“They looked real good,” Judy said. “Everybody looked real good.”
Donald nodded, long and slow. His boots scuffed under the table as he shifted. Judy noticed he’d put on a clean shirt to come over. It looked as if maybe he had even just shaved. There was still a little white patch of something on one side of his narrow jaw. He rested his watery blue eyes on her and smiled.
“It was Rusty’s doing,” she said. “He called them. I never would have.” She looked at her hands, which were laid out on the table in front of her like silverware. She moved the salt shaker a little to the left. “That’s note enough, Donald,” she said. “That’s all that needs saying.”
When the water boiled, she stood up. She reached for a reindeer mitt and used it to lift up the kettle and pour the water. It ran like a slow shush into each cup. Then she got out a teaspoon from a drawer and stirred circles. “Sugar?” she asked Donald.
“Please.” He blushed. “Doctor says I shouldn’t, but I know it wouldn’t hurt this once.”
They sat across from each other with their hands on their mugs, looking quietly around the room. Judy rested her eyes on the knitted covers she’d made for the blender and the toaster and even some of her flour canisters, and she thought now that they looked ridiculous. It looked like her kitchen was dressed for winter. She stood up and yanked them off and stuck them in a drawer, then sat back down across from Donald.
“Good coffee” was all he said.
“I’m glad to think Rusty has you as a friend,” she said. “I’m glad you were the one to see him off.”
“Something’s not sitting right with him,” Donald said.
Judy nodded. “I know.”
“He’ll be back though, I think.” Donald rubbed his chin, catching the shaving cream on his thumb. “Can’t imagine any place he’d go. No place better than Fort Cloud anyhow.”
“Maybe he’ll just drive and drive,” Judy said, sucking coffee through her teeth. “That’s what he likes to do.”
Donald nodded. “Got that right.”
When he’d finished his coffee, Donald stood up and moved around the table to set his mug in the sink. “Celeste’ll be really happy to hear about the baby,” he said, putting on his cap and adjusting it with both hands. “And you need anything, you just holler across.” He put his fists in his pockets, then withdrew his right hand and extended it to Judy. “We got a deal?”
She shook his hand. He circled back around the kitchen table. “Mind if I just go out through the garage?” he asked.
“Go right on ahead.”
The next morning, Judy awoke to a knock at the door. She stumbled into the hall, groggy, feeling sleepless. Expecting Donald, she swung the door open only to find a camera in her face and a microphone up by her mouth, a blonde in a pink suit with boxy shoulder pads pressing in on her.
“Are you Mrs. Glide?”
Judy put a hand on her throat. “What?”
“I’m from Fox News,” the woman said briskly. “We’re reporting on a group of people out of Chicago who call themselves Future Parents. Now, your daughter was taken hostage by this group?”
“Hostage?” Judy said.
“Are they dangerous?” the woman asked. “And excuse me for asking, but do you know if they leave the genitals of the children intact?”
Judy tried to catch her breath. “I’m not going to say anything,” she said.
“Have you been sworn to secrecy, Mrs. Glide? Is your son Ransom also a member?”
“I don’t have a son named Ransom,” said Judy. “His name is Henry, that’s the name I gave him.”
Off to the side, she could see the neighbors all along the street coming out of their houses and standing on their lawns, most of them still in bathrobes. Celeste stood at the base of her driveway, arms folded across her chest, her feet set squarely together in white sneakers.
Judy retreated, shutting the door against the microphone, hearing the wide-shouldered blonde calling, “Mrs. Glide, do you accept this baby as a legitimate grandchild?”
Judy locked the door and waited with her body against it until she heard the woman leave. She went into the living room and drew the curtains, then sat down on the arm of Rusty’s brown chair. Through the sheers she could see the news crew packing things into their van, neighbors gathered around—people she’d never seen or didn’t recognize anymore. She closed her eyes and remembered the warmth of the baby in her arms. She felt different, settled. She was a grandmother to a child with no name or sex. Yet it was a presence all its own, and that brought her a curious peace she hadn’t expected. Gretchen had given birth to a healthy baby, and that’s all anyone needed to know.
