by Isla Morley
In the same situation, Mercy would have found a way to kill this man by now. By now, Mercy would have burrowed a tunnel straight up to the sunlight with her fingernails, and if not that, she would have dug her way to the red core of the earth and joined its fiery river.
Mercy is no coward.
Dobbs pulls me to the cot and forces me to lie on my side. When he spreads himself over me, I pretend it is a shroud covering me. I pretend Mercy is wrapping me up in her white love and laying me down. Where God’s purpose for me ought to be is a blank space. To fill it, I tell myself I am Mercy’s friend. I am Mercy Coleman’s friend.
“I love you,” Dobbs cries, quaking.
“Mercy,” I whisper.
Thinking it’s leniency I want, Dobbs thrusts quickly. “Hold still, it’ll be over soon.”
* * *
I tell Dobbs the cramps are starting up when he reaches for me again. Reluctantly, he lets me go for a walk. “I’ll be reading till you get back.”
Even though it’s still painful to put too much weight on my buckled foot for too long, it feels good to get away from him. He’s given me the run of the place now, except for the silo and the Inner Sanctum. His trust keeps coming, like an oil slick. I hobble downstairs to the tunnel connecting the control center to the silo. Dobbs has cleared out the loose electrical wiring and secured the larger tubes and conduits to the side so there is no risk of me tripping. He’s put down a rubber runner, hooked up electricity to the old light fixtures, and installed a handrail.
I manage half a dozen laps back and forth till pain flares up in my foot. I don’t want to go back to my cot, so I head for the stairwell, where I can sit and be quiet. Just as I am about to take a seat, I pee my pants. I watch a puddle form at my feet. Nothing much about my body surprises me these days, but wetting myself is surely a step too far. And then it dawns on me.
It’s too soon. I’m not ready. Not now.
I try heading upstairs but only get as far as the first cubicle of the lower level. In the cabinet is where he keeps the medical kit. Something for the pain. I tip out everything on the floor—bandages, antiseptic ointment, iodine, dental tools, and some magical pack that’s supposed to turn to ice when you bend it, as if a sports injury down here is likely. If that’s not ridiculous enough, there’s a neck brace, too. Finally, I find it—the prescription bottle with two codeine pills. For an emergency, Dobbs said. My belly about to rip asunder—I’d call that an emergency. I down them both with an almighty slug of cough syrup.
I’m not ready for this. I haven’t even had a chance to read the book. I don’t want to do this!
I double over. I feel as though I’ve been caught in a stampede. I’m being trampled to death.
“Dobbs!”
I get on my hands and knees and crawl to the pillar. I look up and scream for him again.
“What is it?” he yells back.
“It’s coming.”
* * *
Dobbs brings a bowl. Between contractions, he heats water, lays blankets and a clean sheet on the floor for me, stacks towels. I’m too scared to send him away. I watch him boil the only knife he lets me keep down here, one so dull it can’t slice butter. I ask him what it’s for and he says cutting the umbilical cord.
I don’t want to think of Mama, because I hate what she’d have to say about this, but I can’t push her from my mind. When a contraction passes, I picture her bedroom. As with almost every memory, a window is front and center. In this case, it’s tall and veiled with blinds that twang when you peek through them. Buttercream light falls on Mama, who is lying in her high bed, just home from the hospital. Suzie, Gerhard, and I are huddled at the door, not too sure about this latecomer to the family. Everything about Mama is different—her hair tied in a ponytail with a bright yellow scarf instead of scraped into a bun, the airy way she waves us to her bedside, the sound of happy in her voice. Not that Mama was sad before. Folding laundry, fixing dinner, buttoning our coats—she’d do all of these things yet still leave the impression she was off someplace else. But here in bed, with a pea-pod baby tucked in her arm, it seems as though Mama’s body has finally caught up with her daydreams.
Another blow. I take my position on the middle of the sheet. How the woman was illustrated in the book is how I lie. With the onslaught of pain, I am on my hands and knees, then on my haunches. To heck with the picture! By the time the contraction ends, the sheet is mussed up into a ball, the tower of towels knocked over, and the bowl of water spilled. I can’t possibly go through another one of these.
* * *
“Why don’t you help me?” I shout at Dobbs for the tenth time. All he does is show me how to huff and puff. How’s that supposed to help?
“My mother used to say—”
“I don’t want to hear what your mother had to say! Take it out!”
“Here, hold my hand. When it starts to hurt again, you give it a good ol’ squeeze. Hard as you like.”
“It is hurting!”
I get on all fours and do the rock-and-crawl thing as the next siege hits. When the pain backs off a little, I lie down and do the counting breaths. Dobbs has the book open on his lap. He says I have to wait till I count to sixty. When I reach sixty, I must be about the pushing.
I should have chosen a name for it, at the very least. It is about to be born, and I don’t want the silence to have the final say again. I’ve got to find something symbolic—a birthmark of a name. I can only think of one thing: Freedom.
Dobbs counts for me. It’s no use. The futility of everything—what’s the number for that? Because I’ve reached it. The band tightens around my womb harder still. I get up on my haunches. Time to push!
“Freedom,” I growl through clenched teeth.
