Poe's Children (33 page)

“It was pretty amazing,” I say fast, staring at where the flutter was, as though I could pin it there. “Lizzie kicked me and woke me up. ‘You hear that?’ she asked. And of course, I did. Fast, hard scrabbling, click-click-click, from right in here. We came running and saw a tail disappear behind the dresser. There was a dresser, then, I made it myself. The drawers came out sideways and the handles formed kind of a pumpkin-face, just for fun, you know? Anyway, I got down on my hands and knees and found this huge, white possum staring right at me. I didn’t even know there were possums here. This one took a single look at me and keeled over with its feet in the air. Playing dead.”

I throw myself on the ground with my feet in the air. It’s like a memory, a dream, a memory of a dream, but I half-believe I feel a weight on the soles of my feet, as though something has climbed onto them, for a ride, maybe.

“I got a broom. Your…Lizzie got a trash can. And for the next, I don’t know, three hours, probably, we chased this thing around and around the room. We had the windows wide open. All it had to do was hop up and out. Instead, it hid behind the dresser, playing dead, until I poked it with the broom, and then it would race along the baseboard or into the middle of the room and flip on its back again, as if to say, okay, now I’m really dead, and we couldn’t get it to go up and out. We couldn’t get it to do anything but die. Over and over and over. And…”

I stop, lower my legs abruptly, sit up. I don’t say the rest. How, at 3:45 in the morning, Lizzie dropped the trash can to the floor, looked at me, and burst out crying. Threw her glasses at the wall and broke one of the lenses and wept while I stood there, so tired, with this possum belly-up at my feet and the sea air flooding the room. I’d loved the laughing. I could hardly stand up for exhaustion, and I’d loved laughing with Lizzie so goddamn much.

“Lizzie,” I’d said. “I mean, fuck. Not everything has to relate to that. Does it? Does everything we ever think or do, for the rest of our lives…” But of course, it does. I think I even knew that then. And that was after only one.

“Would you like to go for a walk?” I say carefully, clearly. Because this is it. The only thing I can think of, and therefore the only chance we have. How does one get a child to listen, really? I wouldn’t know. “We’ll go for a stroll, okay? Get nice and sleepy?” I still can’t see anything. Most of the other times, I’ve caught half a glimpse, at some point, a trail of shadow. Turning, leaving the door cracked open behind me, I head for the living room. I slide my trench coat over my boxers and Green Apple T-shirt, slip my tennis shoes onto my bare feet. My ankles will be freezing. In the pocket of my coat, I feel the matchbook I left there, the single, tiny, silver key. It has been two months, at least, since the last time they came, or at least since they let me know it. But I have stayed ready.

As I step onto our stoop, wait a few seconds, and pull the door closed, I am flooded with sensory memory—it’s like being dunked—of the day I first became aware. Over two years ago, now. Over a year after the first one. Halfway to dreaming, all but asleep, I was overcome by an overwhelming urge to put my ear to Lizzie’s womb and sing to the new tenant in there. Almost six weeks old, at that point. I imagined seeing through my wife’s skin, watching toe and finger shapes forming in the red, waving wetness like lines on an Etch A Sketch.

“You are my sun—”
I started, and knew, just like that, that something else was with me. There was the damp, for one thing, and an extra soundlessness in the room, right beside me. I can’t explain it. The sound of someone else listening.

I reacted on instinct, shot upright and accidentally yanked all the blankets off Lizzie and shoved out my arms at where the presence seemed to be, and Lizzie blinked awake and narrowed her spectacle-less eyes at the shape of me, the covers twisted on the bed.

“There’s something here,” I babbled, pushing with both hands at the empty air.

Lizzie just squinted, coolly. Finally, after a few seconds, she snatched one of my waving hands out of the air and dropped it against her belly. Her skin felt smooth, warm. My forefinger slipped into her bellybutton, felt the familiar knot of it, and I found myself aroused. Terrified, confused, ridiculous, and aroused.

“It’s just Sam,” she said, stunning me. It seemed impossible that she was going to let me win that fight. Then she smiled, pressing my hand to the second creature we had created together. “You and me and Sam.” She pushed harder on my hand, slid it down her belly toward the center of her.

