McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “Do you mind if I make myself some lunch? Or would you rather I stayed here until you fell asleep?”

  “No, go eat something. I’m fine.”

  She put on her oldest, softest nightgown, slipped between the cool sheets of her bed, pulled the down comforter up to her nose, and inhaled the soft lavender scent of the rinse she had been using on their linens ever since her sister had sent her a bottle from London two years before. She sank deeply into the bed, wishing she could sink even deeper, that her bed could suck her into itself like a tar pit swallowing an animal. She flattened her body against the bed and disappeared into it as completely as she could.

  She dreamed she heard a baby crying.

  Every part of her resisted waking. Her body and mind clung to sleep, burrowed into it, fought the intrusion of sound and life and obligation. But the cry was ineluctable—high-pitched and insistent. It followed her into her hole and harried her like a ratting terrier. It yanked her up and out into the dim afternoon light of her bedroom.

  Edie blinked, waking but not awake. The crying sounded loud in the stillness of the bedroom, but at the same time it was muffled, overlaid with a buzz of static, as if it were playing through a radio tuned just a point or two off the mark. She blinked again, the static of Ambien like rain inside her head, and she wondered if she was really awake, or if this was instead a false waking, a dream of consciousness rather than the real thing. She felt oddly cold and clammy and rolled over onto her side, telling herself sternly to wake up once and for all. A sharp pain stabbed through her breast and she touched something wet in the sheets. She sat up, her mind instantly clear. The sound of a baby crying had stopped, and she looked down at her chest. Her aching breasts were swollen, lumpy as bags of wet sand. She lifted her nightgown. Her nipples, which had grown dark and long over the course of her pregnancy, were each now as thick as a thumb. Pale yellow liquid beaded on the tips and dripped onto her soft and sagging belly. She crossed her arms against the surge of pain in her breasts.

  One of the baby books prescribed cabbage leaves for engorgement, so the next morning Matt went to the supermarket. As soon as he left the house, as soon as the latch of the front door clicked into place, Edie heard the sound again: a baby crying. When it started up she was sitting at the kitchen table, savoring her first cup of real coffee in months, and she jumped, startled. She leaped up and went to the sink to run cold water over her burned wrist.

  The baby wailed, and it was like a string connected its cry to Edie. She felt a tug start deep in each breast and travel through her belly down between her legs. She pressed her thighs together and looked at the front of the old sweatshirt of Matt’s that she was wearing. There were two large, round dark spots over her breasts. Wondering to whom this baby belonged, who was the new mother whose good luck was so blithely inflicted on her neighbors, Edie opened the back door and went out onto the deck. The baby’s cries faded. Nonetheless she peered over the fences into the adjoining yards. She knew that none of her immediate neighbors had babies. There was a three-year-old in the house directly behind them, but the cries were not those of a toddler. Edie went back into the house and walked through the family room. As she passed into the wainscoted dining room with the polished oval table and the high ladder-backed chairs they had inherited when Matt’s mother had died, the cries began again, growing louder as she crossed into the living room, ever louder as she neared the stairs. She leaned the flat of her palm against the ivy-patterned wallpaper of the entryway, pulled open the front door, and went out onto the front porch. Once again, the cries were quieter outside than in. She walked back into the house and stood at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the hall that ended in a blank, closed door. She asked herself what it could mean that a woman who was responsible for the death of her baby heard bitter weeping reverberating through her empty house.

  Edie put her hands over her ears and counted to ten. The hollow rush sounded so good that she stretched it to twenty. To thirty. The baby, a baby, some baby, cried and cried. The cotton of her sweatshirt grew soggy with her milk, fat and sweet and meant to feed a child who lived only in her guilty mind.

  Suddenly, without thinking about it, Edie marched up the stairs. When she reached the top, she was breathing heavily, and she paused, staring at the closed door at the end of the hall. The baby’s cries came much louder now, still muffled by static, but even more frantic, plaintive, as if he knew she was close by. She crept down the hallway toward the closed door, jelly legs, arms shaking, breasts spraying milk like blood from a nicked artery.

