Derrick’s right jaw was scraped and red. He had the beginnings of a black eye and two black stitches in his brow where a nurse first used a tiny razor and shaved a thin, white clearing. He smelled of Mercurochrome and put his face too close to Willow’s, showing her every injury.
Julian had remained at the hospital during Prairie’s birth and came into the room after to grab Willow’s hand and hold his granddaughter, tears filling his eyes. He hadn’t left until Prairie was taken to the nursery and Willow dozed. When she next opened her eyes, the chair he’d occupied was empty. Now she knew he’d gone and found Derrick, and there’d been a reason to hit him. She wanted to throw back the sheets, get on her knees, and blacken Derrick’s other eye.
At the same time, she was exhausted, and her body felt full of a dreamy lightness. The birth was over, and her body reclaimed. Most importantly, Prairie was beautiful. Her soft, pink back, smaller even than Willow’s hand, was smooth and symmetrical. With so much to be thankful for, couldn’t she forgive Derrick, pretend his absence hardly mattered? She wanted to tell Papa to stop, don’t ruin the morning, act like a woman and deny you’re in pain, but she couldn’t shut out his anger. His thoughts, full of rage, threw a red arc over her to Derrick.
“Prairie is beautiful,” she said, a peace offering to the room.
Derrick’s head bobbed too much in agreement, proving he hadn’t yet walked down to the nursery. He sputtered for words, an easy joviality. “We thought it was going to be a boy, didn’t we?”
“Yes, she is,” Julian said, but his emotions roiled with a far different concern. These slammed into Willow, and she tried to shut them out, but couldn’t. You bastard, his mind was wild. You don’t deserve to be a father. She could have died having your baby!
Willow’s fingertips were white on the sides of the mattress she clutched. She felt herself dropping through the floor of the room and on through floor after floor of the hospital, dropping like some hapless Alice into another world. She saw it then. Papa walked through the door of the Wolfe house. Mrs. Wolfe gasped at the sight of a stranger and then recognized him. Grief and acceptance pulled her face and sent her back to the kitchen where she’d been sitting at the table, a cocktail in her hands, her eyes staring straight ahead. Her actions telling Papa both that Mr. Wolfe was not home and that his instincts were correct.
“You all right?” Julian asked Willow, his gaze washing back and over her face. “She’s a beautiful baby.”
Willow’s breath was ice, and the frigid air moving in and out of her lungs painful. She couldn’t immediately unpack everything she’d seen in Papa’s mind. There was too much shocking information. She’d have to break it into pieces, just as she did any too-heavy weight. She wanted them both gone: Derrick for being with Mary, and Papa for making her see it.
“You better rest,” Julian said, his eyes narrowing with concern. When she failed even to nod, he took up her hand. “I’m sending in a nurse. Prairie is beautiful, and you’re fine. That’s all that matters.”
She wanted to reach for him, to have him hold her, and take her back to when they watched football games on television, threw a ball in the backyard, and he made all boogeymen go away.
Eyeing Derrick, he nodded at the door, and the two started out, single file again, Papa in the rear.
Kill him! Willow’s mind shouted. I wish he was dead!
Julian hesitated, glanced back with questioning eyes, winked, and the two left.
She couldn’t close her eyes against what she’d seen through his. How he took the stairs in Mary’s house, threw open the only closed door on the second floor, hit the light switch, saw Mary and Derrick on the bed scrambling apart, both naked, Derrick jumping to his feet to stand beside the bed, his low and frantic, “Fuck, fuck,” Mary wailing and reaching out for some covering she didn’t find because both the blanket and sheet were on the floor, Mary’s hands on her chest, slapping as though a fire still raged there, trying to cover up every inch at once, not cupping her breasts to hide them, the dark areolas of her nipples burned and scarred away, only the exposure of her scars mattering, not her blond pubis, not being caught in bed with Derrick, only trying to hide the white froth of scars that puckered her skin from armpit to armpit and from her throat halfway to her navel.
