Jesus, not the baby.
In the spring, a year and a half ago, he had almost gone away with another woman. She had been lovely and good for him, and she had sought him out at a time when his life seemed nothing more than work and responsibility to Claire and Sarah. It was an old story, and he should have known better. Because she was married and she had said that she wanted to leave her husband to be with him, but once she had moved out, she said she wasn’t ready to go away with him just yet, she needed time to be by herself and think, which meant that everything was finished. But he had already gone to Claire and told her he wanted out, and then he had discovered the fool that he had been.
This baby was their way of forcing themselves to stay together. He had been there to see this child delivered. He had stood next to Claire in her hospital bed through four hours of labor, his hand in hers while she took a deep breath and held it during each contraction, letting it out slowly, breathing deeply again. Too thick, her water sac would not break. The doctor had to rupture it, flooding the bed. The doctor froze each side of her distended cervix with a foot-long needle. The nurses wheeled her off to the delivery room while he and the doctor went through a swinging door to a row of lockers and put on white caps and gowns and face masks and shoe coverings, and then he was in the bright, sharply antiseptic-smelling delivery room where he sat on a stool by her head, watching a mirror that was angled between her legs. His breath felt warm and moist beneath his face mask, faintly suffocating. The nurses were arranging trays of instruments. The doctor was joking about the big surprise the baby was going to have when it discovered there was another world. He himself was laughing excitedly. The doctor took a pair of scissors and snipped a long slit down from the vaginal exit, blood pooling out, and then in the mirror he and Claire could see the baby’s hairy brown-pink head, and Claire said, “Come on, baby, come on,” proud, gasping, and it came, kept coming with each contraction, the doctor easing out one shoulder, then the other, the suspense of what it would be and whether it would be all right, a nurse saying “Come on, fella,” himself saying “No, it could be a girl,” and then in one long easy slide it was out into the doctor’s arms, squirming to breathe with a small thin grating wail, a boy, well-formed, bloody, covered with thick curds of mucus that looked like brown porridge, the thick rubbery blue-black-veined umbilical cord leading back into Claire as she had another contraction and the smooth slick red sac of afterbirth squeezed out into the doctor’s arms as well.
And now Ethan was dead in his mother’s arms. Because of Kess. He couldn’t adjust to it, couldn’t accept it. Each time he turned from the window and saw Claire hugging the child, her long black hair dangling down touching the baby’s face, the shock of what had happened spread a new wave of numbness through his body that left him dazed and shaken.
“
Like breeds like,” Kess said.
“To
get one you need to get them all, cut off the evil at its source, eradicate all the offshoots. You should feel privileged. I’ve never shown these files to any outsider before. They contain the names of more than one hundred and fifty thousand communist sympathizers, complete with microfilmed dossiers. Some of them are
only your garden-variety
camp followers, but most are genuine agitators, and a
lot
of them are in high places. If I give the order, in less than three hours
I
can have
a
rifle trained on
every
one of them. And after them their families.”
No, he told himself and shook his head. No, not the baby. He tried to think about something else, about having some coffee to steady himself, and that was a mistake. Because when he had seen the cat slump into her bowl of milk, he had just been about to pour milk into his first morning coffee. If he had not been busy with the cat, he would have sipped the milk in the coffee and died the same as Ethan. It had been a long time coming to him, so distracted by Ethan’s death that only now was he fully realizing how very close he himself had been to dying. It came in a cold rush up from his stomach. The coldest he had ever felt it. Fear. He could have been dead right now, slumped across the table, sphincter and bladder relaxing, waste and urine emptying. They could have been burying him two days from now, lying softly, sealed in his coffin. Even more than two days: If Claire and Sarah had drunk the milk too and nobody had come around to the house wondering where they were, they could all have started to rot in here. The cold swirled around his heart and set it speeding.
Sarah. From the front hall he heard her coming quickly down the stairs, her footsteps fast and even and muffled on the carpeting. He went to the archway, saw her trip down the last few steps and scramble to get past him into the living room.
