by Jac Jemc
“Last night, I started to have some cramping, but I assumed it was because I’ve been under a lot of stress.”
“Okay.” She angles in the speculum and she is gentle and the pain is less severe and she shines a light inside and says, “Okay, well, it does appear that your cervix is bruised. Have you had any trauma in that region recently? Vigorous activity?” She raises her eyebrows, matter-of-fact.
I tell her no. I flash to falling on the stairs and then in the cave, but it doesn’t seem as if the impact could have rippled so deep.
“I think we’ll perform an ultrasound then, so we can figure out what’s causing this. Stay here, and we’ll get everything set up.”
I feel as if I should be worried, as if I should get my priorities straight and fear for my life, but I feel numb, sure now that I know where this internal bruise has come from, like all the others: it’s that house that’s been sinking into me, farther and farther. I want to suggest this, but I want her to give me another answer.
A nurse arrives and keeps a hand clamped on the back of my gown as she accompanies me to the next room.
As I lie on the table, they rub the jelly onto my pelvis and examine the screen and zoom in and point to different areas. I look away and notice how delicate the doctor’s ankles are in her kitten-heel pumps. I look up when she tells me they see a cyst that’s burst. The blood broken free of its vessels has spread and they tell me it might have happened this morning, and that the tenderness will clear up in a couple of days and they give me a prescription for pain medication to take sparingly as needed.
The doctor says they’ll be doing some tests to determine the cause of the cyst and the severity. “We can do a full blood workup for you in the next few days. Is there someone I can call to take you home?”
I think carefully and give them Connie’s number.
55
“MY GOD,” I say when I find Julie at home, in bed. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“There was no rush. You’d get home eventually.”
I fume inside. It’s not the right response, though. I know that. “What can I get you?”
She is already falling asleep again.
I make a thermos of tea. I fill her water glass. I place these next to the bed beside the bottle of pain medication. I watch her for a while. I go downstairs. I scan through channels. I turn the TV off. I pull on my boots and head out the back door. There is no opening between the trees at the back of the yard tonight. I bend a few around me. They swerve as if they were made of gum and rubber. They don’t fall. The forest’s density feels more like a jungle now. I shove and form doorways for myself. I wonder where the chirps are coming from. It doesn’t seem as if there could be room enough for birds. Their vacant, avian bones shouldn’t be strong enough to form space in the tight weave of branches.
When the beach is in my sight, I feel a shove. I fall forward onto the sand. The trees have pushed me out. They’ve pulled themselves back together again. I peer into the water. The ripples show eyes staring back up at me. When I focus, the vision is gone.
I think, You should be there if she needs you. I think, This is selfish. Turn around. Your wife is in pain. You are running from it. I fixate on the pus and tissue that layered itself inside her. I feel my breath start to leave me. I try to think of something else. The feed of my thoughts, though, has been jump-started. I recognize the bright terror coursing through me. Every minute renders me closer to pitch-darkness. I want to break the seal into the next day. I want to forget what is happening now. I know it isn’t that easy. I want to believe time has already passed. I want to reason my way through it. I am overcome. The tide is fast approaching.
I let it have me. The brackish water reaches over me. Under the waves, without my breath, I find a tinted version of myself.
I can’t tell where my skin stops. I can’t tell where the night begins. I gasp for air. I cannot find it.
56
THE PAIN HAS gotten worse, but the doctor warned of this. I hoist myself out of bed to look for James. The wallpaper of the hallway undulates with a pattern I don’t remember and the floor pulses quietly beneath my feet and the air frays with blips at a frequency I can’t hear, but I tell myself that is just my head pounding. I trick open my robe to let some air in and feel suddenly warm and endangered and consider lying down in the hallway, but push forward.
I take one stair at a time, regarding the banister with expectation, waiting for everything to start reacting: any second, this world will come alive like some Fantasia playing out in my mind. I arrive at new instincts: to skip the last three stairs and jump down, to touch every door handle as if there might be a fire on the other side. I head toward the picture window, looking out at the backyard, and what I see diffuses my boldness. The trees have stretched over the lawn, nearer, almost to the back door, throbbing forward and back, and beyond that, even through the density of the forest, I can see the water struggling wide and tall through the trunks, closer than it’s ever been, and all those cranky birds silence themselves, and I should be afraid, but I am so happy at the prospect of being washed away.
I take a deep breath and I swear I can feel my blood pick up oxygen and carry it through me, delivering questions that blink rapidly behind my eyes like closed captions.
I settle my body onto the cool linoleum and wait.
57
ROLLING IN THE tide’s lace, I sputter awake. I cough up sand and burning water. I trek home, soaked through.
Inside the back door, Julie breathes deeply on the floor. I think, Again? Patterns are developing.
I wake her. I expect her to be disoriented. She isn’t. She grabs my arm to stand. She feels my wet sleeve. “Where were you?”
I skip the response. “Can you make it upstairs? I can carry you.”
