The Cradle Read online

  “What?”

  “The purpose of surprises, Matt.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll look forward to it. I’ll be home soon. Promise.”

  He took off his shoes, leaned back on the bed, and closed his eyes.

  He didn’t wake for six hours. When he did, he shot up with a start and could feel immediately that much more time than he’d planned had passed. Outside it was still light, but the angle of the sun wasn’t very high. His muscles were sore, his body was still deep down inside itself, and he had a headache. The No-Doz, probably. His mouth was parched. He slid from the bed and started the shower. He came back out into the room. The cradle was sitting in front of the television set, right where he’d put it when he first came in.

  He was ten miles past Rensselaer in a Motel 6. He’d assumed there wouldn’t be anything in the town itself and had gone on just a little bit more after seeing the sign. Right across the street there was a Denny’s, so after his shower he crossed and went inside and ate at least five heart attacks of eggs, bacon, and waffles, then ordered a chocolate milk shake and sucked it down in the parking lot, sitting on the curb.

  He did not know what he planned to do. He was here, though, and at the very least he’d go to the house and see the kid and make sure he was real. From there, they’d talk, and he’d tell her. Then it would be difficult—tell her that her mother had another baby, that she had a little half brother living down in Indiana, that Caroline hadn’t left because she hated children but because she’d wanted more. Such things could introduce unexpected complexities. Part of Matt, even though he still felt rage toward Darren for his speech about things mattering and not mattering, agreed with the man a little bit. It would be as though he never found this out.

  But then again, he was here.

  Matt finished his milk shake, threw it in a trash bin, and walked back to the motel. It was evening now; the light was fading. Suppertime was over. He got in his truck and got back on the highway.

  The small streets of Rensselaer reminded him a little of Walton, Minnesota—the shops along the central avenue were run-down and there weren’t many people about. The houses were much the same as well. The only real difference Matt felt was a difference in light, in the feeling of the colors. Indiana had a special light. Minnesota had been gray—even the grass. Here there was an orange hue to everything as the sun hung low in the sky and traced a burning line across the top of every structure. There were more trees, and those, too, seemed to have a warm glow in the evening haze. He again used his driving-back-and-forth strategy, looking for the right road. Rensselaer was bigger, and it took him longer, but eventually he found the house. On one side of the road there was vast farmland with alfalfa in the field. The house was on the corner and had more grass than the others around it, even though the structure itself wasn’t very big. It was made out of brick and had two big bay windows in the front living room and a dilapidated basketball hoop tilting forward in the driveway. Behind the house there were many trees—Matt could see the leaves and branches high up over the roof.

  He went to the door and rang the bell.

  Nothing.

  He rang again, and again there was no answer. He took a few steps back, then walked into the yard and tried to look through the window. The curtains were all drawn. He crossed his arms and looked back at his truck and could see the cradle through the windshield, his passenger waiting patiently. Without really thinking about it, he meandered around the side of the house and walked along the low wooden fence that defined the backyard, letting his hand skim across the ancient twisted 4x4s, looking casually over his shoulder as the rear came into view.

  He could see nothing through the back windows—the house looked empty. He stayed where he was anyway, hands on the fence. I could leave, and this would never have happened....

  There was the boy.

  It was a little white circle in the upstairs window. The face was looking out at Matt just as the cat had in Sturgeon Bay, unmoving, ghostlike. Matt could see his arms hanging straight down at his side.

  Then the boy’s hand came up. He was waving.

  After a moment of watching this, he looked over his shoulder at the rest of Rensselaer, looked again at the window and the waving boy.

  Matt waved back.

