Then the contractions started in earnest. Sylvia came. Was lowered in? And there was some time, between contractions, when I asked her what we would do now and she said I don’t know, she said we’ll figure it out, she said this is your only job right now. Just this. Her hand was warm on my back.
Then I was on my knees on the floor, face pressed to the burgundy cushion, burrowing into it. There was a dark tunnel and the darkness was material, consumable. With each wave of pain I gnawed into it, made a portion of it disappear. I ate and ate the darkness. There was no Lana or Rodney. There was no Chester or Ida or Talia. No Zion or Zoo. No Nests or Piles, stings or ghost fruit. No Deborah dangling from a branch; no disembodied eye pressed against the glass. The pain came and I burrowed into it. There was no Rending except for this.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
When I woke it was dawn. I was huddled under a tartan blanket on the recliner. Below the blanket my belly was deflated, wrinkled flaps of skin crouched on top of one another. I was wearing a pair of mint-colored granny panties with sprigs of baby’s breath pocked across the surface. The panties were stuffed thickly with rags. My breasts were hard, the areolas darker. The feel of my body was all wrong, hard belly turned soft, pliable breasts turned to rocks. My knees. I touched each gently. My knees were still exactly the same.
But my Baby, whatever it was, had been taken.
Had I somehow been drugged? Had I simply passed out from the pain? Had there been some moment of trauma that I was repressing, followed resolutely by sleep?
I looked away from my own body. No one watched from the other side of the glass. No legs dangled from above. Hanging over the hammock was the collecting shirt I’d been wearing and a new pair of pants, beige linen with an elastic waist. Had I soiled my other pants? With blood or fluid or shit? Had the Watchers seen me that way? When had they left? No more questions.
On the floor, on a tray, a cup of cooling water and a Lipton tea bag. Real tea. This must be my reward. Beside the tea, carrots cut and cooked. This was a gesture of kindness too, the way they were arranged on the plate, dominoes fallen in a perfect circle. I uncurled myself from the chair and dressed. I waddled over to the bucket in the corner and expelled urine and clots of blood the size of golf balls. I replaced the soiled rags with new ones I found beside the bucket. I ate the carrots; drank the tea. Tried to be practical and patient. Someone would come soon. I closed my eyes and tried to exhale slowly, thinking of Sylvia’s warm palm on my back. You have not been forgotten, I whispered to myself. Everything is under control. This is happening. Rodney will be here soon. Lana will be here soon. They have your Baby. You will make a list of items for the Nest. Then it will be easy to make as soon as you’re back to Zion. I reached again for my notebook but my notebook was gone.
Then the feeling reared up in me, a door kicked open by hooves. I wanted my Baby.
I don’t know what it felt like in the Before. Of course I’d heard about a mother’s love, but I’d expected some gentle stirring. I’d imagined Mary’s sweet face turned toward a plump and docile Jesus.
The feeling was not gentle. It did not come on softly. It was violent and abrupt: the sudden roar of an airplane right above your head. One minute you see the airplane and the next minute you belong only to that sound. I belonged only to the sound of wanting my Baby.
I was feral.
The last hours of labor are still a blur. The first hours of wanting my Baby are not.
I screamed. I screamed the obvious. Give me back my Baby! Give me my Baby! My Baby, now! I banged on the glass with my fists. I banged until I felt the hardness of the glass in the bones of my wrists and my forearms. I tried to break the glass with my foot, with my body. I directed the screaming upward. I stood on the chair so that my voice could be that much closer. I went to the drain in the middle of the floor. I dug around the edges until the metal cut my fingertips. I called them what they were: cowards, fuckers, oblivious motherfuckers, baby stealers, Nazis, psychopaths. I took a break to sob with my cheek pressed against the floor. Whenever I moved, my whole undercarriage hurt. I reached through the piss and blood in the bucket and grabbed the deflated ball. I smeared my own blood across the glass. Wrote FUCK YOU on one whitewashed wall. I tried to push the poles over; when I failed I shoved the chair under the hoop and tried to rip it from its condescending place at the top. I screamed and screamed. I yelled at the God I no longer believed in.