“No, no. I can manage.” She moves slowly, off-kilter. She recovers from having woken up on the floor. She uses one hand to pull the other wrist over her head and then swaps sides. At the stairs, she lets out a yawn loud enough to sound like a cry. “That felt good.”
I follow close behind her. I am ready to catch her if she loses her balance. She turns at the top of the stairs. She doesn’t flip the light on in our room. I don’t either. I drop my wet clothes in a pile below the drawings on the wall. I join her.
“Talk to me.”
She does. We are both so tired and messy. Our brains have become disorganized with exhaustion.
“The woods, are they still so close?” she asks. I am confused. “Look out the window.”
I pull myself up in bed. I gaze out the back window. There is nothing to find. “Tell me more.”
“When I woke up, the forest was marching closer to the house, and the water was coming through the trees and it all felt unreal.”
“The waves were big tonight, but not that big, Julie.” I wait for her to ask me why I am wet. I wait for her to inquire about my well-being. I lie down again. I pull Julie to me. I hope to transfer the questions I want to be asked into her. I hope they permeate from my open pores into hers.
58
WE DOZE POORLY, and when we rouse ourselves, it feels like something else. Without the comparison to sleep, waking doesn’t feel like much at all.
I still feel tender, but I head downstairs to make breakfast: eggs and bacon and hash browns. James emerges to the smells and we eat as if we’ve gone without for days. I feel bolstered, as if I want to take something on. A plan forms quickly in my head and I pose it for James. “I want to return to the cave. Now. I feel good. I want to take the pictures of the walls.”
James is skeptical, but he doesn’t fight me. I dress with urgency, wincing as I lift my arms to put on a shirt, and I realize I need to hide my pain from James or he will force me to stay put.
The air is wet with summer humidity, and the ground gives soggily beneath our feet. I look at James as if to say, See? The waves reached this far. My feet work hard to lift themselves up from the soft mud, and I feel a sharp pain in my hips each time I piv
ot forward, but I continue.
“Are you sure you’re well enough to do this?”
“I’ll be fine,” I say, determined and wanting to be done already.
After we’ve undergone the trial of working our way through the mud, the sand shapes itself into a mold for our strides. We quicken as we approach the rocky hill, and then the beach leads into the solid boulders. The anticipation of reaching the cave has won out, and I no longer register the pain pulsing through my belly. I have trouble finding a root or rock to clutch and haul myself up the final stretch, but I grip the rough stone and push off with my right leg and raise the left as high as I can to reach the ground in front of the cave. I stand and breathe for a moment as James completes his ascent close behind me, and when I look inside, the ache returns to my gut, racking through.
59
NOTHING. NOT WHAT I remember from my dream. Not what Julie saw when she found the neighbor here. We make our way to the back of the cave. The walls gape and drip. Blank. A clog in our sight.
Julie asks, “Where could all of that writing have gone?”
In the pauses, I stifle my worries. Maybe I did only dream what I saw. Maybe Julie’s mind made up a truth to affirm what I’d told her. Maybe she turned abstract shadows on the wall into some sort of language. Something imaginary can stick. Something false can feel real.
“The waves,” Julie says, “they must have washed it all away.”
I feel these words like a rusty wire through my veins. They rascal through. I know this impression of turning over inside myself. I know how it feels to speak a lie to make it sound more true.
60
WHEN I RETURN to work, Connie takes me to lunch. I fill her in. I have an idea of how she can help us, and I am prepared to ask for it.
I tell her everything she needs to know, sidestepping the most extreme parts, but touching on the basics: the cave, the missing neighbor, the police. “I mean, I know what this looks like. If it wasn’t clear before, I’ve certainly lost it now, right?”
“I think you’re a strong lady. I mean, I ran away when I thought you were being stubborn, and look at all you stick around for. You’re putting up with a lot of weird-ass shit.”
I exhale. “I know. But I can’t run because at least some of it is me. I have to admit that, but I’m starting to doubt myself. Is the house haunted? Or am I imagining things? Am I trying to manufacture some sort of tipping point so we can leave?”
“I don’t know, but you and James are welcome to come stay with me. Anytime. Come take a break and see how things go.”
This invitation sends an optimistic buzz through me; she has offered without my having to ask. “Really? We might take you up on that. I would love to feel normal again.”
“The perils of being a homeowner, huh?”
“My God, is that all it is?” I drain my beer.
“A second?”
I cock my head as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Connie laughs. “I believe you, Julie. I didn’t want to, but I do.”
That’s really the most I could ask from anyone: to hear someone say that I count more in her mind than logic. But I need to force myself out of thinking this is something so extraordinary that it merits that sort of attention. I roll my eyes. “Don’t let me take you down with me.”
61
I STOP AT the grocery store that night, and the checkout lady recognizes me. “That neighbor of yers is off missin’, huh?”
I swallow hard, a hockey puck through a drinking straw. “I guess so.” I try to force worry and sympathy into my voice. I have lost track of my concern for Rolf and turned it on myself.
