The Mothers of Voorhisville (9 page)

Maddy Melvern doesn't know any different; she thinks it's always been this way. She stares at her son, lying on a blanket under a tree in the park. She looks away for
one second
to watch the mailman walk past—not that there's anything interesting about him, because there isn't, but that just shows how bored she is—and when she turns back to JoJo, he's hovering over the blanket, six inches off the ground; flying. She holds him against her chest, frantic to see if anyone's noticed, but the park is filled with mothers holding infants, or bent over strollers, tightening straps. Everyone is too distracted to notice Maddy and her flying baby. “Holy shit, JoJo,” she whispers, “you have to be careful with this stuff.” Maddy isn't sure what would happen if anyone were to find out about JoJo's wings, but she's fairly certain it wouldn't be good. Even pressed against her chest as he is, she can feel them pulsing. She eases him away from her shoulders to get a view of his face.

He's laughing.

He has three dimples and a deep belly laugh. Maddy laughs with him; until suddenly she presses him tight against her heart. “Oh my God, JoJo,” she says. “I love you.”

Tamara Singh has just secured little Ravi in the stroller—not wanting to hurt him, of course, but making sure the straps are tight enough to keep him from flying—when she sees Maddy Melvern laughing with her baby.
It just goes to show
, Tamara thinks,
that you never can tell
. Who would have guessed that the teenage unwed mother, the girl who'd done everything wrong, could be so happy, while Tamara, who'd done only one single wrong thing (the illicit sex thing), would be so miserable?

What is love?
Tamara thinks as she stares at little Ravi, crying again, hungry for more. She parks the stroller by a bench and unbuttons her blouse.
Well, this is love,
she thinks—sitting there in the park, filling his hunger, holding down his pulsing wings; watching the ducks and the clouds and the other mothers (it certainly seems like there are a lot of newborns this summer) and thinking,
I would die to protect you; I would kill anyone who would hurt you.
Then wondering,
Where did that come from?

But it was true.

The mothers were
lying.
They told each other and their loved ones about wellness visits, but none of the mothers actually took their son to a doctor. Because of the wings. Both pediatricians at St. John's were under the impression that they were losing patients to the other, and each harbored suspicions concerning the guerilla tactics being employed. The lying mothers became obsessed with their sons' health. Each cough or sneeze or runny nose was the source of much guilt. Nobody wanted to kill her child. That was the point, the reason they had stayed away from doctors: it wasn't about putting the babies at
risk
, it was about keeping them safe.

Friends and relatives concluded that the mothers were protective, coddling, suspicious, and overly secretive. The mothers even concluded this about
each other
, never suspecting they harbored the same secret.

“This is impossible,” Theresa Ratcher murmurs to herself the first time she sees little Matthew's wings blossoming, like some sort of water flower, while she is bathing him in the sink. She touches one tip; feels the searing proof of hot pain; and the next thing she knows, she is standing in the cornfield. She runs to the house as though it is on fire, tumbles into the kitchen, where Elli sits feeding little Timmy. “Where's Matthew?” Theresa asks. Elli looks at her like she's nuts. Theresa glances at the sink, which is empty and dry.

“Did you lose him?” Elli asks. “How could you lose him?”

“Matthew!” Theresa runs upstairs. He is there, asleep in the crib. She pats his back, gently. It feels flat. Normal.

“What's wrong?” Elli stands in the door, Timmy in her arms. “Mom? Are you all right?”

“I had a bad dream.”

“Outside? You fell asleep outside?” Elli asks. “Are you sick?”

Matthew cries. “I'm not sick,” Theresa says, unbuttoning her blouse. “Before I forget: When is your doctor's appointment? Did you make that yet? I can't be keeping track of all this anymore.”

“Don't worry about it, then,” Elli says, walking down the hall to her room; but when she gets there, it smells like diapers, and flies buzz around the window. Still holding Timmy, Elli walks downstairs and onto the porch.

