The Rending and the Nest

by Kaethe Schwehn

  And then there was Lana, or the back of her knobbed head. The two points where her shoulder blades pierced the film of her blue blouse. Elbows making flesh-colored punctuation marks in the air as she worked the espresso machine at Chilly Italy, a gelato stand outside Macy’s. Beside the café, generators moved a set of escalators up and up toward the amusement park at the center of the mall, where faux foliage framed roller coasters clicking around curlicue tracks. Earlier that day I’d plucked cotton candy off a paper cone while Bim rode the Infinity Coaster. “I guess that’s a sexy way of saying figure eight,” I had said to him and he was gone. Not Gone gone, just gone in the way people left before the Rending, when we assumed invisible strings, when we thought we could wind anyone right back to us.

  Yes, there was Lana puttering at the espresso machine and Rodney sitting at a little table on a patch of faux marble tile in front of the long row of gelato coolers. I guess the table wasn’t little; Rodney’s frame was simply big. But in my memory it’s as if he had been sitting at a toddler’s play table. His face was in profile so I didn’t see the branch tattooed across the right side of his jaw, thicker near the ear and tapering to a fragile twig near the corner of his mouth, three tiny buds at its tip, clustered near his bottom lip as though he were about to be fed.

  It was only when I saw them, when Lana turned and wiggled her fingers, when Rodney offered a half-smile, that the enormity of the wrongness of the situation began to appear at the edges of my consciousness. I couldn’t face it yet, but I knew something terrible had happened and I knew that the man holding my arm was not a good man. Later Rodney would tell me there had been mascara tracks down my cheeks. I don’t remember crying, but when I saw Lana and Rodney I started to shake. My insides parched, scabbed, everything green scythed down to nubs. I rattled. I quaked.

  And Rodney stood and walked to us. He looked at me. While he unclenched Doug’s hand from my arm, while he straightened my scarf, while he took my hand gently. He looked at me. Like my father’s gaze when I was wounded but he didn’t want me to feel the pain of the injury.

  Doug didn’t resist. He turned and whispered something into his walkie-talkie and walked away. As though he hadn’t spent the last hour forcibly carting me around the mall, occasionally using my hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

  Doug was gone and there was only the warmth of Rodney’s hand on my lower back, guiding me to the chair where he’d been sitting. And Lana, setting a cappuccino in front of me, cinnamon dusted across the top. My very first cappuccino. And, of course, my last.

  On the edge of the exam table, Lana swung her legs as though she were sitting on a dock, the water spitting shards of sunlight into her eyes, fish swarming and darting below the balls of her feet.

  “Lie back, sweet pea,” said Ida.

  “Ouch,” said Lana.

  Sylvia looked vaguely concerned.

  “It’s the pins. Digging into my back.”

  “Oh,” said Sylvia. “You’ll have to take your dress off so I can palpate your stomach. Your uterus.”

  Ida and I undid the pins. Lana stood up, pulled her arms through the holes, let the whole thing fall, a drop cloth used to hide the statue beneath. No bra or underwear. She was more like a column than a woman: tall, thin, pale, small breasts, large nipples, hips barely interrupting the line between ribs and thighs. Her pubic hair was neat, the clipped yard of a house trying to keep in step with the rest of the neighborhood. Her nakedness was sudden and therefore strange, though I’d seen Lana naked before. It was too much for a prenatal exam; removing her dress had made her overly vulnerable.

  “OK,” said Sylvia, always articulate, “OK.”

  “That will certainly give us the access we need, sweet pea,” said Ida, coaxing her back onto the table, covering her breasts with a knit blanket, its spaces wide enough for her nipples to poke through.

  “Should I be here?” I asked, suddenly. I felt a blue flame of panic between my lowest ribs. This happened occasionally, a flash of how absurd we were, how ill prepared for anything, really. Most of the time I puttered along, spidering over the Piles, trying to keep the usual kinds of longing and worry at bay. And then suddenly I would have a second of deep clarity, I would see us the way we actually were, Ida and Sylvia like two children still playing at doctor: Sylvia rolling back the sleeves of her XXL pastel green men’s sport coat to wash her hands and Ida pressing her fingers to the inside of Lana’s wrist as if she’d have any idea what to do if the pulse she found there was actually irregular. A counter with scissors and thread, scalpel and rags, a box of Hello Kitty bandages, a bowl with clean water and a bowl with soapy water. The window holding a rectangle of tired grass and the outlines of the Sorting Stations. The aluminum sink on the ground, tipped like a paralyzed man, the hole in the wall from which water would theoretically spill. And Lana, the pretend patient: white, goose-bumped legs, mound of pubic hair, baby blanket stretched over her midsection.

