When the Lights Go Out

by Mary Kubica

  What makes not sleeping even worse than the crippling fatigue is the boredom that infiltrates those nighttime hours. The misery. The morbid thoughts that keep me company all night long. Last night I found myself thinking about ashes and bone fragments. That’s what remains after a body has been incinerated. When Mom came back to me from the crematorium, I expected something soft, like the ashes left behind in Mom’s and my fireplace. On cold nights, she and I used to toss in a few logs, sit on the floor beneath the same blanket, trying to stay warm. When the fire burned out, the ashes that remained were soft. Delicate. I didn’t know that Mom’s ashes would be coarse like sand, like cat litter, and not soft like ashes. Or that there would be bone fragments.

  After Mom’s 130 pounds were reduced to just 4, I didn’t have the wherewithal to bring the urn to the crematorium with me so that they could place her inside. And so instead she came to me in a little baggie in a sturdy box. I was tasked with making the transfer to the rhubarb urn, this straight, canister-like contraption that’s anything but the round body, narrow neck of your classic urn. You wouldn’t even know it was an urn except for Mom’s name impressed in the clay along with the years of her birth and death. Her stint on earth. Forty-nine years.

  I made the transfer at the kitchen table, the day after I brought her remains home from the crematorium. The same table where we used to eat. I used a funnel. Same funnel we used to use when transferring sugar cookie icing to the piping bags. When I was done, a fine mist of Mom covered the tabletop. I wiped her away with the palm of a hand. Then Mom was stuck to me, and it wasn’t like I could just wash her off with soap and water. Because it was Mom. I couldn’t just wash Mom down the kitchen sink.

  These are the things you don’t think about when someone has died. You don’t want to think about them.

  And yet these are the thoughts that keep me up all night. A fine mist of Mom on the palm of my hand.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I say, leaving it at that, pretending it was a one-time thing, not letting on to the fact that I haven’t slept in all these nights.

  “Try a glass of warm milk,” she offers. “It always helps me sleep like a baby,” she says, and I tell her I will. But I won’t. I’ve tried that already and besides, I hate the taste of warm milk.

  But then it comes again. The noise, one I’m certain I didn’t imagine this time. Another dull thud.

  And it’s unintentional when my shaky hand lifts up to tug down the ladder and see for myself what’s inside.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Ms. Geissler snaps, her words brusque.

  I freeze in place, insisting, “There’s something there,” and only then does she reconsider.

  “I didn’t want to scare you,” she explains, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I didn’t imagine the noise. It was there.

  “It’s squirrels,” she tells me. “They’ve taken over the place,” she laments. “I haven’t stepped foot up there for a while.” She says that she’s been working with a pest control service to have them removed, but she’s quite sure the service is more adept at bringing squirrels into her home then getting them out. The space is uninhabitable for now, until the problem gets sorted out. She can’t bring herself to go up there, not until the squirrels are gone and her contractor repairs the damage.

  “The squirrels,” she complains, “have chewed holes in the walls. They’ve gnawed their way through electrical wires. They’ve ruined a perfectly good lamp. I’ve switched services, mind you. But getting rid of squirrels is no easy task. I need a roofer to come and replace the tiles and block the squirrels’ way in, but the roofer won’t come until all the squirrels are out. The darn things have it in for me,” she says, sighing exasperatedly, and it doesn’t once occur to me not to believe her.

  I say to her, “Sounds like a mess.”

  Out the window, I see that the sun has finished setting. Darkness has arrived, anchoring itself to the earth for the night. Ending another day.

  “It’s getting late,” I say, excusing myself, saying my goodbyes, and leaving.

  I make my way around the periphery of the house, cutting across the patio and onto the lawn. There I pause midstride, hands on hips, and look skyward to see that the stars are lost somewhere behind the clouds. That there isn’t a star in sight. The moon is there, but only a sliver of it. A crescent moon that doesn’t do anything to light up the night. The fall air is cool; goose bumps appear on my arms. I rub at them, hoping the friction will make them go away. For now it does, though I’m dreading another night in the freezing cold carriage home.

