Following, for your enjoyment, is the original version of “The Baby,” lurid ending and all.
I hope you enjoy it in a whole different way—and learn something, as I did, about the difference between long short stories and novels.
—Al Sarrantonio
ONE
“I’m asleep, Jack.”
Annoyed: his cold hands on her at one in the morning, she could see the illuminated clock face now that her eyes were open, hear his breathing, the catch in it that would make him snore later. Even facing away from him, she could smell the beer on his breath.
“I promised—”
“I don’t give a shit at this point,” she snapped, still curled up in a fetal position, legs pulled up, defensive, half-asleep. “You were supposed to come home five hours ago. We were going to try tonight. But instead you went out beering with your moron friends. Don’t deny it, Jack—”
She gasped, not letting him hear it as he slid into the bed behind her, naked she could tell, his hands ice cold but soft as they had always been when he had first caught her eye, this boy of a man with the lock of hair in front that wouldn’t stay put, and the violet eyes and the crooked smile. Her heart had melted the first time he looked at her. Melted like the saints and the nuns could not articulate, melted like time stood still and the moon froze solid in the sky and she knew her life was changed forever. His mouth on her later that first time and a kiss unlike any she had dreamed about, two mouths becoming one and then, much later, after fumbling and some laughing, two bodies becoming one. This was nothing like the fairy tales, or the dirty books, or the cable channels only for women where everything was clean and bland with guitar or piano music and then the commercials. This was magic that no one could write or sing or tell you about in the bleachers behind the soccer field when you shared a cigarette with your friends and felt the first chill of autumn blowing up under your Catholic skirt like Marilyn Monroe’s in that movie with the sidewalk grating. What the hell were the nuns thinking? Plaid skirts that looked like nothing but delayed sin, in navy knee socks and those black shoes shined to mirrors that made boys look up at your panties—
“Jack, at least let me turn around!” she gasped, surprised at his ardor which was never lacking.
And then turning in the dark to meet his lips and hands and her nightgown pulled up over her head and the panting and the arched back and then three wonderful bit-lip screams while he tasted her nipples and nipped her neck once and then again as he always did, little bites that left pale red marks and she had to wear a turtleneck for two days.
The nuns couldn’t change you but they could make you blush at your own body still—
And then it was over. He ran his hand through her short hair and whispered, “I promised,” and then added, which made her heart flutter, “a baby,” and she murmured, sleepy, and then rolled over away from him again, naked, too tired to pull on the flannel, and returned to sleep.
TWO
Then:
Six hours later in the police station in shock, with her sister Janet with the pinched look and Baby Charlie asleep in the stroller behind her.
Detective Grant: he looked old, tobacco stains on his teeth and the index and middle fingers of his right hand. A sot’s nose, webwork of tiny broken veins. But the eyes: they were hooded in the shadow of their sockets but wary as a hawk’s. He was definitely paying attention.
He had a notebook out and a pencil, and kept looking from the pad to her and back again.
“Mrs. Carlin, let me make sure I have this right.” He flipped back a couple of pages and read to himself, lips moving silently. Then the eyes were on her. “You say your husband came home at one o’clock this morning?”
She nodded, and Janet, beside her, shifted in her chair, plastic seated, uncomfortable. “Only tell him what you want to, Marianne.”
Detective Grant ignored Janet. Those eyes of his, still waiting . . .
“Yes,” Marianne said. “He . . . woke me up when he came in. I was asleep facing the clock. I’m sure it was one.”
“And he was gone when the phone woke you up an hour later, at two o’clock?”
“That’s right.”
Cold. She felt so cold and numb and dead.
The eyes looked down at the notebook, then back at her. “You’re sure of this?”
She hesitated, looked at the floor. Embarrassed. “We . . . made love when he came home. Then I went back to sleep.”
The eyes. But she said: “I’m sure it was one o’clock when he came home!”
