by Various
Tim’s cry echoes down the hallway. The first cry doesn’t have her racing to him, only waking and sitting up. Her heart still pounds more quickly, and she’s wide awake, but it isn’t as alarming as in the past. Michael rolls over in his sleep. She wonders if he dreams.
Her own dreams have become different. Even though her pregnant dreams were strange, they were still based in reality. Her dreams now are abstractions. Some filled with darkness and fear. Others with light, color, and a growing hope. And always the talking. Someone talking but she can’t quite hear them. She tries so hard to make it out, but whenever she gets close, it fades, or Tim cries.
She goes to Tim. His cry is more cranky than distressed. She lifts him over her shoulder, moves across the room and sits in the rocker, bringing him to her breast. The handy nursing gown makes for easy access, two hidden slits down the front reminding her of her primary job. That first suction and letting down of milk is still sudden and painful. There’s a sharp pull around her nipple as he latches on, the prickling creeping down the sides of her breasts as her milk comes in. She read and heard about how nursing is the most wholesome, wonderful thing a mother can do, but Sarah feels like Tim’s parasitic suckling can only be unnatural. Once they settle in together they’re okay, but Tim doesn’t stare at her with his loving, clear eyes as he does when they’re playing together. He’s gone off to the land of milk, where he dwells alone.
And Sarah’s left to think. Which is not a good thing.
The thing Sarah didn’t count on was other people. This afternoon she felt hopeful about keeping the truth from Michael. They could build a little cocoon and get to know each other as a family. But with the call from Anna and Mrs. Grady’s need to needle her way into every neighbor’s life with her fucking lasagna, she knows the outside world won’t stay away for long. They’ll all start calling and wanting to come over—her sister, her mother, Michael’s mother. Oh, God, their friends.
Sarah feels a stab of fear followed by a tingle at the back of her scalp. She’s suddenly cold and the edges of the room fade into darkness. Tim has a startled look on his face and she realizes that she’s breathing too quickly. She needs to calm down for the baby. She starts to sing, “Every dream has a name, and names tell your story. This song is your dream…”
After a moment, Tim is soothed, the room comes back into focus, and Sarah is present again.
As she sings, she remembers Greta’s words, All that matters is that you are here with your baby. And she has to keep Michael close. Just two things to remember. She can keep track of two things. She used to be in charge of entire cases, held entire law books in her head. She could summon deep wells of knowledge to bring into arguments in front of a judge and a jury.
Tim’s blinking, drowsy. Sarah lays him in his crib where he snuggles down, his head falling to the side. He stares at the pattern on the bassinet, soothing himself to sleep. Sarah heads back to bed. She’s bone tired. She doesn’t think she’s ever been so tired. She’s lost the sensation of tasting, and a lot of the sensation of touch, so why is she so exhausted in such a body-bound way?
• • •
By the time Michael’s finished changing Tim’s diaper later that night, he realizes the baby won’t make it to dawn without needing another one. Which they don’t have. So, with Sarah sleeping peacefully, Michael grabs some clothes out of the bathroom and slips them on in the hall. Slamming his elbow into the wall, he stifles a curse. He’s still too big for this narrow space. He picks up his wallet, shoves the entire crumpled plastic diaper package into his pocket for reference and sneaks out the front door.
• • •
He’s gone. Sarah wasn’t supposed to let him leave.
• • •
Michael’s lost in thought as he steps onto the elevator and presses the button.
A woman says, “And where are you going at this hour?” He wheels around to see Greta standing behind him. He doesn’t remember anyone being on the elevator when he got on.
“Uh, hi. Diapers.”
She has a smile on her face, but anger over something flickers in her eyes. He doesn’t understand. Maybe she had a fight with the mister. Does Greta have a mister?
She says, “You shouldn’t leave your wife, you know. She had a hard time of it. She’s in a fragile state.”
Who the hell is this woman? Michael says, “We’re out of diapers. I need to get some more.”
