Christopher Ransom - The Birthing House

The sky was so much clearer here than in Los Angeles. Without the smog he could see all the constellations he did not know the names of. He knew that Jo was sleeping now, in Michigan. What he had seen in the house could not be his wife. A ghost, an echo, a reflection. Whatever she was, he had seen the impossible and it sickened him to think she was in the house, had maybe been there all along.

He missed Jo that night more than he could remember missing anyone since Holly, and he would have cried himself to sleep if he had not still been in some form of shock. The night was warm and long, full of half-visions every time he nodded off on the grass with the dogs by his side. He dozed on the football field as the air cooled, and he became aware of the orange tint of his eyelids soon after.

He woke on the field and the dogs were gone.

When he had climbed the steps out of the stadium and made his way down the three blocks to Heritage Street and to his front porch, he found them beating their tails against the door.

They wanted to go home. They had no other choice.

After searching the house (feeling and finding nothing out of place) his fear was cut in half, and the thirty-minute hot shower washed most of the other half away. The yesterdays were becoming like dreams, their contents vanishing as quickly as he could forget them. He left messages with the front desk and on her cell, telling her only that he missed her.

He sat in the office thinking about a job. Thought about becoming a father. Wasn't that a job? There had been an article on Salary.com he'd seen a few months back. Some crack team of industry experts added up the hours and skills and decided stay-at-home moms were worth $131,000 a year. Stay-at-home moms had to be a nurse, a chef, a teacher, a driver, and a nanny all in one. Maybe all he had to do was wait for Jo to have the baby and - snap, just like that - overnight he'd be worth $131,000.

Right now house-sitting was not a job. But he had an obligation.

She answered the door, left it open and walked back into the kitchen while he followed her in.

'There was no one there,' he said. He knew she wouldn't come back if he told the truth. He might have imagined it, he told himself. 'I never saw anyone in the library.'

She ignored this, as well as his assertions that Jo was in Michigan and he was not playing games. What would be the point? He confessed that, yes, he had felt something, but that could have been the fear working on his imagination.

'Maybe there was a . . . presence in the house, but if so, that only proves what I've been telling you all along.'

'What's that?' she said, drinking a peach yogurt concoction from the plastic bottle.

'That I could really use your help.'

'I think I've been telling you all along I don't have any answers.'

Conrad nodded. 'What are you doing for dinner? I can cook something, unless you have plans.'

She set the yogurt down and burped. 'No, I don't have any plans.'

'You look like you're doing well. Do you need anything for the baby? The, what, the prenatal vitamins?'

'I don't need anything,' she said.

'Everything was fine when you were there, right? I know it got a little personal at the end there, but I thought we had kind of a nice time. Don't give up so easily, Nadia.'

'You think I'm crazy,' she said, flipping through a copy of US Weekly with a pregnant starlet on the cover.

'No, I don't.'

'You will.'

'No, I won't.'

'Sooner or later every guy calls me a psycho.'

'That's why you've never been in love?' She closed the magazine. 'You're not psycho, Nadia. I know psycho women, and you're not one of them.'

'Thanks.'

Jesus, could he say anything that didn't make this girl roll her eyes? 'Look, I won't bother you. I'll be making teriyaki bowls later.'

'Maybe,' she'd said. 'But probably not.'

He tried to stare her down but she would not budge. He went to his ace in the hole.

'Five hundred now,' he said, placing the bills on the table.

'Two thousand after.' She looked at the money. 'After what?'

'After the rest of it. But no more breaks. We don't have much time.'

Nadia was stretched out across the love seat like it was a fainting couch. He hoped the food was a way in, like the money. She'd wolfed down two bowls of sticky rice, with broccoli and thinly sliced filet mignon he'd marinated and grilled for her. He'd eaten one bowl and then gone back to the iced tea. It calmed him to watch her eat.

Feeding her, feeding the baby.

'You really know how to cook,' she said. The dogs huddled around and under her legs. It was what they did when Jo was here and he felt another pang of guilt that this neighbor girl, not their true mistress, was the one keeping them company.

'I'm glad you liked it. There's more if you get hungry again.'

He left the dishes in the kitchen and took a seat on the couch to her right. He was wearing his Sebadoh tee, camo shorts over bare feet. It was too hot for shoes, and he wondered if he looked younger than thirty.

She was wearing holey jeans and a faded green pocket tee shirt, his favorite look on most any girl. Her feet were bare and her toes had been painted iridescent pink, like little pearls. She'd done something home-made to her hair. It was shorter and choppy around the bottom. The bangs were pulled back on the center of her head, leaving the rest of her straight hair hanging squarely around her face. Her pregnancy had moved from a sometime distraction to a sort of Merlin ball that worked the opposite way: he fed by gazing at it, or wishing to gaze into it, to see the future. He looked at the bulge under her shirt and imagined a honeydew melon, a huge scoop of ice cream. Then, like she'd thought of it ten minutes ago and was ready to dump it on him, she told him another story.

'A few times after the time with the dolls, I was attacked in your house.'

' Attacked attacked? How? Where?'

'Upstairs. In the guest room.' She nodded up at the ceiling.

'What happened?'

As before, she looked away as she recounted it.

'I was alone, or just with the children. The Laskis were out at the VFW. I made brownies while they sat in front of the fireplace and played with those block things, those thick Leggos for dummies. I tried. I really did. But every time I got close to them, they would just stare off into outer space. So I pretended to be with them while I was on the phone with Eddie, then I put them to bed at eight like I was supposed to.'

'You knew Eddie back then?'

'I've been friends with Eddie since I can remember.'

'What kind of friends?'

'Eddie's not important now, not in this story.'

'Okay. So you put the kids to bed.'

'I even read them a story.'

'Which one?'

' The Tale of Pigling Bland , I think. One of those little antique books they had that smelled like mold. They didn't fall asleep after I'd read it twice, so finally I just got up and turned off the light and went into the next room to read.'

'What were you reading?'

'Does that matter?'

'I'm a book guy. Just curious.'

' One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich .'

'For school?'

'No.'

'That's a helluva a book for a thirteen-year-old.'

'Not really. The style is very simple. That was part of the point.'

'To capture the voice of the everyman,' he said.

'And to make the story accessible to every man,' she added.

'Jesus. I hadn't even thought of that, and I've read it twice. Did you get that when you were thirteen?'

'I don't know. And, no, it did not give me nightmares, if that's your next question. It wasn't the book.'

'And you're sure no one was here, just the kids?'