Far from the rumors of town, out past the canning factory, over the hill behind the site of the old paper mill, Theresa Ratcher stands in her pantry, staring at glass jars filled with jelly. She means to be assessing what remains from the winter; instead, she is mesmerized by the colors. She stands, resting her hands on her great belly, as though beholding something sacred; certainly something more spectacular than strawberry, jalapeno, or yellow-tomato jelly. Her husband is in the field. She has no idea where Elli is. Theresa doesn’t like to think about Elli, and she doesn’t like to think about why she doesn’t like to think about her. For a moment, Elli, with her long limbs and protruding belly, stands in Theresa’s mind. She shakes her head and concentrates on the jars before her.
Elli is in the barn. She has no idea why. They don’t have any animals except for cats and mice. But Elli likes it in the barn. She finds it a peaceful place, her dad out in the fields, her mom somewhere else. These days, Elli likes to be far from her mother, because even when they are in different rooms, she can feel the hate. Elli stands in the middle of the barn, beneath the beams, which her father still obsesses about. She is biting her fingernail when the sharp pain drives her to the ground. She lets out a scream, which rises past the spiderwebs and silent, hanging blobs of sleeping bats, out the cracks and holes in the roof, where it mingles with Theresa’s scream as she falls to the ground in the pantry, knocking over several jars that shatter on the floor—an explosion of red goo, which her husband, when he returns for supper, assumes is blood. He runs to get the phone, but she screams at him to help, so he kneels before her in the glass and fruit, and she screams the head and shoulders out. Later, she tells him it’s jelly. He licks a finger but it tastes like blood. He helps her upstairs and tucks her into bed, the baby in the crib.
He looks everywhere for Elli, finally going to the barn where he barely sees her in the evening light. She is lying on the ground, surrounded by pools of jelly (he thinks, before he realizes, no, that can’t be right). She looks at him with wild eyes, like his 4-H horse all those years ago when she broke her leg, and she cries. “Daddy? It’s dead.”
That’s when he notices the small shape beside her. As he leans closer, she says, “Careful. They hurt.” He doesn’t know what she means until he sees the tiny bat wings spread across the small back. But that can’t be right. He looks down at his daughter, horrified. “It’s some kind of freak,” she weeps. “Just get rid of it.”
He picks the creature up, and only then notices its barely perceptible breathing. “Don’t touch the wings,” she says. He looks at her, his little girl who gave birth to such a thing. Now she can get on with her life.
“Get it out of here,” she says.
He takes the shovel and walks out of the barn, bats flying overhead. Curiosity gets the best of him, and he touches the wings. The next thing he knows, he is standing in the cornfield, beneath the cold light of the moon, staring at his dark house, listening to screams. He looks around in confusion but he can’t find the creature, or the shovel, or any sign that the ground has been turned. He runs to the barn.
He finds Elli lying on the ground, surrounded by wild cats, and screaming. He hears a noise behind him, the snapping of gravel, and turns to see Theresa slowly making her way towards them. “Go back. Just go back in the house,” he shouts. She stops, washed with white moonglow like a ghost. “You’ll be in the way. Call 911.”
Slowly, Theresa turns and walks towards the house.
He reaches between Elli’s legs, relieved to feel a crown of head there. “It’s all right. You’re just having another one.”
“I’m dying!” she screams.
“Push,” he says, with no real idea if this is the right thing to do or not; he just wants it out. “Push, Elli.”
She screams and bears down. He feels the head and shoulders. Squinting in the dark, he barely sees the cord. He’s already forming a plan for suffocation, if it’s like the other, but what comes out is a perfect baby boy that he tries to hand to Elli. She says she doesn’t want it. He is pleading with her when the EMTs arrive. They help all three of them into the house, where Theresa sits in the dark living room, cradling her baby.
“Everything all right?” she asks.
Elli opens her mouth, but Pete speaks first. “Everything’s fine,” he says. “A boy.”
“And a freak,” Elli says.
