Cradle Lake

by Ronald Malfi

  Alan recalled a memory from his early childhood when he’d been at a birthday party and he and some of the other boys had gone around stomping all the balloons. They’d picked up the broken flaps of rubber and, pulling them taut across their faces, made funny noises into the rubber and stuck their tongues out and pressed down their noses …

  The hand retreated, leaving the band of navel flesh undisturbed.

  On the couch, Heather rolled onto her side. The book fell on the floor, but she didn’t wake up.

  Alan stood above her for a very long time, waiting to see what would happen—waiting to see if she would come suddenly awake, screaming in pain. But nothing happened.

  He threw up in the toilet, then showered.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Alan did not fall asleep that night. Nor the following night. He found time during the day to catch quick naps on the couch, but his lack of sleep was making him lethargic and was evident in his face and around his eyes. Soon he prayed for winter break to be over so he could get back to school and give himself some time to settle, to rest, and to be away from the house. And Heather. He quickly chased the thought away. That wasn’t what he wanted. They were finally a family again. Finally. What was he thinking?

  Heather quit her job at the art gallery. Alan wasn’t sure when it had happened, exactly. She hadn’t told him when she’d done it, and he only found out about it when he asked her why she hadn’t been going to work.

  “It’s over,” she said simply. “It’s done.”

  “Heather, you love that job. Why would you quit?”

  “Germs,” she told him. She was doing some pregnant woman style of yoga on the living room floor, glancing occasionally at an open textbook with diagrams beside her. She had one of the classical music CDs playing low on the stereo, convinced that it was turning their baby into a genius with each passing minute. “There are germs everywhere. Also, have you seen all the cats in the neighborhood?”

  “Cats?” He thought of Patsy the Cat for the first time in a long while. How it had hissed when Cory Morris had picked it up and how Alan had found it sometime later out in his yard, torn apart. He’d dumped it in the woods that afternoon. “What do you mean?”

  “Cat feces can cause toxoplasmosis. It can make him retarded. Do you want your kid to be retarded?”

  “No, of course not. And you’re still calling it ‘him.’ Did you open the envelope Dr. Crawford gave us?”

  “It’s just what I call him. I don’t like saying ‘it.’ You shouldn’t, either.”

  He shook his head. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Heather laughed sharply. The sound resonated in his marrow. “Me? What’s wrong with you? You’ve been acting like a fucking head case lately.”

  He frowned. “Real nice. You play all that classical music hoping to make this kid into the next Albert Einstein, yet you’ll toss around the F-bomb like a baseball. Real classy.”

  “Leave me alone. Don’t make me upset. It’s not good for the baby to get my heart rate up. You’d know that if you read any of the books.”

  He turned to leave the room.

  “And get some sleep, will you?” she called after him. “You look like hell.”

  In the kitchen, Alan went to the fridge and took out the plastic jug of lake water. There was very little left in it, but it was enough. He popped the cap and drank it all. Almost instantly he felt his throat open up, his capillaries breathe, his body lighten. He hadn’t realized his ulcer had been acting up until the pain in his stomach quelled. Then he threw the jug into the recycling pail.

  He didn’t like what that water was doing to Heather now, anyway.

  That night, he tried to stay awake by sitting up in bed with headphones on while reading a Jack Ketchum book beneath the light of the bedside lamp. But he was working on days of sleeplessness now and, even having finished the water in the jug, his body needed rest. Soon his eyelids grew heavy. He got up at one point and walked through the house, already confident that he would not find an intruder, because he knew where the sensation was coming from. The wellspring was in his wife’s womb. The baby. The baby was the intruder. It was the baby he’d been sensing all along.

  Standing in his pajama bottoms and a sleeveless T-shirt, he stood wavering at the end of the hallway, breathing deeply, listening to the sounds the house made all around him.

  He was on edge. Maybe he would never sleep again.

  But he did as soon as he climbed back into bed beside his wife. His exhaustion carried him down like a weight, sinking to the ocean floor of his dreams. Massive shapes moved through his subconscious. He found himself blinking, freezing, and standing out beside the road that ran in front of his house. Cory Morris was across the street, dressed all in black and wearing white greasepaint, cradling something in his arms.

  —Mistakes have been made, the boy said, though Alan could not see his mouth moving. Mistakes have been made and they need to be rectified.

  The thing in the boy’s arms was Patsy, his dead cat. The lifeless creature was draped over one of Cory’s arms. It bled black blood down the front of the boy’s hooded sweatshirt.

  When Alan opened his eyes, he was temporarily disoriented. It took him several moments to realize he was in bed beside his wife and in his new house and that he had fallen asleep. He sat up and listened in the darkness. Only Heather’s breathing returned to him; the house was otherwise silent.

  But still … the creeping sensation that—

  Something moved down the hallway. He heard it. The sound was like someone dragging a chair across the hardwood floor.

  He sprung out of bed and rushed into the hallway, moving so quickly and reactionary this time that he forgot his baseball bat. The hallway seemed to cant to one side. He fumbled along the wall for the light switch and flipped it on, bathing the tilting hallway in yellowish light.

