The Cradle Read online

  The woman, hands on her hips, nodded to a bird feeder hanging on a low branch of a maple tree. “No. Never knew her. Mary didn’t have many people showing up as visitors.”

  Matt raised the bag and started pouring the seed. He watched the black and white and yellow seed fill in the box behind a wall of plastic. “Do you know anyone who knows where Mary Landower might be?”

  The woman nodded. “I do. But do you know anything about plumbing?”

  4

  If Matt went way way way way back, he could remember things. Not a lot. There was nothing before the age of five. After five, there was the first foster family, the Marcams. That far back, he’d been so young that he didn’t know any better than to accept whatever happened as the same thing that happened to everybody. And the Marcams had given him no real reason to doubt it, at least in the beginning. They were rich. He couldn’t remember the whole story, but later, after they’d already sent him back, another boy told him that Mrs. Marcam couldn’t get pregnant, and that’s why she came in and tried new kids on for size so often. The man had almost never been home. He was thin and fit and austere and had rarely spoken to Matt. Mrs. Marcam, though, had taken him everywhere, had never left his side. He’d gone shopping with her and gone to the YMCA with her and accompanied the Marcams on vacations—there was a beach, even, and he could remember running across it, in the sand, and holding on to a flat stone he’d found, running back with it to show her. There was one trip into the mountains, too, somewhere out west, and Matt remembered sitting on her lap on a balcony and looking out on snowcapped peaks and her leaning over him and saying, “This is what beautiful is.” She wore strong perfume. Once, Marissa had come home wearing something similar, and he’d gotten a little weak in the knees and said, “What perfume is that?” without looking at her, and she said it was something she’d gotten at the department store, a sample. He asked her if she’d bought it and she said no, so he didn’t say anything else. If she’d bought it, then he would have asked her never to wear it.

  What went wrong was simple. It was maybe a year after he’d arrived. He came home with a hole in the knee of his pants after playing with two neighborhood boys and falling on their driveway and skinning his knee. The skin was raw and bloody when he walked in and she’d run over, hands up in the air, and had examined it carefully. Then, as she was putting the Band-Aids on him, after she’d washed it, she just started to cry. Then, very quietly, she’d said, “You haven’t the faintest idea how much these pants cost me, do you, you little asshole?”

  A week later he was back at the boys’ home.

  There were not many more chores. Two hours’ worth. Matt helped her with a clog in her bathtub, and then, after some cajoling, he mowed her lawn. He drew the line at going to Wal-Mart with her to “get some things.”

  He did, though, get information. The woman who had known Mary well had moved to Green Bay. He got the address and drove straight down, once released. His whole idea of the quick in and quick out was already fading away; it was well into the afternoon, and Matt was beginning to doubt he’d return home tonight with anything. He drove with one hand on the wheel, no radio, and accepted the end of the quick recovery.

  He didn’t know what had made him think of Mrs. Marcam. Maybe something about the old woman in Sturgeon Bay, or maybe a question: where was Mrs. Marcam now, and was she an old woman, and was she being taken care of by her husband, or somebody? Or was she taking care of someone else? Had she found any children or settled on a particular group? Or still, to this day, was she rotating them like pets? Loneliness, maybe. Loneliness always made him think of her.

  Green Bay came up on him quickly, and he had to stop and ask directions twice to find the right area. When he did, he saw the big house was just off Mason Street. It looked a hundred years old at least. It was orange and black, coated with broad wooden shingles that looked like fish scales. There was a spire shooting up from the roof, out of the third floor. At the front was a porch and a long driveway that led into the old Queen Anne house’s back lot. The whole structure looked to be in disrepair; Matt didn’t know whether or not it was an illusion, but when he looked at the spire his mind told him the angle was slightly off, that it wasn’t quite plumb, that it was leaning like an old tree. Even from where he stood at the front of the driveway, he could see the foundation was a disaster. He would not have been particularly surprised to see the whole damned thing rumble a bit, then sink down into the maw of the earth amid a cloud of smoke.

