Cradle Lake Read online

  “The first one was a mermaid,” she told him one night as he was about to fall asleep. He was half-dreaming of pastel paintings and great seagoing vessels. Lighthouses and cresting waves.

  “How do you know?” he mumbled.

  “I just know.” She pressed her face against him, warm in the cool night. “This one will be a sailor.”

  Heather carried the baby midway through the second trimester before she collapsed one afternoon at the art gallery and was rushed to the hospital. Alan arrived to find her gray and withdrawn in the hospital bed, nearly catatonic. He talked to her and tried to get her to respond, but it was futile. She could do nothing, it seemed, except stare at the blank wall across the room. Touching her hand was like touching a mannequin’s. A nurse had disposed of Heather’s slacks, which were apparently soaked in blood. None of the doctors could give him a suitable reason for why any of it had happened.

  Out in the hospital corridor, Alan stopped one of the nurses whom he’d recognized going in and out of Heather’s room. She was a heavyset black woman with a lacquered coiffure and neon orange talons for fingernails.

  “I want to see it,” he said.

  The nurse said she didn’t understand.

  Calmly, Alan said, “Then I will explain it to you.” And he did—that he wanted to see it, needed to see it. Where was it?

  “We don’t do that.” She seemed disgusted by the idea.

  “Then get me someone who will,” he said and waited.

  Other nurses filtered by, and some of them tried to give Alan coffee or take him down to the cafeteria for something to eat. Tried to distract him, change his mind. But he wouldn’t be distracted, wouldn’t change his mind. He wanted to see it.

  Eventually, a grizzled old doctor with rimless glasses and hair like a nest of copper wires approached. He spoke in a low voice. His breath reeked of onions. He used phrases like highly unorthodox and would not change what happened.

  “I know that. I’m not a fool,” Alan said. “I want to see it.”

  The doctor nodded. “Then follow me.”

  He would suffer nightmares from what he saw that afternoon in a small room at the end of the long corridor. A very clean, antiseptic room. The thing itself was in a clear plastic bag, vacuum-sealed and with a biohazard sticker on it. He could see it … the suggestion of delicate limbs, the misshapen cranium, the vagaries of all the things that make humans human. A single foot, tiny toes splayed, five of them, all five …

  Back at the apartment, Heather refused to leave the bedroom. She quit her job and spent her days in bed, reading trashy romance novels and watching daytime television with the volume turned all the way down. She refused to come out for dinner; like a prison guard, Alan simply left food on the nightstand.

  For two weeks he slept on the pull-out sofa in the living room. A needling white-hot pain began to spread in his guts. He thought of nonspecific cancers and ravenous tapeworms; of African orphans with bloated bellies whose faces served as banquets for giant, flesh-hungry flies. He thought, too, of exploding fireworks and bloody stool. Half-dreaming, half not.

  Then one night he was jarred awake on the pull-out sofa by something that may or may not have been a dream. He crept down the hall to the bathroom. A sliver of tallow light radiated from beneath the closed door. Gently, he knocked. “Heather?”

  No answer. It sounded like someone shaking a single maraca on the other side of the door.

  “Heather? Honey?”

  The maraca stopped.

  Alan tried the knob and found the door unlocked. Pushed it open …

  She sat naked on the edge of the tub, her hands between her knees clutching a bottle of pills. The pills shook as her hands shook: the maraca sound. She looked up at him, her face blotchy and indistinct, her eyes messy in their sockets. There was a slight tremble to her lower lip.

  He rushed to her, dropping to his knees while simultaneously grabbing her head in both hands. The plastic bottle of pills fell to the floor and rolled against the toilet. He sobbed into her hair. “Christ, hon …”

  “I didn’t take any,” Heather said, and it was the voice of the recently deceased. Her hands continued to shake. Her eyes could not focus on him—could not focus on anything. “I thought about it but I didn’t take any.”

  “Shhhh,” Alan said into her hair, gently rocking her. “Shhhh, babe. Shhhh.”

  And the next morning she was fine. She even got her old job back at the art gallery. Just like that. As if it had all been a dream.

