Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  We enter through a roll-up door on the loading dock, which we reach only through several National Guard checkpoints. We do it in early daylight. Everybody needs their recyclables hauled, right? Shawn and Sera don’t think that this connection will last longer than a couple of weeks more, but it works for us. Sera and I are out of the truck and whisked in so quickly that I hardly get more than a backward glance at Shawn. He’s wide-eyed, nodding, nervous. Once we’re in, a small pink-cheeked woman with a cockatoo crest of white hair takes us to a room in the vast lower level where the mail is sorted among a gray-toned warren of offices, staff meeting rooms, and utility closets.

  She puts us in a closet containing a big soapstone sink for cleaning mops. The closet has a small window carefully trimmed out. On the corners of the window there are small square tiles of lilies, brown, with green tile background. We are facing north, and silvery-gray river light floods through the old-fashioned frosted glass. Although there is hardly room to lie down, I am not in the least claustrophobic. The room is cold, and clean. Even though the white-haired woman clicks the door shut as she leaves and locks us in, I am suddenly filled with the sense that we’re going to be all right, that we’re going to make it out. The comfort that the details on the window give me is perhaps extreme—but the fact that human beings thought to invest a mop and broom utility closet with a touch of charm gives me hope. Mom and I sit down on the floor, cozy up on a couple of couch cushions.

  “Come here,” she says, and I creep near, lean against her. She pulls me to her with a sigh and strokes my hair. I look at the lilies on the window, the calm light through the panels, the careful way the tile was inset, countersunk into the wood. How the flowers were fired and colored into the design. Perhaps this sort of gesture will be lost, perhaps it is a function of consciousness that we don’t need in order to survive. Perhaps this piece of evolution makes no sense—our hunger for everyday sorts of visual pleasure—but I don’t think so. I think we have survived because we love beauty and because we find each other beautiful. I think it may be our strongest quality.

  “Here.” Sera adjusts me, reaches into her pack. She unwraps a granola bar and hands it to me. A real foil-wrapped oats-and-honey bar—the kind we bought all the time in gas-station markets just a couple of months ago. They’re rare now. I eat it slowly, dissolving one oat at a time, melting myself into her once again. Her back’s against the wall and I think I may be too heavy for her.

  “You’re okay, you’re fine,” she says.

  I am flooded with exhaustion. It rolls over me and shuts my eyes midbite. I wake probably a couple of hours later, shocked to consciousness by dreams, seeing Orielee’s eyes lose life, her feet drumming on the dirty pink hospital linoleum. At first I don’t even remember where I am, but when I realize I’m still in Sera’s arms I sink back, and let myself cry, luxuriantly, tears popping from my eyes and cooling my face. Weeping feels sweet and profound, but maybe it’s not a safe thing to do, so I stop. Sera has not moved, not put me down, in all that time. Now I move away from her, sure she’s aching. She rolls her shoulders, stretches out her arms. Her hair shimmers in the light. I stretch too, then curl up on the floor. She gives me a drink of water from the bottle she carries.

  “Would they have killed us, I mean, in the hospital?”

  “Lots of women don’t make it out,” she says carefully.

  “I see so much,” I tell her, “I feel so much. Too much has happened already, and it’s unbearable.”

  She puts her hand on my back. I know she’s searching for what to say, but what she comes up with sounds pretty thin. “We’ve all had to toughen up, even your dad.”

  This makes me laugh.

  “Yeah, Glen the softie. Do you know exactly where he is?”

  She says nothing for a few moments, then whispers, “No.”

  “Are you not telling me because . . .”

  I look at her and point all around the little room. Cup my hand to my ears. Are we being listened to?

  She gives a “maybe” shrug, so I lie back down next to her. No use unloading the big weights around my heart yet. I want to ask her if I’ll be okay, but I should not mention Tia out loud. I’m also haunted by what that sneaky nurse, the Slider, said about these babies being extra difficult to deliver. Will I survive and will you? Was Tia’s labor really normal, and the baby’s death an anomaly? I want to tell Sera what we did to Orielee. I want to share the burden of my horror, my dreams of the killing. How I watched, that moment, before I joined in and helped Tia. Held Orielee down. Her neck was heavy, I remember that now. I couldn’t feel her bones anywhere. Her shoulders, her arms, even her elbows seemed padded by fat. And yet the colors in her eyes were so delicate, the blue irises, cornflower bright. She stared at me, then through me, to the other side I guess. And her feet would not stop pounding on the hospital linoleum.

