by Cherie Jones
Lala learns the first true thing at four o’clock in the morning when she and Adan have already been in the Accident and Emergency Department for two hours and she feels the need to go. They are sitting side by side on two blue plastic chairs, his right hand clasping her left, his left hand rubbing the scar on his forehead, both of them bent over at the waist as if genuflecting before the big gray double doors behind which is someone who can save their baby.
Inside the waiting room, Adan inhales sharply and looks around with the slow sideways stare of a snake every time the doors slide open. He exhales only after he confirms it is another someone ailing, not the police looking for him. He has already spelled out Lala’s name to the nurse staring at a computer screen behind bulletproof glass. He has already returned to the glass, leaned into the series of holes in the shape of a flower until his tongue is almost flat against them, and reminded the nurse that his wife is bleeding. He has tested the limits of his patience so much that his anger can no longer contain itself and trembles through his shoes to tap on the green linoleum tiles of the floor. When Lala starts shaking and fainting in and out of a sort of sleep, this anger radiates outward and Adan jumps upright, sends the chair skating backward and starts to boom swear words into the quiet of the room.
“Wunna understand that my fucking wife here bleeding ’til she ready to faint?”
The nurse behind the glass is fastening a little watch, made like a brooch, onto her starched white tunic. She takes her time doing so, despite the ominous rumble of Adan’s distress. The nurse has suffered these types of outbursts before and has become immune to them.
Adan sprints into an adjoining room, wrangles a blanket off another nurse and returns to wrap it around his wife. He is still looking at the door, still thinking about the gun in the dumpster and what happened at the house. Finally, when they hear a siren wailing closer, Adan says he must leave her there, go somewhere where he can lay low, just in case. And Lala doesn’t remind him that it is possible she could be about to lose his baby.
Lala thinks she asks him to help her to the toilet first, but she is sure he leaves her in the doorway of the ladies’ room. Lala searches every single stall but all the toilet tissue dispensers are empty and she hasn’t seen the sign and she comes outside and Adan is gone and her head is spinning and she stumbles into the men’s room and searches it also because there is blood all over the back of Wilma’s nightgown and she will be damned if there is now going to be shit all over it too. And right when she comes back outside to ask a nurse or a guard or another one of the sick and waiting whether they have a pack of tissues or baby wipes or a napkin from a forgotten sandwich, a voice calls her name over the PA system and the gray doors open and a nurse appears – a squat woman with an ill-fitting wig and a uniform too white to suggest a good bedside manner – and the nurse says Hurry up we don’t have all night and Lala does not move because now she’s wet herself and she’s embarrassed and hurting worse than before and the nurse sucks her teeth because now it will have to be cleaned up (Didn’t you know you wanted to go?) and then she notices Lala’s belly is rounder than just fat and she notices the bloody prints that the soles of Adan’s sneakers have made on the green-gray floor and she shouts. A stretcher comes, and Lala is lying down when she enters the doors and passes into a hallway with prone people groaning. She sees arms held at odd angles and gashes and wounds and shirts and towels being pressed to foreheads and mouths and bleeding places and she looks up to spare herself and there is a grid of ceiling tiles and square fluorescent lights tic-tac-toeing into the future and Lala wonders whether, after all she has already been through, she is going to die here. And the thought does not distress her. The stretcher stops and another nurse appears and when next she comes to, they are telling her to push but Lala does not want to push because she is afraid of what she will find.
Lala learns the second true thing, because when she opens her mouth to ask for water the scream she has been hiding comes out instead. Lala wants to tell them This is not my scream – this is a scream I picked up from a house on Baxter’s Beach because she is hoping that the nurses will understand that this scream will also require treatment, but they don’t. The nurse with the bad Boney M wig says Shut up and asks her if this is how she was screaming when she was taking the man who got her into this mess. Her eyes tell Lala that she cannot, will not, allow Lala’s screaming to get into her own head because it doesn’t look good and these teenage girls without a pot to piss in are in here every day at younger and younger ages.