  The room was filled with a pale, golden light. The sun shone through the striped yellow curtains and licked at the warm wooden furniture; the circular crib with the matching striped yellow canopy, bumpers and baby quilt; the baby dresser with the tiny yellow ducklings and pale green fish hand-painted along the bottom edge; the matching changing table; the half-finished mural along one wall. Ducks and fish again. All ducks and fish. Yellow, pale green, and white. Pale and pretty. Golden and yellow and happy and sunshine. Edie stood on the sage green carpet with the yellow border in the middle of the room and spun in a slow circle. She had chosen every single thing so carefully. She had spent weeks on her theme. Something gender-neutral, of course, because they were going to be surprised. Yellow. And green. Ducklings or dragons. Perhaps dinosaurs. Ducklings, finally. And then fish, little fishies because of what they called him, what Matt said the first time they saw him on the ultrasound. “He’s like a little minnow, swimming inside you.” So ducklings and fishies for their minnow. Duckling furniture. Cloth diapers with yellow and green fabric ticking. Layette. A glider rocker. A matching footstool. And the crib. A gorgeous, round crib, so expensive that even Matt had grumbled, had agreed only when she swore that she would never tell his father and stepmother how much they had paid for it.

  Edie had chosen so carefully; her planning had been meticulous. But she did not plan to go into preterm labor. She did not expect to see her water break at twenty-three weeks. She did not plan to be confronted with the decision of whether to allow labor to proceed and death to come, or to fight off the inevitable for another week, two at the most. Her birth plan did not include a provision weighing the value of a life that might include brain bleeds and blindness, cerebral palsy and mental retardation. Or that might not. And so after months of decisions, ducks or fish, yellow or green, Edie had made one last, unexpected choice.

  Edie closed the door behind her and walked back along the hallway, and as she moved the crying grew louder. She stopped in the doorway of her bedroom and looked in. On her dresser, its little row of five red lights and one green blinking with a furious intensity, sat the receiving end of the pale-blue plastic baby monitor she had bought and unpacked only a few days before. The transmitter she recalled setting up on the little scalloped wooden shelf over the baby’s crib, but she had no memory of putting the receiver in her bedroom. Yet there it was, the cord snaking across the top of the bureau and down the side to the electrical outlet near the laundry hamper. The crying seemed to amplify with her gaze. She crossed to the dresser and switched it off: the red rows of lights went dark, and silence broke over the room.

  Edie sat down on her bed and pressed her hands between her knees, her sweaty palms sticking together. As if her life weren’t sufficiently awash in miserable irony, someone else in the neighborhood had to go and buy the same brand of baby monitor. The cries of that woman’s living baby were being picked up by the monitor that Edie had purchased to keep her dead baby safe. She got up and rolled the dial, clicking it back on, and at once the baby’s cries, wretched and hoarse, filled her bedroom. Who was this horrible mother in the house on the other end, and why didn’t she go to her baby? Perhaps the baby had some kind of awful colic. What else could explain the constant anguish of his wails? No mother could be so neglectful, certainly no mother in this neighborhood, where the young women were like her, college-educated, professionals, all home for just a little while, while the children were small, so a
s not to miss this wonderful time in their lives.

  Edie turned down the volume on the monitor but left it on. She stared at it for a while, listening to the quieted cries, and watching the row of angry lights as they climbed and subsided to mark the rise and fall of the unknown baby’s screams. Then she heard the front door open and Matt call out.

  “The cabbage man has returned,” he said.