Later, after she had showered and made herself toast, Judy called down to the hospital. “How’s the baby?” she asked when Ray answered.
“Fine,” Ray said, his voice hushed. “Not much of a sleeper, though.”
“Word seems to have spread,” Judy said quietly. “A reporter from Fox News just showed up on my doorstep.”
Ray sighed. “Great, just what we need.”
“And there was a writer that came with Henry,” Judy added. “I’m sorry, Ray, I had no idea. I should have done something.”
“It’ll blow over.” Ray sounded resigned. “Hael won’t like it, but we’ll be fine.”
When Judy hung up, she realized she had forgotten to tell Ray that Rusty was gone. Maybe it was better that way, she decided then. One less thing to worry them. No commotion, Gretchen had said. Judy paced the living room, noting the dark stains in the carpet, the faded arms of the couch. The room struck her as suddenly dated and gloomy.
She had a vision of herself wilting against Rusty’s old brown chair, cordoned off from her grandchild by a daughter who couldn’t trust her, deserted by a husband she’d locked out in the garage. She saw herself growing old in this room, lips paling against the pheasant couch, teeth falling noiselessly into the blotchy shag carpet, her hair growing long and ghostly, rippling over her hips. She’d spend her days staring out the front window at the old woman across the street, both of them waiting for the paper at dawn and nodding off each dusk, laps aglow from the winking light of lonely televisions.
The phone rang. Ray again, exhausted-sounding. “Judy,” he said. “We could use you here.” Judy was out the door with a new overnight bag before Ray could finish his thought.
Chapter 15
HIGHWAY MAN
Rusty had just crossed into Pennsylvania when the clunking sound started under the hood. He eased the car off the road near some woods and slapped his thigh, remembering that he ought to have packed some tools. On second thought, he was just as glad he hadn’t. Let someone else fix it, he thought. He still wasn’t feeling like himself, and the last thing he ought to do was crawl around under a damn car, a damn car he didn’t even have the papers for, come to think of it. Those were still back at the lot, where he’d called this morning and left a message for the secretary to take the day off. He needed the weekend and maybe more to think things through.
He’d just put up the hood and wait for a passing car to come by and give him a lift to the nearest phone. He’d stay the night nearby, get himself a hotel room this time, not try to camp out in the backseat anymore like some kind of fugitive. Last night, he’d gone down an empty back road and pulled over, expecting to get in a few solid hours of sleep. He’d been exhausted after his rush job packing, playing offense with Donald, and just generally getting himself out of Fort Cloud. But he’d gotten almost no sleep again. It seemed that empty back road was some sort of trucker hangout. Every hour or so, there’d been a knock on the hood.
Each time, he ignored them, but there was one who wouldn’t let up. Rusty finally sat up and put his face to the window, only to see a bearded man chewing on what looked to be a toothpick, with a big smile. “Need company?” the man asked.
“Nope, need sleep,” Rusty barked.
“’Kay then.”
Rusty had been too tired to move the car elsewhe
re. He’d pushed some Kleenex into his ears and gone back to sleep. Sometime midmorning, he’d gotten going again, had stopped at a greasy spoon for a plate of eggs that went down easy, although now something in his stomach was awry.
He stepped out of the car into a cool afternoon breeze, popped the hood, and climbed back into his seat to read while he waited. Donald had come over with a tattered copy of Moby Dick the day before, wondering if Rusty had ever read it and urging him to take it along. “Toss it in the trunk, along with all the other stuff,” Rusty had said.
“You sure you won’t tell me where you’re headed?” Donald had prodded.
Rusty had shaken his head. “Just got something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.”
“Well, okay then. I see I can’t stop you.”
Ten minutes hadn’t passed before Donald ducked back into the garage again, this time with a waxed bag full of doughnut holes.
“Damn, Donald, what’s gotten into you?” Rusty had said, carrying armloads of clothes out from the house to the trunk. “Can’t you see when a man needs his peace?”
“I’ve been eating on these all morning,” he said. “Celeste’ll have my head if she catches me with them. Why don’t you take ’em with you.”
“Are they stale?”
“They’re pretty good.”
