The Marriage of Sticks (16 page)

But the moment we passed, her head jerked toward me. She raised a hand and shook a scolding finger. Shocked, I turned away. The rain swirled silvery down the window. The street shone glossy black. Cars hissed by. Umbrellas were everywhere. I wanted to look at her again but was afraid. The rest of the ride uptown I tried to keep my eyes closed. I listened to the rain and the bumpity-bump of the tires hitting ruts in the road. I thought of the baby. I thought of Hugh.

Arriving at Frances’s, I paid the driver and ran across the courtyard into her section of the building. The rain soaked the paper bag full of food and I felt it coming apart in my hands. I stopped on a landing and took the things out. Cradling them in my arms, I started up the stairs. They weren’t heavy, but in a moment they were much too heavy. Suddenly I was dizzy and too hot to go on. I was barely able to lower myself to a step without keeling over. I put the food down and put my head in my hands. Was this what pregnancy was going to be like? Nine months of feeling great and then abruptly feeling like you were going to keel over?

Normally the building was as loud as a train station. Kids ran shouting up and down the stairs, dogs barked, radios and TVs blasted. Today it was virtually silent but for the rain pattering outside. I sat trying to will the dizziness away so I could go up and tell Frances my joyous news.

At the same time, it was enjoyable sitting there alone on that cold step, listening to the rain outside plink on metal, splat on stone, gurgle urgently down into the drains. I had never realized before what a variety of rain sounds there were. Rain had always been rain—something to avoid or watch dreamily through a window. It made the familiar world wet and shiny and different awhile and then you forgot about it till the next time. But alone now surrounded only by rain noises, I was able to recognize more and more distinctions: rain on wood, sliding down glass, rain on rain. Yes, there was even a sound to that, but a hidden one, altogether secret.

I lifted my head and said aloud, “That’s not right. No one can hear those things.” But I was already hearing other things too: conversations, channels changing on a television, someone peeing hard into a toilet. What’s more, I knew
exactly
what each of the sounds was. Feet crossing a floor, a cat purring, a person licking their dry lips in sleep, toenails being clipped.

I looked around to check if any doors were open nearby. No. Only the rain outside and now this relentless cascade of sounds falling over me. From behind those closed doors, from apartments twenty or thirty feet away. Noises I shouldn’t have heard. Impossible from where I was sitting.

Back in some bedroom behind closed doors where two kids were supposed to be taking a nap, one little boy was whispering to his brother, both of them under the blanket on his bed. Somewhere else in the building a woman sang quietly along with the radio in her kitchen as she washed dishes. It was the Dixie Cups song “The Chapel of Love.” I heard the rush of aerated water in the sink, the squeak of the sponge on glass, her quiet melancholic voice.

“I fuck you good. You know I fuck you good.”

“Fuck me
hard.
”

I could hear their grunting breath, the smack of kisses, hands sliding over skin. I could hear everything. But where
were
these people? How was this possible?

I stood up. I didn’t want to hear. But none of it would stop. Cars ssh’d and honked outside on the street, a heating pipe clanked in the basement, pigeons chuckled on the windowsill, food fried, people argued, an old woman prayed. “Oh God, you know how scared I am, but you not helping me through this.” All the sounds of a rainy day in Manhattan were too near and I couldn’t stop them. I covered my ears and shook my head from side to side like a wet dog. For a moment the sounds of the world stopped. Silence again. Beautiful, empty silence returned.

But then
it
came and it was the biggest sound of all. My heart. The dull, huge boom of my beating heart filled the air and space of the world around me. I could only stand and listen, terrified. What was worse was the irregularity. Boom boom boom, then nothing for seconds. It started again, only to go and stop and go with no evenness, no rhythm or structure. It beat when it felt like it. Then it stopped. It was moody. It did what it liked. But it was my heart and it was supposed to be the steadiest machine of all.

I knew it was me because I had had arrhythmia all my life. A few years before it had grown so serious that I spent a night in the hospital being rigorously tested and monitored by a twenty-four-hour EKG.

