Stranger Will (7 page)

He grabs the sleeping woman and turns to the hallway. With Shelia’s head and shoulders stuffed into his chest, he suddenly realizes the dilemma of space. They have only one extra room— the half-converted nursery, a room dedicated to the prosperity of a healthy child. William and Julie exchange knowing looks, their faces expressing the same problem. “She will sleep the entire night anyway,” she says and pulls the fallen needle from her lap.

William carries her to the nursery and returns to the couch. Together, Julie and he mutually embrace an evening of silence.

Pillow talk that night veers as it always does, in the direction of the coming child. This is her nightly planning. She asks about color coordination and which bear pattern to use for the nursery frieze, bears with balloons or bears with bows. William too, maintains his usual routine.

“What if the child is mauled by a bear just as it is born,” he asks, “and the only thing left is a head?”

“What if it is born blind with three eyes, fulfilling a Nostradamus prophecy, about the non-seeing soothsayer destined to destroy all of humanity with its visions?” he asks. He receives a heated stare from Julie, illuminated by harsh light from a small bedside lamp. “If we give it away, if were aren’t around to hear it prophesize, does it affect us? Tree in a forest, Julie.”

“What if, when only the head is out, it looks at the two of us and we can read total disappointment?” he asks. “What if
it
doesn’t want
us
?”

Almost eight months and still Julie dismisses adoption. She doesn’t use words anymore, just looks.

These are William’s attempts to anticipate failure. They serve to illustrate a world too chaotic, too random to risk the import of a child. And at that best possible moment, the moment when Julie is reaching for the lamp, ready to drown their world in darkness, screams burst through the walls.

Julie’s immediate reaction is to investigate the noise with the vigor and intensity of a dog, but William grabs her shoulder and tells her to wait. “It will stop,” he says. “Philip told me about her crying.” She lies back down and rests folded fingers on her stomach, intertwined in faux relaxation.

William needs her to remember this moment. He needs her to
feel
the crying, to understand what all of this really means. He wants her breathing to be backed by a soundtrack of tears. This is the definitive version of how William feels, and Julie must under- stand every pitch, the entire tonal range.

Three minutes pass, and when the crying doesn’t stop Julie throws her arms to the side and stands. “I’m going.” She walks to the door, kicks a table on the way, and hisses through her teeth, limping out of the room.

William believes that people have learned to endure life because any attempt otherwise is rectified by disease, by violence, by age, by a shotgun to the face in a dilapidated house the neighborhood wants demolished. By digoxin to the heart. What right, he wonders, does he have to introduce a child to this?

The crying continues and, without fear of Julie catching him, he sprouts a small grin.

Picturing Shelia surrounded by a pregnant couple’s version of infancy—blankets, a crib, children’s books stacked in a small pile against a wall sponge-painted with animal shapes—keeps William confident that life is never fair. As Shelia’s own child passes through her in pieces, she takes in a view that her child will never have. William imagines her crying as the painful truth streaming out wet and salty. She can taste what is left of her child pouring down her face, falling into her mouth, can feel it absorbing into the treads of her shirt. Knowing that Shelia aborted the child does nothing to curb his belief that she is hitting the hard bottom of remorse. Julie will cry as well. She will return to bed with tears shining her cheeks and speak for hours in questions. And for her own child, she will cry as well. But to William their child is already gone—not dead, but he accepts that it will be someday.

The crying stops. Julie eases into bed, not smiling, her face red. “I think it’s the drugs,” she says. “Hallucinating or something. She says her mouth is full of worms and that the walls are closing in on her.”

“The nursery, too,” William adds.

“And this,” she throws a ball of paper to William, crushed tight and moist with her sweat, “this got stuck to my foot.”

He opens the pink slip of paper to his bedside lamp. The piece has fallen from his threaded neighborhoods, pulled perhaps by wind through the back door, perhaps by a close passing shoulder. The ink is sparse and at its heaviest spreads thin into veins along fine creases. He can read words like
thank you
, and
missed you for a while
. He makes out
write soon
, and
look forward to your response
. Mrs. Rose’s handwriting, perfect, suggestive of her years as an elementary school teacher.

He irons the paper against his stomach with his palm and sets it aside for re-hanging in the morning. He watches the note teeter the edge of his bedside table and tries to picture the sender. He imagines a lonely person striving for an equally lonely person, eyes fixed to the horizon, justifying the long hours waiting and the stiff muscles standing by the pleasure found in a returning pigeon.

