Farthest House

by Margaret Lukas

  On the dresser, Mémé’s rose stood in a tall glass of water. Willow lifted the flower and watched clear droplets slide off the end of the stem. The outer petals of the rose were drying and spreading, just as she’d seen in the smoke, but the heart of the rose still held rich color and even the pure and sweet Damask scent. On the wet stem, what began as no more than a series of tiny barbs at the top grew stouter and sharper, until at the bottom they were thick thorns. She pressed the longest and sharpest into her upper arm, piercing the skin, twisting the thorn, until it tore flesh and drew a bead of blood, just as Mémé had done to her in the church. She repeated the process, remembering and promising each woman who had visited her in the kitchen.

  25

  In July, Derrick stood beside Willow, using the neck of a beer bottle to point at the picture on her easel. “What kind of weird shit is that?”

  Engrossed in her work and with the July heat so thick she had to lean into it the way she leaned into strong winds, she hadn’t heard him coming up the apartment stairs or opening the door. She’d lost track even of the hours she sat tipped forward, her fingers clutching a brush. Now, torn from that quiet, interior space, she felt the ache in the small of her back. Already two days past her due date, she thought herself a porpoise. She leaned back and kneaded her pain. The clock over the stove read almost 6:30. “You worked late,” she said.

  Derrick took another drink, longer this time. He shifted his weight. “Who’s that? You?”

  Standing, hoisting her stomach, she looked from his beer bottle hanging at groin level, to the picture. He’d spent the day working on a cement crew for his father’s construction company and now, still in his dirty jeans, steel-toed boots, and with sweat and dust coating his arms and hair, he looked as uncomfortable as she felt. “It’s not suppose to be me,” she said, “though her face is modeled after mine. It’s my great-grandmother, Mémé’s mother. Her name was Sabine.”

  “Paint clothes, that’s gross.”

  “Gross because she’s pregnant?”

  “How many hours did you waste today, doing that?”

  She crossed her arms, one hand on the pattern of thorn scars. “What should I have done? Practiced my high dive?”

  They’d argued before about her paintings, and when they stopped, she was never sure what exactly the arguments had been over. Papa had never objected to the long hours she spent in front of her easel, and she couldn’t imagine why Derrick would either. She suspected he was vaguely jealous—even if he had no desire to paint. It wasn’t envy of her art, but of her having it. As the summer progressed, he was becoming more depressed about the fall. No college recruited him to play football, and he was enrolled at the local Jesuit University, which didn’t even have a football team. Nor did he have a campus life to look forward to. He’d be there, with her and a child, studying with an undeclared major. He didn’t blame her for his not being recruited, and he admitted that high school heroes were often third-string bench warmers when it came to the college level. Still, she feared he saw her as a symbol of his lost dream—leaving Omaha and playing for a Division I team.

  His scowling and half-concealed anger over her painting ate away at her vision. She briefly thought of turning the picture around, but didn’t. The point of the painting was Sabine’s pregnancy, and to get the strongest sense of that, the figure needed to be naked with the unborn child just visible in the womb. The long piece of rich brocade draped over her lap, represented modesty, innocence, and even privilege. Though Willow knew wealth didn’t separate one woman from another when it came to childbearing.

  Derrick wiped the cold beer across his dusty forehead, “Just asking.”

  She took the beer from his hand, wiped the cold across her own forehead, handed it back, and headed for the wall holding their kitchen appliances. She had another painting started and leaned up to the wall behind the easel. Prairie’s Coming was a simpler painting: just an unborn child curled in a sea of blue, which symbolized both amniotic fluid and the idea that babies are born from, and into, a global space.

  “You want a hamburger?” she asked. “Actually, that’ll have to be a hamber-dog. We only have hot dog buns.”

  She watched beads of sweat track down the sides of his face and how he pulled her straight-back chair away from the easel and sat down. He’d need most of his beer before he stepped into the shower. Without taking his eyes from the picture, or answering her, he worked at untying his laces, jerking wide the mouth of his shoe, and accidentally banging his hand against a front leg of the easel. “This thing gets on my nerves. It’s too damn big. Can’t you get something smaller?”