There’s a pause, but Michael finds himself fuming at the intrusion. The elevator stops on the fourth floor. Greta gets off and turns around, holding the door open. She looks at him steadily and says, “Stay close to your wife, Michael. This has all been very hard on her.”
He holds her gaze and says steadily, “I’m going to go get some diapers now. You have a good night.” As the door closes, he can see she’s shaking her head as she shuffles off down the hall.
Michael has been inside the apartment for so long that he’s invigorated by just the sound of his footsteps on the marble floor of the empty lobby. As he steps outside, the cool, night air is downright liberating. There’s a light breeze off the river, and things are as quiet as they can be only at this time of night in Manhattan, and then, only in certain neighborhoods. He heads down toward the Duane Reade on Broadway. The city that never sleeps seems to be in slumber now, not even a cab to be seen. The breeze picks up as he passes a transplanted maple sticking up out of cigarette stub-littered, wrought-iron grating. It won’t ever grow to its potential. The grate itself isn’t optimistic, leaving room for a trunk only a foot across. But he finds solace in the sound of its rustling leaves. Sarah has always been a city girl. Michael immediately loved her sharpness, her humor, her ability to find a great restaurant in any urban neighborhood. He challenged her on this one, taking her to lost neighborhoods in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia. But Sarah would always find a place, whether a mom-and-pop restaurant, a sandwich stand, or a chain that happened to be famous for one specific dish. They haven’t had a bad meal yet.
Michael grew up in a dumpy little town in New Jersey that didn’t have much to offer by way of urbane culture. There was a terrible Chinese restaurant called Yum-Yum next to the local bowling alley; there was a small library and a grocery store and a run-down pharmacy his parents jokingly called Mr. Gower’s. Anything else and you’d have to go to the next town over. But none of this mattered, because for Michael, life was the outdoors. When he was a boy, the only thing that would pull him into the house from the woods in summer was food and drink. He spent hours exploring, collecting rocks or perched under a favorite tree, reading a book. Giant maples that had room to breathe, not these lackluster ailing street types. We’ll take Tim hiking. Maybe we’ll get a cabin for summer. A boy needs to run, explore.
• • •
The lights on Broadway are unforgiving compared to the quiet of the side streets. Once inside the pharmacy, Michael blinks like a startled frog. He goes up and down the aisles and finds himself in the shaving section. He laughs, realizing that this is the only section of the store he’s familiar with. This and feminine products, when Sarah was stuck at work and needed supplies. Otherwise, she always did the shopping.
He walks along the aisles reading his choices, Antacids, Analgesics, and eventually finds his way to the baby aisle. Everything is lit up with colors: bright plastic tubs of wipes, yellow baby shampoo, green bottles of soap shaped like fish, pacifiers and teething rings. The diapers loom in stacks, an array of red and purple and teal packages. The variety is enough to overwhelm the ordinary man, but Michael came prepared. He pulls out the crumpled purple wrapper from his pocket and finds the corresponding package of new ones. N. For newborn. For new. He picks up two packages of wipe refills for good measure.
• • •
Sarah paces the apartment, gnawing on her nails, trying not to hear Tim screaming in the nursery. He won’t stop.
Michael was here. She knows he was here. They made love. And his clothes are on the floor where he shed them. She can’t have co
nfused that. But he’s gone. For ages, he’s been gone, and she can’t figure out where to.
Tim’s been crying. A lot. It’s not that needy newborn crying, but an angry cry. He knows Michael’s gone. She tried feeding him. He won’t take the breast. Burping him. But nothing helps. He’s turned into this wretched little ball of red and wet, thrashing in his crib. She curses the high ceilings of the apartment for making his cries echo in jerky, repetitive, Hnyeah! Hnyeah! Hnyeah! It’s frightening and he’s not letting up. She’s crawling out of her skin.
Maybe Michael got tired of them. Maybe he can’t face the idea of caring for a baby. Greta said that making love “cinched the deal.”
She cinched the deal.
And he left. And she doesn’t like how cold it’s getting and how strange and how the baby won’t stop crying.
She has to go to the baby. It’s the only job she has.
