Damnation Spring

by Ash Davidson

  He shook his head.

  “Do you want them?”

  He lifted his arm off her. “No.”

  “I wish I could be like that,” Colleen said. “We lost two before Chub was born—” She shook her head, eyes brimming. “Why can’t I just be grateful?”

  “Hey, come on.” Daniel hugged her. It felt good, to be held. To cry without hiding it. He released her.

  “Rich won’t touch me,” she confided. “I lost a baby in April. A little girl. Twenty-two weeks. All the others, they were so early, but now—it’s like he doesn’t trust me anymore.”

  “How many have you lost?” Daniel asked.

  “Oh.” She let out a long breath. “One every spring, pretty much, except for Chub.” It was a relief, to finally tell someone besides the nurses, to admit it outside the drab walls of the clinic.

  “Colleen, that’s—I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. “Just not meant to be.” There must have been a reason. It’s just nature’s way. It’s for the best. How those empty consolations had stung and infuriated her when all she wanted was to know why.

  “People always say the wrong thing, don’t they?” Daniel asked.

  She nodded. Something loosened in her chest. She inhaled, feeling, despite it all, better. “What can you do? You keep going. But Rich—he doesn’t even want to try again.”

  Daniel ran his hand through the grass. She leaned, bumped her shoulder against his. He looked up. She felt the click and slide of bolts within her, an old combination popping open a lock. She should leave now, get back in the truck Rich had bought her, the truck that sat like a big white two-ton reminder in her driveway, morning, noon, and night. Instead, she pushed her glasses up onto her head, took Daniel’s warm face in her hands. He slid his fingers up over hers, as though he might remove them, then slipped his hands up her forearms to her elbows, her shoulders, tracing slowly down her ribs. She straightened, so that he wouldn’t feel the little bulge of flab at her waist.

  This is wrong. The thought hovered briefly over her head as she eased herself back onto the damp grass. What are you doing? You’re just sad. Daniel’s heart thudded against her chest, the cold breeze on her bare stomach, her breath quickening, ankles hooked behind his knees. When he tried to pull out, she tensed, pulled him deeper. Wait. Wait. Wait.

  He rolled onto his back and they lay side by side, panting, roar of the surf breaking against the rocks below. Colleen pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them, as the nurse had instructed, to increase the chances of conception. Who knew how many more chances she would get?

  “What are you doing?” Daniel asked.

  “Nothing.” She turned her head to smile at him. “Why did you come back?” she asked.

  “I told you.” Daniel stroked her ribs. “Research.”

  “The real reason.”

  He stopped. “My mom’s sick.”

  She looked over at him, but Daniel was looking up at the sky.

  In Colleen’s memory, Dolores Bywater was fearless, calling Gloria Adair a backward redneck for making her son, who was in Colleen and Daniel’s class, kneel on gravel as a punishment. Sam was a stutterer, his knees pocked with bloody divots.

  Mind your own business, whore, Mrs. Adair had sneered, a word Colleen had never heard a mom use. Mrs. Adair was a homely woman; a cluster of small moles clung to her neck. Daniel’s mother was beautiful. Her dentalia-shell earrings, little bundles of delicate white icicles, had tinkled, though her face remained perfectly placid.

  What does your husband do to you, that you’re taking it out on this little boy? Mrs. Bywater had wondered aloud. He cheats, she’d guessed, doesn’t he?—a flicker of victory in the corners of her beautiful mouth. How could a woman like that ever get sick?

  “Why did you stop walking up to get eggs?” Daniel asked.

  “How do you—?”

  “I’ve been taking samples out of your creek for months. Your mutt’s a real barker.”

  She toyed with a blade of grass. “He’s Rich’s dog.” A pang of guilt, at Rich’s name.

  Daniel propped himself up on one elbow. “Couldn’t you just run a little tap water into those jars for me? Come on. Just once a week. It takes me forever to get out there.”

  “Rich wouldn’t like that.” Colleen sat up.

  “What is Rich like?” Daniel asked.