  She turned on the kitchen faucet to splash water over her own sweaty face and wash paint from her hands. The easel felt alive to her. Some days, when she thought she might do something other than paint, it called her. This was one of the reasons she wasn’t interested in a new one, the cheap kind with three skinny legs and less heft than a toy balsa wood plane. “Are you hungry or not? It’s too hot to turn on the stove, if you’re not going to eat.”

  Tugging one shoe at a time, he let them drop on the floor and peeled off his sweaty socks. Taking the last swallows of his beer, he headed for the bathroom. “It’s a fucking furnace up here.” The door slammed.

  Willow frowned and slid the frying pan from the back of the stove to the front burner—the one of the four burners that actually worked. Sitting at the easel, she’d leaned forward, her breasts resting on the dome of her stomach, where patches of hot skin had met patches of hot skin, and sweat pooled. Now that she stood, the moisture trickled down her sides. She pushed her fingers into the blood-red meat she’d taken from the refrigerator and pulled off a fistful.

  Grease splattered and sweat continued to roll down her sides. She felt she’d been sweating since they moved into the place in May. The day they first looked at the two rooms, the space was empty. It seemed larger and was definitely twenty degrees cooler. She’d smiled at the hardwood floors, the same color stain as the floors at home and just as worn. She’d gone to the window and looked out at the sky, grinning at the idea of living on the third floor, so like the attic at Farthest House. Their soon-to-be landlord pointed out there was no central air, but he assured them they were high enough to get a good breeze. Standing at the window that day and looking out at the neighborhood grocery store where she’d ridden up and down the aisles on Papa’s shoulders, Willow picked out his rooftop just two blocks over. “It’s perfect.”

  Derrick also liked the place. The rent was the cheapest they’d found, and he meant to work as many summer hours as he could. Neither of them imagined summer heat and humidity where milk curdled in the refrigerator and sleep was nearly impossible. Their furniture came from the Goodwill: a kitchen table and two straight-back chairs, a bruised red velvet sofa with a matching and equally lumpy velvet chair, a coffee table, and a black and white television. The lava lamp Derrick brought from home. They could sit at the kitchen table and rest their elbows on the back of the sofa.

  Space in the bedroom was just as tight. With their bed and a crib squeezed in, they couldn’t walk between the two pieces and had to enter and leave the bed by crawling in and out at the foot.

  Derrick came from the bedroom dressed in clean shorts and holding his shirt in his hands. He took another beer from the refrigerator, while she halved the hamburgers with her spatula and placed the halves lengthwise in hot dog buns. “You going out?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Which means you are.”

  He looked at her, “You want to come?”

  “Sure. I’ll put on something slinky and we’ll do the town.”

  “You think tonight’s the night?”

  His question made the baby in her womb stir. She reached for the ketchup bottle. “I’ve thought it was the night for the last two weeks. Maybe the baby knows it’s cooler inside, and she’s not coming out until fall. Look.” She put down the ketchup and lifted her shirt to show the slow motion of an unborn heel or knee move
across the top of her stomach.

  Derrick’s brows came together, and he spoke through a mouthful of food. “Who’d ever believe a stomach could stretch that much?”

  She pulled down her shirt. “I’m part Latex. It was in the marriage contract.”

  He finished eating and headed for the door, the shirt he’d hung over the back of his chair in his hand again. “I’m just going to have a few beers.”

  “Where?”

  He held the door open, ready to step out. “In air conditioning. This guy’s house. You don’t know him.”

  “Derrick?”