  Marissa, usually rock steady, changed on the day of the wedding. She was a rock before and she was a rock after, but she became a different rock, shaped with different edges. She never cried before. Not once. But that day in Glen’s backyard, with her all in white, fifteen people sitting in collapsible chairs watching them, Marissa’s grandma and grandpa sitting in the front row, she’d wept. The whole damned day. The morning, the hours before, all through the ceremony, then at the reception, and even on the dance floor. For the entire day she was occupied by some degree of crying. It was at its peak as they stood before the minister beneath the floral trellis. She held both his hands and looked into his eyes, hers red and puffed up, with tears pouring from them. She had a Kleenex stuffed into the top of her dress. Through the morning Matt had smiled along with it and had not thought too much about it, but there beneath the trellis, he’d begun, for the first time, to get worried. He knew what tears of happiness looked like; he knew how smiles broke through them here and there. And maybe some of Marissa’s tears were tears of happiness that day. But certainly not all of them. He saw so much pain that day. And holding her hands there, as the minister spoke, he realized that love was making him into far more than he ever could have been on his own. He could have sailed around the earth in a hot-air balloon or been a scientist inside a laboratory solving cancer and still those things would have been nothing compared to what she needed him to be, compared to the vessel she was turning him into. It was as though she had held all her pain and her anger deep inside herself until the day she was certain she’d never be alone again. Once that was confirmed, she’d been able to let go.

  Had it all been beautiful, Matt would have wept, too. The truth was that it scared him. Her in her white dress, unable to talk, had been frightening. Later he’d had too much to drink and had just barely avoided doing the chicken dance. That he’d even considered it was as sure a sign as any that he had not been himself.

  She finally stopped crying late that night, when they were both in bed. Out of the dress and in her pajamas, Marissa smiled at him. They’d already made love, and Matt, exhausted, was looking through his tuxedo, trying to find his wallet.

  “It’s two in the morning,” she said. “What do you need your wallet for?”

  “I think I lost it.”

  “Why did you have your wallet in your pocket for your wedding, Matt?”

  “I have no answer to that question,” he said, throwing the pants down onto the floor.

  “Come here.”

  Matt looked at her. She had her arms out. He went to the bed and lay down beside her, and she put her arms around him.

  “What was all the crying, baby?” he asked. “You scared me up there. It didn’t look like you were feeling joy.”

  “I don’t know what I was feeling. I feel joy now, though.”

  It was nine o’clock when the boat of a car pulled into the driveway, and the light was almost totally gone. Matt was waiting back inside the truck, beside the cradle. He left it immediately and approached the driveway before the woman had a chance to get to her front door. There, from a few feet behind her, he said, “Excuse me, ma’am,” and she turned and put her hand up to her throat, startled.

  “Good Jesus,” she said after a moment. She shook her head, not entirely relaxed, and adjusted her big, bubbly glasses.

  In the low light Matt couldn’t quite see the color of her hair, but it was big, whatever it was. She had a massive purse, too, hanging down underneath her armpit. She kept her hand up by her throat. “Can I help you?” she said. Her voice was deep.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” Matt said. “I’ve just been to see your son. My name is Matt Bishop. I’m married to Marissa, th
e sister of that little boy in your house.”

  Now a long, quiet stare. The hand slowly fell from the throat and went back, awkwardly, to the woman’s side. It then passed over her belt and went to the purse, and she started digging around. The hand came out with what looked like a box of cigarettes. The woman took a step forward without pulling one out. She said, “And.”

  “That’s all,” Matt said. “Up until last night I didn’t know he existed.”

  “And Darren sent you here?”

  “No. I came without him saying.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  Matt looked back over his shoulder, at the truck. He sighed, turned back. “I found your address on a birthday card after he passed out.”

  The woman laughed once, like a bark, then chuckled lowly.

  Matt watched her shoulders move up and down as she did. Then the cigarette came out of the pack and went up to her mouth, and she lit it.

  “So you want him.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you want him,” she said, “you can have him. I don’t want him anymore.”

  “Who?” Matt said.

  “Who do you think I mean? Darren?”

  Matt wished he could see the woman’s face better. Now it was only a dark spot, whereas the boy’s had been lit preternaturally in the window. All he could see well was the glow of the cigarette’s tip.

  “I can’t take him,” Matt said. “That’s not—”

  “And here I was, thinking you were a dark angel come to rescue me from my son’s idiocy.”