“What?” Theresa speaks to Elli’s back as she walks up the stairs, leaving the baby with the EMT who carried him inside. He hands the baby to Pete Ratcher, who thanks him for coming all that way “for nothing.” He says it’s his job, and not to worry, but Pete Ratcher watches the man walk down the driveway to the ambulance, shaking his head like a man who just received terrible news. Pete searches the sky for a long time before he realizes what he’s looking for. “I have to take care of something,” he says, and steps forward as though to hand the baby to Theresa.
She looks at him like he’s nuts. “Give him to Elli. She’s his mother.”
He walks up the dark stairs and enters his daughter’s room. “Elli? Honey?”
“Go away.”
“I have to check on something. You know, the other one.”
“Freak.”
“Elli, these things happen. It’s not your fault. And look, you have this one.”
“I don’t want him.”
“God damn it, Elli.”
He thinks that, all in all, he’s handled everything well. It’s been a hell of a night. He tries once more for a calm tone. “I have to go check on something. I’m going to put your baby right here, in the crib, but if he cries, you have to take care of him. You have to. Your mother is tired. Do you hear me, Elli?”
Elli mumbles something, which he takes for assent. He places the baby in the crib. It squirms, and he rubs its back. Only then does it occur to him that the baby is not diapered or clothed, not even washed, but still coated in the bloody slime of birth. He picks it up, and by the moonlight finds what he needs on the shelves of the changing table (a gift from Elli’s high school teachers). He cleans the baby with several hand wipes, tossing them towards the plastic trash can, not troubling to make sure any of them actually land inside. Finally, he diapers the baby, wrapping him tightly in a clean blanket and setting him in the crib. “Elli.” She doesn’t respond. “If he cries you have to take care of him. You have to feed him.”
“I want Mom.”
He realizes Elli doesn’t understand that Theresa has given birth today too. He tells her this, saying, “You have a brother, a little baby brother. Your mom is too tired to help you right now.”
When he closes the door, Elli gets up and walks across the room to stand at the window. After a minute, she sees him walking towards the cornfield. What could he be doing out there? she wonders. She turns away, shuffling like an old woman. She stands over the crib and touches the flat of the baby’s back, places her hand on his soft cap of hair, then reaches in and picks him up. He cries softly. She says, “There, there.” She jiggles him gently on her shoulder, but the soft cry turns into a wail. Why are you crying? she thinks. I’m not going to hurt you.
What is she supposed to do? She takes it back to bed with her, where she sits against the wall, jiggling it, saying, “There, there,” over and over again, until she finally gets the idea of feeding it. She unbuttons her shirt and smashes its face against her breast. It cries and wiggles in her arms before latching on to her nipple and sucking until he finally falls asleep.
She would like to sleep with him, but she remembers hearing how mothers sometimes squash their babies by mistake. She thinks this is probably an exaggeration, but she isn’t sure.
Eyes half-closed, she walks across the room, lays the baby in the crib, and shuffles back to bed. The next thing she knows, her mother is in the room in her nightgown, standing over the crib, and the baby is crying.
“Mom?”
“You have to feed him,” Theresa says. “You can’t just let him cry.”
“I didn’t hear
it,” Elli says.
“Him.”
“What?”
“You didn’t hear him, not it. You have to take care of this, Elli. I’m busy with your brother.” Theresa picks the baby up and brings him to her. “Do you know where your father is?”
“He said he had to go take care of something.”
“You have to feed him, Elli.”
“In the cornfield. I know. Could I have some privacy, here?”
“I don’t want to have to keep getting up for your baby, too.”
“I didn’t hear him. I’m sorry.”
“You’re going to have to hear him,” Theresa says. “What’s he doing in the cornfield?”
But Elli doesn’t answer. She’s turned her back and is unbuttoning her shirt.
“Can you hear me?” Theresa asks.
“I don’t know what he’s doing in the cornfield. It’s Dad, all right?” She pokes her nipple into the baby’s mouth.
