Volume Ten

by Volume 10 (retail) (epub)

  “Hey,” Sam said, pulling my face close to whisper in my ear. His voice brought me back from the brink, and I leaned in to him, smelling dear, sweet, solid Sam, his smell of wood and sandpaper and sweat. I felt his arms go up and then something cold and heavy around my neck. I jerked away from him and looked down. There, resting against my chest, was the fat blue-jeweled necklace, its filigreed gold cold against me.

  “Do you like it?” Sam asked, grinning. “I saw it in the windows on my lunch break and…I don’t know. It just looked like you, that was all. I saw it, and something made me go right on in and buy it.” Sam kissed me on my forehead, and I reached down to pull the cold jewelry away from my neck. I held the weighty stone in my fist and heard the pumpkin-headed doctor laughing above.

  “Ain’t that just something?” he asked. “Boy hoo, now there’s a husband that gets himself a get-out-of-jail-free card for use if ever there was one. Boy hoo, who says men ain’t got intuition?”

  3

  And after that? Well, after that it was winter, then spring, and I forgot all about the girl and the woman in the blue dress. Sam had sold the hotel, and I was pregnant. Our gamble had paid off, and all was right with the world. And, oh, what a world it was! I inhabited it as if it was me who’d just been born, me who was discovering all its glories for the first time. Sam said I was glowing, a pregnant woman’s glow, and while I wasn’t sure that I really looked that different (minus the larger belly), I certainly felt different.

  I was heavier, fuller, more completely there in every way. When I tasted the sweet butter-brickle of a spoon of ice cream, felt the burnt sugar of the toffee crunch between my teeth and the cool slide of the ice-cream trickle down my throat, it wasn’t just me tasting it, but the very center of me, not the baby, exactly, but the part of me that would become the baby, the life inside me that was just waiting to be, be, be, and oh! It was so hungry!

  The days passed and with the profits from the hotel Sam and I bought ourselves a house in Grand Marais. It was pleasant there, and Sam had been offered a job with a local contractor. I was pregnant and had no desire to leave. All in all, the place seemed one of the utmost blessing, a place to expand in health and happiness and to welcome the third member of our family.

  A month before my predicted due date, Sam was called out of town for a renovation in Duluth.

  “It’s only for a day, Nat,” he said, rubbing my toes where they poked out from under our down comforter. It was spring here, but spring in northern Minnesota was still cold. The feather comforter wouldn’t be put away until May at the earliest.

  “What if I go into labor while you’re away?” I was aware of the pout in my voice.

  “If you do, then the doctor’s number is by the bed, and Mrs. Karin is ready and willing to take you wherever you need to go whenever you need to be there. But you won’t need either of them. You’ve got a month to go, Nat. Little Bumpo isn’t ready to leave Mama’s belly just yet.”

  Little Bumpo was the name we’d bestowed on our unborn, both of us deciding not to find out the sex of the child until it was actually born.

  “Fine, then,” I said, kissing the rough scratch of his cheek and sending him on his way. “Just don’t expect me to hold out on eating the rest of the rocky road while you’re away.”

  He grinned, and then, just like on so many other jobs before this one, was gone. I was alone.

  I went to the Fish Hash for dinner. It had been a long time, not since three months ago when I’d eaten there with Sam, and that had been at his request. I knew that my “experience” from the winter months had been a result of my bumped head, but something about it all still seemed too tangible to pass off so easily. I’d avoided the Fish Hash, but with Sam gone and the evening to kill, the noise of the tourists drew me toward it.

  It was an unusually gorgeous night in Grand Marais, the kind of spring evening that the tourists come for, the lucky few who decide to chance the weather and hope for an April evening that flowers instead of showers. Tonight, Grand Marais did not disappoint.

