Frail (29 page)

Natalie took my arm, grasping tight, getting such a hold I almost stumbled. “I knew you’d come here for me, Amy,” she said, as I tried to pull us toward the door. “I knew
you’d
come here. It’s just I had to wait, I hate waiting, and I got scared.”

“We have to go now.” I was tugging back, trying to free my arm, but Natalie’s fingers sunk in and clutched my sleeves like a cop seizing a pickpocket. “They’ll be here soon. You said so yourself.”

“You’re lost. But now you’re found. I know my way back.”

“Good. Then we have to leave.” I turned away, waggling my arm to try to get her to let go. “We have to get out.”

“You’re right. We do.” I felt her swaying back and forth, trying to keep herself steady, not succumb to the instinct to run back into that closet and slam shut the loose rattling door. “We’re getting out. We’re getting out right now.”

At the far end of my vision something flashed and gleamed, not like the sun, like glass or metal made painful-brilliant by the sun’s reflection. Natalie’s other hand came up and my neck was searing, a single thin clean ray like sunlight burning it clean through, and my groping hands felt wetness and I opened my mouth to scream but the damp was all in my throat now, bubbling-thick, I spat and choked and fell to the floor. She let me go. I fell.

The sunlight was too strong now, much too strong, it had burned the whole wall away and let the lake waters spill into the room. The tides flowed ceaseless into my mouth, and I drowned.

NINETEEN

I
t’s dark down here.

Darkness all around me, thudding sounds all in my ears. My limbs waver and flicker, boneless jelly-things in the dark icy water surrounding them, as easily broken as the spines of sea plants. My shoulder blades, the back of my head are stuck fast in the mud, the cold gelatinous murk on the floor of this great icy lake, this freezing sea. I can feel the suction pull of it holding my body in place, down at the bottom where I sank and drowned.

I drowned and I am dead. The thought of that means nothing.

Something flashes behind the lids of my closed eyes, spasmodic, a sudden memory. The glare of early sunlight against window glass, every heated yellow-orange spot a little pool where you could dip your fingers. The sheen of a sharp, metallic thing catching that light.

The suctioning mud at the lake bottom tugs hard at my hair, my elbows, the cloth of my jacket; then suddenly it eases, relaxes, and lets me go. I float upward, flapping uselessly in the current, and then it’s as if I’ve taken the lake mud inside me, I breathe it and drink it and feel each limb growing full with it, nearly taut, air rushing into depleted balloons. There’s mud all in my nostrils but I don’t suffocate. The taste and smell of it is fungal, pungent, and as I rise through the depths I realize this dark muddy lake is no lake at all but a house, the house of my own body, mind, memory. I tunnel upward through the strata of myself, through everything hidden behind the thin pasteboard walls that I’d thought were all there was to me. I’m not hollow inside though, not anymore. The filthy mud, the hoarder’s junk fills every crevice and seam, weighing me so far down I should be buried miles beneath.

I’m not buried. I’m surfacing.

I remember everything.

 

 

March, a few months ago. Winter sleet turned to freezing earlyspring rain. Dave was long dead by then, in a blanket shroud in another house because the ground wouldn’t budge for burial. It was thawing out now. Kristin lay on the couch in Dave’s living room and she didn’t move, didn’t talk, didn’t eat and then late that March, as I brought her what passed for breakfast, she slid her knees up close to her chin and made a hissing sound. She looked down at her own body like it had nothing to do with her, like it was misbehaving just to annoy her out of sleep, but by the time Ms. Acosta returned from foraging Kristin had rolled on her back and kept arching up with pain, great invisible fingers continually drawing her back and down into the drama of her own flesh.

It ate her up even before we started. She couldn’t hear us as we hauled her up, tried to get her to walk between us, squat down for the delivery, the little skull was already poking out from between her legs like the hairy knuckle of some obscene, shoved-in finger and it all happened too fast, so fast. She bled like every period she hadn’t had for nearly a year came on her all at once, deep dark red and gushing all down her thighs and soaking the sofa cushions, the carpet, but Ms. Acosta just kept saying, Push, Kristin, for Christ’s sake just push, and there was nothing we could do.

