All Over Creation (56 page)

“He never knew about them?”

“Oh, no. I tell him. I tell him about Yumi, how good she is doing.”

“But he never asked to see them?”

She shook her head. “He is too scared of her. He is too much coward.”

“Dad?”

She nodded. “His heart attack make him like that, cut him down like a big tree. Before that he was so proud man! He make big money that year. He was real big shot around town, let me tell you. All puffed up. He got lotsa land and lotsa potatoes. Nine-Dollar Potatoes.”

Momoko smiled, remembering, and so did I. “What happened?” I asked. “What changed him?”

“First she run away from him. Then his heart go against him, too. After that he is always scared. Doc say when the man cannot trust his heart no more, maybe he gonna go a little crazy, too.”

Momoko was stabbing the earth and pulling up clumps, tossing them onto a wilting heap. I watched her, then noticed she wasn't pulling up weeds but the onion plants themselves. My own heart was beating fast.

“Mom?”

Mechanical. Plant after plant.

“Didn't you worry about me?”

Yanking the stems. Head bowed to the task. “She write me lotsa letters. I know she is strong girl.
Shikkari shiteru,
you know? Like me. I send her all my seed money.”

I reached out and put my hand on her wrist. “Those are the plants, Mom. Not weeds. You don't want to be pulling those up.”

She looked up, and her eyes were wide and confused as she searched my face.

“Yumi-chan?”

My heart leaped. It had been weeks since she'd called me by my name.

“Yes, Mom.” I knelt in the dirt in front of her and put my hands on her shoulders, facing her squarely, the way I faced Ocean when I wanted her to understand how seriously she was loved. I pulled her toward me and hugged her. She was as small as my child, and I felt her frail bones next to my breast and her heartbeat against mine. She clung to my waist like a vine, and I wanted to whisper to her,
Gambatte ne!
I watched the moon over the top of her silvery head.

Small explanations, pulled like pebbles from the ebbing tide of her mind. But they helped to fill me up, so I didn't feel so hollow.

“Come on,” I said, releasing her. “Let's get some sleep now.”

She nodded obediently and looked around to collect her tools. “I'll come back for them,” I told her. “I'll pick them up later.”

I helped her to her feet, steadying her as she navigated the crumbling earth. I led her by the hand, out of the onion patch and back up to the house. After she was tucked into bed, I crept up the attic steps. Phoenix was asleep, the blankets and bedclothes all tangled around his skinny limbs. I wanted to go and straighten them out and smooth down his covers, but instead I just stood in the doorway and listened to him breathe.

When Charmey was hungry, Cass felt the pangs. When the baby kicked and fluttered, burped and hiccupped, these mundane signs of life made Cass stop what she was doing and catch her breath. Charmey sensed the pull, and she shared the baby's gestation, drawing Cass's hand to her abdomen and pressing it against the swell until Cass could tell the difference between a punch and a roll, a poke in the cervix and a kick in the ribs. Together they played Name That Bump, gently pressing Charmey's belly to identify the baby's body parts—the rebounding head, the soft bottom, the bundle of extremities opposite the smooth arc of the spine. Charmey was not shy with her body. She shared her most intimate indications: the thin leak of colostrum from her breasts and all her various discharges. Cass spent hours rubbing oil into the girl's tight, itching skin while Charmey described the details of this miracle of birth.

“Oh!
C'est terrible,
these . . . how do you say? These diarrheas,
les hemorrhoids!
”

They were like mother and daughter, Cass thought as she calculated their ages. It was not a stretch. Charmey was nineteen, the age Cass had been when she miscarried her first child. That child would be Charmey's age now. The thought excited her, and she felt fiercely maternal as she coached Charmey with her breathing exercises, puffing along, or peeked into her room at night to watch the girl sleep.

Then she realized that if she were Charmey's mother, she was about to be a grandmother. This was not so exciting, and she shook off thoughts like these. They confused her, made her angry, as though the whole middle section of her life—the part where she was supposed to grow to adulthood, bear children, be a young mother, and watch her children grow—had simply been elided. Slurred over. She felt, at once, far too old and impossibly young, and there was a great gap in the middle, like a section of her torso had gone missing. Sometimes in dreams she lived in these gaps, where small false starts came to naught, and sparks of life shriveled or spiraled up like burning ash only to turn to powder on her fingertips when she tried to catch them in the air.

Will would shake her awake, woken himself by her twitches and groans.

“Cass,” he said, his hand firm on her arm. “Cass.”

It was the only time she still felt close to him, in these half-dream states in the middle of the night. He had bad dreams, too, and over the years she had woken him often enough, sweating and shaking, to feel grateful when he reciprocated.

The two of us! she'd think, watching him crawl back into consciousness and shiver off the nightmare.

The two of us. Will had first used the phrase one night before they were married. How it had thrilled her seventeen-year-old heart! It was a grim little phrase, and hardly as grand as other declarations he might have made, but the sense of bonding it conveyed made Cass feel safe for the first time in her life. They were survivors. They belonged together. Running beneath the words was a feeling of awe at the luck of their union. It meant far more than “I love you.”

Daily living had eroded much of the awe, but the phrase had endured. It continued to comfort her even while its meaning changed, growing tougher with every year as it mocked their childless number.

When Will had decided to go forward with the lawsuit, Cass felt a huge rift splitting the two of them apart. And maybe the rift had started earlier, since the arrival of the Seeds, or since Yummy had come back to Liberty Falls—Cass couldn't quite locate the onset, but she had felt herself drifting away from Will.

“I'm not testifying against them,” Cass told him. “I don't want any part of this.”

