The Cradle Read online

  “And you never went looking for her yourself? Knowing this?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know she’s even alive?”

  “I don’t. I don’t care if she’s alive.” He stayed still for a long time, and Matt, despite the urge to do it, felt it would not be right to say anything else. Glen looked lost inside of something big and deep, a cavern Matt could not accompany him through, so he turned back to the television and watched cops talking to one another. He couldn’t hear them.

  “Matt,” said Glen finally.

  Matt turned. His father-in-law was looking at the magazines on the table. The cop show was invisible.

  “If you do go—and I’m not saying you should go or not go—but if you do go, and if somehow you find her, please do me one favor.”

  “Okay.”

  Glen turned his head from the magazines and finally looked at Matt directly. “Please tell Caroline I say hello.”

  Upstairs, twenty minutes after Glen waved good-bye to his daughter, just one hand through the crack in the bedroom door, Matt sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at his wife. She had taken a bowl of ice cream with her, which she’d finished and set on the bedside table. He looked at the remains of the vanilla and a curl of something else, maybe caramel, at the bottom of the bowl. The spoon was propped up inside. Marissa was watching television, one of the evening talk shows, and Matt watched it with her quietly for a few minutes. When a commercial came on, he said, “Are you serious?”

  “I am serious,” she said, not moving her neck but flicking her eyes to him and watching him carefully. There was still some ice cream around her mouth. She’d changed into her pajamas but was outside the covers.

  He looked down at her feet, and while he looked at them, she wiggled her toes.

  “Because I’ll find it for you,” he said. “If you are. So help me. Don’t start me on things unless you want them to be finished.” He turned back to her and smiled. He liked to think of himself this way, as an unstoppable force. Of course, there was the matter of the answering machine.

  “I would like that very much.”

  “This is my last try to talk you out of it.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  “Marissa,” he said. “We’re going to have a baby. I think that’s just about all the meaning I require.”

  “He’s bringing it out in me,” she said, her hand going to her belly. Together they looked at it. “He’s making me think about her.”

  “That makes sense,” Matt said.

  “Yeah. It does.”

  “If I get it,” he said, “and bring it back here, what is that going to show you? It’s an object. We’re here. We have our home. We have everything we could need. It’s going to be fine when he comes. Is that it?”

  “Do you know what you want to name him yet?” she asked, not bothering to answer or disguise that she wasn’t going to.

  “What about Ty?”

  “That was my dog’s name when I was little.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides,” she said, “that’s a redneck name. And not even from here. Isn’t that from the South? ‘Hey, Tyrone.’” She said the last words in her approximation of a Southern accent. Matt smiled and leaned toward her and let his mouth hover near hers.

  “That,” he said, in his own drawl, “was the worst Southern accent I’ve ever heard.” He knew his was better, even though it still wasn’t very good. But the difference in quality was enough to make both of them laugh.

  “So,” she said, after he kissed her and sat back up, “you’ll try?”

  “You’ve given me no other option.”

  “You could just say no,” she said.

  “I know I could,” he said, “as you are crazy. Any jury of rational minds would side with me.”

  “Good thing this trial isn’t going to court, then.”

  “Good thing.”

  He left her with the television on and went downstairs to finish cleaning up. When he was done, he took a beer outside, wandered through his small backyard for a minute or so, then drifted to the grill, which he scrubbed with the steel brush halfheartedly, still sipping at the beer. The sound scraped its way out into the night neighborhood. He sat down in one of the lawn chairs and looked into his neighbor’s backyard, then up at the stars. It was a new moon—the sky was crisp and black and the stars were fairly strong, at least in the west. To the east the glow of Milwaukee lit up the lower part of the sky like a spilled glass of lemonade. He looked back down and saw Frank Rosenblum in the kitchen next door, wearing a white T-shirt. He was in his boxer shorts, looking through his refrigerator. It looked like 1947 inside his house. Last winter his wife died of pancreatic cancer. Matt had watched warily from the yard as the illness moved on, had seen snapshots through the window like a magic lantern and stitched them together into a story with reports from Marissa, who often went through the gate after supper to sit with Mrs. Rosenblum and have tea. Matt, for the life of him, could not imagine what those conversations had been, the specific details. As winter moved on and Mrs. Rosenblum faded, he began to understand that his wife was pursuing the answers to dark questions of her own, but again, just as he’d felt with Glen earlier, he knew she’d be the only one able to understand. They had only just moved in and hardly knew their neighbors, but she’d gone, over and over again, all the way up to the night Mrs. Rosenblum died.

