by Ash Davidson
Chub pointed.
“Well, aren’t you just as bright as a dime?”
Chub ran ahead. From the top of their hill, Rich saw Colleen prying a fist of Himalayan roots from the garden. Chub snuck down toward her. Rich popped a squat to watch, and right there, in the dirt: a boot print. Smaller than his, larger than Colleen’s. He touched the depression, a day old, weakened by dew. Down below, Chub leapt out, Colleen tickling him, making him squeal. Scout barked, feinting.
“What do you think?” she asked, out of breath, when Rich came down into the yard, Chub squirming in her lap. “Should we bake this cookie-boy in the oven?” Tickling had lifted the worry out of her, but now the shadow of it returned. “Anything?” she asked.
He shook his head, swept Chub up, blew on his belly. “What kind of cookie is this?”
“Chocolate chip?” Colleen guessed.
“No!” Chub howled.
“Peanut butter?”
“No!”
“Oatmeal raisin?”
“No!”
“Graham cracker?”
“That’s what he is,” Rich said, and set him down. Chub flopped onto his back in the grass.
“This cookie-boy needs a bath,” Colleen said. Chub blew his hair out of his eyes. “And a haircut.”
Rich glanced up the hill toward the boot print—deer-sense of being watched. A man had stood there, looking down at the house. At Colleen’s geraniums in the window. At the back door, which didn’t lock.
September 4 COLLEEN
Chub strained against his seat belt, fiddling with his clip-on tie as they wound along the coast road toward town.
“It stinks back here,” Chub protested.
“Hang tight, Grahamcracker,” Rich said. “Almost there.”
“How are my eggs doing?” she asked.
“I want to go home.” Chub pouted.
“See any whales?” Rich asked.
Chub pressed the ends of his binoculars to the window glass and stared out at the gray chop. If he saw a whale, he got to make a wish.
At the community center, Wyatt jumped down from Eugene’s rusty truck, followed by Agnes, Mavis, and Gertrude in velvet dresses with white collars, their white cowboy boots brown in the toes.
“Hold on a minute, mister,” Colleen said, straightening Chub’s tie. “You can’t go in looking like a scarecrow.” She licked her thumb and rubbed a spot off his forehead.
Sitting in a foldout chair in the church’s rec room, listening to the pastor, watching Enid unwrap baby Alsea, water running off her head into the basin, Colleen breathed in her mouth and out her nose—Don’t cry, whatever you do, don’t cry—until it was over.
“She didn’t even cry,” Chub observed later, when Colleen sat in the reception room, holding Alsea.
“She never cries.” She wiped the baby’s chin. “She’s a happy baby. Like you were, Chub.”
“Can I have dessert?” he asked.
“Finish your food first.”
Chub nudged cheese onto a cracker, avoiding the deviled egg.
“When are you going to have a little sister, Chubby?” Eugene’s great-aunt, Gertie, the last living DeWitt sister, asked.
“I had a baby sister,” Chub said. “She died.”
Colleen shifted Alsea in her arms. She’d explained it to him, after she’d lost the baby, but she was surprised he remembered.
“What?” Gertie asked, glancing up at Colleen.
“My mom had a very tiny baby in her belly that died,” Chub said. Colleen felt tears well in her eyes. “But I didn’t die.”
“Oh.” Gertie cleared her throat.
“I’ll be right back.” Colleen excused herself, handed Alsea to Enid, and went out the double doors into the parking lot, gulping the cool air.
She’d been up late, mashing yolks, slopping the mixture into the icing bag, filling the rubbery white bowls. She’d woken tired, burned the toast, ironed Chub’s shirt only to turn it over and discover it was missing a button. Even the drizzle had taunted her, like someone walking backward in front of her with a bowl of water, flicking it in her face. And of course Enid hadn’t gotten here early and of course nothing had been set up. And now here was the third pan of deviled eggs, forgotten on the hood of the truck, tinfoil jeweled with rain.
Take it easy on your sister. Someday you two will be all you have.
