“Sister, Will.”
“You don’t have a sister.”
“If the hospital calls I do.” Philip grins. “You’re an emergency contact.”
“Isn’t the emergency room an emergency contact?” William says.
Julie returns with coffee, Shelia trailing. Philip stands to help her. “Thanks,” he says after seating Shelia and accepting a coffee mug with pronounced gratitude.
William refuses his own cup. Instead, he fakes interest in something a room away, biting his fingernails, gritting his teeth, and cracking his toes until Julie returns to the kitchen. Shelia follows close behind. He wants coffee, though; the smell teases.
“She’s a bit out of it right now,” Philip says. “They gave her some pills. Too many consonants to pronounce, and they make her cry. She’ll come down after a while, probably.” Philip sips his coffee. “It’s good,” he yells into the kitchen. He sets the cup down, his face revealing the lie. William sides with Philip’s face—Julie’s coffee is never good—but today, with Shelia in tow, his friend’s compliments mean more than courtesy.
Philip panics with company. Intrusions, like guests can be, are seldom regarded with optimism. Even when he is ready, even when he has had weeks to prepare, he distributes his company among friends while he straightens his last curtain, while he washes his last fork. His mother stayed with him once while exterminators termite-bombed her house. Philip convinced William to mother-sit the first night while he prepared his home. He claimed he had beds to make, carpets to clean, groceries to buy. On another occasion, William took Philip’s little brother in while he had his house painted. He opened his doors to Philip’s cat for the rest of his visit; Philip claiming his brother suffered severe allergies.
“She’s not staying here, Philip.”
He pretends surprise, moving his lips as though he could relay his innocence by their quiver. But it doesn’t convince. William has been prepared for this since the phone call.
“Just one night,” Philip says reaching for the coffee again. “My place isn’t ready.”
“No.” William stretches for reason, thinks of Julie, and accepts a moment of concern. “Julie couldn’t deal with it,” he says. Thinking she’d deliver out of spite the first opportunity she had he adds: “I won’t give her the excuse for a stress-induced labor.” “Don’t think of it as my favor. Think of it as hers.” He directs William’s gaze to the kitchen. Julie and Shelia seem to be arguing over something, but a sudden shared smile calms him.
“She’s got something, William,” he says. “I don’t know what, but it’s there.” He sips the terrible coffee; his smile doesn’t crack.
William tries. He takes a moment to survey the woman and Philip’s brief history with her. She’s got something: a mole on her forehead, just to the side and dominating, hours after a life tragedy which means more baggage than Philip’s rose-colored eyes could begin to contemplate, her still-blue skin. Nothing satisfies.
“And when the drugs wear off,” Philip says, “she’ll be able to talk. I’ll bet she’s got some stories.”
William has often teased Philip that a girl only needs a pulse to have him in her pocket. This latest attraction, a girl originally thought to have had no pulse, only strengthens his theory.
“She’s your sister,” and when Philip doesn’t respond, William continues. “Think of your past women…” he offers, assuming just the thought of any one of Philip’s previous interests might clue him in to the impending distress this once-mother is sure to bring. He waits a few beats for Philip to pick up on his insinuation, but nothing.
“You’ve kept my family before.”
“What about the dead man from the Merchant house, and his stain we were originally meant to clean?” William says. “You don’t think they’re connected?”
“He has nothing to do with me.”
“I don’t know about Julie,” and before William can heft the burden to her shoulders Philip is yelling, asking her to discuss the matter. Shelia follows.
Before Philip explains the situation—all of it; Shelia’s medications, her circumstances, her history—before they’ve had time to discuss sleeping arrangements and stay durations, toiletries and all the small things, Julie is nodding, spite in her eyes. William sinks further into the couch, displaying his discomfort of the situation with uncharacteristic silence, and Julie already, without knowing anything but her own desires, attacks with malice. “Of course,” she says.
“One night,” William says from the couch.
“As long as you need to stay,” Julie counters, rubbing Shelia’s shoulder.