  A few weeks later, in March, Matt had spoken with Frank across the fence about Frank’s plans to trim the apple tree that hung over into their yard. Frank apologized profusely, and Matt told him not to worry about it, they didn’t mind at all. Frank thanked him. Then Frank simply cut the entire tree down one rainy evening. Matt stood in the kitchen, watching through the window, as the old man cut through the tree in one slice of the chain saw, then sliced it into smaller pieces, then hauled them around the house to the curb. He remembered the sound of the chain saw’s little engine going right alongside the rain on the roof. The stump of the tree, exactly one foot high, was still there.

  2

  She awoke and slipped from bed at 5:15 a.m. The house was quiet, empty, dark. As she made the coffee, Renee Owen looked through the window to the frozen black morning in their backyard. The thermometer outside the window, itself caked in ice, read nine degrees.

  She looked away from the red vertical line and back to the dark snow. It was an odd thing to think, but it didn’t take much to see the cold. It was supposed to be invisible, but there it was, right there. You could hear it, too, in the wind, and maybe even smell it in the heat blowing from the vents in the floor. Without the sun, she guessed the waving foot of snow in their backyard had turned solid. She imagined walking across the top of it without breaking through. She imagined being barefoot, feeling the hard ice on the bottoms of her feet. It was warm inside, but she imagined herself out there, freezing, stepping gingerly.

  For an hour she sat alone in the big chair in the den, reading.

  Bill wandered down the stairs at 6:45, the hair on the sides of his head sticking out horizontally.

  “Is he coming?” Bill asked her, squinting.

  “He said he’d come at nine.”

  Their son was going to war. This was the week he would disappear and become an idea. It sounded impossible and it was absolutely true. Renee had hoped for months she would find the magic key, even as her desperation expanded, but in the end the hope was hollow and perfunctory. She’d gone to his apartment and they’d had long, intelligent adult dialogues at his kitchen table. There was the case of Vietnam to consider, and besides Vietnam, there was the more present sense that the war in Iraq already was lost, that nobody was for it, not really. He humored her. She cried. He humored her. She called him and told him about an article she’d read and begged until her own voice, in her ear, was nothing more than a child’s. Fifty-eight, and this was turning her into a baby. He humored her again; he told her he’d be fine. His calm and arrogant nineteen-year-old way of trying to appease he
r didn’t properly match her anger, and it made it all the worse. His ideas were equally infuriating (“If I live in this country and get to have this great life, I should be ready to fight for it, too, right?”), and his insouciance (“I don’t get what the big deal is anyway”) was youthful, cold, thoughtless. It reminded her of the past.

  Bill went to take a shower and Renee went to their room and took off her bathrobe and got dressed. She read more, Bill read the newspaper. She drifted off and woke up and made coffee again. The doorbell rang just before nine o’clock, and Adam, bundled, smiled at the door and gave her a hug.

  “There he is,” Bill said when he came into the room, and Adam laughed for no reason.

  They all went to the kitchen and had more coffee.