“Don’t say another damn thing, Marianne,” Janet snapped. Baby Charlie snuffled in the stroller behind her, then settled back into sleep. “We’ll get a lawyer. I’ll call Chuck now. He’ll know what to do.”
She made to get up, huffing her pregnant belly out of the chair, but now Grant turned to her. “Mrs. Larson, I’m just asking your sister some questions. This isn’t an interrogation and I’m certainly not charging her with anything. I’m just getting the time line straight in my mind.”
Janet glared down at him across the desk. “Then why are we in an interrogation room? I know that’s what this is. I watch TV.”
Grant leaned back in his chair. “As I told you, I thought it would be more comfortable, especially since they’re painting the area where my desk is today. I didn’t want you to have to inhale those fumes . . .”
“So you said,” Janet said. She was studying the far wall, a mirror, and walked toward it. “There anybody behind there? Like I said, I watch TV—”
“No, there isn’t,” Grant said, trying to hide his impatience. “Though you’re right, it is a two-way mirror.”
Before Janet could say it, Grant heaved himself out of his chair. “Let me show you.” He walked briskly past Janet to a door beside the mirror and held it open for her. “Have a look.”
Janet peered in, noting the short, empty hallway, the view into the room through the visible part of the twoway mirror. “Just like television,” she said.
Grant waited for her to have her look, then waited for her to return to her seat before reclaiming his own. As Janet sat down with an “Ooof,” she commented: “If this was a real interrogation, you’d offer us a Coke or coffee.”
Grant looked up from his notebook. “Would you like something?” he asked.
Janet shook her head. “That’s all right. We won’t be much longer, will we?”
“We’re almost done.” The detective studied his notebook and then leaned across the desk to face Marianne again. “You’re absolutely positive about the time?”
Marianne nodded. She barely heard him, Jack on the table, under the sheet, the cold room, colder than his hands had been, he was so white, albino white except for the bruises. The side of his chest that looked like it had been crushed, purple, broken, worse than the veins on Detective Grant’s nose, almost black. They wouldn’t show her anything lower, his legs cocked at an odd angle under the sheet.
Baby Charlie awoke with a squeak, as if thrown out of a dream, and abruptly began to cry. Janet instantly heaved herself back out of the chair and fumbled with a blue bag that hung from the back of the stroller. She produced a half-filled bottle which she thrust at the child without looking at him.
The room was quiet again.
“The reason I ask . . .” Grant began, and then added to the silence in the room.
“You’ve asked her twelve times,” Janet said bluntly.
Grant looked at his notebook and then flipped it closed. “I talked to the driver who hit Mr. Carlin myself. We gave him a Breathalyzer test, which he failed at three o’clock this morning, and a blood test, which he also failed. He’s in custody now. He drove home after his car struck your husband, Mrs. Carlin, and he went to bed. We picked him up at his house. He was so drunk he didn’t remember the accident. There were two eyewitnesses who saw the accident, both of them friends of your husband, and one of them, Petee Wilkins, gave us a partial license plate number. A couple of pedestrians also saw it from farthe
r away . . .”
Marianne didn’t want to hear, she was so tired, so frozen in time, this wasn’t happening. His body so white, the black-and-blue on his side and they wouldn’t let her see the rest, “I promised,” he’d said, “a baby . . .”
“. . . everyonewe talked to,” Detective Grant was saying, “was sure your husband was killed last night in front of Loughran’s Bar at just before one o’clock in the morning . . .”
THREE
How many days?
She had no idea. Whatever they had given her worked too well. The wake, the funeral, the burial, all of it had been surrounded in fuzzy light. She felt as if she was packed in cotton candy. Janet, thank God, had acted like a commander in chief, leading her like a zombie, telling her when to sit, to stand, everyone else in the church on their feet and she was immobile, sitting down, staring at anything but the coffin. And then a soft tug, the hissed, “Get up, Marianne, for heaven’s sake,” and then a push here, a pull there, and then, finally, the empty house and even Janet gone.
