Cradle Lake

by Ronald Malfi

  But the outfield wasn’t having any of it. “Interference!” the center fielder yelled. “Doesn’t count! Interference!”

  “No way!” one of the runner’s teammates shouted. “You wouldn’t have caught that in a million years. Automatic home run.”

  “Yeah,” said the runner. “You heard the old guy.”

  Old guy, Alan thought with some humility. Christ. When did that happen?

  “Do-over!” the pitcher demanded. “Do-over!”

  The runner groaned in protest. Slouching, dejected, he turned around and dragged his feet back to home plate. Casting a glance over his shoulder, the kid eyeballed Alan from across the street. He’d been the kid’s savior just a moment ago, but now the kid looked at him as if he’d just ran over his dog. “Shouldn’t smoke, mister,” he said. “Bad for your health.”

  Alan nodded, somewhat surprised by the kid’s effrontery. He even considered tossing the cigarette to the ground and crushing it beneath his sneaker, setting a good example and all, but then decided to hell with it and finished it off as he walked around to the backyard. “Come on, Jerry Lee.”

  The retriever padded after him, tongue lolling out like a circus pennant.

  The grass was thick and green, patches of it almost as high as his hips. Colorful swells of wildflowers blossomed up from the ground. Jerry Lee’s upraised tail cleaved through the grass like the dorsal fin of a shark. Alan walked several yards into the field until his left foot snagged on a tangle of thick grass low to the ground. He tugged it free with a popping sound. With a little loving care, it promised to be a wonderful yard. He would need a lawn mower, of course—he’d never owned one in his life and, in fact, had never operated one—and maybe Heather would plant a vegetable garden close to the house in the spring. Fresh tomatoes, asparagus, parsley … whatever. It was amazing just how different their lives would be now that they’d left the city behind.

  You can escape the city, but you can’t escape what happened there, said a voice in his head. It sounded frighteningly like his dead father. You can run away, but darkness has quick feet and large wings, and it will follow you.

  There was a rustling off to his left. He looked up and was shocked to see a deer staring at him from the edge of the pine forest. Its moist dark eyes were like pools of India ink, its hide a sleek sorrel hue. It was a doe, its head absent of antlers, and it looked much bigger than Alan would have suspected a female deer to be. (Until now, the only deer he had ever seen had been on television or in magazines.) A world of difference from the diseased squirrels that scavenged from trash cans and shat black marbles in the alleyways back in Manhattan …

  “Hey,” he cooed. Made kissing noises. “Hey, there …”

  At his heels, Jerry Lee whimpered and lowered his head on his front paws.

  “Coward,” he said to the dog.

  He took a tentative step in the doe’s direction. Except for the rotating, bovine-like motion of its jaw as it chewed grass, the animal did not move. He hazarded another step, but this time his sneaker caught under another tangle of weeds; the ripping sound it made as he liberated his foot from the tangle was enough to send the doe bounding off into the forest. The last thing he saw was its white tail flitting good-bye.

  In the deer’s wake, Alan noticed a dark impression in the wall of trees. He trumped through the tall grass and realized he was looking at a parting in the trees, like the opening in a curtain. A rutted dirt path cut through the opening and, from what he could estimate, wound deep into the woods. Had the day been sunnier he might have been able to see farther into the woods, but as it was the woods were dense with shadows. He thought he could make out the shape of the deer arcing through the underbrush, obscured by shadows and the green-blue arms of evergreens.

  It was a man-made path; he realized this the moment he stepped onto it and through the opening in the trees. The ground had been worn down to dirt from the traction of human feet. Around him, the world grew unusually quiet, the thickness of the inner firs providing natural insulation against outside noises. Even the quality of the air seemed different: constricted somehow. Motionless.

  Like being in a sealed tomb, he thought. Then reconsidered: Like being in outer space.

  There was one sound, he noticed. But it took him several seconds to learn it was the sound of his own respiration. Then, a moment after that, the forest seemed to instantly come alive with an arrangement of bird caws, buzzing insects, the crunch of dead leaves underfoot—or, more accurately, under paw or hoof. Up ahead, the dirt path twisted through the trees, vanishing behind a thick stand of bluish firs so dense they practically formed a wall. The silvery sky was crisscrossed by a canopy of interlocking tree limbs.