“Where were you, sweetheart?” he asked and barred her way.
“In the bathroom.” She was staring anxiously past him, trying to get through.
“What’s that in your hand?”
“Aspirins.”
“Why?”
“For Ethan.”
She looked so desperately sure the aspirin would bring Ethan back if only she got to him in time that he had to close his eyes to stop the pressure in them.
“No, sweetheart,” he told her. His throat was constricting him so much that he could hardly talk.
“But maybe he isn’t really dead. Maybe these will help.”
“No, sweetheart,” he said, his voice thick, cracking.
“For Mommy then.”
It was all too much. He couldn’t stand it any longer. “Jesus, why don’t you listen to me? I told you
no
.”
3
The ambulance was braking to a stop in the driveway. Throwing open the front door, he called out to the driver, who was rushing across the brightly sunlit front lawn toward him. “You didn’t use the siren.”
“Didn’t need it. Traffic wasn’t bad at all.” The driver was hurrying across the front porch past him into the dark hall.
“But you took so long.”
“Ten minutes. Coming across town, that’s fast.”
The driver was young—long hair, mustache, sideburns. The doctor hurrying inside behind him looked even younger, short blond hair parted perfectly. My God, he thought, surprised. I need somebody older. Why didn’t the hospital send somebody older?
But they were already going through the living room to the kitchen while he tried to explain, and then they halted at the sight of her. The skin of her face was drawn even more severely, jaw and cheekbones standing out. Her eyes were frightening, glaring wide at them past the child held rigidly to her breast. When the doctor made a move toward her, she instantly came alert, and in the end it took all three of them to get the baby away from her. He felt sick fighting her. The doctor went through the motions of listening for a heartbeat with his stethoscope, of checking for eye movement with a penlight, but the baby was dead all right. “Take it where she can’t see it,” the doctor said. But when the driver went to carry the baby out to the ambulance, Claire screamed and clawed to grab him back.
“Hold your wife,” the doctor told him, swabbing her arm with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol.
His nostrils flared from the bitter smell of the alcohol. He hated struggling with her, gripping her arms so tightly he could feel her bones beneath her flesh. “Claire,” was all he could say. “Please, Claire.” He thought about slapping her to jolt her quiet, but he knew he couldn’t do it.
Then the doctor was jabbing her upper arm with a hypodermic, and she swung so powerfully to get away that it seemed the needle would snap off in her or rip her arm, but already the doctor had the needle cleanly out, and they were forcing her across the living room and up the stairs to the bedroom where she clung to the doorknob, repeating, “My baby. I want my baby,” while they pried her fingers free and dragged her to the bed, holding her down. She thrashed, moaning, “I want my baby,” slowly lost strength, rolled onto her side and started weeping, hands over her face, knees drawn up, and little by little they released her.
“No, don’t fight it,” the doctor told her. “Relax. Make yourself calm. Try not to think.” He went over and closed the bedroom drapes, pale light filtering through, everything mostly in shadow.
The bed had not yet been made. Claire lay on rumpled sheets, weeping steadily, rhythmically, disrupting the pattern to shudder and breathe, beginning to weep again. She wore mostly washed-out jeans around the house, but today she had put on an orange pleated skirt, and now it was hitched up, showing one buttock covered by her blue silk underwear. The elastic of the underwear was loose, itself hitched up above a fold of white-skinned hip. Between her legs a few black kinks of pubic hair stuck out from under the elastic. He glanced at the doctor, and feeling modest for her, he tugged down the skirt. She thrashed to get away from the touch of his hand.
“I said, don’t fight it. Give in, let it put you to sleep,” the doctor ordered, bending close to her. His face was flushed from exertion, dark against his blond hair. He studied her, watching her weep and shudder and breathe. Slowly he straightened.
“It’s working now. In a minute she’ll be under.” The doctor ran a hand through his hair, and his part was destroyed. “How about you?”