  “Rich?” Rich was a man who caught and released spiders. Since Chub was born, he killed the poisonous ones, but always, before the smack, a sigh of regret, of duty. “There’s not a mean bone in Rich’s body,” she said, pulling her turtleneck over her head.

  Daniel reversed her truck the whole way, neck craned to see behind him, humming to himself, mint clacking against his teeth. Colleen was quiet. She’d never been unfaithful, in thought or in deed, and then a door had opened, and she’d walked through it. She pinched her ears. Think of something else.

  The black truck was gone. Daniel backed into the empty pullout. She wanted to go home and strip off her clothes, to huddle in the shower. He killed the engine, sat back, and sighed. She smelled the mint.

  “It’s too bad,” he said.

  “What’s too bad?” The giddy lightness she’d felt earlier was gone.

  Daniel traced the edge of the steering wheel with one finger. “That you left.”

  “I didn’t leave,” Colleen said. “I came home.”

  “Right.”

  “You’re the one who never called me back,” Colleen protested.

  “You didn’t have a phone.”

  “I drove all the way to Crescent City to use that pay phone,” Colleen shot back. “I must have called your dorm a dozen times.” She choked back the rush of shame the memory still produced.

  “You said you’d be gone for the weekend,” Daniel said half-heartedly. In truth, she’d packed all her things, tucked the rabbit lamp under one arm, and slid the keys under the landlady’s door, secretly relieved. For five months she’d stuck it out, homesick and lonely, Daniel consumed by his courses. He’d prop a textbook up on his bare chest to read in bed, humming to himself, leaving her behind. “You were the one who never came back,” Daniel reminded her.

  “You knew where I was.”

  Daniel tilted his head. “Come on, Colleen. You were just looking for a way out, admit it. You saw your chance and you took it.”

  “My mom was sick.” Her voice trembled with anger. “You know what that’s like now, don’t you?”

  “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t show up at your door so your mom could call me your ‘little half-breed boyfriend’ and blow smoke in my face again, is that what you want to hear? I told you I wasn’t coming back here. You made your choice, don’t try to pin that on me.”

  “I’m perfectly happy with my choices,” Colleen said.

  Daniel scoffed. “Are you sure about that?” He elbowed out of the truck, disappearing into the undergrowth, the way they’d come.

  Colleen slid over behind the steering wheel—what had she done? She turned the key in the ignition, gunned the engine, the bend so blinded by brush she barely had time to slam the brakes: there was Marla in a thin T-shirt and jeans, lips blanched with cold.

  Colleen opened her door. “Get in,” she said.

  Marla went around to the passenger side and climbed in. They sat for a moment, Marla’s teeth chattering. Colleen turned up the heat.

  “Where’s your coat?” Colleen asked.

  “I forgot it.”

  Colleen went slow, Marla swaying with each bump in the road.

  “That boy just left you out there?” Colleen asked when they were almost back to the highway.

  Marla looked out the window.

  “Marla,” Colleen said. “I saw you.”

  “I saw you too.”

  Colleen’s cheeks burned. She shifted into second gear, then third.

  “Are you going to tell my mom?” Marla asked when Colleen pulled to the curb outside the school.

  Colleen still smelled the cool burn of mint as s
he drew in air. “Are you?”

  Marla gave a little shake of her head and reached for the door release.

  “Marla, honey,” Colleen said. “Be careful.”

  Marla got out.

  “Don’t do something you might regret later,” Colleen said aloud, watching the double doors close behind her. She wanted to follow her in, to run down the hall to Chub’s classroom. The truck idled. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so alone.

  RICH

  House a sauna, windowpanes smoked with steam, it was still a relief to be home, to sniff the sweet air. His knee throbbed. Colleen tonged a jar out of the stockpot and set it on the counter with the others, solid black, seeds strained, the way he liked it.

  Chub rattled off his first day: nosebleed, class fish, recess—and then, and then—and disappeared to his room.

  “You been at it all day?” Rich asked.

  She nodded.

  “So how was it?” After today’s close call, he wanted to hear her voice. “First day off in five years?”