I had Kristin’s throat under my fingers trying to keep track of her pulse, that artery on the side of her neck, and I’d grabbed
Where There Is No Doctor
and natural childbirth books from all the library shelves, what was left of the libraries, I’d
studied
for this test, but in the end it all came to nothing. I flunked. The pulsations beneath my fingertips were like the wing flaps of a bird flying away: hard and vigorous leaving the ground, a sudden panicked, palpitating rush of speed to catch up with the flock and then, as it caught the current, slowing, slowing, no way to feel or hear it so far away. Gone. Kristin was gone. My head was all hazy but I saw a glint of metal, heard the snick of scissors.

Something slick and wet was in my arms.
My
arms. “Oh, Christ,” I said. Very calm, like prayer. I wasn’t praying. We were agnostics, my mother and I.

“Careful,” Ms. Acosta said, her voice thick, distorted. She left the room and brought back a tablecloth, draping it over Kristin, and as the cornflower cloth took on new dark stains I turned away, I looked down at what Kristin had left me. A girl. Tiny, wrinkled, so red it looked raw and half-cooked at the same time and how could you tell healthy or sickly straight off, how did you even know? It cried loud, hard, that must mean good lungs, even though Kristin had stopped eating and there wasn’t much to eat a lot of the time anyway that must mean it’d be all right. A girl. I need a girl’s name.

“Susan,” I said out loud, as we wrapped it up in a towel. Susan. When I named her, touched her, Ms. Acosta said nothing. She just looked at the little face, like a bit of paper scrunched up and hastily smoothed out again, and turned to me, thoughtful. Quiet. The cloud of gray hair around her face was thin and broken, ribbons of bare shell-colored scalp all woven through.

“You need to go out,” she told me, her bird-whistle voice fluttering up and down as she took Susan from my grasp, as she lifted her away from me. “There’s nothing here for a newborn to eat, try the other side of town where the hospital is. They might have formula left, something.”

We’d already foraged in the hospital, a good dozen times. I imagined Susan sucking happily at the tube end of an IV bag, the kind with sugar water in them, the kind we found slashed open for their contents and littering the first floors we ever stepped inside. “There won’t be anything,” I said, touching the crazy dark thatch of hair smack atop the baby’s head. Her dead dad’s hair. “I looked for more food, last time we went for Dave, I couldn’t—”

“So look again. Someone needs to check. I’ll take care of all of this, and . . .” She looked around the room, at the blood on the sofa and the rug and smearing Susan’s wrinkled sunken cheek, and shook her head hard like she often did to stave off crying. “Amy, just go.”

I went. Because I thought it was real. Because I promised to take care of Kristin’s baby.
You won’t just leave my baby to fend for itself, will you?
No, Kristin, no I won’t, I promised you, except right at the start right when it mattered I just handed her over, I gave her away without even the pretense of a fight, outside it’s cold and dangerous and she’d just slow me down—

That’s how faithfully I kept my promise. For a few seconds, until I thought it might slow me down.

For a shameful moment I’d actually wondered if we could somehow squeeze the milk from a dead woman’s breasts, but now as I stumbled through the slushy rain puddles down Madison and Overmyer and Cypress I was only thinking, Why hadn’t we done this weeks ago, when we had the chance, gathered supplies and stocked up blankets, baby clothes, formula—couldn’t they eat chewed-up people food, newborns, like baby birds or wolves? “People” food, like newborns weren’t people. Nothing at the hospital, I already knew there was nothing at the hospital.

Too much hospital to search, the baby would be hungry, Kristin’s Susan, my Susan now, needed me to move fast. I nearly snapped an ankle on the ER parking lot’s half-melted slick of ice, why hadn’t I stuck closer to Dave’s house, why did I still let Ms. Acosta give all the orders when it was only us left? Susan needed
me
, not her. Kristin made that very clear. She hated Ms. Acosta, hated her voice and touch. Susan needed me to hurry.

Off Forest Street, a house two blocks from the hospital, I found it: right there in the cabinets untouched by famine gangs, a
sealed
canister of formula, a huge one. I shouted out loud with happiness and ran, panting, nauseous with nerves, all the way back. We had water, bottled, to mix it with, a woodstove to heat it. We’d make it last.

I don’t know how long I was gone, an hour or more, but when I got there Ms. Acosta was standing in the doorway waiting for me. No Susan in her arms. She looked beyond mere nausea, about to double over and spew, trembling and shivering in her layers of mismatched odiferous fleece like a dog staked in a freezing yard.