Finally, I curled back into the fetal position in the chair. My effort of moving and screaming had made me bleed through the shitty mint-green underwear and onto the cushion. Wine on wine. I went to the bucket again. More rags. The spot on the cushion looked like Louisiana. At least this place isn’t filled with crocodiles, I said to myself. I could smell the blood in my hair, on my skin. Cleanliness is next to godliness, I said in my brightest Merry Maid voice. Then I flipped the cushion over. There was Chester’s gun.
I know now where they were, why they didn’t come, but I didn’t know any of that when I picked up the gun. At any given moment, no one knows the whole story. We act with limited information, from bias and belief, from memory and hope. My story is only part of a story. But my story is mine.
I pressed the cushion down again. Looked at the glass, at the rim of aquarium above, at the open shell of sky. No one.
Sylvia must have hidden the gun during my labor. One hand pressed warm against my back, the other concealing a firearm in a recliner. A hideous laugh started in my chest but I choked it off. The gun was just the same, but this time touching the trigger, the muzzle, the reptilian grip evoked nostalgia rather than fear: Chester’s blue eyes, the toothbrush holder filled with tiny scrolled fortunes, the thin waxy skin of his forehead. The comfort of his presence.
I knew what the gun meant: we are not coming for you. We won’t or we can’t. This is the best we can offer. Good luck.
I ejected the magazine. I was not surprised to find that it was loaded. I was not surprised that he had lied to me, back there in his room. No one goes into a shopping mall with an unloaded gun. He had meant to do harm. I would have known this then if I had let myself know it. I slid the magazine back into place.
I don’t know how long I held the gun in my hands before Michael appeared, don’t know if he knew the gun was there all along, if he’d been waiting for me to discover it, observing me from a distance. Or maybe it was a surprise to him as well; Michael was delighted by surprises as long as they didn’t unsettle his authority. As usual, he did not look unsettled. He stood a few inches from the glass, black hair slicked into that strange crescendo, hands clasped behind his back, mouth at the precipice of a smile. Pleased to observe his Inhabitant.
He took time to note every changed detail of the panorama before him. I watched his eyes take in the smear of blood on the glass, the chair pushed below the basketball hoop, the graffitied expletives, before his eyes finally came to rest on the gun in my hands.
I leveled it at his face. He held up both his hands, tried to uncurl all of his fingers into a full gesture of surrender, but his expression didn’t change. I tried to remember everything I could from the physics class I’d almost failed junior year: speed and velocity and acceleration, force and mass and angular momentum. A year before the Rending a bear at the Minnesota Zoo threw a rock at its partition and only partially succeeded in breaking it. But maybe gun beats rock. Maybe bullet beats acrylic glass.
Michael wiggled the tips of his raised fingers, as if he were waving to me from the side of some fake battlefield.
My Baby. My Baby.
I took a breath. Refocused. Released the safety. A tiny click. Like an instrument case shutting or a lock sliding into place, a turn signal snapped off, a fingernail clipped. The first sound since I’d woken that hadn’t come from me. A little break in the middle of emptiness.
I fired.
When I opened my eyes a split second later, the acrylic glass was gone but Michael was still standing. I raised the gun again and took a few steps toward him, hoping that my
aim might be better at closer range.
I pointed the gun not at his heart, but at the place where the gold pin glistened on his lapel in spite of the lack of sunshine.
He nodded. As though he’d been expecting this all along. “I’m not afraid to die, Mira.”
“I want my Baby,” I said.
He nodded again. “That can be arranged,” he said.
“I don’t want it arranged. I want it. Now.”
“It’s not here.”
“Where is it?”
“Why don’t you give me the gun and I can show you.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m not going to show you your Baby with a gun pointed at my face. That’s not negotiable.”
