The Longest Night (31 page)

“I'm sorry!” Jeannie cried. “I need to take care of something.” She slid past Martha, grabbed a washcloth from the bathroom, and darted back into the study, closing the door behind her. She didn't have time to worry about how strange all this looked. Stooping, she used the washcloth to lift the bottle and tighten the cap. She balled up the cloth and dabbed at the carpet. To her relief she saw no hole, but when she flicked at the fibers they drifted up and away, like dandelion fluff.

“God
damnit,
” Jeannie hissed.

“Mama?” Angela called from the hallway.

“We are going to the bakery!” Martha shouted, in a panic. “We are going out!”

Jeannie set the bottle back in the closet and replaced the cotton balls beside it. The room fairly reeked now, so, feeling Mitch-like and idiotic, she reopened the window. Tucking the sheet of paper under her arm, she hurried into the hall. She had to dash to catch Martha, who was bundling Angela so thoroughly that only the child's eyes and pigtails showed.

“Martha,” Jeannie panted, “there's no need to go back out.”

Martha paused and slowed her scarf winding. “Are you sure?” she asked, with exaggerated deliberateness.

“Of course. It's freezing out there. Angela needs lunch. How was your haircut, dear?” Jeannie reached for the scarf and for a moment both she and Martha held it as if they might begin to have a wrapping war, Jeannie twirling it one way and Martha the other.

“Fine,” Angela's muffled voice said.

“Your pigtails look nice and cleaned up.”

“I hungry.”

“Oh. Martha will make you some tomato soup.” Jeannie had won the scarf battle and she folded it against herself, stroking it flat.

“Are you sure, ma'am?” Martha stammered. “I didn't know—I thought maybe your friend?”

The air went out of Jeannie in a rush. She stared into Martha's eyes and, gathering herself, smiled broadly. “I'm sorry?” she said. “You thought maybe what friend?”

Martha looked away. “Nothing,” she twittered. “Nothing, of course. Angela, I'll get you some soup.”

I
t had been almost two years since Nat last saw her mother, so she was not sure what to expect. She tried to prepare herself for some kind of drastic change: a sizable weight loss, or maybe gain; some mild, elegant arthritis. She was surprised when her plump, purse-lipped mother climbed easily down the steel steps of the small airplane, clutching a handbag as big as a board game. The only new thing Nat could detect was her thick coat, black-and-white houndstooth. She had rarely seen her mother in any kind of jacket. Doris Radek was of that retired generation who liked to sit in the sun and thumb through the
Ladies' Home Journal,
and she always wore sleeveless dresses.

“Do you remember your Grandma Doris?” Nat asked, her voice sugary with nerves, as she nudged her girls forward.

“Aren't you lovely,” her mother said, smiling at the girls; and then to Nat, “I prefer ‘Grandma Radek.' ‘Doris' isn't quite appropriate.”

“Oh, right,” Nat said quickly. “Your Grandma Radek, then.”

Nat's mother bent to kiss each of the girls in turn. They stood stoically as Nat had instructed them to do. Then Doris leaned forward to tap her cheek against Nat's. Nat was both comforted and slightly put off by her mother's smell, which was the same as it had always been: a mixture of lipstick, fading nicotine, and the baby powder she patted all over herself after every shower. Taken together these created an unsettling aroma, like that of an overgrown infant with adult habits.

“Look at you!” Doris exclaimed, in a somewhat obscure way.

“How was your Thanksgiving, Mom?” Nat asked as the two of them lugged her suitcases to the car. It was a gray day, and the sky sat low like a dull, chilly lid.

“Thanksgiving was wonderful,” Doris said. “Gorgeous weather. Fall in San Diego, you can't beat it. And Marva did a fabulous job as usual. You know how she is—every last detail taken care of.”

“Yes,” said Nat.

“And those beautiful boys!”

“Lyle and Stephen?”

“Yes. They're twelve and ten now. You've never
seen
such well-behaved children.”

“Probably not,” Nat admitted.

“Stephen has given guest sermons!” Doris marveled. “At age twelve!”

These were the kinds of standards her mother's peers held. Young Stephen's guest sermons were probably an improvement, Nat thought, over Pastor Tim's at the very much Improved Saint Ignatius Church. Tim must be in his thirties by now; Nat pictured him sunburned and pigeon-chested, hairline receding (she advanced his aging out of spite), holding forth in his dimly lit record store. She heaved her mother's suitcase into the trunk, pausing to stretch the small of her back.

