The Cradle Read online

  Glen backed all the way in and disappeared.

  Marissa stood up. Matt put his hand down on Joe’s head and they walked a little closer to the house. “So this is where we live,” he said. “It’s small, but there’s enough room for you to stay. You want to come inside?”

  Joe looked up at him, considering. He looked back at Marissa. Matt could see that he had the shakes, but only a little bit.

  Glen reappeared in the doorway, holding a white box with a red bow on it. He paused for a moment, then walked down the stairs and came out, past Marissa. He squatted down then, in front of Joe. Matt saw the bottom of his jaw quivering, and his lips stretched back and his forehead crinkled and he started to cry a little bit. Glen. That was him. What it could have meant to see this boy, Matt didn’t even dare guess. He watched Glen’s ragged face turn up into whatever smile he could manage. He said, “Joe, we got this for you.” He held out the box of Life cereal. “We have different kinds of milk. So whatever you’d like to have.”

  Joe took the box.

  Glen stood, turned, and walked back into the house.

  13

  She remembered it.

  Renee was lying to her mother when she told her she didn’t remember the day. The day she decided. That was a better way to say it, too. Not repressing. Lying, not repressing.

  It was May 17, 1969, and the baby was due in a month. Her stomach was enormous. Both parents were tied down at school with the end of the term, and she had free rein over the house. She was already depressed, but that day, the feeling—she didn’t know if it was grief or anticipation—was different. It was heavier and more destructive.

  She read for an hour in her bedroom, then went downstairs. Sitting alone in the kitchen, she thought about how the baby, if it was a boy, would look like Jonathan. This thought sent her mind wandering down familiar paths—not just that she was afraid one day she’d look at him and see Jonathan and it would simply be too painful, but that other pains, more abstract pains, were possible. For example, say he one day grew up and went to war and died at war, too. Then it wouldn’t just be that someone who looked like Jonathan haunted her life every day. It would be that it had all happened again, in one big circle. That the same man she loved had died twice.

  That day she left her parents’ house and walked down to the corner, to the drugstore. She wandered up and down the aisles, not looking for anything, just taking in all the packages, the reds and whites and greens, the brown bottles, the clean tiled floor. In the neighborhood these days, she had become something. All the local people saw her walking up and down the streets or saw her sitting alone in the park, reading her Whitman, and they all knew her story, and they pitied her. She had felt them watching for months, and she felt it now, too, here in the store. Mr. Henshaw, standing behind the counter, smiled at her when she walked by. His mustache wrinkled into an M. She smiled back and she thought: don’t pity me, you old bastard.

  She left the drugstore and went across the road to the very park where she’d first read the Whitman, and she sat on the bench, holding her stomach, both feet flat on the ground, watching children play in the field. She watched the six of them play football for what must have been an hour. One boy—angry, gaunt, brown-haired, and ugly—seemed older than the rest, and he played with a frenzied enthusiasm his teammates didn’t share. Renee, a few times, wondered where the parents were. No one else seemed to be around. The children never talked to her or gave any indication that they noticed her. They just kept playing. There was only one girl. After a time Renee guessed that her brother was the ugly one. She seemed to play with passion, too, and the few times she stumbled or dropped the ball, she said nothing; she just stood and walked back to her team and started over again. Another boy, the smallest of the group, got hurt. He twisted his ankle and started to cry. It was enough of a problem to send one of the other children running away, and Renee watched the injured boy intently, sitting on the ground, bawling, looking at his foot. No parents came. She stood up and left the park.

  She was them. That was the deepest truth. Children played a game, and their whole world was caught up inside it, the whole range of happiness and sadness. There was absolutely nothing outside their own world, and that’s what let them be what they were. And she knew, walking home, that if she had to choose, if she had to say I am this or I am that, I am those children playing in the grass, or I am my parents, or I am all the other people in the world, I am them. I am the children playing in the grass. I am not some other thing. And if she was that, how could she have a child of her own?

  Joe Bishop first told her about the fire at Delco. Nineteen people had died, another sixty-seven were injured. An ammonia compressor exploded in the southwest wing at 9:15 in the morning, after the shifts changed. Four men and one woman died there, in the explosion. It took almost no time for the holding tanks to catch, and even though the sprinklers were spraying full bore, even though the fire trucks had arrived, there were explosions up and down the floor as though it were a war. Joe said the shift boss, a man named Gary Pollian, was trapped inside his office and tried to call his family on the phone before he burned to death. Matt’s friend Eric Granderson had died, too, but he had died of smoke inhalation, and his body had been found without a mark on it. Since January there had been new investigations—they said the safety measures had not been up to code, that it wouldn’t have happened at all had the water dump worked or had the insulation around the tanks been re-fireproofed sometime in the last thirty years. It was possible there would be a class-action lawsuit. Joe said that at the very least, there were many, many people in St. Helens without work. There were many mourners and many people without work.