“I’m sorry, Amy.” Her voice was as chalky and drained as her face. “I’m so sorry. It, she, just stopped breathing. Its lungs must’ve been weak. I tried, I kept trying, but there was nothing I could do.”

She was breathing just fine, when I left. Susan was breathing and crying hard and that meant her lungs were just fine. I stood there, staring at Ms. Acosta, still clutching the canister of Healthy Start in my hands. She kept trying to look me in the face but she couldn’t do it, her eyes kept jumping away and past my gaze like a camera on a shaky tripod. I set the formula down on the floor, next to the tall, heavy snow shovel we’d kept propped near the front door all winter.

“What happened,” I said. Harsh, and flat.

“I just told you.” There were tears in her eyes, brimming, unfeigned. But she still couldn’t look at me.

“So let me see her.” One of my sweaters, Dave’s sweaters, the sleeve had twisted around my arm in a snarl of cheap acrylic and I tugged hard at it, wrenching, ready to rip it back into thread. “I helped her get born, I have a right to say good-bye. Let me see where you put her.”

Ms. Acosta turned away. There was an old chest of drawers near the front hallway and she smoothed out the runner, kept moving Dave’s wife’s little china shepherdesses here and there and all over the wood like she was playing a game of Bo-Peep chess. My stomach had contracted to a thin, painful ribbon, snarled just like that sweater sleeve, and the space it should have occupied inside me was filling up fast with something else. Something thick and hot, like steam, that got hotter and thicker as it traveled through my gut, my chest, headed for the veins.

“It
stopped breathing
because you did something to stop it. Didn’t you?”

Her fingers curled around a purse-lipped shepherdess, all ruffles and flying ribbons and a tall maypole crook. I wanted the little smug-mouthed thing to come alive, there in her palm, so I could hurt it. “I know why it stopped. It ‘just stopped’ because you put your big ugly liver-spotted hand over its mouth, you squeezed her nostrils shut—”

“Stop it, Amy. Just stop it.”

Her shoulders flinched, when I said it, like I’d kicked her in the back.

“Stop what? Stop saying what
actually happened
?” The hot squeezing thing inside me was sparking now, jumping, steam turning to molten metal. “You can’t even look at me. You can’t even look, because you lied to me and took her away and I listened to you and—”

“Amy.” The shepherdesses were all in a line now, arranged by color of ribbon. Pink, baby blue, toothpaste green. “Stop.”

There were tears slowly streaking down her cheeks, a hollowness in her eyes whose depths she’d never climb out of again. The hot thing, squeezing, sparking, let me feel no pity; it grew and expanded and propelled me toward her, I couldn’t stop, it hauled me rough and fast like a little girl dragging a doll along the floor and I hit her, hard. She shouted, grabbed at my arms and we were struggling, hauling at each other and I was screaming, “What did you do with her!
What did you do!
”

“What I had to do!” She screamed right back, full in my face, her broken nails drawing blood. “So you wouldn’t have to!”

“You killed her.” I couldn’t manage her cut-glass tears of vague regret, horrible hypocritical tears, I was blubbering and choking like another baby past all comfort, Susan was dead, I’d given her away to death. “I promised Kristin over and over, I promised and that was
my
baby, Kristin gave her to me and you killed her—”

“Amy? Amy. Stop.”

She did that thing I hated, that thing where someone puts their palms to your cheeks like they can mesmerize you by touch. “Look at yourself in a mirror sometime—I won’t say look at
me
, all my hair falling out, but you’re young, healthy as you can manage now, look at yourself.” Each word was a stone thrown at my face. “Look what a skeleton you’ve become. Remember back in November, when your gums started bleeding? That’s scurvy, that’s why Dave kept making you eat the liver whenever he shot a deer, take all those vitamins we found. What happens when that formula runs out, when we can’t feed a baby because we can barely feed ourselves? Rickets. Diarrhea. Edema, those skeleton babies with the swollen stomachs. Brain damage. How the hell do you think we’d manage, with a baby to worry about? How can we take care of her, when she gets sick? About as well as we did Dave? Or Kristin?” Shouting now, right in my face. “Is that what you want to have happen, again, after all this?”