I lowered the gun. He reached out his hand.
“No,” I said.
“It seems we’re at a bit of an impasse then. You know I don’t offer things without expecting something in return.”
“It’s my Baby.”
He shrugged. “That may be. But right now I have it.”
I considered his hands. I wasn’t even sure they could hold the gun properly.
“Where’s Lana? Rodney. Sylvia. Where’s Chester?”
Michael stirred the dust motes above his head with his fingertips. “Off,” he said. “Elsewhere.”
I felt that elsewhere in my body. Felt that I had stepped into a different version of myself altogether. Not just my loose belly, painfully huge breasts, the aching pulse of blood between my legs, but this gaping uncertainty. Had I been loved? Had I been abandoned? The grief was so great that there were no tears, only a great trembling that moved through my limbs until it felt like the whole room was shaking, quaking open.
“The gun,” he said again.
“Send Drake,” I said. “Tomorrow. There’s a Barnes and Noble off of Galaxie Avenue. I’ll give him the gun once I see the Baby.”
“Fair enough,” he said. Perhaps too quickly. “Let me escort you out.”
And he did.
When we got to the road, it was mostly empty. He handed me a water bottle. Clapped me once on the shoulder as though he were my mortgage broker. As though he’d gotten the financing he’d promised.
I looked over my shoulder twice; he was always watching.
The people I passed veered out of my way, tried not to look at me directly. I’d unloaded the gun by then; bullets in my pocket, gun itself tucked into the waistband of my pants. It slipped farther and farther until it was somewhere in the bloody mess of rags I carried with me, until I couldn’t take a step without feeling metal poking my ass and blood drying on my inner thighs.
There was a bit of gummy residue on the water bottle where the label had been. I concentrated on adhering my thumb to that residue and plucking it off. I concentrated on not thinking a single thought until I had ripped my thumb away one hundred times. Two hundred times. Three hundred times.
Without the commentary of Talia and Chester, the Barnes and Noble felt even more empty and eerie: the stuffed crocodile, the faded pages taped to the windows, the stain of smoke on the ceiling. Hardest of all, the photos in the Biography section, each face a living human being now gone. A story, kaput. I looked at the pictures and let myself cry. Not the angry tears I’d cried in the aquarium, but the wrung-out kind. All of those people gone.
And the version of life I’d lived since the Rending was gone too, because whatever had happened with my Baby, I had to carry this wanting, this attachment with me. I hadn’t understood before. The cruelty was not that women were giving birth to objects; the cruelty was that we felt for those objects something akin to what mothers feel for living babies.
The problem with love is that it craves an outlet. Love is a verb, as my father said, and so love makes us act: notes scribbled, roses purchased, hair brushed, ointment administered. Simple acts and tremendous ones. Offering a cup of tea, a fortune, a visor to block the nonexistent sun. There was no way to love the Babies. To birth a Baby was to learn to suffer in a new way.
I studied the photos again. All those people gone and no way to love them anymore.
I fell asleep in front of all those faces. A bloody mess curled around a gun. Aching with love I wasn’t sure I’d be able to offer to anyone else again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I woke a little when he scooped me up. I turned to him after he kissed my forehead. He told me later I murmured that I must taste like blood. There were whiskers on his cheek but I could see the branch, even in the dimness of the night.
When I woke again the light in the room had edged closer to dawn. Chester was staring at me from the kiddie chair beside the children’s table. The stuffed alligator lay in his lap. He offered it to me and I took it. It was soft and smelled oddly of laundry soap. Rodney lay sleeping beside me. Chester scooted the chair closer and took my hand. I fell back into sleep holding on to him.
I think I could have slept for days but Rodney and Chester roused me fairly early.
“Drake could be here anytime,” Chester said by way of greeting.
“Here’s how this will go,” said Rodney. His voice, so tender and certain, made me start crying again.
“Are you in pain?” asked Chester.