  Ida began to whistle “What a Wonderful World.” The flame between my ribs rose higher. I tried to blow it out slowly, between my lips. A thin stream. We practiced this the one time I’d gone to Lana’s yoga class.

  “Yes,” Lana said, grabbing my hand. Though by now I’d forgotten the question. “This is happening, Mira,” she said. Then she turned to Sylvia. “Let the palpating begin.”

  The exam consisted mostly of Ida wiping Lana’s midsection with a washcloth and then Sylvia kneading around like a cat until she found, a little above the pubic bone, the place where she thought Lana’s uterus ended.

  “Measuring tape,” she said, holding the place on Lana’s belly with two fingers on her right hand and hanging her left into the air, a perfect replica of every medical show ever invented.

  “Tape,” said Ida, playing along. Only the measuring tape wasn’t the long flimsy kind you’d use for fabric or for circumnavigating your ribs to check for cup size. It was the kind used for carpentry, the kind that curls like a snail inside a metal square and goes snapping and sizzling back to its home when a job is complete. Sylvia looked ridiculous trying to unspool it from its shell and then trying to lay the flat plane across Lana’s (only slightly) rounded belly. The flame of panic rose again.

  Lana squeezed my hand and rolled her eyes. “This is happening,” she mouthed.

  “Eighteen centimeters” proclaimed Sylvia. Ida dutifully wrote the information down in a college blue book (I’d found a box the previous week and they’d decided to use the books for patient files). “That means you’re about eighteen weeks along.” Lana stared at her blankly. “There are forty weeks in a pregnancy, so you’re probably a little over four months.”

  “Goodie,” said Lana. “Can I get dressed now?” Sylvia nodded.

  While Lana slipped back into her 1950s housewife attire, Sylvia asked her a few standard pregnancy questions. Date of last menstrual period (Lana shrugged), morning sickness (no), other symptoms (I have to pee all the time), any movement (no), any questions (no).

  “We’ll see you in another month,” said Sylvia.

  “I think you’ll see me before then,” said Lana.

  “You know what I mean,” said Sylvia.

  “Sure,” said Lana.

  “Everything looks good,” said Ida, cheerfully.

  “Would you know if everything wasn’t good?” asked Lana.

  Sylvia’s response was the sound of the curtain, pulling back over the rod, revealing an empty waiting room, no one hoping to be seen.

  I don’t know when Sylvia knew something was wrong, or Ida for that matter. I don’t think it was that first visit, but maybe she had an inkling, something quivering below her own skin indicating the lack of what was quivering below Lana’s. I did note the crease in her brow that quickly erased itself when Lana still reported no movement at twenty-two weeks and still none at twenty-six. Lana herself seemed unperturbed, partly because she was ambivalent about the baby and partly because she was twenty-one. When the Rending happened she was waiting to go to Yale on a dance
scholarship. She’d been spending her last summer pirouetting and pas de bourrée-ing her way across her parents’ basement, the mirrors and barre a gift from a foundation that provided for kids with nonterminal cancer. “Essentially, getting cancer as a ten-year-old was the best thing that could have happened to me,” Lana had explained to me about a year ago, in her brushing-lint-off-a-pea-coat kind of way.

  But the point is that she hadn’t read books on pregnancy or labor, had no idea when the fetus should grow fingernails or nostrils, when it would begin to register light behind its closed lids or to hiccup against its cavern walls.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Come have a cup of tea with me before you go back to humping the Piles,” said Lana as we left the Clinic.

  “I don’t know if I can put up with Talia right now,” I said.

  “Maybe she’ll be taking a break. We can play Candy Land. I have to learn this kind of shit now, Mira. I’ll even let you win. See how my mothering instincts are already coming through?”

