The Invisibles (11 page)

Hazel was going to ask a question, but the technician moved quickly, printing the photo, telling them to return to the waiting area. “Dr. Kornblum will be with you momentarily,” she said and went quickly through the curtain and out the door.

Hazel was afraid. “Usually they let you listen to the heartbeat.”

“That woman,” Riley said, “was a total bitch. The way she looked at us? Sheesh.”

Hazel tried to believe this. She could see Riley trying, too. But there was so little evidence that the technician had been a bitch that they said nothing as they waited, first in the waiting area, and then in a consulting room, where Hazel sat on the patient's bed and Riley sat in the doctor's wheeled chair and they both studied a poster with an illustration of a baby gestating in its mother's womb. The baby was packed and contoured around the woman's organs, and its eyes were closed like the eyes of a sleeping koala. Hazel wished the time would stretch out into an eternity of waiting,
but soon she heard Dr. Kornblum coming down the hall. The doctor knocked, came in smiling at them, and shook their hands. Riley surrendered her chair, and then the doctor opened a folder she had brought and, without consulting it, began to speak.

“As you recall, you've been having some bleeding, and we were worried about the heartbeat,” she said, looking first at Hazel and then at Riley, intent and focused, as if she were selling them a car. “We wanted the heartbeat to be stronger. It should have been. But we waited, hoping for the best because sometimes some bleeding happens in the first trimester. It is not normal but neither is it uncommon. Today we can see that there has been no more development since your last visit. The technician could not find a heartbeat.” Dr. Kornblum was looking squarely at Hazel, reaching out and then placing her hand firmly on Hazel's shoulder. The hand was surprisingly light, and Hazel reached up and covered it with her own, as if she were in a position to give comfort. Dr. Kornblum continued to study her, unmoved, and Hazel supposed that Kornblum had been a doctor for some time now and could not be talked out of what she was telling them. “I am so sorry that this happened to you. What happens next is that your body will have to expel the material. You've been bleeding, which tells us that your body has been trying to do something for a while.”

“Okay,” said Hazel. She was crying, but only slightly. She looked at Riley. He leaned rigidly against the counter, arms tight across his chest, his stare inward, as if he had become bored and begun to daydream. He lifted his fist to his mouth and sank his teeth into the skin beneath the knuckle of his index finger.

Dr. Kornblum pulled a tissue from the dispenser in the wall and handed it to her. “These things happen at random, usually as a result of a genetic abnormality. It is likely that this embryo carried some form of what we call mental retardation, something like Down Syndrome. Whatever is wrong prevents it from developing
further.” Her warm hand squeezed Hazel's shoulder. “It was probably retarded or something like that.”

Suddenly the doctor was talking in a lighter, faster voice, saying something about options. Options? The word turned in Hazel's mind like an oddly shaped rock. Apparently there were decisions to be made. Dr. Kornblum could give her pills to take at home before she went to bed, in the hope she would wake up bleeding heavily. Or she could have a procedure, right here in the clinic, first thing tomorrow morning. Dr. Kornblum would perform it herself. She promised it wouldn't hurt a bit. “I'll give you some Valium to relax you,” she said. “I have an instrument that will vacuum out the material.”

Hazel's queasy pregnant feeling was worse than usual now, like she might vomit. Maybe this was what people meant when they talked of motion sickness, which had always seemed made-up to her, even though she knew those people couldn't all be lying. She considered what the doctor had said. She disliked pills, and the thought of coming all the way back in the morning felt like an invitation to climb a mountain tomorrow. Besides, she was no longer sure she liked Dr. Kornblum after what she'd said about Henrik being retarded.

“I want to go home,” she said. “If it's going to happen, let it.”

Riley thought she should have the procedure performed. He said so when they got back to the apartment and were standing in the midst of the cards from all the people they would now have to tell to forget about the baby, and from a percentage of whom they would then have to accept condolence cards. The procedure, Riley said, sounded not only harmless but quick, and she could be free of that thing by tomorrow morning. That thing. She wanted it gone, didn't she? His eyes were dark and tearful, and he was very angry suddenly, though not with her. He was angry with Henrik.

