End Times (31 page)

“I—can’t,” he croaked. “I’m sorry.”

Janie looked up, stricken. She opened her mouth to call his name, but a contraction shook her body like an earthquake and she doubled over, wailing.

Doug took a slow step back, then another. If Daphne didn’t know him better, she could have sworn she saw true regret in his eyes, a genuine desire to stay and help even if he didn’t know how. But he was Doug: creepy, violent, arrogant Doug, who never cared about anyone but himself. It was no surprise to her when he turned and started running, each foot hitting the ground like a ten-pound sack of potatoes, heavy shoulders heaving as he hurried away.

“Daphneee!” Janie gasped, tears rolling down her cheeks. “It’s—oh, God, it hurts.”

Daphne’s heart thudded in her ears as she looked around for Owen. He stood a few paces away, trying to direct traffic to keep the caravan of cars from running Janie down as they sped out of the parking lot. She called his name and he turned, taking in the situation with one quick glance. Then he was beside her.

“I’ll get one side, you get the other,” he suggested. They each wedged a shoulder under one of Janie’s arms and lifted, carefully arranging her knees over their arms so they could carry her to the bleachers.

“Can someone please turn on the lights?” Daphne screamed into the chaos of the parking lot. Mercifully, someone must have heard, because soon they buzzed on, bathing the bleachers in a harsh fluorescent glow.

They lowered Janie, panting and moaning, onto the cold metal. Daphne squatted next to her cousin and smoothed back her hair, using her sleeve to wipe the sweat from her forehead. “You’re going to be all right,” she assured her. “The ambulance will be here soon, and they’ll take care of you.”

Janie’s eyes were round as peaches, her breath coming in short, desperate puffs. “I don’t know if I can wait,” she gasped. “It’s really coming. Like, now . . .
oooooooww
!” Her head snapped back, and the howl shuddered through her body, turning her into something feral and frightening, a bright-hot conduit of pain.

Daphne looked helplessly at Owen. “You don’t know anything about delivering babies, do you?” she asked.

“Only what I’ve seen on TV. I know we need boiling water and towels, and that’s about it.”

“We don’t have either. This will have to do.” Daphne ripped off her hoodie and laid it under Janie’s writhing torso. The night wind whipped against her bare arms and went screeching away through the trees, but as hard as she listened, she still couldn’t make out the wail of an ambulance.

Janie flopped back and forth on the hoodie, contorting herself and clawing at her underwear. As Daphne bent to remove them, she realized with a shiver that they were soaked in fluid and already spattered with blood. Janie was gasping for breath, growling low in her throat.

“Don’t forget to breathe,” Daphne reminded her. She forced herself to take an exaggerated deep breath and blow it out through her mouth, like it had said to do in one of the baby books she’d brought home from the library. “Breathe with me. Good. You’re going to be okay.”

Rivulets of sweat poured down Janie’s face, which was as pink and strained as a pimple about to burst. It soaked her hair and dribbled into her mouth, making her gurgle and sputter even as she cried out a prayer.

“God,” she panted, eyes rolled back to address the heavens, “please watch over us and deliver my baby safe and sound. Please, God, that’s all I ask.”

Her prayer ended in an agonized yelp as her body contorted violently, shaking the bleachers.

“I think he’s crowning,” Daphne said. The blood was coming thick and fast, soaking her hoodie and running like rivers down the grooves in the bleachers, but through it she thought she could see a shape emerging, the round top of the baby’s head. A sudden and unexpected wonder surged in her chest: Life was beginning before her eyes, and a tiny miracle was about to enter the world.

“Push,” Owen urged. He had ripped off his shirt to wipe the sweat from Janie’s eyes, and the muscles in his chest twitched as she crushed his hand in the throes of another contraction. Another small section of the baby’s head emerged, and Daphne noticed with growing astonishment the tiny curls of hair on his scalp. The whole time Janie had been pregnant, she’d thought of “the baby” almost as an abstract concept, an object that lived inside her cousin’s belly like an extra organ.

But as she watched the head emerge centimeter by centimeter, as Janie grunted and screamed and Owen stood by her side reminding her to push and breathe, assuring her that she was doing great, that it was almost out, Daphne truly understood for the first time that the baby was a real person, someone with a unique personality who would develop his own habits and dreams and ambitions and fears. He was someone with a soul.

Pastor Ted had claimed the baby would be a miracle, a prophet sent by God to lead the people of Carbon County through the Great Change, and now that she knew about the tablet and Owen’s dreams, she may have even believed it. But whether the child was a prophet or just an ordinary kid who burped and pooped and smiled, he’d still be a miracle. Every soul on earth was.

Daphne held out her hands to catch him as Janie’s son made his way into the world, into the light. Janie gave one final push, Owen urging her on, the contraction so strong she nearly levitated off the bleachers. There was a rush of blood that soaked Daphne’s arms all the way to the elbow and spilled out in a lake of red, and then Janie was lying back in a soft pile of exhausted flesh, and the baby was in Daphne’s hands.

She used Owen’s shirt to wipe the blood from his face, revealing wisps of hair softer than corn silk, a nose no bigger than her fingertip, and eyes the color of cornflowers staring up past her, way up into the sky. He was perfect. Each of his limbs, all ten of his tiny fingers and toes, were flawlessly formed, as if sculpted by the greatest artist who ever lived.

But there was something wrong.

He wasn’t crying.

His eyes, so blue and serene, saw nothing. His flesh, still warm from Janie’s body, grew slowly cold in her arms. She put her hand to his chest, but there was no heartbeat.

And when she bowed her head to listen for his breath, there was nothing but the mourning keen of a siren still half a dozen miles away.

“Can I hold him?” Janie groggily propped herself up on one elbow, wisps of hair framing her face like a halo. “I want to hold my baby.”