  He turned and beckoned to Jerry Lee to follow him, but the dog only whined and did not move from where he had hunkered down in the grass. Alan felt a pang of compassion for the old beast; a city dog all his life, Jerry Lee probably had no clue what to make of their new surroundings.

  Alan turned around and moved farther down the path, having to bow his head several times to clear the overhanging limbs. Good way to lose an eye, he thought. When he came to the place where the path cut through the firs, he noticed a smooth white stone sitting at the apex of the path’s bend. It was roughly the size of a football, and there was something carved into it: an upside-down triangle. Was it supposed to be an arrow instructing which way to go? Because the path led in only one direction—

  A giant bird burst into flight no more than two feet in front of him, forcing a startled cry from his throat and causing him to stagger backward. He fell down hard on his ass, the right side of his face skimming the bark of the nearest tree. Fireworks exploded before his eyes, and his cheekbone felt as though someone had addressed it with a swatch of sandpaper.

  The bird cut easily through the tangled canopy of tree limbs overhead. Alan heard it squawking as it vanished into the air, its visage a blurred hieroglyphic approximation.

  “Son of a bitch.” He brought one hand up to the side of his face. His right cheek burned and felt twice its normal size. When he fingered the tender spot just above his right eyebrow he winced. His fingers came away slick with blood. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help but shake his head and grin like an asshole. He was such a goddamn city boy. What the hell was he doing out here in Bumfuck, North Carolina, anyway?

  He returned to the house, Jerry Lee trailing behind him in a cloud of his own cowardice, hoping to locate the first-aid kit in one of the bathroom boxes without much difficulty. But when he opened the front door, he was surprised to find they had guests.

  Heather stood in the middle of the living room holding a ceramic dish tented with tinfoil and a bottle of wine. Beside her stood a handsome couple and a girl about ten years old.

  “Well, hey, here he is now,” said the man, a wide smile nearly cracking his face. He extended a hand to Alan. Alan shook it. “I’m Hank Gerski. This is my wife, Lydia, and my daughter, Catherine.”

  “Alan Hammerstun. Hello.”

  “Lord,” said Lydia Gerski. “What happened to your face?”

  Alan pawed at the fresh wound as if he’d forgotten about it. “It’s nothing. I was a little careless out in the yard.”

  “Looks like someone sucker punched you good, partner,” Hank Gerski said.

  “Violent trees around here.”

  Hank laughed. Lydia cocked her head and smiled like someone out of an Ira Levin novel about creepily perfect housewives. Catherine twisted her hands together in front of her, looking just as out of touch and aloof as Heather.

  “We saw the moving truck earlier and just wanted to welcome you both to the neighborhood,” Lydia said. She had a squeaky, birdlike voice.

  “It’s good to have new neighbors,” Hank added, giving Alan a toothy smile. Hank was tall, his skin nicely tanned, his black hair cropped short and turning gray at the temples. He wore an IZOD polo tucked into his overly tight jeans, and reflective sunglasses hung around his neck by a nylon cord. “Old guy who used to li
ve here was a real curmudgeon.”

  Alan, who had never heard any adult male use the word curmudgeon in his life, forced a smile and said, “He was my uncle.”

  Hank’s face seemed to drop like an elevator crashing through floors. “Oh, hey … jeez …”

  Lydia slapped her husband on the arm. “See that? Always opening your mouth.”

  “Didn’t mean anything by it …”

  Alan shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I hardly knew him. In fact, I’m surprised he left us this place in his will.”

  “They brought us food and wine,” Heather said.

  The detour in conversation was as loud as an explosion. Everyone turned and looked at her.

  “Ah yes,” Lydia said, still maintaining her perfect smile. “Some tuna casserole and a bottle of Pinot.”

  “Well, thanks,” Alan said. “That was very nice.”