  “Are you still hungry?”

  Of course I am. I’m always hungry. Ravenous, like a dog. Mom has a lovely bag of mixed nuts, unsalted, and I try to eat each one slowly, carefully, extracting the max in flavor and nutrition. I ask her if Tia’s labor was normal, and Mom assures me that it was. She thinks that the baby probably suffered from the fall back at the hospital, because when she examined the placenta she found a place where it had ruptured. The baby itself did not make things difficult, she tells me again. She is positive that I am not going to have complications.

  “How come you’re positive?”

  “I asked your birth mom and grandma about their deliveries—all completely normal.”

  “Those things run in families?”

  “For sure.”

  I think she’s exaggerating, but this does make me feel better, and I’m even more encouraged when Sera takes her stethoscope and blood pressure cuff out and listens to my heart, and then finds your heart. I listen too—a little whuffing sound. She puts the cuff around my arm, pumps it up, times my pulse.

  “Your blood pressure’s fine,” she says. “Baby’s active?”

  “Real active,” I say, proud, but she just nods. I have this moment of longing to share my happy moment of pride in you, and I miss Phil so much I have to shut my eyes and breathe slowly, rhythmically, so that I don’t start to cry.

  “Can you talk about Phil?” I mouth his name.

  Sera nods, but looks uncomfortable and spooked, so I let up.

  “Do you have anything else to eat?”

  She rummages around in her pack again and takes out a Lunchable, one of those cheese and pressed-meat snack boxes, mostly packaging.

  “Sorry.”

  “What do you mean? I longed for these. You wouldn’t let me eat them!”

  “Enjoy.”

  I take the little package apart and eat every bite of cheesy cracker and baloney, but I’m still hungry, and parched, too. I drink most of the bottle of water, then I try the tap on the mop sink.

  “Safe?”

  “I think so.” I gulp down the rest of the water and fill the bottle again.

  “He’s probably growing. I think I’m having a boy.”

  Sera doesn’t react like a grandma’s supposed to. Her face stays neutral. An abrupt stubbornness comes over me.

  “You could at least act like you’re happy,” I say.

  The light is dim, her eyes are clouded. She won’t smile because she never acts. This is the part of Sera I can’t stand, her inability to prevaricate, to tell the nice lie, whitewash, even to make someone feel better.

  “C’mon, just pretend like you’re happy,” I say, my voice miserable.

  “Well, I can’t. I’m hoping . . . Well, it was very sad, but at least your friend’s free now.”

  “Don’t say it, don’t say it!” It’s like she’s darted me, put an arrow into me, the sudden hurt is that intense. “Don’t you dare say it!” She wants me to lose the baby. And I’m suddenly furious at my mom and wish that I could get out of this mop closet just so I didn’t have to sit so close to her. I don’t want you to be affected by her lack of instinc
tive love. I move as far away as the couch cushion allows. I think of curling up on the hard concrete floor—but she’s the one who should get off! And the thing is, she’s not sorry. She won’t apologize for what she considers honesty. Why should she, even when it hurts somebody else, somebody desperate, somebody who needs a lie?

  “I just hate it when you will not compromise,” I hiss.

  “It’s my truth,” she says, sadly, moving her shoulders in a defensive shrug.

  Her truth. It’s like she’s bent two electric wires in my brain together. I feel sparks.

  “I’m so tired! You and your fucking truth!”

  She glares at me and I know what she’s thinking. I’m not grateful that she came back to the city, that she found out where I was, that she somehow got a job at the hospital using impossible-to-obtain fake papers, got a job in food service, handled all that meat and meat-based substance. All for me.

  “I know you want me to lie,” she says bitterly. “Well, tough. I can’t. I wish the baby had never happened.”

  I jump to my feet, now, sizzling with anger.

  “Oh, do you? Never happened? How easy, I wish. I wish, I wish. I wish I’d never been adopted. How’s that? How absurd is it to wish something never had happened?”

  “Ah, well . . .”