“Toss them in on the seat, then,” Rusty had said, calling around the side of the trunk.
Now he flipped the pages of his book and was glad for the doughnuts, especially the ones rolled in powdered sugar. He hadn’t eaten more than half a dozen when he doubled over in pain, clutching his belly and writhing on the seat. His book fell to the floor and the bag of doughnuts upended all over the dash, sending up little white clouds of sugar.
“Holy Jesus,” Rusty cried out, his whole body convulsing. He fought whatever it was that was trying to get out, then banged open the glove compartment, hoping to find the bottle of antacids he’d stashed there earlier. He winced. No bottle fell out. He sat up on one elbow and pawed around through the maps, the other hand still clenching his gut.
The little mirror in the compartment sprang up, and all it took was one glance at his face to convince Rusty that he was going to die. His face was as yellow as the margarine tub. Even his eyes looked like gory dandelions. When had he turned so sallow, and what the hell had come over him?
“I’m being punished,” he said, heaving and rolling onto his back. He flopped around like a fish, his whole body locked in a painful spasm. “Dear Lord, I beg you,” he cried, flipping over onto his stomach and drawing his knees up under his chest. There he heaved again and again, purging his body of all he had consumed that day and the day before. It filled the car with a smell so noxious that he found the wherewithal to yank open the driver’s side door and lunge forth, sputtering for breath and wiping his face of the sour spittle that ran all down his front.
He lumbered along the dirt shoulder a few yards, then collapsed in a heap, his insides still smoldering, his lungs gasping for air. God, this was a horrible way to go. In between painful seizures, he saw back into those mornings when Judy, newly pregnant, had begged him to pull over along the road so she could throw up. He’d been so glad then that he had been born a man, but it all caught up with you. And he remembered the times they’d raced to the hospital, her doubled up with contractions that rendered her speechless. There again, he’d felt spared. Oh, it was all coming to haunt him now. He cursed himself for ever being so smug, for ever thinking she ought to be quieter about it and accept her pains with a little more grace. The Lord would send him to his grave without the least bit of grace, and he supposed he deserved it.
He kicked around and finally rolled off into a ditch, hoping this gesture of submission would encourage the creator to curtail his misery. “I’m ready to go, Lord,” he cried. “Just name the time. It’s your stinkin’ victory.” Another wave of pain coursed through him as he closed his eyes and submitted himself entirely to a black place, not unlike the realm of dreams, where, from time to time, he had envisioned his legs spreading to birth a monster.
Chapter 16
BABY X
To Gretchen, it seemed impossible that all she’d been waiting for had arrived. She could remember visiting Hael soon after each of her two births, holding M16, then M64, in the very same hospital. She remembered walking this same floor, hearing babies up and down the hall as they entered the world. Such surreal sounds, those first cries, the mother giving voice to the child’s. And to be in that ward and overhear spirits being born—that had been almost wilder than entering the birthing suite to meet Hael and Glyn with flowers for each of their newborns. How could birth be so magical and yet so mundane?
Now here she was with her own little one, and she felt only quiet elation. She couldn’t imagine taking her eyes away from its face. It pained her even to blink. Who was inside, she wondered? Each eye like a tiny keyhole, each cry a clue. She surveyed the room from the rocking chair, taking a last look around the birthing suite to make sure Ray and Judy had packed all her belongings. On a shelf, she saw they had forgotten the black candle she’d asked the nurse-midwife to light as soon as the baby’s head appeared.
Though she was still exhausted, her body felt light, as if she and the baby were floating. Maybe it was the hours of relaxation exercises Ray had led her through during labor, whispering in her ear, “You’re floating in water, let the baby float out of you.” And she had pictured this and started to chant the word “floating,” laughing to herself now as she remembered how the soft chant had grown into a shrill roar at some point in the night, her voice becoming hoarse as the sun seeped in around the putty-colored curtains.
She said the word aloud now in the room, the afternoon light bent across her knees. The baby blinked, as if in recognition. “Floating,” she said. “Would that be a good name for you? Would you like to be a little verb?”
Judy came in, wearing a dark dress, tiptoeing through the room.