  “We were going to invite you over for supper,” Hank said, “but we didn’t want to impose on your first night in your new home—”

  “We really went around and around about it,” Lydia interrupted. “Should we invite them or shouldn’t we.”

  “Should we or shouldn’t we,” Hank parroted. It was like watching a tennis match. “Moving is a hectic thing. We didn’t want to add any confusion. And it looks like you’ve got a lot of boxes to go through, too.”

  “Yeah,” Alan said.

  Lydia touched Heather’s arm. “Maybe later in the week we can have you both over. We’re just across the street.”

  Wonderful, Alan thought.

  Heather smiled wearily, her eyes unfocused. It looked like one of her hands was beginning to tremble slightly. He would have to give her more Ativan.

  “So what do you do?” Hank asked, perhaps discomforted by Heather’s obvious detachment.

  “I’m an English professor,” Alan said. “I took a job at the community college. I’ll be starting in the fall.”

  “Wow,” Hank said. “A professor, huh? Way cool.”

  Alan just nodded and thought, Way cool? What the fuck?

  “Oh, hey, great tats,” Hank said, suddenly noticing the tattoos on Alan’s arms.

  Lydia tugged on her husband’s elbow. “Come on. Let’s get out of their hair.”

  Hank Gerski clapped Alan on the shoulder as his wife pulled him toward the front door. “I’ll give you a shout later, Alan,” Hank said, his smile like the chrome grille of an eighteen-wheeler. “Fill you in on the neighborhood’s tawdry secrets.”

  “Sounds inviting,” Alan said, feigning a smile of his own.

  As they filed through the door, Catherine went to pet Jerry Lee on the top of his head. The dog took a step backward and growled deep in his throat. The girl’s hand froze in midair, her eyes wide.

  Alan got down on his knees and raked his fingers along the dog’s head. “Cut that out.” To Catherine, he said, “He’s a friendly guy, really. He’s probably just a little scared, being in a new house in a new town.”

  “What’s his name?” Catherine asked.

  “Jerry Lee. Like the piano player.”

  “Oh,” said Catherine. As if she had any clue about piano players.

  “Come on,” Hank called to her. He and Lydia stood in the doorway, a mutual look of distaste on their faces as they stared at Jerry Lee.

  “Really,” Alan promised, “he’s a big old dummy. Perfectly harmless.”

  “I’m sure.” Hank cleared his throat and put one hand on the back of his daughter’s neck. “Well, anyway, you folks have a good night.”

  They left.

  “Hey,” Alan said, looking into the dog’s sloppy eyes. Jerry Lee seemed perfectly fine now. “What’s gotten into you, huh, bud?”

  “He’s probably cranky from the car ride.” It was the first thing Heather had said to him without being prompted in what seemed like forever.

  “Probably.” Alan went to the front windows and peeked out past the latticework of vines that veined the windowpane. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a grown man use the word tawdry before.” He watched the Gerski family cross the street toward their house. They looked like the perfect middle-class Leave It to Beaver family. Well, almost perfect: he noticed Hank walked with a slight limp.

  When he turned away from the window, Heather was gone. Blink—right out of existence. Yet he could hear her in the kitchen, setting the food down on the stove. Alan went to the bathroom and peered at his reflection. Even without the peppery sprinkle of a bruise on his right cheek, which indeed had swollen to nearly twice its normal size, and the bleeding laceration above his eyebrow, he was surprised to find his reflection looking haggard and run-down.

  I’m thinking too much about it, he told himself. It was the truth. I’m thinking too much, and I’m going to cause the goddamn ulcer to act up again. Stop it already.

  The ulcer had developed last year after the second miscarriage. At the time he had thought it fitting that he should suffer with stomach pains after Heather’s womb had equally suffered. But what was so easily rectified in him with antacid tablets and misoprostol could not take away the memory of the miscarriages nor fix whatever was inside Heather that had caused them.

  After scrounging around in a number of cardboard moving boxes, Alan finally located the little white first-aid kit with the red cross on the lid. He applied peroxide to the gash above his eyebrow, gritting his teeth at the sting.