Shelia, with a body full of drugs, weak, and drained of a child, cries out again. William pretends to be asleep until Julie stomps from the room.

William wants to approach the dreamed sender, to wait with her until her bird returns. He would admit his hobby, just as the bird dives for its cage.
“You don’t need this human connection to
live
,”
he would say.
“The world is not an infinite resource waiting to be tapped dry.”

He would intercept the bird.
“In fact,”
he would say, ripping the message from its foot,
“the world has been dry for years. I’ve seen the desert our world has become, shredded with bullets holes in apartment buildings where nothing but filth exists. I’ve cleaned it from walls with a toothbrush stolen from the deceased’s bathroom. I’ve believed in a world with good intentions for too long.”
He would pocket the note.
“I need this more than you.”

The room vanishes the way open eyes will do.

“Good morning,” he says, wakes with an elbow against his ribs.

“Quiet,” Julie yawns.

Shelia’s cries become the air. William closes his eyes and imagines this time the sender is him waiting on a message from his own bird, no longer stealing from the periphery. He waits for his own pigeon from Mrs. Rose.

Chapter Eight

A baby rattle shakes, unseen.

“Morning,” William says, stretching and yawning.

The sun cuts through the bedroom blinds. Julie stands at the door shielding her face from the harsh beams. She removes her robe and throws an orange pill bottle to the bed. The capsules rattle. “No more of those,” she says. “I’ve been awake all night. I can’t deal with her crying.”

“Shelia wasn’t my idea. Remember that.” William pushes the bottle to the floor.

Julie gathers a blanket from the bed. “I need sleep, William.” Her voice trails from the bedroom, to the hallway, to the front room couch.

“You wanted her,” William yells, biting back a smile. He interprets Julie’s failure to calm Shelia as a greater failure. Unwilling to forgo this opportunity he follows her into the front room, sits in the chair nearest Julie’s head, its arm lined with her thin cross- stitching needles, each threaded a different color.

“Just answer me,” William says. Julie pulls the blanket over her head. “Shelia was your idea, correct?”

“Take her somewhere.”

William pulls a needle from the chair. He spins it between his fingers, whipping the long green thread against his face and arm. He could dispose of Shelia. He could call Philip and explain Julie’s sudden disinterest in caring for his fake sister. It
was
Philip who jumped into the ambulance. It
was
Philip who agreed to be her brother. It
was
Philip who found the doorway to the basement. But it is William who needs her most, who needs Shelia the Burden, Shelia the Child, Shelia the Way-it-Will-Be.

“I think we should keep her,” William says.

“She’s not a dog,” Julie replies from under the blanket.

“True. A dog we could shoot.” William settles deeper into the chair. The two of them exist in this home stretched and worn by their own heat. Julie believes in the possibilities of form, of structure. She hangs Ann Geddes photographs of babies sleeping in mounds of roses, and William is quick to remind her that roses have thorns. Julie collects tiny porcelain dolls, while William collects canned food in boxes in the basement. “Are you saying I should shoot Shelia?”

Julie grunts. “I think I feel contractions.”

“No you don’t.” He drops the cross-stitching needle. A quick move to retrieve it drives the needle under his fingernail. He pulls his hand from the chair, the needle fixed into his skin, an extension of his own thin bone. When he removes the needle, blood bulbs at his fingertip. “I’ll get rid of her,” and he lifts himself from the chair, bathing his finger in spit. A morning means fresh air and a night without nicotine. He needs to refill anyway, so he takes the telephone to the back porch, dialing Philip’s number as he searches his pocket for a lighter. Twice he tries and twice he gets no answer.

Shelia’s age is a problem. She is too young. Julie sees her as a child, someone filled with potential, someone in need of protection. William regards Julie’s hospitality as instinct, a natural urge to fight the world. Mrs. Rose has taught William many things, one of which is that the world is not worth fighting against. The world knows what it is doing.

Pigeons fly overhead. William dials Harold Straton Elementary. The receptionist answers as the cigarette touches his lips.

“Hey Stacey,” William says and “one moment,” the nasal voice responds before William can manage a third word. Within moments Mrs. Rose arrives, a static breeze somewhere behind her.