Her dad is in the cornfield with the boys he hired for the summer. They aren't boys Elli knows. They're from Caldore or Wauseega, her dad can't remember which. They come to the house for lunch most days and ignore her. Elli knows why. She walks over to the apple tree and spreads Timmy's blanket on the ground, which is littered with blossoms. She sets him down, then stares at the cornfield, trying to force herself to see it as a field, and not a cemetery. Was her dad nuts? Why'd he bury it out
there
?
Did he really think she'd be able to eat the corn this year?
Elli shakes her head. She looks at Timmy, who lies there grinning. “What's so funny?” she says, meanly, and then feels bad for it. It is just so hot, and she is so tired. Between the baby eating all the time, and the bad dreams she has of the other one flying into her room and hovering over her bed, she's exhausted.

She wakes with a dark shadow standing over her. Elli turns to the empty blanket; then, in a panic, looks up at Theresa, who is standing there, holding Timmy. “You can't do things like this anymore, Elli,” she says. “You can't just forget about him. He's a
baby
.”

“I didn't forget about him.”

“Look.” Theresa turns Timmy so that Elli can see his pink face. “He got sunburned.” Elli looks down at her knees. She doesn't want to cry. Theresa leans down to hand Timmy to her. “I know this is hard, but—”

“Mom, there's something I have to tell you.”

Theresa is not in the mood for teenage confessions.
Why is Elli doing this now?

“There was another one, Mom.”

“What do you mean? Another boy? Is that why you won't say who the father is?”

“No. Mom, I mean, another baby. I had two. Dad doesn't want me to say, 'cause, well, he was a freak, and he died. Dad buried him in the cornfield.”

“What do you mean he was a freak?”

“Please don't tell anyone.”

“Sweetie, I—”

“He had wings, okay?”

“Who had wings?”

“The other one. The one that died. Do you think it was something I did?”

Theresa cannot form a logical connection between her daughter's revelation and her own son's wings. Several things occur to her, but not even for a second does she consider that she might have shared a lover with her fifteen-year-old daughter. (That notion comes later, with disastrous results.) Instead, she thinks of the paper mill, or some kind of terrorist attack on their well, things like that.

“You didn't do anything wrong,” Theresa says, “except have unprotected sex.” (Feeling like a hypocrite for saying it.) “And if every woman who did that was punished with a dead baby, there wouldn't be anyone living at all.”

“But it wasn't just dead, Mom. It had
wings
.”

Theresa glances at the house, where she'd left Matthew resting in his crib. “How do we know that wasn't some kind of miracle? How do we know it was a sign of something bad happening, rather than something good?”

Elli sighs. “It's just a feeling I get. Remember ‘We are the stuff that dreams are made on?'”

“What about it?” Theresa says, feeling tense at the topic hovering too close to the library, and Jeffrey.

“I don't know,” Elli says. “It's just something I think of sometimes.”

Theresa knows she's been distracted lately, perhaps not as supportive of Elli as she would have liked. She glances at the house again, trying to decide if Matthew could be flying through the rooms, banging into walls and ceilings. She doesn't know anything about raising a child with wings, except that it is hard enough to raise one without them.

“Try to think of it as a good thing, okay?”

Elli shrugs.

“Will you at least try?”

For three days, Elli tries to convince herself that her first baby was not a freak or a punishment for something she'd done, but a sign of something
good.
She almost convinces herself of it. But on the third day, while she has Timmy on the changing table, she watches in horror as dark wings sprout from his back.

That's when she knows. The stranger she had sex with was the devil. That explains everything. It even explains why she
did
it with him. She looks into Timmy's beautiful blue eyes. For once, he isn't crying. In fact, he is smiling.

Evil
, Elli thinks,
can trick you
. She works the saliva in her mouth and spits. Timmy's face goes through a metamorphosis of expressions, as if trying to decide which one to employ—a slight smile, raised eyebrows, trembling lips—all while closely watching Elli. She begins to cry. He opens his mouth wide and joins her, the glop of phlegm dripping down his forehead. Elli wipes it with the blanket. “Oh, baby, I'm so sorry,” she says, picking him up.