“The little fucker tricked us,” he said with a grown man's unintentionally comic sadness. “It never meant to come out, just to waste our time and lie to us. I wish it was already gone.” He sat down and got out his phone and began to send text messages to coworkers, telling them he would be working from home. By the time he had gotten out his laptop and turned it on, he had calmed down somewhat. His face looked drained and tired. It was 9:43 in the morning. He asked if he could cook her some breakfast.

She was starving. “Get takeout from Mack's,” she said, referring to the diner up the street. She ignored his baleful eyes and wrapped a blanket around herself. She could not believe what he had said about Henrik, who may have been dead, but who was nonetheless part of them both. “Go on and order,” she said. “You know what I like. But get some dessert, too. I could eat a horse.”

Twelve weeks. Henrik was nearly half an inch long. Sinking in the water, falling into his red underwater cushion, he looked like an unbaked piece of pie dough. Hazel wondered whether she should call Riley. There was no point in it. He would close his laptop and come home, and then he would simply be here, too. It was better to let him work, finish a strong day's output, and return in the evening to news he would find a relief. She looked a last time into the swirled water. Henrik had been the last to turn against her. She closed the lid and pushed the lever.

The water washed Henrik down the pipe through several floors and a spider-infested basement, and then down a larger pipe, where he joined a river of sewage. The water was foul but swift, and he moved along unimpeded. Other rivers spilled in constantly, creating a communion of waters. He came to a whirlpool, plunged through a crack in the ceramic, and shot out into cleansing salt water. Without anchor he drifted gradually upward, among the dark shapes of aimless fish, passed a shark's dim eye, and whirled
among pearly mullet until the surface lay just above, a blanket of shimmering sunlight. The ground beneath him fell away into blackness, and then there were no more fish, only the ceiling of light pressing down in steady ripples. Gradually the light vanished, and he was enclosed in a darkness that seemed never ending, until the light returned gradually. This process repeated itself many times. He came to a place where leafy green lianas hung from the surface, and the water was very still. Thick eels swam around him, their mouths smiling as they came together, coupling in spirals. One day the seaweeds and the eels were gone, and the water was colder, and the ceiling of light came and went as it had before. This happened so many times that Henrik lost count, even though he had nothing to do but count, because he had never learned numbers. He moved among tremendous masses of rough blue ice and found himself drifting in a frozen maze with giant skeletons trapped in its walls. His tiny black eyes, preserved by cold, watched the ceiling of light that had become constant. The light was brilliant and warm and had a carefree existence there on the frigid water that encouraged anyone who saw it to daydream. The dream of light stretched on and on, until it was collapsed into a single moment as Henrik was jolted from this state, snagged by a warm, faster current. One day, as harpoons plunged into the blue around him, he saw a great black whale break loose of their barbs, leaving ribbons of blood to drift toward the light as it dove hard into deeper blackness, never to return. He hovered over shipwrecks and coral reefs, saw the bones of broken ships, and one day he entered an ancient city where mermaids adored him. Some nights he settled gently on the headboard, just as Hazel dropped off to sleep.

After the Second World War an ambitious developer cleared woods east of the city, measured acre lots, and built colonial houses and cottages. Though he'd had a vision of white money flocking to the country, when the bank seized the land only half the houses had sold. In subsequent decades farmers razed most of the remaining forest to grow soybeans and corn, but when my parents bought the second house down from Woodacre Lane's dead end, enough timberland enclosed the neighborhood to pass off the setting as an enchanted forest. Throughout my boyhood I played ranger in this paradise, exploring each grove with my pellet gun in hand; I eliminated rabbits, possums, starlings, and blue jays, and made room for squirrels, cardinals, robins, migrating finches, and sparrows. My sense of what made a pest came from my taciturn parents, amateur gardeners who poisoned shrew burrows and smiled to see the furry rodents lying swollen among the vegetables and vines. When circumstance forced me back into the house of my childhood, which devastated my pride at the age of thirty-four, it was difficult to regard the little wood around the neighborhood without feeling a pinch of guilt. I'd buried so many varmints in mass graves behind the woodshed that the random stab of a spade could turn up a pile of white bones.