“You don’t have to be quiet,” Gretchen said. “He/ she’s eyes are open.”
“Ray’s bringing the car around,” Judy said, pressing her palms together and scanning the room nervously. “Have you seen Sunny and Klaus?”
“They were in and out a little bit ago with some lunch.” Gretchen smiled.
“I feel terrible,” Judy blurted out, kneeling by Gretchen’s chair. “I let a guy from the Chicago Reader in here after the birth. He was doing a story on Henry’s tour.”
Gretchen shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“I know you didn’t want any commotion —”
“Mom.” Gretchen looked at Judy’s shaking hands. “I don’t care. I’m so happy, I don’t care what anyone knows. Just relax.”
Judy forced a weak smile. “I’m a little on edge, I guess,” she said. “But, look, I’m wearing all black.”
Gretchen nodded approvingly. “You’ve come a long way, Mom.”
Judy grinned feebly. “I’m trying.”
They made a dark entourage in the lobby, Judy, Gretchen, Ray—all of them dressed in black clothing, down to the baby in its onesie. Judy thought she could feel people watching them. Probably think we’re Amish, she reassured herself as she helped Gretchen out of the wheelchair and into the new Volvo Ray had borrowed from Glyn and Hael. Judy followed closely behind in her Datsun, terrified whenever anyone changed lanes in front of her or cut too close to the rear door where the new baby was strapped into its seat. She couldn’t remember being so protective of her own children, but as Celeste had warned her, this was a grandchild, and grandchildren were different.
Back at Gretchen and Ray’s apartment, Sunny and Klaus were waiting on the stoop in matching blue running suits with gold piping, sipping smoothies. They raised their glasses in salute as Ray pulled up to the curb, then came running across the lawn like Olympians. As soon as Gretchen stepped out of the passenger seat, people from all down the block crossed leaf-strewn yards to see the community’s newest addition, cooing and whooping.
“Can I hold him/ her?” Glyn was the first to ask.
“Let me see!” cried a small child holding a foam blob.
As Klaus helped Ray gather up the bags from the trunk, Judy observed Sunny standing off to the side under an elm. She was smiling to herself, taking it all in. She knows, Judy thought to herself, she knows. But when Sunny finally joined the crowd, it was only to chat politely about the fall weather and to nod about Gretchen’s bravery and the miracle of birth. To Glyn, who was still rocking the new baby in his sweatered arms, she said, “I’m just so glad to be a grandmother. I’m even looking forward to a few nights on the blow-up mattress so I can help out around the house.”
Judy bristled at the thought. Sunny sleeping at the apartment? Sunny within constant range of the baby? What if Gretchen and Ray left the room for a moment? Sunny would be the first to unsnap the onesie and break their confidence. Judy flashed Gretchen a concerned look, but Gretchen only rubbed her still-swollen belly and smiled, her eyes bright against the dark sweater around her shoulders.
From the corner of her eye, Judy caught sight of what looked like a white news van pulling up down the block, but before any reporters emerged, everyone started inside to make supper, leaving the yard empty except for a gray foam blob bouncing down the walk.
As late afternoon sagged into evening, Gretchen slipped off to her bedroom with the baby for a nap. Already the day felt like part of a moonwalk. Somewhere between elation and exhaustion, she was still floating. The phone rang, a distant bird trill weaving through her half-sleep. The baby began to cry. She sighed and sat up on the futon, pulling a changing pad out of the diaper bag. The baby fussed briefly, then resumed staring into space. Gretchen looked down at its perfect moon of a head as she unfastened the crotch snaps of the onesie she’d made and began peeling back the diaper’s cloth folds. From the living room, she heard Klaus’s dry laugh, her mother’s birdsong giggle.
It was strange to see the baby naked, even though she tried to make its sex mean nothing. During her pregnancy, she had pictured the sex as a sort of blur when her mind dealt with it, but now it surprised her. She found she had to bat away certain thoughts, nicknames, connotations that crept into her psyche. Remaining neutral to these thoughts was more difficult than she had imagined. Some part of her wanted to dash into the hall and show everyone the baby in its pink entirety.
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