The Cradle (4 page)

She was on to structure—the poems were finished, nearly—it was just a matter of arranging them. She had set up a bulletin
board on the wall with the title of every poem written on a white note card. This way she could stand in front of the whole
thing and see it laid out all in one shot, and she could mix and match by theme, image, content. The only thing she felt sure
of was that there would be two parts—so often the chapbooks were divided into thirds, as though all books of poetry were syllogisms.
She was tired of that logic and wanted something else.

Two parts felt right. It was something like: there is a before and there is an after. There is a yes and there is a no. There
is a now and there is a then. The world is separated into two parts.

Now and then was right because she’d not been a poet, not in her mind, for thirty-some years. Poetry started her writing,
but she’d had access to something else when she was young, something elemental and angry and burning that faded out of her
heart. By the time she met and married Bill, at thirty, it was gone. By then she’d already moved to children’s books and sold
three. Now, at fifty-eight, she was the author of more than a dozen. She was Renee Owen. She was the smiling lady on the back
of the book. She was the lady who had written it, you see? She wasn’t famous but she was read, most definitely. She had done
well. And it didn’t bother her that she was not the best-known children’s writer of the century. That was not important. What
delighted her was the secret cadre of children who carried her stories along with them in their minds, whether they knew it
or not. There were thousands of them.

Whether they knew it or not, they were out there, an entire army, some of them now grown. She helped make their minds and
their imaginations, their rights and their wrongs, every single one. Who were they? Where were they? It didn’t matter, and
she would never know, but they carried along Fiona and Samuel, the sister and brother detectives; they carried along Wesley,
the ape; they carried the prince named Thomas on the quest to find his shield; and they carried along the kittens and the
yubyubs and the evil men who came to tell Annabelle her parents had given her up.

That voice, though—that voice that woke up and whispered in her ear on 9/11—that was the thing. That was what had left her
all the way back then, in 1969. She’d thought it was simply gone forever, that Jonathan’s death was the death of some space
within her own heart, the same space where that voice lived. The evil surprise was that it was back, a reborn child and full-grown
by the time Adam came home and announced his plans to be a marine. On that day, she decided there would be no more children’s
books. She was through with them. And from there, it was only a matter of time before the poems began to come back. Only words
and phrases in the night at first, as she drifted off to sleep, and later, whole stanzas that came to her at dinner with Bill’s
decrepit parents or while she gripped the wheel and listened to NPR and waited for the wax coating in the car wash.

She had a whole book—forty-nine poems. The book frightened her. There was no saying what the poems were. There were few characters,
rarely any complete human forms. War, and fear of war, and fear of loss from war. But there were other phrases and lines that
did not make sense to her at all. Each one of the cards correlated to one of the poems, and the poems were printed and stacked
in a pile on the desk. She ran her eyes across the right-hand group of cards, focused on one. Then she went to her papers
and flipped through the stack until she found what she was looking for.

The truth was, she had no idea what she was doing with any of the poems, and she had no idea whether she would try to publish
them, or what she would try to do. She replaced “Wednesday’s Child” in the stack, stepped back, and looked at the board. Some
of them she’d shown to Bill. Only a handful. He’d read them and he’d been very kind. A few times she asked him to tell her
more—more about what they made him see in his mind, more about what they made him feel. He had tried to respond. It was not
his strong suit, this kind of thing. He was better at the stock market. He was better at taxes and finding property to buy.
Snowblowing. She no longer had any poet friends. The only other reader she could go to was her mother, but so far she hadn’t
been able to do it. Her mother’s readings would be the opposite of Bill’s. Her mother’s readings would be too deep. Her mother
knew too much. Her mother would see what the metaphors pointed to in the world.

She focused on another card, tacked up on the board but far off to the side, not included in either category. There was one
word written on it.

apology

This poem didn’t exist. It was the only card that didn’t connect to something she’d actually written.