  He turned back and waited while she stared at him. He’d become even better looking over the summer, tanner, and stronger. His life felt almost alien to hers, and she didn’t know how to ask for what she needed. If she asked him not to go, that would be an excuse to leave because she was a clinging nag who suffocated him. If she said go, that would be an excuse to leave because she didn’t care about him. Either way he was leaving, and either way it was her fault.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  She stood at one of the street-facing windows. Like all the windows in the apartment, this one was raised, but there wasn’t enough breeze to stir the dust on the sill. She lifted damp strands of hair that had fallen out of her ponytail, twisted them up and off her sweaty neck and tucked them back into her rubber band. She’d never lived in a house with the distractions of small chatter, never needed someone in the room with her, but now she was huge and uncomfortable, and that changed things.

  Derrick appeared on the walk below her and headed for his car, his shirt swinging over his shoulders, his arms punching into the sleeves, jubilant and athletic in his motions.

  A flash of bright color at the end of the block, no more than a half-second streak of lemon yellow caught her eye: Mary’s car. Or had the color been mango, maybe gold? She turned back into the room. She was probably letting her imagination get the best of her; the low sun added a golden wash to everything. Mary had been calling though, even if Derrick denied it. Did he suppose her too pregnant to notice how he jumped for the phone, saying nothing beyond, “Hello,” but listening, then after a minute placing the phone back on the cradle? “Wrong number.”

  Willow didn’t know where Mary had been in the months since the wedding, but she was back now, when I look most like Flipper, she thought. Still, she trusted Derrick wasn’t having sex with Mary. They hadn’t been doing it in high school when everyone else was, and when he came home after an evening out, he always insisted on it no matter how long Willow had been asleep or how exhausted she was. At least, he had until a few months ago, but who could blame him now.

  She wouldn’t spend the evening thinking about Derrick, or Mary, and she went to her easel. The unfinished painting of Sabine showed her in profile and looking into a mirror. With the majority of her face seen only in reflection, there was a slight psychic disconnect. Sabine’s body was on the chair, and her sad face in the mirror opposite her.

  To find the place where she spent the afternoon, the breathing place, Willow had only to begin. Inspiration found her when she began dabbing her brush in color, feeling the slight weight of it in her hand, stroking crimson onto the canvas.

  As she worked in the quiet, and I studied the picture of my sister, I couldn’t stop the memories from flooding through me. The Beast’s room, too, had rich brocades, along with silks and satins on the walls and bed, ancient hanging tapestries, and a ceiling painted to look like a garden. I could hear his voice in my ear, “God says you must stop crying.”

  Lying on his bed, quaking, I imagined my body full of birds: rock doves, skylarks, redstarts, and nightjars. When he pushed into me, the birds burst out of my mouth, my ears, my eyes, flying away until only my empty skin remained, silenced, because what was left to make noise?

  Trapped inside by stained-glass windows, the birds flew to the ceiling where trees were never touched by wind, clouds never sent rain, and lifeless flowers had no scent. Reaching that ungarden, the birds flapped and beat against the dry plaster. Feathers dropped. Then, whole birds fell all around, soft thuds beside me on the bed, on the crimson carpets, dying, dying.

  When he was done, The Beast walked to the basin across the room, poured water from a pitcher frosted in gold, and washed himself. “Kneel, Amelie-Anais. Confess your sin to me. Ask God to forgive you.”

  All this I left for Sabine.

  26

  Early afternoon of the next day, with the heat and humidity churning the air and tracking sweat down her body, Willow’s contractions began. Derrick hadn’t come home the night before—a first, though he often came home late—and his steel-toed shoes still sat wide-mouthed in front of her easel. Protective shoes were mandatory on the job site, which meant he was not at work. There was no use calling there, and if she did, and Derrick had called in sick, she’d be ratting on him.

  She paced and cleaned, pouring out the curdled milk in the refrigerator, wiping down the shelves and making the bed. She needed to keep busy, and she kept reminding herself that Derrick’s absence might not be for the worst reason she could imagine, Mary. A whole host of things might have happened.

