His spark of hope flickered, dimming to match the vacant cabin.
He killed the car and got out, shutting the door with more authority than was necessary. If anyone lived here, he didn’t want them surprised.
A reluctant shuffle dragged him up the creaking steps to the front door. Ajar, it creaked open to reveal the ruined remains of human habitation—a rotted-out couch showing springs and rat’s nests; moldy plates piled next to the sink visible through the kitchen door; the old, red-brick hearth blackened and littered with beer cans.
“Hello?” His voice rang out in the empty, soulless space. A fat raccoon darted from under the couch, bumbled two steps toward the door, then retreated into the kitchen without undue haste—it didn’t fear him. And why should it? Why should any animal fear man anymore?
With no answer, he approached the bookcase against the far wall. Most of his father’s collection had disappeared. A few had rotted to nothing. But The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow stood tall and proud on the third shelf up, the sleeve on the hardcover defying the ravages of time, except for a scuff on the spine betraying the aluminum underneath.
He grabbed the book with both hands, pushing in the top while pulling out the bottom. It gave. The bookcase popped away from the wall on silent hinges, revealing the ladder leading below.
The rich, earthy smell of a garden twisted his stomach. His mouth went to sandpaper at the thought of killing another rabbit, cutting around its neck and tearing off its skin moments after petting it and calling it a good girl. He gagged on the memory, sucking in air to displace it—sterile, cool, bleach with a sweet hint of lemon. Someone had cleaned, and recently.
He climbed down the two stories, knees aching with every rung, knuckles white as the vertigo ebbed and flowed. “Hello?” he called, halfway down, voice echoing through the tiny antechamber that led to the greenhouses. His feet hit the floor and he walked through the dark to the light switch, flicking it up with old confidence.
As the LEDs flashed on, figures rushed him. Stars exploded through his skull as they slammed him against the wall, pinning his arms and legs with their bodies.
A black woman in nurse’s scrubs looked him up and down, and grunted. Her gray afro matched wrinkled skin stretched over chubby cheeks, the softness in her face at odds with the murder in her eyes. “Shorted, did you?”
“Yes,” he said, breath short and raspy through the fingers around his throat.
“It’s Esther.” She backed up, and his assailants let him go. He rubbed his wrists and stepped away from the wall.
“You know me?”
“Your name is Barry Esther. You must be, what, seventy-four?”
“Seventy-three.”
“Seventy-three. I’m Annie, and I’m in charge here. Don’t do anything impulsive.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I’m just looking for my family.” Her smirk could have meant anything. Hope soared, fragile and exposed. “Are they here?”
“Your mother passed not long after you were taken. Sasha called it a broken heart.”
It had to be true. Knowing stabbed an icicle through his chest.
“A long time, then.”
“A long time,” Annie said. “We have some of her things in Sasha’s desk.”
“She’s here?”
Annie jerked her head toward the door to the greenhouse. “Follow me.”
It wasn’t an answer, exactly.
One of his attackers, an old man over six and a half feet tall, opened the door into soft, warm light. Barry stepped around the huge man and gasped.
The greenhouse of his childhood shattered into memory, replaced by a hospital ward, two rows of fifty—no—sixty beds. Women lay in each, most of their bellies bulging to one degree or another. IVs trailed upward from needles piercing their arms; skinny legs stuck out from underneath hospital gowns. Gray and wrinkled, the youngest of them couldn’t have been ten years his junior. And none of them looked enough like his sister to be an older version of her.
“What is this place?”
“The Nursery. Sasha founded it, not long after, you know. After. We knew each other from the food kitchen, you remember?” He nodded; she continued. “Twenty years in she found me, shorted, administering what care I could to other Shorts. She offered me a chance to do something more.”
Annie walked down the rows and he followed, waiting patiently as she passed kind words and greetings to each woman, touching hands and kissing foreheads, rubbing pregnant bellies and massaging swollen feet, until at last she stopped at a small desk set against the farthest wall. Above it sat a portrait of his family, smiling in happier times—he couldn’t have been more than five. Barry leaned forward, knees turning to jelly, unable to think, to breathe. They got him settled into a chair and handed him the frame. He ran his fingers down the glass, leaned in and kissed it.
