Better Times

by Batkie, Sara;

Louisa regarded them with curiosity. The older women in the building had never shown much interest in her or Wally, never responded to their greetings with more than a nod or a curl of the lip. Their youth marked them as interlopers, freeloaders, reminded them of the worst impulses of their own kids, who threw water balloons at the mailman and got arrested for trespassing at the railyards. But there was an amusing quality in how they gathered, mobilized, as if maternity was something that must be bestowed.

  “Let me think about it,” she said.

  That night Wally came home tripping over the tips of his shoes.

  “Did you know,” she said as he tumbled into the bedroom, “that snakes use internal fertilization? The males store paired, forked hemipenes in their tails that hook into the females’ insides.”

  “Ouch,” Wally said, but it may have been for other reasons.

  “They also abandon their eggs as soon as they’re laid,” she continued. “Except for pythons, which coil around them until they hatch. Female pythons will even shiver to generate heat for incubation.”

  She got up from the bed and went to the desk, plucking one of the eggs from the nest. The lilac color had begun to fade, as if it’d been left too long in the sun; now it looked the same dishwater gray as it had on the television.

  “Do you think I should do something else with them?” she mused. “Maybe build something that will keep them on my person? Like a pouch or a sling?”

  “You’re doing fine,” Wally slurred. “You’re doing fine lookaftering them.”

  Louisa held the egg up to her ear as if she might hear the ocean in it. But there was just the gentle swell of Wally’s snores.

  Once, not long after she and Wally started dating, Louisa was approached by a lost girl in the mall. She looked exactly the way you’d expect someone left behind to look: saddle shoes, pigtails, thumb in mouth. “I can’t find my dad,” she’d whispered, giving the last word clear uppercase emphasis, when Louisa bent down toward her outside the Orange Julius.

  Louisa did everything she thought she was supposed to do. She asked what her dad looked like. He was tall, thin, wore glasses. He was a doctor, which was a fact provided without prompting. She let the girl lead her by the hand around the stores while she conveniently remembered that no, her dad hadn’t come in here after all. Louisa tried locating a security guard but the girl always distracted her with tears or a request for some of her soft drink. Finally, after the girl asked to use her cell phone, Louisa gave her all the money in her wallet and left her by the fountain.

  “You did the right thing,” Wally said when she told him. “I’m sure it was a scam. I bet her dad wasn’t even a doctor at all.”

  At the time Louisa convinced herself that she agreed, but now the memory frightened her. It seemed some sign of her capacity for monstrousness.

  A week after the women began to arrive, Louisa’s mother called. “I saw you in the grocery store this morning,” she said in her brittle-boned voice. A life-long smoker.

  “That’s impossible,” Louisa said. “I haven’t been to the store.”

  “Not you. Your face.”

  “My face?” Louisa repeated.

  “You’re a tabloid sensation,” her mother said, with the same enthusiasm she reserved for announcing the results of a recent colonoscopy.

  “I am?”

  “Don’t speak like that, honey. It makes you sound slow.”

  “But I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”

  “You’re on the cover of Idol. There’s an article, too. About you and Wally and your little . . . situation.”

  Louisa glanced over at the eggs, as if they might have heard.

  “Well? What about it?”

  Her mother sighed, which set something loose and she began coughing.

  “Now, honey,” she continued once it passed, “I’ve known Wally for years. You know that I love him. But.”

  Louisa waited.

  “But it just doesn’t look right. Him never being around, coming home late, drunk. It’s all in the story.”

  “And?”

  “Don’t you see? Everyone who reads it will think they know things about you. Like the way they think they know things about movie stars. Or the president. Or anyone who’s not them. I just want you to be prepared, that’s all.”

  Louisa sighed, raking her teeth along the edge of her right thumbnail. “Do you remember those encyclopedias you gave me?”

  “Not really,” her mother said.