This poem was still inside her. She didn’t know what it would be or how it would look. She doubted she would ever write it.
But there it was on the board, interestingly enough.

Right now the poem was only a feeling—not a single image attached to it. She knew it fit into the whole somewhere, but she
wasn’t ready to ask how, to sit down and try to see. When she imagined the poem, she only felt worried; a cold wind, a dark,
lost feeling. Herself, or someone, in a cave. Nothing to do but wait and hope.

She knew, as she knew every single day of her life, what the apology was for. She hadn’t made herself that blind, not yet.
It was for what she had done. For Jonathan, long dead. But there were other questions. Who would see it? Who would overhear
it, and what would that mean? Could it be told? Who would know it was there, and what would that do? Would she then have to
go out and deliver it? And if it ever became more than only a card, what then? Even seeing how the
A
and the
O
s and the
G
and the
Y
fit together as they did made her stomach drop. She knew the power and could feel it. She knew it was bigger than she was,
that it could destroy her as easily as a crashing wave could lift a healthy human body and drop it and batter it against the
sand and the coral and be done with it, then recede, all in one second, leaving a wet corpse behind.

She was terrified of it.

However, there was the card.

She expected to find Bill asleep on the couch downstairs. When she came into the living room, she saw that he was still awake,
sitting upright in front of the television. No more
Mystery!
He was watching the news.

“Hi,” he said, looking up. “Bedtime for the old people?”

“Yes,” she said, coming to the couch. “I’m absolutely exhausted.” She flopped down beside him. His arm came instinctively
around her. With his other hand, Bill adjusted his glasses. The weather was on, and he said, “They think more snow tomorrow.”

“Maybe it will just snow permanently,” she said. “Forever.”

“For that,” he said, “we may have to get a new snowblower.”

She breathed out, looked up at the ceiling. “You are so calm,” she said.

“I’m not calm,” he said. “I look calm. I’m scared, too, Renee.”

“I don’t even look calm,” she said.

“Well,” Bill said, “you’re the mother. Something would be wrong if you looked calm.”

“He chose it. Of all the things that make no sense about this. He
chose
it. This is
our
child.”

Bill didn’t react to this. She wanted to make it seem like it was impossible that their child would become this. Obviously
it wasn’t. She had her thoughts about children choosing other paths and finding their own ways, but there was also this: Bill
was Bill. Bill had never said a thing to indicate he was against war in general, or against this one in particular. What if
he had been firm? He was diplomatic and not aggressive. He had a balanced opinion on the subject and saw merits here and there.
He was patriotic when it was convenient and he didn’t get tired, ever, of making fun of Hillary Clinton. He was a fungible
man and hadn’t pushed Adam hard one way or the other.

She wanted to hate him for it and to see this way he had as weakness, and yet here, now, beside him, she felt no resentment.
Only loss, and fear. Love for him, love for the years of life they had together. She thought of the apology card.

Maybe it was for him, after all. Maybe she’d guessed wrong. How was it possible to live with one man for this many years and
never, ever mention to him the central truth of your history, the one most important thing? He knew about Jonathan, of course.
Some old boyfriend, a tragic story. But he didn’t know everything. She dreaded what he would feel if he ever knew. He would
feel like he didn’t know her. He would look at the same face she’d studied in the mirror this morning and it would go from
familiar to alien in a flash. She would see it as it happened, and it would be unbearable. For most of their marriage, she
had assumed she would just die and never say a thing for fear of that moment. The secret was so old, so a part of her, that
the thought now—the voice?—surprised her. It said: you know you can tell him, don’t you? Even though? Just tell him.

She looked at the television and saw apocalypse. The images were of a fire, from above. Some industrial building, sprawling,
was engulfed in flames.

Around it were what seemed to be thousands of fire trucks and police cars, all their lights flashing. Mobs of people made
of tiny colored dots were grouped together in clumps not far from the building.

Bill must have felt her muscles tense up, because he turned to her and studied her face, squinted, and said, “What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “This just”—she nodded at the TV—“this just looks horrible. What is it?”

