Above

by Isla Morley

  His gaze moves up to an area with which I am well acquainted. If you close your eyes just so and peer through your lashes, the circular wall forms the horizon on the other end of Clinton Lake. Look long enough, and a boat just might go sailing by. You can hear the voices of children, smell the sunblock on their faces. There’s the other smell, too, the stench of stagnant water at the inlet. That part of the shoreline you’ve not explored before. You turn toward the sound coming from the underbrush. A deer, perhaps. You walk tenderly, hoping you won’t startle it, because just once you want to see something rare. Instead, you pick out human sounds and you think what everyone thinks when they hear human sounds coming from a clearing in the thicket. But it is not a lovers’ embrace you come upon. It is a man bending over a large flat rock, gutting a fish. The severed head is positioned in such a way that it has to watch its own slaughter.

  The lake retreats, and the voices fade, and everything compresses into that one gray edge and becomes again the edge of the ceiling.

  “I said, get off me!”

  Dobbs lowers himself. He grinds his pelvis against mine. He starts to rock. I squeeze my legs tightly together. He knees them easily apart. He rubs himself against me. The thin polyester nightgown is no match.

  “No! You’ve got no right!”

  A cold hand shoves its way down, rips my underwear to one side.

  Dobbs uses his head to push up against my chin, forcing me to look at that horizon. I feel his spit land on my chest, run down the side of my neck.

  He is at the shore of the lake, and I am out deep where his hook’s got caught in my resistance. I pull away. The harder I pull, the harder he yanks. I’m all thrashing. He wades into the shallows, drawing up his rod. Reeling, reeling, reeling. Everything in him is one taut line. Something gives way. He is out of breath. It takes one more mighty pull to rip me free from the current. He sputters and pants. I am his flapping, gasping catch.

  Measure it, weigh it, take a picture of it for your scrapbook. Just don’t throw me back so you can return tomorrow and cast your line again.

  He won’t look at me when he stands up. Anyone would think he’s the wronged party the way he covers himself, hunches forward, hurries from the room.

  I get up. I can feel color, awful color running down my legs, spreading in places I don’t want to look. The floor is covered with powder except for one speck of bright red. Some rainbow.

  I GET OUT the cereal and stir up some milk. I wolf it all down, then refill my bowl. This time, I add a dollop of strawberry jam and a dash of salt. Funny to have an appetite again, and an upside-down-and-back-to-front one, at that.

  All my faiths have forsaken me, save one. Faith in my body. The fixed set of functions just goes on and on and on. Heart continues to beat; lungs expand; stomach growls; kidneys flush. And now, a new function. It took me a long time to cotton on. It wasn’t the lack of a period that gave it away, it was this appetite, and even then, it took me a good many meals, not to mention a few pounds.

  There are several of us Blythes down here. There’s the girl from that day at the Horse Thieves Picnic, thinking she was in love. There’s the one who wears herself out throwing things and overturning furniture and pounding her head against the wall. There’s one who doesn’t come out till it’s dark. I have no clear picture of her except she snivels and whimpers a lot. And then there’s this one. Fatty. All she does is eat, but not with any real enjoyment. I mark the changes. Swelled-up belly, swelled-up ankles, veins pumped up with all that blood. She’s like a tick.

  To keep from jumping off the top of the bookshelf belly first, this is how Fatty’s convinced the rest of us to think of it: our way out.

  Dobbs is still attributing my weight gain to eating too much, and he bellyaches about the cost of keeping the shelves stocked. It’ll save him a lot of money, my going home. And I am going home. Because this is not part of his plan. He’s showed me his plan. Procreate is in Section IX, right after Outliving Radiation Fallout. Heck, we haven’t even come to Apocalypse yet.

  I wash the dishes and make last-minute preparations. Instead of the bulky sweater, I find a dress that won’t leave anything to the imagination.

  * * *

  “I said, I’m pregnant.”