  The stabbing, burning pain worsening in his gut, Alan went to his own doctor who diagnosed him with an ulcer. The doctor prescribed misoprostol and antacid tablets and told Alan to cut back on the drinking and smoking and try not to be so stressed out, maybe take a vacation.

  Alan could only smirk and assure the doctor that he would try to relax.

  When Alan picked up the misoprostol from the pharmacy, the plastic bottle had one phrase mockingly printed across the label in all capital letters—PREGNANT WOMEN SHOULD NOT INGEST. The pharmacist looked at him as if he were crazy when he started laughing like a loon at the counter.

  With the medication lulling his ulcer into semidormancy and Heather seemingly back on track, the nightmare appeared to be behind them. (Just to be on the safe side, Alan collected all the pills from the bathroom medicine cabinet, including Heather’s antidepressants and an ancient tub of Tylenol, and hid them in the hallway closet behind a bundle of towels.)

  The doctors found nothing physically wrong with either of them, so there was really no reason they couldn’t try again, couldn’t eventually have children. There were all sorts of reasons why the body aborts a fetus—they were told this dozens of times—and, in the long run, it was usually for the best. Mother Nature’s way of righting herself, one doctor had said. Alan and Heather had mumbled to each other, “Mother Nature’s a whore. Mother Nature never did nothin’ for nobody” until their laughter filled the apartment.

  They went out to dinner and to the movies, read books in Central Park, visited their favorite café for Sunday brunch. When Alan got word that his uncle Phillip had died and he had inherited the old man’s house, he and Heather never even considered the possibility of leaving the city and moving to rural North Carolina. In truth, he was not only surprised that his uncle had remembered him from the few times they had seen each other when Alan was just a boy, but Uncle Phillip had two grown children, Maryanne and Keith, who would have been more appropriate recipients of the property.

  In an effort to do the right thing, Alan attempted to track down both cousins, a task that was difficult to say the least, and finally managed to locate Keith in Rhode Island. He offered Keith his condolences to which his cousin made a snuffling, snorting sound on the other end of the line that reminded Alan of hogs nosing through slop. There was a cold, distant air about his cousin. The distance only increased when Alan brought up the house. Of course, Keith had already known the house had been left to Alan.

  “I’m not quite sure why he left it to me,” Alan confessed. “I didn’t think he remembered me.”

  “I’m not sure why, either.” Keith sounded like he wanted to get off the phone quickly. “Doesn’t matter. That dump is your problem now.”

  “I was going to see if you wanted it. I’ve got no use for a house in North Carolina.”

  “So sell it.”

  “What about Maryanne? Do you think she’d have any interest in—?”

  “She moved to London ten years ago. I’ve heard from her maybe a dozen times since then. She’s got no interest in that old place, either. Believe me.”

  When Alan got off the phone, he felt like he needed to take a shower. Something about talking to his cousin had left him feeling dirty. “I guess I’ll eventually have to take a trip down there and check the place out,” he said to Heather one morning over breakfast. “You know, before we can sell it.”

  Then one random night, Alan was jarred awake by a horrible nightmare, the details of which he could not
remember the instant he sat up in bed.

  Heather’s side of the bed was empty.

  Through the darkness, he peered down the hall. The bathroom door was closed, the sliver of buttery light visible beneath the door.

  His heart began to race. He tried to calm himself. Thought, She’s taking a leak. Chill out. He waited. Waited.

  “Babe?” he called.

  No answer.

  He flipped the bedsheets off and hurried down the hall, twisted the bathroom doorknob.

  Locked.

  “Heather!”

  He slammed one shoulder against the door. The frame splintered on impact. He stumbled into the cramped bathroom and froze as he saw her in the tub, the water around her stained pink, a razor in the soap dish. Her gaze shifted in his direction. He could see the life draining from her eyes even as he stood there.

  He rushed to her, gathered her up out of the tub. Examining her wrists was like facing his worst nightmare. He wrapped her arms in towels and called 911. Twice she started to pass out, but he slapped her face and talked to her and made her eyes stay open.