She looked up, as if Mom might be standing there across the parking lot. Colleen had made it through dozens of parties like this one. Six kids’ worth of baptisms and birthdays and school plays. She would make it through today. She would focus on what she had: Chub. She had Chub.
“How many of these did you make?” Enid asked when Colleen came back in, Enid’s hand hovering over the deviled eggs as though she were deciding her next move at checkers. Even heavy in the hips, her pale skin a little pitted, she was beautiful. Have to be pretty to carry off a do like that, Mom had said the first time Enid hacked off her hair. Colleen had understood the warning.
Enid’s kids swarmed the bowl of chocolates.
“Where’d all these redheads come from?” the pastor asked.
“You got me,” Enid said, as though no more responsible for their behavior than their hair color.
Colleen’s father’s hair had been black, but his beard, when he grew one, had two orange streaks down either side of his mouth, like the hinges were rusting. Colleen wondered if Enid remembered this.
“Can you hold her?” Enid asked, unloading the baby into Colleen’s arms again.
The doors to the playground were propped open and she saw Rich sitting on a stump outside, where the men were talking, bent paper plate between his knees.
“Tree-hugging welfare bums,” Eugene said. “I’ll tell you what really tears them up. Bunch of rednecks making bank. Virgin forest. Who the hell wants a virgin anyway? They show up again, we should shoot ’em all.”
“You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn,” Lew Miller ribbed him. “From inside it. What the hell did you use in Viet-nam?”
“My bare hands, Lew. My bare hands.”
Colleen watched Chub chase Wyatt across the playground, bouncing Alsea in her arms. Latecomers slopped macaroni salad onto paper plates. The widow of a killed choker setter hurried her moonfaced kids along. Growing up, kids like these might as well have had the company stamp branded onto their foreheads. They used to get winter jackets, a Sanderson Christmas basket filled with tangerines. Once, Evelyn McCurdy, whose father had been cut in half in a rigging accident, had left a tangerine in her desk. Colleen had snuck in during recess, taken it into the girls’ bathroom, and eaten it. She’d smelled the rind on her fingers long after she’d washed her hands. There were no Christmas baskets for girls whose fathers had drowned poaching mussels in a borrowed skiff.
Colleen shifted Alsea’s weight.
“Have one more,” Eugene’s great-aunt Gertie said, leaning in, as though letting Colleen in on a secret. Gertie’s white hair was set in finger curls. She smelled of talcum powder, something sour underneath. Colleen forced a smile. Gertie patted her hand. “Honey, you’re like ice.”
Colleen had the urge to swat her. Instead, she let Gertie fuss with Alsea’s swaddle, tucking it up under the baby’s rump. Gertie was almost ninety, a widow for over half a century. Her only son had died of polio. She still wore a locket with his picture inside.
A chorus of guffaws erupted across the room, Eugene carrying on, holding Enid by the hip. Rich never touched Colleen in public.
“Look at those two.” Gertie tsked. “We’ll be back here again before long. Well. You’re young.”
But when had Colleen ever felt young? Even as a teenager, Enid had seemed less her little sister than her wild and careless daughter. She looked out the doors at Rich, his head tilted, listening in the fading light.
“It’s lonely with one,” Gertie said.
“Chub has his cousins,” Colleen answered, though it sounded hollow, even to her.
“Have another.” Gert
ie patted her hand again. The old woman’s skin had melted over her bones, speckled with bruises. “I never met a man who didn’t enjoy that part, no matter how old he was.”
Chub wandered back inside.
“Can I have cake now?” he asked.
The cake hunched on a platter like a wrecked sandcastle. Dot cut him a slice.
“Nothing wrong with a baby that don’t cry,” Dot said, smiling at Alsea asleep in Colleen’s arms.
They found a seat, Chub licking frosting from his fork. She kissed him on the head. Her sweet boy. Her little miracle.
“Grahamcracker,” she whispered. “Where’d you get that beautiful brown hair?”
* * *
“Marla!” Enid hollered. “Put this stuff in the truck.”
Marla hefted the ice chest.
“She’s got a date,” Enid told Colleen. “She’d carry me to the truck if I asked.”