• • •
Michael’s so focused on unlocking the door quietly that when he swings it open to find Sarah standing there, seething, he drops the bag of diapers.
Sarah’s hair is in disarray; half of it has fallen out of its clip and hangs in hanks around her neck, the other half is still up, making her look disjointed. Her face is frightening, her pupils enormous and the rings under her eyes brought into relief by the light from the hallway. Her cheekbones stand out like shelves.
“Where the hell were you?” She’s not yelling, she’s hissing a whisper, but she might as well be yelling.
Michael realizes there aren’t any lights on in the apartment. And Sarah’s wearing an ugly, cornflower-blue jersey nursing nightgown, and judging by the freezing temperature in the room, it isn’t healthy for her to be so exposed. Her legs look unnaturally pale and spindly.
When he pulls himself together enough to talk, Michael says, “We were out of diapers.” He scrambles to pick up the packages and close the door before the neighbors see this wraith giving a pale impression of his wife. The door closes, plunging them into shadow.
He says, “What are you doing here in the dark?
She snarls, “You were gone for weeks! What was I supposed to think?”
The orange streetlamps shine up through the windows, casting odd shadows on the walls. He knows his apartment well enough to get around in this dim light, but Sarah’s condition frightens him into turning on the light.
“Weeks?”
Sarah turns away from him as if he’d said something stupid. She looks worse in the light. This doesn’t look like a change that can have come over his pliant, weary but glowing wife in half an hour. It’s more like she’s been in prison for a few months, doing hard labor. Her chest is heaving, making the pits in her neck above her clavicles go deep and shallow in turns, which makes her look even more gaunt.
“You need to get a blanket or something,” he says. “ Honey, is the heat even on in here?” The thermostat is turned up to seventy, but the temperature reads fifty-five. He taps on it. What a time for the goddamned heat to go out. “Shit. Is the baby warm enough?”
Sarah turns on him. “How can you act like nothing happened? Where have you been?”
He walks over to her. She’s shaking with rage. He doesn’t know how she got so disheveled since this sunshiny afternoon. He grabs a blanket from the sofa and wraps it around her shoulders, pulling her in for a hug. She’s freezing.
She breathes into his neck, “I don’t understand.” He sinks onto the sofa, holding her, thinking that maybe Greta was right, he shouldn’t have left. Is this postpartum depression? He heard things could get weird with chemical changes after childbirth. Maybe this is just that.
He kisses her. She’s shaking, but starts to calm. He starts talking into her hair in a soothing voice as if to the baby. “I was gone twenty minutes, honey. We were totally out of diapers and I didn’t want to be shorthanded at four in the morning, so I went to get some more. I came back as soon as I could. You’re fine. We’re fine. You probably just woke up disoriented. I’m so sorry, I should have left a note.”
The radiator starts to clank, maybe just the heat kicking in.
He says, “There, now. Is the baby warm enough?”
“The baby is warm enough.” She says this impatiently as if it never should have been a concern. This puzzles him. Things that seemed important no longer are and things that meant nothing have taken on life-shaking proportions. Sarah says, “I didn’t know if you were coming back.”
He looks into her eyes, which seems to calm her. “I always come back. Across continents and oceans I come back. I can’t help it. It’s a compulsion.”
She’s beyond a laugh, but has relaxed now. He pulls the blanket more tightly around her and rubs warmth back into her limbs.
Samuel Marzioli became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “A House in the Woods” in Penumbra eMag (Jan. 2013), edited by Celina Summers.
Visit his website at marzioli.blogspot.com.
* * *
Short Story: “A House in the Woods” ••••
Short Story: “Midnight Visitors” ••••
Short Story: “Burning Men” ••••
A HOUSE IN THE WOODS
by Samuel Marzioli
First published in Penumbra eMag (Jan. 2013), edited by Celina Summers
• • • •
THE HOUSE was on a hillside, overlooking ships and the monolithic cranes set in and around the emerald waves of the bay. Apart from pictures on a website, I bought it sight unseen. Risky? Probably. But the years had flashed by with the speed of shuffled cards. I was old now, prone to fits of illness that several times took me to the brink of death. And, since I wasn’t religious, all I had to look forward to in my golden years was the peace and relaxation that only solitude could offer.