Lying in her hospital bed, Willow struggled not to make any noise that would alarm the nurses. She turned on her side, and even catching the scent of the bleached and disinfected sheets, she wiped her eyes and nose with the hem of the pillowcase. Mary’s burns had likely happened in first grade when the class cut and glued the black paper chain and prayed endless rosaries. The scars explained why Mary needed to run her fingers around the ridge of Willow’s bone—all the time keeping her own larger disfigurement hidden. The scars explained her turtlenecks and mandarin collars, her anger over the Pandora painting with its bare chest visible through gossamer, her visits after Christmas dances and proms when other couples were crowding eight to a motel room, shedding tuxes and dresses and four to a bed, passing out rubbers and shots of whiskey.
“Willow?”
Rolled in a ball, she wiped her face again on the pillowcase, a wet, slick hem now, and looked out at the nurse holding Prairie. “It’s not quite feeding time, but your dad asked me to bring her in for you.”
Willow held out her arms.
In the evening, Papa and Derrick stepped back into the room. The purple around Derrick’s eye had deepened, the bruising reaching down onto his cheek, the bridge of his nose was newly swollen and knotty, and Papa’s right hand was wrapped in an ace bandage. They’d fought again, and the hatred that raged between them earlier in the day was still cold and bitter, but also changed.
She hated that they’d reached even this frigid resolution, and the rest of what happened the previous evening flooded over her: Mary screaming at Papa, “Don’t look at me you fucking pig!” Derrick’s eyes droopy and slow, looking at Mary, wincing at the sight of her chest in the light, turning back to Julian, and only then looking down at his own nakedness, covering himself with his hands, Mary’s hysteria increasing, her rolling over, her white buttocks in full view, “Get the fuck out of here!” Papa stepping up to Derrick, his fist rising, Derrick’s head snapping back with the hit, and Mary wailing, “I’ll kill you for this, you fucking pig.” Papa’s eyes lifting to White Mask hanging on the wall above the bed.
27
Stepping back into the apartment, this time with Prairie in her arms, things at first looked the same to Willow: cramped space with a sagging sofa, a lava lamp with its constant regurgitation, and oppressive heat muscling in from the outdoors, the hallway, and up through the two lower floors.
Julian and Derrick followed her in, neither suspecting she knew what had happened. She wondered just how long Papa planned to tail Derrick, keep him out of trouble, and carry the secret of Derrick’s betraying them both. Secrets, however, were Papa’s forte.
Both men angered her, and she went into the bedroom with Prairie. At least she had her baby home, and no nurse would be walking in to take the infant back to the nursery. Curled on the bed, she studied Prairie’s tiny dark lashes against her translucent skin, her soft auburn hair already half an inch long, her bit of upturned nose, and her lips the color of innocence. She tucked one hand beneath Prairie’s perfectly flat back, closed her eyes, and tried to rest.
The apartment looked the same as she passed through, hadn’t it? Her eyes opened. The easel shelf was empty. The painting with the blue wash and infant, Prairie’s Coming, was gone.
She threw open the bedroom door. Julian stood at one of the windows. Derrick sat on the sofa staring straight ahead, and the feeling in the room was moratorium rather than celebratory. “Derrick, where’s my picture?”
He jumped, his face both dull and surprised, and he looked first at Julian, then around the room. Was he, Willow wondered, looking for other proofs that Mary had been there: a shoe, maybe a bra he hadn’t tucked away?
“What picture?” Julian asked.
<
br /> She wanted to scream at him, too. She wouldn’t have known anything if he hadn’t gone looking for Derrick. He ought to go home and mind his own business. She couldn’t tell him that—how insane. Who didn’t know facing the truth was better than living a lie? But this truth threatened to buckle her knees. “Never mind,” she managed, turning back for the bedroom and Prairie. Now that Mary had touched it, she didn’t want the painting back.
A week passed in a blur of nursing and sleeping. Merciful sleep that invaded Willow’s bones and blood and head, keeping some part of her mind in lockdown, insisting on it. A week in which she did no painting and didn’t move from the bed but to use the bathroom or go to the refrigerator, forcing herself to nibble on food so that her body would continue producing milk for Prairie.