  He went to the front porch and climbed the stairs. There was a doorbell, but when he pressed it he had the distinct impression absolutely nothing was happening within the bowels of the house’s electrical system.

  He knocked loudly.

  He waited for about a minute, then knocked again.

  Finally, as the very beginnings of relief and plans of returning home were edging toward the front of his mind, and the very idea of releasing the cradle and the Civil War was strengthening, he heard the sounds of metal sliding. Once, twice, then a third time. The great door swung open, into the house.

  An ancient woman stood before him. Below him, actually. She was four feet tall.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hello, young man.”

  Like the house, she could not have been younger than one hundred years old. Her hair was stark white, puffed and sticking out in every direction. In her withered, rheumatic hand Matt saw a cigarette burning. A blue dress clung tenuously to her skeletal frame. She was barefoot. Curled yellow toenails stretched away from each toe.

  “Hello, ma’am,” Matt said, looking down at her.

  He thought to go to one knee for the conversation but reconsidered, and instead just took off his hat. “I was wondering if I could have a minute of your time.”

  “You certainly can,” the woman said. “I’m having fun already.”

  “I was just up in Door County,” he said, and he pointed his thumb over his shoulder, toward the driveway. “I was speaking to a woman there named Hannah Price.”

  “Oh,” said the woman. A smile lit up her face. Matt saw the ash on the cigarette drop down and land on top of the woman’s foot. She didn’t seem to notice. “Hannah. What a nice young girl. Yes. Lovely.”

  “I’m looking for someone named Mary Landower. Hannah told me you might know where she is.”

  “I do, certainly,” said the woman. “Mary Landower lives in Antarctica.”

  Matt nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Okay.”

  “Would you like to come in?” she asked. “Would you like some tea? You look tired, young man. Why don’t you come in? Why are you looking for Mary? And how was Hannah? Did she look happy?”

  Inside the old house, Matt sat at the table, watching the old woman as she moved about the kitchen. She’d already stubbed out the first unsmoked cigarette, and another was stuffed into the gap between her fingers, burning. He’d yet to see her actually touch a cigarette to her lips. Lost ash littered the linoleum floor. The kettle was on, and a pot was ready and waiting on the countertop. The woman, whose name was Sylvia (Ancient Sylvia, Matt’s mind said, and after he heard it once in his brain, he had trouble not thinking it over and over again), had settled into an easy chatter as though she’d known him for twenty years. “Now I don’t think you could technically call it science, what she’s doing. And don’t ask me how she got them to take her there. She’s persistent, I suppose.”

  Ancient Sylvia used to have a house in Sturgeon Bay, she’d explained, and from time to time, Mary had stopped in to check up on her. Her house had been only a few doors down.

  “Did you ever know her sister?”

  “No,” said the woman, pausing at the sink for a moment. “I never knew anyone in her life.”

  “Why’d she come to see you all the time?”

  “I suppose because I was so old!”

  Matt thought about agreeing with the woman about her age but then thought it might be rude. The water began to boil, and Matt watched as Sylvia shuffled toward it. He saw her
trying to lift the heavy kettle with the same hand that held the cigarette—ash now spilled down onto her wrist and into the stovetop—and he stood and said, “I can do that,” and poured the hot water into the teapot.

  “Thank you very much,” she said.

  The tea steeped, and Matt sat back down.

  “Why do you need Mary now?” she asked him. “Is she your lover?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “I see. What, then?”

  “Her sister,” Matt said, “is my mother-in-law. Not that I’ve ever met her. But I’m looking for her because she’s got something I need.”

  “What has she got?”

  “A cradle,” he said. “For a baby.”

  Ancient Sylvia’s face collapsed and reconstituted itself into a beaming smile.

  “So you must be having a baby,” she said.

  “I am,” he said. “My wife is, I mean. I’m just observing.”

