The Birthing House Read online

  He nosed the Volvo alongside the curb and stared through the windshield, up at his house. Again, that nagging question:

  If not for to have children, what are we here for?

  He sat in the Volvo and listened to the tick of the engine and creak of the upholstery. The idea that she might not come back pressed down on him like a seatbelt possessed. Perversely, his mind tightened the belt further by reminding him of the last one who’d left him.

  Holly.

  Why was he thinking about her now? Holly was more than twelve years ago. What could a high school romance hold to his life now? To Jo? To this beautiful new home?

  Don’t think about Holly. She’s old news.

  Her tears. She cried for what we did.

  ‘Enough of this shit.’ He exited the car, bidding Holly to stay buried.

  He was on the porch with one hand on the door when the man started yelling.

  ‘Harrison! Conrad Harrison!’

  For a second, Conrad was sure the voice belonged to his father, that the whole thing had been a strange dream and now he really was dead and the old man was coming to lead him away for good. He turned around slowly.

  But it was only Leon Laski, the former owner of 818 Heritage Street. They’d not met, mainly because Laski had groused about the closing dates and Roddy had kept them out of it. ‘Believe me, it’s better this way,’ Roddy had said. ‘You don’t want to meet the S-O-B.’

  Too late - here came the S-O-B, barreling up the sidewalk and across Conrad’s lawn. In his hands, a heavy wooden soda crate, stiff-armed away from his body as if it were full of dirty diapers.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Laski dropped the crate on the porch. ‘This all belongs to you now.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Conrad said, a skeptical grandfather.

  Laski was shorter than Conrad by six inches, but he was clearly the larger man. He had the hard-packed muscle, ruddy cheeks and battered hands only middle-aged mechanics and sailors seem to acquire. His gray-blond beard and scraggily locks were more frayed rope than actual hair. He wore blue workman’s pants and a plain brown shirt with a name patch that read LEON stitched to the tit.

  ‘Wife packed her up on accident . . . crazy bitch.’ Laski’s accent was aggressively northern Wisconsin.

  The dogs went off like fireworks.

  ‘Quiet down,’ Conrad yelled at the door, though he was glad he had Alice and Luther if things turned nasty. ‘Sorry, dogs aren’t used to the place yet. I’m Conrad Harrison.’

  ‘Ya say.’ Laski ignored the proffered mitt, removed a moist, splintered toothpick from behind his ear, and began to gnaw at it like a beaver, his tongue darting over his callused thumb and forefinger as if they were next. ‘Anycase, don’t need more’n I already got to unpack, so dare ya go.’

  ‘Fine. Thanks, I think.’ The crate was covered with a sheet of black felt tucked into the sides, obscuring the contents. ‘Something for the house?’

  ‘Could say that, ya sure could.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Well, looks like you cleaned out pretty good. I’ll call Roddy if I find anything.’

  Laski whistled through his toothpick. The end flapped wetly like a ruined party favor. ‘Cleaned out all right, all right, but I wouldn’t call it pretty anything. You two woulda taken another week getting your shit together, we’d a lost the deal on the new farm. But you go ahead and tell ’at big buck Roddy anything you want. I got what I need. We’re clear.’

  Conrad managed to smile. ‘Anything else I can do for you today, Leon? No? Good.’ He grabbed the crate and turned for the door.

  Laski spoke in a low, slithering voice. ‘You got kids, boy?’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I hear dem mutts tearing up your floors in dare, but I don’t see no kids. Appears you don’t got none yet, but what I mean is, you plan on having any?’

  ‘No, we - why would you ask that?’

  ‘Just curious.’ Laski pointed one thick finger at Conrad’s front door. ‘You have yourself a nice life in ’at old house.’

  Before Conrad could reply, Laski wheeled on his dirty boots and knuckled down the walk, flicking his toothpick in a high arc as he disappeared around the corner, his vehicle out of sight or non-existent.

  Conrad slipped inside and summoned his courage to open the crate.

