The Birthing House Page 8

  ‘I’m sorry, Jo. Calm down. I do know what it’s like. I’m living in a city where I don’t know anyone, either.’

  ‘It’s not the same. You’re home! You have the dogs.’

  ‘They miss you. We do. A lot.’

  She was still on the verge of shouting. ‘Have you even thought about this? One week we’re living in Los Angeles and now, what, we just decide to move to the middle of nowhere? I don’t think this is what we thought it would be.’

  ‘What did you think—? No, skip that,’ he said. ‘I know what we said it would be. What is it now?’

  ‘I think you need to do some serious thinking.’

  Some serious thinking! ‘About?’

  ‘About everything.’ Her voice had resumed a normal pitch. This frightened him, that she could be nearly hysterical one minute and then go Dr Phil the next. ‘For starters, why did we have to leave Los Angeles? No, don’t answer me now. I want you to think about it because this is really important, are you listening?’

  ‘Yes.’ Talk, don’t talk. What do you want me to do, woman?

  ‘This isn’t like us, it’s too fast, the whole thing. It’s like we woke up different people. I know you’ve been through a lot with your father dying, but I’m sorry. There’s more to it. You’re not being truthful with me. I know something . . . else . . . happened to you. Something bad. You’ve always been aloof, but you’re different now. Darker. And I’m sorry if that sounds paranoid. But I’m not sorry because it’s how I feel, so don’t try to blame me.’

  This, more than anything about his wife, made his blood jump. The way she dumped everything on him and, whether he deserved it or not, backed it all up by telling him that he could not, dared not, dispute it because this was the way she felt. He equated this sort of haired-out logic with fundamentalists who burned books because they were offended and pissed off at the world. She felt bad; it was his responsibility to change until she felt better.

  ‘—and then there’s your career. Because I can take care of myself, but I don’t want to take care of you, too. And you shouldn’t want me to.’

  Wasn’t that what married people were supposed to do, take care of each other? And, Christ, he’d just inherited five hundred thousand dollars. What the fuck was this about?

  ‘I’m solvent now. We’re ahead of the game here, Jo.’

  ‘It’s not about the money, Conrad. You have to do something real.’

  ‘Something real? Like what? Selling more software I don’t even understand? Like traveling around the country so much neither one of us is home to so much as feed the dogs, let alone a kid?’

  ‘What has that got to do with anything?’ It was an actual screech now. ‘You don’t think I will make a good mother?’

  ‘No. Yes, of course you will. I’m just saying we’re both still in transition here. I’m going to find something else. Just have some patience.’ And stop acting like you have it all figured out because obviously you do not.

  ‘Are you going to figure it out?’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘Because I can’t take another diversion.’

  ‘Now wait a goddamned—’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. I’m sorry.’

  He was fuming. A diversion? They’d moved to Los Angeles for her goddamn career, not his. And the staying home all the time. She said it was nice knowing he was home. She’d even started to call him Mr Mom, for fuck’s sakes.

  ‘If you thought the past few years were a diversion, you should have spoken up,’ he said. ‘Instead, you waited for me, and I changed. I was the one who pushed us to move. Before I came home to find That Fucker Jake standing in the hallway with his dong in his hand. Jesus!’

  ‘Conrad, I don’t want to fight.’

  ‘You don’t - hey, that’s actually funny.’

  ‘I can’t. Not here.’

  ‘Then don’t.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘But you should know . . .’ she said in a condescending tone.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not coming home this weekend.’ This wasn’t lobbing one over to see how it would play. This was something she knew from the minute she called.

  ‘Why not?’ He made his voice cold.

  ‘I don’t feel like it.’

  ‘You don’t feel like it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fine, then do whatever the fuck you feel like with whoever the fuck you feel like and leave me the fuck alone!’

  There was a small tea saucer lying on the kitchen table, next to the cordless phone cradle. When the phone went down like a torpedo, it nicked the saucer and shattered the porcelain into a thousand white slivers, one of which embedded itself in the cheek meat just below his left eye. There was a ringing sound from the shattering and for a second he thought it was her calling back. He reached for the phone, heard silence and threw the phone at the wall and kicked the chair up in the air where it did a neat little somersault and landed almost perfectly straight again.

