Everything about it whispered of permanent incompleteness, of a life cut short and a future that no longer existed: a haunted house waiting for the ghost to arrive; a cold emptiness; the echo of an incomplete sentence.
He decided to leave the lights on, just as she had, undoubtedly because she’d been too upset about the broadcast and the story of the baby and his not bothering to call and warn her about it.
He decided to leave the lights on as a reminder to himself of all the thoughtless little cruelties he’d inflicted on her over the years in the name of Advancing His Career.
He went back up and retrieved his now-lukewarm tea. It was only as he was stumbling toward the kitchen table that he realized there was a light coming from the living room.
The living room that had been in darkness when he’d passed through it fifteen minutes ago.
He moved toward the doorway and peeked around the edge.
There was a small fire burning in the fireplace.
Panic moved into his core, making itself right at home: OhGod, why didn’t you ask Emerson to come inside for some coffee or something, you fucking idiot? Split-Face had to have followed you from the park—how the hell else would he have known you were at the hospital?
He very slowly, very quietly, moved back into the kitchen, set the mug of tea on the counter, and pulled open the cutlery drawer, wincing at the way it groaned. He removed the largest knife he could find.
Exhaling a breath he wasn’t aware he’d been holding, he moved toward the living room. The fire popped loudly, then hissed and sizzled. The scent of burning wood filled his nostrils.
The flames cast malformed, dancing shadows across the floor and up the walls, giving the room a sense of perpetual disproportion, of an inanimate thing suddenly given sentience and trying to shape itself into something other than what it had been.
Keeping his back pressed against the wall and wishing that he owned a gun, Robert moved left, toward the fireplace and the sofa—which had been moved, turned around so that anyone sitting on it would face the fireplace and not the other, smaller sofa that sat six feet across from it to form a makeshift conversation pit.
He wondered if it had been moved earlier, while he was still at the hospital.
He wondered why, if this had been done during the few minutes he’d been in the basement, he hadn’t heard anything—unless he was a helluva lot more wasted than he’d thought.
Then he wondered if Split-Face was waiting for him, curled up so he couldn’t be seen until Robert was right on top of him, curled up all warm and cozy in front of the fire, smugly satisfied with this most recent violation.
Robert slid along the wall, his breath coming out in ragged, painful bursts. God Almighty, what did he think he was doing? He was in no shape for a physical confrontation, even if he was armed.
One of the cats yowled again, much louder this time, anxious and angry (more likely than not it was Tasha, defending her food against The Winnie), and the sound—commensurate with some cheap scare tactic from a low-budget horror movie—startled him, almost causing him to drop the knife; as it was he caught it by the business end of the blade and felt it slice one of his fingers.
Gripping the handle with as much strength as he could muster, he moved closer to the sofa and the sizzling fire crackling like delicate bones snapping, and now—breathe, c’mon, that’s it—he was facing the side of the sofa, and moved forward, closer, ready to surprise Split-Face’s beauty sleep, closer, only three feet away now, the dancing shadowfire making the room twist and ripple, and now only two feet away, readying himself to leap on top of the son-of-a-bitch if he had to, and then he caught a glance of firelight creating glissandos over skin and—
—disbelieving the sight before him, Robert dropped the knife and stood staring at the Impossibility that lay so peaceful before him. He slowly raised both hands to cover his mouth before any sound could escape. He didn’t fear crying out, didn’t even fear an hysterical scream: he feared that he might laugh at the perverse absurdity of it all, and that frightened him more than anything else in the world could have at this moment because he knew that if he allowed himself to start laughing he’d never stop.
His daughter lay there, still naked, still open in the center, looking for all the world like a newborn in peaceful slumber while Mommy and Daddy watched over her.
He sat down at the end opposite where she lay and stared at her.
She was dirty, covered in places with thick patches of drying mud. Split-Face must have dropped her. He hoped it hadn’t hurt too much.
Cruising on auto-pilot, he moved through the house, Just In Case, checking all the rooms to make sure Split-Face wasn’t hiding somewhere in the house, then checking to make certain all the doors and windows were securely locked, arming the electronic security system, and, Just In Case he’d overlooked any hiding places Split-Face might have found, retrieving an old baseball bat from the hall closet.
He picked up the knife from the floor and placed it on the arm of the sofa, in easy reaching distance, Just In Case.
He looked upon the still figure of his daughter and smiled.
In the glow of the fire, her head didn’t appear nearly as large as it had at the hospital; it looked almost, in fact, like a normal newborn’s head.
He reached out to touch her, pulled back his hand, and then reached out again, his palm less than an inch from her tiny face.
He called her Emily, the name he and Denise had chosen. He said silly things to her, jokey things that one might say to a newborn in order to get it to grin. His own voice sounded unfamiliar, the voice of a man who had not spoken to anyone in a very long time. “We have all sorts of things for your nursery,” he said. “Wait until you see it. There’s a shelf full of books with fairy tales and stories about Curious George. You’ll like George, silly monkey that he is.”