  “It doesn’t matter. But I’ve been reading them. Most fish, you know, engage in oviparity. The females lay a great number of eggs, sometimes several million, which are externally fertilized by the males. Then the eggs are left to develop on their own. The parents have really no say at all.”

  “True,” her mother mused. “But how many end up as caviar instead of fish?”

  After hanging up Louisa went to the front window and peered through the curtain at the women outside. Most were doing what they had been doing all week: chatting, painting one another’s nails, taking lopsided selfies. But a few held copies of Idol, were shuffling through the pages, the image of the eggs from the television reproduced in queasy close-up, like quivering porno flesh. Louisa shrank from the sight. She wanted nothing to do with them.

  Wally found her on the bedroom floor in a fetal curl around the nest. He knelt down and held a copy of Idol in front of her face.

  “How did this happen?”

  He didn’t sound angry, only deeply, deeply sad.

  “The way all of it happened,” she said. “Without anybody asking me.”

  “Nobody asked me, either,” Wally said, bringing his butt down and crossing his legs to sit.

  “I did,” Louisa said. “On the very first day. I asked if you would help me.”

  “And I am. Aren’t I?”

  Louisa sat up, rubbing at her eyes, blurring the Wally before her.

  “Is this what you think of me?” he continued. “What these rags say?”

  Wally came back into focus. He looked older than she remembered either of them being. She thought back to when they had first met, which was different from when they first decided on one another. It was at a party in college, held in an abandoned apartment complex. Half the roof had already been torn down and the rest of the building was set to follow in the new year. The first snow of the winter came early and the floors were covered in a damp white dust. There was no electricity; everyone huddled around trash can fires, or one another, for warmth. Others sprawled out on the staircase that led up to an open sky. Beer was retrieved from a bathtub filled with ice.

  They’d gotten into a room upstairs somehow, underneath a shredded section of the sky. It was empty aside from the snow, which had fallen in haphazard clumps from the jutting skeleton of the roof. The wallpaper had split and peeled away in the cold; it hung from the walls in stiffened strips, like a woman caught undressing. The floorboards groaned beneath them as they wandered. “Is this safe?” Louisa had asked.

  “Probably not,” he said.

  He’d tried to kiss her that night, but Louisa, skittish and virginal, took one step back too many and fell to the ground. She lay spread-eagle for a moment, not sure what to do. Then she brought her legs together and her arms down and made a snow angel.

  Later Wally would confide that was the first moment he knew he could love her. She couldn’t remember when she knew she could feel the same way.

  Now Louisa reached out for the paper and began tearing off pieces, adding them to the nest. Wally watched her in silence until she finished, little black smudges left behind on her fingertips. Then he grabbed her left wrist. He held his other hand out, palm up.

  “Do you trust me?” he said.

  Several years later, after Louisa had given birth to their first child, while Wally was out trying to locate some coffee in the hospital commissary, two nurses waited while she tried to get her new daughter to latch onto her breast. It was a tedious process to watch as it was almost alway
s successful, eventually, and yet it kept them in a state of suspense nonetheless. The baby’s head lolled about like a buoy on an ocean.

  “She’ll get it,” the younger one whispered to the other. But the older one was not convinced. How could you ever know a thing like that?

  Now Louisa reached into the nest and picked up one of the eggs, then placed it gently in Wally’s outstretched hand. It was the first time he had held one. They’d grown no larger in their six weeks of existence but there was a density to them now that felt fibrous, braided, less like the pulsing of a heart than the flexing of a muscle.

  They held their breath as Wally let it settle into the cradle of his palm, both looking down at what was between them. As the minutes on the digital clock ticked silently by, they drew closer until their foreheads rested one against the other, forming a chaste tent. Then, just as they were starting to get comfortable, there was a tiny cracking sound, like kindling starting to splinter in a fire. Something was breaking through the surface of the egg. They remained as still as possible, waiting to see what they had made.