  The home is enveloped in blackness as I arrive. I have to fight to get the key into its hole. Twice I drop it, scrabbling around on the stoop to hunt it down.

  The sound of a siren in the distance startles me. As I glance backward, over my shoulder to see the red and blue emergency lights whirling through the sky, I find Ms. Geissler standing in the back doorway of her home. She’s illuminated by kitchen lights, easier to see than me, who stands in total darkness.

  And yet her eyes are unmistakably on mine as if she’s been watching me the entire time.

  I find the keyhole and open the door. I hurry inside.

  As I climb the lopsided steps, I feel the weight of fatigue bearing down on me. Fatigue from physical exertion and fatigue from lack of sleep. I lie down on the mattress, staring at my shaky hands before my eyes. There’s an anemic quality to them. Blanched and mealy, the skin at their edges disappearing somehow, evanescing, like a loose thread being tugged from the hem of a shirt, the whole thing unraveling, coming apart at the seams. That’s me. Coming apart at the seams. Little by little, I’m disappearing.

  I look again at my hands, and this time they are fine. Intact.

  But still shaking.

  I close my eyes and even though sleep is there within reach and I stretch my hand out to grab it, it’s unattainable. Elusive and shifty. It moves away, mocking me. Laughing in my face.

  For as tired as I am, I still cannot sleep.

  eden

  December 21, 1996

  Egg Harbor

  For months now, Aaron and I have become slaves to the red circles on my pocket-size calendar, our intimacies slated out in advance. During my most fertile days we make love two, sometimes three times a day, though there’s something inorganic about it now, something mechanical and forced. Our entire world, it seems, has become about making a baby, and I struggle to remember what our lives were like before we made the decision to start a family.

  Two nights ago I stayed up until he was home from work, in bed, reading my book. Twice I rose from bed to look outside, searching through the bare trees for signs of headlights in the distance—a shock of blinding yellow against the blackness of night—rambling down the long, winding drive. But there were none. The night was pitch-black, no moon anywhere, not a star to be seen. It seemed to take forever for him to be home.

  The bedroom lamp was dimmed, a candle burning on the dresser for ambience, though when he finally did arrive, Aaron took one look at that candle and blew it out, thinking I’d gotten tired and plumb forgot about the burning candle. The small room filled with the noxious smell of smoke as he pulled his chef getup from his body, dropping it to the floor. He climbed into bed beside me, saying how he was so tired, how his feet hurt. His words were slurred with simple lethargy and fatigue. He didn’t bother to turn off the light. I smelled the chophouse on him, the garlic, the Worcestershire sauce, the flesh of chops and steaks.

  And yet there it was, another red-circled date on the calendar.

  Beneath the blankets I wore a satin robe and beneath the robe nothing, though in it I didn’t feel nearly as sexy as I’d thought I would, as I’d hoped I would, a feeling that was only exacerbated when I untied the ribbon from around my waist, revealing myself to him, and in Aaron’s eyes spied a moment of hesitation, an excuse ready to form on his lips.

 
“Remember?” I asked, childlike hope in my eyes. “I’m ovulating,” I reminded him, and before he could speak, before he could tell me why it wasn’t a good night, I lowered myself beneath the sheets and easily changed his mind.

  I don’t think he minded that I did. In fact, I think he was quite pleased.

  When we were through, Aaron pulled away and moved to his side of the bed, leaving me and my elevated hips alone in the hopes that this time, gravity might work its magic.

  For three days in a row now it’s gone like this, though tonight Aaron did object and it was much harder to make him acquiesce, and even when he did there was little satisfaction in it, little pleasure, but rather the knowledge that he was doing this for me. Because I wanted him to. Because I was making him do it. There was resentment in it, disgruntlement in his every move. When we were done I offered a pitiful thank you, which felt entirely wrong, as we each drifted to our own side of the bed, an ocean of space spread between us.