William’s bitten hand throbs.
“Thank you,” Philip says. He stands from the couch, leans into Julie and hugs her above her stomach. “It’s good to see you, as always.”
Philip stops at William and thanks him on his way out. William understands his gratitude as sincere. Philip is never anything but. Looking into his eyes, though, William can’t help but wish this girl had been dead. He looks for a reason to doubt Philip’s infatuation. He wants to believe that Philip is sending out something small, a tiny thread of doubt and that his intention is for William to recognize the plea and rush in to save him. But he sees only Philip’s glazed eyes.
William steps out the back door, lighting the cigarette as it hangs from his mouth, stressed by subtle breezes.
Chapter Seven
Pigeons invade the air above his home. A few quick pumps and the conversations strapped to their legs and necks would rain down. It hurts him to see all the secrets of the world escape so easily.
He lights a cigarette. The quick inhale dries his mouth, and a stiff breeze breaks through the gauze around his dog bite, turning an open nerve against him.
Rabies, he fears. The world suddenly smells of mold and rust. William laps chalk from his inner cheek, never enough spit, no moisture, his tongue just a suffocated muscle squatting in his mouth. So one cigarette becomes two, two becomes four, and four evolves as the new level of tolerance. Every muscle calms, a sedation he has not felt in months. From now on, anything less than four will forever be false. He dismisses, for the duration of this fourth cigarette, what the feral dog may have planted in him.
A stiff wind rattles the screen door. He flicks the fourth butt far into the yard behind him and captures a final breath of the outside air. He carries the chill inside his lungs to the living room and lets it pour slowly into the heated air of his home.
The two women are quiet. Julie knits a baby blanket with a needle the size of a weapon. Shelia sleeps in a chair, breathes deep, exhales loud. William is relieved to see her sleeping. He considers conversation a temporary solution, and with that option now gone, he relaxes.
“Been out for a while,” Julies says keeping her eyes to her colored thread.
“She’s had a tough morning.” “You,” she says.
“I’ll smoke inside if you want,” William replies, unwinding the gauze from his hand as he turns to the bathroom.
The bite washes free of dirt and ash under the cold faucet, but the skin underneath remains swollen and blue. As William leaves the bathroom, he bumps the wall with his foot, waking Shelia. Julie offers a moment of stern disappointment and shakes her head before returning to her blanket. Shelia takes a few moments to slowly absorb her new world.
William watches Julie twist and flip the blanket around as she knits, as Shelia stares with lust in her eyes–Shelia covering the room in her gaze, bouncing from piles of baby clothes yet to be placed into the nursery, to Julie’s cross-stitch pieces advertising togetherness and family, to William’s shoes at the front door next to Julie’s shoes next to an empty linoleum patch just large enough for a child’s shoes. Shelia yawns, falls back to the pillow.
William swallows two Percocets he stole months ago from Julie’s back-pain stash and re-wraps his hand. He pulls a knot tight against his wrist and considers dulling the pain with cigarette five.
Julie has slowed her knitting and keeps one ey
e to Shelia. It might be pride, or her instincts sprouting early, telling her to keep watch over this woman without a child of her own. Or the firm stare might indicate a hesitancy to conform to the situation; her anger toward William has subsided, and here she sits now, stuck in her own home and afraid of a stranger. Of course, William hopes for the latter. He hopes Julie will foam when Shelia wakes completely, when she comments about “missing her child enough to…” and out of fear Julie will force the two of them to sleep in shifts.
“Could we keep going?” Julie asks. A dropped her needle in her lap rests wedged between her gut and thigh. “If it were our child, could we be so calm?”
Or Julie could find strength in Shelia’s passivity, unearthing a will strong enough to carry her through the difficult mess after
‘A’ all the way to ‘B’.
“If we had her drugs,” William says.
