by Melanie Tem
She could almost not breathe. The air was too thin and too cold. The air was full of things, too—ice, blood. Her legs trembled.
She slipped and fell. The snow on the sidewalk was already ice. She scraped the side of her head on the stone wall, sprawled on her side. She clawed her way back to her feet. The baby was raging, transforming, transforming her. Deborah couldn’t do anything to either stop it or help it, except she could get out of the storm, get into the house.
Which house?
Easily, she jumped over the wall into the center courtyard. In here snow was falling, too, heavy gray from the low gray sky, pinkish where the streetlights got to it. But the houses blocked the wind. Deborah crouched where she’d landed. There weren’t any footprints at all in the courtyard, or any odors except her own and the baby’s. Snow was halfway up her legs, coldly cradling her butt.
Muscles contracted. Other muscles bulged. Blood spurted warm between her legs and out onto the cold ground, probably melting the snow, where it would be diluted to pink and covered up, made to seem like part of the natural world or part of the built environment in the world inside the courtyard of the four old houses. Pain clawed her, inside and out, and she yelled. In the quiet of the snow falling in the courtyard without any wind, her voice was loud and long and she didn’t think it sounded like either a woman or a wolf. She wondered what her voice would sound like to the people who lived around here, and what it would sound like to the baby.
The pain stopped. Bracing herself against the cold rough wall, Deborah managed to stand, then walk. All four houses looked empty, no lights on, solid dark against the moving dark of the falling snow. There was something especially sinister about how quiet the snow was, how cold. The house she’d lived in (not her house or her mother’s because all the houses belonged to Nana) was totally dark, the lightest thing about it was the snow on all its roofs. Her mother always left a light on. Not for her.
A thought came into her mind that at first seemed to make perfect sense. The passion of the image seemed to solve everything. She’d have her baby in her own bed. She’d raise it in her own house. She would be a wonderful mother—with help from her own mother and grandmother and great-grandmother, or alone if she had to.
Following the wall with her shoulder, she started around the periphery of the courtyard. Muscles bulged and spread, other muscles contracted sharply. Her own muscles, the baby’s, muscles so high inside her that they couldn’t really be just hers, were her connection and the baby’s to all the women of the family, all the generations.
Pain.
Deborah squatted, her thighs as far apart as she could push them. The baby didn’t come out. She could feel it pushing against the tender back of her vaginal opening, raging against her, hating her, hurting her, because she was the one confining it when what she wanted, wanted was to set it free, get rid of it, purge it out of her body into its own body, its own life. But it wouldn’t come out, and it blamed her. Maybe it would stay trapped inside her for its whole life, share her breath and her food and her blood, and it would always be her fault.
Squatting there in the snow, hot between her legs and so cold everywhere else, waiting for the baby to be born out of her, waiting for more pain and more blood, Deborah remembered how she’d played in the courtyard during other snowstorms, sometimes by herself and sometimes with her cousins from the mountains, snowball fights and digging dens. Remembered, too, one warm fall afternoon picking and eating a lot of the belladonna crop and most of the tomatoes, red ones and still-green ones.
For several hours, she thought now—although both her experience of time and her memory of it were badly distorted—she’d laughed, talked, danced, paced, flicked with terrible and beautiful visions that had filled the courtyard with friends for her, at last, until her mother had discovered what she’d done. Then her mother had punished her while the older women watched, whipped her and raked her thighs with her claws. “Goddammit, I’m so afraid you’re going to hurt yourself!” her mother had gasped, hurting her badly.
Then, alone, Deborah had thrown up the rest of the day and into the night, no need to stick her fingers down her throat to rid herself of the poison. Her mother had stayed up with her, for all the good it did, and Deborah had wished she hadn’t. Her mother couldn’t do anything to help her, couldn’t even say anything to her that made sense. Her mother, as usual, was helpless, and pissed off at Deborah for making it so obvious.
