Slices (9 page)

And
under her skin, something moved.

He
was sure for a moment that he was dreaming, and he stirred a little
in his half-sleep, and then she looked down and smiled. Put a hand on
her stomach where the movement had been, then cradled her arms around
it, lips moving in unspoken lullaby.

He
did go back to sleep after that, and woke convinced he’d
imagined it. Then he put it out of his mind all together.

But
the awareness was there, restless in his deeper mind, and with it,
the suspicion.

Dreams
went on, as some dreams will. Not long after he’d talked to
Sammy about his wish for children, his dreams brought him another; a
baby sister for his first dream daughter, who was herself a toddler
now, pretty and precocious, hair in impossibly thick dark curls,
already starting to be able to pick out and read a few phrases from
the books he read her — Dr. Suess,
Goodnight
Moon,
others. He had, in dreams, other books already bought and set aside
for them both when they were older —
The
Velveteen Rabbit, The Little Prince,
the Narnia stories. Sometimes, in his waking life, he would wander
through bookstores after work, reluctant to come home, and find
copies of these books, run his fingers over their spines.

As
time wore on and his younger dream daughter had started walking and
his first dream daughter was nearly starting Kindergarten, he dreamed
one night that they were back in the park again, the older girl
skimming stones across the lake and the little one in the stroller, a
little fussy, wanting to be free.

The
sun was low and huge in the sky and the light was coming down at a
warm summer evening angle, their shadows huge and unreal giants along
the ground. People would smile at Nathan as they passed, admire his
beautiful girls, say “Hello” like old friends. It was
just that kind of evening.

His
eldest sat at the lake’s edge now, dangling feet just above the
water, tapping the surface of the lake gently with her shoes.

She
looked up at him, the wide smile she’d had just moments before
suddenly gone. The shadow of a cloud stole the sun from the sky.

“What
is it?” Nathan asked her. “What’s wrong?”

She
hesitated a moment, and then she said: “When is she going to
tell you about the rabbits?”

And
then Nathan jerked awake.

He
was wide-eyed and startled in the cool gloom, tangled in the sheet.
Sammy’s arm was sprawled across him in her sleep, but she was
moving it away —

No.
Something inside the arm was moving away.

Nathan
never got back to sleep that night, after seeing it, after watching
the shadow he was sure was his daughter slide away unseen. He wanted
to call out her name, but remembered, now that he was awake, that
she’d never had one.

He
didn’t understand what she’d said to him. Didn’t
understand why it had startled him badly enough to wake him up. But
the words kept echoing to him the whole next day:

When
is she going to tell you about the rabbits?

It
sounded at first like nonsense, like a phrase his mind had just
pulled randomly into his dream. Like something from an old book he’d
read in college — “Tell me again about the rabbits,
George” — but he didn’t think that was it. That
wasn’t it at all.

The
next day was Saturday, and after spending the morning trying to come
up with some excuse to slip away from Sammy, he realized in the end
he didn’t need one. He just left while she was singing in the
bath, and spent all afternoon and all evening at the library, reading
everything he could find about rabbits; using their computers,
setting search engines into motion.

By
the time he got home that night, he felt like his mind was boiling.
If Sammy noticed he’d been gone, she didn’t say anything.
He didn’t know what to say to her. He watched her silently,
watched the way she moved and held herself, and all his suspicion
boiled down to certainty, all his unnoticed resentment cooling into
anger. It would keep cooling, he knew, to hatred, if he let it.

The
next week, he realized, nearly forgotten by both of them, was their
anniversary. He surprised her by announcing a spontaneous trip, the
two of them, alone, out to a cabin in the woods. Far away from
everything.