  At the end of the hallway, something was banging around in the kitchen. Someone—or something—was going through the cupboards, moving things around, making a racket.

  Sprinting down the hall, he skidded into the kitchen while simultaneously turning on the light. Harsh fluorescents burned his retinas.

  The kitchen cabinets were open, the lower cupboard doors ajar. There were pots and pans strewn about the floor.

  Something shattered behind him.

  Alan jumped and spun around, his heart like a locomotive in his chest. The foyer behind was pitch-black, though he thought he spied the silhouette of something moving across one of the windows. He couldn’t tell if it was outside the window or in the house. He couldn’t tell what it was.

  Steeling himself, he went into the living room and turned on the lamp. A glass vase lay shattered at his feet. He was sweating profusely now. It felt like his ears had been stuffed with wads of cotton.

  At the opposite end of the house, he heard Heather cry out in her sleep. He turned and ran out of the room, sprinted down the hallway, and switched on the bedroom light upon entering the room.

  She was still asleep, lying on her back, all the blankets kicked onto his side of the bed. Her cotton nightgown was hiked up past her hips, leaving her upper thighs and the vague cleft of her genitalia exposed to him.

  There was something coming out of her.

  He tried to speak her name, but it came out a petrified gasp, more breathy and indistinct than any actual utterance.

  There was a little bit of blood on the mattress and a smear on one of her inner thighs. The thing coming out of her—elongated and flesh colored, horrifically wormlike in its appearance, maybe six inches in length—bent at an angle that suggested a knee or an elbow. It made a sound like a cicada. The appendage was grotesquely footlike… and then it retreated inside his wife. In disbelief, Alan watched Heather’s labia close upon it like stage curtains after an encore performance.

  The mound of Heather’s belly rose. It was obvious something was moving around in there.

  What have I been chasing around this house for the past month? he wondere
d … but could not bear to consider the notion for longer than a second.

  Heather broke out in laughter.

  He went to her side and spoke her name several times, but she would not stop laughing. Disturbingly, she still appeared to be asleep.

  (they came out wrong)

  (came out)

  The sounds of cicadas echoed in the center of his brain.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  When Heather awoke, it was still night. She startled him from his own slumber, where he slumped on the floor against her side of the bed, by standing above him, legs spread, hair tousled into a mop.

  Groaning, still half-asleep, he blinked and scooted against the wall. “Heather, honey …”

  She did not move. In the dark, he could not make out the details of her face, could not see if her eyes were open and she was awake or if she had gotten up in her sleep, a somnambulist.

  “Hon … ?”

  She said nothing. The silence was like the aftershock of a tremendous explosion. Then he heard the sounds of what he at first mistook for the crackle of a distant burning fire until he felt the wetness spray onto his bare feet, and he realized his wife was standing before him, urinating on the bedroom floor. Alan groaned and hugged his legs to his chest.

  Once she had finished, she climbed back into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Two seconds later she was snoring.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  And when Alan awoke, it was to the sound of running water in the bathroom down the hall. He sat up, his neck stiff, having fallen asleep on the floor with his back against the wall. Heather was no longer in bed. The room reeked of ammonia; the puddle of urine was a clearly visible pool on the hardwood floor between his feet.

  She was soaking in the tub, a washcloth on the dome of her belly.

  “We need to make another ultrasound appointment,” he said, standing in the doorway.

  Heather wrung out the washcloth, then draped it over her eyes as she rested her head against the tiled wall.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  She made a hmmm sound but didn’t remove the washcloth from her face.

  “I’m calling Dr. Crawford’s office and scheduling another ultrasound. Something isn’t right.”

  She threw a fist down into the water, splashing. With her other hand, she swiped the washcloth from her face. The expression there chilled him to the core.

  “What’s the matter with you?” She was practically seething. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I’m not doing anything. I want to have the baby checked. Something’s not right with the baby.”

  “You leave us both alone.”

  “Something isn’t right. We need to see Dr. Crawford.”

  “Lesbian cunt,” Heather growled.

  “Something isn’t right with you, either.” His mouth was dry and tasted like old tube socks.

  She sat up in the tub, sloshing water onto the floor. Her hair was stringy and wet about her face, her eyes larger than he had ever seen them. “I know what you’re trying to do.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not trying to do anything.”

  “You are. You’re weak. You never wanted children. You were happy the other two died.”

  Her words stung him worse than anything she had ever said to him. “That isn’t true.”

  “Isn’t it? Your father was a criminal and a lousy dad, and your mother split before you were even old enough to stop shitting in your pants. You’re weak and you think you’ll be just like them. You never wanted children, and you were happy when the other two died. You were happy.”

  “Heather, baby, no …”

  The mound of her belly glistened in the water. She caressed it. “Take your weakness someplace else. You are not taking this baby from me. Do you understand? I won’t let you.”

  “None of that is true. I’ve been heartbroken over all of this, just like you have.”

  “You’ve been afraid I’d do something to myself, and you feel bad about what happened to me, but you never wanted to be a father. You never cared about our two dead babies. Where are they now? Ashes in a trash heap? The city fucking sewer? They were babies. You never fucking buried them.”