There’d been a time, before Chub, when Colleen had so longed for a child of her own that just saying good night to little Marla had wrung her heart out like a wet rag. Now look at her: a teenager, white-blond hair, skin so pale it showed the little blue veins at her temples, an eerie beauty. Looks will get you knocked up and tied down before you get a chance at life, Mom had told Colleen once, in high school. Better to be plain.
“I need a beer,” Eugene announced, tablecloths shaken out, card tables wiped and folded.
“What about the kids?” Colleen asked.
“They can share. I’m not buying them all their own beers.”
* * *
The kids crammed into the Only’s corner booth.
“I want cheese fries,” Wyatt demanded.
“Me too,” Enid said.
“We just ate,” Colleen objected, spotting Daniel at the bar talking to Bessie McQuade, who had been in their class at school. Gone for years, and now suddenly he was everywhere. Bessie’s husband had left her. She lived above Mill Creek with her harelipped son and about fifty cats. Colleen remembered the flare of disgust in Bessie’s husband’s nostrils when he’d seen the little boy’s lip, how he’d backed away when Colleen set the baby on Bessie’s chest, already distancing himself.
“Huh, Aunt Colleen?”
“What?” Colleen asked.
Across the room, Bessie McQuade smacked Daniel across the face. Kel stood behind the bar, arms crossed. Daniel rose. He dropped some bills beside his glass, shoved a notepad into his pocket, tucked a pen above his ear. But it was the look on Bessie’s face that struck Colleen.
“Don’t let the screen door slap you on the way out,” somebody called after Daniel.
“Must have got the wrong idea.” Eugene winked. Colleen wanted to press her finger to the corner of his eye, pin it.
“Those hippies screw like rabbits,” Enid said, setting baskets of fries on the table.
“Enid.” Colleen hushed her.
“What? It’s true. They’re out there humping trees, aren’t they?”
“Hugging,” Colleen corrected her.
“One thing leads to another.”
Don’t fan the fire, Mom used to say when Colleen let Enid needle her.
Conversation ratcheted back up. Bessie McQuade traced a finger along the rim of her glass, making it sing a high note only Colleen could hear. Daniel had been asking about her son; Colleen could tell by the slope of Bessie’s shoulders, the way she sat at the bar surrounded by people, totally alone.
“What’d I miss?” Rich asked, sliding into the booth beside her, jogging his foot.
What was he so nervous about? She touched his thigh under the table and his leg stilled. He laced his fingers through hers and brought them up onto the table, into plain sight.
September 6 COLLEEN
Chub held her hand across the parking lot, but inside the double doors—whiff of sloppy Joes—he slipped free. She’d cut his bangs too short, his forehead white and vulnerable. She wanted to cup her hand over it. The bulletin board outside his classroom was covered with paper fish: IN THIS SCHOOL, WE ALL SWIM TOGETHER. She traced his name fish—G-r-a-h-a-m—but he’d already scampered in, red lunch box in tow, children swarming past her like water flowing around a rock.
She lingered in the lobby to hold off her own loneliness. She’d walked by the class photos thousands of times, but now she studied the class of 1942, the year Rich would have graduated, the year Colleen was born. There was Astrid Fitzpatrick: tall, proud. That Astrid was so cold, Marsha said. She was sharp, Rich had explained once. Neither a compliment nor an insult. Rich never said a bad word against anyone.
Beside Astrid, chubby, smiling, unrecognizable but for the glasses: Gail Maloney—before she’d married Don. Colleen looked toward the front office; Gail Porter stared back. Colleen studied the photo a moment longer, feeling the pinch of Gail Porter’s regard.
“Did you hear?”
Colleen turned, Gail suddenly beside her, pinning a notice to the bulletin board.
“Elyse lost the baby.”
Elyse had been only a few weeks behind Colleen. She lived past Gail and Don’s, a few mailboxes up from the Larsons. It was her first baby, so she’d wanted a doctor, not a home birth. Colleen had driven her down to the clinic once, to show there were no hard feelings.
“There’s a sign-up sheet in the office,” Gail Porter said. “If you want to bring them some food.”