  You tricked me, he thought. You had me believing everything was all right so I’d drop my guard. And then you tried to leave me again.

  He was sobbing like a baby into her hair by the time the paramedics came in through the front door.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Alan awoke covered in sweat, the memory of the past year clinging to him like a web. It took him a few moments to recall his surroundings: the new house, the new master bedroom. Their bed shoved against one wall, boxes still strewn about the bedroom half unpacked. Beside him, Heather slept soundly. The house was silent, not even the ticking of a clock to disturb the void. Alan stared at the rectangular panel of bluish moonlight along the ceiling while he listened to his own heartbeat.

  (I didn’t take any. I thought about it but I didn’t take any.)

  He pawed sweat from his eyes. He had been dreaming of the babies, the dead babies, and how the one had looked in the vacuum-sealed biohazard bag. The splayed foot, each toe perfectly and undeniably identifiable …

  The memory of those events caused his ulcer to claw at the walls of his intestines. He groaned and rose creakily from the bed. His jeans were draped over a nearby chair. He climbed into them as Jerry Lee, who’d been asleep on the floor at the foot of their bed, lifted his head and watched him with lazy detachment. Too tired to follow his master, the dog dropped his head back down on his paws while Alan made his way out of the room to the hall.

  Stumbling in the unfamiliar darkness and fumbling for light switches he couldn’t readily locate, he arrived in the bathroom just as the pain in his stomach tightened into a tiny burning fist. He found his antacid tablets and downed two of them. His reflection stared wearily back at him.

  Being eaten from the inside out, he thought. Grimaced. And on the heels of that, he couldn’t help but think of wombs, broken and infertile …

  As quietly as a cat, he slipped on his Nikes in the foyer and eased open the front door, stepping onto the porch and already poking a cigarette into his mouth. The porch floorboards groaned beneath his feet. Lighting one of the cigarettes, he looked out across the front yard. It was late. All the houses on the other side of the street were asleep. He listened, wondering what was wrong, what was missing … then realized with half a smirk that it was the commotion of the city. He had grown so accustomed to city sounds that the rural silence was nearly deafening. Manhattan was alive in that electrical-current-through-wires way. Out here, it was as quiet and desolate as an ancient tomb.

  From out of nowhere, he caught a strange yet oddly familiar scent on the air. Oddly nostalgic. It took him only two seconds to place the smell: his father’s cologne. That cheap, medicinal Aqua Velva smell. It had come down on the wind and infiltrated his nose as sharp as a slap across the face.

  Bill Hammerstun, who had been a miserable human being up until the day he died from a bullet in the brain, had tried to warn Alan against marriage. Women ran around on you. They were selfish and they cheated. And if they weren’t running around on you, they stuck by your side just to make your life unbearable. (Alan had often wondered how his old man had come upon this second bit of wisdom as no woman, as far as Alan could tell, had ever stuck by his side—including Alan’s mother.) Bill Hammerstun had been positively brimming with words of wisdom.

  Alan remembered coming home from high school one day in late May, just a few weeks before graduation, to a squad car parked outside the Upper West Side tenement where he lived with his old man. Two cops were standing on the stoop with Jimmy Carmichael, one of his father’s drinking buddies. The sight of the police car and the cops didn’t alarm Alan; he had come home to such things before. It was Jimmy’s presence that struck him as unusual. Jimmy did not associate with cops.

  As Alan mounted the steps of the tenement, Jimmy had eased off the porch railing with a grunt. The man’s considerable bulk shifted beneath his too-tight, sleeveless undershirt. Grinning sourly around a short black cigar, trying desperately to appear approachable, Jimmy had placed a heavy hand on Alan’s shoulder and exhaled fetid breath into his face. Hey there, sport, he’d said. Hey there, kiddo.