  It’s become apparent that these days we do it because we have to, not because either of us wants to have sex. We skip any sort of foreplay and get straight to the grunt work, finding sex as pleasurable as brushing teeth or washing dishes. Our movements have become as repetitive and predictable as cleaning laundry.

  Just like any other of our daily chores, we’ve begun to grudgingly make love for three days out of the month, finding the other twenty-seven to be a blissful reprieve.

  January 9, 1997

  Egg Harbor

  It took nearly thirty minutes to get to the obstetrician appointment, and all along the way, all I could hear was the grinding of snow beneath the tires’ tread. Outside it was cold, a frosty thirty-two degrees, and the plump clouds looked like they might burst apart at the seams at any moment, burying us with three more inches of snow. Aaron was torn, worried we wouldn’t be home in time for his shift, but feeling the need to go too. To be at the appointment. He vacillated about it for a good five or ten minutes, standing in the open doorway, letting the cold air into our home.

  In the end, he decided to go so that as we drove south on Highway 42, both of us quiet, I felt a great guilt about it, knowing that if he was late to work, it would be my fault.

  The obstetrician was in Sturgeon Bay, a seventeen-mile drive. He was the closest I could find and also came with a recommendation, one from Miranda, the only woman in town I knew well enough to ask. Miranda, who drove her three boys to my home last week in her Dodge Caravan—windshield caked with ice crystals still, so that it was near impossible to see through the rimy glass—because it was far too cold to walk.

  Miranda, who sat sprawled on my sofa, feet raised to the coffee table, while I rocked her crying two-month-old baby, Carter, to sleep.

  Miranda, who was so overwhelmed with motherhood that she couldn’t stand to be alone with her own three kids.

  Miranda, who revealed to me that she was pregnant again, that it was a mistake this time, that they hadn’t been trying. “Because who in their right mind tries for more when they already have three kids?” she asked, staring at me sadly as if I should take pity on her for this obvious misfortune, but what I felt instead was infuriated and sick, anger and bile rising quickly inside me.

  Miranda confessed to me that though she and Joe had waited the recommended six weeks after Carter was born to fool around, sure enough, Joe managed to knock her up on the first try, and already the morning sickness had set in so that her boys were forced to watch even more TV than ever before because Miranda didn’t have the stamina to entertain them all day, let alone feed them. “The nerve of that bastard,” she said of Joe and his evident virility, and then she asked what in the world was taking Aaron and me so long to conceive.

  “You don’t think,” she asked, eyes wide, “that you’re infertile, do you? That that handsome husband of yours is shooting blanks?”

  As I sat beside him in the car, driving to the obstetrician appointment, listening to the pulverization of snow beneath the wheels, staring at the clouds, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the case. Was Aaron shooting blanks? Was Aaron infertile?

  Aaron, who could do anything, who could fix anything, could not create a child?

  Aaron, to whom everything came so easily, had difficulty making a baby?

  The thought alone made me angry and annoyed. Angry at Aaron because why, for all the things he was so capable of doing, was he incapable of doing this?

  Why couldn’t he fix this? Why couldn’t he make this right?

  Assigning fault seemed to be the name of the game these days, pointing fingers, attaching blame. Whose fault was it that we didn’t yet have a baby?

  March 11, 1997

  Egg Harbor

  What I’ve come to learn after being referred to a fertility specialist is that even though I get my period each month with moderate regularity, my body isn’t ovulating correctly, isn’t always ovulating. Anovulation, it’s called, a word I’ve never heard of before but now think about at every waking hour and when I should be asleep. If I’m being honest, this comes as little surprise to me. My body is simply going through the motions, the preparations of the endometrium—the lining of my uterus readying itself to welcome a fertilized egg—and then sloughing off when no egg moves in. It’s not that the egg wasn’t fertilized by Aaron’s sperm. It’s that it simply wasn’t there to begin with.

