Christopher Ransom - The Birthing House

He was aware that something larger than his own fear was at work here, and that he was powerless to stop himself, forced to watch the rest happen as if to someone else.

Under the beam a dirty hand appeared and patted the soft fabric grayed with the indifferent passage of time. The beam swept from one end to the other until it found an opening and the dirty hand peeled back the layers with the grace of a florist stripping petals from a dried rose. With nothing left to stop its progress, the beam shone deeper, revealing the face of a doll burnished and painted with all the color and detail of a proud toy-maker whose principal calling is to animate what can never be. All the maker's love was evident in the way the thin strands of hair had been combed and made glossy over the tiny painted brows and suggestion of a nose. The beam stilled over this creation and for a lingering moment the illusion achieved its goal; its beholder regarded the doll with some reluctant swell of his heart and returned the smile. And then his heart broke. The only hope for a lasting art vanished as all life's likeness fell away, revealing black holes where once were eyes, tiny blackened nubs of teeth, and the decaying, bird-like ribs, spine and pelvis of a newborn.

32

If it was a sin to keep a woman not his wife in the marriage bed, then it was also a sin to leave the child in that dark forgotten corner of the basement.

As he climbed the stairs with the bundle in his arms, that which weighed no more than the balsa model airplanes he and Dad had labored over on those endless summer nights of which you can never grasp the fleeting nature until you have grown sad beyond your years, he thought of death. Not only how it seemed to prefer the young and unprotected, but how you can see it every day all around you and never understand it until you are holding it in your arms.

How death was final, yes. But also how something lived on, trying to communicate with the living. How, too, it was all the sickening secrets revealing themselves, finding depths you did not know you possessed, giving birth to some new you both loathed and welcomed.

Someone wanted him to know her secret. In delivering hers, she had forced his own to the surface. He had been chosen to share it because she knew, somehow, that her secret was safe with him. That he would understand. That she might rouse his empathy to an act of faith.

He placed the bundle the only respectful place he knew, a place it would be safe until the rest of it had played out. Setting the swaddling on the natural fiber pad inside the crib, he pulled the blanket over the older, rotted cloth. He would return when she had made clear the rest of her wishes.

He left the safari lamp on, fearing he would not again be able to make the approach in the dark, and shut the door.

He had to deal with Nadia first. Something here was testing them. Something had brought them together, and he would need her to go all the way with him. Their survival required a different confession.

He went to her and rested his tired body next to hers on the bed.

'Did you see anything?' she said, breaking the ringing silence in his ears.

He nodded.

'Was someone here?'

'Someone was here,' he said, closing his eyes. 'We don't have much time.'

'Conrad. I want to go home.'

'I know.'

'Can we go now? Why can't we go now?'

'Listen,' he said, inching close to her on the bed, taking one of her dry hands in his. 'I have never told anyone what I am about to tell you. I think you need to see how we got here. Me to this house. You in this room, with me.'

If she could see his face, she would not have been able to stay, the pain be damned. He was grinning like a child fascinated by some enormous and just-grasped scheme: the sound of his mother's car arriving in the driveway at midnight, the orbit of the planets, conception at the cellular level.

'What happened?'

He leaned over and kissed the exposed white space just below the wound.

'Conrad?'

'Her name was Holly. You remind me of her. Sometimes, when you are with me, it's like she never went away, Nadia. And that's strange, I guess, but it's beautiful, too.'

His heart filled with something beyond blood as he remembered her face, her eyes full of hope and trust.

'No one knows what we did, Holly and me. No one knows anything about it.'

Nadia's grip tightened around his fingers. 'Did you hurt her?'

'What we did was, we made a baby.'

HOLLY

That night in the house we had entered as children and left as something else; we exchanged much more than cells and fluids and the physical particles that transmit. We created a third entity that depended on the two of us, a spirit that was made of the part of myself I had willingly abandoned inside her, and she in me. Having given this, we were never whole again, together or apart. This is something else I say without the benefit of sarcasm. There are days when I wish we had died there before it ended, but end it did.

Eventually we dressed, packed up the candles, remade the bed and cleaned our dinner plates. We folded our single blue sheet and took it with us out the door, locking everything up the way we had found it. The sheet was Holly's idea, after I suggested we wash it.

'No,' she said with territorial authority. 'They can't have this one. This one we keep.'

Later we would refer to it as 'our night' or 'the night' but we never discussed what had passed between us.

We both knew she was pregnant.

We never talked about what we had wished for. The words, the promises, the vows. They were there. But we could not square them with the rest of our seventeen-year-old lives. The secret we carried was about to blow up and we had no way of knowing how much destruction it would leave behind. We wanted to prepare, I think, but we didn't know how or where to begin.

Like everything else that had been our secret - the long walks at night, the shoplifting, the drugs, the sleepovers - we wanted the conception of our child to remain ours and ours alone. To tell our parents, our friends, would somehow diminish it.

Of course we were terrified.

Looking back, I still believe that if some twist of fate had dropped a million dollars in our laps, killed off our parents or in some other catastrophic way destroyed the rest of the world for us, we would have made it. We would have emerged stunned but ultimately glad, free to live out the secret life we had made together.

How did it finally end?

I thought that would be the hard part. But now that the rest has been told I find that everything that came before was the pain. Seeing myself with her has always been the hard part. The end is easy. The end, unlike Holly and the five years I knew her and loved her, is not alive. The end is easy because it has no life, no soul. It is easy to tell because it is death.

When Holly's mother found out her daughter was pregnant and that we wanted to have the baby and make a go of the life we had imagined together, she was almost freakishly supportive. But there was the other half. Holly begged her mother not to, but eventually Mrs Bauerman had to tell Mr Bauerman.

Mr Bauerman had more money and therefore more power, and he did not take it well. He sent Holly away.

To a private school? A town? Another country?

I searched for two years. When I would not stay away from her father's house, he had me arrested. I wrote letters, talked with lawyers and worked on Mrs Bauerman until I was a weeping, vengeful menace that even she had to turn her back on. The family moved to be with her, or so her friends told me.

Eventually my mother wore me down. She said she would support me as long as it took, but I had to let go.

The reason I quit was pretty simple, actually.