Yet I had not committed my crimes alone, and when I opened the paper to see Henry grinning suavely in an ad for his legal services, I knew our paths would cross in a city of eighty thousand
factory hands and bankers. A divorce lawyer, he'd helped more than a hundred residents leave their spouses. He was like a movie star, only less popular. I lacked the patience to let small-town fate reunite us. I called him at the office, and soon we were passing weekends together.

The night a neighbor let herself into Ellie Pardo's house and discovered Ellie cut to pieces in the basement, Henry and I were playing friends-turned-cops for money on Frogville's center table. Frogville was a neon-signed brick billiards house in the snowy fields south of the city. We'd come here a lot in high school, hoping to witness fights or solve the mysteries that surrounded getting laid. Teens still gathered in the stale heat with the same ambitions. They lined the vandalized walls, smoking clove cigarettes and Marlboros, watching the matches proceed on the twelve red-felted tables.

We were the oldest players in the bar, maybe the only ones of drinking age, though a lot of kids had bottles in hand. What made us stand out more was the muscular guy in the police uniform handing over more ten- and twenty-dollar bills after the end of each game. The only thing that seemed to prevent him from killing Henry was the woman beside him, who was also a cop, though in her off-duty loveliness it was hard to believe.

“Don't be so upset, babe, now listen to me.” Watching us with her big eyes, Officer Candy covered her hand with her mouth and talked strategy to Officer Perzik. Friends since childhood, they had become cops, fallen in love, and decided to get married. Maybe it had to do with the way they each looked in uniform.

Perzik's radio crackled unexpectedly, startling shooters at the next table. He liked to have his presence known while he pretended
not to notice. These little disturbances of other games were his only solace as he lost and lost.

“I should arrest you both.” Blue dust rained from his hairy fist as he chalked his cue. He missed an easy six-in-the-corner and shouted, loud enough to silence the hall for a moment.

“Am I up again already?” Henry asked. A slim pretty boy with parted hair and a suit, he never questioned his influence over the room, keeping a step ahead of his skeptics. As Perzik muttered in frustration over a mistake, he stepped right in to line up his shot. Though we were on a team together, he was the one winning. From the way Candy glared, as if wishing he'd get it over with so she could go home with her fiancé, I got the feeling he took their money often.

Striped tie thrown over his shoulder, his head in a hedge of smoke, Henry took the measure of a combo shot that would sink the nine. “You two must be broke by now, so here's where it gets interesting. If I make this,” he said, “Candy's got to give me a kiss.”

Candy sipped her beer and thought it over. “And if not?”

“Then Perzik gives you a kiss,” I suggested.

“If I miss,” Henry said, pretending to think about it, “then I'll give Candy a kiss.”

“Fucking crook,” Perzik griped. Having copied Henry's test answers in school, he'd recently admitted, while drunk, that his decent grade-point average had helped his admission to the police academy. He hated the thought of owing Henry; now he crossed the room to make a kid of about thirteen put out his cigarette. He came back to the table with his radio to his ear, frowning as he listened over the chatter and colliding balls.

“There's more than one recipe for success,” Henry was telling Candy. He'd stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, like a
little gangster or newspaper man. She smiled at me and shook her head, as if amazed by the flirt this former examinations worrywart had become. This was the guy who used to pee his sleeping bag whenever he stayed the night at my house. The first time he aimed my rifle and took out a crow, he insisted that we hold a funeral for it. But I knew him to be a fast learner. Less than a month after he dropped that first bird, he roamed ahead of me in the woodlot, leaving the animals where they fell until the timber stood perfectly still.

“He's come a long way,” I said.

Candy nodded. “If I'd have known he'd be such a success, I might have gone with him to homecoming sophomore year.”