  Matt stayed home from work for the rest of the week. Mostly they read the paper, all the papers, front to back, and watched television. Matt made a few excursions to the video store and the market, and each morning he went for a run. They spoke very little, except about what they should watch next, or what they should eat. Matt would ask her what she wanted, and Edie would say she didn’t care, that he should decide. Whenever he left the house, Edie would turn on the baby monitor, and the baby would always be there, crying. It was almost, she thought, as if the baby were waiting for her to tune in. And no matter how many cabbage leaves she stuffed into her bra, no matter how sure she felt that lactation had finally ceased, whenever she heard the baby crying, her milk began to flow, steady and warm. After a while, the pain eased and it began to feel like pleasure, to feel sexy even. With the rush of milk from her nipples, Edie felt a corresponding tug between her thighs.

  One night after they had turned off the light, Matt reached across the six inches of mattress that lay, an empty no-man’s-land, between his side of the bed and hers. “Edie?” he said. “Come on over here.”

  “I’m not allowed.”

  “What?”

  “For six weeks. I’m not allowed.”

  “Not that. I just want to hold you.”

  “Oh.”

  She rolled over in his direction. Clenched between her thighs and cradling her belly was the long body pillow he had brought home one day early in her pregnancy, when she’d begun complaining that her back hurt at night. Now it lay like an inert third body in the bed between them. He reached over the hump of pillow and caressed her hip.

  “If you flip over, we can cuddle,” he said.

  She sighed and rolled onto her other side, taking the pillow with her, and he spooned his long body against her. She felt the brush of the hairs on his chest against her back and the insistent pressure of his thighs behind hers. His skin was hot, almost feverish, and she ached to move away to the cool comfort of her side of the bed. Finally, after what felt like hours, when his breathing was coming rhythmically, and he had thrown his arm over his face as he always did when he was deeply asleep, she slipped out of bed and went over to the dresser. She bent down and turned the monitor on to the very lowest setting. She pressed her ear against the speaker, feeling the lines of plastic against her soft cheek and the hard cartilage of her ear, and listened to the faint, echoing cry.

  The next day Matt was due back at work. Edie lay on her side in bed while he took his shower. She watched steam billow from the bathroom door and disperse in the cool air of the bedroom. While he dressed, she stared at him critically, her hands tucked between her knees.

  “You’re in a good mood,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” Matt said.

  “You’re happy.”

  Matt stopped, one arm in his suit jacket, the other pulling the pin-striped worsted across his chest. “I am not happy. How can you say that?”

  She pointed to his tie. “You tied a Balthus.”

  Matt looked down at his chest. His grayish-purple silk tie was dotted with violets and was, it was true, expertly tied in a complicated knot. The nine-move Balthus was Matt’s favorite knot, one that required an extremely long tie and one or two tries before it hung just right. He attempted a Balthus only when he had something to celebrate, or for luck. He’d worn a Balthus knot on his first day of work at the firm and to his first oral argument. He’d learned it for his law school graduation and, if she remembered correctly, he’d been wearing a Balthus knot in his tie on the evening he proposed.

  Matt shrugged on his jacket. “I just felt like it,” he said. “I don’t know, maybe to cheer me up.”

  “You were whistling in the shower.”

  “I always whistle in the shower.”

  The ability to whistle underwater is an accomplishment underestimated by most people. Matt could not only whistle in the shower, but even while washing his hair. He also seemed to have some psychic pop music connection, and it was not infrequently that over breakfast they would find themselves listening on the radio to the very tune that Matt had been whistling in the shower, even when the song had been something as relatively out-of-date as Cheap Trick’s “The Flame” or “Give It to Me Baby” by Rick James. Edie had, at first, been charmed by the shower whistling, then grown irritated by it. She was by now inured to it, which made its sudden absence after Minnow’s birth and death shocking, even frightening. Still, when the whistling reappeared on Matt’s first day of work, she was more angry than relieved. Matt had been so wonderfully solicitous to her these past two weeks. He had behaved precisely as a man whose wife has suffered a tragedy should behave. He had brought her tea, he had prepared her meals. He had even done the laundry. All the while, however, she had sensed a tentative fear underneath his solicitude, and now this tangible proof of his relief to be escaping her pissed her off.