No psychic connection crackled from the smooth, cold surface. No mystic message whispered across time that everything would be all right. He wiped his eyes and looked down at the book, leather-clad with “Sasha Esther” emblazoned in peeling silver on the bottom-right corner. Setting down the photo, he opened the diary, hands shaking.
The first page showed an old printed picture, ink faded with time. Sasha, a beautiful, vibrant woman a mirror of their mother, leaning against a man as she cradled an infant, so tiny, too tiny, his head bulging over his right eye, his left drooping too low. A sad smile blossomed on her loving face. Underneath, it said, “Sasha, Bob, and Little Barry.”
He read. With fertility drugs she’d conceived, birthing Barry during C-section at twenty-three weeks. He’d lived three days. Their next lived a week. The one after that miscarried fourteen weeks in, the next bled down her leg after only ten.
Through blurred eyes, he found the nurse.
“Where is she? Can I see her?”
The nurse nodded toward the desk, where a small purple vase rested against the wall. It had shattered and been repaired with gold, an old Japanese trick their father had loved, the beauty that came from broken things. Barry remembered it from Sasha’s room, after their father had passed—she’d taken it as a memory of him, and kept flowers in it when she could find them. Now, a crude engraving near the bottom said SME, dated thirty years earlier. He ran his fingers down the smooth pottery, traced the letters.
“She’s gone.” Like everyone else. “So you put her on a desk?”
“I’m sorry,” Annie said. “She wanted to rest with her children.”
He swallowed. “What happened?”
“She carried her fifth to twenty-five weeks. We pulled her out, but your sister didn’t survive. The baby made it nine days. We named her Ruth.”
“Sasha was, what? Fifty-one years old?”
“About that.”
“What was she doing having children?”
The nurse stepped back—he still didn’t know her name—and gestured at the beds. “Do you see anyone here of childbearing age? Thousands of women have lain in these beds. Tens of thousands. We do what we can: fertility drugs, different donors, in vitro stabilization techniques, genetic engineering. We’ve had children survive ten days, even two weeks, with so few deformities, hell, you could almost think them normal. It’s … progress.”
“Have any lived? Beyond … beyond—”
“No. And it only gets worse as their mothers get older. But one of these days we might get lucky.”
“Then why?”
She kneeled next to him and whispered into his ear. “What else are we to do?”
A noise escaped his lips that might have been a laugh, might have been a cry of despair.
Barry couldn’t breathe.
He stumbled out of the chair, dizzy, his chest squeezed by a sudden panic. Voices, stern and sharp, called out behind him as he rushed for the door. The bookcase creaked shut as he reached the squalid living room, but the python around h
is chest wouldn’t let in any air.
The world hazed from red to black.
~
He came to at his father’s desk, the wood pale and cracked after so many years of neglect. Sasha’s urn sat in front of him, the purple and gold vase encasing all that remained of hope or joy, a beautiful lie that things can be repaired, made more beautiful. A million white lines crackled through the glaze, the truth of entropy made manifest on the vessel that contained the ashes of hope. Inert, lifeless. Like the rest of the world.
His father’s revolver rested warm in his hands, the black metal marred with flecks of rust where pieces meshed, the faintest smell of gunpowder still lingering in the drawer that lay open at his knee. He’d cleaned it, oiled it, that day long ago, but nothing lasts, no matter the care taken.
He raised it, turned it over, ran his fingers down the dark curves. He cocked the hammer, and it slid back with little difficulty, latching into place with a faint click.
Outside, a wolf howled.
Tears melded the urn into the gun, the gun into the urn. Sasha had always liked wolves.
He pressed cold metal against his temple. The trigger rubbed rough against his index finger.
A second wolf answered the first. Then a third, and a fourth.
His father’s pistol rang in reply.
SNAPSHOT
Liz hissed as her pregnant belly touched the cold marble sink. She brushed back a lock of auburn hair, spat out her toothpaste, and rinsed the cloying mint taste from her mouth. She stepped back from the vanity and frowned.