  She had spent a good part of nineteen years trying to do or say whatever a mother might do or say to build up all the kinds of thinking and ways of looking at the world that would keep a son from waking up one day, deciding there wasn’t any other choice to make, walking down, signing papers, and flying off, armed to the teeth, to do the work of government. With Vietnam it was so different. Then, it was easy to say the war was the wrong thing, almost fashionable to say it, especially in the city of Days of Rage and the Democratic National Convention, especially in the house of two professor parents. Here and now, today, 2008, so many of those old lines were crisscrossed, weren’t they? The way people thought was different. Was it that no one cared? No, that wasn’t it, not exactly. But something close. Something like: it doesn’t matter. It will turn out on its own. So let’s just hang out.

  In only forty years that had happened. They’d been so confused then and they were still so confused, but at least then their confusion had been tilted in the right direction, the direction in which things mattered.

  You will die, Renee had even said to her son. You will die in that godforsaken place, Adam. I am begging you. You think you’ll be fine, but I see very clearly the point you’re trying to make and it’s not worth it.

  Since then, she’d stopped speaking of doom directly. But she felt it. Really she knew from the morning they’d watched the towers fall down. She remembered. She and Bill both sitting there in the living room, Adam already at school. The building buckled and the unreal finale began. Exactly at that moment, some dark aspect of her heart awoke and shook its head at her and tsked its finger back and forth and said, Don’t you understand? And she did. It fit her history perfectly and to her it seemed designed and implemented from above. It was a punishment.

  She knew everything in advance. As they watched the towers on television, she knew Bill’s thoughts. She could see them. He stood quietly in the living room, wearing his suit, staring at the screen, car keys still in his hand. Briefcase there on the floor, leaning against the couch. Something like: all those Arabs now must pay, damn them to hell! As though it could be erased. And as she watched her husband, she saw more: it would slip from his mind into Adam’s, from father to son. She could guess about the announcements coming over the PA at Adam’s school, too. She could guess how they would say it. She could imagine all the years of the country’s anger that would come, imagine the whole shift of feeling that would overtake their street and their suburb and the restaurants and buses, seep all through Chicago, to all of the Midwest, to the South, to the coasts, seep into every person, no matter who they were. Not bloodlust but uncertainty. And with that came anything.

  And Adam. When she became Prometheus that morning in the living room, she saw his whole path as well. No one remembered that about Prometheus—he was a seer, not just a thief, not just the demigod chained to the rock and eaten. She saw the future just as he had. The world would bristle, war would come, and Adam would go toward it. She saw it and knew it would be true. He was only twelve years old, but she knew him well enough, even then. He would look at every person who said, no, it’s wrong, and he would say, no, you’re wrong. And he would look at every person who said, yes, it’s right, and he would say, maybe it is; maybe it’s right, maybe it’s not. I’m going to see for myself because I, unlike you, am not afraid.

  That was Adam’s way. He knew he could be unique in the world if he guessed at what other people feared and then immediately did that very thing. Every play battle, in one blink of his child’s mind’s eye, would shimmer and become human and real. In an instant he could move past every one of his friends and every one of his classmates and be standing alone. Except he could not possibly understand what that meant. At twelve years old or nineteen years old, he could not understand what that meant.

  “I feel like donuts,” Adam said.

  “Donuts?”

  “I know Daddy Warbucks feels like donuts. What does the ol’ champion say?”

  Renee wasn’t watching this exchange. Her back was to them both. Now the sun had come up and the snow in the backyard was glaring bright. The sense of their Illinois home being an absolute arctic wasteland had faded some, and now it even appeared beautiful to Renee, in some abstract way. In some alternate universe, this exact family is on their way out to go ice-skating together, she thought. She felt gray and numb. She was at the sink, looking down at the bits of onion and dill that had collected in the drain guard.

  She reached her finger down and started scooping up what she could.

  “Then, let’s have them,” she heard Bill say. “I’m no anti-donutist.”

  She turned.

  “Okay, my boys. Let’s have them, I agree,” she said. “Should I go? Why don’t I just bring them back?”

