understood that. Now we have to pay for it. Can we leave it at that?’

  He stared at her, unsure who was to blame.

  ‘We carved that whole life out and it wasn’t easy to cut back. I loved that house. I wanted to buy it—’

  ‘We never could have afforded it. Or did you really want to stay in LA for another five years?’ He loaded that question to the hilt.

  ‘No. No. This is a great house. I’m just trying to adapt. Think about the next move. My next move. Job, I mean.’

  Conrad sighed. ‘I’m sorry. Cutting your salary down. You shouldn’t have had to deal with that blow by yourself. That must have been horrible.’

  ‘It wasn’t. But I might’ve gone shopping a few times to ease the pain.’

  Her forced laughter made him sad. They had lost control of a lot more than their finances in the past year. They had lost even the normal day-to-day verbal tennis ball going back and forth across the net. The financial shit was the same as the thing with That Fucker Jake. And not so different from Conrad’s thing. The thing with the girl, Rachel. Not that he’d done anything, but still. It had been close. Bad choices they wouldn’t have made if they’d kept each other in the loop. The money was like that - it came from the same place, anyway. Worst of all, here they were talking in a healthy way and it sucked, yes, but it was honest. He didn’t want it to end. He wanted to sit here in their new old kitchen until they were discussing holes in their Medicare coverage.

  And it was pretty clear that, since his father’s death, money was not the real issue. She needed something to do, he’d rushed her, and now here they were.

  ‘I just want you to be happy,’ he said.

  ‘It’s eight weeks,’ she said. ‘And the next training class starts day after tomorrow.’

  He wouldn’t taste another beer
this good until she came home.

  Jo did not cry as they said their goodbyes inside the Dane County Airport. Surrender had been reached; neither husband nor wife had the energy to continue the debate. Conrad shuffled aside to make room for three generations huddled around a tall girl in a University of Wisconsin sweatshirt, the whole famdamly seeing off their pride and joy for the summer.

  Conrad squeezed Jo’s hand. ‘I can stay a while.’

  ‘You’re sweet,’ she said, releasing his grip. ‘I trusted you about moving here. Trust me on this one, for a little while?’

  Trust was still a loaded word - he could make a list of loaded words now - and he let the comment slide. He kissed her scar for comfort. The thin line ran from the left arch of her top lip to the exact middle-bottom of her nose, one of childhood’s accidental fissures he’d always found sexy, the snarl of a femme fatale.

  He passed another Perkins and looped around Madison on the Beltline at a steady sixty miles per, stealing glimpses of the Capitol dome at the top of State Street. Then he was winding his way on to Highway 151, which split off Madison and went south to Black Earth and then another fifty miles to Iowa. Suburbs gave way to box stores and furniture outlets.

  After that, farmland. The familiar rolling greens. Dense mini-forests gathered around the streams. The silent sweet manure field of nothingness, tranquil as the sea. Just as it had been when he discovered it the first time, it was a lonely patch of country, but soothing, almost hypnotic. Made him glad they’d left California.

  Conrad saw the sign for Black Earth, Pop. 2713, and switched off the cruise control. Riding the business loop, he passed a farm equipment dealership and a graveyard full of enormous granite headstones. Apparently, these small towns liked to keep their dead front and center, on Main Street if possible. Would they live here long enough to raise a family, a family that would bury him in yonder graveyard? How soon would it come? Another thirty years, or forty? Fifty was not out of the question, but even that seemed too short a time. Look at Dad. One day you’re working and joking around with the boys with your hand on the box and ZAP - you’re fucking fried, end of story. No more time to apologize to your son.