  “I have to go to work, Edie,” Matt said. He leaned over the bed. “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  He sighed. He bent to kiss her but she turned away. His lips grazed her cheek and she held herself stiff to keep from shuddering.

  “I’ll call you from the office, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Once she was sure Matt was gone, she got out of bed and went to the monitor. Somehow the baby seemed sadder today. Less frantic, perhaps. His cry more monotonous, more hopeless. She left the monitor on and listened to the baby while she got dressed. She stuffed her bra with wads of toilet paper, regretting now that she had not bought breast pads, because she had never quite made up her mind that she was going to breast-feed.

  “Where is your goddamned mother, you poor kid?” Edie said out loud. She unplugged the monitor, leaving herself in abrupt silence. She carried it downstairs, found two AA batteries in the kitchen junk drawer and fitted them into the monitor’s battery compartment. She felt an odd sense of relief when the crying started up again as soon as the batteries were snapped into place.

  She clipped the monitor to the waistband of her sweatpants and it hung, dragging the fabric down and slapping against her thigh while she walked. She turned the volume down until the baby’s cries were just audible, and she put on her sneakers. The air was cool in the shade of the porch and she stepped quickly into the warm sun. Since returning from the hospital Edie had been no farther than the front and back porches of the house, and the brick of her front walk felt strange under her feet, hard and inflexible. She wrapped her arms around her body and set out down the walk along the flower beds and trimmed-back rosebushes. There were a few blooms on the apricot-colored rosebush, always the first to blossom, but the others—the red, the yellow, the purple and the many whites—were still in the bud stage.

  Their neighborhood was full of young families, and Edie had always imagined that after she had the baby she would get to know the other young mothers. She would take Minnow—who would by then have graduated to a real name, perhaps Fiona or Finn after Matt’s mother—to Mommy and Me, or to Gymboree classes at the Unitarian church on the corner. They would meet other babies and their mothers at the yoga studio in postnatal yoga classes, or at Starbucks. They would join the stroller crush at the café in Whole Foods. All those places that Edie now knew she would have to avoid.

  She walked down the street listening to the baby monitor, her ears pricked for any change in volume or tone that would signify her proximity to the source of the cries. There was none. Still, one house, about six down from her own, caught her attention. The house had a very small front yard; it was set back from the sidewalk no more than six
feet or so. A long porch ran along the front of the house, with broad steps on the left side and a huge picture window to the right of the door. On the porch was a Maclaren Techno XT, the very stroller she had put down on her registry. While Edie stared at the stroller that should have been her own, a cloud passed over the sun, darkening the sky. For a moment she could see into the front window of the house all the way through to the living room. Some kind of swing contraption was hanging in the wide archway between the front room and the one behind, and she thought she could see a baby bouncing in the swing, kicking off from the floor on its chubby legs.

  The sky grew light and Edie’s reflection stared back at her. She stood, one foot on the sidewalk, the other on the flagstone path leading to the house, and listened to the drone of the baby’s cries through the monitor. They seemed no louder nor softer than they had since she’d left her own home, but she took a few tentative steps up the path anyway, listening to see if they changed. Although they did not, Edie continued, until she was standing on the front steps of the house, and then on the porch by the front door, her hand poised as if to ring the bell, her eyes fixed on the sight framed by the picture window.

  There was indeed a baby in the bouncing swing. Edie stared at her, transfixed. She was blond, with thin, flyaway hair that hovered over her head as she rose and fell. Her fists were balled, one in her mouth, the other pushing at a pile of what looked like Cheerios on the tray of the bouncer. She was not crying, although the baby on the monitor maintained his constant wretched drone. Edie watched the baby girl fling herself up and down, jumping harder and harder. Then a small boy came running from out of Edie’s field of vision, hit the back of the swing with his hand, and sent it spinning. He flung himself down on his belly on the floor, leaving the baby twirling in the bouncing swing, her face clenched in an angry, red fist, her screams audible through the window glass.