A week after the deal closed, I made plans to meet Mike Welsh at the house for an inspection. Mike had always been a sensible man, my adviser on countless real estate deals previous. If anyone could sort through the chaotic jumble of a reckless investment it was him. I took Tanner, a narrow road that ascended into the wooded hillside. It skirted a sheer drop, before the asphalt leveled a thousand feet up. Then I cruised a few more miles before I finally spotted Mike’s truck.
The second I stepped out of my car, I took in the scene. Pines loomed overhead like silent sentinels. They blocked the sunlight beneath their ancient spiraled branches, giving the day the appearance of dusk. The air was absolutely ripe with their scent, as clean and pure as the city wasn’t. It would have been perfect, but for the house itself: a dirty, cracked and bowing box, faded to the color of avocado flesh. At best it was a decrepit thing, effete and uninspiring.
“Let’s get down to it, Ray. In case your glasses don’t quite work, this is a real shithole, through and through,” said Mike.
“That bad, huh?” I laughed.
“Yeah, and that’s just the sugar coating. Your best bet is to knock it down and start from scratch.”
As Mike launched into his demolition plan and the associated expenses, I found myself distracted by a warm pressure against my face. The more I focused on it the more I realized I’d felt it before—like the beam of consideration one feels when they know they’re being watched. It wasn’t unreasonable. We were far from the bosom of civilization, but hardly isolated. I looked around expectantly, thinking I’d see a hiker, a bicyclist, or even an animal gazing my way. Instead, I found the house itself. Its blackened windows seemed to watch us, not as eyes peering through glass, but as glass peering as eyes.
“Do you see that?” I said, jerking a finger.
Mike turned toward the indicated direction, and shrugged. “What I see is an easily solved problem. An excavator will make short work of this heap.”
The instant he finished talking there was a soft, almost whispered, rumble of discontent. A gutter shifted from the eaves, swung out like an arm and crashed against the driveway. Mike and I exchanged wide-eyed shock, and then turned in unison to the house. Th
e blackened windows seemed locked in a defiant stare, its sagging double-door garage frame like a twisted, angry mouth.
We both left without another word.
• • •
On the day of demolition, I showed up a few minutes after Mike and his crew unloaded their equipment. When they saw me, we all saluted coffee cups, and they got to work. I sat on my car’s hood and watched as the excavator lumbered forward with a metallic grind. It drew up to the house’s side. With its flaking yellow boom and black-worn bucket extended out like a grasping arm, it slapped and tore into the house’s façade like a hot knife through butter. Windows shattered, wood cracked and split, bits and pieces fell over.
By evening they finished. Mike said they would return the next day to clean up and get to work on the foundation. They left soon after. As for me, I stayed behind, rooted to my spot, watching the fading sunlight that broke through the treetops in strips. What was I expecting? I couldn’t say. Something strange had happened the first time I was here, so I suppose I was hoping something strange would happen again.
I passed the time by remembering stories I’d heard and read of real haunted houses, and the spirits of the dead that supposedly lived in them. I never believed in life after death—never saw much reason to—but the idea of ghosts was still capable of raising gooseflesh and sending a creeping chill racing down my spine.
Death. I wasn’t long for it myself. And while I had settled on the brute fact that a black, discontinuing abyss would met me once I passed away, I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hope there was something else. Not necessarily heaven or bearded old cloud-fathers. Just something good and pure and clean to account for the whole damn bother of life.
Time passed without event. The silence lingered, unbroken by birds, or squirrels, or wind, or even passersby. Eventually, I decided to leave too. Once I settled in the driver’s seat of my car, and turned to close the door, the whispered discontented rumble returned. I shot a glance at the house’s remains, catching the jerking movement of several boards and a metal pipe in mid-action. It was a subtle shifting, but too obvious not to detect.