Only then did he dare touch her.
Her flesh was both cold from death and slightly warm from the fire.
He ran his hand slowly, lovingly, over her entire body, noting but not really letting it register that all of the areas that had been stripped of tissue were now restored.
He scooted closer and leaned down, staring into the chasm of her center.
Something that looked like a pinkish spider’s web filled the area just underneath her ribs, and Robert snaked two fingers inside to clear it away, whatever it was.
The web felt moist, warm, organic.
He traced its pattern until his fingers encountered something semi-solid in the middle.
Something as moist as the web.
Something with...veins and...valves.
He pressed against the tiny, impossible heart with his bleeding finger and felt his blood seep onto its surface.
For a moment, the world was frozen.
Then he felt it; softly, almost imperceptible at first, but he felt it, nonetheless.
Her tiny impossible heart shuddered, then began to beat.
Once.
Then nothing.
Twice more.
Then nothing.
He waited patiently, a parent sitting next to a child’s sick bed, but her heart did not beat again.
Maybe she needed to be warmer, maybe that was it.
He removed his hand from inside the chasm and carried her upstairs to the bathroom. He washed her in the sink with warm, soapy water. Her eyes were shut tight, but he remembered how they were the color of her mother’s. He compared her fingernails to his own and thought he saw a similarity in shape. He turned her on her side, emptying water from her chasm, then began to pat her dry with one of the heavy, thirsty towels Denise had recently purchased.
He was drying her inside when he felt her impossible heart beat again. He didn’t care how this was happening; he only knew that he was being given a second chance and would not squander it.
He tried closing the flaps of the chasm but they would not fuse together, no matter how much he wished them to. But that was all right; he would love her anyway.
He wrapped her in a fresh, clean-smelling towel, then stood with her in front of the bathroom mirror, thinking that he most definitely looked like the father of a newborn baby; she was not dead, as some part of him still believed, just sleeping, little Sleeping Emily, sleeping like babies do all the time.
He carried her downstairs and sat by the fire. His index finger followed the delicate profile of her face. His finger looked grotesque, and he hoped she wasn’t too scared by the feel of it. Some of her skin peeled away at the gentlest of his touches, and he remembered that she had been born too soon, before the thicker skin needed to survive in the world could fully develop; and, besides, they’d taken away a lot of her skin earlier, hadn’t they? To help others. Taken it away just like most of her internal organs. To help others. That was all right, she’d pull through and they’d be just fine, the two of them.
He sat there holding her until the fire began to die, allowing the still-dark night to seep in and absorb parts of the room. He never once thought to eat, or drink, or rest. He just sat there, holding her, rocking back and forth and singing songs and occasionally slipping his finger in against her heart and convincing it to give a few more beats.
He decided then to do something Denise had asked him to do for their child when it was born: not possessing the most appealing of singing voices, Robert had promised Denise that he’d dig out his old flute from his high school orchestra days and practice some calming tunes to play for the baby when it woke up at night and needed soothing. He gently laid Emily on the sofa, placing soft pillows on either side of her so she wouldn’t roll off, then went to the hall closet and rummaged for a few minutes until he found his flute case.
Back on the sofa, he tried out the instrument for the first time in over twenty years. It sounded surprisingly good. After several headache-inducing notes wherein he got the feel of the thing back, he played for Emily his best selection, the one that had won him an award at a competition in eleventh grade: “Promenade” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. She seemed to enjoy it, and Robert was pleased to discover that he could still deliver a pretty good rendition of it after all these years.
Toward the end, though, his hands began to tremble uncontrollably, and he could no longer play or hold the flute. He placed it back in its case, then touched Emily, one trembling hand on her shoulder, the other against her soft, cool, chubby cheek. He brushed her lips with his thumb, then leaned over and kissed her forehead, her perfect-baby forehead. He wanted this to last forever but knew that was selfish.
His hand still touching Emily’s cold cheek, Robert suddenly thought of something his sister, Lynn, had talked about on a night last September when the two of them had gone out for their twice-monthly dinner date. Lynn, a biology teacher at Cedar Hill High School, was expressing her concern over the health of Denise’s mother when, not missing a beat, she’d segued onto the subject of death. Robert listened to her much more intently than he’d wanted and now, looking down at Emily, he found himself thinking about death in terms of simple biology. Death wasn’t instantaneous; the cells went down one by one. It took a while before everything was finished. A person who wanted to could snatch a bunch cells hours after somebody’d checked out and grow them in cultures. Death was a fundamental function; its mechanisms operated with the same attention to detail, the same conditions for the advantage of organisms, the same genetic information for guidance through the stages, that most people equated with the physical act of living. Now, here, with his daughter, Robert couldn’t help but wonder: If it’s such an intricate, integrated physiological process—at least in the primary, local stages—then how did you explain the permanent vanishing of consciousness? What happened to it? Did it just screech to a halt, become lost in humus, what? Nature did not work that way; it tended to find perpetual uses for its more elaborate systems. Maybe all that crap from 70s about “All of us, together, make up God” was true; maybe human consciousness was somehow severed at the filaments of its attachment and then absorbed back into the membrane of its origin. Maybe that’s all reincarnation was: the severed consciousness of a single cell that did not die but rather vanished totally into its own progeny. Maybe it was more than that—
—and maybe he should stop this before it got out of hand. He should call the police, call Bill Emerson and tell him there was no need to search for Emily, she was right here with her father where she belonged, but then they would come and take her away from him again, and he refused to lose her twice in the same night.