  For a moment, I think he’s going to do something creepy, like hug me, but he sits down heavily instead. “Are you sure?”

  I smooth down the dress. He can see for himself that the weight gain is confined only to the waistline.

  “How far along?”

  “Four months, maybe five. It’s started moving.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me before now that you’re going to have a baby?”

  I shrug.

  “It’s a baby, for crying out loud!”

  I nod even though I don’t think of it that way. Secret weapon is what it is.

  His nose starts to run. He goes to the bathroom and shuts the door. I hear him blowing his nose. When he comes out, he picks up the duffel bag. “You tricked me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You planned this.”

  If it would do any good to remind him of the facts, I would. After that first time, I thought he’d come back for more, but he hasn’t. Only once has he even spoken of it, to make me understand that he wasn’t “that kind of man.” The way he put it, anyone would think it was my fault, virtually throwing myself at him. Some apology.

  “Babies come early sometimes, you know. It can go bad when they do. My aunt almost died that way.”

  Dobbs begins pacing around the room. He keeps running his hand through his hair.

  “Everything I’ve worked for.”

  I know, I know, is how I nod.

  “You think this was all for me? It was for you, too.” The pitch of his voice is right up there where dogs cover their ears.

  When he turns to me, I rub my hand over my belly, which incenses him.

  “It was all for nothing!”

  Hear it? Past tense. Was, was, was. The word for things coming to end.

  “You should have told me sooner!” When we could’ve done something about it, he means.

  “It won’t work like this,” he mutters to himself. And then a few minutes later, “You’ve ruined everything!”

  I turn slightly, giving him the side profile.

  “Everything!” he screeches.

  I have. I’ve ruined everything. I’ve brought him down. The tremors rock the silo. The bomb’s gone off. The pipes are falling; the beams are collapsing; the plaster crumbling. It’s all coming down.

  TIME GOES QUICKER if you keep busy. By keeping busy, you can tackle boredom, fend off infirmities, stonewall sorrows. Keeping busy is the antidote for indecision, chaos, even insanity. To prove it, I’ve amassed crocheted scarves long enough to hang myself ten times over. I’ve filled enough notebooks with nouns to build a wall, drawn enough pictures to paper this dungeon top to bottom. Today, though, I rearrange the furniture to how I remember it being when he brought me here. I take down all my notes and pictures. I turn the wall calendar to July, the month I first came here. No matter how hard I’ve tried, each system for keeping track of time fails. The hash marks on the wall helped until the plaster started peeling off, and the pinto beans in the jar representing days was good until Dobbs cooked them up and ate them. It’s either seventeen or eighteen months that I’ve been here, but it may as well be decades. It hardly matters. All that matters is today. Today will come to an end, and when it does, I will be free of this place.

  I try several different outfits. I have to look my best. Imagine how Mama would feel with a beggar on her doorstep. Settling for the cornflower-blue empire-line, I rummage through the stacks for the sweater Grandma knitted so it can hide the part where the zipper won’t close. I stand in front of the plastic mirror. He’s let me grow my hair again. It doesn’t quite touch my shoulders, and it isn’t auburn anymore—more dirt-colored, except for the white streak sprung from my widow’s peak. I trim my bangs as best I can with the nail
clippers. I polish my teeth, then polish them some more. My face has lost its roundness, but at least I have green eyes again, not dark wells.

  I set about packing. I’ve got to take the letters I wrote to Mama, though I doubt I’ll give them to her. My notebook. The blank pages where my poems are going to be. I take the portrait of Dobbs to show the police. On second thought, I put it back. He’s not going to let me leave with an Identi-Kit.

  The voice says, “You think he’s worried about some stupid picture?”

  “Oh hush up!”

  Dobbs is going to run, that’s what he’s going to do. He’s always talking about some remote location in Mexico. He’ll tie me up someplace and leave himself enough time to get across the border.

  “And all this stuff?”

  He’ll come back for it when the fuss dies down. Or he won’t. Nothing to stop him building a shelter and piling up more junk somewhere else.