So Lala closes her mouth and swallows the scream she caught on Baxter’s Beach the way some people catch a cold and in her mind she begs the baby not to die as she pushes and feels the vessels in the whites of her eyes pop and flood her vision.
And Lala learns the third true thing when she gets past the stinging and the tearing and the stretching and the slippage and is suddenly, breathlessly freed of a weight she has been carrying within her for the past eight months and recognizes that she does not hear the squall that, in every television depiction she has ever watched, signals the birth of a baby. So she says, “Nurse – nurse?” because she wants the reassurance that everything is all right, that the baby is fine, but the nurse does not look at her, the nurse yanks her wrist out of Lala’s grasp and tells the other nurse to call the doctor and her hands are holding something that does not move. She is rushing the baby to the spot of light under a lit lamp on a table, putting a bulbous tube into its nostrils, rubbing and pressing and listening to the baby’s chest. And Lala understands that it is not good and she does not want to look but she does and she wills the baby to live because she can see that the nurses have already given up and because, suddenly, she is angry that Adan is not there and after tonight, she is sure that she can no longer love Adan and perhaps the baby is all the good in him and she wants it to live so she can love it instead. Another nurse bursts into the room and a very young student doctor is behind her and it is the two of them who stand over her baby on the small side table and slap it and prod it and prick it with tubes and needles until Lala hears a weak little cry. And it is only after Lala starts to whimper her relief that the student says, “Is she stitched up?” and the nurse who worked on saving Baby says “No” and comes back to her and pats her arm and says it is okay, they are doing everything they can.
By the time they are done Baby is still blue but she is breathing, and she is taken from the small, white table and shown briefly to her mother and then whisked away and the room is quiet while Lala is stitched up and stabbed with more needles and transfused with someone else’s blood and she is cold and she is shaking and the nurse with the wig is wrapping Wilma’s blood-soaked nightie in a ball and putting it into a bag and preparing the room for another delivery and Lala asks if they can call Wilma and tell her Stella had the baby and ask her to come, even though she knows that Wilma will not come. And the nurse, unimpressed by the fact that Lala calls her grandmother by her first name but softened by Lala’s apparent ability to beat the odds, says, “Okay – but the baby probably won’t be able to have visitors for a while.” And her tone says maybe the baby will never see visitors. And she leaves Lala in the cold quiet room on her back with her legs still splayed and no feeling at all at the intersection of her thighs and it is nothing like the bliss on the posters in the clinic or on the TV ads or the faces of the wealthy tourist women who walk with their newborns on Baxter’s Beach. Instead, she realizes that she has now brought another person into the dark, that birth is an injury and having the baby has scarred her and when the nurse asks her if she wants to go with her to see her baby in ICU she shakes her head No and the nurse clucks Tsk, tsk and Lala thinks of Adan, who hasn’t come back and she wonders if he went back for the gun but she keeps her mouth closed because some of the scream is still in there.
Chapter 2
Mrs. Whalen
26 July 1984
For the first five days after the murder, Mira Whalen is mute. She cannot speak when the maid says
good morning, she cannot tell the swarming policemen to move their booted feet off the white carpet in her bedroom, she cannot say anything when the police insist on showing her photographs of all the robbers they know who were out of jail at the time of Peter Whalen’s murder. She can only moan refusals (Don’t come, Don’t arrange for the body to be taken back to England just yet, Don’t cry) when her mother calls with offers of assistance.
But her voice is not the only thing that leaves her – on each of the five nights since the murder, Mira Whalen has also lost her teeth.
Painless though it is, it fills her each time with an unexplainable terror as she dreams it, a terror that remains unabated on waking. It is often an ordinary dream, as dreams go (walking the dog, washing the dishes) save that, before she knows it, her two front teeth tumble from her mouth and into her hands. Every night.
