A Collapse of Horses

by Brian Evenson

  BearHeart™

  I.

  The Donners, Michael and Lisa, first heard about BearHeart™ when they were at the obstetrician’s office, about four months into the pregnancy. They were waiting at the counter, behind an almost-due Brazilian woman, and while the receptionist tried to locate some staff member named Marlie, who apparently could speak broken Portuguese, Michael started looking at the brochures and flyers spread to one side of the reception window. There was an invitation to be part of a study on weight gain and pregnancy, and a flyer for an exercise class. There were glossy trifold pamphlets for IUDs and other contraceptives, as well as special high-resolution color ultrasound packages that produced the image of your baby in the womb matted with a pink or blue border, or, if you wanted to keep relatives guessing as to the gender, yellow.

  And then there was BearHeart™. There was a single flyer for it, battered and a little wrinkled, with phone numbers at the bottom that you could tear off. BearHeart™ offered an ultrasound that would, they claimed, be covered by most insurance. They would not only provide the client the usual ultrasound image, but in addition, for a small fee of fifty dollars, they would make a high-resolution recording of the heart of the baby in question. This would be placed into a device that would be sewn into a silken fabric heart. This in turn would be placed inside a teddy bear, in its chest. Squeezing the chest just right would start the recording of the heart beating, which would run for thirty minutes.

  A perfect gift for your newborn! it exclaimed near the bottom of the flyer. Babies find great comfort sleeping next to a bear that beats with the rhythm of their own heart! Give your child the gift of postwomb womblike comfort! Only fifty American dollars!

  Grinning, Michael showed the flyer to the other half of the Donners, to Lisa, and watched as she read it.

  “Weird, right?” he said.

  “That can’t be good for the baby,” said Lisa. “Having its heart both inside and out at the same time. It’d be confusing.”

  “Sweetheart,” said Michael. “The heart’s not actually outside of the baby. It’s just a recording.”

  “Still,” said Lisa. “Would you want to curl up with a recording of your own heart?”

  “I don’t know,” said Michael. “How do I know? I’ve never tried it.”

  They kept talking about it in the waiting room once they were checked in. It was just something weird to talk about. They talked about it too once they were in the examination room and waiting for her doctor to come, and then the doctor came. Among other things, she squirted gel on Lisa’s belly and pushed a pocket ultrasound against it. It was connected to a little speaker in her jacket pocket. She turned the sound up and they heard the rapid, rhythmic sound of the baby’s heart.

  “Some people think it sounds like a stampede of horses,” said the doctor.

  There were other things, measurements, questions about diet, a little discussion, then the visit was done. The doctor was gone, and Michael was helping Lisa into her clothes again.

  “Maybe we should just record a stampede of horses and put that in a bear,” said Michael.

  “Very funny,” said Lisa.

  But on the way out, after giving the receptionist his credit card for the co-pay, Michael reached over and tore off one of the tabs from the BearHeart™ flyer. “Just as a joke,” he explained to his wife as she rolled her eyes. “Just so we have a story we can tell at parties. Just so we can say we did.”

  Which was why, when the baby was born premature and stillborn at six and a half months, they still had a bear containing a recording of the baby’s heartbeat. They had called the number on the paper tab and made an appointment. They had gone to a body-imaging facility at around eight o’clock one night, where a nervous technician wearing ash-colored scrubs had met them at the front door, unlocking it for them and locking it again after them. He hustled them into a basement ultrasound room and did a quick sonic scan. He put a binder with laminated pictures of teddy bears in front of them and told them to choose one. They were obviously not supposed to be there.

  “But that wasn’t thirty minutes of heartbeat,” said Michael.

  “What?” said the technician. “Oh, no, we only need about fifteen seconds. We just take that and loop it.”

  Michael wondered if he should complain. It felt like a mistake now to have come; what had started as a joke now just seemed odd. But they were far enough into it, far enough along with it, that it seemed like they should finish. Lisa was just barely tolerating it—this was not her thing, but Michael’s; she had made that very clear on the drive over. And now, when he tried to get her involved in choosing a bear, she just waved the book away. He looked quickly through the pages, but what did he know about choosing a bear? He hadn’t even had one when he was a child. They looked all more or less the same as far as he was concerned. In the end he chose one with small black eyes and dark brown fur that was described as “tight nap.” He chose it partly because of the thought that he’d be able to make a joke about it when the baby was napping with the tight-nap bear.

  Before they left, the technician took Michael’s fifty dollars, then grabbed his insurance card and wrote down the numbers.

  “It’ll show up tomorrow,” he said.

  “Why?” asked Michael. “Why not today?”

  The technician looked furtive. “That’s just the way we do it. Anything freelance shows up as tomorrow.”

  And then they were standing out in the improperly paved parking lot watching the technician relock the door.

  The bear, when it arrived in the mail, wasn’t dark brown at all but more a kind of streaked pale brown. The nap too couldn’t be properly described as tight since it was basically not a nap at all but just fabric. It was, no question, a cheap bear. It looked worn too, like maybe the technician had just gone and bought the first used bear he’d seen out of a thrift store.

