Shine Shine Shine

by Lydia Netzer

  Maxon was silent again. Was he looking down at her, at his wife, so deep in love? Could he see her, there in the hospital, under all the hairs? No, she didn’t want him to go. It was too dangerous. But from the way he squeezed her hand, she could tell that he was nodding, slowly, making an arc through the air with his chin, up and down, to show that he agreed. To show that he had accepted the idea.

  “I agree,” said Maxon.

  Sunny felt a change in her body, down through all the numbness, and a shift of angles somewhere in the room, so that when she held her breath and strained, she felt tension and purpose down below. Whatever was drifting, whatever was floating, came plummeting down and sank right back into her blood, into her bones, into that grainy, pivoting moment around her hips. “Yes,” said the doctor. “I see the head. You’re doing great, Sunny. Come on, Dad, count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten! And rest. And now count!”

  And that’s the way it was done. The robots told the doctor, who told Sunny, when to push. The doctor told Maxon, who counted to ten. There was not a single drop of sweat trickling down her face, nor was one eyelash loosened in the process. Hand in hand with her mother on the left and her husband on the right, the perfect mother shape opened up and the perfect baby shape emerged. Bubber was slimy with fluid, strong, loud, and big, bright with orange hair. In the way all normal mothers love their normal babies, she fell for him completely. She would never say, “That didn’t work out quite right.” She would never say, “There is something wrong with my child.” She would never say, “I did not succeed at motherhood.” Because she felt, and she was, so responsible. She would have killed for Bubber, without hesitation.

  She had heard her mother and Maxon talking about something. But that memory had drifted away along with her memory of the pain, until she wondered, Did Mother and Maxon really talk about the moon while I was having Bubber? Did I dream the whole thing?

  She should have taken the wig off, yes, then and there. She should have flung it out the window of the hospital, or burnt it. She should have let everything change, let Maxon keep bouncing along at the edge of things, let Bubber emerge as orange as his hair, say to her mother, “Yeah, you were right about that, but no, you are wrong about this.” She should have remembered that quiet, terrible conversation, had it out with both of them. Stripped off the layers of her maternal construction and shouted out, “I’m here! I’m alive! You don’t have to send him to the moon, and you don’t have to go.” But instead she took her baby home, installed him in the perfect nursery, fed him the perfect foods, took him to the perfect schools, and kept stumbling along, down the same wiggy path, which put her here at last: no husband, no mother, no son, no hair. Just a big body tearing apart and a hot, empty neighborhood to absorb her bloody pieces.

  *

  SHE CRANKED HER WAY up Les Weathers’s porch steps one by one, feeling huge and slow, like an amoeba rolling toward an underwater cave. The door wreath was gone, and he had not replaced it with any other holiday decor. Safe choice. She picked up the heavy brass knocker and let it fall three times. There was no response. She waited through another contraction, tears squeezing from her eyes at the pain in her back, and then she slammed the knocker fiercely against the door, making a rattle they could surely hear all down the twisted block. The door creaked open a bit. It was not latched.

  The house was built like all the town houses in Norfolk and the world, one room leading to the next back through the house with no central hall. The first room she entered was a sitting room, including a semicircle window seat that bulged into the front facade of the house. There was a fireplace there, and on the mantel an assortment of candles in tall holders and wooden picture frames. In the center of the room was a circular table with a marble top, holding a large arrangement of dried flowers.

  “Les Weathers! Help!” she called. Maybe he was upstairs.

  Moving back through the house to the next room she paused, one foot in the air, and her hand went out to steady her on the chair rail. She stopped because she saw a giant television, lying on its face, front smashed against the floor. She felt a twist of fear slide down around her torso, wrapping itself into the place where the contractions would be. Maybe Les Weathers had been robbed—maybe he was lying upstairs at this moment, dying of a gunshot wound to the back. Maybe she should leave, and save herself and the baby. But go where? She was an animal in need of a cave. She was a sinner in need of salvation. She was a desperate woman in need of a rock solid, unexcitable man. Anyway, the front room had been so tidy. She shuffled toward the back of the house and came to the kitchen.

