Refresh, Refresh: Stories (5 page)

Sometimes the blackness would go gray and they would click off their flashlights and pick their way through the gloom until they came upon a sort of skylight, where the roof of the cave had collapsed and now let in the sun. One time they found a dog—a German shepherd—hanging from such a hole. It had been lynched by its leash, its leash tethered to something aboveground and out of sight, perhaps a tree. And the dog dangled there, spotlit by the sun, turning around and around.

There were things—a far-off moaning, a bundle of bones, a dark shape scuttling just past the reach of their flashlight—that scared them. Rocks scared them. Rocks cluttered the cave floor, some of them the size of melons, others the size of elk. For this reason they bought REI spelunking helmets. Sometimes the ceiling would come loose with a click of stone, a hiss of dirt, nearly noiseless in its descent, but when it slammed to the cave floor, it roared and displaced a big block of air that made them cry out and clutch each other in a happy sort of terror.

But that was before.

Becca doesn’t like to go down in the cave anymore. Not since the day in July when the bats came. It was early evening, and they were sprawled out on the couch watching
Wheel of Fortune.
At that time she was four months’ pregnant and her belly was beginning to poke out enough that women would stop her in the grocery store and ask. She needed a safety pin to fasten the jeans she wore now. He was drinking a Bud Light and she was drinking water. She let in enough liquid to visibly fill her cheeks, and then swallowed in tiny portions, her cheeks growing smaller and smaller until sunken. He liked watching her drink. She drank water as if it were wine, not as a necessity but as a pleasure, trying to make it last longer. She looked at him looking at her and said, “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That.”

He picked up the remote and hit the mute button and the applause of the audience fell away and a hush descended upon the room. He heard nothing and said as much.

Becca had her head cocked and her hand raised. “Just wait,” she said, and then,
“There.”

And there it was, a scritch-scritch-scritching at the steel door.

For a long time they simply looked at each other and then she pushed him and said, “Go see what it is,” and he said, “All right already,” and got up from the couch and slowly approached the door and put his ear to it. The metal was cold against his cheek. From here the scratching sound sounded more like the sound of eating, of teeth mashing something into a paste.

Becca said something he couldn’t hear and he pulled his head away from the door and said, “What?” and she said, “You think it could be a wild animal?”

“Don’t know.” Right then he opened the door and the bats came rushing in, a dense black stream of them. They emitted a terrible screeching, the noise a thousand nails would make when teased across a chalkboard. They fluttered violently through the living room, the kitchen, the hallway, battering the walls and windows, seeking escape. Kevin screamed and so did Becca and the noise of flapping, of air beaten in many different directions, was all around them.

Somehow Kevin ducked down and pushed his way through their black swirling color and ran for the front door and threw it open and not thirty seconds later most of the bats had disappeared into the twilight gloom.

Becca was on the couch with an injured bat fluttering limply in her hair. She did not move, except to part her lips and say, “Holy shit.” She had a hand between her breasts, over her heart. “Holy fucking shit. What the fucking shit was that?”

The next morning she woke up complaining of cramps.

Even before she was pregnant she would talk about her pain incessantly, saying her back hurt, her neck hurt, her feet hurt, her head, her stomach. If it were touchable—like, the space between her eyebrows—she would touch it. “I think it’s a tumor,” she would say, completely serious. “Feel this. This does not feel normal.”

And Kevin would say, “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” was what he said when she complained of cramps, when she limped to the shower with a hand pressed below her belly.

“My lower back,” she said. “On the right side. I really, really hope I’m okay. I’m pretty worried about the way this feels.”

And then she began bleeding. A rope of red trailed down her leg. And Kevin, now in a panic, wrapped her in a bathrobe and with shampoo still in her hair drove her to St. Charles where she delivered, with a rush of blood, the baby that looked like a baby, a little girl, only too small and too red, the size of his hand.