  Now she’s quiet and gets all reflective. In a moment I know that I will be ashamed, for as usual I have gone too far. It will be me who apologizes, me who says how sorry I am, because the next thing she’ll let me know is how hurt she is. Stricken to the core. Wish you’d never been adopted? How much truth is there in what you just said? She’ll say that, or maybe she’ll just maintain that little-girlish studied silence that even infuriates Glen.

  But to her credit, Sera only says, “Enough.” She lifts her strong, thin hand, so pale in the almost dark that it shines like porcelain.

  “Your hand, it looks so saintly, like a statue,” I say, my voice all sour and harmed.

  She doesn’t take that bait, either. We don’t go toward the old Catholic business, although there’s an attraction to go there, a pull. Maybe we need a fight, to warm us up, because we can’t seem to take the right turn out of the tangle of our irritations. Though I must admit she’s trying harder than I am, for she manages not to go much further than “We haven’t heard much from your pope.”

  And I can’t really parry that, so I just sit back down and feel the letdown, the emptiness, the resentment over the fact that nobody but me appreciates your presence here on earth. I’ll just have to appreciate you twice as hard. I’ll appreciate you for everyone. I think of Eddy’s letter of happiness, and the hug that Sweetie gave me. Before I know it I say to Sera, “Maybe it’s a cliché, you know, about warmth and acceptance, Mom, but my birth family was real glad for me up there.”

  I feel her stiffen, and I know that I’ve hit the bulls-eye, which doesn’t make me feel in the least bit better, but now it’s too late.

  “Oh,” she says very quietly, “well, they would. I mean, Cedar, it’s easy to say how marvelous your being pregnant is, but when it comes right down to it, you know, the hard thing is to look clearly at the situation. The tough thing is to see the problems it presents.” She nods to herself, clearly steaming inside. Now that we’re equally hurt, I go in for the last word.

  “There’s nothing wrong with showing a little positive emotion, Mom; it won’t kill you to be loving.”

  But now I’ve taken it right over the edge, I guess, because Sera’s head slowly bends and her shoulders curve and her face is in her hands. As soon as she sobs, I’m a fountain of tears, and after a while we are both moaning and hiccuping. And that’s it—a not untypical Cedar/Sera fight, no lasting hurt done, as long as we end up crying in each other’s arms.

  * * *

  Once most of the employees go home, the white-haired lady unlocks the door and lets us out so we can go to the bathroom. We take some rags from the mop closet to wash ourselves with, and scuttle down the hall behind her. She brings us to a special, private bathroom that must have been constructed for the use of the postmaster or one of the higher-up postal officials, and here again, she locks us in. She says she’ll be back later and she walks away, jangling the keys on her belt. I’m not sure what all the locking and unlocking means, but I assume that there must be postal workers who do not know that we are hiding in the building.

  The bathroom’s made out of that gold-pink stone, polished, plus a brown marble trim. The mirrors are framed in brass but the faucets have been replaced with new aluminum spigots. The water’s cold of course, but it feels good to wash. We even have a bar of strawberry soap from Mom’s pack. The hospital mirrors were made of reflective steel, and my face was a blur. So as I wash and dry my body, I am overcome with the sin and embarrassment of pride. While Mom is in the toilet stall, I look at myself in a real mirror for the first time since I was at home, and I marvel at my breasts. They are like big fake breasts, magazine breasts, completely drop-dead gorgeous. They stick straight out and when I put them back into their old worn bra they swell—great cleavage. I turn back and forth, catching the light, dazzled with myself—my skin is so clear, my hair so thick. And you’re this giant ball, hard and resilient, sticking straight out over my skinny legs. It is a shame to cover up such glory with long underwear, overalls, boots, a jacket. I’d love to wash my hair but Mom says that we should ask how long we’ve got. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us. So I jam a dark blue postal-worker stocking cap on over my hair and when the white-haired lady lets us out, into a darkened hall this time, I follow her.

