The Cradle Page 3

Here is me, she thought.

  “Ready?”

  “I’m ready.”

  Dunkin’ Donuts wouldn’t have been too difficult a walk, but it had snowed overnight, then frozen over, and the sidewalks weren’t clear. She waited beside Adam in the snow as Bill backed the car out of the garage. The air was cold but not unbearable. She let it come down into her lungs and meet with the warmth of her body. She imagined it down there, swirling.

  “It’s cold, huh?” Adam said.

  The garage door was coming up. Adam put his arm over his mother’s shoulder and squeezed her once, quickly, as though to warm the air in her lungs. It meant more. She knew it was his way of trying to apologize. He’d done it over and over again these last weeks, made small apologies. Replacing the batteries of the smoke detector as an I’m sorry, sweeping out the garage as an I’m sorry. He couldn’t say it out loud, because he didn’t actually mean it, but he could give invisible apologies that were just apologies for making her so afraid.

  “It is,” she said, tightening her shoulders at his touch. “Yes. Brrr.”

  “Mom,” he said, looking down at her. “Come on.”

  “What?”

  “I can tell you don’t feel good. It’s obvious.”

  “Can you?”

  He looked at the white lights of the car as it crept from the garage. “Just don’t get all weird. I’m leaving in a couple—”

  “Weird is a lazy word, Adam. Don’t you dare use it on me.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do,” she said, “and you know what I mean, and we’re going to get donuts. I’m fine.” She twisted her head and looked up at him. “Is that weird?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay,” he said, taking his arm away. “You’re not, but okay.”

  They drove down the street, just a half mile, Adam in the back, his knees up awkwardly, Bill leaning forward and being careful on the slippery roads. She tried to find the word Adam hadn’t been able to find as they sat in an orange booth at Dunkin’ Donuts. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t remove her coat or hat as they ate. Perhaps it was the urge to flee at a moment’s notice. Both Bill and Adam did remove their coats. They hung on the hooks attached to their booth. Dunkin’ Donuts, she thought. I have never, she thought, actually been in a Dunkin’ Donuts. It was down the street from the house she’d lived in for fifteen years, and she’d driven past it nearly every day. She’d walked by it, she’d stared at the bubble lettering. She’d looked through the glass at people chomping down. Still, this was the first time she’d ever been inside.

  She ate one donut and they each ate four; they had coffee and she had water in a Styrofoam cup. As they talked she looked out the half-frosted window at the whitened street, saw cars sliding here and there, and thought: not weird but displaced. Not weird but discord. Not weird but unexpected. Not weird but inharmonious. Not weird but improper. Not weird but juxtaposed.

  “—-still going to Hawaii, then?” Adam was saying.

  She turned back to them. Adam stared at her. Bill, also, looked and waited.

  “Are we still going?” she said. “Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at her husband. “I don’t know. Are we? Have we decided? I thought all this was all on hold.”

  “I think we’re going,” Bill said, pushing his chin down in what Renee had always taken to be something he did in meetings. “All things considered. We need sun. Both of us.”

  They’d had the plan for a year, longer than they’d known that Adam would be leaving. The idea of the trip, now, to Renee, was repulsive. Vacations were unethical. Adam was going to the desert to be killed to prove a point about the upper middle class’s dedication to democracy, and they would be lying on a beach, tanning, while it happened.

  She was the one to plan it and now she would rather die than go to Hawaii.

  “I do need it,” she said. “I do need a break, it’s true.”

  She would find some other way to kill the trip after Adam was gone. Her fear of flying would overwhelm her the week before.

  “You’ll get it,” Bill said. He patted Adam on the shoulder. “Next year, kiddo, you come, too. Try to have a wife with you, okay? Or at least a girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, right,” Adam said, smiling widely, and Renee looked at the smile and thought: you are a child.

  She turned away from them. Through the window she saw a mother pushing a stroller. She caught the slightest glimpse of a puffy blue hood ringed with fur inside and imagined the baby sitting upright, eyes open, taking in the cold and snow. Some little boy having his first taste of what it was like when the elements became disagreeable. The mother was dressed in brown fashionable clothes and had a black stocking cap on. She looked rich. Bill and Adam again dropped into their own conversation, and Renee scraped a piece of frosting from her fingernail. All she had to do was check in once in a while. She knew that. She was allowed her leeway. Adam could get donuts on Saturday morning and she could stare out the window while it happened. They all agreed that she would drift off here and there.

  And why shouldn’t I? she wondered. Here, here, I make this choice, good-bye. Then she could daydream. She could think about what she would write later on. She could form phrases, crack them apart, lock them back together. She could do whatever she wanted if they could do whatever they wanted.

  She looked at the plowed piles of snow up against the curb—there was one mound in particular that seemed to be almost a perfect pyramid, and someone had made the decision to place a snowball at the peak. She hoped it would snow again tonight, that they would all be able to sit together in the living room after supper and they would all be able to glance up, from time to time, through the windows and see the white dropping down, and that way, they would all know—that way, there would be one more thing. She imagined it: black-orange sky, white snow. Maybe even red fire in the living room. If she was allowed to make a memory, right here, today, that would be exactly it. If God reached down and handed her a sack with every single thing inside of it and told her she was allowed to make just one memory from the ingredients, whether or not it happened, whether or not it was real, that would be exactly it.

