The Birthing House Page 5

  ‘Fuck you!’ Conrad threw the album across the room. He had not imagined seeing her the first time. He had not imagined seeing her now.

  It was Jo.

  The dogs darted to the couch, swerving wide of his path. He felt like an asshole for losing it like that. But he couldn’t ignore her now whether he tossed the album in the garbage or set it on fire and danced on the ashes.

  What if there are more? What if she’s in a whole bunch of them? What will you do then, ’Rad? What if she’s on every page staring back at you with those glossy black eyes, smiling into the camera so close you can see into her soul?

  No, impossible. With six billion people on the planet (not even counting the dead) there had to be an explanation. It simply could not be his wife.

  And he was not crazy. Lonely, yes. Recovering from a very stressful exit from the City of Angels, yes. But not insane. He needed to investigate the house’s history, these women, but where would he begin? Who else besides Leon Laski would know about the house? People who lived here. People who—

  ‘The neighbors.’

  He hopped off the couch and ran upstairs to get ready for dinner. A few laughs, some human company. Jo would be pleased with the effort.

  8

  The House of Grum was another Victorian, barn-red with crème and robin’s egg trim, pillars slim as dancers, with bursts of filigree on top. The front porch was narrow, wrapping around and widening on one side. Inside, the décor was somewhere between antiquarian and mid-twentieth-century frugal farmer’s wife. The dinner table would seat twelve, but tonight was attended by only two couples - Gail and John Grum, and the neighbors, Steve and Bailey Bartholomew - plus Conrad. Both couples were comfortably attired in Lands’ End (worldwide headquarters was just two towns over, people kept telling him): cargo shorts, untucked shirts with button-down collars, slip-on shoes. Canvas shades of ecru, loden, heather abound.

  This is us in ten years, Conrad thought. But if this was the Game of Life, he was missing his pink peg. If Jo were here, she would do all the talking, knowing what to reveal and what to hold back. As it stood, he felt like a fraud and kept waiting for one of them to call him out on it. What do you do? Is it true you paid cash for that house? What the hell are you doing in Wisconsin, Conrad?

  Hiding? Or running?

  But they didn’t call him on anything. Instead, they fed him and watched him like the polite stranger he was, and spoke kindly, even when he began to pry.

  ‘So what’s the story with the guy used to live in my new house,’ Conrad said, pushing his roast beef aside to dig into Gail’s peach cobbler.

  ‘What about Leon Laski is it you want to know?’ Gail Grum said, a spoonful of vanilla ice cream hovering under her nose.

  ‘Oh, I dunno,’ he lied, reminding himself these people might very well still be friends with the man who once owned his house. ‘He came by earlier today and, well, it was weird. Some issues with the closing, I guess.’

  Gail pulled the spoon from her mouth slowly. ‘Leon can be a touch abrasive at times, but they’re good people.’

  Big John Grum turned to his wife, ‘How long were dey in dare? Ten, twelve years?’ At six-six and pushing two hundred and fifty pounds, Big John towered over his little garden gnome of a wife. He was a carpenter and a mason, with the hands to show for it. The gentle giant was also a haggard giant.

  ‘Oh, nooo. More like sixteen,’ Gail corrected.

  Big John shook his head. ‘Leon’s just upset he’s overextended himself on that farmette. He was probably all in a rush to get the money out of your deal, and now that you’re here he doesn’t know where to put his family. Don’t even have plumbing’s what I hear. Be another three months yet.’

  ‘Poor Leon’s going to be shitting in the woods all summer long,’ Steve Bartholomew added. Steve had the tidy presence of a financial manager, but his voice filled the room. He strode around with his belly out, red in the face, his gray-flecked black hair shorn military tight enough that Conrad could see the shiny sunburn on his scalp. As with many men of his disposition, Steve’s wife was his opposite. Bailey Bartholomew was so quiet she seemed to disappear, popping back into the conversation only to temper her husband.

  ‘In the woods, huh?’ Conrad said. ‘Do we have poison ivy around these parts?’

  ‘Yes, we do!’ Gail said, laughing with the others.