  His breathing came in ragged gulps like he’d been punched in the balls.

  And it was a lovely summer day.

  She doesn’t feel like coming home? And why should she? She’s got Shirley from Akron to keep her company.

  ‘Fuck Shirley, fuck Shirley’s baby, and fuck you Jo, fucking Oscar-The-Grouch-cheating-ass-bitch.’

  Easy. Deep breaths. He would go to Wal-Mart and buy a new phone, and maybe sign up for whatever shitpoke regional coverage worked out here, because his Verizon mobile still wasn’t working in this house and he just wanted to put the stupid thing in the garbage disposal. Later. Right now he needed to calm down and figure out what to do with the next two weeks until his wife deigned to visit him in their new home. He needed to think about his freak-ass snake eggs, and the fucking hundred year-old photo album full of ugly fucking women he burned because he was too afraid to turn the page.

  He poured himself an oceanic glass of iced tea and drank it in one go. God, he could never remember being so thirsty. The summer air was so thick you could drink by wagging your tongue in front of your face. He refilled, walked upstairs and thought about Los Angeles. Rachel, the girl from the bookstore. Oh, he should have given it to her upside down and from behind when he had the chance. He went to the bathroom and tweezed the saucer shrapnel from his face, squeezed the cut like a pimple, swabbed it with witch hazel.

  Luther and Alice followed him from a safe distance. They were staring at him and he stared back, all three of them panting. He opened all the windows in the library and the master bedroom. He finished the second glass of iced tea. Properly brewed iced tea with no lemon or sugar was better than most water. He wished he had brought the whole pitcher with him so he could fucking bathe in it.

  Conrad fell into bed with his dogs beside him, pulled one pillow over his eyes and thought about showering in a golden waterfall of iced tea, some Edenic setting with sprigs of mint growing from rocky walls, drinking and drowning in the pure wash of it. Ice cubes floating around his balls in the basin, tea seeping into his pores until his skin was stained brown, tea-swamped and purified. With his belly full of the stuff, Conrad drifted and cooled and soon fell into the deluded reprieve of an angry, deviant nap.

  Later, he woke in darkness to the sound of the dogs stirring from their crate beds, the click-click-clicking of their nails on the hardwood floor. Abruptly they stopped. And he sat there waiting for the dogs to jump on to the bed.

  ‘Come on, Alice,’ he said, realizing he was about to pee the bed. Too much iced tea.

  Silence.

  When the clicking started again, the sound was different. Instead of going click-click-click in timed groups, now he heard them individually. Not the dogs, the clicks.

  Click . . . silence . . . click . . . silence . . . click. He smiled at the image of Alice tiptoeing, stepping on a single claw at a time, but the smile vanished as the next click drew closer and he realized there was no weight behind the sound. This was not the sound of a
dog at all. It was something else.

  He found the lamp, twisted the knob, and crunched his eyes shut until his pupils adjusted to the flood of light. He blinked at the foot of the bed, waiting for the next click to offer a clue as to the dogs’ whereabouts.

  But it’s not one of the dogs, and I think you know that now, don’t you?

  Conrad leaned over. Nothing on the hardwood floor.

  Click.

  There - on the other side of the bed. It was in the room, whatever it was.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said to the room. Before he could talk himself out of it, he jackknifed belly down over the covers to see into the blind spot on Jo’s side.

  Between the dog crates and the bed was a two-foot path of wood floor. A pair of Jo’s panties collecting dust sat crumpled in one corner, the lavender Victoria’s Secret ones he liked on her. Down this little wooden path, at the foot of the bed, there appeared to be twin Popsicle sticks jutting out from the post of the bed frame. For some unknowable reason, the flat sticks made him think of crude shoes, what you would see if you were to encounter a clown hiding behind a tree. As soon as this image came to him, as if reading his mind one of the feet jerked up perhaps two inches and stepped forward, and the rest of the doll pivoted around the post and tilted its head . . . up at him.