  The World to Come

  Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed

  The night the ground beneath Sherwood, Alaska split in two, the only witness to the tragedy was Kirby, the village drunk. It was mid-December and the kind of cold that cracks cloth. In summer the earth was damp and suckled at the townspeople’s toes as they walked over it. By winter it was always brittle, temperamental, sharp as elbows. Anyone with a bed was buried deep in it.

  As the floe broke loose and began to float away, carrying nine of them with it, Kirby slumped against a lamppost and watched the shoreline recede slowly into the darkness. No one, as usual, heard his hiccups.

  They lost the lights first. Then the rest of the electricity followed. At three days in they were storing perishable food outdoors. Kirby downed the remainder of his alcohol, then stepped off the ice and into the sea. Two more tried to swim back to shore. Another vanished trying to find the other side of the floe in a storm. The five who remained moved on to the canned and dry goods. The youngest was seven, the oldest eighty-three, and the rest were somewhere in between. Before they had been neighbors. They weren’t certain what they were now.

  With no reception and all lines cut, most of them lost hope of getting in touch with loved ones left behind. But they held on to wild possibilities, of passing a steamship or getting picked up by a helicopter traveling overhead. Maybe a whale would swallow them whole, turn them into a colony of Jonah’s. Or maybe they’d plow right into another piece of land. Eventually the hope of being rescued or perishing in such ways dwindled too.

  Lloyd, the town handyman, was the first to wake on the morning after the split. His first thought was to find his flashlight and shine it over the sea in the hope that someone would answer. He had a fiancée, Orya, back in the town. She’d been living with her parents until they could marry. Everyone agreed it was the respectable thing to do. But the glow was too slight to meet anyone; it disappeared into the jaundiced fog. Lloyd never realized how ugly the sky could be when it was all you saw.

  The second thing he did was take a hatchet to his front door. He’d been building a raft ever since. He was a man who needed something to do with his hands.

  When he and Orya first met, he had asked what her name meant and she said peace and that was what she would give him. This had been true for a time. But the last few weeks he’d been dreaming of other women’s faces. It would happen unexpectedly, while he was sanding down a board, for instance. He’d bend over to pick up the stray curls and suddenly there was a woman beneath him, one he hadn’t thought of for many years, her hair tangled in his fingers, her body warmer than anything for miles.

  He couldn’t think of his fiancée this way, though he wanted to. They had not yet known each other in the intimate sense. This was Orya’s bidding; she was nineteen years old and, having waited this long, perhaps didn’t see anything disagreeable in waiting a bit longer. Lloyd obliged because he was thirty-four and still somewhat surprised that she had agreed to know him at all.

  He remembered her spider-leg eyelashes. How she read cookbooks all the way through, like a novel. He thought how well she’d taken to his mother, Beulah, and feared what they spoke of without him there. He imagined her standing at the ocean’s edge, in the wedding dress he hadn’t yet seen her in. He wondered how long she would wait to leave him. That was when the images of others came in: the soft down belly of one, the violin-bowed body of another. Moving beneath him, above him, and then wriggling out of sight, as they had in his life. He used to see them walking in town. They’d smile at him in that knowing, pitying way. Almost all of them married other people the year after they’d been with him.

  Lloyd continued to build, taking the post office, the bar, and its swinging saloon doors along the way. Though few words had passed between him and the others on the floe, it was assumed he would take them with him. The construction was slower than he hoped; he hadn’t worked without electric tools since his apprentice days and the labor of it exhausted him.

  Jude stopped by daily to check his progress and ask for firewood. The boy was seven and caught here with his mother, Alicia, one of the many women from the cannery who mourned a husband that still lived. The boy must have sensed Lloyd’s fatigue because one day he invited him to have dinner at his mother’s house. The offer touched Lloyd. He had never been entirely comfortable around children; they made his already hulking figure seem perilous. But on his way over that night he caught a glimpse of Alicia undressing through her bedroom window, lit up by a pauper candle. Her belly was full and indulgent as a yawn but even from a distance he could see her skin had begun chipping like ice, the dark hoods that had settled under her eyes. As he watched, she slowly worked a comb through the ragged net of her hair. The somber beauty of it clanged his bones and, rather than eat with this woman and her son, he turned back around and sent his ax through the door of the bookshop. The force of it rattled the pages that hadn’t yet frozen together. Jude continued to visit him, but he never extended the invitation again.