The loudest noise I ever heard pulsed and stopped and pulsed again but with no pattern, no safe recognizable rhythm. Maybe it would beat another time. Maybe not.

“Miranda? Are you all right?”

A moment passed before my mind focused on her voice and face. Frances stood several steps above me. She wore a red robe and matching slippers, which made her intensely white skin glow in the dark of the stairwell.

“What’s the matter, dear?”

Her voice brought things back. I tried to speak but couldn’t. She slowly worked her way down. When she got to me she put a hand on my elbow. “I was sitting by the window and saw you come in. I got worried when you didn’t ring.”

She helped me up the rest of the stairs. Without that help, I don’t know how I would have made it.

“It’s all my fault.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Frances. Unless you made all these things happen to me.” I tried to sound facetious, but the words came out sounding self-pitying.

“You don’t understand; it’s more complicated than that.” She began walking around the room.

I had just finished telling her everything. From the day I saw the ghost of James Stillman on the street, right up to the impossible sounds I had heard out in the hall. Once I’d started, the whole story leaped out like an animal that had been trapped in a cage too long. Simply recounting all of the strange events made me feel better.

Frances was silent throughout and spoke only after a long pause. “I knew you were pregnant the day we went to Crane’s View. I don’t know if you remember, but when we got to my house I stood on the porch and asked to be alone while you two went in.”

“I remember that. Hugh mentioned it.”

“I didn’t want you to see my face because I might have given it away. That’s when I knew.”

“How, Frances? Are you psychic?”

She shook her head. “No, but when I was a young woman in Romania I met people. Shumda introduced me and they taught me some things. That was the greatest mistake of my life: they were willing to teach me much more but I wasn’t interested. Incredible. Incredibly stupid.

“Shumda was Romanian. He had been raised in the country, and to country people, real magic is no big deal. Things like that
shouldn’t
be a big deal. They are to us because we’re so sophisticated and skeptical that we’re above all that primitive hocus-pocus.

“But there
is
another world, Miranda. Most of us refuse to accept that because it scares us. It threatens to take away our control. But that won’t make it go away. Let me read you something.” She walked to a table and picked up one of the many notebooks she kept around the apartment. She called them daybooks and filled them with her thoughts and quotes from things she had read and liked. She leafed through this book. “Here, listen to this: ‘Maybe what comes from elsewhere will make me do crazy things; maybe that invisible world is demonic and should be excluded. What I can’t see, I can’t know; what I don’t know, I fear; what I fear, I hate; what I hate, I want destroyed.’ ”

“But Frances, I do believe in those things. I always have. I’ve just never had any contact with them until now. Did you really know I was pregnant that day? How?”

“Your smell. And the color of your fingertips.”

“What does a pregnant woman smell like?”

“Like hope.”

I smiled and felt my spirit lift. “It’s possible to smell hope?”

She nodded. “When you know how.”

“And what about the fingertips?”

“Look at them.”

I held up my left hand but saw nothing at first. Then I gasped. The tips of my fingers were changing colors—the colors of clouds on the sky. As if a strong wind was pushing fleecy clouds across the sky, clouds that were white, purple, orange-red. They moved over my fingertips in a passing rush. The colors of storms, sunsets, early morning. All of them together flying across my fingertips.

I guess I made some other noise because the moment I did, the colors disappeared and my fingers returned to their proper color. I kept staring at my hand. Eventually I looked at Frances again but with a whole new perspective.

“
That’s
what I saw when we were in Crane’s View. You can’t because you haven’t been trained. I did it to you now so you could see for yourself.”

“All women have that? On their fingers? All of them when they’re pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“And you learned how to do that in Romania?”

“Among other things.”

“What else, Frances? What else do you know?”

She sighed loudly. “Not enough. I was too young to appreciate what they were offering. Knowledge pursued me, but I was faster. When you’re young you’re only interested in parlor tricks, Miranda, things that can impress others or get you in the door.