  She brought the teapot to the table, then went back to the cupboard for the cups. In between the cups and the milk and the sugar, she lit another cigarette. “I love babies,” she said, sitting down. “I have one.”

  Matt, in the middle of pouring her tea, looked up at her.

  “Had,” she said, nodding a little, looking past him to the wall. “Had.” She turned her old blue eyes to him. “He’s not a baby anymore, of course. Now he’s a troll.”

  Matt poured his own tea.

  “Milk, ma’am?” he said to her.

  “Thank you.” Her cigarette was now entirely one long tube of ash. It was no longer even burning. “My advice to you about children,” she said, “is to make sure they leave eventually. They have an amazing habit of coming back, over and over again. Keep them close to your heart early on. Then make them leave.”

  “Does that mean yours hasn’t?”

  “My troll lives upstairs in the attic.”

  Matt looked up at the ceiling.

  “We’ll need him,” she said, “if we want to call Mary. We’ll need his special skills. Do you want to call Mary?”

  “Call her?” he asked. “We can call her?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “Do you not know about the Internet?”

  “I know about it.”

  “You see, all the computers in the world are now hooked together into one large computer,” said the woman.

  “Yes,” Matt said. “I know that.”

  “And by using them together, they can talk to one another, and you can control them.”

  “I know that.”

  “Let me call Brian,” she said. “Hold on.”

  As the woman stood, Matt again had to push away the notion that his job was finished. Since the tea began he’d been thinking about the drive home, calculating times. Would there be traffic in Milwaukee for the ride home? What speed would he set his cruise to? Now, again, it seemed as though there were a glimmer of hope. Which was the exact opposite of what he wanted. Once it was extinguished, he could go, but the flame wasn’t out yet. It was still burning and Marissa back home was still upright in the chair, envisioning the cradle coming back. Ancient Sylvia was at a bank of drawers now, near the sink. She pulled one open and rifled through it. She said, “Ah,” then withdrew a black object and turned to show him. “-Walkie-talkie,” she said. It was an older model, the type that kids had played with when Matt was growing up, with a long rubber antenna and orange buttons on the front. The woman twisted some knobs, and the sound of static filled the room.

  She ashed her cigarette on the floor, then moved the walkie-talkie to her mouth, pressed the button down, and said, “Brian, if you don’t mind, we’d like to use the computer. Over.” This last word she added with a touch of glee.

  She released and there was more static.

  “I’m busy, Mother. Over.”

  It was a man’s voice, lost in the back of a cave.

  “I have company,” Ancient Sylvia said. “We need to use it. I’m sure whatever you’re doing can wait. Over.”

  “It can’t. Over.”

  “Brian,” said Ancient Sylvia in a more authoritative voice.

  There was a long pause of static.

  Ancient Sylvia waited, staring down at the walkie-talkie.

  “Fine. Come up.”

  She smiled again. “There, you see?” she said to Matt, turning and putting the walkie-talkie back into the drawer. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  The old woman rambled her way out of the kitchen, her bare feet padding on the linoleum, then into the next room and over the carpet. This room had four couches in it, all of them different colors. The walls were yellow-white. She moved very slowly, and Matt went very slowly behind her. He could see the beginning of a staircase at the far side of the room. He took one step, then stopped. She took three. Leaning against the wall near a grandfather clock was a cane, and the old woman made a detour to get it. Finally, they reached the bottom of the stairs.

  “Here we are,” she said, looking at him over her shoulder. “Now we start to go up. These stairs will take us to the next floor.”

  He nodded.

  “And then again.”

  He nodded.

  She turned back and started to climb.

  Fifteen minutes later they’d reached the third floor of the house.

  They were in another den, this one far more minimal. An open door led off to a bedroom, and Matt saw more stairs in the far corner. These were spiral, and went up into a hole in the ceiling. He assumed it was the spire he’d seen from the outside.

