The Cradle (2 page)

Then one morning he woke up and decided he was done, all of the energy to pursue his parents was out of his system. It had
left him like the heat of a fire leaving a chimney, entering the cold. He’d tried, and besides, he didn’t need them. He had
worked long enough and made enough to be comfortable inside a world with huge gaps of not knowing. It had been a crazy idea.
A foolish idea. A child’s. He went back to living his life.

Marissa wasn’t the same way. Marissa just kept going when she wanted something. Just like the black shirt. She waited him
out and won the argument, not because Matt decided he thought it was a good idea but because he realized the total cost of
resisting the shirt was greater than forty-five dollars.

Finished with the dishes, Matt stood in the kitchen near the stairwell and picked his battle. Either upstairs to Marissa,
where her cradle-plan urgings would probably continue, or into the living room to watch TV with his father-in-law. He didn’t
recall inviting Glen to stay and watch TV. That sort of invitation was never required with Glen, actually. But Matt had a
special place for Glen because of the way he made himself at home. He was now fifty-seven years old and worked in the administrative
offices of a soap factory in the middle of Milwaukee. He’d been on the floor when he was younger but had worked his way up
through the years, and then, when he’d gotten arthritis in his knees, he’d worked his way across, into the administrative
offices.

Matt went into the room and sat down on the sofa with him. “Great burgers, Dad,” he said to Glen. “You know how to work that
thing.”

“Thank you,” Glen said softly, still watching the television.

Matt noticed how low the volume was on the TV.

Glen had some kind of cop show on. The volume was so low that the voices were like whispers. This was not normal. Matt looked
over at Glen. Glen said, “She had a sister, you know.”

“Who?”

“Caroline,” Glen said, turning to him. “She had a sister. Marissa doesn’t know this. If you want to find Caroline, or the
cradle, the best I can do is point you toward her sister. She lives in Sturgeon Bay.”

Matt kept staring at Glen.

He was not about to deny the conversation he’d had outside, but he was having trouble understanding how Glen had heard it
at all.

“You become a superhero since the last time I saw you?” Matt asked him.

Glen smiled. “I’ve still got my tricks,” he said.

He set the remote control down on the coffee table, then very gingerly reached up to his ear, dug around for a moment, and
withdrew his finger. Matt leaned over and peered at the insectlike object Glen held out for him. It was a tiny flesh-colored
hearing aid, so small that neither Marissa nor he had noticed it all evening.

“You know, they actually fit these things right into each person’s particular ear hole?” Glen said.

“No,” Matt said. “I didn’t.”

“Well, they do. I got this one on Wednesday. I’ve been having a little trouble with it, however.”

“How so?”

“Volume seems to be set too high,” Glen said, and he started laughing. “I spent all Thursday blowing my head up every time
I tapped the damned computer keyboard. It was like a war was starting.”

“Isn’t that something,” Matt said.

Glen nodded, then sighed, replacing the hearing aid.

“Her sister,” he said again, “lives in Sturgeon Bay. It’s her half sister, actually. You can find something out there about
the cradle, I would guess. Maybe even Caroline’s there, too.”

“And you never went looking for her yourself? Knowing this?”

“No.”

“How do you know she’s even alive?”

“I don’t. I don’t care if she’s alive.” He stayed still for a long time, and Matt, despite the urge to do it, felt it would
not be right to say anything else. Glen looked lost inside of something big and deep, a cavern Matt could not accompany him
through, so he turned back to the television and watched cops talking to one another. He couldn’t hear them.

“Matt,” said Glen finally.

Matt turned. His father-in-law was looking at the magazines on the table. The cop show was invisible.

“If you do go—and I’m not saying you should go or not go—but if you do go, and if somehow you find her, please do me one favor.”

“Okay.”

Glen turned his head from the magazines and finally looked at Matt directly. “Please tell Caroline I say hello.”