  “We can all go,” Adam said. “Isn’t that weird? To imagine actually, like, sitting down at Dunkin’ Donuts?”

  Adam laughed. He had stripped his layers down and was now wearing only jeans and a white T-shirt. He’d already buzzed his hair once, which had upset her. It had grown out a little since and he hadn’t done it again. Still, it was only fuzz. Beneath his light stubble his cheeks were rosy, and she could still see the twelve-year-old boy in his long face. Now, she admitted, it was a man’s face, not a boy’s—strong cheekbones and a strong jaw, considerate and expectant eyes. He was athletic, he looked strong. But when he looked at her, she saw the child first, then what was real.

  “That sounds like a fun adventure,” she said.

  Bill just stared.

  “Let’s all go,” she said, nodding. “I think it’ll be nice. I haven’t eaten a donut in about five years.”

  For a moment the two watched her at the sink.

  “You’re totally not into this,” Adam said. “It’s fine.”

  “I am,” she said. “Really.”

  “I do like the fake positivity, Mom.”

  “It’s not fake,” she said. “It’s not.”

  “Eating donuts here, at home, is also interesting,” Bill said. “To me. Incidentally. Do you two realize what it’s like out there?”

  Adam stepped sideways; he stood directly behind his father. She watched as he ceremoniously placed his hand on the skin of Bill’s bald head. Adam started rubbing back and forth. Bill didn’t bother turning around and looking up. This had happened before. It was their routine.

  “What does the genie tell you?” Bill asked, still holding his coffee cup.

  “The genie tells me that your attitude about the donuts,” Adam said, “sucks ass.”

  “What else does it say?”

  “The genie says you want to go out, not stay here.”

  “All right, all right,” Bill said, pushing Adam’s hand away. “Let’s go sit at Dunkin’ Donuts, then. Like every family should.”

  Adam had taken quite a shine to what this week was becoming: anything he wanted. It reminded Renee of how he’d been at Christmas a decade ago. All the usual things—unable to sleep, obsessed with his presents, Santa Claus. Wanting to camp on the roof to see. But his enthusiasm for the holiday ran deeper than it did for other children, she knew. The idea of gift, of present. Of getting when it was not asked and giving when it was not asked. She had seen his fascination with it over the years. The tr
ansition of things—that was his obsession.

  Was it such a stretch to say this same feeling was what drew him to Iraq? No clear idea of what he would be giving but the sense that it was, asked for or unasked for, another gift? If so, if that was really it, then she was sorry, he was her son but he was an idiot. The blurred lines infuriated her. He had probably heard some blustering man on CNN one day say something about the gift of freedom and used that to make up his mind.

  As she slid her coat over her shoulders and found her hat, she thought that this was the perfect paradox of parenting: they ignored every lesson you taught and instead found lessons you had never thought to teach and made them their own. They got them somewhere, picked them up, looked at them like they were shiny baubles on the side of the road—they understood that they were not their parents’ laws and not their history’s laws, so they made them their own. For freedom’s sake. Or maybe just to survive.

  She looked in the mirror and brushed her hair aside, tucking a clump of bangs beneath the elastic of the maroon wool. She did not feel old. She was fifty-eight years old and she felt forty-two, and she’d felt forty-two since she’d turned forty-two. She’d had Adam at thirty-nine. So late the doctors had been concerned. Bill had not wanted any children. Neither had she. But she’d woken up one summer day in 1988 and realized she’d been wrong, and she’d said to Bill she was wrong, and he’d thought and had said, finally, okay, I understand. We’ll have one. We can do this—at least we’ve got the money now, huh? Renee had thought: when did we ever not have the money?

  She didn’t look old. Good skin, her mother always said. You have good skin, absolutely unlike mine. Renee was glad for whatever genetic anomaly made it possible. Now, adjusting her hair, she felt what she always felt when she looked at her face—glad it was her own but surprised this was the thing that stood her place in the world and showed people it was she.