  Steve drained half his wine and fixed on Conrad. ‘A man raises his family in a house, I don’t care how well he does in the transaction - and that house was worth a lot less when Leon bought it - it’s never easy leaving your home.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Conrad said, feigning sympathy. ‘I’m sure Leon’s a decent guy.’

  Gail touched Conrad’s arm. ‘Greer - that’s his wife - was probably just worried about the kids. Four is a lot to carry around, with or without plumbing.’

  ‘Three,’ Steve corrected. ‘But she’s preggo again.’

  ‘Actually, Steve,’ Big John put in. ‘Wasn’t it two plus the pregnancy? ’

  ‘Oh, that’s right,’ Gail said. ‘I can’t keep track.’

  Steve scoffed. ‘Don’t even try. It’s like ten little Indians over there.’

  ‘Okay, everybody,’ Big John said, heading to the back porch for a post-meal smoke.

  A mutually regrettable silence ensued.

  ‘How old are his kids?’ Conrad waited, but suddenly no one wanted to crunch the numbers. All eyes around the table had drifted away or downward.

  Steve nudged Conrad in the ribs. ‘Our Leon’s a regular Johnny Appleseed. Shoots more bullseyes than Robin Hood.’

  ‘Steeeeve!’ Bailey wailed. ‘You are terrible.’

  Steve winked at Conrad - aren’t I a piece of work? - and Conrad smiled, realizing he liked Steve and his cruel humor. Suddenly Conrad imagined spending long summer evenings on his porch with Steve, the two of them getting red in the face over the state of the world. He realized he was making a new friend, or could be.

  Bailey turned to Conrad. ‘They lost their first two. Years ago. So sad. Gail, did Greer ever—’

  ‘No one knows,’ Gail said. ‘Could have been something rare. Just . . . one of those things.’

  ‘They should have called the doctors sooner,’ Steve said. ‘There’s just no excuse.’

  When no one added to that, Conrad decided to let the topic go for now. But two kids ‘lost’? Something bad had happened, oh yes.

  ‘I’ll kill you, you asshole!’ the girl screamed. ‘How dare you fucking touch me. No, no! Come back here, Eddie! Eddie, you piece of shit!’

  Her voice was an octave shy of a shriek and it was coming from outside. A car door slammed, the engine revved to the moon and tires barked.

  Conrad jerked in his chair, certain the car was coming through the walls.

  The front door banged open and a teen girl crying her eyes out barged in, colliding with her mother. Everyone turned to witness the drama.

  ‘Liebschen!’ Gail grabbed her daughter by the elbow.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ The girl clawed back like it was her mother that had been hitting her, if hitting was part of it. Conrad glimpsed tears and blood near her mouth, but not much, and it was hard to be sure with the long hair tangled over her features.

  Before Gail could corral all five feet nothing of her daughter’s whirling madness, the girl turned on them, aware she was making a scene. Face gone red, blue corduroy jacket flapping, exposing the bulges, her awkwardly large breasts like twin summits over the earth orb that was her belly peeking from under her skin-tight tee. Her entire life on display, daughter Grum glared across the table and locked on Conrad with eyes as large and green as turtles.

  ‘Who the fuck is that?’ she said. ‘What’s he looking at?’

  All he thought was, Damn, that girl’s pregnant.

  And she was the one hiding in my house the day I toured it with Roddy.

  ‘Nadia, out.’ Gail pointed like a hunter for her setter.

  Conrad felt a snap of embarrassment
for her, followed by shame, like he was on some jury deliberating her guilt. All that was missing was the big red P on her chest. He turned away quickly and saw Steve shut his mouth, wisely offering no comment while Gail wrestled her into the adjacent room, applying a mantra. ‘Nadia, calm down, Nadia, calm down . . .’

  He owed her one, in a way. The girl had taken the attention off of him. He felt relieved and run over. She had that effect on him from the first. Even in her tears, her corded neck mottled with angry red patches, her white hair flying, little Nadia Grum was, to a wounding degree, gorgeous.