Their
evening was nearly perfect, up in the rented cabin. Nathan had to
admit that. They shared a simple cold meal, meats and bread and
cheeses and wine, like when they’d been dating, perfect little
slices with the knife set and bread board she’d bought him
their first Christmas, and it all brought back memories, sweet ones.
They talked, more in a night than they had in months. She laughed
that night, and for a change, she was laughing for him; her eyes were
huge and dark and deep and his candle-lit image danced inside them as
she laughed. All of it nearly perfect. This was what he’d
hoped, wanting to draw her out, to get her to talk to him.

He
hated to ruin it.

He
nearly asked a dozen times, but the moment never seemed right. Then,
as she was laughing at something he’d just told her about
something that had happened at work the week before, it just slipped
unbidden from his lips, exactly the wrong moment:

“When
were you going to tell me about the rabbits?”

In
that second, even up to the last, some remaining part of his rational
mind expected — something else, expected her to look at him
blankly, or quizzically, to ask him what he was talking about.

Instead,
her eyes widened, startled and trapped, and her arms curled
reflexively, protectively, around her waist. No pretending and no
going back.

She
sat down on the cabin’s small bed, arms still around her waist,
looking little and lost. The look on her face was sad and anxious,
and he’d seen that expression just the other night, in his
dream — he’d never noticed, before, how much his dream
daughter looked like his wife, how similar was the set of the mouth
and the eyes.

For
a moment, neither one of them said a word. Silence waited in the room
like a witness. Then she said:

“When
I was five years old, my mother wanted to get away from my father for
a while.” Another pause, and Nathan wasn’t sure she was
going to say anything else. Then, “She took me out her parents.
My grandparents — they lived on a farm. I loved it. I loved all
the animals and I never wanted to leave.”

She
wouldn’t look at him. Her eyes were fixed on some distant
point, firmly in the past. “I still remember catching the
rabbits in their pen and holding them and petting them. I asked
Gramma if it was true rabbits had lots of babies. I wanted to take
some home with me, I guess. That was when she told me. That sometimes
…. ” Her voice trailed off.

He
finished for her. “Sometimes they don’t have babies,”
he said. “If there’s not enough food, or it’s too
crowded — ”

She
nodded. “A momma rabbit can just reabsorb the baby before its
born. If it’s not a good time for babies.” She saw the
look on his face, his slow horrified nod, and said, “It’s
not so strange.” Her voice was a little defensive. “Other
animals do it, too, sometimes. Deer do it.”

“People
aren’t supposed to be able to,” he said, trying to say it
gently.

“I
know,” she said distantly. “I don’t think I did it
right.”

This
is insane, he wanted to say. I can’t believe we’re having
this conversation, he wanted to say. He knew all the things he was
supposed to say, he knew the script he’d need to follow to take
the lead in the conversation, bring it back to the realm of the
reasonable and normal.

All
he managed to say instead was, “I’ve seen them.”

She
finally did look up at him then, meet his eyes for a moment, and then
just went back to staring at nothing, nodding.

“Can
— ” His throat seemed too dry for speech. “Can I
see them now?”

She
turned and looked at him again. A faltering smile played across her
lips. “All right. Turn on the lights.”

He
did, and she stood up, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra. Ran a
hand over her stomach, back and forth, a long practiced stroking
gesture. It brought them drifting up to the surface.

He
stared, fascinated, no longer caring if any of this was real or not.
“Those are our daughters?” he whispered, reaching out and
hand to touch them.

She
looked up at him oddly, the obvious question — how did you know
they were girls? — left unspoken. Still smiling shyly, she
nodded.

They
moved, and his hand followed. Drifting out of sight behind her
breasts, resurfacing near her shoulder, slowly spiralling down her
arm to meet him.

There
you are, he thought, blinking back tears. There are my girls. She
kept you all to herself all this time, but there you are.

They
didn’t talk much more after that. The earlier mood of the
evening was broken, the mood that had felt so much like the beginning
of their relationship. She was quiet again, now, carrying her secret,
but now she would sometimes smile at him instead of to herself. The
expression was knowing, conspiratorial, and he wasn’t sure he
liked it.