  Once it might have been a rather elegant little room, white and black, with glass-fronted cabinets and a basketweave floor. It was now in shambles, every surface covered. There was murky water on the floor. Sunny turned and faced the refrigerator. On its door she saw a magnet that said, “I don’t want to work! I just want to bang on my drum all day!” Next to it, a postcard-sized poster of Garfield complaining: “I hate Mondays.” On the counter was a smashed television, lying on its face. Next to it, what had once been a melon. Two of the cabinets had been smashed out, and inside one of them there was a telephone lying in shards of glass.

  Sunny mounted the stairs, calling, “Les Weathers! Are you all right? Help!” She was in labor and convulsing. But Les Weathers could be bleeding, dying. Or maybe he didn’t really live here. Maybe it was all a front. Someone else must live here, some bad version of Les Weathers, anti-television, anti-clean, anti-golden-hair. Or maybe Les Weathers was a robot that lived in his car, shutting down after the evening news, never entering this sham house, this ruined building. She stepped on the stairs nervously, her heaviness causing them to creak and complain. There was a tilt to the upstairs hallway, the railing crooked and cracked.

  There was a bathroom down the hall, full of boxes with the sink unhinged from the wall, and then a dressing room, where she switched on a light. She found his suits there, pressed, perfect. She found a box of old dress shoes, like the kind a grandpa might wear. She spent a full minute lying on her side half in the closet, having a contraction, oozing amniotic fluid onto his floor, but she had to go on. She had to know, what was going on with Les Weathers? Where had he gone? What was he? Was this the house of someone else, someone strange, some terrible twin brother? Some other Les Weathers?

  Through the dressing room she found another bathroom, caked with filth, a tub ringed with wax from candles set around the edge, whose wax had stuck together shampoo bottles and filmed over the tiles. There was such dirt inside the tub that two distinct footprints articulated themselves at one end, under the faucets. He sits here, she had to tell herself. He puts his feet into those prints! He lights these candles. He stands on this floor. Were the grime and grunge as old as his wife’s departure? Were the footprints started the day she left? A toothbrush, blue, balanced on the side of the sink. A tube of Aquafresh, squeezed from the middle, lay beside it.

  Sunny moved into the bedroom, where she found yet another giant flat-screen television on its face, smashed against the floor. There were piles of newspapers and books, discarded clothes and boxes, an ancient dresser overflowing with linens. The huge bed, covered in what looked like tapestry, was broken. The legs of the top end had collapsed or been furiously kicked out, so there was a steep slope down to the headboard, against the wall. But it was made up with a pillow where it belonged, next to the wall on the low side, the side that had fallen down.

  In the pillow was a dent, shaped like a head. Next to the pillow was today’s paper. Today’s. She had to acknowledge this. At this depth of her extremity, she had to come to terms with this visual, and accept the fact that as she went about her nightly rituals, taking off her eyebrows, taking off her wig, arranging it on her dresser, considering herself safe for another day, Les Weathers of Action News Reporting was three houses away, sleeping upside down. Les Weathers, the last bastion of urban normalcy, of the square jaw and flawless skin, of the resonant voice and si
gnature finger point, was sleeping upside down in a house where a herd of giant televisions had met their violent end. There was no terrible twin. There was no secret robot. He and this were real at the same time. He was, in fact, just another lunatic. Sunny had to laugh. She laughed, looking out the window on their neighborhood, because it was such a ridiculous thing. All the wives, drooling over him. And all the while, him taking a bath in that tub.

  She laughed until another contraction came, and when it had passed, she went back into the hall. She had to find him. Maybe he was in a basement. Maybe he was just now emerging from his Lexus, slamming the car shut, trotting toward her over the pavement. Les Weathers. Looking like the cover of a magazine. She heard a sound from the third floor and put her foot on the first of the attic stairs.