Only the pills left.
How many days?
It was sunny out, Indian summer. It had been raining the day of the funeral. At least one day, then. Had the burial been on a Monday or Tuesday? She didn’t remember.
She sat up in bed, already claiming the middle, and groaned. She was staring at the red numbers of the alarm clock, staring at them, the bottle of pills next to the numbers—
With a howl of pain she lashed out with her left hand, knocked the pills and the clock to the floor.
“Dammit!”
She sobbed, and kept crying, hands balled into fists against her eyes, rolling over onto her side of the bed and curling up against herself as she had that night.
“Jack, Jack . . .”
She opened her eyes and saw the blank face of the broken clock radio staring at her, the red numerals extinguished.
“Oh God, oh God . . .”
After another half hour she crawled like a zombie out of the bed onto the floor. She felt around until her hand closed on the bottle of pills, which had rolled under the bed.
Something gently brushed over the top of her hand, like the tips of trailing fingers, and tried to take the bottle from her.
“No!” she said, out of it, holding the bottle tight. “I want to!”
She ripped the top of the bottle off and quickly shook a mountain of pills into her palm, then into her mouth.
She crawled back into bed and slept again, still clutching the bottle like a precious keepsake.
FOUR
“That’s it. Enough is enough,” Janet announced.
Marianne forgot that she had given her sister a key to the house. Through a very thick fog, she heard Janet storming around downstairs, then clumping up the stairs.
She tried to feign sleep.
“Get the hell out of bed,” her sister ordered.
Marianne felt something in her hand, opened her eyes and stared at the empty pill bottle. Her sister was there, yanking the bottle from her and holding it up for examination.
“How many of these damned things did you take?”
“Lot . . .”
“Goddamned idiot . . .”
Janet threw the bottle down. Marianne heard her sister on the phone, the tap of three buttons before sleep came again . . .
FIVE
A brighter yellow light, sharp edged like the world.
She opened her eyes and smelled starch. The sheets were still white in hospitals. There was a cool autumn breeze smelling faintly of pumpkins and leaves, an open window to her right. To her left was a white panel screen in sections that covered the length of her bed as well as the foot. The sound of a television behind it. A game show, The Price is Right. Audience laughter.
She took a deep breath.
As if on cue, the panel at the foot of the bed was folded abruptly aside and her sister was there, glowering.
“About time,” Janet said. There was a chair behind her, Baby Charlie asleep in his stroller next to it. Two vases of unattractive flowers were set on a dresser behind the stroller. She could see the edge of the television now, mounted on the wall and swiveled toward her sister’s chair.
“Catatonic in the other bed,” Janet explained, reading her mind. “So I bogarted the TV. Feel like watching?”
“No.”
“You’re not going to keep up this gloomy shit, are you? It’s getting tiring, and Baby Charlie’s been missing his play group.”
“How long . . . ?”
“You’ve been in this rat hole for three days. The candy machines don’t even work. But they take Jack’s insurance, thank God, and no one’s asked me to sign anything.” Her eyes dilated for a moment. “Except for Detective Grant.”
Memory failed Marianne, then kicked in. “Grant . . . ?”
“The cop. They wanted to swab your business end, so I said go ahead.”
She was more awake now, and frowned. “Why?”
“Apparently Detective Grant didn’t like what Jack’s buddies had to say when he talked to them. Especially that moron Bud Ganley. And since you were so insistent about . . .” She waved her hand, suddenly embarrassed. “You know.”
Threads were slowly weaving together, her mind un-fogging, a clear picture . . .
“He thinks I was raped?”
“Something like that. The detective thinks you may have been mixed up about the time, that ol’ Bud paid you a visit after he brought Jack to the hospital. You know Bud, always on the make. And since you and Bud had a history . . .”
She was speechless, and Janet went on.