  Not wanting to time her contractions and frighten herself, she timed her trips to the window, not letting herself go more than once in any ten-minute period. Each time, looking down on the empty street and seeing that Derrick wasn’t there, she felt something pitch inside her. Then pressure built behind her eyes, her hands started shaking, and her mind played old tapes. She needed to be fixed; she was disfigured.

  She swept the floor with a worn broom, dust bunnies coming from the corners, sand and white dust from Derrick’s shoes. Her doctor had told her not to rush to the hospital, overreacting when labor was sure to take several hours. She still had plenty of time for Derrick to screech his car to a stop in front of the apartment building, sprint like a madman up the three flights of stairs, and gather her in his arms.

  The sweepings slid from her dustpan into the trash. She could call Papa or walk over to his house, but then he’d know before Derrick, and he’d be full of shameful questions about Derrick’s whereabouts.

  Late into the previous night, she’d worked on the painting of Sabine, but she took that work off the easel, the still-damp oils sticky, and leaned Prairie’s Coming on the ledge. She chose the name Prairie for her daughter because the name was not listed in The Book of Catholic Saints. This meant it would never be written with a black marker on a square of blue felt and worn for a scapular. Prairie meant place: land and a physical spot on the Earth where one belonged. Prairie was a prayer that the infant’s life be grounded, as Mémé had wished for Willow when she buried Willow’s cord at Farthest House.

  Derrick scoffed at the name, confident the child would be a boy. “Derrick II.”

  Squeezing small dabs of blue and then white onto her palette, she took up her brush, determined to stay at the task until inspiration caught her up, transporting her beyond even the deep skin of art to where time had no meaning and waiting a minute or an hour would be the same thing.

  By ten o’clock, the streetlights below her apartment windows were globes of yellow and lightning bugs blinked like scattered, nocturnal eyes, opening and closing. Long gripping contractions burrowed across her lower back, wrapped around to carve equally deep trails across the front of her stomach. Their strength scared her. She had no choice now but to call Papa, and she held the phone ashamed of what she knew would be his first question.

  “Where’s Derrick? How long you been hurting?”

  She twisted the telephone cord around two fingers. “He called a while ago. I was fine then.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Can you come? I think it’s time.”

  Julian was there. Hurrying up the three flights of stairs before Willow put the phone back and thought to step into her rubber flip-flops and pull the bag she’d packed from under the bed. In his car, she watched his hands gripping the steering wheel, as every half block he asked her
again how she was doing and then answered himself before she could. “Having a baby is a lot safer these days. Hospitals are the best way to go. Yeah, being in the hospital, you’ll be all right.” He slowed the car minimally at a red light and went through. “In a hospital, they’ll have everything you need, good doctors.”

  “I’m scared,” she heard herself admit. “Damn doctors couldn’t save Jeannie and couldn’t fix me.” Where was Derrick?

  He glanced at her and took the next corner so fast she rocked against the door.

  “What if she has my shoulder? What if both her shoulders …”

  “All right, now, that’s enough of that.”

  “We don’t know what—”

  “Don’t Willow.”

  “I’m not six. You can’t scold me for talking.”

  He walked at her side through the wide emergency doors, so close she could slump against him if need be, and into the lobby where one of her shaking hands brushed one of his shaking hands, and the two sets of fingers slid one into the other and held on.

  The night receptionist called a nurse, and Willow answered questions and received a wrist band and was helped into a wheelchair. She and Julian didn’t speak to each other.

  “I’ll take her to maternity,” the nurse told Julian. “You fill out the paperwork here, and I’ll come back for you.”

  At the end of the hall, the nurse turned a corner, and Willow, from her wheelchair, glanced back at her father. She did not take her eyes off his aging face until she could no longer see it.

  The morning sky still held pink, azure, and opal, when first Julian entered the room and then Derrick on his father-in-law’s heels. Julian stood on one side of the bed, asking her how she was doing, while he absentmindedly pestered the coins in his pocket, bouncing change in his hand, only to drop it in the linty bottoms of his pockets and pick it up again. His eyes kept flashing anger at Derrick, who stood on the other side of the bed.