  Although it had snowed only the week before, now, everywhere, the fledgling spring made itself known. From the warm breath of the near-sixty-degree air to the cry of the birds, newly invigorated, and finding good nesting spots in the budding trees. I walked to the Fish Hash with a happy heart, ready to welcome all changes, including the one kicking at my belly. The lake water whisked itself in a welcome against the Fish Hash’s dock, and I saw what I took, at the time, to be a good omen—the three otters who often visited the dock in hope of scraps. I spent a few minutes watching them play, the littlest of them delighting the tourists by surfacing in great breaks of waves and then diving down again whenever one of the larger otters would try to come near him. It was a merry chase, and I laughed out loud at their antics, thinking of how in the springs to come, I could bring my own child here to watch them.

  The restaurant was, as I expected, crowded, but by some miracle I found Mrs. Karin, our new neighbor, already there. The woman was late-middle-aged and kindly; we’d grown close in the past few months.

  “Natalie!” she cried, standing from her table to wave me over. I joined her, and the two of us spent a good hour ignoring everyone else in the restaurant.

  “Thank you,” I said, as our meal ended and we both ordered a hot cocoa over which to linger. “It’s so nice to have company with Sam away.”

  “Psh, I should have thought to invite you before I ever came over,” Mrs. Karin said, blowing on her newly delivered cup, steam rising from her hot chocolate. “I would have, too, but I didn’t want to impose.”

  “Please! Spending time with you is as far from an imposition as a person could get,” I assured her. “It’s delightful.”

  When our hot chocolate was over, we amiably linked arms and walked out into crisping air of the evening. For a moment, I was taken back to the night in the winter when I’d discovered my pregnancy. When I looked down and saw Mrs. Karin’s hand upon my own, a glovelike shadow from the building’s overhang made me think of the woman in blue I’d dreamed up, and a shudder ran through my frame.

  “Are you all right, dear?”

  “I’m more than all right,” I said. And I was. This was no phantom woman, Mrs. Karin, and the evening was not a dark winter’s one. Instead, the setting sun washed everything in an ethereal glow of the utmost beauty; the lake’s waves looked like skeins of orange silk. “Everything’s wonderful,” I said, and I felt the life inside me kick, as if in confirmation. I took Mrs. Karin’s hand in my own and gently laid it on my belly. The kick came again, and as we stood at the lake’s edge smiling at each other, I felt a great rush of happiness come over me.

  Mrs. Karin dropped me off at my house with promises of coffee in the morning. We’d lingered on the walk back, and the sun had left the sky almost fully, the light changing from an orange to a pale silver. When I stepped inside the house, I was struck with the pleasant silence of it, and a smile crossed my lips as I imagined how shortly such a silence would be relieved.

  I had just removed my shoes (pink ballet flats; I’d been able to wear nothing but flats since the pregnancy and my seemingly ever-growing feet) when, clutching the doorframe to help me stand straight again, a misplaced shadow caught my eye. I stopped, the way a deer might stop in a forest seeing the shadow of a hiker’s backpack fall across the trail.

  Someone was in the living-room chair. A shot of adrenaline followed this realization, and I felt myself go shiver-cold with it, my hands trembling so much that I nearly fell over and had to push back hard at the doorframe to steady myself. In doing so, I looked away from the chair, and when I looked back again…nothing. No figure at all.

  I was a fool, of course. That is what I told myself. The night had got me thinking about darker things, as a woman close to her time was wont to do. There was nothing more to it than that. All the same, I turned on al
l the lights in the house, every damned last one of them, and hurried myself upstairs and into my warm robe and the comfort of a cup of hot tea and the bed. I slept easily that night, even without Sam’s warm body beside me. Only on near dawn did I awake, and then it was to two hands, pressed very firmly, on either side of my belly.

  “Sam?”

  The pressure on my belly grew firmer. There was a pain. I shot upright in bed to look around. No one. Just the early light gray of coming dawn streaming through our curtainless second-floor picture window. Gray that bathed the room, poked a trembling finger into all of its corners, to the bureau, to my vanity with its ragged bench, on to the easy chair in which no one ever sat, except…

  There, quite clearly, a figure now rested, its head hunched low upon its chest. I opened my mouth to scream when, like a jack-in-the box, up popped the head, revealing the ghost-white of a face that I knew.