“Must be Alz-hammers.” Her eyebrows are drawn on at a slant today, stopping short of curving down in the middle, so she has an expression of concern even though the rest of her face remains blank. “Shame that someone wasn’t takin’ care of him. Now he’s gone and got himself lost.”
I inhale, afraid to say more.
“Did he seem confused to yah?” She scans the bagels, coffee, frozen fish fillets, and glances up at me.
I allow my head the slimmest pivot right, then left.
“That’s how they say it goes: all there one minute, vanished in the maze of yer mind the next. It’s hard to understand it, but I guess that’s the point.”
“If the point is that it’s pointless,” I mumble, and slide my card.
She frowns and looks away. “Well, anyway, nice to see yah. I’ll say a prayer for yer neighbor. Take care now.”
I thank her and drive the dark road home, the canopy of trees having grown so dense with the summer rain it’s like driving through a tunnel. I allow myself to consider the possibility that Rolf had lost control of his mind before he lost himself to the woods or the water or wherever he might be. Even if this was true, I could still see a logic to his world, enough of a story that I could almost grab hold of it and imagine what filled the gaps.
Coming in the front door, I eye the photo of my stepmother as a little girl on the wall and then another of my step-grandmother as a teen right next to it, stained, blotched bright, as if the light is in the viewer’s eyes, like when you look at a person haloed against the sun and you can only see their faulty edges burned away by the shine.
When her mother died, I helped Carol clean out the house and found these photos in a box. I asked her if I could have them. “Sure,” she said. “They’re all muddled with water damage and fading. What would I do with them?”
“I’ll take them, then.” I tried not to feel judged.
I stand and watch as that stain shifts around the grandmother I have no claim to, her chin and left cheek disappearing to the burst, then surfacing again, the blemish hiding her other half.
“James, how can a stain move around a picture?”
He tilts his head.
“James, Connie offered for us to stay with her for a while to get away from here and see how we feel.”
James approaches the idea carefully. I watch him roll it around. “Yes,” he says. “Let’s try it.”
62
“PLEASE, PLEASE. Come in!” Connie wraps her arms around Julie. When they let go, there’s a moment of hesitation. Connie and I half hug. I inhale a few of her curls, but don’t acknowledge it. We release quickly. “I put new sheets on the bed in the guest room for you. You can have the bathroom next to it all to yourselves. Anything in the fridge? Yours! Don’t fuck up my DVR, though, okay? Welcome!”
We laugh. Connie invites us into the kitchen. She’s set out bagels, muffins, and fresh coffee. “Jeez, Connie, you’re not hosting a B and B here. You didn’t need to go to any trouble. This is too much.”
“It’s no trouble at all. I’ll be right back!” She disappears upstairs.
“This is really nice of her,” I say to Julie. “I was convinced she hated me. I wasn’t expecting this.”
Julie looks at me a little bewildered. “Me neither. And she doesn’t hate you; it’s just that she can’t see the full picture. She’s protective of me.”
I try not to feel defensive. “This blueberry muffin is mine.” I pour myself a cup of coffee.
Connie returns. “So, what’s on the docket? Should we sit on the back porch? It’s a beautiful day!”
“You don’t need to entertain us, Connie. I’m just going to read my book,” I say.
“Fine. Miss out on all the fun. What do you think, Julie: patio?” I notice the way the tip of Connie’s nose moves, ever so slightly, as she talks. When she closes her mouth, her nose pulls down a bit, like a bunny, sniffing.
Julie smiles sheepishly. “I know it’s early, but I could use a drink.”
“Eleven a.m. is five o’clock somewhere! You’re my kind of lady.” Connie stands up from her chair and goes to the corner cabinet. She pulls out a bottle of tequila. “How about some agua fresca? I have fresh watermelon in the fridge.”
The offer is too good to pass up. “I’m in,” I say.
Connie pours me a drink and I carry
my book outside to read. I fail. Julie and Connie take over the silence with layer on layer of jokes and gossip.
They argue about some elaborate card trick they remember from a television special they watched in their dorm room. Connie produces a deck of cards. Her attempt at the trick fails again and again. I’m convinced I can pull it off. I can’t. Nothing has ever been funnier. We shift to several hands of gin rummy. Then we play a round of a more violent game I’ve never heard of. I never quite wrap my mind around the rules. Connie wins. When we look up, the sun is already descending into a pink smear at the tree line.
“How are we at the end of this day already?” Julie asks. It has been so long since time has passed quickly and easily.
We decide to walk the mile to dinner. We’ll sober up while we stroll. We’ll fill ourselves with tacos for the walk home. “Are there actually sidewalks all the way there?” I ask.
“Yes. This place is in that strip mall with the urgent-care clinic and the bakery. I walked over there this morning actually.”
Julie and I disappear to change our clothes. Julie slips on a dress amplified by a floral print. “How do I look?”
“Like a svelte garden,” I say. I know she’ll like that.
“How do you feel?”
“Mostly, I feel those drinks. They feel terrific. You?”
“Yes, it seems right to be away from that place.”