* * *
The truck felt empty without Chub. She crossed the road and drove up Requa Hill to the top of the headland, a whole sad day ahead. She’d lain awake most of the night, listening to Rich breathe. He’d gone up the hill in the dark, as if today were no different from any other day, while she’d fixed two lunches for the first time.
She stared out at the ocean. The truck’s engine ticked, cooling. Mist smoked up into the dark spires along the narrow strip of coastal park. Sunlight reflected off a patch of shoreline in the distance, a tide pool maybe, or broken glass, winking like a signal mirror. She sat and watched it for a long time. It was cold in the truck by the time she started it up again. When she got back down to the stop sign, she let the truck idle. Left would take her home to the silent house. She was supposed to have a baby to feed and burp and sing to sleep while Chub was gone at school. Instead, she turned right, crossed Gold Bear Bridge, and turned off onto the river road, soft with dead leaves, littered with fallen limbs, hemmed between water and timber, the kind of road you shouldn’t drive without a chainsaw. She passed the two tarnished bears where the old bridge had stood, before the flood. A logjam had bashed against the footings, pounding until they gave way. She’d forgotten these bears, still guarding their invisible bridge. She leaned across and rolled down the passenger-side window. If she could hear the river, maybe she wouldn’t drive into it.
Old logging two-tracks cut up the ridge past the dump, and then, like a curtain swept aside: the river’s mouth, the sandbar, the wild ocean. A black truck was parked in the make-out spot where the road elbowed downcoast. She heard a shriek, then laughter. She slowed, straining up out of her seat to peer down the steep drop. A girl stood on a blanket, a boy pulling the corners. She watched the girl twirl, taunting the boy until he lunged, swung her around, kissed her, a whirl of white-blond hair: Marla. Marla, out here with a boy. Colleen hit the gas, the road downcoast barely wider than a path. She plowed through, thorns screaking.
Enid’s voice jabbed like a finger into her chest. Why don’t you stop them?
They look happy.
Horseshit.
You only get one life, Enid.
Exactly.
Her tires slammed something solid and the truck lurched back, landing with a jolt. Colleen got out, kicked through the brush until she found the downed log, hidden by brambles. It wouldn’t budge. She wiped hair out of her face, looked back the way she’d come. She’d have to reverse all the way to the bend just to turn around. She scanned a slow circle, as though there might be another way. Below, she spotted roof shingles worn tawny gray: the radar station.
She sidestep
ped down through the ferns. The bottom windows were concreted in, attic windows shattered. The radar had been hauled away, but the shell of the phony house remained. It had done its job, fooled German U-boats into thinking there was a farm hanging from this cliff. Colleen had gone to school with half a dozen kids like Daniel, the unclaimed offspring of the radar boys who’d spent their war here, hunched and listening.
Daniel rounded the corner. She froze, as though stillness might camouflage her.
“Colleen?”
“What are you doing here?” she blurted out.
He lifted a jug of berries, fingers inked purple. Couldn’t go two steps without tripping over canes—they’d swallow the houses if no one fought back. He was three steps away, the time it took to draw a breath and hold it, to tuck a piece of hair behind an ear. His watch face caught the light. No bigger than a quarter. Had she spotted it all the way from the headland, signaling her?
“Chub started school today.” Cold gusted off the water. She hugged herself.
He studied her. “You okay?”
She nodded. Tears spilled down her cheeks.
“What time does he get out?” he asked.
“Three thirty.” Her voice cracked. She sat down in the wet grass.
“Hey.” Daniel squatted beside her. She sobbed into his shoulder until he put his arm around her.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally, lifting her head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“What makes you think something’s wrong with you?”
Each time, after the warm gush of blood in her underwear, the cramping, the clots the size of plums slipping out of her into the toilet, after three emergency D&Cs she’d have bled to death without, and especially, especially after their little Easter girl, she’d spent weeks combing back through to locate her mistake. If only she hadn’t lifted that bag of dog food, if only she’d drunk more water. If only, if only, if only. There must be something wrong with her, why else would it keep happening?
She sucked in snot, wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s just—You don’t have kids?”