  “Or from finding another girl.”

  That’s all it takes for Fatty to throw up her breakfast.

  * * *

  Hearing the latch, I meet Dobbs at the door, paper sack in my hand. “Hi!”

  “Well, aren’t you perky today?”

  It’s true. I am all smiles.

  I follow him to the table, where he puts down the duffel bag. He looks at me flitting about him on ballerina toes.

  “I think you know today’s a special day.”

  I nod in agreement, smooth my hair. I am ready.

  He gives the room a once-over. The only difference between this scene and the one from a year and a half ago is me. Me multiplied four different ways should make me a quarter of what I was, but I know it’s worse than that. In percentages, I’d say I’m down to single digits.

  “You’ve made the best of this situation, as I knew you would.”

  If anything, I think I’ve been impertinent, packing away all the little gifts he brought me.

  “It hasn’t always been easy on you, especially lately.” He glances at my belly fleetingly. It must disgust him the way it does me. “But you’ve shown me what you’re made of.”

  I am about to suggest we save the speeches for the car when I see him slip one hand behind his back. I am to be given something. I can’t think of what I need when I am about to be set free. Unless. The key.

  “I admit I was beginning to give up hope.” He scratches the parting of his hair with a long fingernail and pulls it close to his face to examine it. “I didn’t think you were ever going to see things my way. Until your—announcement—I wasn’t entirely sure you felt the same way I do.”

  Suddenly, I don’t want what is behind his back.

  Dobbs drops to one knee. He holds out a small velvet box. The room starts to spin. He mouths something. I clamp my hands over my ears. I squeeze my eyes shut, but it’s too late—I’ve read his lips—Will you marry me?

  The engineers who built this monstrous steel drum and suspended it in a concrete cylinder had it all wrong. It cannot withstand impact. The entire rattletrap shakes and sways, and it is hard to believe rivets aren’t exploding from the beams and flying about like bullets. Dobbs tries to help me to my feet, and all I can think is, Duck and cover!

  “I don’t want you to think of this as a shotgun wedding,” he says, dragging me out from under the kitchen table. “I was planning to marry you in a couple months, on your eighteenth birthday, but this way we can think of it as an early Christmas present.”

  Birthday? Christmas? He thinks I care about these things?

  “Go on, open it.” He means the box, not the door.

  His smile slips when I begin shaking my head. This is worse than being violated.

  He takes my wrist, twists it face-up and puts the box in my palm. “Anyone would think it was going to bite.”

  I cannot open the box. I cannot even look at it. A squall forming up across the way, one of those late snowfalls that freezes all the daffodils barely up from their bulbs—that’s what’s got my attention.

  He snaps open the lid and removes a ring. Something glinty catches my eye. There’s nothing to do but look down. On a band of gold is a tiny winter stone, about the size of my heart. Dobbs takes out a piece of paper from his coat pocket—only now do I realize he is wearing a suit! He unfolds it, telling me he has spent hours laboring over our vows. He squeezes my hand as he reads the script.

  I snatch my hand from his, and cover my ears again. His promises will have to find someplace else to land.

  He offers me the piece of paper when he’s done and tells me it’s my turn.

  I grab my little sack of belongings. “You’re taking me out of here!”

  He says not to worry, he will read my part for me. He does this while following me to the door.

  “I can’t have a baby in here! I’ll die!” It’s the other Blythe who has the floor now. The one who screams and kicks and throws things.

  “Well, that’s certainly not the reaction I was expecting,” he says, once he’s done with all the obey-this’s and obey-that’s.

  She starts busting her foot on that door. I can hear toe bones cracking. He stops her from going at it with the other foot.

  He unfurls her ring finger. He slides the ring on it. “There. I now pronounce us husband and wife. Mrs. Blythe Hordin, will you do me the honors?” Dobbs purses his lips, juts out that long chin, and leans toward me.

  With every ounce of weight, with the power both of the forgotten and the unborn, I shove him away.

