Future Home of the Living God(62)

“Stop bleeding. Stop it right now. Stop bleeding.” I say this in a commanding voice, and I glare at Tia fiercely, as if it is her fault. And her eyes open. She looks at me very sweetly.

“Okay,” she says, dutifully. “I will try. I will.”

And she does it. The sudden flow quits.

“That’s good, you’re doing well,” I hear myself say. That is all I’ve been saying for hours. But now there is a new thing to say. Only I’m not going to be the one to say it. I refuse. I have been through too much with Tia to be the one who has to tell her. Sera will have to do it, when Sera herself understands. When she stops the useless little puffing sounds over there by the chair. When she stops hunching over the little bundle in her arms. When she sits up. When she just fucking quits. Which doesn’t happen for a long, long time. So long that I think, Sera, say it. Say it, now. But she does not. That baby’s dead, but Sera doesn’t say that. Eventually, she crawls over to us and says something like Your baby didn’t make it, or Your baby is in the spirit world, or just Gone. I’m sorry. Gone.

“I want to hold it,” says Tia.

Sera gives the baby to her all wrapped up in a swaddling blanket.

“A girl,” Sera says.

Tia uncovers its face and it looks like any baby, a crumpled little stone-idol face, only a blue-gray color. The silence and the stillness of this baby is godly. I get up. I fall down. I am on my knees. I worship. Tia croons, holds her baby, and begins to sing. Not a song composed of words, but a song made up of sounds that I will hear later, in a different place. Sounds that were made a hundred thousand years ago, I am sure, and sounds that will be heard a hundred thousand from now, I hope. As she sings, I fall asleep beside her—her songs do soothe a baby, the one in me. I can feel you stretching your limbs, turning, settling, and you’re alive. You’re so very alive.



October 21

When I wake up, there is no baby in Tia’s arms. She is sleeping, not dead. I check her breath with my hand. Her face is warm. And Sera is in the corner on a little camp mattress, sleeping too. Everything’s been cleaned up. The blood. The bloody placenta. The bloody blue pads. Everything’s balled up in a white plastic bag in the corner. I can see the bag glowing in the dim lamplight. Sera’s thought of everything. I see movement, though, now, and for a while I think it is part of some dream. There’s an unreality to it. But then very slowly I understand what I am seeing—an undulating brown fur mat or rug is actually rats carefully rooting out and removing what is in the white bag through a precisely chewed hole. And more rats are piled on something placed upon the little table. They have shredded its covering. They are moving in a bizarre way, on the table, back and forth, swarming, swimming, over one another, diving into a pile of themselves and diving out again. I jump up but I am silent. I do not want Tia or Sera to see this. I do not. The rats aren’t scared of me. They just swarm thicker, faster, in a soundless, squirming excitement. I take the broom and sweep at them, but they are a tide and just keep lapping back. I see my mom’s boots, there in the corner. Frye boots. My mom’s hippie boots. She started buying them in the seventies and never quit. I put them on. I stand there for a moment in the boots, and sort of work out what I’m going to do. Then I stoop over and grab a rat by the tail. Quickly, I swing it around underneath my mom’s boot and crush its head. The cracking sound pleases me. I do another, and another. Soon, they notice. There is no sound in the cave but the crack and crack of my mom’s boots. I am really full of admiration for these boots. They are made of leather so thick that a rat can’t get a tooth through, and the heels are heavy enough to crush a rat’s skull with one crack. I crack again, maybe twenty or thirty times now, I don’t know. I crack until they understand, maybe from the rat shrieks somewhere beyond the decibel level that I can hear, what is happening. That’s too much for them. They are gone. Suddenly, they just disappear.

They’ve ripped apart the baby’s blanket, so I wrap the tiny idol up again, tightly. I do not want Tia to realize. Then I take your striped cotton flannel blanket from my pack. It’s a blue and yellow plaid, very pretty. I secure it around Tia’s baby. There’s a couple of tin boxes where the food is stashed. I retie the garbage bag and stuff all of the bloody pads in there. I arrange the bodies of the rats in a circle around us. My mind is not right. How could it be? I know my thoughts are bizarre, extreme. I take the baby, then, and curl up next to Tia. We sleep a long, long time. Maybe days. I don’t know. The next time I wake up, the baby is gone from my arms. The crushed bodies of the rats are off the floor. In the lamplight, I see Sera at the stove and I smell something good, something with broth, maybe onions. There is a buttery type of smell. I am overpoweringly hungry and the horror is reduced to a bitter aura, more like a dream. Tia’s sitting up. She is even at the table. The same table.

“How can you be sitting there?” I ask her.

“I feel better,” she says.

She is wearing a snowmobile suit, too small, maybe child-sized, because is it bubble-gum pink with lavender trim and it has the three Disney princesses embroidered over her heart. Her boots are good, Sorels, a grimy white with yellow fur. She’s eating noodles, eyes downcast, in a satisfied and even excited way. Her lank black hair falls forward with each bite. It occurs to me that losing her baby is not all bad. Obviously not. Without a baby, Tia can move in the world like a normal person. She is free. She can leave this cave as soon as she recovers, and go anywhere she wants. Tia can stroll on sidewalks in broad daylight. She can step into a coffee shop and have a coffee, if there still is coffee. She can sit down and read a book, right there, in the public eye, and she will not be arrested. Her tummy’s going to flatten out and she will not have to run away to hide her baby. There is no baby anymore. No one to drag her down. She will have to register for the womb draft, but there are surely ways out of it. She will not be subject to this freakish sense of continual paranoia. She will not have to live in a cave. Or with rats. As I watch her eat the soup my hunger fades. She has passed through the valley of the shadow, and even if she feels grief, which surely must come, she is on the other side. My valley lies before me still.