  “That’s it?” said Lisa, rubbing her stomach. She was maybe six months pregnant at the time. “Hideous.”

  But she had stayed and listened as Michael had pushed on the bear’s chest repeatedly, trying to switch on the heartbeat. It took a while to make it go, but when it finally started, even she had to admit it sounded remarkably clear.

  “But even so, why would a baby want to listen to that?” asked Lisa.

  Michael shrugged. He had no answer. He toyed with it a while, turning the heart on and off, and then he’d tossed it in one corner of the crib, to wait for the baby.

  For all intents and purposes, the Donners forgot about the bear. Instead, they prepared for the baby. They read online about what they needed and what they should expect. They filled the house with baby things, slowly settled into the idea of a baby coming. They did another ultrasound, this one at the obstetrician’s office, and found out they were having a girl. Michael was surprised—he’d expected a boy, had directed his thinking toward that the whole way along. But then he began to get his mind around the idea of having a girl and grew to like it.

  Indeed, it was all going smoothly—a textbook pregnancy the obstetrician liked to say—and then, suddenly, it was not. Michael Donner came home from work and called out to Lisa Donner, and there was no answer. He thought she’d gone out. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a drink. He took off his tie and placed it over the back of a chair. He wandered into the bedroom and then he saw her, collapsed on the floor, unconscious, her thighs stained with blood.

  He called 911. Then he checked to see if she was still breathing. She was. He slapped her and talked to her and chafed her hands until she started to come around, but even then she was confused and didn’t seem to know where she was. And then she saw the blood and became hysterical, and it was all he could do to control her until the paramedics arrived and sedated her and bundled her off to the hospital.

  “Sometimes,” the pediatrician told them a few hours later, “the pregnancy just doesn’t take.” It wasn’t their fault, there was nothing they could have done differently. Sometimes the body just decides
to let the developing fetus go.

  “But we heard the heart,” protested Lisa. “We saw her on the monitor. She was alive.”

  The pediatrician shook her head. Who knew what had gone wrong with the fetus? Something had, and that had stopped the baby from going to term. They shouldn’t blame themselves; they should just understand that this was something that happened.

  But Lisa had a hard time not blaming herself. It was her body after all that had been holding the baby and thus, she reasoned, her body that had killed it. Michael tried to comfort her, to hold her, but quickly came to realize she did not want to be comforted or held. She wanted to be alone with her grief.

  There followed days when she almost didn’t leave the bed, days when Michael had to force her to eat. They were told, after the loss of the baby, that she had been old enough that they could get a birth certificate, and so they filled out a birth certificate and a death certificate at the same time, marking a one-minute difference between when she had been born and when she had died, even though to Michael it seemed as if the baby had been born dead. But this, they were told in the hospital, was the custom. They were asked if they wanted to have a funeral, were told that too was something that could be allowed, but Lisa couldn’t face it. Instead they had the body cremated and took the ashes home. He didn’t know what to do with them and couldn’t get Lisa to say what she wanted done, so he placed the urn temporarily upstairs, on the changing table in the nursery.

  When the baby had been born stillborn, Lisa had held it—one of the nurses said this was sometimes done, was one way of saying good-bye—but it hadn’t seemed to do Lisa any good. And it had ended up giving Michael nightmares. It was hard not to think about: the child, obviously dead and not fully formed, pressed against his wife’s skin as she wept.

  They left the baby things just as they were. At first Michael had suggested taking them away, storing them in the basement, but when he began to gather them, his wife had given a strange, keening cry that had frightened him as much as anything ever had, and he put everything back.

  So there they were: Lisa barely functional, Michael trying to live on tiptoe so as not to make it worse for her, the baby things for a missing baby all neatly arrayed in the nursery, both of the Donners waiting, hoping for a time when they would feel better.

  II.

  About three months after losing the baby, Michael woke up to a noise. He could barely hear it, wasn’t sure for a while that he wasn’t imagining it. He lay in bed, his wife crumpled beside him, either asleep or pretending to be, and listened. For a while he thought he might drift off again, but there was something about the sound he couldn’t quite put his finger on that continued to keep him awake.

  Yawning, he finally got up and went in pursuit of it. He opened the bedroom door and went into the living room, but he wasn’t hearing it nearly as well there. He went into the kitchen and stood, holding his breath. Still nothing. Same in his office.

  In the end, he went back into the bedroom and lay down. Immediately he started to hear it again.

  He was wide awake now. He tried to find the sound and this time walked from place to place in the room, listening. Until, finally, he realized he was hearing it through the heating register in the ceiling, that it was coming from upstairs, from the nursery.

  He went upstairs, opened the nursery door, and waited. There it was, a sound like white noise, but softer, a strange thrumming to it. He walked around the darkened room, slowly homing in on it, only realizing at the last moment that it was coming from the crib.

  For a moment he experienced sheer panic. It flashed through his mind that they had had the baby after all, but that both he and his wife were in denial that the baby existed. They had left it up here, alone, to die. And then he reached out and felt around and found the body of the bear.

