Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

At my car, Bull stopped walking. The lawn mowing man was long gone, as was the sun and the pleasant summer evening. The street was dark and still. Something cramped in my stomach and a sourness rose in my throat. Maybe it was the coleslaw. My arm throbbed where Julia had gripped it.

Bull sighed. “Nothing happened, Gemma. That’s how life goes. You are friends with someone until you aren’t, and it’s usually over some small, silly misunderstanding. I don’t even remember what it was. Go home, honey. Get some sleep; you look exhausted. I don’t like the thought of you in that empty house, all alone, not a neighbor in sight. When is Brody home?”

“A few more days.”

“Are we going to see a wedding before that baby comes?” Bull asked. His tone was gentle. My reaction was prickly; petulant undertones, hated but uncontrollable, crept into my voice. “What, you don’t want a bastard great-grandchild?”

Bull gave me a look. “Gemma, stop it. At some point, you need to crap or get off the can. Brody apologized. You’re having a child together. Forgiveness heals the giver much more than the receiver. Marriage is a great stabilizer, especially for a child.”

“I forgave Brody a long time ago, Bull. Forgive me if I’m still not convinced that marriage is the right choice for us. You know what they say, ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater.’”

“People change, Gem. They grow and mature. You two were young and in love and things turned serious. Brody got scared. He’s a man; at the end of the day everyone knows we’re really the weaker sex. We constantly struggle with our biological need to sow our seeds and our desire for a stable home front with one good woman. He loves you too much to hurt you again.”

“It’s got nothing to do with love. It never has. It has everything to do with Celeste Takashima and all the other beautiful women in the world who turn the heads of men who don’t belong to them.”

“Well, that’s your first problem, Gemma. Brody doesn’t belong to you. You go on thinking that way and sure as spit he’ll up and betray you again,” Bull said.

I didn’t have a response to that, so I shrugged and got in the car. Bull closed the door behind me. I rolled down the window and thanked him for dinner then backed out. He stood in the drive, watching me until I reached the street, then he turned and was swallowed by the dark shadows lining the edge of the house.

I slept little that night. The Peanut was active and every jab and kick felt like a personal attack against any hope of slumber. When I did sleep, my dreams were vivid. Twice I woke, heart pounding, my body covered in a film of sweat that simultaneously chilled and fevered me.

I dreamed I stood at the edge of a great precipice.

Below me, miles below me, a narrow ribbon of indigo water wound its way through a rust-colored canyon. I raised my arms in a swan dive and pushed off the ground, lifting up and over and then I was falling, falling down through the air. What seemed like an eternity passed, and suddenly the river was rushing up to greet me and my face hit the water with a sharp slap.

The green light on the tiny alarm clock next to my bedside read two in the morning. I walked downstairs and got a glass of milk and then splashed cool water from the kitchen sink on my face. After a few stretches, I lay down on the living-room couch. Although the couch wasn’t as comfortable as the bed, the room was cooler.

The windows had no curtains and I watched as the pale moonlight made fantastical shapes and shadows on the pine floor: a witch on a broom, then a headless horse, then a silo that shifted and slid into a nameless blob.

I remembered Dr. Pabst’s explanation of nightmares as being one of the mind’s ways to work through traumatic events. He also said they are a common reaction to stress. My grandmother used to tell me that nightmares were the result of too much sugar and not enough love. When I woke crying from a bad dream, which was a common occurrence in my youth, she would lie with me and shower my forehead with kisses.

Curled up on my side, I called for Seamus. He waddled over from his doggy bed in the kitchen and with a groan, jumped up on the couch. He lay at my feet and passed a squeak of gas and was soon snoring. He was no replacement for my grandmother but he was a comfort nonetheless.

I fell asleep to his snorts and grunts and funny little sighs.

I woke a few hours later from my second dream, one that was as familiar to me as the thin cotton quilt, hand-stitched by my other grandmother, my mother’s mother, that lay jumbled in a heap at my feet. I’d been having this same dream for years; it started a few weeks after I found the skull in the woods.

If I was lucky, I went a full month between the dreams.

If I was unlucky, they haunted me three or four times a week.

I stand in a meadow in the middle of a dense forest. The air is cool and silent and still; the pine boughs do not so much as move. I’m in a nightgown, an old-fashioned dress with long sleeves and delicate lace trim, what they used to call a granny gown. The white fabric glows in the moonlight.

I’m a beacon in the dark woods.

The children creep toward me from opposite directions, emerging from the black forest like wraiths. They form points on a compass: Tommy from the north and Andrew from the south. One after the other, they fall to their knees around me, their hands together in supplication, in prayer.

We are the dead , they whisper.

Do not forget us , they chant.

Tommy is closest and I put my hand on his head in a gesture of comfort, but he is mere ether and my hand passes through his face like a hand through a cobweb.

A noise emerges from the woods, a dragging, clanking, terrible sound. The children rise to their haunches and scuttle backward, their eyes never leaving my face. As they slip back into the darkness at the edge of the trees, a man emerges. He stays out of the moonlight, but I can tell he is a big man, over six feet tall, and strong.

He drags a sleigh. Something lies on the sleigh, something small and shrouded and still.

Strapped to the man’s back are tools: A pick-ax. A shovel. A handsaw.

They are a woodsman’s tools.

As the old kettle began to babble with the sounds of boiling water, I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and scanned the fridge. The Peanut had taken a liking to cinnamon rolls in the morning and I wasn’t going to fight her (although I was a little pissed about all the kicking she’d done during the night). I popped a frozen bun in the microwave and snipped open the corner of the tiny frosting package that had come with it.

Sticky white icing leaked from the plastic wrapper and I licked my fingers and felt the sugar hit my bloodstream.

On the kitchen table, my MacBook beeped. I opened it to see a Skype call waiting so I logged in and Brody’s face, slightly hazy and out of focus, greeted me. I waved at him and waited for the connection to improve. His beard looked full and his hair seemed to have grown inches since we’d last Skyped.

“Morning my sweet one, how are my girls?”

I was grateful for the technology that allowed us to not only talk but see each other as well, but I hated how close he looked and how far away he actually was. Anchorage could have been on the moon for all the miles between us.

“We miss you. Four more days, I don’t know if we’ll make it,” I told him. The microwave beeped and my belly growled. “Hang on a sec.”

I grabbed the cinnamon roll and a decaf tea and sat down in front of the computer screen. I held up the pastry and mug. “See what you’re missing? Momma’s on a sugar rush.”