The car dipped as Doris squeezed into the passenger seat. It was a challenge to get the girls in after her. Nat crammed in Liddie and then Sam, who scowled but, at Nat's warning glare, accepted her cramped fate.

Nat almost expected her mother to say something about the return of the yellow car: “Oh, I see you have the Fireflite back,” or some such. She realized, however, that her mother had never known it was gone, and this cheered her. It would be the same when Paul came home. She really could pull off her lie, and everything would seem exactly the same as it had when he left. That morning she'd snuck into the girls' room, bagged their trinkets from Esrom—arrowheads, small rocks printed with fossils, the now-tattered and flattened snake skin—and, though it hurt, thrown them away. Luckily these items had fallen behind a bookshelf, had been forgotten for weeks despite the girls' initial love for them—with the exception of the snake skin that Liddie liked to carry around, fondling absently, like a mildly occult pacifier—and Nat hoped they'd stay out of mind if out of sight.

“Marva is on the flower committee,” Doris was saying, still on the subject of her beloved daughter-in-law. George's wife was a prim, double-chinned woman who once suggested that Paul was “lowborn” and that Nat had abandoned her family by marrying a military man and moving away. This was an interesting opinion given the fact that Marva herself had moved from Tucson to marry George, a man so boring that in his thirties he seemed almost elderly. Nat had never really known her brother, but chafed at the slavishness with which both Doris and Marva doted upon him. Marva actually cut George's food for him: She cut his food!

This is not nice,
Nat told herself.
Control yourself
.

The drive home proceeded mostly without incident, except that every time Doris worked up some bit of conversation, Sam was suddenly inspired to speak from the backseat. Interruptions made Doris peevish. “Sam, hush!” Nat said, more strongly than she had intended. Then she wanted to apologize but knew her mother would find an apology to a child ridiculous.

When they reached the falls, Nat brightened. Here was something to show a visitor. Doris leaned forward in her seat, appropriately impressed. Nat slowed the car, watching the cold, rushing water. The Mormon temple was so bright white against the gray sky that it looked lit up.

“That's quite a building they have,” Doris said, and Nat hoped she would hold her tongue against the Mormons. She didn't want the girls to hear any pointed remarks. Thankfully Doris didn't say anything more than “They must have deep pockets,” and Nat nodded and gave a little shrug, which committed her to no particular assessment.

They were almost at their street when Nat felt the cramping start in her back and abdomen. She pulled the car up to the curb and paused, trying to pay attention to the feeling. Doris got out of the car, and Nat felt the band of pain start at her back again, working its way forward. She knew what this was, but she didn't know whether to feel dread or relief. She got the girls into the house and put them to bed, then paced up and down the hall, a heavy, gravid beast of burden.

“Just go to the hospital,” her mother called from where she sat smoking at the kitchen table.

“You're probably right,” Nat said.

“Got here just in time, didn't I?” Her mother exhaled a slow plume, looking around. “I guess we'll be fine here. I'll wash this floor for you.”

“Okay.”

“I don't know what I am going to do with those girls all week, though.”

“They love to color.” Nat shuffled down the hallway and back, her elbow prodding the wall again and again like a walking stick. “They can watch TV.”

“What should I do when Samantha gets lippy?”

Nat ground her molars together. Then the pain subsided and she felt normal enough to be irritated by her mother. “
If
Sam misbehaves, I send her to her room.”

“Do you have a yardstick on hand?”

“No,” Nat lied. She walked stiffly back down the hall. “I'm going to go to the hospital now,” she said.

Outside, she could see her breath. She set her bag in the passenger seat. Then she had a stab of sentimentality and decided to go back inside and kiss her girls good-bye, just in case she never returned. She lugged herself through the kitchen and past her mother, who glanced up, curious.

In their bedroom, the girls were sound asleep. She bent low over each of them in turn. Liddie was soft and breathy, with dark eyelashes spilling down her cheeks; Sam was stretched out flat on her back, wild limbs and hair tossed everywhere, as if she had fallen onto the mattress from the ceiling. Nat felt a sudden, desperate affection for them, her little big girls.

She huffed back through the kitchen past her mother. Her forehead was starting to sweat.