  She found him in a room that had been intended for a nursery. The beautiful curtains and the drape around the bassinet were dusty and still. He was sitting on a rocking chair. It was the squeak of the chair that she had heard. In the bassinet was nothing. All around, the things a baby needs: a box of diapers, a dresser with a lamp, a changing pad on a wicker table, a stuffed purple rhinoceros standing watch. Les was wearing his anchorman clothes but his jacket was off, his tie gone, his sleeves opened at the wrist. When he spoke, his voice was low.

  “Hey, Sunny, are you all right?” he said.

  “Fine, fine,” Sunny choked. “Just going home.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come down to let you in.”

  Sunny saw that Les Weathers had been crying.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Is it bad, this house?” he asked.

  “It’s not good,” Sunny said. She went to the window to look out, but as she reached it, she felt the pain tighten around her back, and she went to her knees with another contraction. Just trying to breathe a little bit, she let herself feel the rolling spasm. Her belly, hard as a rock, brushed against the floor as she leaned down and grasped the rug, trying to get the pressure off her back. Les Weathers sprang out of his chair and knelt beside her, holding her in his arms.

  “She died, you know,” he said, his voice a moan. “I’m sorry, but she died. She died inside Teresa.”

  Teresa was his wife. Sunny, raw to the core from the pain of labor, felt the twist of fear tighten into a need to flee. She was afraid of Les Weathers. She was afraid for Les Weathers.

  “Teresa didn’t leave with the baby. She left when the baby was already gone. Dead. Dead inside her. We tried to hide it…”

  Sunny rolled onto her side and curled around her alive baby. Les Weathers threw his hands out in an expansive gesture.

  “This is what happens!” he said. “This is what happens, Sunny! We tried, but this is what happens!”

  As soon as the contraction let go of her and she could move, she began to crawl. She crawled to the door, dragged herself up on the frame, and got out into the hall. She went down the stairs on her butt like a toddler, one at a time. She wished just to get back into her own house, close the door, and be safe. But her pelvic bones were grinding on themselves, and she felt that if she went too fast, she might fall apart, literally, into pieces.

  “Do you need to go to the doctor again?”

  “Don’t feel good,” Sunny groaned. “Talk later.”

  Les was beside her, tall and strong. But inside him, a baby was dead. He had raged around his house to get it out, but it was still in there. He took her by the arm, supported her down the next staircase, his face a perfect rendition of care and concern.

  “Can I drive you to the hospital?”

  She stared up at him. He looked to her like a gargoyle, some hideously gross miscalculation. And yet he was there, and human. The same man. The same man that lived in all these houses. Even hers. Just a person. Does everybody have to have a bathtub with footprints? Does everyone have his mangled hand, his bald head, his Quasimodo hump?

  “No, no,” she said. She knew if she could get her creaking, straining body out the door, down the step, past one sidewalk square, and then the next, and then four more, she would be at the edge of her yard. She felt as though her hips were splitting apart, her pelvis on fire. She wanted to get to her yard before another contraction came. On the porch, she knew she was leaking fluid along the concrete, but she kept her eyes up, kept herself moving along. He followed her.

  “Sunny, should I carry you?”

  “No,” she said firmly, as she dragged herself across the yard. She was embarrassed for him, that she had recognized him, but she could not undo it. At what point do you say, “It’s no big deal, nothing to be ashamed of” to a person who is sleeping upside down. Is that nothing to be humiliated by? What about head banging? What about murder?

  “That was not the right thing to say, Les Weathers. Call an ambulance. Then get back in your house. I’m fine.”

  28

  Sunny had seen Maxon humiliated once, but she didn’t tell him, so he didn’t know. It was long after his father had died, but his brothers still treated him like a hired hand and his mother did nothing to stop them. Sometimes he had to fight them, and if he could get away, he did. Sometimes he had to do what they wanted. There were days when he didn’t answer Sunny’s summons, and she knew that he was either stuck doing some kind of chore, or AWOL, either way unavailable.

  It was on one of these days that Sunny was out riding by herself. She was thirteen, the summer after Maxon’s first year in high school, when she was about to go to high school herself. It was August, hot, and the horseflies were bad. She let Pocket pick out his own way, after a canter down their dirt road. He went down the deer paths through the meadows where he could lean down and chew on comfrey and mint growing wild, unencumbered by a bit in his rebellious little mouth. When Sunny got too hot in the sun, and too irritated with his loud crunching and munching, she turned him toward home through the woods and urged him into a canter. Down the logging trail they flew, a welcome breeze in her hair and his mane, and the flies gone, replaced by swarms of gnats that they blew right through.