  “Fine.” She pinned a jar under the roiling water. It knocked the bottom of the pot.

  “Any left over?”

  She clanked a mixing bowl with some jam at the bottom onto the table along with the cracker tin. Canning always put her in a bad mood.

  “You pick all these today?” he asked. Her hair was up, streak of blackberry crusted across her nape. He sat with a groan, picked up Chub’s art project—dried macaroni glued to construction paper. “Crafts. What happened to learning to read?”

  “It’s only the first day.”

  He spooned jam onto saltines, sighed with appreciation. “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

  She ignored the compliment. Chub came back, nosebleed tissues still stuffed up his nostrils, a stick poking up from his bib pocket. Colleen hadn’t noticed it yet, or she would have made him surrender it. She worried about him tripping and poking himself in the eye.

  “Trade you.” Rich swapped the stick for a saltine.

  Chub licked the salt off the cracker, handed it back, and scampered out.

  “That’s the second nosebleed he’s had in a week,” Colleen said.

  “I got them too, as a kid,” Rich said. He polished off the sleeve of saltines, washed them down with a swig of cool water, hissed through his teeth.

  “Let her fill that tooth,” Colleen said, exasperated.

  The clinic had a new lady dentist. He shook his head, took the ice-cube tray from the freezer, grabbed a dishcloth, and limped into the front room, keeping the leg straight. Goddamn. He’d been listening to the clock tick inside his head, counting down the days until the first loan payment came due, when the rotted-out branch broke, cracked him in the knee so hard it almost knocked him loose. He lay back on the couch, sank into the cushions.

  * * *

  Rich squinted, shielded his eyes against the lamplight. Colleen stood by his feet.

  “Dinner’s ready.” She waited, making sure he could stand, his pants wet where ice had melted through the dish towel.

  At the table, Chub chased a mushy carrot across his plate.

  Rich tugged at one of the tissues sticking out of Chub’s nose. “That sniffer still bleeding?”

  Colleen set a slice of roast on Rich’s plate, ladled juice into the crater atop his mashed potatoes.

  “I think it’s time to take those out,” Rich said. Chub tipped his head back as Rich removed the tissues. “Make a dent out back?” he asked, jam jars lining the counter.

  “Can’t hardly tell.” She hadn’t met his eyes all night.

  “Is the pie done?” Chub asked.

  “We’ll have it tomorrow,” she said.

  Chub dragged his fork through his potatoes, plate a landscape of his disappointment.

  “Go brush your teeth. You have school tomorrow.”

  Rich cleared their plates, limped to the faucet. The water sputtered.

  “Been like that all day?”

  Colleen nodded. He needed to clean out the water line again. He stopped up the sink, let it fill, rolled up his sleeves, nabbed a deviled egg from the pan on the counter—nice tang of mustard.

  “Those are for Robley and Elyse,” she said.

  He’d heard they’d lost a baby. He hadn’t mentioned it to Colleen, but women had a way of passing bad news around.

  “You’re keeping those chickens in business,” he said.

  “Somebody has to.” Colleen elbowed him out of her way, rinsing the plate he’d soaped. “Go put that leg up.”

  “Stain of guilt,” he said, catching her hand, fingers purple to the first knuckle, nails black crescents. His mother used to say that when he came in for dinner with blackberry seeds stuck in his teeth.

  Colleen blushed and slipped her hand back into the dishwater, as though she would stand at the sink until it soaked clean. She’d get used to having the days to herself. He ran a palm up the face of a cabinet. The first one they’d lost, a few months after they were married—wash of blood, clot the size of a lemon—she’d stayed in bed for a week while he tore out the old cabinets and built these, pecky cedar. He’d taken the sledgehammer to the old frames, planed the cedar, everything square, everything level. He’d tried, the best way he knew how, to build a life for them. She would get used to the idea of it being just the three of them. They had Chub. They had each other.

  * * *

  “Can you walk on my back?” he asked when she finally came into the bedroom. He’d been dozing, but now he rallied, lowering himself stiffly onto the carpet.