  His heartbeat became violent even as his limbs and back seemed to fill with concrete. Blood rushed into his face, neck and scalp, making everything itch.

  ‘Oh, for the love . . .’ he moaned.

  Less than twelve inches tall, the home-made doll looked like a finger puppet or some poor child’s art project. The legs were thin sticks attached to the flat feet and the cloth stitched over the body was of faded pink flowers on white, frayed and yellowed with age. Just below the neckline the thing appeared jolly and fat, the stuffing wrapped inside coarse cotton, bulging in obscene contrast to the stick legs. The doll had no neck, but it had a head.

  It did not have a face.

  Under the dry and stiff black hair that sprouted from the crown, where there should have been button eyes and a cute cross-stitch of a nose there was only a blank pad. Most queer of all, while the little rag had the hair and dress of a female, he sensed the other sex in its posture. It felt mean and hard, a little male troll that would speak in a clipped, ugly voice if it had one. He really hoped it did not speak. A few seconds passed. He was starting to doubt that he had actually seen it move when the doll took another step - click! - and then another after that one, moving with renewed purpose, as if had just found what it was looking for.

  But that’s crazy, because it has no eyes.

  Conrad was splayed crooked on the bed, immobilized as the absurd stick figure doll, no wider than a Scarecrow Barbie, came at him in rapid steps - click-click-click-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK! - and raised its pipe cleaner arms to attack.

  It wants to put my eyes out, his mind cried, damned if it doesn’t!

  Conrad’s bladder wrenched in pain as the thing trotted alongside the bed. He flung himself away and tangled himself in the bedding as he scrambled off the other side. His right foot hit the floor and he had the crazy, self-preserving presence of mind to yank his bare foot back up in case the thing had taken a shortcut and was now coming at him from under the bed.

  What if it jumps up on to the bed? What then?

  How can it jump? It’s only a pile of sticks, no taller than a number two pencil. Hey, it fucking walked, didn’t it? No, at the end there it had started to run.

  Get the fuck out of here!

  His feet hovering over the floor, Conrad glanced over his shoulder - nope, not coming over the bed - and then back to the floor. He couldn’t see the doll now, but he could hear it. Click-click-click . . . pause. It was pacing, maybe coming around the other side, taking the scenic route for Chrissake, but coming just the same.

  Blood humming through his veins, eyes wide and snapping left to right, Conrad planted his feet, shot off the bed, and bee-lined for the open door. Approaching the threshold he (Don’t look back! No, fuck you, I have to!) glanced down just in time to see the doll marching stiffly after him, swaying left and right, and the moment stretched into a vacuum of pre-car-crash clarity that seemed to last five minutes.

  He saw the doorframe floating toward him; behind him the doll high-stepping like a Nutcracker reject. He saw the arms reaching up, but not after him this time, no, instead arcing out and back down until the tiny home-made fingers dug into the wiry black hair and proceeded to yank it out in clumps, shaking its dead growth at him with that blank pad of a face somehow conveying pure, untainted hatred.

  Conrad’s shoulder slammed into the doorframe, pinwheeling him sideways and down. His forehead bounced off the black maple banister (another two steps of uninterrupted momentum and he might have crashed through the banister, head first down to the foyer) and he hit the hallway floor shoulder first, hipbone next, jaw last, the culminating sound like billiard balls after the sledgehammer break.

  The panic and pain mixed into a blinding cocktail and he used his last bolt of strength to roll sideways. He was eye-level with the doll, the room darkening as he hovered on the edge of consciousness. His vision blurred, the doll becoming two dolls coming for his eyes until he could almost feel their tendril fingers crawling into his skin like insect bites. Pain flared behind his eyeballs, and then he could only squeeze his eyes shut and tremble.

  When some time passed and he felt no stabbing and heard no more clicking sounds, he opened his eyes and blinked. There was no sign of the doll. The room was quiet. Empty. He got to his feet and circled the bed, weak through the knees and unsure of what, if anything, he had really seen.