“But these people, and they were from all walks of life, were willing to teach me incredible things because I was with Shumda. If only I’d had the patience and dedication! I met a Yezidje priest, people in the Sarmoun Brotherhood.…You can’t imagine who I knew when I was there. But none of it penetrated. The young are like rubber—everything bounces off them.

“Shumda called me
bimba viziata,
his spoiled child, and I was.” She sighed again and rubbed her hands up and down her sides. “You talk to shadows too much when you get old. Old memories, old regrets. I could have learned so much when I was a young woman, but I didn’t and that was a great mistake. But I do know some things. I knew you were pregnant. I know that what you’re going through now is a result of that pregnancy.”

“And James’s ghost? Or the noises I heard outside? The little boy in our house?”

“They’re part of it. Believe me, it’s all necessary for you now. Something enormous is about to come into your life and all of these things are part of the overture.” She walked over, put her hands on my tense shoulders, and kissed the top of my head. It was the first time Frances had kissed me.

When I got back to Crane’s View, the rain was having an intermission and the sky was full of black fat thunderclouds. After getting out of the train I stood on the platform and stared at that turbulent sky, remembering my fingertips and what had happened in Frances’s apartment earlier. The day had exhausted me, but I decided to walk the mile to our house. I wanted the exercise. The air smelled delicious and ripe as it always does in the country after rain.

As I walked and breathed deeply of the thick air, I kept thinking about what she had told me. More than anything else, “there is another world” kept chiming in my head like a clock striking twelve. Like it or not, that world had become part of mine. I would have to accept it and go wherever it led me. But how would it affect my relationship with Hugh? And our child?

Frances told me about a dull man she knew who suddenly, in middle age, was able to see what people would look like when they were old. For the rest of his life he had to live with that…talent? Curse? What would you call it?

Another man suddenly developed a frighteningly accurate ability to read palms. That lucky fellow went mad because it reached a point where he could see nothing else but people’s palms and the certain fates that awaited them.

“Need a ride? You look tired.”

I looked up and saw Chief McCabe leaning on the roof of his car in front of the bakery. He held a French cruller in one hand and a small carton of milk in the other.

“No, thank you. I just got off the train and this walk is bringing me back to life. But I have a question.”

He grinned and nodded. “You don’t want a ride but you got a question. Okay. Shoot.”

“Have you ever known anyone with special powers? People who could tell the future or read palms, that sort of thing?”

He didn’t hesitate. “My grandmother. Spookiest person I ever knew. Always knew when you were lying. The family legend. No one of us ever lied to her because she always
knew.
Worst part was, if you did lie, she hit you. Lie—BANG! When I was a kid she must’ve got me a thousand times! Shows how smart I was, huh? Why do you ask?”

I didn’t even know McCabe, but for a moment I wanted to tell him everything. Maybe after what had happened that day, I just needed a friend.

“Oh, yeah,” he went on, “and Frances Hatch too. She gets tuned into weird channels too sometimes.” His car radio squawked and he bent in to listen. I couldn’t make out what it said.

“Gotta go. Someone’s screaming up on Skidmore Street.” He popped the rest of the cruller into his mouth and took the milk with him when he got into the car.

He drove off before I could tell him. It was a Japanese woman. A Mrs. Hayashi. I had never seen her before. She had taken too many pills and the hallucinations were driving her mad. Her children stood on windowsills in a high building waving happily to her down below. Bye-bye Mama. Then one by one they jumped. She watched as they dropped through space and hit the ground directly in front of her. I saw her face, the wide open mouth screaming to her sanity to help.

Outside her small house on Skidmore Street, neighbors stood worriedly at the window watching her on the floor, pulling her hair and screaming in a language none of them understood.

I saw it.

Five hours later Hugh came in looking pale and very drawn. He went into the living room and sat down in his new chair and let out a low groan. I got him a drink and asked if there was anything I could do. Unsmiling, he kissed my hand and said no. Sweet man that he was, he looked up with weary eyes and apologized for not being able to make lunch earlier. He’d had an awful day. An important deal for a rare Guadagnini violin fell through. He had argued with his assistants. Charlotte called and accused him of terrible things.