Julie spreads her hands open, fills her palms with her stomach’s taut skin. The rest of her hangs loose and helplessly obeys her every subtle move. She is a big woman, a trait William has always loved. When they first met, he embraced the aesthetic contrast of skin textures. He wanted to trace the rippled cellulite as it crashed into her smooth stomach. But when Julie started associating these loves as a right of the child, citing “child- bearing hips” and insisting that she ate for the sake of the baby he lost interest. He would imagine her as a thin woman when they had sex. He would wipe away her cheeks, her arms, and pinch her waistline skinny, below the threshold of a healthy child. She became bones held together by just enough skin—thin enough to pass through a wedding ring.
“You know what I mean,” Julie says.
“I know.” William agrees. He claims the space between Julie— giant, motherly Julie—and Shelia—groggy, shivering Shelia— with a silent moment to himself. He tries again to find in Shelia what Philip has not only found but also claimed as an element powerful enough to drive him toward thoughts of a stable future. In many ways, Philip reminds William of himself a few years younger, desperate for a hand grasping his own, a body to fill his bed, a spouse to curb his fear for the future. But now, having cleaned up so many stains, William explores the true impact of a second generation. He turns to his wall, mapped with his own neighborhoods and thinks of his mentor, Mrs. Rose, the leader of the pigeon rings.
They met months ago at the clearing under awkward circumstances: William holding a downed pigeon and Mrs. Rose behind him, having snuck up with passive concern. She asked about the dead pigeons, her dead pigeons. He denied his role at first, despite the telling position: blood on his hands and a second dead bird at his feet. She pressed. He gave in. It was never a personal matter with Mrs. Rose. She simply demanded an explanation to which William answered by blaming domestic issues. Julie. Her brand new pregnancy. His belief that one more child is just one more body that will eventually become a mess. They have been friends since.
“We should get her to bed,” Julie says but makes no motion toward that goal. Pregnancy has forced William strong. He moves everything, now.
He grabs the sleeping woman and turns to the hallway. With Shelia’s head and shoulders stuffed into his chest, he suddenly realizes the dilemma of space. They have only one extra room— the half-converted nursery, a room dedicated to the prosperity of a healthy child. William and Julie exchange knowing looks, their faces expressing the same problem. “She will sleep the entire night anyway,” she says and pulls the fallen needle from her lap.
William carries her to the nursery and returns to the couch. Together, Julie and he mutually embrace an evening of silence.
Pillow talk that night veers as it always does, in the direction of the coming child. This is her nightly planning. She asks about color coordination and which bear pattern to use for the nursery frieze, bears with balloons or bears with bows. William too, maintains his usual routine.
“What if the child is mauled by a bear just as it is born,” he asks, “and the only thing left is a head?”
“What if it is born blind with three eyes, fulfilling a Nostradamus prophecy, about the non-seeing soothsayer destined to destroy all of humanity with its visions?” he asks. He receives a heated stare from Julie, illuminated by harsh light from a small bedside lamp. “If we give it away, if were aren’t around to hear it prophesize, does it affect us? Tree in a forest, Julie.”
“What if, when only the head is out, it looks at the two of us and we can read total disappointment?” he asks. “What if it doesn’t want us?”
Almost eight months and still Julie dismisses adoption. She doesn’t use words anymore, just looks.
These are William’s attempts to anticipate failure. They serve to illustrate a world too chaotic, too random to risk the import of a child. And at that best possible moment, the moment when Julie is reaching for the lamp, ready to drown their world in darkness, screams burst through the walls.
Julie’s immediate reaction is to investigate the noise with the vigor and intensity of a dog, but William grabs her shoulder and tells her to wait. “It will stop,” he says. “Philip told me about her crying.” She lies back down and rests folded fingers on her stomach, intertwined in faux relaxation.
William needs her to remember this moment. He needs her to feel the crying, to understand what all of this really means. He wants her breathing to be backed by a soundtrack of tears. This is the definitive version of how William feels, and Julie must under- stand every pitch, the entire tonal range.