He
didn’t come to bed when she asked him to, and if she was hurt
by that, he didn’t show it. He stayed up and sat by the window
in the moonlight, finishing the bottle of wine, staring out at the
trees and at the long winding road back to civilization. When the
wine was gone, he broke out the second bottle he’d brought for
tomorrow’s dinner, and started on that, and soon finished it,
as well.

Long
past midnight, he shook her awake.

“What
is it — ?” she asked.

“I
want to see my girls.”

“All
right — ”

“I
want to hold them. I want to hold my girls.”

Sammy
didn’t understand what he meant. In the dim moonlight from the
window, she just barely saw the knife as it came gleaming down.

Nine
days after, and Nathan was in a hotel room, somewhere halfway between
the cabin and home, but it was the furthest away from home he’d
ever felt. He didn’t have the television on. He’d turned
its glass face to the wall, in fact, after it had shown him his own
face one too many times.

The
police had found the cabin, found Sammy, found her body. He hadn’t
meant to kill her. He honestly hadn’t, or at least, he didn’t
think he had. He was just too uncertain with the knife. He didn’t
know what he was doing, how to set them free.

He
stood now, naked, in the bathroom. He was all over the news,
splattered all over it, and he didn’t know how long he could
stay here, quiet and ignored, even in this place where they took only
cash and asked no questions. His face was everywhere on the news. So
was Sammy’s, so were the pictures the police had taken. He
hadn’t thought they could show pictures like that on television
and he’d barely been able to eat since he saw them.

The
room was filled with steam from the hot bath. The girls were swimming
now, in water as hot as he could keep it.

Something
had broken. He hadn’t just cut into Sammy’s skin, he’d
somehow managed to cut through the flesh and membranes between his
waking and dreaming worlds.

He
dreamed all the time now, dreamed awake as he would walk down a
supermarket aisle in the middle of the night, his girls alongside him
looking soft and candle-lit under the harsh antiseptic fluorescent
glare. His older daughter pushed the younger one in her stroller as
he looked for medicine, bandages, anything, and he could see them and
smile and reach down and pat his daughter’s curls and that was
real, even though he knew his daughters were really in a bath at the
hotel and that was real too. He tried not to think about it any more
— just let it all wash over him and accept the truth of
everything.

But
the truth he couldn’t accept was that he didn’t know what
to do now.

He
didn’t know how to take care of his girls. They were small and
soft and red and wrong, and he didn’t know what to do with them
and he was afraid of everything, of bruising or breaking them, of
each little scratch they might get, each infection. Their breathing
was shallow and erratic; their eyes refused to open. He didn’t
take them to a hospital — he couldn’t. A hospital
wouldn’t know what to do with them either, and worse, a
hospital would take them away from him. He couldn’t stand that.

“We’re
going to die,” the oldest had told him, and he refused to
believe it. She talked to him, told him the truth of it, that they
didn’t know how to survive out in the world, that they couldn’t
live without the safety and shelter their mother had given them, and
he would lie curled on the bed, listening to her, crying, holding on
tight to the dream of her, asking what he could do.

She
finally told him last night.

He
stood now, in the warm bathroom, naked and waiting, his breathing
panicked, his heart calm. They swam in the tub, and they stood right
next to him, even the littlest — she’d taken her first
steps the night before, and now she clung to his leg, as her older
sister looked up at Daddy and held his hand and told him everything
was going to be all right.

He
held tight to the knife.

She
reached up with one finger, and with a fingernail that was both
impossibly long and impossibly sharp for such a little girl, she
traced a line across his abdomen, and showed him where to cut.

David
woke up on the floor, something running sticky down his mouth and
chin, curled up tight on his side, his whole body wrapped
protectively around the cramping fist that help a scrap of paper.

For
a minute, he couldn’t remember where he was or what he'd been
doing. His head felt like it was going to crack open and he wiped at
his mouth with his hand — blood, his nose had been bleeding,
and standing up made him feel like he was going to fall right back
down.