  Five minutes later, when he felt somewhat better and his face was cleaned up, he went into the living room and found Heather sitting on the sofa, right in the middle of the room where the movers had left it, staring blankly at one wall.

  “Hon,” he said, “you hungry?”

  He waited several moments until the silence grew intolerable.

  Then he went into the kitchen and uncorked the bottle of wine.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Long before Alan Hammerstun had ever dreamt he and his wife would be living in his uncle’s house in North Carolina, they had spent five months trying to get pregnant. They had talked long and hard about children, though they both agreed early on that they wanted a big family.

  One question, among myriad others, was that of location. Heather had grown up in the Midwest, with sprawling acres on which to run and play, lots of animals and friends and well-meaning neighbors at every turn. Alan, on the other hand, had been a child of Manhattan and knew of no other life. There was some brief talk, initiated by Heather, about relocating outside the city for the benefit of their future children. Alan had insisted city life would be good for their unborn progeny, citing the importance of learning how to deal with different types of people while attaining certain street smarts that he didn’t believe were easily come by outside a major metropolitan area.

  Those conversations died down, however, after months and months of trying to conceive without result. Each time Heather had her period there was a definite gloom that overtook them but nothing serious. Not in the beginning, anyway. They didn’t truly start to worry until, ironically, they went to the doctor to see if there was a problem and found out Heather was pregnant—that her missed period did indeed signal the arrival of new life. They scheduled an appointment with an obstetrician who inserted a gelled rod into Heather’s body. Squiggly, ill-defined shapes, like the suggestive presence of ghosts, appeared on the ultrasound monitor.

  Mommy books came quickly. Hasty phone calls were made to close family and friends. Alan bought a stack of classical music CDs, which they played on rotation on the portable CD player by their bed at night, because they had heard playing classical music made your fetus smart.

  Then, two months into the pregnancy, Heather sat up in bed—

  “Alan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Alan … Al—Alan—”

  “Babe—”

  “I think—”

  “Heather—”

  “I think—”

  Under the blankets, his right foot slid in something wet.

  Heather screamed, jumped out of bed, and raced to
the bathroom down the hallway of their tiny Manhattan apartment.

  Alan hopped out of bed as well, the sheets tangling around his ankles, and flipped on the light switch. As he listened to Heather’s moaning from the bathroom, he stared in horror at the mattress. A dark crimson smear of blood stood out obscenely on the white sheet. At its center was what looked like a small twist of black fibrous tissue. Alan thought of bloody noses blown into Kleenex.

  In the bathroom, Heather was curled in a fetal position on the floor. Her inner thighs were wet with blood, and there were dark red asterisks on the yellow linoleum tile.

  It had been a horrible evening that segued into a horrible two weeks. Neither of them wanted to talk about what had happened. And neither of them did. Heather put in extra hours at the art gallery, and Alan buried himself in his work at the university.

  Time continued to move on. Clocks ticked.

  (There was no explanation and these things sometimes happened. It was nature’s way, Mother Nature up to her old tricks, and anyway, it was just one of those things and they would get past it and move on from there, everyone said so.)

  They did not make the effort to try as hard this time. They let things happen naturally. Perhaps, Alan thought on occasion, it was the stress of trying to get pregnant that had caused the pregnancy to end prematurely. Even the obstetrician agreed that it was certainly a possibility.

  So there was no stress, no effort to make things happen.

  (these things happen)

  Several months later, Heather discovered she was pregnant again. She told Alan one night over dinner, after having already gone to see the doctor for confirmation on her own. Everything looked fine. They were happy again. More phone calls were made.

  As time progressed, Alan moved his computer and desk out of the spare bedroom and painted the walls a neutral yellow because it was too early to determine the sex of the baby. Heather watched what she ate—no deli meats, no sushi or undercooked food, no more coffee—and, because that was sometimes hard to do, Alan watched what he ate in an effort to support her and put up a unified front. So they suffered caffeine withdrawal together. In bed at night, they thought of names. Heather suggested William if it was a boy, but Alan didn’t want to name his child after his father.