“He’s a weird one, that Detective Grant. Looks haunted, to me. And a lush, too. Remember Chip Prohman? In my class at Orangefield High? He’s a desk sergeant, now. I talked to him yesterday. He told me Grant’s wife is dead, and he’s been involved in some real weird stuff the last few years. You remember those Sam Sightings everyone talked about a few years ago? Folks tramping through the woods, looking for Samhain, the Celtic Lord of the Dead? The rumor was Grant was somehow mixed up in that. And all those rumors when the house at Gates’ farm burned to the ground—he was in the middle of that, too, according to Chip. But Chip always was an asshole, so who knows . . .”
Janet’s voice trailed off. Her unease hadn’t left her. She glanced briefly at Baby Charlie for help, but he was snoozing contentedly, head tilted slightly to one side, a river of clear snot flowing from one nostril.
“Look,” Janet said, “I didn’t think it was a big deal. You were out like a light, and Grant was persuasive. He said they’d be lucky to get a sample after that much time, but apparently they did. A female nurse did it. I was right here, outside the curtain, the whole time. Took two minutes.”
“You always hated Bud Ganley.”
Janet’s unease evaporated. “You bet I’ve always hated him. What’s not to hate? And I wouldn’t put it past the prick . . .”
“To come to my house and rape me after my husband had been hit by a car and killed?”
Janet looked at the floor for a moment, then shrugged. “When you put it that way, it sounds pretty damn stupid.”
“What did Petee say?”
“You know Petee Wilkins. He’ll nod his head at anything Bud says. He swears Bud was with him the whole time. That they put Jack in Bud’s car and drove right to the hospital. Then after they called you they went back to the bar.” She snorted. “That part sounds right.”
“Bud told me on the phone from the hospital that they couldn’t handle what happened, that they had to have a drink. He was almost crying.”
“So he and ol’ Petee get drunk and leave you alone to handle it. Like I said, that sounds about right. Well, Detective Grant doesn’t believe either of them. He thinks Bud paid you a visit after they left the hospital.”
“It was Jack who was with me!”
Janet just looked at her.
Baby Charlie came awake with a sudden intake of breath. Before he could start wailing, Janet expertly slid his bottle
from its bag and plugged it into his mouth.
“Like I said, Marianne, I’m not going to be able to keep doing this.”
“You’ve already done too much.”
“Tell me about it.” She locked eyes with Marianne, and her expression grew serious. “You still look a little out of it. You gonna try to kill yourself again? Can I stop worrying about that, at least?”
“Yes. It was stupid. And the weirdest thing is, I think someone was in the room with me.”
“Come again?” Janet asked.
“A . . . spirit, trying to keep me from taking those pills. There was a hand . . .”
Janet stared at her as if she had just landed from Pluto.
“You think that was Jack, too?”
Marianne looked away. “I don’t know . . .”
There was a sudden chill in the room—as if clouds had pushed the sun away, and autumn had flipped over into winter. The pumpkin and fallen leaf odor had disappeared, leaving a chill. Marianne shivered, and looked at the window, which darkened for a brief moment, ushering in silence and cold, before snapping back to normal.
Her arms, she saw, were covered with goose bumps.
Her sister was speaking, fussing with Baby Charlie, making sure the straps on his stroller were secure.
“I’ve gotta go,” Janet announced. “Now that you’re awake, they’ll probably want your bed and release you. I’ll talk to the nurse and come back later to bring you home. Your house is clean, most of Jack’s things are packed up and in the garage. You can decide what you want to do with them later. You’re having dinner at my house tomorrow night. No argument. And you’re going to call me before you go to bed tonight, and again when you get up tomorrow morning. And if I hear anything I don’t like in your voice, a slur from pills or alcohol, or even cough syrup, I’m going to come over to your house and strangle you. Got it?”
Janet turned away from Baby Charlie to her sister, who was staring out the window blankly. “Earth to Marianne!”
Halloweenland Page 17