Upstairs, twenty minutes after Glen waved good-bye to his daughter, just one hand through the crack in the bedroom door, Matt
sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at his wife. She had taken a bowl of ice cream with her, which she’d finished and
set on the bedside table. He looked at the remains of the vanilla and a curl of something else, maybe caramel, at the bottom
of the bowl. The spoon was propped up inside. Marissa was watching television, one of the evening talk shows, and Matt watched
it with her quietly for a few minutes. When a commercial came on, he said, “Are you serious?”

“I am serious,” she said, not moving her neck but flicking her eyes to him and watching him carefully. There was still some
ice cream around her mouth. She’d changed into her pajamas but was outside the covers.

He looked down at her feet, and while he looked at them, she wiggled her toes.

“Because I’ll find it for you,” he said. “If you are. So help me. Don’t start me on things unless you want them to be finished.”
He turned back to her and smiled. He liked to think of himself this way, as an unstoppable force. Of course, there was the
matter of the answering machine.

“I would like that very much.”

“This is my last try to talk you out of it.”

“Okay,” she said. “Go ahead.”

“Marissa,” he said. “We’re going to have a baby. I think that’s just about all the meaning I require.”

“He’s bringing it out in me,” she said, her hand going to her belly. Together they looked at it. “He’s making me think about
her.”

“That makes sense,” Matt said.

“Yeah. It does.”

“If I get it,” he said, “and bring it back here, what is that going to show you? It’s an object. We’re here. We have our home.
We have everything we could need. It’s going to be fine when he comes. Is that it?”

“Do you know what you want to name him yet?” she asked, not bothering to answer or disguise that she wasn’t going to.

“What about Ty?”

“That was my dog’s name when I was little.”

“Oh.”

“Besides,” she said, “that’s a redneck name. And not even from here. Isn’t that from the South? ‘Hey, Tyrone.’” She said the
last words in her approximation of a Southern accent. Matt smiled and leaned toward her and let his mouth hover near hers.

“That,” he said, in his own drawl, “was the worst Southern accent I’ve ever heard.” He knew his was better, even though it
still wasn’t very good. But the difference in quality was enough to make both of them laugh.

“So,” she said, after he kissed her and sat back up, “you’ll try?”

“You’ve given me no other option.”

“You could just say no,” she said.

“I know I could,” he said, “as you are crazy. Any jury of rational minds would side with me.”

“Good thing this trial isn’t going to court, then.”

“Good thing.”

He left her with the television on and went downstairs to finish cleaning up. When he was done, he took a beer outside, wandered
through his small backyard for a minute or so, then drifted to the grill, which he scrubbed with the steel brush halfheartedly,
still sipping at the beer. The sound scraped its way out into the night neighborhood. He sat down in one of the lawn chairs
and looked into his neighbor’s backyard, then up at the stars. It was a new moon—the sky was crisp and black and the stars
were fairly strong, at least in the west. To the east the glow of Milwaukee lit up the lower part of the sky like a spilled
glass of lemonade. He looked back down and saw Frank Rosenblum in the kitchen next door, wearing a white T-shirt. He was in
his boxer shorts, looking through his refrigerator. It looked like 1947 inside his house. Last winter his wife died of pancreatic
cancer. Matt had watched warily from the yard as the illness moved on, had seen snapshots through the window like a magic
lantern and stitched them together into a story with reports from Marissa, who often went through the gate after supper to
sit with Mrs. Rosenblum and have tea. Matt, for the life of him, could not imagine what those conversations had been, the
specific details. As winter moved on and Mrs. Rosenblum faded, he began to understand that his wife was pursuing the answers
to dark questions of her own, but again, just as he’d felt with Glen earlier, he knew she’d be the only one able to understand.
They had only just moved in and hardly knew their neighbors, but she’d gone, over and over again, all the way up to the night
Mrs. Rosenblum died.

A few weeks later, in March, Matt had spoken with Frank across the fence about Frank’s plans to trim the apple tree that hung
over into their yard. Frank apologized profusely, and Matt told him not to worry about it, they didn’t mind at all. Frank
thanked him. Then Frank simply cut the entire tree down one rainy evening. Matt stood in the kitchen, watching through the
window, as the old man cut through the tree in one slice of the chain saw, then sliced it into smaller pieces, then hauled
them around the house to the curb. He remembered the sound of the chain saw’s little engine going right alongside the rain
on the roof. The stump of the tree, exactly one foot high, was still there.