In her dream, she is warned by a mental tearing-away devoid of physical sensation that nevertheless compels her hands upward until they reach her lips. She parts them slowly and feels the proof plop into her palms. It is always baby teeth – bloodless and tiny – the kind you might leave for the tooth fairy. Her Morphean self stares at these miniatures, whiter and more multifaceted than she remembers, and while she stares, the mental rending starts afresh, the central incisors in her palms are elevated and there is the slow parting of lips and the silent crash of more of the teeth she hasn’t owned since she was a mere little girl.
What disturbs Mira Whalen most about these dreams is not the threatened loss of her ability to chew, but rather the fact that she often continues to stare at the teeth in her palm, even though she knows that more are to be lost. It does not matter to Mira that she is dreaming. Surely, she thinks on rising in the near-morning, surely her sleeping version should be smart enough to foresee what will happen next? To do something to prevent the loss of more teeth? While Mira Whalen ponders the stupidity of her somnolent self, her sensible side repeats the same actions each morning on waking: Mira Whalen walks the twenty steps from the makeshift bed on the carpet behind the closed bedroom door to the mirror above the bathroom sink. There she takes three deep breaths before forcing herself to face the glass, at which point she watches her reflection bite the back of her hand, hard enough to mark it, and then examine each curve in the smarting impression.
It is only after Mira Whalen has convinced herself that her real teeth are all grown up that she counts them, every morning after the murder. Mira Whalen counts aloud, as counting her teeth in her head gives her the sensation of still being asleep and the prospect of being a sleepwalker is the scariest thing of all, but today is the first day that her voice actually makes a sound. Mira’s voice grates over her tongue and teeth, and emerges from her mouth a rasping thing that whispers even when she doesn’t want it to. On each of the first five mornings after the murder, Mira Whalen considered it a blessing that she could not speak and wake the children even if she was so inclined. On this, the sixth morning, she chides herself for being so stupid as to still believe in blessings.
On the sixth morning after the murder of her husband Mira Whalen looks at the lonely pink electric toothbrush in the medicine cabinet while she swallows three Panadols and one Celexa with a gulp of water she catches in two cupped palms under a hot tap. She does not realize that she opens the tap marked Hot but she does not burn her fingers, because she never needs more water than she can catch in the ten seconds before the water from the spout begins to steam. She swallows all four tablets in one gulp and lifts her head from the spigot just as the water reaches a temperature that could singe her skin if she isn’t fast enough, and then she is faced with the mirror again. For the first time since the murder, Mira allows herself a look, a long look, at a witch with wild hair, wandering eyes and a wet, crusting bruise on a cheek now shaded with purple and blue. Mira Whalen turns away, partly because, outside of the teeth, the person in the mirror isn’t someone she recognizes and partly because she has better things to do than try to fix that woman’s face. Things like calling the Baxter’s Beach Police Station, for example, to determine whether they have yet caught the man that killed her husband. Things like calling the mortuary at Baxter’s General to find out whether the forensic pathologist has flown in from Sweden as yet so he can tell them what they already know and she can take the children and get the fuck out of here. Things like trying to reach Peter’s ex-wife and the mother of his two children to tell her what has happened because the first Mrs. Whalen is an artist and has gone off to a retreat on a mountain in India where she doesn’t even have access to a fucking phone. Things she hasn’t been able to bring herself to do in the first five days since she lost her husband.
On the sixth morning since the murder, after counting her teeth and her medicine, Mira Whalen counts the children. She retraces the twenty steps from the mirror to the soft stack of bedding on which Beth and Sam are still softly snoring. She sits on the carpet and watches them first, counting the rise and fall of breast and back. After two sets of ten counts of breath, Mira Whalen counts two sets of ten fingers, two sets of ten toes. And then she counts two sets of ten breaths again. It is only after this second set of ten breaths that Mira can close the curtains more firmly against the daylight, go back to bed and drift into the future. In this future, she is leaving for Peter’s retirement party, getting dressed for Beth’s wedding, sitting in the audience at Sam’s graduation until, inexplicably, she decides to walk a big white dog she has never owned in real life and the moments start to slow down the way moments do when something is about to go terribly wrong.