  Halfway across the quadrangle, off to the right, I could see Kristen talking to Chester outside of his room, her brown ponytail marking the air for emphasis. I tilted my head in the direction of Lana’s room where a red bandana fluttered above her doorframe. “It looks like you have someone waiting for you anyway.”

  “Oh, he can wait. I think they like to wait, even though they whine about it. Plus, the longer they have to think about it before I arrive, the less I have to do after I arrive.”

  I didn’t say anything. I’d slept with two boys before the Rending, one to spite my parents and one I really liked. I’d slept with one man since the Rending, early on; because the men in Zion outnumbered the women almost four to one it was easy, initially, for sex to become a form of currency. Those exchanges got old quickly, for the women at least, so we developed the Rules, decided to share resources, assigned communal tasks. But Lana insisted on offering her own body as her contribution to communal labor. The community tried to dissuade her publicly and I tried privately; she just shrugged and then baldly observed that if the men couldn’t get sex here they’d leave, they’d go elsewhere in search of it. Plus, she noted wryly, it was unlikely that any of the women were going to willingly spread their legs for Oscar or Zephyr anytime soon.

  We didn’t talk about Lana’s job all that often but when Lana did start to banter about sex I felt awkward and stodgy; I tried to fill in the gaps in conversation without revealing my limited knowledge. Luckily, Lana never really seemed to notice; her attention span was short enough that she was on to the next topic before the blush that began at the tops of my breasts could work its way to my neck and cheeks.

  “Wasn’t Marjorie talking at the last community meeting about doing little stones or fences or something?”

  “What?”

  “Here,” said Lana, “in our glorious quadrangle!” She did a little hills-are-alive-with-the-sound-of-music spin, her Fourth of July dress turning briefly into a navy blur around her.

  “Fences? That seems weird.”

  “Cobblestones could be cute though.”

  “If we had a bunch of cobblestones.”

  “Oh, you’d find something. Not cobblestones but something better.”

  “Lana, the water containment system is leaking, the roof over Tenzin’s room is turning to shit, and about thirty community members still don’t have enough stuffing for their beds.”

  “I know, I know. The List! I’m saying that with a capital ‘L,’ Mira, can you hear it in my voice? The List!” She grabbed the small black notebook that dangled against my chest, its neon shoelace strung through the spiral and knotted at the back of my neck. Then she bent her head and kissed it reverently.

  “You’re so funny,” I said.

  “People need beauty, too, Mira.”

  “I don’t know if cobblestones qualify as beauty.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I did know what she meant. The quadrangle was the open space at the center of Zion. The Clinic at one end faced the Center on the other, the length of a football field between them. Our rooms—barracks in form but shantytown in appearance—lined two sides of the quadrangle, thirty rooms on each side. A few couples shared a room, like Marjorie and Sven, and a few Zionites, like Rodney, had decided to construct their dwellings in other areas of the community.

  The matted brown grass and weeds of the quadrangle were interrupted by packed paths, some darker and more worn than others, but all of them giving the space the appearance of a spiderweb gone wrong or a wheel with broken spokes. An uneven road encircled the buildings and the Sorting Stations. Beyond the road to the east lay the ghost fruit orchard, to the north the fields where we grew root vegetables, and to the west the river. Beyond the road to the south, about three quarters of a mile from where we stood, the Piles rose up, jumbles of color against the gray. On good days, I could manage to find hints of beauty or comfort in Zion—in the Formica of my favorite table in the Center or the juxtaposition of corrugated tin, shingle, and green awning that marked the top of the rooms where Asher, Chester, and I lived. The amiable puttering of the river was a comfort. Even the sensation of ghost fruit, crumpling to a sweet skin of nothing on my palm, was fascinating, at least. But I couldn’t walk across the quadrangle without the word desolation pinging around in my head.

  “Someday. Cobblestones. Definitely,” I said. Lana linked her arm through mine. “Plus, your baby will need a job,” I reminded her.

  “True. Cobblestone installer.”

  “You could name him Cobblestone. Or her.”

  Lana nodded thoughtfully; her face moved from light to shadow as we entered the Center.

  A small voice chirped across the darkness. “Name who what?”