  She sat on the end of the bed and pulled off her socks. He groaned when she stepped up, her cold toes pressing into the flesh above his tailbone.

  “Were you really going to leave?” Colleen balanced, muscles along his spine rolling.

  “What?” he asked, his voice hoarse, pinned by her weight.

  “Marsha said you were going to Oregon.”

  She stopped, toes gripping his shoulder blades. Marsha talking about Astrid again, dredging the river of their lives.

  “I was just a dumb kid.”

  When Astrid had finally emerged from the back room of the Millhauser house, she’d looked smaller, drained of color. After Colleen had lost their first, she’d looked the same way and he’d almost told her then, this thing he’d never told a living soul. He’d breathed in, and there was the sweet iron musk, water boiling on the stove, Astrid whimpering in the next room, the eerie music of the cat walking across the piano.

  It’s not a baby, stop calling it that, Astrid had said on the way there.

  He’d touched a key on the piano.

  It’s a dollar a lesson, June Millhauser had said, staring at him with her mismatched eyes, one blue, one brown. She gave him the pot to refill at the tap outside—You got her into this, you’re going to help get her out.

  But he’d breathed out, and the urge had passed. Hadn’t told Colleen then. No reason to tell her now. At least there were some stories she couldn’t read on his body.

  “Why didn’t you?” Colleen asked, pivoting, tightroping slowly back down his spine.

  “Lark fell.”

  He could have shown up at the dormitory at Oregon State, knocked on every door until Astrid’s opened. But the days went by and he didn’t, and when she came back she was engaged to a man studying to be a dentist. She’d told him straight, as though she were simply closing an account at the bank. He’d carried the caddis she’d given him in his breast pocket for a year afterward, fished with it every chance he got, watched it play on the surface—peacock-herl body, elk-hair wing, grizzly hackle—pulled trout half the length of his arm, until finally, one day, coming out of the tank shed, he’d slid the fly up on top of the wall frame.

  “Do you ever wonder what your life might have been like?” Colleen asked, stepping off. “If you’d left.”

  “Things worked out pretty good for me.” He sat up. “What made you think of that?”

  “I don’t know.”

>   He waited for her to say more. But whatever it was, she held it.

  September 7 COLLEEN

  She heard Melody screaming as soon as she opened her truck door. Keith met her in the yard.

  “How long ago did it start?” she asked, grabbing her bag.

  “Couple hours? I worked a double. I’d just got home when I called you.”

  Colleen pushed past him. Inside, Melody lay on the bed, panting. Her little girl sat on the pillow beside her, petting her head.

  “This is it,” Melody gulped.

  “Ready or not,” Colleen agreed.

  She washed her hands and arms, gathered towels. Down the hall, she heard a contraction seize Melody. Colleen looked at herself in the dim mirror, her heart racing, though she’d done this two dozen times. Breathe.

  “Breathe with her,” she told Keith. He’d stayed for the first child’s birth, which not a lot of husbands did, but Colleen wasn’t sure he’d make it through this one, by the looks of him. She went into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. “Let’s see how we’re doing.” She felt Melody’s belly, a lurch in her own chest. Melody’s eyes were wild with fear—the baby was breech again.

  “Why didn’t you—” Colleen checked her watch. It would take an ambulance an hour to get here.

  “We can’t go to the hospital,” Melody pleaded. Another contraction. They were three minutes apart now, and a minute long.

  Colleen spread the shower liner on the bedroom floor.

  “Get her up,” Colleen told Keith. “She needs to squat.”

  “Why?” Keith asked. The little girl began to cry.

  “Help her. Hold her up,” Colleen instructed, keeping her voice calm. “Now, kneel down behind her. Support her back.”

  Colleen raised the thermostat to 85, turned on the television in the front room and cranked the volume. The little girl sat on the floor, sobbing.

  “You take her,” Colleen said to Keith. Keith stood up and Colleen slid into his place. “Leave that heat up,” she told him. “And turn the oven on. It needs to be hot in here.”