That's when Theresa walks into the room.

Elli, still crying, looks over the small dark points of her baby's wings at her mother, who puts her hand over her mouth and—turning on her heels—spins out of the room.

Theresa wheels down the hall like a drunken woman, and opens the door to her own room. Matthew lays there, damp curls matted at his forehead, his pretty pink lips pursed near his tiny fist. Gently, she rubs his back and feels the delicate bones there.

“Mom?” Elli stands in the doorway. “You
said
it could be good.” Then she sobs and runs out of the room.

Matthew wakes with a wail. Theresa soothes him the best she can as she walks to the rocking chair. Sitting there, Theresa can see all the way out to the three figures working in the field. Matthew sucks at her breast while she stares at the blue sky and gently rocks, asking herself, “What does it mean? What does it mean? What does any of it mean?”

Of all the lying and confused families that summer, perhaps the Ratchers—with their strange convergence of mother, daughter, son, brother, grandson, grandmother, sister, husband, father, and grandfather, all embodied in one small family—were the
most
confused, with the
biggest
web of secrets.

*   *   *

Pete Ratcher came home from his Saturday dart game at Skelley's Bar one hot night, with the news that Maddy Melvern, a year ahead of Elli in school, had given birth and also wasn't divulging the father's name. “What hot shot are these girls protecting?” he asked his wife, who tried to make all the right noises while she fed the little monster (that's how Pete thought of him, though he tried not to) who seemed to be hungry
all the time.

Theresa tried to talk to Elli about it. “You know, Maddy Melvern had a baby too,” she said. Elli rolled her eyes, the baby latching on her breast
again
as her mother stood there,
again
bothering her with ridiculous information (What did she care about
Maddy Melvern
?
)
, when all she wanted was to be free, instead of trapped here with this baby and horrible dreams about that other one rising from the cornfield and flying over the house; trying to find her, to punish her for burying him out there, no better than one of the cats—though, really, it wasn't her fault. It was her dad who did it.

Meanwhile, Pete Ratcher spent more and more nights at Skelley's, because what was he supposed to stay home for? To watch his wife and daughter endlessly feed and rock the crying babies, which neither would let him hold? Like they didn't trust him or something? Christ, what was that about?

The regulars at Skelley's grew used to Pete Ratcher's complaints. The bartenders could wipe the counter, serve drinks, watch TV, and say, “Women these days,” at just the right moment in Pete's lament; that's how predictable it was. The regulars were so tired of it they were careful not to sit next to him. That's how, on the night Raj came into Skelley's, blinking against the smoke, he happened to sit right next to Pete, who finally found a sympathetic listener.

Raj nodded and said, “I know, I know. He's my son, too. I
want
to be a part of his life. I
want
to change diapers and take him for walks. I don't understand why she won't let me do those things.”

Tamara knew Raj was drinking. Frankly, she was shocked: it was not something she'd imagined he'd fall into. But only a week into this new bad habit of his, he ran into their bedroom to tell her he'd just seen the baby flying. She was able to convince him that he was so drunk he'd been hallucinating. “No, no. I don't drink that
much
,” he said.

Tamara went into the nursery, and sure enough, Ravi was floating above the crib, hovering like a giant hummingbird. She had just plucked him to her chest when Raj returned to the room.

“And you get angry at
me
for not letting you hold him more? Look at you. How can I trust that he'd be safe with a father who drinks so much he thinks he sees flying babies?”

“I don't drink
that
much,” Raj said. “And all this was happening before I was drinking.”

“The baby was flying before you started drinking? Do you really expect me to believe this nonsense?”

“No, no. I mean
us
. We were already fighting about you not letting me near him.”

Tamara, who, just a year ago, would never have believed she could hurt her husband, and, only five minutes ago, would have sworn that she'd never hurt her baby for any reason, now pinched Ravi's arm, hard, so that he broke into a loud cry. She turned to attend to his tears as Raj watched, helpless and confused. It was like watching a movie or television: his wife and son in a separate world, with no need of him at all.