Theresa walks out of her daughter’s room, trying to stay calm, though she feels like screaming. She hears the baby crying and turns back, but Elli, who gives her a look as though she knew her mother had plotted this surprise return just to look at Elli’s bare breasts, is nursing him. It takes a few seconds before Theresa realizes the crying is coming from her own baby. Suddenly life has gotten so strange: her daughter nursing a baby whose father she won’t name; her husband out in the cornfield in the middle of the night; her own baby, whose lineage is uncertain, crying again, though it seems like only minutes since she fed him.
* * *
Voorhisville in June: those long hot nights of weeping and wailing, diaper changing and feeding, those long days of exhaustion and weeping, wailing, diapering, and feeding.
Sylvia’s roses grow limp from lack of care and—just as some dying people glow near the end—emit the sweetest odor. The scent is too sweet, and it’s too strong. Everywhere the mothers go, it’s like following in the footsteps of a woman with too much perfume on.
Emily continues baking, though she burns things now, the scorched scent mingling with the heavy perfume of roses and jasmine incense, which Shreve sets on a windowsill of the yoga studio.
“I have to do something,” she says, when the mailman comments on it. “Have you noticed how smelly it is in Voorhisville lately?”
The mailman has noticed that all the mothers, women who had seemed perfectly reasonable just last year, are suddenly strange. He’s just a mailman; it isn’t really for him to say. But if he were to say, he’d say, Something strange is happening to the mothers of Voorhisville.
Maddy Melvern doesn’t know any different; she thinks it’s always been this way. She stares at her son, lying on a blanket under a tree in the park. She looks away for one second to watch the mailman walk past—not that there’s anything interesting about him, because there isn’t, but that just shows how bored she is—and when she turns back to JoJo, he’s hovering over the blanket, six inches off the ground; flying. She holds him against her chest, frantic to see if anyone’s noticed, but the park is filled with mothers holding infants, or bent over strollers, tightening straps. Everyone is too distracted to notice Maddy and her flying baby. “Holy shit, JoJo,” she whispers, “you have to be careful with this stuff.” Maddy isn’t sure what would happen if anyone were to find out about JoJo’s wings, but she’s fairly certain it wouldn’t be good. Even pressed against her chest as he is, she can feel them pulsing. She eases him away from her shoulders to get a view of his face.
He’s laughing.
He has three dimples and a deep belly laugh. Maddy laughs with him; until suddenly she presses him tight against her heart. “Oh my God, JoJo,” she says. “I love you.”
Tamara Singh has just secured little Ravi in the stroller—not wanting to hurt him, of course, but making sure the straps are tight enough to keep him from flying—when she sees Maddy Melvern laughing with her baby. It just goes to show, Tamara thinks, that you never can tell. Who would have guessed that the teenage unwed mother, the girl who’d done everything wrong, could be so happy, while Tamara, who’d done only one single wrong thing (the illicit sex thing), would be so miserable?
What is love? Tamara thinks as she stares at little Ravi, crying again, hungry for more. She parks the stroller by a bench and unbuttons her blouse. Well, this is love, she thinks—sitting there in the park, filling his hunger, holding down his pulsing wings; watching the ducks and the clouds and the other mothers (it certainly seems like there are a lot of newborns this summer) and thinking, I would die to protect you; I would kill anyone who would hurt you. Then wondering, Where did that come from?
But it was true.
The mothers were lying. They told each other and their loved ones about wellness visits, but none of the mothers actually took their son to a doctor. Because of the wings. Both pediatricians at St. John’s were under the impression that they were losing patients to the other, and each harbored suspicions concerning the guerilla tactics being employed. The lying mothers became obsessed with their sons’ health. Each cough or sneeze or runny nose was the source of much guilt. Nobody wanted to kill her child. That was the point, the reason they had stayed away from doctors: it wasn’t about putting the babies at risk, it was about keeping them safe.
Friends and relatives concluded that the mothers were protective, coddling, suspicious, and overly secretive. The mothers even concluded this about each other, never suspecting they harbored the same secret.