Becca was convinced it had something to do with the bats. Perhaps she had been bitten or scratched and perhaps some parasite with leathery wings and claws traveled through her bloodstream and did ruin to her. When she told the doctor this, vines of sadness trembled through the skin around her eyes. They ran blood tests and found nothing. No, the doctor said. Not the bats. It was just one of those things.

She didn’t like this. She didn’t like to think that her own body could turn on her, collapse upon itself. So she said, “What does he know? Doctors don’t know anything. One day they say eggs are good for you. The next they’re bad. How can they have the answers when the answers are always changing.”

Right then Kevin could see the pain between her legs in her face. Still can to this day. Sometimes he imagines a rotten spot inside her, like a bruised bit of peach he wants to carve away with a knife.

Tonight, after they clean all the blood from the fridge and their bodies, after they buy Chinese takeout and carry it into the living room to eat on TV trays, they find a bat. It is tucked into a corner, where the wall meets the ceiling. Kevin can see its heartbeat pulsing through its thin leathery skin. Maybe it is one of the old bats that never escaped or maybe it is a new bat that somehow found its way inside, its tiny brown body crawling through the heating ducts, the walls.

Kevin wants to surround it with something—maybe a glass or a Tupperware container—and carry it outside and release it. When he says this Becca looks at him as if she wants to spit. “I hate this house,” she says. “I hate this stupid, stupid house.” Then she grabs the poker from the fireplace and holds it like a spear and jerks it forward, impaling the bat.

When the metal moves through it, it makes the smallest scream in the world.

They haven’t had sex in a month and a half, not since the miscarriage.

In the back of the closet, on the top shelf, beneath his sweaters, Kevin keeps an old copy of
Penthouse
. He bought it at a gas station several years ago and sometimes sneaks it down to read when his wife isn’t home. He likes having something hidden from her, something that belongs to him alone, a small betrayal.

Becca has a rule: if you don’t wear a piece of clothing for a year, you get rid of it, and right now she is going through their closet with a garbage bag, filling it with clothes for Goodwill, when she finds the
Penthouse.

Kevin comes out of the bathroom to find her standing there, with her legs spread apart, the magazine crumpled up in her fist. “What?” she says. “I’m not good enough for you?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

This is a question with barbed wire around it, and when he doesn’t answer she rips the magazine in half and then in half again and throws its pages to the floor and stares at him, panting. The way her anger grows reminds him of an umbrella, a big red umbrella, suddenly sprung.

“Look,” he says, exasperated. “You want to punch me? Would that make you feel better?”

Her eyes narrow with anger and he motions her forward with his hands and says, “Come on. Hit me, why don’t you. You know you want to. Do it.” He can see her little hand balling into a fist. And then she draws it back and gives him a glancing blow to the shoulder. “Is that all you’ve got?” he says. “Come on. You can do better than that. You hit like a girl. Hit me like you mean it.”

This triggers some switch inside her. She makes a furious little noise and charges forward and hits him again and this time his shoulder seizes up with hurt.

“That’s better,” he says.

She has a look of complete rage or religious exaltation on her face—he isn’t sure which. She is breathing hard. He can hear the air coming in and out of her nose. “What else do you want me to do to you?” she says.

“You tell me.”

She points her finger at him and tells him to take off his shirt. And he does. Bare-chested he stands before her, swaying slightly. She reaches forward and twists his nipples—hard—and when he screams she smiles and pinches between her fingers a clump of chest hair and rips it out, leaving behind a pink place where the blood rises in tiny dots. And he screams again. And their eyes hold together like the pieces of a puzzle.

She throws him against the wall and kisses him, roughly kisses him through all their laughing. And they tear the clothes off each other and he picks her up and pushes her against the wall and enters her. And she is bucking her hips against his and he can feel himself losing control, can feel the heat rising in him, moving through the tunnels of him and nearing eruption, when all of a sudden she pushes him away and says, “That’s enough.”

When he asks what’s wrong she absently scratches her bare breast and stares down at her feet as if the answer lies somewhere underground.