  6

  Alice and Luther pogoed at him as if he’d abandoned them for weeks instead of hours. He set the crate on the coffee table and rolled around with them, letting them slobber on his face. There wasn’t a pill on the market that cured mild depression - or just a shitty day - as fast as these two dogs.

  Then he quit stalling and went to the crate. The covering was indeed felt, but thick as a shroud. As he lifted one corner he was overcome by an irrational thought: what if it’s a trap? Like the kind used to catch badgers or snap my hand off at the wrist? But that was ridiculous. Nothing more than his imagination blowing off steam.

  Wedged inside the crate was a large portfolio or scrapbook. It was heavy. Maybe five, six pounds. Why in the hell would Laski think this belonged to him?

  Conrad examined the cracked spine and yellowed paper edges. It wasn’t a book. It was an album, but photo albums had ten, maybe twenty cardboard pages. This thing had fifty or more, some thin, others not.

  The first page had pinpoints of black mold in the crease, but he could see the rest well enough. It was a charcoal sketch. Bare land, the lines done over and over, mostly grass and a few shrubs and a single sapling with no leaves. The plot of land stretched back over a rolling slope, narrowing on the page to give depth to the short horizon. Deeper, ‘over’ the rise of the land he could just make out two slashes of the artist’s pen. At first he thought it might be another tree, but no, upon closer inspection, his nose almost touching the musty paper, he could see the clean lines, one shorter and horizontal over the taller vertical.

  A cross.

  And why not? Black Earth, like a lot of Middle America, was full of devout Christians and probably had been more so a century ago.

  But why did the rest of the sketch seem familiar?

  ‘Hey - shit.’

  He backed out the front door and up the cracked sidewalk to the street. He looked at the book and then back up at his house. His house and the lot. Standing next to him, almost exactly one third of the distance from the western property line, was a tree that topped out at least twenty feet higher than Conrad’s roof, its trunk as thick as three men. The house was two and a half stories with the attic - the tree was pushing fifty feet. He looked back at the drawing, then back up at the tree. The huge tree stood where the sapling in the drawing stood, and the slope of the land in the sketch matched Conrad’s yard.

  ‘How ’bout that,’ Conrad said, smiling for the first time all day. It wasn’t quite like discovering buried treasure, but it still gave him a child’s satisfaction. If the MLS printout had been accurate, this tree was, like his house, over one hundred and forty years old. ‘The house’s birthday tree.’

  The next page wasn’t a sketch. Pasted to the stiff yellow paper was a photo of unusual size, roughly seven inches high and nine inches wide. The light looked rusty, the photo developed in sepia. The framing and scale matched the sketch, but that was where the similarities ended.

  The people gathered in front of the completed house looked cold, arms crossed, angry that they had been called out for this impromptu Kodak moment. All were women, late teens to geriatric and everything in between, garbed in the frumpy black dresses and white bonnets of maids or nurses. Little Midwife on the Prairie. Maybe a family . . . no. They all wore such dour expressions and pale countenances, he was unable to imagine them as anything other than employees. He didn’t think more than a few of the women were relations; their size, shape and facial features were too diverse to be of the same stock.

  Relations, stock.

  My God, he thought, I’m musing in the vernacular of their time just looking at them, and it feels right. No, it feels proper. And what is, what w
as, the purpose of this gathering? If they were marking some special day, why the pug chins and hunched backs? The tired boredom in their sunken black eyes? Some of them were looking away from the lens, as if someone or something on the street had captured their attention. Or maybe they had simply refused to look into the camera. This made more sense because they were looking in different directions, not focused on any one point of interest. The women had no shape except bulky, even the one with the breasts.

  ‘No, they were bosoms back then,’ Conrad said to the book. ‘Bosoms or teats, depending on the company you ladies kept.’

  Another woman, this one in her twenties or thirties (it was hard to tell; for all he knew women had aged twice as fast at the turn of the century), was holding her skirts above the ground as if preparing to step over a puddle. Another stood ramrod straight with a broom clutched in her thick fists.

  Wrapping up his inspection, Conrad found only two common details uniting these women. They all wore black boots that rose above the ankles, mannish in their thick soles and metal eyelets and pointed toes. The other was that none was smiling. Not all were sour or angry. It was simply that happiness, even a forced smile, seemed a foreign thing to them.