  “We’re loading now,” she says to Mom, and we slip through the dim night out to the dock where the back of a semitrailer truck stands, its back door rolled up and open. It is a shimmery, prickling, peaceful night. A slim man wearing an earflap hat gestures us forward, onto the truck. We step into the shadow of the trailer and hunch through a narrow opening past stacks of mail crates. I only see that the slim man is Hiro when we reach the front of the trailer, just behind the cab, where there is a sort of cage—protection against the mail crates in case they topple. He helps us into the thin space and shows us hammocks, bottles of water, quilted blankets—the kind movers use to protect tabletops. There are two black down jackets and two sets of heavy-duty snow boots. A bag of food and a covered bucket.

  I thank Hiro and I try to hug him, but he ducks his head, shy or restrained, and only says, “I don’t know how long you’ll be in here.”

  “Who’s this mail for?”

  “Towns north.”

  “Any junk mail?”

  “No junk mail anymore.” Hiro grins. “One of the few positives. How are you feeling?” He looks at me, his head inclines, he waits for me to answer, his face beaming as though I am just any lucky pregnant woman.

  “Good,” I say. Hiro nods, satisfied. He is wearing a quilted postal employee jacket, but his scarf is a knitted orange and black Halloween scarf.

  “Only a week to go,” I say, pointing at the scarf.

  “No tricks, just treats, this year,” he says, making friendly, nonsense small talk. “I am not driving, but don’t worry. Chris will get you there before the candy is gone.”

  “Who’s Chris?”

  “Me,” says a man stepping through the stacks. He’s short, shrewd and boxy, powerful; he’s got a dark goatee and underneath his CAT cap the start of a scroungy mullet.

  “Chris will take good care of you,” says Hiro.

  “How come you’ve looked after me?” I ask Hiro just as he’s about to go. “How come you found me at the hospital? Brought me the messages?”

  Hiro looks surprised at my question, taken aback, as though I should know. “You were on my route,” he says.

  We’re settled in our cage, wearing the heavy boots and jackets. Mom folds the movers’ quilts so that they fit inside the hammocks. There are metal hand- and footholds in the walls of the truck so we can climb, catch, roll into the hammocks, and swing free. Mom takes the higher one, and that night, as
we swing lightly in the knitted hammocks, the truck moves slowly along. I think how surprising some people are. Hiro has casually risked his life for me because I am on his mail route. Recycling-truck Shawn, with the tragic brown eyes, is devoting himself to the rescue and hiding of pregnant women. Tia’s husband did exactly what they’d agreed, and now they are together.

  Slowly, in the dark truck, not a crack of light coming through in any part of the walls, I am lulled to a sleep that goes straight into Orielee’s murder. I resist, choke out a warning to myself. But it seems I have to pass through her death, through her kicking and grunting, through the pupils of her eyes, every time I begin to fall asleep. Once I pass through the murder and Orielee’s legs splay open and Tia falls backward, gasping, onto the floor, I relax into a black unconsciousness. I dive in, submerse, and breathe oblivion, my favorite element.

  October 24

  Stuck at a weigh station.

  Peeing in the covered bucket. Reading by flashlight until Mom stops me, telling me we’ll need the batteries. They are LED batteries and should last for a real long time, but I suppose she’s right. Luckily, a thin gap in the truck’s siding admits a slash of radiance that I can move across the page. It is only about a half inch wide, so I move the notebook forward as I write, then return it to the left edge of my knees, then move it forward again. I’m probably this hungry because you’re adding baby weight—you are supposed to gain about half a pound every week from now on. Seems like a lot, to me, and I wonder if your hiccups have anything to do with how fast you’re growing. I use you as a kind of shelf, resting a cup of tea on you or this book. Your lungs are still fragile, little bits of tissue paper, but your brain is zipping with electric energy and all parts of your brain are lots more mature. To create all these new cells and keep you alive, I’ve made a lot more blood, and my heart’s beating about 20 percent faster than normal. Women often get hemorrhoids around this time, and sad to say, the crummy and erratic food has affected me in just this way. I need green things—roughage, as Sera calls it. Next stop, she’s going to find some, even if she’s got to stew up fallen leaves. It’s so ignoble, really brings me down, humbles me a lot. I just want to cry when I know I have to take a shit—it hurts so much, sweat pops out on my forehead. Mom’s emergency supplies do not include hemorrhoid cream but she thinks that she can score Metamucil. That, dear baby, is what the future’s come down to. My butt’s both numb and painful, and I really don’t want to think about my butt this much, so it’s really good that I am beautiful.