  His birthing house was a sauna. Hoping to cool down and stave off the inevitable wine hangover, Conrad took a beer from the fridge and returned to the album. The whole notion that his wife was trapped in there now seemed absurd. He plopped down on the couch and flipped the pages idly, skipping the first photo of the women, the ones he had begun to think of as the Heritage Street Gals. He didn’t really want to know if Jo was still with them, waiting for him to look again into her dead black eyes.

  The next few pages were sketches of the house under construction and he skimmed them without much interest. Then the book seemed to fall open to a gatefold containing another photo. The perspective was from garden level, inside and looking out one of the basement windows. The photo was a close-up and it required some effort for him to make out its true subject. Around the window frame were the nubs of the natural rock foundation. In one small gap in the mortar was a large brown spider - Conrad, who knew something about reptiles, amphibians and arachnids, guessed it was a brown recluse - perched with the weight of its thorax tilted back, one needle-like foreleg extended. A woman testing the temperature in a body of water. Her web had been spun out in every direction, and desiccated insect carcasses remained stuck within the spokes. Her fat body - no, wait. It wasn’t her body bulging this way. It was her egg sac the photographer had been after.

  She was nearly bursting.

  Conrad stared at the spider, imagining her offspring. Hundreds of tiny brown spiders scurrying beneath him, crawling in the foundation, in the walls, in the soil all around, descendants of this old girl.

  The spider connected his thoughts to the Heritage Street Gals and, without reflection, to talk of the Laskis’ lost children and even the pregnant Nadia Grum. And then his mouth went dry.

  The album was all about the house. A history he wanted no part of.

  There were fifty or more pages remaining.

  Head pounding, Conrad carried the album to the fireplace, rolled three balls of newspaper into the grate, wedged the album in and set the entire works ablaze.

  9

  The routine was comfort. The routine was habit. The routine was boring.

  The routine lasted two weeks.

  He kept telling himself if he could stay positive until Jo’s first planned visit home, all would be reconciled, or at least renegotiated.

  He was wrong.

  Hot, jobless, wifeless, he roamed in a fugue from one hour to the next. The days passed so slowly Conrad found himself staring at the kitchen clock (a plastic hen happily handing eggs to a farmer), wishing for a gun to blast it to pieces.

  And he was trying, at least in the beginning. Conrad forced himself to rise and shower before eight, to dress as if he had a job. Clean-shaven, freshly polo-ed and khakied, his navy and lemon-striped Adidas kicks (his one concession to acting the man of leisure) laced neatly, he would walk the two blocks to the Kwik-Trip and pick up the Wisconsin State Journal, a watery coffee and maybe a banana or plain cake donut for breakfast. After reading the paper during his meditative and open-door toilet time, Conrad would walk the dogs around town. He became familiar with the houses, many of them old like theirs. Most were smaller. Some were twice as large, but these looked tired, thirsty for paint. He told himself 818 Heritage Street was the best in the entire town. That it was a special place.

  After walking the dogs, Conrad would work the yard, pruning here and there, never making much of a dent in the wild grapevines and pine trees. It had been a wet spring, and so far June had delivered heat in the morning, rain almost every afternoon and sometimes again at night. The result was a gardener’s dream climate of steamy, lush growth. He would weed the gardens until his back spasmed and his arms trembled. By noon he always found himself back inside the house, panting, guzzling iced tea, spitting and wheezing from the humidity or some allergy he could not classify.

  To combat the afternoon malaise, he took to drinking iced tea by the gallon. It poured through him while he wasted hours checking email, surfing the web, reading scandalous DrudgeReport and PerezHilton headlines: This Little Starlet Went to Rehab, This Little Starlet Forgot to Wear Panties When She Pumped Gas. This Little Terrorist Had Roast Beef, This Little Husband Had None.

  Left to fend for himself, he cooked four-course meals and shared them with the dogs. He looked out the windows and tried to time his trips to the mailbox with the neighbors’ comings and goings. Steve Bartholomew worked from home - architecting databases with co-workers in Bangladesh - and always asked about Jo, which only angered Conrad. He talked with Gail Grum when he saw her in one of her six or seven gardens that grew in her backyard and between their homes. Sometimes Big John would wave to his junior neighbor as he unloaded diamond-blade saws and scrap rock from his truck at the end of stone-dusty days.