  The light came down through the trees in filtered shafts, yellow on the ferns, and the trees moved over each other as she passed them in layers. Sunny heard a shout before she saw anyone out in the woods, and slowed her pony to a walk. She didn’t want to be seen, but she could see a little clump of people in the trees. They were shouting into a hole, and had not noticed her approach. Not knowing whether to turn around and run or go and see what they were doing, she let Pocket keep walking, his feet making soft thuds on the pressed dirt.

  She saw that there were three young men standing around a pile of stones, and heard them shouting “NO!” down at a pile of rocks, and she heard a voice from inside the pile of rocks, pleading and crying, and then she knew that these were Maxon’s brothers, and the rocks were a well, and they had made him go down that well.

  Country wells were inexact mechanisms and plumbing could become clogged by anything biological, or just a buildup of silt or rust. There were methods for cleaning wells that didn’t involve freezing a human being in cold mountain spring water, but for Maxon’s brothers, the downside of this method did not exist. They had to clean out the well, to get it working again, and they didn’t mind freezing Maxon to do it, so there was no problem. Now they were standing back from the well, being quiet and pretending to be gone. They stifled their laughter and poked each other in the arm. There was a rope hanging over the side, but it wasn’t tied to anything. He couldn’t pull himself out. Pulling on the rope would only pull it in on him.

  Hearing him scream from in the well, Sunny’s heart froze. He could be dying. He could be losing whatever there was of his mind to lose. She felt her rage rising, her need to protect him. At least she could yell, “I’m here, Maxon! I’m here!,” and he would know that he wasn’t left in the well, legs braced against the sides, neck deep in the water. She knew that it hurt him to be down there in the cold. But she kept her mouth shut, her legs slack; her pony kept on plodding down the path. She knew that if she let them k
now she was there, it would be worse for him. The two of them could not overpower these three men. Later, he would learn to beat them. But now, they were an army.

  Then they took the rope up, and began to pull him out. His head came up first, dark and wet, and then his body. He climbed out and stood there, dripping. The brothers were angry. The task had not been accomplished. As they conferred about what was to be done, motioning at Maxon as if he were a wrench or a drill, he stood shivering, his whole body shaking. Sunny could see them but not hear them, except for a few sounds that punched through like the bark of a laugh. Maxon was wearing nothing but boxers. She could see every bone in his body, his sharp clavicles, his jutting hip bones, the knobs on his back. It was so precious to her, that body, covered and uncovered by the trees as she passed them, his cold and dripping body. He clasped his arms around himself, rubbing up and down and trying to get warm. She was terribly and permanently moved. She never forgot it.

  The brothers turned to him. They were finished discussing the matter, and they directed him sternly to get back into the well. He shook his head firmly, back and forth, ducked to run, but quickly one of them had him by the wrist. He let out a yelp, a sound like a wounded dog that turned Sunny’s blood to fire. Then “No!” he yelled. “No, no,” and “Please!”

  She panted, her breath coming in gulps. She would call to him, “Maxon, run!,” and he would come straight to her, jump up on the back of her pony, and they would canter away to safety. She could save him, protect him, warm him, those wet bones pressing against her back as they fled, his cold arm clamped around her waist, hips banging against her, making the back of her shirt cold and wet. But she said nothing, did nothing, let the scene pass behind her, let the trees cover it, the noises of it slipping away into the birdsong and cicadas. Her pony was too small even for just her. With Maxon on board, too, it would be ridiculous, he probably wouldn’t even trot. Hers was no white stallion, she no crusader. The most she could do for him was to never speak of it, never let him know she had heard those cries, she had seen him brought so low, watched that wretched shivering in the woods, and felt for that cold body such a strange desire. Later, in the fall, she would hold him in her arms in the planetarium, and kiss him under the stars.