She awoke and slipped from bed at 5:15 a.m. The house was quiet, empty, dark. As she made the coffee, Renee Owen looked through
the window to the frozen black morning in their backyard. The thermometer outside the window, itself caked in ice, read nine
degrees.

She looked away from the red vertical line and back to the dark snow. It was an odd thing to think, but it didn’t take much
to see the cold. It was supposed to be invisible, but there it was, right there. You could hear it, too, in the wind, and
maybe even smell it in the heat blowing from the vents in the floor. Without the sun, she guessed the waving foot of snow
in their backyard had turned solid. She imagined walking across the top of it without breaking through. She imagined being
barefoot, feeling the hard ice on the bottoms of her feet. It was warm inside, but she imagined herself out there, freezing,
stepping gingerly.

For an hour she sat alone in the big chair in the den, reading.

Bill wandered down the stairs at 6:45, the hair on the sides of his head sticking out horizontally.

“Is he coming?” Bill asked her, squinting.

“He said he’d come at nine.”

Their son was going to war. This was the week he would disappear and become an idea. It sounded impossible and it was absolutely
true. Renee had hoped for months she would find the magic key, even as her desperation expanded, but in the end the hope was
hollow and perfunctory. She’d gone to his apartment and they’d had long, intelligent adult dialogues at his kitchen table.
There was the case of Vietnam to consider, and besides Vietnam, there was the more present sense that the war in Iraq already
was lost, that nobody was for it, not really. He humored her. She cried. He humored her. She called him and told him about
an article she’d read and begged until her own voice, in her ear, was nothing more than a child’s. Fifty-eight, and this was
turning her into a baby. He humored her again; he told her he’d be fine. His calm and arrogant nineteen-year-old way of trying
to appease her didn’t properly match her anger, and it made it all the worse. His ideas were equally infuriating (“If I live
in this country and get to have this great life, I should be ready to fight for it, too, right?”), and his insouciance (“I
don’t get what the big deal is anyway”) was youthful, cold, thoughtless. It reminded her of the past.

Bill went to take a shower and Renee went to their room and took off her bathrobe and got dressed. She read more, Bill read
the newspaper. She drifted off and woke up and made coffee again. The doorbell rang just before nine o’clock, and Adam, bundled,
smiled at the door and gave her a hug.

“There he is,” Bill said when he came into the room, and Adam laughed for no reason.

They all went to the kitchen and had more coffee.

She had spent a good part of nineteen years trying to do or say whatever a mother might do or say to build up all the kinds
of thinking and ways of looking at the world that would keep a son from waking up one day, deciding there wasn’t any other
choice to make, walking down, signing papers, and flying off, armed to the teeth, to do the work of government. With Vietnam
it was so different. Then, it was easy to say the war was the wrong thing, almost fashionable to say it, especially in the
city of Days of Rage and the Democratic National Convention, especially in the house of two professor parents. Here and now,
today, 2008, so many of those old lines were crisscrossed, weren’t they? The way people thought was different. Was it that
no one cared? No, that wasn’t it, not exactly. But something close. Something like: it doesn’t matter. It will turn out on
its own. So let’s just hang out.

In only forty years that had happened. They’d been so confused then and they were still so confused, but at least then their
confusion had been tilted in the right direction, the direction in which things mattered.

You will die, Renee had even said to her son. You will die in that godforsaken place, Adam. I am begging you. You think you’ll
be fine, but I see very clearly the point you’re trying to make and it’s not worth it.

Since then, she’d stopped speaking of doom directly. But she felt it. Really she knew from the morning they’d watched the
towers fall down. She remembered. She and Bill both sitting there in the living room, Adam already at school. The building
buckled and the unreal finale began. Exactly at that moment, some dark aspect of her heart awoke and shook its head at her
and tsked its finger back and forth and said, Don’t you understand? And she did. It fit her history perfectly and to her it
seemed designed and implemented from above. It was a punishment.