The baby twisted and sent pain through Deborah’s body, but didn’t come out. Furious, Deborah shouted at it, pressed her fingertips hard into the lower part of her stomach, punched and punched herself with clawed fists. It didn’t make any difference what she did. The baby wasn’t coming out.
Somebody called her without using her name.
Pain slashed from her heart to her cunt. Deborah roared, fell, pressed her face and belly into the snow. More snow kept falling on top of her. Pain slashed. What was inside her was wild to get out.
Somebody called hoarsely, “Deborah.”
Up on all fours, she swung her head heavily from side to side, squinted through the sheets of dark and snow. Her nostrils flared but didn’t catch anything but the wet smell of the snow and the hot, intimate, unidentifiable odors of what was coming out of her body and what wasn’t. Her ears captured the hard swish of snow on stone, on bone, and the baby’s heartbeat louder than her own.
“Deborah.”
Nana.
Nana was sitting calmly across the billowing courtyard, outside the mother house. An enormous solid presence, like a house herself. Waiting for Deborah. Calling her, by name and not by name.
Nana. Nana would know what to do.
Deborah took a step. Pain slashed. She left the wall and started across the vast expanse of the courtyard toward the beckoning voice and presence of her great-grandmother. From just inside her, the baby called—called her, called Nana.
Nana called.
“Deborah.”
Not Nana. Julian.
“Deborah,” he called sweetly. Rage burst in her brain, heart, pelvis, and she leapt full at him, leapt for his throat, leapt howling into his arms.
He caught her easily, both her and the baby. Pain slashed. He stopped her from hurting him, easily. He was saying just “Deborah, Deborah” over and over. The gentle syllables of her name reached her, calmed her a little.
Pain slashed. The baby slashed, roared. Julian kept saying, “Deborah.”
Somehow then they were inside the mother house. Snow wasn’t falling and it was warmer. Too warm—sweat poured into her eyes and from her eyes like tears. Blood and birth fluid poured from between her legs but the baby wasn’t coming, wasn’t coming that way. It would burst up out of her heart and kill her, send pieces of her flying like snow.
The room smelled of wolf, smelled of her family, smelled so strongly of the holy unguent that she didn’t need to put it on, could absorb it through the hairs in her nose, the fur breaking through her skin. There were no blue candle flames but there were the six doors, she kept counting them, one, two, three, four, five, six, a rhythm, one, two, three, four, five, six, and a tall window on each end of the long, long room edged with dark snow like a claw.
Nobody was here but her and Julian and the baby, coming. The house was empty. Her family had left. Left her. Nobody was here but her and Julian. The baby wasn’t here yet.
Pain slashed. Deborah screamed. Julian held her easily, stayed right with her. His odor was sweet and strong in the odoriferous room. He stayed with her when there was pain and when there wasn’t any pain, and her blood got on him and he stayed.
Light changed in the room and outside the shaded windows. Night deepened. Then morning showed itself at the western edge of the city sky and in around the clawed edges of the tall windows. It was still snowing, and bitter cold.
The baby came in the morning. Thick blood and thick dark hair. Perfect little rosebud lips, with one sharp fang protruding from the pink upper gum. Perfect gemlike fingers and toes
with a curved black nail on the little finger of the left hand. It was a girl.
A cold, hard wind blew through the city that morning, still snow-laden though it had come across the Continental Divide. By rush hour the streets were very nearly impassable. Schools closed. Flights in and out of Stapleton were delayed by hours or canceled altogether. Sidewalks and gutters filled in and smoothed over, leaving virtually no sign that anyone had ever passed this way or ever would again.
Julian went out once to shovel, but snow was falling so thick and fast that he saw immediately it was pointless. After just a few minutes his hands were reddened and numb.
He hastened back inside Mary’s house, stomping snow off his thin shoes and shaking it off his black coat and orange Broncos cap, to find both Deborah and the baby wailing. Deborah was trying to nurse. The baby was shrieking her hunger and frustration, her fundamental dissatisfaction with anything her young mother could think to offer her.