“I don’t know.” He wanted to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. “All right, I guess. Yes. I’m all right.”
“Sure you are.” The doctor reached into his satchel and came out with a clear plastic vial of pills. “Take these two with a full glass of water. These other two are for when you go to bed.” The pills were long and yellow. “Break one in half and give it to your little girl. Remember. A full glass of water. Especially the little girl.”
Reminded of Sarah, he suddenly wondered where she had gone this time. She had twice been in the way downstairs, and then she had disappeared.
“Wait,” he said. “These things aren’t going to put me to sleep, are they?”
The doctor looked sideways at him. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I just don’t want to be put to sleep.”
“They’re only to relax you. That’s the truth, no need to look like that. They might make you dizzy, so don’t try to drive, and don’t drink any alcohol with them. You’ll wind up on the floor.”
Claire was weeping slowly now, softly, almost asleep.
“I’ll stay with her until I’m certain she’ll be quiet,” the doctor told him. “Better go and take the pills.”
He looked down at her, lingered uncertainly, then did what he was told.
4
The bathroom was directly across the hall. Thinking of the poison in the milk, he stared uneasily at the glass of water in his hand. The water was clouded gray as it always was after several days of heavy rain. Still he could not stop thinking of poison. The pills maybe. But he knew that was crazy. Even if Kess
had
planned a follow-up, he would have picked another kind of man to deliver those pills, somebody older, who looked more like an experienced doctor; and Kess’s man would have said a name, would have mentioned something about the hospital to establish his credentials. But this man had not said anything; he had just gone right to work.
The water had a gritty earthen taste that obscured any taste the pills might have had. They wedged down his throat in two choking lumps, He left the tap running, cupped cold water in his hands and splashed his face repeatedly.
You knew what kind of man Kess was. You knew even before you met him. What the hell was going on in your head?
The year before, in December, three of Kess’s lieutenants had been charged with attempted assassination. That was in Hartford, Connecticut—their target a third-term U.S. senator who wanted to establish trade relations with Cuba. They had attached a fire bomb under the stage in a hall where he was to give a much publicized speech, and it had failed to kill him only because midway through his talk he had left the stage to speak directly with his audience. Fragments from the stage had badly lacerated eight persons in the front row. The lieutenants themselves turned out to be from three Connecticut branches of the Kess organization, respected in their communities: a policeman, a fireman, a high-school botany teacher.
One day later, six mortar rounds had hit an upper New York farmhouse and barn where a Black youth camp was being set up for the holidays. Fifteen minutes of sniping had killed two girls and a boy; two other boys were burned by fires from the mortar explosions, and most of the others were almost torn apart by shrapnel. At nightfall, police raided an isolated hunting lodge owned and used as a training ground by another of Kess’s lieutenants; they arrested five men and seized eight machine guns, three grenade launchers, two mortar launchers, one antitank missile launcher, a variety of handguns, shotguns, and hunting rifles, and ten thousand assorted rounds of ammunition.
Both times Kess had denied any knowledge of what his subordinates were up to. He seemed genuinely shocked and annoyed by it all. But a week later on Christmas Day, police had raided his home in Providence, Rhode Island, and seized twelve fully automatic submachine guns plus two cases of grenades, charging him with violations of the National Firearms Act. They had also charged him with organizing a conspiracy to attack and loot an Illinois National Guard armory.
Now in September, the water dripping off his face into the sink, trickling down the drain, he thought of how he had watched the news of Kess’s arrest, how he had been curious to see what the man looked like, but there had been no pictures. He thought of how he had worked so hard, taken so much time to set up the meeting with Kess—and then he suddenly thought of Ethan again and fought to concentrate on the cool feel of the water drying on his skin. He toweled his face as roughly as he could. Anything to keep from thinking. Get busy, he told himself. Do something.
Like what?
Like find Sarah. Find out how she is.
He found her the first place he looked—down at the end of the hall in her room. She was sitting propped up against the headboard of her bed, pretending to be occupied. The book in her hands was upside down.