“You look beautiful,” Scott said, squeezing in behind her and sliding his arms up under her shirt to her abdomen. “Just thinking about this … I love you!”
She grunted. “I look like a bloated hippopotamus.”
“A beautiful, bloated hippopotamus.” Scott grinned at her in the mirror, flashing perfect white teeth in a perfect, rugged face crowned with perfect blond hair. The star anchor of Rise and Shine America always looked perfect before he left the house. Hell, he looked perfect with bed-head and a five-o’clock shadow.
She closed her eyes and leaned back into him. “I’m just ready to be done with all this. I’m tired and fat and tired of being fat.”
His hands slid upward and squeezed her breasts. They were swollen and tender, and his hands rough, but she didn’t stop him. He whispered in her ear. “A couple weeks. You’ll be back in bikini shape in no time.”
She smiled as he nibbled her ear, and craned her neck as his lips moved lower. She turned around and kissed him, long and hard. She nibbled his lip, then bit a little harder. She pressed against him, inhaling his scent, but when his hands slid lower she shoved him back into the wall. “None of that, now. You need to get to work.” She stole another kiss and then darted into the hall, dancing as best she could from his grasping hands.
~
It took Liz an hour to get comfortable. She frowned at Scott, untroubled by the burden of childbearing, fast asleep with his arms over his head, an Adonis in repose. She closed her eyes and the world faded to darkness, and then to peace.
A pitiful cry split the night. Liz groaned and groped across the bed. Her arm found a shoulder and she shook it. “Honey.” He didn’t respond. She shook harder. “Scott!” She cracked an eyelid. He hadn’t budged. “It’s your turn.”
Scott ran his tongue over his teeth. “Okay.” He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and stood. “Yeah, um … I got it.” He shuffled into the hall. She heard him murmur in the next room, and the wails turned to quiet sobs. She rolled onto her back. Damn it, now I have to pee.
She struggled to her feet and shuffled to the bathroom. A minute later she stepped into the nursery. Scott sat on the bed, cradling their three-year-old daughter in his arms. She blubbered around a thumb jammed between her teeth, her head a riot of tangled blonde hair.
As Liz leaned against the door, Josie lifted her head. “Mommy?” Her brittle voice cracked, and her pale green eyes stared outward, unseeing in the lamplight.
“Yeah, sweetie. Mommy’s here.”
Josie held out her arms, grasping at the air. Scott stroked her head, but didn’t let her go. Liz tiptoed across the cold wooden floor. Her knees ached as she knelt and rubbed her daughter’s leg. Josie grabbed her head with both hands and hugged her cheek to cheek.
Josie’s voice was a bare whisper. “It hurts, Mommy. A lot.”
“I know, baby. I’m sorry.”
Josie chocked back a sob. “It really—”
Liz shushed her, patting her head as her eyes rolled to Scott. “Did Daddy give you medicine, sweetie?” She felt the answering nod against her cheek. “Do you want to sleep with us?” Josie nodded again. “Okay. Daddy’s going to take you.”
Once situated in their bed, Josie’s pain-wracked breathing relaxed to a soft snore. Liz stifled tears of her own.
Scott rubbed her stomach. The baby kicked and he gave her a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
She kissed his lips, then stroked her daughter’s hair. “I hope so.”
Josie grabbed her arm and held it, still asleep, as Liz slipped into a memory.
~
Josie, just over two years old, pouted in a paper gown. She rubbed her eyes, and Liz pulled her hands from her face.
“Don’t rub, sweetie. You’ll get puffy.”
The pout turned to tears. “Ouchy, Mommy.”
“I know it’s ouchy,” Liz said, tousling her hair. “That’s why we’re at the doctor.”
The door opened and Doctor Schrock stepped through, his eyes glued to the transparency in his hand, his wizened brow furrowed. He gave Josie a perfunctory glance, then put the slide on the light panel mounted on the wall. He flipped a switch, backlighting the picture.