“Are you sure you should be driving?” Doris asked, still at the kitchen table.

“I'm fine. There's no traffic this time of night.”

“Wait,” her mother said as Nat reached the door. Nat turned around impatiently. To her surprise her mother came to her and patted her shoulder. Nat felt grateful for this kindness, though she had to breathe through her mouth to avoid gagging on the cigarette-and-baby-powder scent.

“Be nice to my girls,” Nat pleaded, only half-joking.

“But of course. Good luck, dear.” Doris leaned in to kiss Nat but missed her mark, from shyness and unfamiliarity, and pegged her wetly on the neck. The kiss sat on Nat's skin and announced itself until she shrugged it off just outside the door. Then she shuffled down the cement steps, to the dark and waiting car.

There was a light layer of new snow on the road, just enough to leave thin imprints of tire tracks. Nat drove for a couple of minutes and sat out a contraction at a stop sign where no one else showed up. When the fist released her she drove again. She tried to cover as much ground as she could before the pain's next winding ascent through her abdomen. The following contraction turned her belly from its normal pregnancy firmness into a rock-hard, bulging expansion that overtook her body from rib cage to anus. The brakes ground sharply as she pulled over, clenched the wheel, writhed in her seat.
It will be over soon it will be over soon
she chanted in her head, and then it was, lifting as suddenly as it had come. When the pain left she felt nothing of it at all; it had just floated away. She gunned another mile down the road, felt the pain build, and waited until it was unbearable before yanking the car back to the shoulder. Her body was nothing but center, nothing but hurt for one horrible minute—her limbs and head incidental, just stuck there waiting—and then she was free, driving as fast as she could, not because she thought the baby's arrival was imminent but because she simply wanted to get off the road and into the hospital. Her limbs were not yet shaking away from her; she did not have the sickening sense that her body was opening itself in a perfect circle against the car seat. She still had an hour or two to go, both a relief and a discouragement.

In front of the hospital, however, she had the sudden and senseless thought that maybe if she didn't go in, she could avoid the whole rest of it. Her body might just forget, or decide to pick this up some other time. But no, she was in its clutches, this thing that turned her into a simple animal: no negotiation, no speech, no poetry.

Once in high school she'd gone for a beach walk, during yet another bonfire night with her friends, and come upon a large flat shape ahead of her. It was a sea turtle, its lower body tucked into a smooth damp hole in the sand. Nat had knelt beside it, watched the mucousy pulse of one egg after another down the well-dug chute. The turtle stared straight ahead, unmoving, as if it were alone. One of its front flippers was carved with deep, smooth, nearly crippling scars. When Nat leaned too close it opened its tulip-shaped beak and she sat back quickly in apology. It was the first time she'd ever witnessed such a perfect and critical focus, such coarse and untaught beauty.

She grasped the door handle and pushed it open but suddenly she couldn't make herself stand. She sat half out of the seat with her arm stretched to the handle. Paul was so far away that his presence was impossible, and he'd never been allowed anywhere near her during childbirth anyway; this made room for the soothing, heartening fantasy that Esrom was beside her. His kindness would make all this bearable. She imagined that he had brought foals and calves into the world in a gentle, welcoming way, whispering words of encouragement to their huffing animal mothers, and it was only fair that he might do this for her, too. She pictured his hand on her head, his cheek by hers, talking her through each wave of pain.

At the front of the hospital an attendant in a white uniform noticed her and settled her into a wheelchair, asking if her husband was parking the car. “No,” Nat said. She was taken to a white room, familiar in the way all single-function rooms are familiar: three beds in a row separated by shower curtains. A woman in the far bed shouted for her husband, or someone named “Mr. Jackson,” in a parched and agonized voice. Nat heard that voice and felt an almost-paralyzing dread: It would be her own in an hour or so. She changed into the thin and useless gown, and held out her arm when the nurse asked for her pulse. Her belly grew hard again, harder than she thought flesh could get, and she felt both the desperate urge to thrash away from it and also to curl herself around it, as if it were just a very sensitive monster that would respond to comfort. But it responded to nothing, only intensified, and pinned her to the bed with its strength. When she came out of the contraction she leaned her head back against the hard mattress and imagined that if she opened her eyes Esrom would be there, telling her that she was wonderful and brave.