No, let them look for her and wonder what happened.
Dead was dead, gone was gone, and nothing you or a single cell or its progeny could do was going to change it.
He stroked her cheek and whispered, “Shhh, there, there, time to rest now. You can sleep here, you can stay at home where you belong. Daddy’ll watch over you. Always.”
He again wrapped her in the crisp white towel and held her a little while longer before doing what he knew must be done.
From the closet he took his heavy winter coat, for it was so very cold out there.
From the basement he took a shovel and one of Denise’s garden spades.
From an upstairs closet he took a large box that had once held his new winter boots.
From the cutlery drawer he took an ice pick, Just In Case.
Finally, from the sofa, he took his daughter, placed her gently inside the box—it was a perfect fit, all snug and comfy—and carried her outside, into the back yard and her mother’s garden; it, too, was slumbering, and it seemed appropriate that Emily rest here, in a place where beauty bloomed in spring and summer, faded elegantly in autumn, and froze motionless under winter ice, gathering its strength to emerge with even more loveliness and grandeur.
The garden was surrounded by a circle of flagstones. Robert chose the largest of these, the one facing directly east. Emily would like it here, would like the feel of the sun warming her every morning. Yes, this was a splendid spot.
Checking the neighbors’ windows on either side of the fenced-in yard to make certain no one was looking out, Robert knelt and overturned the flagstone. The soil underneath was brown and moist and friable. He used the garden spade to loosen an area big enough for the shoe box, surprised to discover he needn’t have bothered bringing the shovel; the spade was more than enough to dig a hole a foot long and thirteen inches deep. He knelt back and wiped the sweat from his face. He squinted his eyes as he looked toward the sky and saw the first faint hint of sunlight.
He lifted the shoe box, kissed its lid, then lowered it tenderly into the hole. He shoveled the dirt back in with his hands, patting it down, giving Emily a good, strong blanket of earth. He moved the flagstone back into place, stood, and scuffed more soil around it.
He looked down at Emily’s unmarked grave and thought he really should say something.
All he could think of was part of a poem Denise had written shortly after finding out she was pregnant; she’d planned to read it to Emily every night in place of a prayer.
“May the night be your friend, and may dreams rock you gently; may you never know hunger, and may you love with a full heart; may the bright, smiling moon light your way, until the wind sets you free....”
He couldn’t recall the rest of it.
He blew her a kiss. He went back inside and locked the door behind him. He went upstairs and washed what he could of his face without disturbing the tape and metal splint protecting Dr. Steinman’s handiwork. He thought about shaving, but who did he have to look good for now? He took off his clothes and turned on the bath taps, watching like a man hypnotized as the warm water crept up the sides of the tub. He stretched. He saw a small mummified spider floating on the surface of the water. He cupped the water underneath the body in his hands, lifted the spider, and tossed it into the sink. He lowered himself into the warm water like a convalescing invalid and lay his head back. He closed his eyes, folding his hands against his stomach. He waited until the water had risen almost to his neck, th
en used his left foot to turn off the taps. He snuggled down into the water and its soothing ripples as if it were a living liquid quilt. Soon he drifted off into a half-sleep. He dreamed that he was living in a great wilderness and watched over many, many children. Denise was there, and so was Emily. The children adored both of them. The children laughed often, for they no longer wore masks to conceal their true faces, no longer dressed to hide their true forms, and though some might think them grotesque, Robert saw them as beautiful. He comforted them, taught them, loved them with all his heart and was loved by them in return. He stood upon a tree stump playing “Promenade” on his flute; then, once the piece was finished, he spread his arms wide as gold-flecked sunlight fell like strands of silk through the trees’ thick leaves. The children emerged from the wilderness, from the shadows, from the place where the mountain opened, and surrounded him. They touched him lovingly. They were so beautiful. They all looked so happy. They called him father.
It was such a pretty picture....
PART TWO
Parlor Tricks and Cocteau Prayers
“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.
“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s all I can do to see real people, by this light!”
—Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass
The most terrible thing of all is happy love, for then there is fear in everything.
—Cosima Wagner
In Silent Graves Page 7