“Good news?” she asks. She breathes heavy. William blames age.

“Just news.” His cigarette bounces to the rhythm of syllables.

“I need a favor.”

“Julie is not having the baby, is she?”

“That wouldn’t be
just news
,” William says. “I need a place for the night—for this woman I know.”

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Julie,” he says. “She’s been kept awake all night by crying.” “Crying?”

“Not what you think. We had a guest for the night, a constant crier, and Julie can’t take it.”

“We can claim that as good news,” Mrs. Rose says. Her breathing drops for a moment. “She can’t handle those all- nighters.”

“I thought of that,” he lights the cigarette, and lets a needle of smoke from his mouth, “but this woman is like us, really. She could use your help.”

“It seems we are all born afraid of a child’s passing,” Mrs. Rose says. She breathes her own static into the phone. “These delinquents in my office go to lunch in twenty minutes. Be at my house,” and the phone goes dead.

William wanders back inside with the cigarette pinched between his fingers. Julie has migrated to the chair. Shelia stretches on the couch. Julie waves away smoke that has not yet reached her.

“I’m getting rid of her,” he says. “Be happy and help.”

Julie forfeits a shirt and a pair of pants from a pile pushed against the wall. The articles smother the girl. She dresses Shelia in shoes that flip hard to her feet when she walks. She brushes the woman’s hair, ripping locks from her head. Shelia endures. She flexes her cheeks and balls her fists but says nothing. “Sorry,” Julie says. “I’m so sorry.”

William retreats to the bedroom, his cigarette still burning, and dresses quickly. He finds shoes and a baseball cap and grabs the van keys from his bedside table. The pink note from last night, the “thank you” fallen from his wall, sits flat by the lamp.

He stuffs it into his pocket, planning to ask Mrs. Rose about this one.
It fell from the wall for a reason
, he tells himself.

“Goodbye,” Julie says. “Good luck with everything.”

“She’ll be fine.” William flicks his filter into the weeds along the house as he steps to his van, pulling Shelia behind him.

He stops at a small convenience store along the way, neither of them offering one word to the other. He walks in, comes out seconds later with a newspaper under his arm. Once inside the van he takes a few silent moments to search the paper ’s small text, then, happy with his discovery, throws the open paper to Shelia’s lap. “You’re famous.” He points to a short paragraph describing the basement scene from that traumatic night past.

Shelia studies the text for miles before letting the vibrations of the van bounce the paper from her hands to the floorboard.

“This woman I know, Mrs. Rose, she’s pretty excited to meet you,” William says picking up the paper. “She wants to help.”

Shelia stays quiet. Even as William tries igniting conversation with keywords like “boyfriend upstairs,” trying even with small talk promises like “weather ” and “the game,” Shelia bites her bottom lip. She looks ready to sneeze.

“Sorry about the smell,” William says and nods toward the back of the van. “I don’t feel the chemicals much anymore, but your nose isn’t primed.” He puts down a window and waves the air out. “I clean up dead bodies,” he says. Shelia stays fixed to the road. “Not the bodies, really. Just the stains.”

He lets miles pass without further interaction, taking interest in passing telephone poles and houses moated by yards decorated with lawn gnome armies and craft fair windmills. He chews his fingernails and adjusts the rearview mirror to Shelia’s eyes. They float in tears. He sneaks glances, pretending to check the glove box for papers and pens. He cleans dust from the dashboard and twists his neck enough to glimpse Shelia staring at her stomach. She swallows tears, and William hands her a napkin from a greasy bag behind his seat. “If it means anything,” William says, “I think you did a good thing, getting rid of the baby.”

Shelia doesn’t move.

“It wasn’t easy, I’m sure, but it’s done and you have to believe that the world will adapt around it. There is a lot wrong with the world, but fighting it won’t help anyone. Mrs. Rose, she helps people in your situation all the time. Adoptions, actually, but a lost child is a lost child, right? She says that every time someone gets rid of a child they go through a pretty heavy bout of remorse. They wonder if it was the right decision, and even sometimes they go crazy convincing themselves that they’ve done something wrong. Just remember, Shelia, you’ve done nothing wrong. It’s hard to give your entire life to something that you were never sure of to begin with. You—heck,
we
—aren’t ready for that responsibility. Mrs. Rose says that nobody is really ready for that. They just think they are and end up screwing everything up.”