  “Since Brian knows we’re coming, this shouldn’t be a problem,” said Sylvia, who reached into her dress pocket and pulled out another cigarette. Slowly she lit it, and Matt waited to see if she would take a drag. Instead she said, “Do you like them?”

  “Like what?”

  “The pockets,” she said. She pointed down and then tapped the pockets on her dress. They were a different color than the fabric, Matt saw. “I sewed them in,” she said.

  “They’re nice.”

  “It was not difficult,” she said. “And I decided there was no good reason to not have pockets. Men have pockets, always. Look at you. You have pockets.”

  Matt looked down at his pockets.

  “Now I have them, too, you see,” she said.

  They made their way to the next staircase. Then, slowly, they started winding up. The old woman took even longer climbing these stairs, as they were steeper and required a slight twist of the body. He resisted the impulse to pick her up by the armpits and carry her the rest of the way.

  Once his head had gone over the level of the ceiling, he could see anyway, so he spent the last minutes of the climb taking in the room. Computers. There were eight computer screens in this room, arranged on a circular desk that wrapped all the way around its interior. There were cables everywhere—power strips overflowing with other power strips, black and yellow and red and white cords snaking along the walls, where they’d been stapled sloppily in place. Matt thought he could smell something rancid in the air, too, like a wet dog’s bed left to mold. There were windows all around the circular room, higher than only the cords and the desk. There was a small platform around the stairwell where one could stand. The rest of the space was taken up by Brian.

  Brian.

  He was a troll. The old woman was right. The man’s long, thin back, hunched, was essentially all Matt could see, save the bald crown of his head and the ring of dark, greasy hair that hung down past the T-shirt’s collar. The spine stuck up and ran down the center of the shirt. The skin was inhumanly pale.

  “Brian is writing a book,” said the old woman, once they’d both arrived at the landing. “It’s about history.”

  Finally the man turned to look. His face was softer than Matt had expected. What had he expected? The face of a monster? At the very least sharp, angry features. This man looked sad, and his face drooped. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked tired. He looked at least sixty. The top of his head was sweaty—this was not surprising, as it w
as twenty degrees hotter in this room than in any of the others.

  “Hello,” he said loudly, as though he were calling to Matt across a great distance.

  “Hello,” Matt said, trying to give him an example of a better volume.

  “He needs to speak with Mary Landower in Antarctica,” said Ancient Sylvia, also loudly. She leaned toward him and said more quietly, “Using the Internet.”

  “All right, Ma,” said Brian, swiveling back in front of his computer monitor. “I know. You said it on the walkie-talkie anyway.”

  He pointed to another monitor, and Matt saw a small stool beneath the desk. “She might be there.”

  Matt sat down.

  “Oh, she’ll be there,” said Ancient Sylvia. “Where else does she have to go?”

  “I don’t know,” said Brian. “How about a crevasse somewhere?”

  “-Crev-what?”

  “She might be somewhere,” Brian said. He looked at Matt. “She might be somewhere. It’s not like this is Star Trek.”

  He turned back to his monitor and clicked a few times. Matt watched him moving boxes around on the screen. He knew nothing about computers and only barely knew what the Internet was himself. Not because he’d never had a chance to learn but because he’d avoided it on purpose.

  “She’s there,” Brian said. “Hold on.”

  A few more clicks, and a window opened up on the monitor in front of Matt. In the window, for an instant, there was a man, poorly shaven, wearing an old gray hat. Then Matt realized it was his own picture.

  He leaned forward, and the picture of himself leaned forward as well.

  “So this is video, then?” he said.

  “No,” said Brian. “I just happened to do, like, totally perfect CGI animation last night and it just happens to look exactly like you.”

  “Brian,” scolded Ancient Sylvia. “Sass.”

  Brian ignored her. “You should appreciate this. Do you know how amazing this is? This is nineteen ninety-seven. You are dealing with two thousand three technology here, my friend. She has it down there because of the government. I have it up here because I am a master of the universe.”