On this sixth morning Mira Whalen hears clicks and spits teeth and gasps awake to the sound of a young girl’s screaming, Beth’s terror a fuller, deeper version of her own.
* * *
The day before Peter died, they had been arguing: one of those pointless rants about nothing important, which Mira will now never forget. He’d asked her to bring raisins on her way back from the beach, because he wanted to make bread pudding, her favorite dessert in the whole wide world. Peter wasn’t a good cook. As far as she was concerned he didn’t need to be, and he certainly didn’t need to cook for her – he could afford to eat anywhere he wanted every day for the rest of his life, and therefore, by extension, so could she. She hadn’t understood why he’d insisted, this visit, on making her bread pudding, why he’d gotten so upset when she said she’d forgotten the raisins. He hadn’t understood why she couldn’t appreciate that the argument was about more than bread pudding and raisins.
In the end, when the argument had escalated past raisins and cooking, Peter had decided to spend the night in the spare room again, and this time he didn’t bother to wait until the children were asleep before he took his things down the long, lit hallway to one of the other bedrooms. She’d watched Sam’s face fall and had said Daddy’s making room for you to sleep with me because a seven-year-old accepts such explanations. For him that had been enough, but his sister had rolled her eyes and slunk off to play her stereo much louder than she should have been allowed. Mira had rolled her own eyes. If she and Peter were never able to make the baby they so desperately wanted, she’d long decided, if the gods decided to be that unkind, she’d still have counted herself lucky to have been the stepmom to these two, even when life with Beth was beginning to get a hell of a lot more challenging. Sam remained as sweet as ever.
She’d admired Peter that evening as he’d passed her with his arms full of bedding. She’d taken in the slightly sagging skin of his arms and chest, the laugh lines that never left his cheeks, the cotton-candy wisps of salty hair under his armpits. Inside, she’d acknowledged that he was a good man. The thing that had come to her mind then was But he is a good man, and she sometimes forgot now that if her thought had been a qualifier, then what must have come before it was that he was somehow not. That night she’d taken in the sight of him, walking with a pillow with a blue striped pillowcase under his arm, trying his best not to look at her. She’d thought him beautiful, but hadn’t told him. A sm
all, a stupid thing. A thing you do in full expectation of waking up the following morning on the other side of the argument, brushing his back on the way to breakfast, catching his eye when you both laugh at something one of the children says over pancakes. That night she’d gone to bed secure in her entitlement to another chance. At the time, three weeks into their summer vacation at their luxurious beachfront villa, the arguments had been new, and never about the thing they were really arguing about. She had hoped to finally be able to argue about the real thing this holiday. To get things out in the open and off both their chests. She’d felt entitled, at least, to that argument.
But that argument had eluded her.
That night, she’d surrendered to sleep despite the bump and scrape of Peter’s restlessness through the wall, drifting off fitfully. Later she’d been awakened by the barrel of a gun prodding her face. She’d gotten up groggy, thinking it was him, which still pained her – that the conclusion that it was her husband who’d broken into her bedroom to do her some evil was the first one she’d come to. Perhaps Peter would have been perfectly entitled to want to kill her for all the wrong she had done.
But it hadn’t been him.
It had been a blue-black man with a gray-blue gun and a palm wide open, standing at the side of her bed demanding money. At the sound of her scream, Peter had come running. He’d opened his arms and offered his wallet to the robber and when the man was still not satisfied, he’d begged him to spare her. Please, Peter had said, let my wife go. And the robber had looked at him, focused in on the fact that he was pleading for a life other than his own, and laughed. A deep laugh he’d lost a moment later, when he brought the butt of the gun down on Peter’s nose until it bled. The children had been sleeping, Sam having decided that he would stay in Beth’s room for the night, and Mira Whalen had witnessed Peter’s efforts to muffle his anguish when his nose broke – so that the children wouldn’t hear him cry out, wouldn’t wake and come running into the room with the robber and the gun.