It becomes a chant, “Freedom, freedom.” Something starts to give way, something else rips.
Dobbs moves between my legs.
“Freedom, goddammit!”
And then it comes. My fingers reach down and run across the landscape more beautiful than the fields of home.
Dobbs puts the baby on the towel next to me, bends back down between my legs.
I gather that little creature.
I put her on my chest. The instant Mama placed Theo in my arms he was no longer a stranger. All the many months I’d spent wondering what my baby brother would be like, and there he was, the element we didn’t realize that had kept us from being whole. At the same moment I felt both a longing and the fulfillment of that longing. Looking at this child is no different. All anyone has to do is peer into those dark, glistening eyes to feel a part of something big, of something with no edges. She lifts me clear off my feet and sets me up where the stars dazzle. Every faraway dream has taken root in this little one. And that’s when I realize I don’t want to be robbed again. I want to keep her, this perfect little baby.
She’s so quiet. Not at all like the squalling babies on TV.
I whisper to her, “Hello, little one. Hello, Freedom.” She is very pale and very still.
Dobbs is beside me, trying to start some sort of conversation. “Blythe—” he keeps repeating, until I just bark at him to hush.
“She’s trying to go to sleep.”
I caress her tiny head. So soft, like chamois leather.
“She’s not sleeping, Blythe.”
All at once, she doesn’t feel right. It’s as though my rib cage is about to crack open. “Shouldn’t she be crying? Dobbs, you were supposed to make her cry!” And her eyes don’t look right now, either, and I spread my hands over her to keep her from growing cold.
In a panic, I hand her to Dobbs and tell him to swat her bottom like he was supposed to in the first place. But instead of doing that, he cradles her and covers her with a blanket, and I think, I could do that! He’s supposed to be making her breathe. He is the most impossible man!
“Give her to me!” I will do it myself. I sit up and a pain shoots up through my stomach.
Dobbs is saying something, but he’s speaking too sof
tly; I can’t hear what he says. He’s pulled the blanket all the way over her head. He starts walking to the door.
“Where are you going with her? Come back here!” I am on my knees, gripping the chair leg to help right myself. Why can’t he just fix it?
“She’s gone, Blythe.”
“Bring her back here. I said, bring her back to me!
“Freedom,” I whisper when the door closes. Because she has found it. And I am robbed once again.
I FEEL AROUND for her, my fingers eager for those little folds. Emerging from sleep, I open my eyes and cast around, desperate for the sight of her. I remember she has been taken away. I lay my head back down. If there is a God, he will let me go to sleep and dream her back.
* * *
“What did you do with her?”
“I took care of everything. Don’t worry. Here.” He offers me a mug of lukewarm broth. “You have to get your strength up.”
I put the mug aside. “You buried her someplace nice?”
With his back to me, he says, “I’m sorry it happened the way it did.”
“No, you’re not.” She would have loved me. I saw it in her eyes. I’ve never felt so cut off by love, anyone’s love, than I do now.
“Look, the sooner you put this behind you, the better off we’ll be.”
“You’ll be, you mean.”
Dobbs, the Taker Away of Things. Waste products, sunlight, the shape of a child.
* * *
What he brings I don’t want. Today it is a cassette tape and a record player with batteries. I am violently ill when he pushes PLAY and a guitar starts strumming. I hurl it against the wall. Dobbs gathers up the parts and tries to put it back together again. He holds up the castor oil. I can barely be bothered to shake my head at him.
“You’ve got to snap out of this. It’s been five weeks.”
“Why don’t you stop coming? That’ll make me feel better.”
He puts his hands on his hips, sighs. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”
“I could follow her to the grave. What’ll it take? A couple of weeks? A month?”
“You want another baby? Is that what you want?” He touches his belt.
Someone other than him is what I want. Anybody. Doesn’t have to be my mother. Bring me any mother, a wife, anyone. Bring me Bernice, with her talk of rainbows. We could pretend for each other, and it wouldn’t be so bad. We could make up new names for each other, new personalities. Ruth and Naomi. “Whither thou goest, I will go,” I could tell her. She could say to me, “Your people shall be my people.” She, too, will mourn for the loss of Freedom. She will cleave to my side and pledge her loyalty and cry the tears I cannot cry.
* * *
Dobbs finds the soiled sanitary pad. He acts like it’s my doing, summoning a menses at will. He can’t understand why, if I mope about a baby so much, I am not knocked up again. Especially given how he’s gone about his business with a nose-to-the-grindstone thoroughness.
“I don’t work right anymore. I keep telling you. Might as well find another girl to help you seed the New World.” I get up, go to my cot, and show him the bent coat hanger I keep hidden under it. “I fixed it so I can’t have another baby.”
That gets his attention.
I run my finger across the tip. “So, no need to keep trying.”
It’s a lie, but he swallows it hook, line, and sinker.
“What good is it if you’ve got a woman who can’t produce? Not going to be much of a New World, is it?”
He turns around. “I have to go away for a while.”
So I’ve finally convinced him. He’s going to do it this time, I can tell by the look on his face. I haven’t seen him this determined since the day he brought me down here. He won’t be coming back till I’m done for.