We made love, held each other, sang to her stomach. Not until long after Lizzie had fallen asleep, just as I was dropping off at last, did it occur to me that she could have been more right than she knew. Maybe it was just us, and Sam. The first Sam—the one we’d lost—returning to greet his successor with us.

Of course, he hadn’t come just to listen, or to watch. But how could I have known that, then? And how did I know that that was what the presence was, anyway? I didn’t. And when it came back late the next night, with Lizzie this time sound asleep and me less startled, I slid aside to make room for it so we could both hear. Both whisper.

Are both of you with me now, I wonder? I’m standing on my stoop and listening, feeling, as hard as I can. Please, God, let them be with me. Not with Lizzie. Not with the new one. That’s the only name we have allowed ourselves this time. The new one.

“Come on,” I say to my own front door, to the filigrees of fog that float forever on the air of Sutro Heights, as though the atmosphere itself has developed bas-relief and gone art deco. “Please. I’ll tell you a story about the day you were born.”

I start down the warped, wooden steps toward our garage. Inside my pocket, the little silver key darts between my fingers, slippery and cool as a minnow. In my mouth, I taste the fog and the perpetual garlic smell from the latest building to perch at the jut of the cliffs and call itself the Cliff House—the preceding three all collapsed or burned to the ground—and something else, too. I realize, finally, what it is, and the tears come flooding back.

What I’m remembering, this time, is Washington, D.C., the grass brown and dying in the blazing August sun as we raced down the Mall from museum to museum in a desperate, headlong hunt for cheese. We were in the ninth day of the ten-day tetracycline program Dr. Seger had prescribed, and Lizzie just seemed tired, but I swear I could feel the walls of my intestines, raw and sharp and scraped clean, the way teeth feel after a particularly vicious visit to the dentist. I craved milk, and got nauseous just thinking about it. Drained of its germs, its soft, comforting skin of use, my body felt skeletal, a shell without me in it.

That was the point, as Dr. Seger explained it to us. We’d done our Tay-Sachs, tested for lead, endured endless blood screenings to check on things like prolactin, lupus anticoagulant, TSH. We would have done more tests, but the doctors didn’t recommend them, and our insurance wouldn’t pay. “A couple of miscarriages, it’s really not worth intensive investigation.” Three different doctors told us that. “If it happens a couple more times, we’ll know something’s really wrong.”

Dr. Seger had a theory, at least, involving old bacteria lingering in the body for years, decades, tucked up in the fallopian tubes or hidden in the testicles or just adrift in the blood, riding the heart-current in an endless, mindless, circle. “The mechanism of creation is so delicate,” she told us. “So efficiently, masterfully created. If anything gets in there that shouldn’t be, well, it’s like a bird in a jet engine. Everything just explodes.”

How comforting, I thought but didn’t say at that first consultation, because when I glanced at Lizzie, she looked more than comforted. She looked hungry, perched on the edge of her chair with her head half over Dr. Seger’s desk, so pale, thin, and hard, like a starved pigeon being teased with crumbs. I wanted to grab her hand. I wanted to weep.

As it turns out, Dr. Seger may have been right. Or maybe we got lucky this time. Because that’s the thing about miscarriage: three thousand years of human medical science, and no one knows any fucking thing at all. It just happens, people say, like a bruise, or a cold. And it does, I suppose. Just happen, I mean. But not like a cold. Like dying. Because that’s what it is.

So for ten days, Dr. Seger had us drop tetracycline tablets down our throats like depth charges, blasting everything living inside us out. And on that day in DC—we were visiting my cousin, the first time I’d managed to coax Lizzie anywhere near extended family since all this started—we’d gone to the Holocaust Museum, searching for anything strong enough to take our minds off our hunger, our desperate hope that we were scoured, healthy, clean. But it didn’t work. So we went to the Smithsonian. And three people from the front of the ticket line, Lizzie suddenly grabbed my hand, and I looked at her, and it was the old Lizzie, or the ghost of her, eyes flashing under their black rims, smile instantaneous, shockingly bright.

“Dairy,” she said. “Right this second.”

It took me a breath to adjust. I hadn’t seen my wife this way in a long, long while, and as I stared, the smile slipped on her face. With a visible effort, she pinned it back in place. “Jake. Come on.”