  Matt had survived. His arms and hands, though, had been burned from reaching through a hole in the wall, trying to help a man climb through. Apparently just as Matt reached back, there was an explosion on the other side of the wall. The force of air that came through the hole knocked him twenty feet, and he landed in a wide-open space in the center of the main floor, stood up, looked back to where the hole had been, to what was now a flaming wall, and ran out of the plant with a group of other men. It was only after he was outside and safe that he realized his hands and forearms were different colors.

  That was the first story. Renee listened to Joe speak at her kitchen table, and she thought as she listened: I am dreaming.

  She wasn’t over the shock of this person, Joe, here at all. Joe—her grandson? And before she was allowed to even think things through, he had launched himself into this. This story of Matt.

  Matt. Matthew. It was this boy’s father’s name. And this boy’s father was her son. For so long he hadn’t had a name, in her mind. She had kept herself from guessing or from giving him one.

  “So then he was in the hospital,” the boy continued, looking past her as he spoke, hands crossed on the kitchen table. “They had him on all of these, like, crazy painkillers, I guess? He had morphine and all of that, you know? So Mom and me and my little brother were in there all the time with him and he was all doped up. I don’t even think he knew we were there half the time.”

  “But he’s okay?” Renee said. “He’s out of the hospital?”

  “Yeah,” said Joe, turning his eyes to look at her, now that she’d finally said something. His eyes—there was something in his eyes that was just not in Adam’s eyes. “He’s okay. He sits around all the time at home and I think he’s driving my mom crazy at the house, though. He messes around in the garage all day. I think he’s depressed. Plus, now he doesn’t have a job.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, Joe. I don’t understand how you found me. I don’t understand what made you come here.”

  “That was my mom.”

  “Your mom.”

  “Yeah. She found you, like, six or seven years ago, I think. I mean, she had some guy find you. I have no idea how he did it. I don’t really know any of this. She just paid him, and he went away for a week and he came back and he gave her your n
ame. But I didn’t know until just now. She didn’t tell any of us that she did it. She just told me about you last week.”

  “Your father doesn’t know who I am then, you’re saying? He doesn’t know that you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “Your mother didn’t tell him, still?”

  “No.”

  Renee leaned back in her seat, thinking.

  Joe watched her and said, “I know. I mean, I don’t know. Don’t feel bad if it seems messed up to you. My mom’s kind of a weird person.”

  “Weird?” Renee said. “Weird how?”

  “She just—does things. She makes, like, plans. She has all these plans.”

  “Plans to send you here to talk to me,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Weird, huh?”

  When Renee didn’t say anything, Joe put his elbows on the table and scratched at his cheek. “So you wanna know another weird thing?” he asked.

  “Okay,” said Renee.

  “I’ve read every single one of your books,” he said. “Every one. Which is weird because you’re, like, the lady on the back of all the books I read when I was a kid, but I’m right here in your kitchen, talking to you.” Joe scratched his cheek again. “So that’s totally weird.”

  Joe didn’t know exactly what to think when she stood up and asked him if they could take a walk. He didn’t care one way or the other, and now she was starting to look not well.

  She said, “I just have so many questions, but I can’t—I’d like to go out, perhaps? The house feels...” She trailed off.

  He said, “It’s getting colder again. Do you care?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t. It’s okay. I like the cold.”

  She had her hand down flat on the table and was looking around as though she’d lost something. The phone started to ring, and she didn’t move to answer it.

  Joe stayed still in his seat, half expecting her knees to buckle and for her to fall face-first onto the floor right in front of him.

  Seeing her so out of sorts made Joe feel more at ease. She looked older than she did in the pictures. Also, in the pictures she had a big smile, and now it was more like a thin, confused moving up and down of the lips. He was glad she hadn’t asked him whether he actually had liked any of her books. They’d all been cute. They weren’t exactly bad, but just so cute. He had planned a response to the question, though, just in case, because he was not about to walk up to this woman and say, Hi, ma’am, you’re my dad’s long-lost mom, and also by the way your books totally eat it. If she asked, he was going to tell her that he couldn’t remember the actual stories well but he knew that he had liked them because he could remember the thousand times his dad had sat down on his bed and read them to him, so that made it just a good feeling. It was a way to get around the question by saying something true. Joe had a problem in that he never lied.

  “I just need my keys,” she said, drifting over to the other side of the kitchen. Joe stood up and went to the front door and waited for her there. On the wall he saw a picture of her and what must have been her family, a husband and a son. The husband was bald and had a big goofy smile. The son was taller, with brownish hair. Joe reached into his back pocket and pulled out his gloves. He slid them on, still studying the picture.

  Joe’s mom was weird. His mom was actually crazy. The whole drive down this morning (Marissa had said, “If you get a speeding ticket, I will kill you, and this won’t be such a sweet story after all, will it?”), he had thought about how she’d come home one day with a bag of books, the entire Renee Owen oeuvre, how she’d said an article had said these particular books were good for children, and how she’d then made Matt be the one to go into the boys’ room and read to them, even though he was tired. His dad did it, too. Almost every night for a year or two, until they were through with all the books. Matt used to read with funny voices. Maybe they hadn’t all been that bad. A couple had been okay if you could get past the cheese.

