Christopher Ransom - The Birthing House

Conrad did his best to ask questions and nod his head with a vigor that suggested he was memorizing all this just fine, thank you, no need to write it down. The truth was, all of Big John's directions were going in one ear and out the other. He was still obsessing about Jo. Someone had been in her room.

'I want to be clear on the roof access here.' They stopped at the end of the second-floor hall facing the street. Conrad was staring off into space when Big John slapped him on the shoulder. 'You still with me, bud?'

'Yeah, sorry, John. Been a long day.'

'You got that right. Now, when you go out to clean the gutters over the porch, do not attempt to use the ladder from the yard. Because it is not long enough, and you will fall and break your neck and then Gail will never let me hear the end of it.'

'Right. No ladder.'

'I don't expect you to do the top gutter - there's only one and I'm pretty sure it's clean - but if you do get a wild hair up your ass, bring the small ladder up here, use the ladder into the attic, open the front-attic window. Using a broom you ought to be able to reach anything on that last stretch of roof, but I repeat. Do not crawl outside of the attic. That little patch needs new shingles. Unless you want to do a Greg Louganis into Gail's ferns, stay inside, got it?'

'Of course,' Conrad said.

There was an unlatching sound as the bathroom door opened. Nadia exited wearing a navy blue towel around her waist like a man in a locker room. Her damp blonde hair clung in sticky whorls to her frost-white and drip-drying back. The curves of her wagging hips held the towel low, revealing the dimple above her butt cleavage as she crossed the hall to the linen closet.

Conrad sucked air through his teeth.

She didn't see them standing in the hall until her father barked, 'Nadia, for goodness' sake!'

Nadia did a half-pirouette, covering her breasts with one arm as she looked over her shoulder and scowled, her eyes darting to Conrad and back.

'Daddy, you scared the crap out of me,' she yelped, slipping through her bedroom door at the end of the hall.

Conrad looked away . . . too late. Before the dewy daughter had made her escape, he'd glimpsed one heavy breast squeezed up in the hook of her arm. True, all he spied within the fold was pale flesh (by chance the nipple had been sheltered), but the exposure of the stretch-marked topography of her pregnant belly and milk-laden ( bosom, they were called bosoms or teats back then! ), breasts set off an uncomfortable male charge between father and neighbor.

'She thinks she's still living in her damn dorm room,' Big John said.

Conrad kept his eyes averted. He didn't want Big John thinking he was a willing participant in this impromptu peep show.

'They got steers and heifers sharing showers up the school. Can you imagine what that's like?'

'Oh, yeah, they do that now, I guess,' Conrad said, legs literally shaking.

'Well, that's pretty much the whole shootin' match, anyway. Let's go see what Gail's gone and zapped for ya.'

As they moved down the hall, the soapy smell of the girl rode out on a wave of shower steam and settled upon his neck, mingling with the beads of sweat, and he entered the kitchen with a cluster of stubborn girl molecules working its way into his pores.

Gail handed him a plate of angel hair pasta with home-made pesto that burned his sinuses. Conrad ate standing over the kitchen counter while Gail wrote down the emergency phone numbers. He saw Steve Bartholomew's name and another he did not recognize. As he was leaving, Gail gave him at least three more hugs and thanked him.

'No, thank you,' he said, light-headed from the meal, the girl.

'What for, putting you to work?'

'For making me feel at home.'

'Aw.' Gail tilted her head in sympathy. He hadn't meant for it to come out that way. 'You miss her.'

'I don't know what I was thinking letting her go.'

Nadia Grum.

MySpace. Her space.

Pink and black frames, looping cursive text for font. Blank spots popped to life while cell phone snapshots of the girl next door looking younger and not yet pregnant filled the screen: with her friends in the woods, standing on a car, on the football field, in her bedroom, sitting on the bed, a bandana on her brow. Hugging various girlfriends, their faces plastered with clown make-up. Nothing gratuitous, nothing revealing, but he was transfixed. The candor with which she displayed herself and the details of her life made him feel like a creep. He learned more about his neighbor in fifteen minutes than he learned about high-school classmates he had known for three years. No wonder parents the world over were terrified.

In a box decorated with flowers and hearts, guitars and guns, her profile:

Her cliche answers and trumped-up confidence were empty calories, leaving him hungry for more. The most pressing questions - Who is the father of your baby? How has the pregnancy changed your life? What are you going to do now? - would have to wait .

Question: Have you ever been in love?

Answer: No .

He returned again and again to one photo. She was sitting in a slat-backed wooden chair at a small desk in someone's bedroom, her hair pleasantly ruffled as if it had been wet and then slept on. She wore masculine black reading glasses and she was looking up in surprise, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open, as if the photographer had crept up and caught her in a private act.

HOLLY

If every love needs a home, then theirs was each other. And if every couple needs a home to shelter their love, Holly's mother's house was their sanctuary. Holly's father lived on the other side of town, and he was busy rebuilding his life, building a new brood. Holly was allowed to choose where she lived, and her mother played cool to keep her daughter in her camp. Soon our boy was spending all his time with Holly - including nights, weekends and even the taboo school nights - and together they lived as a new family.

His mother was tired after work and relieved to have him on someone else's watch. Better for her son to be at Holly's than running with boys who didn't have girlfriends and spent their time wrecking cars, stealing CDs and burning cats. He always told his mother the truth - I'm going to Holly's - and then forgot to call home to say he was staying. Nobody seemed to mind.

In her mother's home snuggled up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains there was a finished basement made up like an apartment for a real adult (kitchenette, living room, full bath, spare room and Holly's cocoon-like bedroom). They lived like a real couple and forgot about school until the alarm went off and they had to commute, sore and feeding each other fruit and listening to The Smiths on the way to class.

The sex had evolved things, but the basement house below the real house was the thing that made it real.

They took baths, cooked five course meals, watched movies and became like newlyweds. They dressed alike in shirts and jeans purchased with Holly's mother's credit card. They ate magic mushrooms, smoked good pot, sipped wine. They ate grilled shark, large salads and entertained cleansing fruit diets together. They had small parties with close, chosen friends from school, but they never lasted, the friendships. There wasn't room for anyone else. People grew bored of them, spiteful of their closeness, and drifted away.

Holly always had fresh money in her account. But when they got bored they shoplifted clothing, bedding, lunch, seafood dinners. They walked out on hundred-dollar meals and no one cared enough to stop them. They grew daring in their dalliances, monstrous in their self-absorption, reckless in their search for new thrills.