  “I thought at the very least,” Matt said, “my wife, Marissa, should know that he exists. That’s what this is about.”

  “Okay, then,” the woman said. She swung her head and her big hair and looked at her front door, then turned back. “Let’s go make sure he exists, even though you saw him through the window.”

  There was something in her movement and her voice, in that last sentence, that made Matt realize just how drunk she was. The way she’d been able to cover it up through the beginning of the conversation made him think, too, that this was not amateur drinking. This was a lifetime’s work.

  He followed her. At the door she messed around with her keys for quite some time, and he was close enough to smell the strong perfume coming off of her. With hair, she was taller than he. Without hair, she wasn’t.

  Inside, the air-conditioning was on high, so strong it was chilly. She flipped on the light and continued walking, and Matt stood. The living room was neat and tidy, although it didn’t have the same sterility that Darren’s did. There were two cats lying together on the sofa, in each other’s arms. One, a tabby, looked up at them, and the other didn’t move. The woman disappeared through a doorway, and Matt followed her. He found her in the kitchen, leaning down and looking into the refrigerator. When he came around the corner, she twisted her head and said, “I’m Susan, by the way. You want something? Dinner? You’d think I would have eaten something by now.”

  “I’m fine,” Matt said.

  She pulled out a cucumber, brought it to the countertop, and started cutting it. She was well over sixty, but Matt could see she’d once been astoundingly beautiful. A part of it remained. She was wearing a long, loose dress and sandals. She’d gotten a new cigarette for herself at some point, and now she leaned over the cucumber and started slicing it. She’d lost the glasses somewhere. “You have a certain look to you, you know,” she said. When Matt didn’t respond, the woman took in a lungful of air, leaned her head up toward the ceiling, and yelled, “Joseph! Come down here!”

  There was a bang like he jumped off of something, and then Matt listened as the footsteps moved across a room above, then came to the stairs, then trundled down the stairs. The woman pointed with the knife. “You see?” she said. “QED. Existence.”

  Matt turned. The little boy was standing in the doorway, wearing a pair of white briefs and a white T-shirt. He also had on a pair of Strawberry Shortcake socks. His hair was black and messy, and he stood still, looking up at Matt, arms down at his sides.

  “He doesn’t talk,” Susan said.

  Matt found himself squatting down. He stayed there, looking at the boy across the room. He thought of holding out a hand to shake, but of course that would be ridiculous. “Hi,” he said instead.

  The boy turned and left the room.

  Matt heard him go back upstairs.

  “He doesn’t talk,” the woman said, “and I for one find it quite eerie.”

  Matt stood and turned back to her. “Doesn’t talk at all?”

  “He said hello once,” said Susan. “Other than that, no.” She was starting to cut again.

  “Are you his guardian?” Matt said.

  “No.”

  “Who is?”

  “I’d imagine Darren is still,” she said. “I haven’t checked.”

  “You haven’t checked?”

  “No, I haven’t checked.”

  “What about school? You have to know.”

  “He’s not in school.”

  “How old is he?”

  “He’s five.”

  “So is he starting school, then?” Matt asked. “In the fall?”

  Now the woman was leaning forward on the countertop, holding a sliced cucumber in front of her mouth like it was a potato chip. “You seem to be understanding the problem.”

  “I’m not,” Matt said.

  “Let me add the last piece of the equation,” she said. “I am getting married in four weeks. I have a honeymoon to go to in Costa Rica. After that I would not mind taking a trip to California, to visit my sister. From there, I don’t know. James and I may move. We like it better in Florida. None of these things fit properly with him.”

  “Those sound like lovely plans.”

  “I am not going to do this,” she said. “Any of this. I am done. Officially.”

  “You can’t just be done,” Matt said.

  “I raised my child,” she said. “This one’s not mine. I am done.”

  “What, then?” Matt said. “You’ll throw him away on garbage day?”

  The woman smiled a little and came around the corner of the countertop, a new cucumber slice in her hand. She took a drag from the cigarette, then took a bite, then sat down at the kitchen table. “I knew you were coming,” she said. She nodded at another chair.