Deborah had managed to name her daughter Suzanne, although that hadn’t been easy. A teenage girl playing with dolls, she’d considered numerous other names, written them in a spiral notebook with lots of hearts and curlicues to see how they’d look. Robyn, Melisande, Deirdre, Taylor; fancy, romantic names. Solid names, too: Jane, Sarah. None of them fit. Suzanne didn’t really fit, either, but she knew she had to call her something, couldn’t let her out in the world for very long without some kind of name. So her name was Suzanne, and Deborah knew she couldn’t take care of her. Couldn’t give her what she needed. Couldn’t possibly keep her safe.
Julian came to take care of both mother and infant. He stroked Deborah’s tangled hair, washed her sweaty face with a cool cloth, and gently took Suzanne from her. He sang to them both, and the baby hushed, her still-unfocused, still-blue eyes seeming to light now and then on his face. Deborah watched, then turned her head away and closed her eyes.
Julian hadn’t seen the paw prints, much bigger than his own footprints, that circled the house, circled the four sister houses on the block. They came from the west and disappeared again westward toward the mountains, while snow fell heavily into them, filled them up and smoothed them out.
Suzanne was a small baby, five pounds or less in Julian’s estimation. Therefore, her difficulties in being born, the pain she caused Deborah and the copious amounts of blood and internal tissue she brought out with her had nothing to do with her size. Although he’d studied human anatomy and physiology fairly extensively in graduate school, and fetal development at the public library in recent weeks, Julian had no formal medical training, but he thought the problem might have been her positioning, and the force with which she’d pushed herself out of Deborah’s womb. He also suspected, though he was not sure it was actually possible from a kinesiological point of view, that she had scored the birth canal and birth opening with both her single fanglike tooth and the black curved nail on the little finger of her left hand, which was nearly half an inch long and very hard.
Julian was awestruck. When he held the baby, he was moved by both her smallness and her strength, and by the lively sparkle of her eyes, which were a newborn’s muddy blue with just a hint, in some lights, of yellow. He held her more and more.
He went out through the snowy streets to the 7-Eleven up on the corner of Federal and bought baby bottles and formula. His shoes and socks and pant cuffs were soaked by the time he got back. Suzanne was howling, and Deborah, furious, thrust the child at him with such force that he nearly dropped her.
“Deborah!” he chided gently. But she stalked off into some other part of the house and he didn’t follow her, turned his attention instead to the baby, who happily ate what he fed her and fell contentedly asleep in his arms.
On the fourth day after Suzanne’s birth, the wind in the city finally subsided. The snow stopped, and the sky cleared to a luminous blue with sunshine iridescent on the snow. Even inside her great-grandmother’s house, with the shades pulled and the doors locked, Deborah’s eyes were hurt by all the light.
She was trying again to nurse her daughter. She knew it was hopeless. Suzanne wouldn’t look at her, and when she consented to take Deborah’s breast in her mouth she bit it. Deborah’s nipples were ringed with blood. The baby’s fanged rosebud mouth was ringed with blood, too, her mother’s blood, and still she was always hungry.
Feeding her child hurt, and did not nourish anyway. Deborah hated this child. She didn’t want to hate her. She had to stop herself from hurting her—spanking her, raking her tender baby skin with her nails. She loved her too much to hurt her, but she was sure someday she would.
She lay in bed—her grandmother Ruth’s bed, sheets and blankets no longer smelling of her grandmother because Julian had washed them—listened to the sounds of the city starting to move again, and tried to decide what to do. But she knew what to do.
By the end of the week, daytime temperatures were in the fifties and the snow was melting, freezing at night, melting more the next day. Deborah forced herself to hold her daughter, forced her daughter to be held, although the baby stiffened her sturdy little arms and legs and pushed away from her. Deborah fingered the tiny, curved black fingernail and the dark down on the baby’s head, rocked her for a while, gave her back to Julian, and Suzanne relaxed right away, quieted the minute she came in contact with his body, his voice. Deborah wept without tears, raged, and wouldn’t talk to Julian about it, though he tried.
