Nightscript 1

by C M Muller

  Holly’s face is swollen to the point of unrecognizable. Jennifer hurts just watching her talk.

  “He said he’d had a vasectomy and called me a bitch and a slut.”

  “You’re not a slut,” Jennifer says. Holly’s a serial dater. She breaks up with The Current Boyfriend as soon as she has The Next Boyfriend lined up.

  “The baby’s safe,” Holly says, “and I’m pressing charges.”

  “Good.”

  When Holly is released from the hospital, Jennifer brings her home with her. Jennifer’s house is small, but big enough for the two of them.

  “Only for a little while. Until I get back on my feet,” Holly says. She doesn’t have The Next Boyfriend picked out and has no one to help her.

  Jennifer takes Holly to Dr. Yuhaz. They both carry boys.

  “I’m thinking about naming him Thomas,” Jennifer says. Thomas was their father’s name.

  “No! I’m using Thomas.” Holly’s lower lip sticks out.

  “I claimed it first,” Jennifer says.

  “I bet I thought of it first.”

  They bicker, like when they were kids.

  Their father hated their squabbling.

  “I was only supposed to have one daughter,” he said and retreated to his den.

  “I’m the oldest so that would be me,” Jennifer told her sister.

  “Yeah, but if he could pick one, it would be me.”

  Jennifer never argued about that. Holly was probably right.

  “I was Dad’s favorite. I should get to name my son after him,” Holly says.

  “You’re right. I give up. I’ll come up with another name.”

  “You can use Thomas as a middle name.” Holly is magnanimous. Her pout is replaced by a smug smile.

  Jennifer keeps her satisfaction to herself. She never intended to name her son Thomas. He is Bennet, after the man in the photographs.

  The police call. The Ex-Boyfriend’s crotch rocket is found in a ditch. His body is found about a hundred yards away. There is no need for Holly to appear in court.

  Holly works from home and can do her job from anywhere with an Internet connection. A little while stretches on.

  “I can’t bear to go back to that apartment,” Holly says. “Bad memories. Bad for the baby.”

  Jennifer drives the hundred and fifty miles and packs up Holly’s clothes and a few miscellaneous belongings. The furniture she leaves for the landlord to deal with.

  Holly’s neighbor helps load the car. “So. That guy got what was coming to him,” he says.

  “Yes,” Jennifer says.

  “Did you hear about his eyes?” the neighbor asks. “I heard they were pecked out by birds. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy.”

  Jennifer doesn’t tell Holly.

  Holly rarely leaves the house. She chatters on her phone and takes over preparing the house for the babies. The room Jennifer calls her office, really a catchall for everything she can’t figure out what to do with, is emptied and transformed into a nursery. It’s barely big enough for two cribs, but Holly says it’ll do for the time being. Jennifer has no input on the decor. When she offers a suggestion, Holly doesn’t hear. Her sister is on a mission. She’s nesting.

  On the back wall, Holly paints a forest dominated by a large leafy tree.

  “I wanted it to look like a fairytale, but boyish,” Holly says. “You know what I mean.”

  Jennifer doesn’t know, but doesn’t tell her sister. “Why do the leaves have eyes?”

  “They’re birds!”

  “Oh.” Jennifer drops it but avoids looking at the mural. The watchers in the tree make her nervous. They make her think of the girl.

  Holly orders everything she needs for the nursery, as well as baby supplies—blankets, onesies, diaper bags—for both of them online, but never answers the door when the deliveries arrive. Jennifer is used to finding packages by the back door.

  The latest packages weren’t left by the postal service or UPS. On the creased wrapping paper, dancing storks dressed in jackets and hats shout It’s a Boy! When Jennifer picks up the bundles, one loses its glittery stick-on bow.

  “Have you told anybody the name you picked?” Jennifer hands Holly the gift addressed to Thomas.

  “All my friends.”

  Jennifer opens the other gift. The smell of cheap new clothes makes her eyes water and her nose run.