  Today I began my third cycle of Clomid. After months of this, I have no sense of humility left, no modesty. I’ve paraded my private parts for every doctor, nurse and technician in the fertility clinic to see, while all Aaron ever had to do was drop off a sperm sample and endure a simple blood draw. It hardly seems fair. The first month I didn’t ovulate. Last month we upped the dosage and, though Dr. Landry spied two follicles when he performed his ultrasound—forcing the transvaginal ultrasound probe between my legs so that I should rightfully have felt violated and ashamed, but no longer did, sending Aaron and me home with strict orders to have sex—we didn’t get pregnant.

  The pills make me weepy all the time, for no apparent reason at all, though having seen the inventory of potential side effects, I consider it a blessing that the only one I’m doomed to endure is the predisposition for crying. I cry at the market; I cry in the car. I cry at home while mopping floors and folding laundry and standing in the doorway to one of the spare bedrooms, wondering if it will ever hold a child, steeling myself for another cycle of Clomid that will likely end again with my monthly flow.

  To counter Aaron’s low sperm motility, as it’s called, he’s switched to wearing loose-fitting underpants (I don’t tell Miranda this), and is tasked with finding ways to reduce stress in his life, stress which neither of us knew he had. He now sleeps until after ten o’clock every morning so that we no longer share our day’s coffee on the dock, which is fine anyway seeing as the eternal winter has trapped us indoors and there are no sailboats to be seen on the bay, none until spring. He takes herbal supplements and when the temperatures aren’t too abysmal will go for a walk or a run, so that our days together are mere hours at best. This too is fine, seeing as we don’t have much to talk about anymore, nothing that doesn’t involve the many things the world is reluctant to let us have: strong, capable sperm; regular ovulation; a positive pregnancy test; a baby.

  It isn’t that Aaron doesn’t have enough sperm—he does—it’s that what he has doesn’t swim properly and isn’t able to travel the four inches or so to where my egg may or may not be waiting.

  In short, we’re both to blame, though there isn’t a moment that I don’t wonder which of us is to blame more and even though I think it’s me, I know it’s me, there is a part of me aggrieved that I’m the only one forced to record my body temperature, to take ovulation tests, to cry in public for no sound reason at all, to travel to the fertility clinic again and again, to be probed so that some doctor or technician can gaze inside me and at my ovaries, while all Aaron has to do is take an herbal supplemen
t from time to time and exercise on occasion.

  It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem right.

  I’ve come to resent Aaron for this, as I’ve come to resent him for many things.

  March 13, 1997

  Egg Harbor

  I field questions nearly every day about when Aaron and I are going to have a baby, often from my stepmother or Aaron’s mother, calling on the phone when he’s at work, asking not-so-subtly for grandchildren.

  When can they expect them? When will there be good news to share?

  It’s not that grandchildren are in short supply because they aren’t. Instead it’s that Aaron and I have been married for over two years, and society doesn’t take well to that: two nearly thirty-years-olds, married for over two years without kids, as if there’s something unthinkable about it, something taboo.

  Is there something wrong with that?

  It feels as if there is.

  A married woman of my age without a child is quite the anomaly these days.

  I can’t bring myself to say aloud that we’re trying, trying and failing to make a baby because I don’t want pity and I don’t want advice. And so instead I tell Aaron’s mother and my stepmother soon, wishing that my own mother were still alive because hers is the only advice I want and need.

  I spend my days waiting. Waiting for Aaron to wake up, waiting for Aaron to leave, waiting for Aaron to get home so I can again close my eyes and sleep. Waiting for a new cycle of Clomid to begin, to ovulate, to make love to Aaron like robots would do, hasty and unfeeling, and then waiting for the negative pregnancy test results, the loyal, trusty blood.

  It’s the only thing I can depend on anymore. That sooner or later, my period will come.