  It didn’t snow again. Instead of staying home, Adam decided to go bowling with his friends.

  It was Saturday night and he was leaving on Wednesday. He promised to come again tomorrow, watch football with his father, and afterward stay for dinner. Now Bill was on the couch, glasses low on his nose, engrossed in an episode of Mystery! She watched it with him for five minutes but decided to go to the office and look over her manuscript.

  She was on to structure—the poems were finished, nearly—it was just a matter of arranging them. She had set up a bulletin board on the wall with the title of every poem written on a white note card. This way she could stand in front of the whole thing and see it laid out all in one shot, and she could mix and match by theme, image, content. The only thing she felt sure of was that there would be two parts—so often the chapbooks were divided into thirds, as though all books of poetry were syllogisms. She was tired of that logic and wanted something else.

  Two parts felt right. It was something like: there is a before and there is an after. There is a yes and there is a no. There is a now and there is a then. The world is separated into two parts.

  Now and then was right because she’d not been a poet, not in her mind, for thirty-some years. Poetry started her writing, but she’d had access to something else when she was young, something elemental and angry and burning that faded out of her heart. By the time she met and married Bill, at thirty, it was gone. By then she’d already moved to children’s books and sold three. Now, at fifty-eight, she was the author of more than a dozen. She was Renee Owen. She was the smiling lady on the back of the book. She was the lady who had written it, you see? She wasn’t famous but she was read, most definitely. She had done well. And it didn’t bother her that she was
not the best-known children’s writer of the century. That was not important. What delighted her was the secret cadre of children who carried her stories along with them in their minds, whether they knew it or not. There were thousands of them.

  Whether they knew it or not, they were out there, an entire army, some of them now grown. She helped make their minds and their imaginations, their rights and their wrongs, every single one. Who were they? Where were they? It didn’t matter, and she would never know, but they carried along Fiona and Samuel, the sister and brother detectives; they carried along Wesley, the ape; they carried the prince named Thomas on the quest to find his shield; and they carried along the kittens and the yubyubs and the evil men who came to tell Annabelle her parents had given her up.

  That voice, though—that voice that woke up and whispered in her ear on 9/11—that was the thing. That was what had left her all the way back then, in 1969. She’d thought it was simply gone forever, that Jonathan’s death was the death of some space within her own heart, the same space where that voice lived. The evil surprise was that it was back, a reborn child and full-grown by the time Adam came home and announced his plans to be a marine. On that day, she decided there would be no more children’s books. She was through with them. And from there, it was only a matter of time before the poems began to come back. Only words and phrases in the night at first, as she drifted off to sleep, and later, whole stanzas that came to her at dinner with Bill’s decrepit parents or while she gripped the wheel and listened to NPR and waited for the wax coating in the car wash.

  She had a whole book—forty-nine poems. The book frightened her. There was no saying what the poems were. There were few characters, rarely any complete human forms. War, and fear of war, and fear of loss from war. But there were other phrases and lines that did not make sense to her at all. Each one of the cards correlated to one of the poems, and the poems were printed and stacked in a pile on the desk. She ran her eyes across the right-hand group of cards, focused on one. Then she went to her papers and flipped through the stack until she found what she was looking for.

  The truth was, she had no idea what she was doing with any of the poems, and she had no idea whether she would try to publish them, or what she would try to do. She replaced “Wednesday’s Child” in the stack, stepped back, and looked at the board. Some of them she’d shown to Bill. Only a handful. He’d read them and he’d been very kind. A few times she asked him to tell her more—more about what they made him see in his mind, more about what they made him feel. He had tried to respond. It was not his strong suit, this kind of thing. He was better at the stock market. He was better at taxes and finding property to buy. Snowblowing. She no longer had any poet friends. The only other reader she could go to was her mother, but so far she hadn’t been able to do it. Her mother’s readings would be the opposite of Bill’s. Her mother’s readings would be too deep. Her mother knew too much. Her mother would see what the metaphors pointed to in the world.

  She focused on another card, tacked up on the board but far off to the side, not included in either category. There was one word written on it.

  apology

  This poem didn’t exist. It was the only card that didn’t connect to something she’d actually written.

  This poem was still inside her. She didn’t know what it would be or how it would look. She doubted she would ever write it. But there it was on the board, interestingly enough.

  Right now the poem was only a feeling—not a single image attached to it. She knew it fit into the whole somewhere, but she wasn’t ready to ask how, to sit down and try to see. When she imagined the poem, she only felt worried; a cold wind, a dark, lost feeling. Herself, or someone, in a cave. Nothing to do but wait and hope.