Josie stopped blubbering and looked at the image. Liz recognized the human eye, parts of it anyway. Lens, retina, the big squishy white part. Without preamble, Schrock’s finger stabbed an area behind the eye, a squid-looking thing in ugly grayscale.
“Do you know what this is?”
Liz shook her head. Josie copied her.
“This is your daughter’s optic nerve. Do you see these gray areas? These black specks?”
She nodded.
“A healthy optic nerve would be all white. Stark white.” He poked at the image again. “This? This is troubling.”
Her heart caught in her throat. “Troubling?”
“Yes, troubling. More spots on her retinas, see?” Liz didn’t see them, but she didn’t interrupt. “They’re signs of bilateral necrotic neuropathy.” He held up a hand, cutting off her unasked question. “It means the nerves in her eyes are dying.”
Liz looked from the specialist to her daughter and back.
“What? I mean … How? Why?”
Doctor Schrock shook his head. “The pathogenesis is unknown. Common causes: acute papillitis, ischemia, or herpes simplex. None of these are present in your daughter’s case. There doesn’t appear to be a bacterial or viral component.”
Liz dropped to her knees and looked in Josie’s eyes. Pale green, beautiful, full of life. Perfect. Josie smiled at her, unaware. She looked at Doctor Schrock.
“What does this mean? For her?” She squeezed her daughter tight.
The doctor frowned. “Pain, which is partly treatable with medication, NSAIDs and the like. Blindness, which is not.”
Liz gasped. “No. No, not my baby.” Images of white canes and dogs and dark sunglasses flooded her mind. “Not my baby …”
Schrock’s frown deepened. “I’m sorry. There’s little we can do.”
She clutched Josie and cried as Doctor Schrock walked out. He left the door open.
~
Scott was in the shower by the time she woke. Josie lay curled in the fetal position, her thumb in her mouth, her hair scattered across the pillow.
Liz leaned over and kissed her temple.
Josie’s eyes fluttered open, unfocused and useless. “Hi, Mommy.”
“Good morning, baby.” Liz stroked her hair. “It’s time to get up. Daddy has to work, and you have a doctor’s appointment.”
As Josie guided herself to her room, one hand on the wall and the other out in front of her, Liz looked at the calendar on the nightstand. Her due date was two weeks away. It seemed like forever.
By the time she got to the breakfast nook, Scott was gone. A vase on the table held a dozen roses, the bouquet lined with baby’s breath and green cellophane. Scott’s severe handwriting filled the blank card with two words: Just because.
She grabbed a tissue to dab tears from her eyes, swiped a Slim Fast from the fridge, and waddled back up the stairs. Josie’s shirt was right-side out, but it clashed with her shorts. “Wrong shirt, baby. Let’s get you changed.”
~
Liz gasped as the contraction faded. She tried to remember her breathing, but it wasn’t easy doing eighty in a thirty-five. Scott swerved around a mail truck into oncoming traffic, then ducked back into the right lane.
“Hold on, girls. We’re almost there.” He blew through another stop sign.
Gasping, Liz replied. “Honey, you’re going to get us killed. It’s not that—” She gritted her teeth as the next contraction gripped her. She realized she was holding her breath, and gasped instead. It passed. “Your daughter is in the car.”
Scott glanced at Josie in the rear-view mirror, her knuckles white as she clutched the door handle. He slowed to fifty.
“Thank you,” Liz said.
They screeched to a halt in front of the blue EMERGENCY sign. Two attendants helped her out of the car as Scott hoisted Josie onto his hip. They put Liz onto a gurney, its front left wheel squeaking as they hurried down the hall. Liz saw the obstetrics sign, and under it a smiling Doctor Faliha in a severe white skirt-suit.
“How often?” Faliha’s voice was cheerful as always.
“Every couple minutes,” Scott said.
She smiled at Liz. “Well, we’ll be done in no time, then.” She brushed Josie’s cheek with her knuckles. “Go with Valerie, dear. She’ll take you to the room where we keep the toys. Get you a drink and some cookies.” Scott passed their daughter to the waiting orderly.
In the Garden of Rusting Gods Page 15