“Mmm,” Bill said, looking back. “Chemical plant, I think,” he said. “Yesterday afternoon. It’s up near Milwaukee. A whole
bunch of people died.”

“What happened?”

“Look at it,” he said. “It burned.”

“It looks just...terrible.”

Bill nodded again. “It was, from what I’ve heard. Very bad. Ammonia compressor exploded.” He frowned down at the remote control,
then pointed it at the TV and turned the volume up. The sound of the reporter’s voice filled the room. She was speaking of
the dead.

“Delco,” Bill said. “Delco, I believe that place is called.”

Matt took a change of course on Monday and began trying to divvy his Delco shifts instead of collect them. When Ken Granderson,
Eric’s father, wandered into the break room, Matt offered him up Friday and he took it. To be on the safe side, he found Eric
a little later and got him to take Thursday, then went to talk to the foreman to make sure all was understood. There was a
funeral in Tennessee he had to go to. Old friend from grade school who’d moved away. Gun accident, tragedy. Okay, Bishop,
the foreman had said kindly. I understand.

On Wednesday night he changed the oil in the truck and made sure the windshield wipers were fine, drove it to the gas station,
filled it up, bought three Twinkies, put them in the glove compartment, and went home. He and Marissa tried to have sex, but
for the last few weeks it had been too uncomfortable, even from behind, as they had grown accustomed to.

“I’m sorry,” she said as he got out of bed and crossed the room, toward the bathroom.

He said, “It’s fine,” turned on the shower, stuck his head back out, and said, “It’s fine,” again, then went into the shower
and masturbated with his back to the curtain, listening hard to make sure she wouldn’t sneak in and surprise him.

Glen had produced an address. Matt had it written down and stuffed into his wallet, although, really, he didn’t need anything.
The half sister’s name was Mary and the address was 78 9th Avenue. Glen had a little tickle in his voice when he told him
over the phone. Matt said, “Not only did you never go to look.”

“It’s hard to forget an address like that.”

“That address is so easy I’m surprised you didn’t just one day suddenly find yourself there.”

“I’m not.”

“Glen,” Matt said, “are you and Caroline still married, then?”

“No. The papers came in the mail a few months later. Some lawyer in Minneapolis. I signed them all and sent them back where
they were supposed to go, and that was the end.”

“Why’d you sign them?” Matt asked. “Couldn’t you have found her that way? Gone to see her? Talked to her?”

“I signed them—” Glen started saying, but he hesitated. Matt waited. “I signed them just because. Maybe this is hard to understand,
but I signed them because I thought signing them would make three lives better. Every life inside of the family.”

“What family?”

“Ours.”

“But it was gone.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“Does Marissa know about the papers?”

“Yes,” he said. “She knows.”

In the morning Matt had cereal at the table in the kitchen. Marissa came down while he was eating, in her bathrobe. She’d
called in sick. He didn’t think she should be working anymore anyway, but Marissa, up until now, had done everything she could
to continue and seemed almost offended by the idea of changing her routine or her life. She didn’t want anyone to think she
was taking advantage.

“No one’s gonna think that,” Matt had said. “You work at the damned Planned Parenthood. They live for people like you. I’m
surprised they haven’t bought you a new car for getting pregnant.”

“I know,” she’d said. “I just don’t want to. After, fine. Then I’ll stay home. Before, no.”

When he was finished with his cereal, Matt stood in the middle of the kitchen, hands on his hips, and said, “Okay. I’m going.”

“You’re going where?” she said, surprised.

“I’m going going,” he said, raising his eyebrows at her.

“What?” she said, eyes wide now. “You know somewhere to go? Already? For the cradle?”

He nodded.

“How?”

“You said you didn’t want to know.”

“And what were you planning to do? Just disappear for a couple of days? Just slip out on me?”

“Do you want the thing or not, Marissa? It might only take me a day. I don’t know.”