  The packages contain matching t-shirts. Holly shakes hers out and holds it up. The orange shirts say Mommy’s Mini Man! in glittery letters.

  Orange and sparkly.

  “Ugh. Like I’m going to dress my son in that.” Holly tosses the tiny shirt to Jennifer. “You can have them both. They must be from one of your friends.”

  Jennifer folds both shirts and slips them back inside their wrappings. She keeps the tag that says Bennet hidden. She hasn’t told anyone, not even Holly, her son’s name.

  Holly looks around the living room. “You know, we really need to brighten this place up before the boys come.”

  Holly goes into labor first. Jennifer carries her sister’s suitcase and is explaining to the nurse that no, she isn’t in labor yet—it’s her howling sister—when she feels the warm gush between her legs.

  “Looks like it’s a good thing you’re here,” the nurse says. She calls somebody to clean up the puddle on the floor.

  A nurse delivers Bennet. Dr. Yuhaz is with Holly. Thomas is the older by four minutes, which makes Holly happy. Jennifer lets her crow. She doesn’t care who’s the eldest.

  Filling out the birth certificate, Jennifer writes Unknown in the place for the father’s name. Which is true. She doesn’t know and holding her son, doesn’t care. She doesn’t ask what Holly writes. The One with the Crotch Rocket, deceased.

  Both boys are born with shocks of dark hair. The hospital staff can’t get over how much they look alike.

  “Our father had dark hair,” Holly says.

  A nurse brings the squalling Bennet to Jennifer’s room. “Hush, my beautiful boy,” she croons.

  Jennifer recognizes the voice. The girl. She shakes as she reaches for her son.

  “Calm down. He’s just hungry.” The woman looks like an older, tired version of Holly.

  Or the girl.

  “You’re my beautiful boy,” Jennifer whispers to her son.

  Holly and Jennifer take the boys to the park. With their matching strollers and identical outfits, people assume the infants are twins and are surprised to find out they’re cousins.

  “We’re sisters,” Jennifer says.

  “You two must have the same taste in men. Or else there’s some real strong genes on your side of the family. But, they really are beautiful babies.” The elderly woman’s comment is a variation of what the sisters hear every time they take the boys out together. They always take them out together. When separated, the babies scream and work themselves into a frenzy.

  “Must be the genes. The first thing we’ve ever agreed on is the boys,” Holly says. It’s her stock reply.

  Across the park, a heavily pregnant girl sits down next to a woman with a book. The woman’s body language tells Jennifer she’s annoyed at the interruption.

  The girl looks at Jennifer and waves. For a moment, Jennifer thinks the girl is her girl. She pulls Bennet’s stroller closer.

  She’s not. Other than their bellies, they don’t look at all alike.

  “Whatever happened to your stalker?” she asks her sister.

  “I don’t know. She disappeared around the time I found out I was pregnant.”

  “Mine too.”

  Bennet, or maybe Thomas, lets out a howl, and soon both boys are crying. Distracted, Jennifer forgets about the girls—hers, Holly’s, and the one across the park.

  The sisters pick up their sons. “Hush, my beautiful boys,” they croon in unison.

  The Sound That the World Makes

  David Surface

  They were too old for this—that was the thought that kept coming back
to her as she watched the bare trees fly past the car window while the hum of the engine blended with Jerry and Gordon’s voices and the ancient-sounding croaking of Peter Gabriel coming from the speakers.

  “Daddy, are we there yet?” Gordon said in a whiny kid-voice and then chuckled, cracking himself up. Gordon had always been a lightweight since they’d started these midnight rides back in college. One-toke Gordon. At least some things stayed the same.

  “Patience, sonny boy,” Jerry boomed in his best fatherly baritone, “patience...”

  Maddy liked how Jerry still retained some of his actor’s skill and presence, even though he no longer used them on stage but in the lecture hall. Jerry had not planned on being an adjunct professor in the psychology department, nor had Maddy planned on being married to one. Plans change—that was how Jerry put it. The important thing, he said, was not to be so attached to your plans for the future that you can’t handle it when a whole different future arrives.