  “Hello, Natalie. How’s the baby coming along?” The woman’s silver hair blended so perfectly with the gray of the light that it, along with the white of her face, made her seem nothing more than a waterstain on the background of the room. My hand flew protectively to my belly, and yet…there was no fear. Hadn’t I known? Hadn’t I always, in some way, thought to see her again?

  “How did you get in, Cassandra?”

  Coolly, with the grace and ease of a water eel, she stood, and I saw that she wore the same blue dress that I’d seen her in months ago. She writhed a clean and lanky dance to my bed, where, instead of sitting down, she leaned over to extend a cold, white hand to me. “Shall we?” Without waiting for a response, she pulled my hand away from my stomach and drew me to stand, the sheets puddling at my feet and revealing my skin to the room’s cool air. With a quick yet somehow tender motion, Cassandra drew me to her, enfolded her arms around the back of my neck, and we stood, almost like lovers, my large belly pressed against her flat one.

  There is nothing I can say to myself nor to anyone else that will make the rest of this make any kind of sense. I’ve told the police this over and over again, although I know they hardly take me seriously. You see, they can tell from the forced window that someone was in the house. A real, honest-to-God person, and not just me.

  But they didn’t find any prints. “She must have worn gloves,” they told me. “The only prints here are your own.” And then they wink their eyes at one another and wait to hear the rest of my story. They try not to laugh when I tell them.

  “Why would you dance with her?” they ask me, looks of puzzlement crossing their faces.

  But yes, it was just that. Dancing. I danced with her. We danced. My belly against hers, and I listened to those words that she whispered.

  “Give her to me. Give her to me, please.” And her belly pressed, pressed, pressed against mine. And I knew that not only was she real but that she was familiar, that scent that she wore, the feel of her belly matched so comfortably against my own.

  “You saw what will happen to her,” she said. “What must happen later. If you give her now, then I can bring her into it after the fact. Please.”

  When she said the last word, I pulled away from her because there was such desperation in it. Such horrible longing, such…evil. Yes. I thought then and I think now, that there was evil in it.

  And when she pulled away, I understood what it was she was asking. She wanted the child. She wanted my baby. I understood something else, too. Something terrible.

  When Cassandra pulled away, I looked at her clearly for the first time and saw how old she looked. How tired. Her eyes were puffy, that jagged hook of a wrinkle that I’d noticed over dinner more prominent now, the skin around her mouth pulled in a permanent frown with lines where I was just beginning to get them. Marionette lines, they were called. And her eyes, oh, her eyes…

  “No,” I said.

  “You don’t know.” Cassandra raised her hands, and there, on her left hand I saw a ring that I knew. “You can’t know,” she said, “how much it’s cost me to come here. How much…”

  “No,” I said, more firmly. “No, no, no! No!” I was screaming. I saw the look on her face shift, saw her lower lip tremble, and now I was not screaming, I was laughing. Laughing so hard that the air would hardly come. “No!” I said, hiccupping it in between the laughs. “Whatever game you’re playing, you can’t have her. No!”

  I reached beside me and lifted the phone, dialed the three necessary numbers, and waited for the voice of the authority, the voice of reason.

  Cassandra gave me one last, terrible look. A look so sad, so tired, and so…yes, I said it then and I say it now…evil, that I had to drop my own eyes, so evil that my hand went straight to my belly.

  “You don’t know what a person can be willing to do for a child,” she said, “the distance she will travel.”

  When she left, I was still laughing.

  The police periodically follow up on the investigation of the break-in. I tell them that I haven’t seen her since then.

  I wish this were true.

  The marionette lines grow deeper in my face every damned day, and sometimes, when I am alone, I find myself whispering the words “Give her to me,” just to see how they will sound.

  Sometimes I even add a please.

  It all sounds very…familiar. As if I’ve said it a million times before.

  Seven Years

  by Wrath James White

  Seven years ago my best friend Greg died. Shot down in the street. Seven years ago I fired a gun for the last time. Seven years ago I vowed never to live that type of life again, I vowed to change. And I did. I’m not that angry young man I used to be.