  There was a clicking in the hall. He tensed for it.

  Alice came around the corner and looked up at him. She was sleepy. She had slept through the whole thing. Probably woke up when he hit the floor.

  Conrad rubbed his head as he traipsed through the library and into the bathroom. As if timed with his bladder’s release, his heart pounded in slow, heavy thumps that faded only when he had flushed.

  He took three Advil and lay back down on the bed. His head began to pound in earnest, and he knew it needed some ice. He was still thinking about going downstairs to fetch some when he drifted back to sleep.

  The next morning Conrad showered, drank four glasses of iced tea, and went to the office. After poking around on Google for forty-five minutes, he read the following excerpt from an article titled, ‘Before There Was Teddy: The Evolution of Manikins, Poppets and Other Teaching Icons’, originally published by ON FOOT, Ohio State University’s journal of anthropology.

  Not every culture approves of your average toy store doll. Some older customs prevent children from playing with manufactured dolls bearing a human likeness. The Amish, for instance, have long forbidden girls to play with human-resembling caricatures. Many dolls found in the Amish household would not have the same features as, say, Barbie or Ken. Imagine, I suppose, a thing made of cloth and other natural materials. Certainly one would not find dolls with eyes, a three dimensional nose, artificial hair, etc. Such a doll would not have much of a face at all.

  The guiding principal here is similar to their disapproval of being photographed, one of biblical origin. Exodus 20:4-6. ‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath . . .’

  12

  If Jo had been home she would have talked some sense into him, told him he was having nightmares, convinced him to go see someone. But she wasn’t home and he didn’t know when she would be back. He still felt guilty for screaming and hanging up on her, but he was also still hurt by her refusal to come home. What had she said? ‘Because I don’t feel like it.’ Now that was cruel, wasn’t it? Unless . . .

  What else had she said? ‘I’m not feeling so good.’ Was it possible, in his quick jump to self-pity, he might have mistaken her words? What if all she really meant was, I’m too sick to fly? I feel like shit?

>   ‘So I’m the asshole.’

  After completing a short walk around the block, Conrad let the dogs inside, unhooked the leashes and went for the phone. Then he remembered he was supposed to go to Wal-Mart to replace the one he’d busted all to hell.

  We came to start our new lives together, he would tell her. Baby, I love you more than anything and whatever happened out there I won’t take no for an answer. You need to come home soon.

  Before something bad happens.

  As soon as Conrad had driven the fifteen miles, exited Highway 151, and passed the last dairy farm, he was confronted by the mini-city that was Wal-Mart. The parking lot was vast, hot and full of American nameplates. He’d heard the state’s residents bemoaning the retail giant’s destructive effect on their small towns on National Public Radio, which, he’d noticed, regularly named the chain as a sponsor. But when Pringles were seventy-eight cents a yard and cordless phones started at $9.23, why shop anywhere else?

  ‘Vote with your dollars, assholes,’ he mumbled, yanking a cart from the fossilized greeter. ‘Sorry, not you.’

  After grabbing the cheapest phone on the shelf, he roamed the DVD new releases, saw nothing worth $13.88. He lost track of time and came back to himself browsing, for no real reason, an aisle of bath towels. He put two ugly green ones in his cart.

  Standing in the checkout lane, Conrad fell into a glazed, tabloid-induced stupor until a frog-voiced woman exclaimed, ‘How about that, childrens? It’s the nice man who moved into our house.’

  Conrad turned to see a gaunt woman in her thirties or fifties with gray-streaked black hair and leathery skin pulled so tight around the bulge of her pregnant belly it seemed to drag the corners of her mouth into a pouting brat’s frown. She was wearing a large halter-smock and dirty jean shorts. He knew at once she was Leon’s Laski’s wife, and that he should be polite, but he couldn’t stop staring at the tangle of grimy tykes crawling around her legs, swinging from her arms and slapping at her knobby knees.