Three minutes pass, and when the crying doesn’t stop Julie throws her arms to the side and stands. “I’m going.” She walks to the door, kicks a table on the way, and hisses through her teeth, limping out of the room.
William believes that people have learned to endure life because any attempt otherwise is rectified by disease, by violence, by age, by a shotgun to the face in a dilapidated house the neighborhood wants demolished. By digoxin to the heart. What right, he wonders, does he have to introduce a child to this?
The crying continues and, without fear of Julie catching him, he sprouts a small grin.
Picturing Shelia surrounded by a pregnant couple’s version of infancy—blankets, a crib, children’s books stacked in a small pile against a wall sponge-painted with animal shapes—keeps William confident that life is never fair. As Shelia’s own child passes through her in pieces, she takes in a view that her child will never have. William imagines her crying as the painful truth streaming out wet and salty. She can taste what is left of her child pouring down her face, falling into her mouth, can feel it absorbing into the treads of her shirt. Knowing that Shelia aborted the child does nothing to curb his belief that she is hitting the hard bottom of remorse. Julie will cry as well. She will return to bed with tears shining her cheeks and speak for hours in questions. And for her own child, she will cry as well. But to William their child is already gone—not dead, but he accepts that it will be someday.
The crying stops. Julie eases into bed, not smiling, her face red. “I think it’s the drugs,” she says. “Hallucinating or something. She says her mouth is full of worms and that the walls are closing in on her.”
“The nursery, too,” William adds.
“And this,” she throws a ball of paper to William, crushed tight and moist with her sweat, “this got stuck to my foot.”
He opens the pink slip of paper to his bedside lamp. The piece has fallen from his threaded neighborhoods, pulled perhaps by wind through the back door, perhaps by a close passing shoulder. The ink is sparse and at its heaviest spreads thin into veins along fine creases. He can read words like thank you, and missed you for a while. He makes out write soon, and look forward to your response. Mrs. Rose’s handwriting, perfect, suggestive of her years as an elementary school teacher.
He irons the paper against his stomach with his palm and sets it aside for re-hanging in the morning. He watches the note teeter the edge of his bedside table and tries to picture the sender. He imagines a lonely person striving for an equally lonely person, eyes fix
ed to the horizon, justifying the long hours waiting and the stiff muscles standing by the pleasure found in a returning pigeon.
Shelia, with a body full of drugs, weak, and drained of a child, cries out again. William pretends to be asleep until Julie stomps from the room.
William wants to approach the dreamed sender, to wait with her until her bird returns. He would admit his hobby, just as the bird dives for its cage. “You don’t need this human connection to live,” he would say. “The world is not an infinite resource waiting to be tapped dry.”
He would intercept the bird. “In fact,” he would say, ripping the message from its foot, “the world has been dry for years. I’ve seen the desert our world has become, shredded with bullets holes in apartment buildings where nothing but filth exists. I’ve cleaned it from walls with a toothbrush stolen from the deceased’s bathroom. I’ve believed in a world with good intentions for too long.” He would pocket the note. “I need this more than you.”
The room vanishes the way open eyes will do.
“Good morning,” he says, wakes with an elbow against his ribs.
“Quiet,” Julie yawns.
Shelia’s cries become the air. William closes his eyes and imagines this time the sender is him waiting on a message from his own bird, no longer stealing from the periphery. He waits for his own pigeon from Mrs. Rose.
Chapter Eight
A baby rattle shakes, unseen.
“Morning,” William says, stretching and yawning.
The sun cuts through the bedroom blinds. Julie stands at the door shielding her face from the harsh beams. She removes her robe and throws an orange pill bottle to the bed. The capsules rattle. “No more of those,” she says. “I’ve been awake all night. I can’t deal with her crying.”
“Shelia wasn’t my idea. Remember that.” William pushes the bottle to the floor.
Julie gathers a blanket from the bed. “I need sleep, William.” Her voice trails from the bedroom, to the hallway, to the front room couch.
Stranger Will Page 5