  As for this particular plan, Marissa had come to Joe in the living room just last week and had explained to him how he would be driving down to Chicago to deliver a message to Matt’s mother.

  He’d been sitting with his feet up on the table, watching TV. It was just the two of them in the house. It was a few months since the fire at Delco. Matt was still at his physical therapy, and Chris was at his guitar lesson.

  “What?” he said.

  “Your father’s mother,” she said, standing beside the table, “lives in this suburb by Chicago. The woman is only a hundred miles away.” She had printed a map off the computer, along with driving directions. She held them out to him. “Go meet her.”

  He turned off the TV. He set the remote down in his lap and reached up and took the papers.

  “How do you know where Dad’s mom lives?”

  “Because I know,” she said, crossing the room and going back to the kitchen. She called to him from there. “Can you go on Monday?”

  Joe stood and went into the kitchen. He looked down at the papers and looked back at her. She was sitting at the kitchen table now. A half-finished crossword puzzle was in front of her. “Why would I go?” he asked. “What am I supposed to say to her?”

  “I’ll tell you what to say to her,” she said. “It’s not like it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be easy. The reason that you have to go is that you have a driver’s license, and I can’t just disappear all day on Monday because Mr. Grumpy Burn Victim would get all out of sorts and not know what to do with himself.”

  And now here he was, walking down the street with Ms. Renee Owen, children’s author, his father’s mother.

  She hadn’t said anything since they’d left the house. Her jacket was long, cream-colored, all the way down to her ankles. She had a maroon cap and she walked with her hands in her pockets. She walked fast. It looked like she was thinking.

  “It’s better out here,” she said finally. “Thank you. You were right. It is colder. Brr.” Since the afternoon it must have dropped twenty degrees. The light outside was getting softer; it would be dark in just a couple of hours. Joe thought of driving back home through the night.

  “Joe,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you my grandson, then?”

  “I’m adopted.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I see.”

  They walked in silence for a minute or two.

  He couldn’t tell if she was angry. Up ahead he could see the main intersection and the suburb’s little downtown area. The bookstore, he remembered, was right there. Once, he thought she would turn off down another side street, but she kept going straight, and soon they were waiting at a stoplight.

  “Why did your mother never tell him where I was?”

  “Because she wanted him to find you on his own, I think.” Marissa had said as much.

  “But what made her change her mind?”

  “Because I think he’s always gone back and forth,” Joe said, “and almost tried to find you and then stopped, then almost tried to find you again. For a few years, he was about to—I don’t know. I mean, I was little. Mom said, though, that when he was in there, in the hospital? She said that he said things. When he was all drugged up.”

  “Said things?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Said what?”

  Joe looked away, down the street. He was telling her too much. The car was parked there, across from the bookstore. He’d left it there all day and had been walking around, waiting for her to come home. He hadn’t wanted to talk to her there.

  “Listen,” Joe said. “You know what? I actually think I have to go.”

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. She turned to her left and pointed to an orange-and-white sign. “I was about to offer to buy you a donut.”

  “That’s okay,” Joe said.

  “You said that so suddenly,” Renee said. “Did I somehow—did I say something to offend you?” She smiled at him, shook her head. “Why are you going? You just got here.”
r />   “No, no,” Joe said. “Not at all, you didn’t offend me. I’m just—” He reached into his back pocket and removed the folded envelope. He unfolded it for her, held it out. “I’m actually not supposed to tell you anything else. My mom really wanted me to just tell you, like, basics.”

  Renee was looking at the envelope.

  “She told me to just be the emissary,” Joe said.

  “Emissary?” She was still looking at the envelope.

  “You know,” he said. “Greeter.”

  “What’s this?” Renee said.

  “From him.”

  “How, from him?”

  “He wrote it on one of those days,” Joe said. “When he got into one of those moods and decided he was going to find you. My mom said he actually wrote it the day my little brother was born.”

  She took the envelope.

  “Our phone number’s written on the back right there,” he said.

  Renee turned the envelope over, looked at the number, then turned it back. “And your mother—”

  “She stole it out of his glove compartment,” Joe said. “Yeah. So yeah, it’s not sealed. I mean, she read it. I read it, too, actually. Sorry. I think he just thought he was going to go out and find you and then he just didn’t.”

  “No, no, no,” Renee said. “It’s okay.”

  She was still staring down at the envelope.

  “So I’m gonna go,” Joe said. He took a step back. “So I’ll see you, maybe? Or talk to you? Or something?”

  She leaned back and looked straight up at the sky. “My God,” she said. “Is it snowing? It’s supposed to be spring.”

  Joe looked up, too. He noticed a few flakes coming down.

  “It got cold again.”

  “It did,” she said. “You’re right.”

  “Well.”

  “Are you sure you’ll be safe to drive home?” she said.

  “I’ll be okay,” he said. “Snow’s okay.”

  “I get so worried about people driving in the snow,” she said.

  He stepped away again, just in case she tried to hug him.