None of the museum cafés had what we wanted. We went racing past sculptures and animal dioramas and parchment documents to the cafés, where we stared at yogurt in plastic containers—but we didn’t dare eat yogurt—and cups of tapioca that winked, in our fevered state, like the iced-over surfaces of Canadian lakes. But none of it would have served. We needed a cheddar wheel, a lasagna we could scrape free of pasta and tomatoes so we could drape our tongues in strings of crusted mozzarella. What we settled for, finally, was four giant bags of generic cheese puffs from a 7-Eleven. We sat together on the edge of a fountain and stuffed each other’s mouths like babies, like lovers.

It wasn’t enough. The hunger didn’t abate in either of us. Sometimes I think it hasn’t since.

God, it was glorious, though. Lizzie’s lips around my orange-stained fingers, that soft, gorgeous crunch as each individual puff popped apart in our mouths, dusting our teeth and throats while spray from the fountain brushed our faces and we dreamed separate, still-hopeful dreams of children.

And that, in the end, is why I have to, you see. My two Sams. My lost, loved ones. Because maybe it’s true. It doesn’t seem like it could be, but maybe it is. Maybe, mostly, it just happens. And then, for most couples, it just stops happening one day. And afterward—if only because there isn’t time—you start to forget. Not what happened. Not what was lost. But what the loss meant, or at least what it felt like. I’ve come to believe that time alone won’t swallow grief or heal a marriage. But perhaps filled time…

In my pocket, my fingers close over the silver key, and I take a deep breath of the damp in the air, which is mostly just Sutro Heights damp now that we’re outside. We have always loved it here, Lizzie and I. In spite of everything, we can’t bring ourselves to flee. “Let me show you,” I say, trying not to plead. I’ve taken too long, I think. They’ve gotten bored. They’ll go back in the house. I lift the ancient, rusted padlock on our garage door, tilt it so I can see the slot in the moonlight, and slide the key home.

It has been months since I’ve been out here—we use the garage for storage, not for our old Nova—and I’ve forgotten how heavy the salt-saturated wooden door is. It comes up with a creak, slides over my head, and rocks unsteadily in its runners. How, I’m thinking, did I first realize that the presence in my room was my first, unborn child? The smell, I guess, like an unripe lemon, fresh and sour all at once. Lizzie’s smell. Or maybe it was the song springing unbidden, over and over, to my lips.
“When I awoke dear. I was mistaken.”
Those things, and the fact that now, these last times, they both seem to be there.

The first thing I see once my eyes adjust is my grandfather glaring out of his portrait at me, his hair thread-thin and wild on his head like a spiderweb swinging free, his lips flat, crushed together, his ridiculous lumpy potato of a body under his perpetually half-zipped judges’ robes. And there are his eyes, one blue, one green, which he once told me allowed him to see 3-D, before I knew that everyone could. A children’s rights activist before there was a name for such things, a three-time candidate for a state bench seat and three-time loser, he’d made an enemy of his daughter, my mother, by wanting a son so badly. And he’d made a disciple out of me by saving Lizzie’s life. Turning her father in to the cops, then making sure that he got thrown in jail, then forcing both him and his whole family into counseling, getting him work when he got out, checking in on him every single night, no matter what, for six years, until Lizzie was away and free. Until eight months ago, on the day Dr. Seger confirmed that we were pregnant for the third time, his portrait hung beside the Pinocchio clock on the living room wall. Now it lives here. One more casualty.

“Your namesake,” I say to the air, my two ghosts. But I can’t take my eyes off my grandfather. Tonight is the end for him, too, I realize. The real end, where the ripples his life created in the world glide silently to stillness. Could you have seen them, I want to ask, with those 3-D eyes that saw so much? Could you have saved them? Could you have thought of another, better way? Because mine is going to hurt. “His name was Nathan, really. But he called us ‘Sam.’ Your mother and me, we were both ‘Sam.’ That’s why…”

That’s why Lizzie let me win that argument, I realize. Not because she’d let go of the idea that the first one had to have a name, was a specific, living creature, a child of ours. But because she’d rationalized. Sam was to be the name, male or female. So whatever the first child had been, the second would be the other. Would have been. You see, Lizzie, I think to the air, wanting to punch the walls of the garage, scream to the cliffs, break down in tears.
You think I don’t know. But I do.

If we survive this night, and our baby is still with us in the morning, and we get to meet him someday soon, he will not be named Sam. He won’t be Nathan, either. My grandfather would have wanted Sam.