Daphne just looked at her, tears flowing down her face for the first time since she was a very young girl, unable to speak the horrible truth: that there on the cold, dusty bleachers at the Carbon County motocross track, with nobody around to bless his soul, Janie had given birth to a baby boy who was perfect and beautiful in every way . . . but would never take his first breath.

The child in her arms was stillborn.

THE coffin was no bigger than a shoe box.

Pastor Ted stood above the grave, his suit black and his face, normally pink with piety and passion, the dull gray of regret. It matched the late-afternoon sky above them, a solid blanket of drabness as endless as their grief.

The world was gray. Mourning.

No longer able to keep up the tough exterior that had protected her since childhood, Daphne let the tears fall as the tiny coffin was lowered into the ground. The rage that had flowed through her blood for most of her life was washed away, replaced with a bleak hopelessness that fell in endless tears from her eyes. She’d been crying off and on since the baby went cold in her arms. In those horrible few minutes before the ambulance came, the words from the Aramaic tablet had blared in her head:
Death of a Firstborn
.

Her tears flowed through the ride with Janie in the ambulance to the hospital, dribbling down her face while she sat under the bleak glare of the waiting room lights until Floyd and Karen burst in. Seeing her cry for the first time since her father died, they understood what had happened without having to be told.

Karen’s face went white, and her knees seemed to give out from under her. She nearly hit the floor before Floyd caught her and, clinging to one another, they made their way to the intensive care unit. The night passed in a long blur of hushed conversations and IV drips as Janie was treated for blood loss and dehydration, and the words on the tablet echoed over and over in Daphne’s mind like the chorus to a terrible dirge:
death of a firstborn, death of a firstborn
.

The baby was officially pronounced dead at one eleven A.M., and Daphne sat helpless next to her aunt and uncle as the doctor solemnly explained that funeral arrangements needed to be made.

The Varleys arrived sometime after two, Deirdre’s un-made-up face like a pile of chalk dust. Her hand shook as she placed a bouquet of hastily cut begonias from her garden in a vase by Janie’s bedside.

“We couldn’t find Doug.” Vince’s voice was coiled tight as a spring. “Tried calling, texting—no answer. I don’t suppose you’ve seen him.”

“No.” Daphne thought of Doug’s slow headshake when she asked him for help, the terror in his eyes before he’d turned tail and run clumsily away. “Not since the meet.”

Uncle Floyd’s face, already the color of day-old dishwater, darkened, but he said nothing. It was dawn before they were able to take Janie home, bundled in a hospital blanket and shivering. She hadn’t spoken since her son had been pronounced dead, and her eyes stared unseeingly out at the world, as empty as a grave.

Pastor Ted had no sermon. There were no lessons in the death of the child, a holy child who he’d believed with all of his heart would lead the Children of God through the Great Change. He merely opened the Bible and read.

“Thessalonians 4:14,” he recited, his voice hollow with grief. “‘For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, through Jesus God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep.

“‘For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with the sound of trumpets. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore, encourage one another with these words.’”

The congregation was silent. Their faces, the sky, the entire day, and all the days beyond seemed gray. Uncle Floyd blew his nose into a handkerchief, Aunt Karen wept openly, and the rows of folding chairs were a sea of sniffles. Shoulders shook and sopping tissues were crammed into pockets and purses, the steady shuffle of grief broken by the occasional wet sob.

Only Janie sat silent. Her face was stony and white as a marble statue, her eyes unfocused and unseeing. She stared past Pastor Ted, not registering his words, unresponsive to the protective hand her mother laid over hers. She was somewhere beyond grief, in a place of shock as bleak and barren as the desert.

Across the aisle, Deirdre Varley dabbed at her eyes and Vince balled his fists tight in his lap, his face twitching. Doug sat between them with his hands on his knees, shoulders hunched over, refusing to look at anyone. His head had been down since they arrived, his skin colorless. He hadn’t yet spoken to Janie, hadn’t done so much as acknowledge her with a glance, and Daphne could tell that the fact that they weren’t sitting together was raising eyebrows.

Pastor Ted knelt and sprinkled a handful of earth into the open grave. “We commend unto thy hands, most merciful father, the soul of this thy child,” he chanted in monotone. “And we commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Amen.”

Sorrow spilled from his eyes as he stood and faced the congregation once more. “You may now proceed to the funeral home for the reception,” he said quietly.

Daphne stood. As she turned to follow Uncle Floyd, she realized that Janie hadn’t budged. She sat like a pile of earth, unmoving, as the crowd bustled around her.

“Janie.” Daphne took her hand, which was as white and limp as a dead fish. “It’s time to go.”

The stiff beige drapes and overstuffed sofas in the funeral parlor’s reception room felt oppressive. The stagnant air smelled of Lysol and egg salad, and the congregants moved slowly through the space, too shell-shocked to mingle freely. A rainbow of crudités and crystal bowls of dip sat untouched on a long table to the side of the room, small mountains of egg and pasta salad unmarred by anything but their silver serving spoons. Even the pyramids of brownies and lemon squares were intact. The occasion was too bitter for sweets, and the congregation had lost its collective appetite.

“Do you want a soda?” Daphne asked Janie as they made their way through the doors. Her cousin made a soft gagging sound, which Daphne took as a no. She fetched a clear plastic cup of water instead and watched Janie accept it passively, holding it in front of her like she didn’t know what it was.

“Drink.” Daphne placed her hands over Janie’s and helped bring the cup to her lips. “The doctor said you need lots of fluids.”

Her cousin’s lips opened obediently, and her throat rippled as she swallowed. A small stream of liquid leaked down her chin, leaving a dark spot on the front of the dress Daphne had selected for her that morning while Janie sat catatonic on the couch.