  “Talia,” Lana sighed under her breath.

  “Please don’t name the baby Talia,” I said.

  “Never,” said Lana.

  Talia was the reason we had stopped walking. After the Rending, after Lana and Rodney and Chester and Ida and Sylvia and I found each other, after a brief stay in IKEA and a few weeks of scavenging what was left to be scavenged in the Cities, we had left, following the trail of abandoned cars down Highway 77. We crossed the Minnesota River, spotted a single heron in the reeds and took it as a talisman, a sign. At night we slept in cars. Usually Ida and Sylvia in one, Lana and I in another, Chester and Rodney in a third. One night we slept in a greenhouse, chewing the leaves of mint, stuffing our pockets with the few remaining seed packets on a rotating stand. The next day we sounded like rattles as we walked, like we were being shaken by an invisible fist. Another night Ida and Sylvia stretched out in the back of a Volvo station wagon and Lana and Chester and Rodney and I curled up like puppies in the back of a minivan. Rodney had a bottle of whiskey and we were drinking—because we were seventeen and eighteen and twenty and didn’t grasp that the end of this particular bottle was the end of alcohol altogether. Ida and Sylvia didn’t drink so they went to bed early. After we’d downed half the bottle the four of us crept the fifty feet from our vehicle to theirs. We were going to play a prank, I think; we were tipsy and wanted to inflict something on someone. But when we reached the back window of the station wagon, we just stood and stared. This was before Sylvia and Ida changed, when they were still identical: brown shoulder-length hair, still shiny in spite of the days walking, with bangs cut straight across their matching foreheads. The both slept on their backs with a tartan blanket pulled up under their armpits, bare arms lying on top, as though preparing to give blood. The only difference between the two was Ida’s half-smile, a softness around her mouth and eyes, and Sylvia’s tight lips that changed quickly, abruptly, with an occasional twitch, then went back to a line so perfect that you wondered if they’d twitched at all.

  “OK, that’s creepy,” Rodney whispered quietly.

  “They’re so strange,” said Chester.

  “They look like American Girl dolls,” said Lana.

  We turned then and went back to the van. Rodney was bes
ide me that night, asleep as soon as we lay down in our nest of coats and blankets. I pretended to fall asleep too, but I couldn’t sleep, not with his body that near. So I closed my eyes and dedicated myself to turning, every once in a while, in my supposed sleep so that I could curve my spine along his rib cage, test the fit of my head in his armpit. He turned, in the middle of the night, on his side, away from me, and then I brought my body against his, breasts to his back. He reached behind him, cupped the back of my thigh. We slept like that for a long time. It is easy to be brave with your body when you’re not supposed to be in charge of it, when you can blame your unconscious for pushing you toward warmth or touch or breath. Not that I had to explain myself, not that I ever had to defend what my body wanted from Rodney’s.

  Most of the other survivors we met were walking toward the Cities, rather than away from them. It was the obvious choice. The lure of supplies, dwellings, companionship. But most of the supplies were gone. We’d walked the mall, then IKEA. We’d hiked to Kmart and Cub. Each store looked raided, purged—at first we thought other survivors had simply been faster, more aggressive—but the remaining objects were perfectly aligned, undisturbed. A bottle of Pert Plus and a box of razor blade refills sitting seven feet apart. Or all the Hallmark cards gone except for one, “Happy 5th Birthday to My Darling Grandson.” Chester plucked the card from the rack and read the poem inside repeatedly that day. We collected an odd assortment of foods: a box of Lucky Charms, a mango, a mostly thawed bag of Ore-Ida hash browns. Some of the buildings and houses were damaged too—though again, not damaged in the way we had witnessed damage before the Rending—simply missing parts. Shutters, frames, and ivy missing from the right side of a Victorian mansion on Lake Harriet. Bricks stripped from a squat apartment complex in Bloomington so that the building looked naked, plucked. Rodney worried about internal absences; he knew enough about how a building was made to imagine the lack of support beams and joists. “A body without veins or nerves,” was how he described it. “Or a body without bones. You don’t want to be living in a body without bones.” Ida and Sylvia nodded—they always did when Rodney spoke—and then Ida took Sylvia’s hand and shuddered a little.