When he leaves, I pull out from under my pillow the slim volume. It is the Book of Common Prayer. I turn to the section of prayers in Latin. I begin with one of those. It is easiest to pray when I don’t know what the words mean.
* * *
I’ve come to believe that if I can control one thing, I can be free, even if that freedom is the size of a matchstick head. I didn’t have any control over my coming into the world, but I do have control of when I leave it. That is the one thing. It’s almost two years since he brought me here. Long enough.
I gather every flammable thing I can find—all those hideous clothes, my notebooks, the knitting patterns, the classics off the shelf, a year’s worth of paper goods, the bedding, the wig. It forms a great big pile right beneath the escape hatch that isn’t an escape hatch.
Before I light the match, I present myself to the plastic mirror. My hair’s long enough to braid now. It’s brittle, though, and breaks easily. The same color eyes, the same small mouth, but there is nothing left of that girl. It’s just a skinny cripple person looking back at me.
You don’t ever think, this is the last time I’m going to kiss my mother good-bye, make it a good one. You don’t think to turn back where she is standing at the Dutch door for one last look at her face. Just as you don’t think to look in the mirror one last time, and say, Good-bye, dimple; good-bye, cowlick; good-bye, funny birthmark. You get in the back of your father’s pickup and go for a ride and don’t pay much attention to anything—not the bullfrogs croaking, or the pealing church bells announcing the official start to the Horse Thieves Picnic. It’s a crying shame you don’t even look up at the evening sky and wonder why night never falls in Kansas, why it comes slowly, reluctantly, dragging its tail feathers. Giant cotton spools sit in the middle of shaved pastures. Good-bye, land, I wish I’d said. Good-bye, sunflowers. Good-bye, green; good-bye, yellow; good-bye, blushing pink clouds.
This time, I say it. “Good-bye, dimple; good-bye, cowlick; good-bye, funny birthmark.”
I ask the cripple for her permission.
She is so glad someone finally does. Yes, she says.
I light the match and toss it into the pile.
III
IT’S HARD TO say what it would be like if I had burned it all down, myself included, if Dobbs hadn’t come back for his duffel bag. Turns out there’s no escape through death, either. Still, I have been to hell and back. There’s not much to show for the trip anymore, other than a bit of cellophane skin puckered in untidy heaps. Because of the shots he gives me, there’s barely any pain, which is a pity; pain can be such an attentive companion.
The sooty walls are scrubbed clean, the supplies restocked; I’ve even been given new old clothes. There’s been plenty of talk of me “learning my lesson,” as if injury is a lesson. He thinks he rescued me, when the truth of the matter is that the fire rescued me from him, from needing him.
I don’t need you anymore.
It’s only when he spins around that I realize I am speaking aloud again. More and more the stuff inside my head and the stuff outside my head swap places. Thoughts are more real to me than concrete walls.
Dobbs is unpacking more than the usual provisions. A dozen boxes of mac and cheese, beef jerky, enough canned beans to last a year. “I’m going away again.”
“Where do you keep going?”
“This is the last long trip. Before you know it, I’ll be back.” He turns from me. Dobbs is a hundred evil things all rolled up together, but one thing he cannot do is lie to my face.
I get up and confront him. “What’s going on, Dobbs?”
“I told you.” He starts chewing on the corner of his recently grown mustache. It looks ridiculous. All he needs is a pair of black plastic glasses to look like a man in a cheap disguise. “Nothing’s going on. I’m taking a business trip.”
“You’re lying.”
He gives me a tube of ointment that’s supposed to help with the burn scars. “Use it twice a day.”
“Are you going on vacation?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Dobbs finishes his task and then looks like he’s going to embrace me. I step back.
�
��Good-bye, Blythe.”
The second he leaves, I realize what it is. I rush up to the door as he’s locking it. “Are you going to prepare another place for us?” I yell.
I turn around and hug myself. He is. He’s going to take me above. I don’t care where he takes me. Sunlight. Wind. Air. Faces.
* * *
For the first time, a dream with no pictures, just sounds. Only one sound, actually—the sound of a very small child crying.
I try reaching for him. He keeps crying, and my eyes keep staring into the dumb darkness. I want the crying to go on, because it is at least a voice, one that isn’t mine.
Then, another voice, the one I know only too well. “Shut up, already.”
The light snaps on. I am still in the same cell. The same captor has returned only to take up the bulk of the space with his bloated enthusiasm. Wedged between us, impossibly, is a curly-haired boy. Has he climbed out of my dream, out of my head, into this room? Snot is running into his mouth. He’s been crying for a long time.
“Mama.” He wails at the ceiling.
“Hey, little guy.” My voice only makes him cry louder.
It makes no sense. If it weren’t for the fact that Dobbs clearly sees and hears the child, I’d chalk this up to another hallucination. All manner of specters have appeared to me lately.
“What’s going on?” I ask Dobbs, and am given that you-got-eyes face.
“Little boy?” The child rolls into a ball the moment I make a move toward him. Pill-bug boy.
I glare at Dobbs, who pats his hair back in place. He smiles, frowns, then shrugs, running through an inventory of expressions. But what is the right one for this, whatever this is?