  Jerry’s profile against the dim blue light from the driver’s-side window could have been the same one captured in the old Polaroid she’d found last week when they were cleaning house. The same proud Roman nose, the same flowing, tousled mane of hair, although occasionally a square of illumination from a streetlight outside would pass across his head and show for a moment the balding forehead, the creases and sagging skin around the eyes before the light moved on and darkness covered him again.

  “Hey, doc...” She turned and saw Gordon handing the joint toward her. She’d already declined twice, but Gordon, like a goldfish swimming around the bowl, kept coming back to the same spot with no memory of having been there before. Good old Gordon.

  Maddy shook her head. “No thanks.” They didn’t smoke that often anymore, so she knew her refusal would not attract attention. Drinking was a different matter. Jerry had already remarked once about her not sharing their nightly bottle of wine. You making me drink alone again? She’d pleaded fatigue and a weak stomach—that much was true. Also, she needed a clear head to finish working on her doctorate. Almost two months since her last drink and her head was anything but clear.

  “Jerry,” she said, “can you roll down the window, please?”

  “It’s pretty cold out there, sweetheart,” he said.

  “I don’t care,” she said, the harshness in her own voice startling her. Then a little softer, “Please.”

  Jerry pushed the button, the window next to her moved down a few inches and in a second the cold winter air was all around her, numbing her cheeks and filling her lungs. With every breath, she felt the first traces of nausea subside.

  “So how long before we get to this place?” Gordon asked.

  “Few more miles,” Jerry said with the kind of bold assurance that Maddy knew meant he wasn’t exactly sure. “In the meantime, enjoy the pretty lights.”

  At those words, Maddy suddenly thought of the song that her mother used to sing years ago when her parents drove her around to look at the Christmas lights. She hadn’t thought of it...for how many years? It should have been a good memory, even a comforting one. But the searing pain it caused made her want to tear the sound of her mother’s voice out of her head.

  “Holy shit,” Gordon laughed, “look at that one!”

  A blaze of light and color appeared on the right and moved toward them. Maddy saw a two-story house strung with blinking lights and a dozen or more illuminated plastic figures planted on the lawn; a nativity scene complete with all three wise men, plus a row of open-mouthed Dickensian Christmas carolers, Santa in his sleigh with all eight reindeer, and even Snoopy smiling blissfully in a Santa hat.

  “Jesus, where’s the Easter Bunny?” Gordon said.

  “He’s on his government-mandated fifteen-minute break.” Maddy could hear the smirk in Jerry’s voice. Here we are again, she thought. Enjoying the things we have contempt for—what would we do without them?

  Maddy felt a surge of nausea returning. Not now, she thought, not here. Why did she agree to come along on this ride? She was too old for this. Too old and too pregnant.

  She’d almost told Jerry about it tonight. She’d planned to, like she’d planned to tell him the night before, and the night before that. But then he’d asked her to come along on this stupid midnight ride out to the country and he’d seemed so excited that she didn’t want to spoil it. She was angry at herself now for that. For thinking of him first. That was going to have to stop. That was going to have to stop soon.

  Another garishly decorated house rose out of the night and moved toward them on the right. Maddy flinched at the chaos of plastic holiday figures clustered together in the snow.

  “Are the giant candy canes actually supposed to be touching the Nativity scene?” Gordon asked. “Christ, my parents never spent that much money on Christmas decorations in their whole life. What about your family, Maddy. Did they...” Gordon stopped himself even before Jerry’s hand reached across the driver’s seat to touch his arm. “Shit, sorry...” Gordon mumbled.

  “It’s okay, man,” Jerry said, patting Gordon on the knee. “Betty and Henry were into all this Yuletide stuff big time. They would have loved all this, right sweetheart?”

  Maddy didn’t answer. This was Jerry’s way of helping her deal with it. No use tiptoeing around or keeping it hidden. Bring it all out, bring them out into the open. It was a way of keeping them alive, Jerry said. And it might have worked. If it hadn’t been for that item in the newspaper.