  The guy with the gray hoodie was following me again. His pants sagged low, past his hips, so you could see his red-and-white Calvin Klein boxers—and the gun in his waistband. He kept his head bent down, staring at the sidewalk beneath his old-school black-and-white high-top Nikes. His face was hidden by the hood, enshrouded in shadows. Hands shoved deep into the pockets of his faded black jeans, which were at least two sizes too big. He kept a respectable distance, but this was the second day I’d seen him following behind me. It wasn’t a coincidence. He was after me.

  Adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream like a blast of crack cocaine. My heartbeat quickened. I could hear it. Feel it pounding against my chest, trying to free itself from the prison of my ribcage. My breath came fast and hard. The edges of my vision began to close in, narrowing to a fist-sized window. I hadn’t felt this in years. It was the fight-or-flight response, my body preparing itself for danger. I used to get this feeling four or five times a day when I was younger. Before I changed.

  Seven years ago, I was a street thug, a gangsta. I sold drugs, carried a gun, even used it a few times. I was headed for destruction. Then I decided I wanted to go to college. Now I’m two months away from graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a neuroscience degree—unless I get shot first.

  The guy behind me looked over his shoulder. His head swiveled, looking from one side of the street to the other, scanning for witnesses. Making sure no one would be able to identify him once whatever he had planned for me went down, and scoping out his exit route. I knew the routine. I’d done it many times myself. I even knew what he was thinking, all the psychological games he was playing to push his conscience to the side, lower his inhibitions, and silence his fear. Telling himself he was a “bad motherfucker,” that this would be an easy mark. I was determined not to be. I needed a weapon.

  This area of town wasn’t like the hood I grew up in. There were no broken bottles or pieces of rubble and debris from buildings that had crumbled, burnt out, or been looted. No random car parts sitting on someone’s front yard or just lying there on the sidewalk. This was Society Hill. I worked at a clothing store here during the week to help pay for my books and supplies. It was all brick homes with manicured lawns,
opulent apartment buildings with doormen, five-star restaurants, and extravagant boutiques. Mercedes, BMWs, and the occasional Cadillac or expensive SUV passed me on the street, always within a mile or two of the speed limit. It was clean, and safe. At least it was normally. That left few options for improvised self-defense weapons. I didn’t like my chances of taking on an armed assailant with nothing but my fists. I hadn’t thrown down with anyone in years. Not since I got my life in order and enrolled in college. I couldn’t remember the last time I had to bust some fool’s grill with nothing but my fists. That wasn’t who I was anymore.

  Changing the entire trajectory of my life hadn’t been as simple as waking up one day and deciding I wanted a better life for myself, but then again it was. It was Sunday morning, seven years ago almost to the day, when the idea to do something different with my life first came to me. I had attended my best friend Greg’s funeral the morning before. I watched his mother wail and scream over his coffin, repeating “Why?” to the listless air above the church and crying out for her baby, insane with grief. I imagined my own mother grieving over my coffin the same way. My death would ruin her. But I knew that’s how my life would likely end. Few young black men made it out of the ghetto alive. That’s just something I grew to accept like corrupt cops stopping me on the street and searching me without probable cause, bill collectors calling all hours of the day, white Jesuses, and black Republicans.

  Greg had been sitting right next to me at the bus stop when he got shot. A drive-by. A guy in a black Cutlass Supreme leaning out the passenger-side window with a red scarf wrapped around his face, black sunglasses, and an AR-15 on full auto. For all I know, those bullets had been intended for me. I dove behind a car, landing facefirst on the concrete, busting my lip, chipping my front tooth, and gashing open my forehead. Greg landed directly in front of the bench we’d been sitting on. Half his skull was missing. Blood poured from his ears and nose like a fountain of red wine gushing down into the gutter. He was gone. A kid I’d known since kindergarten, who I’d just been laughing with moments before, was now a bleeding sack of meat. That’s when I knew I had to change my life. Still, it was almost another month before I actually took action. My high school science teacher, Mr. Sumpter, was the one who finally convinced me to do something about my future.