  Both cops had taken a simultaneous step forward, their arms folded. For one fleeting second, Alan thought they were there to arrest him. He thought of shoplifting from the 7-Eleven and stealing money from the tip jar at the Afghan Kebab. Also, there had been the silver BMW with the cryptic vanity plates—MRBBALL. Alan and his friend Ritchie Ulrich had smashed the passenger window and pried the stereo out of the dashboard with a screwdriver. Before running away, they had even glommed the loose change from the cup holders between the front seats.

  Hey there, sport. Hey there, kiddo.

  The cops had shuttled him off, along with Jimmy, to the city morgue where his father had already been pronounced dead. Jimmy stood behind him with one fat hand on his shoulder as Alan looked at his old man dead on the stainless steel table in the basement. Bill Hammerstun’s skin had already gone a fishy, sallow color. His face looked like a mold of himself made out of vulcanized rubber. There was something that resembled blue pool chalk on his cheek. And, of course, the dime-sized bullet wound in his right temple. Blessedly, the blood had been cleaned away.

  Alan had looked to Jimmy and, with little emotion, asked him what the hell he was supposed to do now.

  Jimmy rolled his big, meaty shoulders and said he didn’t know. You’re eighteen now, ain’t you, sport? Guess you can do whatever you want. Happy trails.

  He had contacted his mother, who had been estranged from him since his early childhood. He had never fully understood what had gone wrong in his parents’ relationship, though he often wondered how any woman could have put up with Bill Hammerstun for the entirety of a marriage, so he didn’t necessarily blame her for leaving. He had located her somewhere in Michigan, and she passed along unemotional condolences over the telephone—a bad connection, the line popped and hissed with static for the duration of the phone call—but she did not invite him to live with her. The call lasted no longer than five minutes, and toward the end of it, Alan paid more attention to what sounded like a crying baby in the background than to the actual words coming out of his mother’s mouth.

  He received money from the sale of his father’s nightclub, which paid for the funeral costs and even set him up in an apartment in Manhattan. He took on two roommates—punk rockers with dyed hair and an affinity for clove cigarettes and fuzzy music with garbled lyrics—and Jimmy Carmichael gave him a job as a bicycle courier in Midtown while he put himself through college with the remainder of the nightclub money.

  Only once did Alan think he saw his dead father, and it was a cold, rainy late afternoon. He’d tethered his bike to a No Parking sign and rushed into an office building to deliver a package. On his way out, an eerie calm seemed to overtake him. Strangely, there wasn’t any traffic along the street, though he could see the flaring of taillights at the nearest intersection through the
drizzle. Tugging the hood of his nylon jacket over his head, he began running the combination to his bike lock, anxious to get home and out of the rain.

  But then something had caused him to look up. Across the street and hidden within the shadows of a narrow alley that cut between two buildings, a pale visage emerged from the gloom. At first, Alan thought it was a homeless man, but then he recognized the face, floating there in the darkness of the alley like a moon hanging in space, and a cold dread coursed through his veins. He hurriedly undid the bike lock and jumped onto the seat, his legs already pedaling in the air before they had a chance to settle onto the pedals themselves. Once he hopped down the curb and gained speed, he risked a glance over his shoulder. The pale face was gone, having retreated into the shadows. Or perhaps, he would think later that night, it had never existed in the first place.

  Happy trails, he thought now, smoking the cigarette down to the filter. Contrary to what his doctor had told him, smoking actually made his ulcer feel better. Fuck doctors. Happy trails, indeed.

  He stepped off the porch and cut through the yard on his way around to the back of the house. Momentarily, the scent of his father’s cologne grew stronger. The sky was a country sky, afire with an abundance of stars. The moon was fat and full, the color of bone. Lighting a second cigarette, Alan crossed the yard while trailing the palms of his hands over the high grass. It was warm enough for fireflies, and this night they were out in multitude, filling the sky with their peculiar brand of visual Morse code.

  Alan’s gaze fell upon the dark hollow in the curtain of trees. It looked like the mouth of a cave in the side of a mountain. He exhaled a cloud of smoke out of the corner of his mouth and tromped down the tall grass on his way over to the stand of trees. Stupidly, it caused him to think of the alley between the two buildings and the pale moon face that had floated there, watching him from across a Manhattan street.