  His thoughts turned to the unseen photographer. Would he have been their employer, the owner of the house? A doctor? Or a hired man, a local with the equipment and a knack for taking pictures? Conrad guessed the latter, for it was clear even to his untrained eye that, grim as its subjects were, the photo itself was quite good. Nothing you’d want to hang on your staircase wall (it might give someone cause to fall down the stairs), but a strong piece of work nonetheless. In its own droll way, it was almost lovely.

  Who said the owner was a man? Maybe the house had been full of women, and only women.

  Midwives, wet nurses.

  Mothers, daughters, granddaughters.

  What if some of them are still here?

  He went over them again one by one, his nose close enough to the warped paper that he caught the scent of a sun-dried milk carton.

  Roaming, searching . . .

  His eyes locked on the one he had missed, the one standing behind the first row, elevated in her stance on the porch step so that only her face was visible between the shoulders of the other women. He saw her clearly then, recognized her open mouth, the teeth exposed as if preparing to bite.

  No. Not possible.

  But there she was, hollow-eyed and waxen like the others. The tall raven-haired woman in the photo stared back at him with something akin to hatred, and he recognized her, of course he recognized her, for hers was a face he had come to know intimately. She of the compressed lightning bolt of a scar, the lovely fissure running from under her nose to her lip.

  An involuntary cry escaped his throat as he ran into the house, leaving splayed on the sidewalk the album containing a century-old photo of his wife.

  7

  Conrad stood in the front sitting room, looking out the window to the album on the ground. Twenty minutes had elapsed since he’d fled the scene. What if the neighbors had seen that little show? What were they thinking of the nice young couple from California now, ’Rad?

  He must have been mistaken.

  Feeling foolish, he put his hand on the doorknob and stopped. If he went back for the album, he would have to bring it back inside the house or throw it away in one of the new Rubbermaid cans out front. Either way, he knew he would have to look one more time. How could he not? His wife was in there, with teeth that wanted to bite.

  Even if it turned out to be a coincidence, a striking resemblance and nothing more, he did not want to see that woman again. She had those black eyes. That starved look only women who’ve suffered and absorbed evil can project. And if it was a coincidence, what did that say about his state of mind, his wife gone only a few hours?

  Just before he turned the knob there was a quick, pitter-pat rapping at his door. Conrad’s heart jumped. A woman was standing on his porch, a shadow shifting behind the gauze curtain Jo had installed last week.

  Christ! Who the fuck was this? Was she coming out of the photo to ask for her supper?

  ‘Conrad, everything all right?’ The voice was country-sweet and tinged with humor. Ah, yes - Gail Grum, his new next-door neighbor. Conrad and Jo had met Gail and her humongous husband three minutes after staggering out of the car, foggy from the drive from California. He remembered feeling overwhelmed by Gail’s politeness. ‘You left your book on the sidewalk, do you want me to put it on the porch?’

  Conrad opened the door and smiled. ‘Sorry about that. Phone was ringing. Thank you, Gail.’

  He accepted the album and tucked it under one arm while she plowed on.

  ‘I hate to bother you - I’m sure you’re still unpacking. Do you two need anything to help you get settled in?’

  ‘Oh, no, you’re not a Hobbit - bother, I mean. Sorry.’

  He didn’t mean to say it. Most people would have found it rude. Gail laughed like he’d told a terrific joke.

  ‘A Hobbit! Maybe I am!’

  Gail was five feet tall when standing on a phone book, a fifty-year-old in better shape than Conrad at seventeen. Her smile was warm and toothy. As she spoke her hands never stopped moving, waving like three fawning members of a welcome committee. He found it impossible to be abrupt with her. She was wearing the same gear as when they’d first met four weeks ago: a tank top that revealed her strong, tanned arms, green cargo shorts with a pair of cotton gloves hanging from one pocket, and yellow rubber gardening clogs with no socks.

  The dogs broke out and clobbered Gail with affection.

  ‘Okay, Luther, Alice, stop that.’