She sat in her bed now, leaning against the headboard, pillows behind her back, Prairie in her arms and nursing, a tugging sensation that flooded Willow’s blue-veined breast. She felt shaky and kept glancing at the doorway. Rain had fallen most of the night, but she’d left the bedroom window open, unable to bear shutting out the sound and the cooler, clean air that helped to rid the room of the faint smell of dirty diapers and grief. The old and porous wooden sill was swollen with water, and on her last trip to the bathroom, she opened the closet, grabbed up an armload of Derrick’s clothes, hangers and all, and dumped them in front of the window to keep the rain from flooding the room and dripping down on the tenants below. Derrick, already gone for two hours, was hardly pouring cement in the rain.
She stroked Prairie’s cheek and cupped her hand protectively over the infant’s head. She glanced again at the doorway, still empty. In the middle of the night, with Derrick snoring on the sofa, she fed Prairie and was returning from the bathroom when she stepped into the bedroom and saw the dark form lying on her bed—an arm through the bars of the crib, a shadowy hand on her infant’s back. She gasped and took a step back, her heart racing. The apparition disappeared. She thought to run, and for one brief second to wake Derrick for help. Instead, she gathered her courage and crawled very slowly up from the foot of the bed, putting her hand through the crib slats as she’d done so often that week—a hand needing to rest on Prairie and feel Prairie’s breathing—her own body taking up the space where she’d seen the darkness.
The rain increased as Prairie finished and burped on Willow’s shoulder. She’d sleep now for a couple of hours, but Willow couldn’t, not another day of lying there, her mind chewing on the fat of how she’d been betrayed. She needed to be up, if not painting, then at least moving, even if only to kick over chairs and punch pillows.
In the main room, her eyes avoided the sofa where Derrick spent the last week of nights. She had no appetite, but again, there was the responsibility to eat for Prairie. Hopefully, the milk Papa brought the night before was still cool and smelled like milk instead of the cow. Taking a glass from the cupboard, she poured, but her hand began to shake when she sensed otherness. First visible only out of the corner of one eye, she saw it beside the sofa: a bleak haze. Milk splashed onto her feet. The apparition looked down at the pillow where the imprint of Derrick’s head remained.
“He’s not staying,” Willow’s voice was a whisper, but the Poe-like phantom had already vanished. For some time, Willow sat at the table, stared out at the rain, and thought of a movie she had once seen—the ghosts of dead soldiers walking up and down the battlefield where they’d died, unable to leave the horror, stuck in the memory of the worst thing that ever happened to them. But she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t.
Later in the shower, she let the water drum over her skin, flatten her hair to dark oil down her back, and create a tunnel of sound that mixed with the noise of the storm’s increasing rancor. Every few minutes, she listened for Prairie and then turned the overhead rush back on.
How like Julian she seemed to me, letting the water wash her and then batter her.
When finally her fingers and toes had puckered, she turned off the water for the final time. She stood stock-still, knowing the shadow waited for her behind the curtain. She could feel its nearness, loathsome and needing her. She pushed back the plastic, heavy with hard water stains, the curtain rings scratching along the aluminum rod. The shadow sat on the closed toilet lid, its legs drawn up.
Water ran off Willow’s breasts, over her spongy belly, and from her kneecaps. She stared, less afraid this time. Derrick would never touch her again, but she hadn’t told him to leave because doing so would free him to go to Mary, where he’d be happy. As long as he slept on the sofa, with Papa visiting every evening to be sure he was home—under the guise of wanting to hold Prairie—Derrick was miserable. Miserable. She hadn’t even told him she knew he’d been with Mary because bringing up that bit of news would also force a showdown guaranteed to end in his leaving and going to her. So he remained, not because there was any hope for them, but because she fed more on her anger than she did on milk, vegetables, and protein. All the while, she passed her loathing of him into her breast milk, making it worse than anything in the refrigerator, feeding Prairie swill.
The shadow, dark and sluggish, passed through the steamy air and disappeared.