  She knew, as she knew every single day of her life, what the apology was for. She hadn’t made herself that blind, not yet. It was for what she had done. For Jonathan, long dead. But there were other questions. Who would see it? Who would overhear it, and what would that mean? Could it be told? Who would know it was there, and what would that do? Would she then have to go out and deliver it? And if it ever became more than only a card, what then? Even seeing how the A and the Os and the G and the Y fit together as they did made her stomach drop. She knew the power and could feel it. She knew it was bigger than she was, that it could destroy her as easily as a crashing wave could lift a healthy human body and drop it and batter it against the sand and the coral and be done with it, then recede, all in one second, leaving a wet corpse behind.

  She was terrified of it.

  However, there was the card.

  She expected to find Bill asleep on the couch downstairs. When she came into the living room, she saw that he was still awake, sitting upright in front of the television. No more Mystery! He was watching the news.

  “Hi,” he said, looking up. “Bedtime for the old people?”

  “Yes,” she said, coming to the couch. “I’m absolutely exhausted.” She flopped down beside him. His arm came instinctively around her. With his other hand, Bill adjusted his glasses. The weather was on, and he said, “They think more snow tomorrow.”

  “Maybe it will just snow permanently,” she said. “Forever.”

  “For that,” he said, “we may have to get a new snowblower.”

  She breathed out, looked up at the ceiling. “You are so calm,” she said.

  “I’m not calm,” he said. “I look calm. I’m scared, too, Renee.”

  “I don’t even look calm,” she said.

  “Well,” Bill said, “you’re the mother. Something would be wrong if you looked calm.”

  “He chose it. Of all the things that make no sense about this. He chose it. This is our child.”

  Bill didn’t react to this. She wanted to make it seem like it was impossible that their child would become this. Obviously it wasn’t. She had her thoughts about children choosing other paths and finding their own ways, but there was also this: Bill was Bill. Bill had never said a thing to indicate he was against war in general, or against this one in particular. What if he had been firm? He was diplomatic and not aggressive. He had a balanced opinion on the subject and saw merits here and there. He was patriotic when it was convenient and he didn’t get tired, ever, of making fun of Hillary Clinton. He was a fungible man and hadn’t pushed Adam hard one way or the other.

  She wanted to hate him for it and to see this way he had as weakness, and yet here, now, beside him, she felt no resentment. Only loss, and fear. Love for him, love for the years of life they had together. She thought of the apology card.

  Maybe it was for him, after all. Maybe she’d guessed wrong. How was it possible to live with one man for this many years and never, ever mention to him the central truth of your history, the one most important thing? He knew about Jonathan, of course. Some old boyfriend, a tragic story. But he didn’t know everything. She dreaded what he would feel if he ever knew. He would feel like he didn’t know her. He would look at the same face she’d studied in the mirror this morning and it would go from familiar to alien in a flash. She would see it as it happened, and it would be unbearable. For most of their marriage, she had assumed she would just die and never say a thing for fear of that moment. The secret was so old, so a part of her, that the thought now—the voice?—surprised her. It said: you know you can tell him, don’t you? Even though? Just tell him.

  She looked at the television and saw apocalypse. The images were of a fire, from above. Some industrial building, sprawling, was engulfed in flames.

  Around it were what seemed to be thousands of fire trucks and police cars, all their lights flashing. Mobs of people made of tiny colored dots were grouped together in clumps not far from the building.

  Bill must have felt her muscles tense up, because he turned to her and studied her face, squinted, and said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “This just”—she nodded at the TV—“this just looks horrible. What is it?”

  “Mmm,” Bill said, looking bac
k. “Chemical plant, I think,” he said. “Yesterday afternoon. It’s up near Milwaukee. A whole bunch of people died.”

  “What happened?”

  “Look at it,” he said. “It burned.”

  “It looks just...terrible.”

  Bill nodded again. “It was, from what I’ve heard. Very bad. Ammonia compressor exploded.” He frowned down at the remote control, then pointed it at the TV and turned the volume up. The sound of the reporter’s voice filled the room. She was speaking of the dead.

  “Delco,” Bill said. “Delco, I believe that place is called.”

  3

  Matt took a change of course on Monday and began trying to divvy his Delco shifts instead of collect them. When Ken Granderson, Eric’s father, wandered into the break room, Matt offered him up Friday and he took it. To be on the safe side, he found Eric a little later and got him to take Thursday, then went to talk to the foreman to make sure all was understood. There was a funeral in Tennessee he had to go to. Old friend from grade school who’d moved away. Gun accident, tragedy. Okay, Bishop, the foreman had said kindly. I understand.

  On Wednesday night he changed the oil in the truck and made sure the windshield wipers were fine, drove it to the gas station, filled it up, bought three Twinkies, put them in the glove compartment, and went home. He and Marissa tried to have sex, but for the last few weeks it had been too uncomfortable, even from behind, as they had grown accustomed to.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as he got out of bed and crossed the room, toward the bathroom.

  He said, “It’s fine,” turned on the shower, stuck his head back out, and said, “It’s fine,” again, then went into the shower and masturbated with his back to the curtain, listening hard to make sure she wouldn’t sneak in and surprise him.

  Glen had produced an address. Matt had it written down and stuffed into his wallet, although, really, he didn’t need anything. The half sister’s name was Mary and the address was 78 9th Avenue. Glen had a little tickle in his voice when he told him over the phone. Matt said, “Not only did you never go to look.”