  Gail only encouraged them. ‘Look at them go. Upsy-daisy! Oh, how sweet! They’re beautiful. Oh, they must be so happy in their new home! Joanna said you rescued them - they must love you soooo much.’

  It was this immediate taking to his dogs that warmed Conrad to Gail Grum. ‘I’m sorry, you’re just standing there. Would you like to come in? I have iced tea.’

  Gail flapped her hands. ‘Oh, no. Listen, I saw you run inside and I just wanted to make sure everything was all right.’

  ‘I was up late unpacking and didn’t sleep well, been a mess all morning, and . . .’ he trailed off, taken by the motherly look in her eyes. She wasn’t just listening to him; she was hanging on every word. Without meaning to, he blurted it out. ‘Jo left me.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Oh, not like that,’ he said. ‘She took a job. She’s in Detroit for eight weeks of something they call intensive consultative sales training.’

  ‘But you just got here. Eight weeks? What are you going to do? I’d just go crazy if John left me!’

  ‘Ah, yeah, well,’ he said. ‘It’s a great job. Just kind of sudden.’

  He stood there in the doorway for another ten minutes, filling Gail in on all the details. He told her how he was already looking forward to Jo’s first trip home at the three-week break, and added, ‘but hey, at least I have the dogs’.

  ‘We’re having the Bartholomews over for roast beef, even though it’s summer, I know, we like our hearty meals, ha-ha-ha. Have you met the Bartholomews, across the street?’

  ‘I haven’t met anybody.’

  ‘Oh, you have to come over, Conrad. It’ll be so much fun!’

  ‘That sounds great, but don’t wait for me. I might have to finish this . . . thing.’ He didn’t have a thing, but he wanted an out. ‘You’re very kind.’

  She slapped his hands. ‘I’m not kind. This is what we do. You don’t know it yet, but you now live next to some of the best people you’ll ever know. Anytime after seven is fine. See you tonight, Conrad!’

  Conrad watched her goofy garden clogs flapping across the yard. When she had popped back into her house, he closed the door and dropped the album on the coffee table.

  It’s not that I’m afraid of it, he told himself, heading up the stairs to check his email. It’s simply that there is no possible way the woman in the ph
oto could be my wife and I’ve got better things to do than stare at a bunch of memories that belong to someone else. So fuck that, okay?

  Right.

  It was after seven when the phone rang. That made it past eight in Detroit, but she was still all kinds of excited from her big first day, which irritated him.

  ‘Is Detroit everything you dreamed it would be?’

  ‘Actually, it’s nice. The offices are in Troy, not really Detroit, and it’s pleasant in a Midwest corporate way. Sort of like the Long Beach of Detroit, without the ocean. My suite is a dump, but kinda cozy.’

  ‘The Residence thing?’

  ‘It’s like going back to school. Everyone eats at the buffet in the clubhouse every night and there’s a sand volleyball court and a pool. I met a nice girl named Shirley. She’s twenty-three, two kids. She was crying all day because she misses them so much. But then I was thinking, well, if little Shirley from Akron can make it here, then I can definitely make it, right?’

  ‘Of course, Baby. You’re brilliant. You’ll do fine.’

  But what about me? What am I going to do?

  ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘I’ve been invited to dinner.’

  ‘Really?’ The way she perked up, he knew she had been hoping for this.

  ‘Gail came by earlier.’

  ‘Oh, sweetie, please go. I don’t want them thinking we’re rude.’

  ‘Well, she knows you’re gone, so she can’t think you’re rude. But I told her I was tired, and I am.’ He was inching toward the album on the coffee table.

  ‘We need to get off on the right foot.’

  ‘I can see them rolling out the Pictionary now.’

  Jo sighed. ‘Conrad.’

  ‘I know.’

  They said goodbye. Then, before he could chicken out, he flipped the cover open and stared at the photo of the women in black. It was night and the lighting was dim in the living room. He had to squint to make out their faces. At first he couldn’t find her and he was sure he had imagined the whole thing. His eyes darted and then he locked on her, saw her teeth and her scar—