  He thought about Holly, his one that got away. Every guy had one. Eventually you forgot her and moved on, and he had, but she was coming back. He fought the indulgence, however, and in her place turned his imaginings on Nadia Grum. The expectant girl next door. A little blonde ball of blustery ignorance. Did she live at home? Did she have bruises from her fight with what’s his name, the boyfriend? Teddy? Davie? What did she do with her days? Was she a student? A dropout? Was Teddy preparing to be the father?

  Was he still fucking her?

  He spoke with Jo every night. Their conversations were short and depressing. She was always too tired to discuss the job and her routine in any detail. As they talked, Conrad would lie on the couch and imagine her lying on the bed in her pajamas in her suite, both of them flicking channels as the conversation dwindled to static sighs and half-hearted miss-yous, neither willing to admit they were stuck in a rut, separated by a lot more than Lake Michigan. He mentioned how excited he was to have her home for the weekend, floated the idea of a special night out in Madison - drinks on Monona Terrace, some live music, maybe.

  ‘Ugh,’ she said. ‘All I can think about is sleeping in my own bed, cuddling with the dogs and taking a long, hot bath. The tub in my room is tiny and I just want to sleep for days.’

  ‘Yeah, you sound tense,’ he said, angling for the common thread. He imagined her long body folded up in the suite’s tub, a washcloth draped over her eyes. ‘We could always, you know . . . like we did that one time.’

  She didn’t remember ‘that one time’, back when they did all kinds of things. Undaunted, he hinted around it three or four times. She yawned. Finally he just said: ‘Here’s an idea. You’re alone there. I’m alone here. Pour yourself a glass of wine, let’s get crazy and have a hot and dirty conversation.’

  He could hear her tense up and he immediately regretted the suggestion.

  ‘No, not happening,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

  Maybe she was just tired. And maybe he was being too sensitive, sounding weak, which she always despised. Either way, her answer felt cruel.

  ‘I wish you’d never gone.’

  ‘Conrad, please. We chose this.’

  ‘But I didn’t go away. You did.’

  ‘Don’t be mad.’

  ‘I’m not mad.’ I’m fucking horny. Seventeen years old revved up and ready to go fifteen rounds! ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to you, honey. No pouting.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘Call me tomorrow.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Love you, too.’

  It didn’t add up. Sho
uldn’t she be the one trying to make it up to him? Shouldn’t she be writhing at his feet for the way he forgave her? For the house he’d bought for her? For getting her out of the rut, no questions asked?

  He couldn’t recall the last time they’d had sex, but he remembered their last night together in this house all too well. He’d had the chance and somehow he’d blown it.

  It had been late and they were in bed. They had been tired from chores, but it was a shared pain and therefore good.

  Jo had leaned against his shoulder and whispered, ‘I love it here.’

  He’d been cranky on purpose. ‘What kind of training makes you leave home for eight weeks?’

  ‘Think of it like, I dunno, the down payment on your own business. As soon as I’m done, I can telecommute -’

  ‘- from anywhere in the world,’ he finished for her. ‘Is that what Donna said? Are you still selling me, now?’

  ‘Maybe I am selling you. But if I do this, you can take all the time you need to figure out what you’re going to do next. And I don’t care, I really don’t. Take as long as you want.’

  ‘I thought this would be different. I thought it would be a relief for you.’

  ‘What’s to relieve?’

  ‘I never liked being the man who depends on his wife. I’m supposed to be supporting you, and now I am.’

  ‘I don’t want you to support me.’ She had said as much before and this always bitched him up. He had married a smart, capable woman, but he couldn’t help feeling useless for the past couple of years. Maybe it was a man thing, not just a Conrad thing, but that didn’t change the basic truth of it. ‘It’s six figures. One-fifty plus a bonus, to be precise.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s a lotta lettuce, Baby. But will you be happy?’

  ‘With one-fifty? How can I not be?’