  “How exactly did you know I was coming?”

  “My psychic,” she said. “I heard about you last week.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “That somebody was going to come and take him away and be his father.”

  Now she turned and started rooting around in a low cupboard behind the table. Matt didn’t move to sit with her. After a moment she turned and had a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. She set them down and filled them both and put the bottle on the table.

  “No, thank you,” Matt said.

  The woman took his cup and poured his whiskey into her own.

  “I knew you were coming,” said the woman. “You’re just in time. Good for you. Congratulations.” She sipped.

  “You haven’t the faintest idea who I am,” Matt said, “and now you’re trying to give me a child.”

  “I do know who you are,” she said to her glass. “You’re his brother.”

  “I’m his brother like I’m your brother.”

  “No,” she said, looking up, shaking her head. “Not quite.” She tipped the glass back and drank half the whiskey. She set the glass down with a thunk. “It’s a little more than that, isn’t it?”

  He was back in his room by ten o’clock. He lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, television on, sounds of a telephone conversation coming through the wall. It was a man’s voice. He wasn’t yelling, but it had a persistent strength to it. When the noise got filtered by the wall, it turned into a trumpet with a mute being played sixty feet away—the same note, over and over again.

  Come back in the morning. That’s what the woman had said. Come back in the
morning, and you can take him with you.

  She’d almost said it with a smile on her face; like a test, like a tease. All he felt was rage, the same as he’d felt the day before while driving. That anyone could do this, that people could be this. Better for this boy, Joe, to have never been born. It would have saved him the trouble of having to realize so soon people’s indifference to their situations. Or to anyone else’s.

  Because of the feeling, he knew he was a long way away from sleep. He got out of the bed and went across the room to the cradle, which he touched lightly, then rocked. He was standing right in front of the television; some pundit was talking into the camera, holding a pencil, pointing it at someone else. The man said, “She is not and should not be this nation’s moral center,” and the camera switched and showed another man, and he said, “No one ever asked her to be.” Matt looked into the man’s eyes and remembered Don Kincaid and his wife, Lucille, the couple who’d taken him when he was nine years old and the couple with whom he’d stayed for nearly two years. They were not particularly bad people and had treated him with a distanced fondness; Lucille had never taken him into her arms and hugged him like he was her son, but she’d touched him on the shoulder when she wanted him to clean up his messes and she’d even sung songs to him from time to time. Don worked at a bank somewhere. They took him to church every Sunday. He hadn’t had many friends, but it was the first time in his life he’d felt a sense that the world could be the same thing for a long period of time, that the ground didn’t necessarily always have to rumble and shift underneath you. Once, they went to the beach; Matt didn’t remember where. Something told him it had been Lake Michigan, but he thought now he might be inserting it after seeing the lake during this trip. More likely it had been somewhere like Lake Geneva. He remembered many tourists, and he remembered Don, wearing goggles, standing on a dock in a pair of blue swimming trunks that matched his own blue swimming trunks, the water trickling down through the silver hair on his chest. He remembered Don telling him to wait where he was because he had a surprise, then disappearing down the dock, then coming back a minute later with another pair of goggles. He said, “Are you ready?” and Matt nodded his head that he was. Don jumped into the water feetfirst. When he came up, he fixed the goggles on his face and said, “Okay, you next,” and Matt hadn’t hesitated to jump in just beside him, laughing because he knew Don had expected him to wait a long time and have to think it over and be tentative, because that’s how he usually was. It had been his little trick. When he came up, Don was laughing, too, and he helped Matt put the goggles on right, and together they swam around and looked at the rocks and mud and weeds in the shallows. At one point Matt saw Don, through the green of his goggles, swim his awkward, overweight body down into a cluster of wavy plants and come out holding a jelly sandal. He held it up and did a funny underwater smile. Later, Matt found a dime placed perfectly on top of a rock. Don had a heart attack and died the next year, and Lucille sent him back, but at least Matt had the memory and, along with that, the very slightest notion that the earth could have its safe pockets.