It is easier for Kevin. He can lose himself in the rhythms of his hammer, can smash the frustration from his body. Every day at work he drinks a milk jug full of water and sweats out every last drop of it and it is more than a little like crying.

Right after the miscarriage he thought a lot about the baby, the little girl they never named. How she might have smiled ridiculously at him making funny faces. Or used the coffee table to pull herself up and take her first teetering steps. Then he drank himself to the very pitch of drunkenness, and that was enough. The baby has almost disappeared from his memory, almost.

Sometimes he will say something—maybe he will be watching CNN and maybe they will broadcast a dead Iraqi child lying in the middle of the street and maybe he will make some offhand remark about how lucky they are—and only when he sees the crumpled-up look on Becca’s face does he remember and say, “Oh.”

She cannot not remember. A playground busy with children. A dirty pacifier abandoned in the aisle at Wal-Mart. The purple teddy bear she bought and set among her rocks on the bureau. On a daily basis all of these things fly into her eyes and thump around inside of her skull, like bats, leaving the poisonous dust of their wings. She keeps her lips pursed around the edge of a pain he can only imagine and she cannot seem to forget.

Midnight. He wakes up to find his wife gone, the shape of her head still imprinted on her pillow. He calls out her name and when she doesn’t answer he gets out of bed and walks down the hall and into the living room where moonlight comes in through the windows and makes the quartz set here and there sparkle.

He observes the steel door hanging open—and there, surrounded by blackness, a palpable blackness, strange and horrible, that seems to ooze into the house, stands his wife.

He goes to her. If she hears his footsteps, if she feels the weight of his hand on her shoulder, she gives no indication. She wears one of his T-shirts and nothing else, her feet tight together, her arms at her side.

From the door a cool wind blows, bringing cave smells, of guano and mold and sand and stone. He closes the door and hoists up his wife and cradles her in his arms and carries her to the bedroom, to bed, where she finally comes alive and says, “No,” and jumps up and goes to her dresser and opens its drawers. She steps into her panties and zips up her jeans and pulls a fleece over her head and asks, as she begins lacing her boots, whether he is coming or not.

Their flashlights are the only lights. There is no moon down here. Beyond the cones of yellow light there is nothing, everything utterly black. Dark as only a cave can be dark. The longer they walk, the closer the walls seem to get, the narrower the passage.

Becca leads the way—her body tense, her shoulders bunched up nearly to her ears—down a series of unfamiliar corridors, taking a right at each junction so they will know to always take a left when returning. Around a bend, among a pile of rocks, a pair of red eyes brighten, then vanish, and Kevin spends the next dozen yards sweeping his flashlight back and forth, waiting for something to materialize and come rushing toward them.

Becca moves her pale hand along the basalt, steadying her passage and crumbling away the green-and-gold patterns of lichen growing there. Occasionally she pauses, close-lipped, contemplating something visible only to her, before continuing forward. Her flashlight makes giant shadows that seem to knock against each other.

Then the channel opens up into a space as big as a banquet hall. The floor is strangely clean, absent of rocks. From the ceiling hang roots, like capillaries, groping for purchase. He gives one a tentative tug and when it doesn’t give he tries swinging from it and it carries his weight and he flies from one side of the cave to the other, like something out of a Tarzan episode.

Becca has a small smile on her face when she walks the room, touching the walls and looking all around her, as if committing the space to memory. And then she locks eyes with Kevin and brings the flashlight to her face, throwing shadows across it. They seem blacker than the darkness of the cave.

The light clicks off and she becomes a gray shape in the near distance.

He waits a moment, surrounded by his own ball of light, before clicking off his own flashlight. And the next thing he knows a cloud of darkness settles around them. He can hear her feet whispering across the cave floor and then her voice playfully calling out to him, “Marco.”

He can hear the saliva popping in his mouth when it rises into a smile. “Polo,” he says and moves toward her voice with his hands out before him, his fingers like the snouts of moles, routing through the dark. When he touches stone he hears her voice again, saying, “Marco,” behind him now.