Will stuck to his guns, even though she could sense that he was not convinced by Elliot's fast talking. “It's the principle of the thing,” he insisted. “They can't just go around violating other people's rights.”

“People's rights? What about Frankie's? You don't think he has a right to be here when his baby's born?”

“Not to mention the fact of them bringing that pornography into the town.”

She exploded at that one. “Oh, like no one in Liberty Falls ever bought a dirty magazine at the gas station! That's just hypocritical, Will, and you know it. You never even looked at the Web site.”

“I don't need to.” Will shook his head. “I just don't approve of them, is all.”

Conversations always ended something like this, and Will spent a lot of time out in the fields or in his office. He stayed clear of the spare room. Meanwhile, down at the courthouse, the Tri-County Interfaith League of Family Values was holding a daily vigil, picketing outside with signs that read TERMINATE THE DEMON SEED! and PORNOGRAPHY IS TERRORISM OF THE SOUL! and RID US NOW OF THE SEEDS OF TEMPTATION!

Cass had to pass by this gauntlet on her way to the jail next door, where the Seeds were being held. People recognized her as Will's wife and cheered whenever she passed by. She knew some of the local folks, but others were strangers to her, clearly from out of town. She wondered why they were there and where they had come from. They had crazy petitions for passersby to sign, demanding that the Seeds be brought to trial for felony offenses including terrorism and even treason. Of course they all assumed that Cass was supporting her husband and their cause. What they didn't know was that she was harboring a demon seed in her spare room and conveying updates to another one in lockup.

“Charmey's fine, Frank,” she told the boy. “The doctor just wants her to stay lying down. That's why she can't come to see you.”

He didn't look so fine. He had a fresh cut on his chin, and a bruise healing on his cheekbone. He beat on the bars with his fist. The guard glanced up, but Cass shook her head, and he went back to his magazine. It was the local jail, and the guard was the son of someone she knew.

“I can't believe this shit!” Frankie said. “That's my fucking kid getting born. I gotta be there!” He bowed his head and ran his hands over his scalp and stayed like that for a while. Outside, the protesters had started to chant something, but she couldn't really hear what they were saying.

“Listen,” Frankie said, raising his head. “Tell Charmey to hang in there, okay? Tell her to stay chill and keep on breathing like we practiced. Tell her . . . I don't know what the fuck to tell her.”

“What happened to your face?”

He ducked his head again. “I fell.” Then he looked up quickly. “Hey, don't tell her that, all right? Tell her everything's cool. Tell her I love her and I didn't hit back.”

Cass delivered the message, but as the days wore on, the girl was starting to fret. She drew her lips together in a little pout of worry.
“Ce n'est pas possible,
do you think? That the baby will arrive before they are liberated?”

Given the severity of her preterm labor symptoms and the stubbornness of the judge, Cass thought it quite possible. She tried to encourage Charmey to prepare herself for a hospital birth, but Charmey just shook her head—Frankie and Lilith would be liberated, and they would give birth in the Spudnik as planned. So Cass contacted the hospital behind the girl's back and made arrangements for a delivery room. She packed a suitcase, but she assembled a collection of clean towels, antiseptics, shower curtains, and a dishpan, just in case Charmey was right.

“He will be here,” the girl said.

 

 

Groans in the night. Yelps of pain. Unquiet repose. Common sounds in the Quinn household, which was why, one night in early August when Cass woke to the sound of whimpers coming out of the dark, she rolled over to rouse her husband from his dream only to find him wide awake and staring at her. They both sat up in bed. The noises were coming from the spare room.

They worked quickly, snapping back into orbit with an efficiency you learn on a farm. Will called the hospital and the sheriff's office while Cass sat with Charmey timing her contractions, which were coming fast and strong. Charmey was moaning and calling out Frankie's name as Will carried her out to the Suburban. He placed her in the backseat, and Cass climbed in after, with the pillows and blankets and the suitcase she'd packed in advance. Will gunned the engine.

“Ready?”

Cass nodded, and they took off. The potato fields were lush and gleaming on either side of the dirt road. A streak of moonlight rippled along the massy surface of the leaves, moving along with the car. Charmey let out a long howl that ended in a sob. “Frankie . . .
please!
”

Cass glanced up at the back of Will's neck as she drew the girl toward her, cradling her head and wiping the damp hair from her brow.

“Oh . . .
je crève!
” Charmey moaned, arching her back and twisting as the contraction wracked her. “I'm dying!”

Cass held her down, pressing her shoulders. “Charmey, listen to me! You're not dying. You're having the baby.”

“Please . . .” Charmey's eyes were dark, and tears glistened on her lashes.

“Just breathe. Come on. You know how to do it.” Cass started panting the short rhythmic breaths. Ahead she could see the red and blue lights from the sheriff's SUV, waiting for them at the entrance to the highway. Will honked and flashed his headlights, and the SUV pulled out in front of them. Charmey started to moan again as the two vehicles spiraled up the tight ramp.

The sheriff's siren wailed as they merged onto the highway.

“Frankie!” Charmey howled, and Will floored it.

 

 

Cass knew hospitals, and her associations had nothing to do with the joyful emergence of a new life. Sweat and antiseptics. Anesthetized fears. Exactly what the girl wanted to avoid. The obstetrician arrived. He palpated Charmey's hard belly and checked her dilation. “Prep her,” he barked to the nurse. “Don't let her push.” He looked at Charmey's white face. “Did you hear that”—he glanced down at her chart—“Charlene? Hang in there, but no pushing.” Then he turned to Cass. “Follow me.”