  Alicia was running out of food to feed her son. One morning it was six dry flakes of cereal in a milkless bowl. Would the next be sawdust? Milk from her own breast? If there were any animals, she’d hunt for them. But out here each crunch across the ice could echo for miles, a single step made seismic. It seemed they were alone.

  Her son was not a good eater and over the past few weeks Alicia had been making a game of their meals, splitting up his food into real estate. Plots of peas, mashed potato complexes. But there was not enough here to make a single home. She’d already stopped eating just about anything herself.

  “It’s not good to skip breakfast,” he told her once.

  “I’m not hungry,” she lied.

  Jude reached across the table for her bowl, tipped his sideways, and parceled three flakes from it to hers. Then he pushed it back without a word. They ate them one at a time, letting the cereal melt into soggy cardboard on their tongues.

  She tried to maintain some sort of normalcy with Jude, sending him off during the day to spend time with Ms. Kimball, the schoolteacher. She wished him to continue learning, even if it were things he wouldn’t be able to use.

  Her husband, Espen, had never put much stock in education. He’d dropped out of high school when his father died to take his place in the family whaling business. They married not long after Alicia graduated. In Sherwood there were two strains of romantic desperation: that of the young, to find someone, and that of the old, who didn’t. Divorce was rare but a match made wisely was rarer.

  Espen was not a bad husband when he was there to be one. But his work often kept him from home and Alicia was unprepared for the loneliness that would come to blight her love. She spent her days working in the cannery, wearing the prints off her fingertips, and her nights knitting sleeves that never evolved into sweaters. When she slept she fantasized about the other men in the factory pasting mermaid-shaped labels onto her
skin; when she laughed the mermaids shimmied like tattoos. Espen would crash through the door unannounced, a shock of salt in his beard, offering a vial of ambergris or a soapstone sculpture, and Alicia would feel the surface of her heart split like a cold lake. She tore at the layers of his clothes as if she hardly believed the body underneath. When she had their child, she didn’t know where to wire the news. Now they were both at sea, though she suspected he wasn’t trying to reach her. With so much more ocean to sail, he had no reason.

  Drifting apart. What an inadequate way to describe people deciding to leave one another. As if all it took was going limp. Every night Alicia sat down at the table with Jude and again neglected to tell him about his father. After so many days working in the factory, she had longed for such closeness with her child, but now she didn’t know what to do with it.

  On the morning she and Jude split their flimsy breakfast, Alicia resolved to do better. She gathered herself into her warmest coat, went to the closet where her husband stored his things, and dug out his fishing line and tackle box. She hadn’t been angling since she was a child but the howling of her stomach thwarted the demurrals of her head.

  Alicia hadn’t been outside in weeks; looking out over their limited land, the houses that were left seemed to huddle together against the wind. She wasn’t certain how long she walked until she reached the floe’s edge, but it didn’t seem long enough. The ice simply dropped into the sea, like someone turning a corner. Today the waves were calm, a sort of dirty-dish gray, but she could recall the nights when the water sounded like it was preparing to knock on her door, vampirically awaiting an invitation to come inside.

  She must have sat there for hours, drawing the line through the water, casting and reeling nothing back. The lure bobbed about the surface like a child at play. She remembered the catches her father would return with, heaps of fish, the scales shining like treasure. Her mother would fry them in a pan with butter. They would freeze the rest until winter and then roast them over the fire along with chestnuts. But this sea betrayed no life roiling beneath it. She was right: they were alone.