  Its heart was beating, slowly and regularly. Its borrowed heart, rather, since it was the sound of his dead child’s heart. He’d completely forgotten about it. There must be something wrong with the mechanism that had caused it to go off at random, he thought.

  He held the bear for a few minutes until, as suddenly as it had begun, the beating of the heart stopped. Had it really been thirty minutes? Perhaps there was a glitch somewhere. He placed the bear gently back in the crib and went back to bed.

  The next day he didn’t think about it. He left as usual to go to work, spent the day at the office. But when he came home for lunch, he found his wife wasn’t asleep. She was up and functioning, had showered, had even tidied the house. Something had begun to change. For the better.

  He took a deep breath. In the months after the baby’s death, watching his wife struggle, struggling himself, he had told himself that they, the Donners, would make it through, but he hadn’t exactly believed it. But now he thought it might be possible.

  He kissed her, they ate the lunch he’d picked up at the Vietnamese place, then he went back to work, whistling. The rest of the day was a good day, one of the best he’d had in a while. He felt good all the way up to the moment when, at the end of the workday, he walked through the door and found his wife sitting in the living room rocking the bear, listening to the beating of its heart.

  “Ssshh,” she said. “She’s almost asleep.” And smiled.

  He had stopped dead in the doorway. He just watched her from there, wondering what he should say, what, if anything, he could say.

  “Do you want to hold her?” she asked.

  “Lisa,” he said. “You know that’s just a toy, right?”

  She looked down at the bear in her lap. “Yes,” she said. “You’re mostly right.”

  “Mostly?” he said.

  She nodded. “Only it has her heart,” she said.

  “Just the sound of her heartbeat,” he said. “It’s a recording.”

  “Sure,” she said, after a long pause. “I know that.”

  He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t say anything more, just kept rocking softly, looking down at the bear.

  “Lisa,” he said.

  “She was calling to me,” she finally said.

  “Oh, honey,” he said. He moved to take the bear, but she was clutching it now, not letting it go.

  In the end, after a lot of talking, he got her to relinquish it of her own accord. Yes, she said, she understood. She hadn’t meant to scare him. Of course she understood—it wasn’t their daughter, it was just a teddy bear. She hadn’t meant to suggest anything beyond that, she claimed.

  “What did you mean when you said it was calling to you?” asked Michael.

  “She, you mean,” said Lisa, her eyes not meeting his.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t say it,” she said. “I said she.”

  He gestured with his hand. “Does it matter?” he said.

  For a moment she looked at him with a shocked expression, but then slowly it vanished and she looked away. “No,” she said. “Not really.”

  And then she became listless again, like she had been before. She let him lead her back to bed. Maybe it would have been better to let her keep the bear, he couldn’t help but think. But another part of him was worried about what would happen if he did.

  “What did you mean when you said she was calling to you?” he asked again, tucking her in.

  “Just that,” she said. “I heard it. I heard something and went up to see what it was. It was the beating of her heart.”

  “It just started on its own?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t do anything. It just started on its own.”

  And having experienced something similar himself, he felt he had no choice but to believe her. There was something wrong with the player inside the bear, some sort of glitch. They would have to fix it. Either that or get rid of the bear. Probably better to do that, he thought, to just get rid of it.

  But a few days later, he still hadn’t gotten rid of the bear. Once it was back in the nursery, he simply forgot about it. Lisa was spending most of her time back in bed again, but she was gett
ing up a little more, and Michael told himself she was slowly getting better.

  He would have completely forgotten about the bear if, three days later, he hadn’t awoken in bed again knowing he had heard something. It was louder this time. Half in a daze, head throbbing, he made his way out of the bedroom and up the stairs to the nursery, but when he got there, the bear was nowhere to be seen. The sound too had diminished. He looked for the bear for a few minutes before returning to the bedroom. Only then did he realize the bear was in the bed.

  Furious, he woke Lisa up. She looked sleepy and confused. He brandished the bear at her.

  “What do you have to say about this?” he said.

  “About what?” she said.

  Couldn’t she just admit she’d gotten the bear and brought it into the bed? What was wrong with her?

  “But I—” she said.

  “No buts,” he said. He continued to excoriate her until, furious herself, she yelled, “But I didn’t go get it!”

  Then how had it gotten there? he wanted to know. Stuffed animals don’t just walk around the house. One of the two of them got it, and God knew it wasn’t him. Which left her.

  “No,” she shouted. “I swear. I didn’t get it!”

  He took a deep breath. All right, he said, finally calming down a little, maybe she didn’t go get it. Or didn’t know she had. He was willing to accept that as a possibility. Maybe she had done it in her sleep, without thinking.

  “No,” she said, calming down a little herself. She had been in the bed the whole time. She was sure of it.

  He shook his head. There just wasn’t any other explanation, he told her.

  “What about you?” she said. “Why couldn’t you have been the one to do it in your sleep?”

  Without thinking, he said, “I’m not the one who’s sick.” He immediately regretted it, but it was too late. It was the beginning of an argument that ended with the bear in the outside trash, his wife livid, and him having to sleep upstairs on a pile of blankets in the nursery.