  “Oh,” he says, falling backward.

  When I drop my hand to my side, the ring slips off my finger and bounces across the floor. He crawls to retrieve it, while I slump down, feet too broken for standing.

  AFTER DOBBS SCRAPES the cold food from my plate into the trash, after he does the dishes and packs everything away, he makes up each cot with clean sheets and then pushes them together. Then he kneels at my feet and removes the dressing. My toes have set in all sorts of directions.

  “Any day now.”

  I don’t answer.

  He gets up and brings me a book. “This tells you what to do to get ready for the birth. There’s a big section on home delivery.”

  It’s never going to come out. It’s too big. Even if it does I shudder to think what it would look like. Two heads? It can’t be anything except some twisted thing, something that belongs in one of his jars. I’ve asked him to put me out with the chloroform and just cut it out and sew me back up, but he says this is just the worry talking. It’s not worry; it’s terror.

  I leaf through the pages and even the diagrams horrify me. A picture falls from the book. Dobbs hands it to me, making sure to brush his fingers against my arm. They leave a damp spot. I shiver in disgust.

  “That’s her, isn’t it? Your friend.”

  It’s a snapshot of Mercy with the aunt who raised her, and a little girl, maybe a year old, on Mercy’s hip. They are walking out of the post office. Mercy’s gained weight since I last saw her, gained a hunch around her shoulders, too.

  “Who took this photo?”

  “I got it for you.” He watches me run my fingers over her image, and says, “Black folks look peculiar white, don’t they?”

  “She’s not peculiar!”

  Eighth grade was well into its second quarter when Mr. Landon came to the door with a new student. Sally Ludnow didn’t even try to stifle her gasp, and Buddy Morris coughed in his fist, but everyone heard what he said. Freak. I thought Mercy was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Rare, like an ancient map, lightened from the sun. Before sitting down at the vacant desk in front of me, Mercy gave me a searching look. Or maybe it was a testy look. Whatever it was, for the first time in a great long while, someone looked me in the eye and acknowledged my existence. Right then and there, I knew I wanted to be her friend.

  The resemblance between Mercy and her child is unmistakable. “Lucky her kid didn’t get it.”

  “I don’t want you to talk about Mercy. Just leave her alone.”

  “I’m j
ust saying if someone like her can do it, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  I remember our last conversation. She wanted to know if God ever spoke to me. Mercy went with her family twice a week to the Church of Christ Our Precious Redeemer, where folks were prone to hearing the Lord speak. I came from a long line of old-school Protestants. God didn’t have heart-to-hearts with us.

  I immediately suspected Mercy’s question had something to do with her cousin with the green eyes, the one who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. “Is this about Rowland?”

  “Reverend Washington says God has a plan for each of our lives. He says we got to pray to make that plan a reality.”

  “Tell me you did not let that boy get into your pants.”

  She got real quiet, which obviously meant she had.

  I start to cry. I miss her so much. And here she is, going on with her life, baby and all.

  “You’ve got no right to take pictures of her. She doesn’t belong to you. Not everyone in this world belongs to you. I don’t belong to you.”

  Dobbs snatches back the picture and puts it in his jacket. “All you have to do is deliver it. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “You’re going to dump your baby on someone’s doorstep?”

  “You just do what the book says when it comes time, and pay the rest no never mind.” He sucks in his lower lip. “You ready for Married Time?”

  All the many months before, and he barely touched me. I never thought of it as restraint, like with priests. I mistook it for him not being like other men, not being quite right down there. But it’s wicked, what he now has. The pregnancy has brought it out in him. It’s obvious the minute he walks in the door. He has his way, and five minutes later, he wants it again. Sometimes, he has me do him with my hand when he sees I can’t take it anymore.

  “I’m not your bride, Dobbs—I’m your prisoner.”

  He pretends he hasn’t heard. “A wife has a duty to her husband.” To make his point, he unbuckles his belt.