Willow clutched a towel to herself. She knew the figure was a projection of her mind, very real emotion in psychic form. She was at a crossroads. She could fight to reclaim a life, or she could let the shadowbeing with its slow vibration move permanently into the apartment, into her life, and into her heart until she forgot how to live without envy and hatred. The darkness had already spent over a week passing on torpid sleep, keeping Willow’s thoughts miserly and too dull for honesty. How long was she willing to live off anger—justified as it was? How long would she let bitterness so consume her that it followed her like a specter?
Over the next two days, the shadow spent more time sitting on chairs, staring out windows, and refusing to let Willow near the easel. With each sighting, Willow felt torn. She still wanted her grief, had earned her grief. She’d been wronged, and other than Papa’s watching him, Derrick wasn’t suffering. Maybe he’d even confessed to Father Steinhouse, and for ten Our Fathers bartered an absolution.
Watching her, I wondered, was I her guardian, as I fancied myself, or was I there to learn from her? I was likely too young to save Sabine, but had I released my shadow being, my resentments toward my mother and The Beast, would I have found the sight necessary to prevent what happened those many years later?
The next day, Willow brought Prairie out of the bedroom. She bathed her, admiring the tiny body, the loose skin on her knees, the down of her hair, and especially the grace of her perfect, ivory shoulders. When Prairie slept, Willow painted.
Late that afternoon, she sat on the sofa holding Prairie. She waited for Derrick, even letting him go to the refrigerator for a beer. Earlier, she thought to wait for July to end, not wanting Derrick’s leaving to be in the same month as Prairie’s birth, the way her own birthday fell on the day Jeannie died, the worst day in Papa’s life. Every day Derrick stayed though, the shadowbeing also stayed, and she healed less than she would without him.
“Pack your things and go,” she said. He had come to her for the sex Mary wasn’t giving him. He figured he’d settle for the bicycle with the bent wheel and work his way up. “If you hurry, you’ll be out of here before Papa arrives.”
Derrick stood fixed beside the refrigerator. The motor clicked on.
“I don’t care if you go to Mary’s bed,” Willow said. She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Yeah, I know about your little screw fest. Just go. I need you gone so I can quit haunting myself.” All day she’d considered how she’d only be divorcing her fantasies of what they could be together. She had no actual memories of them that she’d re-live with longing. “Prairie doesn’t deserve to live with how much I hate you.”
He took a long drink of his beer. “What about your old man?”
Not, what about us? Or what about Prairie? “Well, Derrick, if some night he steps up to your bed, nestles his gun barrel in
your ear, and pulls the trigger, you’ve been warned.”
“Nice Willow. That’s real nice talk.”
“You know what ex-cops are like.” She knew what Derrick wanted: an angry scene he could hold up over his blame and use for the reason they split. He needed something he could tell his dad that would keep the old man in his corner and his inheritance safe.
His belongings fit in a 48-count Pampers box and two soggy pillowcases. He stopped at the door, looking over the apartment. “I think I’ve got everything.”
Willow snuggled Prairie closer and whispered, not wanting Prairie to hear the hiss of her anger. “You’re not sticking me with that lava lamp.”
He set the box and pillowcases in the hall, came back and picked up the lamp. “I thought you liked the colors.”
“That’s not color.” Her gaze leveled on him. “It’s upchuck. I’ll keep myself supplied with color.”
He hesitated a second time at the door. “Remember, this is all your idea.”
“Get the hell—”
“I’m going. It’s just,” another long pause followed, his throat full of hesitation, “we thought for sure it would be a boy.”
Willow’s breath felt sucked from her lungs. Shock kept her mute, able only to say, “Destroy the picture Mary stole. I don’t want her, or you, looking at anything having to do with Prairie.” He started to shake his head, saying Mary didn’t have it, but she stopped him. “Do it Derrick.”
He closed the door, and she heard him struggling with his load down the stairs. They’d shared nothing: no books, no hobbies, no souvenirs, not even something as simple as a bauble won together at the state fair. He hadn’t held up a single item and wondered which one of them it most belonged to. His trashy lamp didn’t count. Prairie was the one precious thing they shared, and he’d not once held her. He hadn’t even opened her tiny hand and let her wrap her fingers around one of his. She kissed Prairie’s forehead, Derrick’s words ripping through her: We thought for sure it would be a boy.
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