  He took a step backward. Her eyes never left him. He could feel them piercing straight through to the core fibers of his being.

  And just like that, her face went slack, expressionless. She dipped the washcloth into the tub water, wrung it out again. As she eased back down, resting her head against the wall, she draped the wet cloth over her eyes.

  The glistening mound of her belly rose like a leviathan out of the water.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Alan spent the remainder of that day falling apart.

  After her bath, Heather had returned to the bedroom wrapped in a terry-cloth robe and a towel turbaned around her head, humming softly and pleasantly as if nothing had ever transpired between the two.

  Alan had cleaned up the urine from the bedroom floor with a wad of paper towels, then retreated to the backyard where, in the cold midafternoon air, he smoked an entire pack of menthols. Beyond the hedgerow that ran along the curb, he saw Landry’s cruiser parked down the street. From this distance he couldn’t tell if the sheriff was in the car or not. Then he lifted his gaze to the line of pines along the street’s edge. He could make out the weighty black shapes weighing down the boughs, the hooked beaks and fire-flecked eyes of the great birds. There were more of them now. Many more. They had come out of the woods and were now nested in the trees lined up and down the street. One of them was even perched atop a nearby telephone pole, surveying the neighborhood.

  —You fucked up good, old sport, Owen Moreland spoke up beside him. The man’s words were garbled, and Alan knew it was because his face had been torn apart from the shotgun blast. What now?

  Alan shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  —I’m not part of it, Owen said. You may think I am but I’m not. I’m a casualty, just like you.

  “I’m not a casualty.”

  —Maybe not yet. Maybe you can still fix things.

  “What do you mean you’re not part of it? Part of what?”

  —Doesn’t matter. Only thing that matters now is that you fix your mistake.

  “How do I do that?”

  —I can’t tell you what to do. You just have to think about it and do it.

  He looked down. His hands were quaking.

  —You’re a good kid, Alan.

  And it was then that he realized he’d been talking to his father all along.

  Alan stood out there in the yard by himself—or seemingly so—for the next three hours. He hardly moved. He was watching the birds.

  Only once did Heather poke her head out, and her disposition was one completely different from that morning in the bathroom. “My water jug isn’t in the fridge.”

  “I’ll get you more water,” he told her, and she let him be for the remainder of the afternoon.

  Alan Hammerstun gave thought to a lot of things. By the time he went back inside, more birds had come out of the woods and gathered on the branches of the evergreens that ran up and down the street.

  After Heather had fallen asleep, Alan got out of bed and padded to the bathroom. Opening the medicine cabinet, he rifled through bottles of aspirin, a tub of TUMS, ointments and skin cream, hair products, and various other hygiene products. When he found the bottle he was searching for, he didn’t reach for it immediately. He just stared at it, listening to the whoosh of his heartbeat amplified in his ears. It sounded like the heartbeat on an ultrasound.

  On the bottle’s label in all capital letters: PREGNANT WOMEN SHOULD NOT INGEST.

  He recalled the day he’d picked up his first prescription from the pharmacy and how, after reading the label, he’d let out a pained and ironic laugh all the way to his car. The pharmacist’s eyes had gone as large as lightbulbs. Now Alan just began to tremble.

  Misoprostol. Little white octagonal tablets that helped reduce the agon
y of his stomach ulcer.

  He was thinking of Heather’s words to him from earlier that morning. He was thinking about the mermaid and the sailor. He found he couldn’t consider her accusation for longer than a few seconds. To do so meant to convince himself of its authenticity.

  None of that is true, he thought now. I want to be a father. I can be a good father.

  Then what was he thinking? What was he about to do?

  He thought, Pregnant women should not ingest.

  After his father’s death, he spent the remainder of his life being self-sufficient. There hadn’t been a family there to support or advise him. He had been utterly and completely alone.

  Until Heather …

  You never cared about our two dead babies. Where are they now? Ashes in a trash heap? The city fucking sewer?

  He took the bottle of ulcer medication from the medicine cabinet and carried it to the kitchen. With the wall clock ticking overhead, he dug the empty water jug from the recycling bin and filled it with tap water. He listened as the house’s old pipes rattled and chugged through the walls. After the jug was filled, he set it on the counter, then opened the bottle of misoprostol. He shook several tablets out into his hands and put them on a paper towel on the counter. From one of the kitchen drawers he withdrew a table spoon which he used to crush the tablets into powder. Then he poured the powder into the jug of water, screwed the jug’s cap back on, and replaced it in the refrigerator.

  Around three in the morning he awoke screaming, certain that something had been squeezing his genitals. Despite the scream, Heather never stirred beside him.

  In the morning, Alan prepared his wife a large breakfast and pretended that everything was fine. He smiled a lot, and each time he walked by Heather he made sure to rub her head and pat her stomach. She ate all her breakfast and never once remarked about the taste. She did the same with the lunch he prepared for her, which was tuna salad, and he knew she could not taste the things he had put in there. (He’d cut his hand opening the tuna can and it bled freely. He rinsed it under a stream of water at the sink. The cut did not heal.)