“This is impossible,” Theresa Ratcher murmurs to herself the first time she sees little Matthew’s wings blossoming, like some sort of water flower, while she is bathing him in the sink. She touches one tip; feels the searing proof of hot pain; and the next thing she knows, she is standing in the cornfield. She runs to the house as though it is on fire, tumbles into the kitchen, where Elli sits feeding little Timmy. “Where’s Matthew?” Theresa asks. Elli looks at her like she’s nuts. Theresa glances at the sink, which is empty and dry.
“Did you lose him?” Elli asks. “How could you lose him?”
“Matthew!” Theresa runs upstairs. He is there, asleep in the crib. She pats his back, gently. It feels flat. Normal.
“What’s wrong?” Elli stands in the door, Timmy in her arms. “Mom? Are you all right?”
“I had a bad dream.”
“Outside? You fell asleep outside?” Elli asks. “Are you sick?”
Matthew cries. “I’m not sick,” Theresa says, unbuttoning her blouse. “Before I forget: When is your doctor’s appointment? Did you make that yet? I can’t be keeping track of all this anymore.”
“Don’t worry about it, then,” Elli says, walking down the hall to her room; but when she gets there, it smells like diapers, and flies buzz around the window. Still holding Timmy, Elli walks downstairs and onto the porch.
Her dad is in the cornfield with the boys he hired for the summer. They aren’t boys Elli knows. They’re from Caldore or Wauseega, her dad can’t remember which. They come to the house for lunch most days and ignore her. Elli knows why. She walks over to the apple tree and spreads Timmy’s blanket on the ground, which is littered with blossoms. She sets him down, then stares at the cornfield, trying to force herself to see it as a field, and not a cemetery. Was her dad nuts? Why’d he bury it out there? Did he really think she’d be able to eat the corn this year? Elli shakes her head. She looks at Timmy, who lies there grinning. “What’s so funny?” she says, meanly, and then feels bad for it. It is just so hot, and she is so tired. Between the baby eating all the time, and the bad dreams she has of the other one flying into her room and hovering over her bed, she’s exhausted.
She wakes with a dark shadow standing over her. Elli turns to the empty blanket; then, in a panic, looks up at Theresa, who is standing there, holding Timmy. “You can’t do things like this anymore, Elli,” she says. “You can’t just forget about him. He’s a baby.”
“I didn’t forget about him.”
“Look.” Theresa turns Timmy so that Elli can see
his pink face. “He got sunburned.” Elli looks down at her knees. She doesn’t want to cry. Theresa leans down to hand Timmy to her. “I know this is hard, but—”
“Mom, there’s something I have to tell you.”
Theresa is not in the mood for teenage confessions. Why is Elli doing this now?
“There was another one, Mom.”
“What do you mean? Another boy? Is that why you won’t say who the father is?”
“No. Mom, I mean, another baby. I had two. Dad doesn’t want me to say, ’cause, well, he was a freak, and he died. Dad buried him in the cornfield.”
“What do you mean he was a freak?”
“Please don’t tell anyone.”
“Sweetie, I—”
“He had wings, okay?”
“Who had wings?”
“The other one. The one that died. Do you think it was something I did?”
Theresa cannot form a logical connection between her daughter’s revelation and her own son’s wings. Several things occur to her, but not even for a second does she consider that she might have shared a lover with her fifteen-year-old daughter. (That notion comes later, with disastrous results.) Instead, she thinks of the paper mill, or some kind of terrorist attack on their well, things like that.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Theresa says, “except have unprotected sex.” (Feeling like a hypocrite for saying it.) “And if every woman who did that was punished with a dead baby, there wouldn’t be anyone living at all.”
“But it wasn’t just dead, Mom. It had wings.”
Theresa glances at the house, where she’d left Matthew resting in his crib. “How do we know that wasn’t some kind of miracle? How do we know it was a sign of something bad happening, rather than something good?”
Elli sighs. “It’s just a feeling I get. Remember ‘We are the stuff that dreams are made on?’”
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