On a clear night, the house all but dark and the city pearly, Deborah slipped out of the back of the house and headed west. Sitting up with the baby in the front bedroom on the second floor, Julian didn’t hear her go. Footprints of people and dogs and cats and birds, whose outlines had melted during the day, now froze into shapes not much like any known footprints. Deborah herself left no footprints on the hard crust of the snow as she headed west out of town toward the mountains.
Chapter 20
Seen from the city, a band of lavender sunset edged the peaks. The moon was covered by clouds so that the whole sky glowed. The snow-covered ground glowed, too—slopes, valleys, high meadows—and the stream along the roadbed glittered. There was almost too much light. Deborah’s eyes ached.
There were almost too many odors and textures, too, and sounds, though infinitesimal, were myriad and tangled. As Deborah reentered the canyons, she knew exactly where she was going.
She’d been up here once a year for as long as she could remember. In summer, usually, and in the company of her grandmother and great-grandmother and sometimes her mother—so, alone now and in the winter, she wouldn’t have thought she’d know the way. But there was no thinking. She followed heightened senses and some profound instinct, and she ran.
For Suzanne.
For her daughter, who was a separate creature now with a life of her own. There wasn’t much Deborah could do for her. She couldn’t raise her.
She couldn’t make her safe. She couldn’t, really, even love her. But she could do this.
She raced up Waterton Canyon, left the road, and without a misstep found Wolf Canyon where it cut through the Devil’s Backbone, went with it for its entire narrowing length until it narrowed farther into Bitter Canyon. The sheer cliffs, where the caves were, were gray in the diffused moonlight, with darker gray stripes bent and broken. Deborah had a flash of memory of how red they were in daylight, red with gray and darker gray and darker red stripes.
She stopped, prowled. The caves were here. She remembered, well below conscious or organized memory. She dug furiously and pressed her shoulder into the rock wall, which seemed to be shifting under her weight but would not, yet, open for her.
Around her and below her, the canyon teemed with shadows, with vivid snippets of odor and sound. Bird, rodent; Deborah twitched with a brief, strong urge to hunt them down, which she ignored. No wind that she could feel, but the tops of the tall pines moved.
Marguerite.
Deborah’s head came up and her nostrils flared.
But then the scent was gone, and no one else was here
. No one on the surface. But underneath, in the caves (underground but still higher than the city; blue light and red walls; the feel of the air like stone—she remembered), they were waiting for her to find them, and she would, easy. She would find them and destroy them. To give Suzanne a chance.
Maybe she would eat their hearts.
Maybe she would take what she could of their brains.
Maybe she would just kill them and leave them to rot, or maybe she would bury them in the mountains and put up stones.
Nana.
Her throat constricted and her head pounded with the black noise of pain. She shook her head and cleared her throat violently to rid herself of it, but it didn’t go away. Her hair flew around her in a stiff ruff. Cold dirt filled her eyes like gritty tears so that for a while she could hardly see.
Suzanne, she said deliberately to herself. My child. Her head cleared.
There. She uncovered the entrance to the caves and burrowed into it. Childbirth had hurt her body but somehow had also strengthened it; she was aware of pain in her back, belly, cunt, but somehow it didn’t hurt. It energized. She broke through.
She pushed herself into the first big cave and was completely underground. “Deborah,” they called. No words, of course, not her name, but they called.
This first room was empty. This was where she’d been before, every year, for as long as she could remember. She remembered: cries of infants vibrating through the mountains, pushing one layer hard into another so that rock lifted, shattered, even altered its basic composition. Cries of initiates.
A well on the floor held unguent, congealed to within six inches of the lip and then sliming the sides. Deborah dipped her hand in and massaged the thick, slightly rancid gel into her skin. It drew so fiercely that she thought she couldn’t stand it, thought she was being turned inside out. The two bony knobs in the front of her collarbone pushed apart, and pain shot through her breastbone into the muscle of her heart, making her heart beat wildly. Her pelvis spread, sending radiant pain and excitement through her groin.