I shook my head. “Just glad to see you both,” I choked out. Chester winked at me.
“Here’s how this will go,” said Rodney again.
“Where have you been?” I interrupted.
“Later, Mira. I promise. We don’t know when Drake will be here.”
“Where’s Lana?”
Rodney sighed. “With Sylvia. Heading to Zion.”
“Is she—is she herself? Does she—”
Chester shook his head. But I didn’t know whether that meant she was still closed off, shut down, a cipher of her former self, or if it meant that we didn’t have time to talk about this now.
Rodney began again. “Drake will be here soon. Chester’s hidden the ammunition. I’ll do the exchange. You can watch but you need to be hidden outside somewhere. Chester will be with you.”
“That doesn’t sound safe for you.” I was thinking of the knives on Drake’s belt, all those dangling points.
Rodney shrugged. “We’re giving him what he asked for. We didn’t promise the bullets. We promised the gun.”
“But what if he won’t give you the Baby?”
“I’ll get the Baby, Mira.”
Chester and I waited in a silver Volvo on the far side of the parking lot. He sat in the driver’s seat and I sat in the backseat behind him, beside a car seat he told me not to look at. Rodney sat in front of the Barnes and Noble, on a chair that had once been used in the café. One of the chair legs was missing its rubber tip so if I stared hard I could see the motion Rodney made, rocking back and forth against that tiny imbalance.
As time crept on I peppered Chester with questions he wouldn’t answer: Had he seen my Baby? What was my Baby? Where had everyone been after I gave birth? How did Lana and Sylvia get away? Had he seen my Baby? With each question my throat constricted more tightly until Chester simply said, “Mira, breathe.”
To quiet the want that pulsed in every breath I took I distracted myself by reading the driver’s manual aloud to Chester, by poking the back of his seat, by shaking the little monkey rattle attached to the car seat’s strap.
Chester shot me glances of annoyance in the rearview mirror and then occupied himself with sorting through the fortunes he kept in the drawstring Tibetan purse he’d found in the Zoo courtyard.
“I wouldn’t be good at stakeouts,” I observed.
“That’s an understatement,” said Chester.
“Why won’t you tell me anything?” I asked him, catching his eyes in the mirror.
“Because I’m supposed to be keeping you calm.”
“Then how about why you had the gun in the first place. How about that story?”
He was quiet. We both stared at Rodney, his almost imperceptible rocking. A bird landed on an oil stain a few parking spaces over.
“Sparr
ow,” I said quietly.
“I wasn’t a happy kid, Mira.”
I tried not to move. The sparrow pecked at the stain as though the residue contained some lost nutrient.
“Have you ever had a dream where something terrible is happening to you and you open your mouth to scream and nothing comes out?”
I nodded. Realized he wasn’t looking at me. “Yes,” I said.
“That was what my waking life felt like.”
“Why? Was someone hurting you?” I asked.
“Not exactly. Sort of. Other kids ignored me or harassed me. Light bullying, I guess you’d call it. Not one person in particular and nothing drastic. But I felt it all. Every minor aggression, every interruption, every time someone turned away from me or ignored me. My mother called me hypersensitive and I thought maybe she was right. So I started to document them, all of the strikes against me. Seeing the slights and unkindnesses, even the few moments of brutality, seeing them written down made me feel justified in my bitterness. But then the bitterness turned to rage and the slights seemed to be growing, part of a greater plan. I really felt like people were trying to slowly grind me into oblivion. Trying to extinguish me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know,” he said simply. “I see now that my world was not closed. I see that there were ways out, people I could have asked for help. And there were a couple times when I tried. But it was like that dream. Nothing coming out of my mouth. Maybe because there was no big story to share. My parents were shitty and distracted but they weren’t abusing me. I was bullied some at school but not particularly aggressively; I wasn’t singled out. But I had this notebook full of grievances. And I decided that once I got to the end of the notebook I would do something. I would fight back. I wouldn’t be extinguished.”
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