  It was a single line, a quote from a nameless source, a truck driver who’d seen her parents’ car go off the road and over the cliff, who’d followed the sound of screams to the crash site. That one line was the worst thing she could imagine, worse, even, than their deaths. It was all she could think about, day and night. She told Jerry and he’d tried to play the therapist with her. That one moment, terrible as it may have been, was not her parents’ whole lives. Their lives, he tried to assure her, were more than that, and that one moment could not wipe away all that they were. She listened in silence and thought, It already has.

  She drank wine and vodka every night to shut off that terrible sound in her brain until the news came from the doctor and she had to stop. No more drinking. No more looking back. Only looking forward to the new life inside her that would be the start of a new life for her too. That was how it was supposed to work, wasn’t it? One generation dying to make way for the next? It was natural. But that thought couldn’t keep out the feeling that there was still something horrible and unfair about it all.

  She glanced up at her own reflection in the passenger window and was instantly sorry. The haggard face, the flesh starting to sag under the eyes and at the jawline. She was going to be forty-one years old in four months. What business did she have giving birth to a child? Who did she think she was? No one ever believes they’re as old as they really are. Not even her mother. On one of their last visits, over their third glass of white wine, her mother had admitted that she couldn’t believe she was seventy. I look in the mirror sometimes and I wonder, Who is that old lady? Old age had taken her by surprise. A reasonable, intelligent woman, she had still somehow thought, against all reason, that it would somehow not happen to her. Just as she had probably not thought that she would die in a dark ditch by the side of the road, screaming in the crushed wreck of a car...

  Maddy squeezed her eyes shut tight and pressed her fists against them, trying to push the thought out of her brain. When she opened her eyes again, things had changed. It was darker outside the car now. All the lights of town far behind them. They were in what Jerry liked to call the old, real country.

  Maddy saw a small, ramshackle wood house with several oblong blobs of ghostly white light standing between the trees. The shapes were vaguely human, with the contour or suggestion of a face, an arm, or a leg, a few smudges of cracked and faded color still hiding in the creases. Maddy wasn’t sure if she was looking at a wise man, an angel or an animal.

  “Wow. How old do you think those are?” Maddy said. The
cold air had made her feel almost normal again. “Guess that’s what happens when you can’t afford new decorations.”

  “It’s not about that,” Jerry said in that all-knowing tone that always annoyed her; tonight it set her nerves on edge. “If those people had a million dollars they still wouldn’t throw those things away.”

  “If they had a million dollars, they would live like fucking trailer trash,” Gordon said. Maddy grit her teeth.

  “No, no,” Jerry said, “that’s the good stuff. The real stuff...”

  “You mean it’s because they’re poor,” Maddy said, sounding a little harsher than she meant to. “You think it’s cool because they’re poor.”

  No one spoke for a moment. Then Gordon chuckled, “Wow. Someone’s grumpy.”

  “There’s nothing cool about poverty,” Jerry said in his measured teacher’s voice. As if she had suggested that there was. “What I love is what they do with what they have. Remember that graveyard in Mexico? Those wooden crosses with the names and dates spelled out in roofing nails and thumbtacks?”

  Maddy remembered stumbling through the desert graveyard with Jerry—was it thirty...thirty five years ago? Jesus. She’d agreed to split a hit of acid with him, the first and last time she’d ever done that. The little wooden crosses with their thumbtack names made her think of a child’s art project, and before long she became convinced that it was a cemetery for dolls. They’d sat on a stone bench and watched the sun turn the Western sky blood-red, and she’d felt like there was something in the sunset, or behind it, watching her. It was going to take her with it. She sat there holding her breath longer than she thought was possible, waiting for it to happen, not understanding why it was taking so long.

  Jerry was good at seeking out places like that. The strange, out-of-the-way corners of the world. Like the place he was looking for tonight. God only knows where he’d heard about it. This was typical Jerry. Off the grid was where the good stuff was, the real stuff, and that was where he was taking them tonight.