The Northwoods Chronicles (3 page)

Pearce finished what he was doing, washed and
dried his hands and then went to her and held her.

She clung to him, sobbing.

He didn’t know what to do. “C’mon, let’s see to
these scratches,” he said, and she followed dutifully to the
bathroom where he washed off all the blood, kissed each scratch and
put ointment on it. “If you do this in the summer, you’ll be sick
with poison ivy,” he said.

She nodded like she understood, but he knew she
didn’t.

When she was all cleaned up, he washed her face
and then took off her torn and stained pink dress and put her to
bed. He took off his clothes, got in next to her and held her
close.

Her hands began to rub him in a most pleasant
manner, and he let her do that for a while, as he puzzled yet again
over her situation and what to do about it.

And then it came to him. She wasn’t cut out to
be a pastor’s wife. She didn’t like doing all those pastor’s-wife
social things. Regina had a style of her own and he’d been trying
to stuff her into a mold that didn’t fit. The answer was
obvious.

“Honey?” he said.

She stopped what she was doing. “What?”

“I think you should get a job.”

“No,” she said, “a baby.”

“No baby,” Pearce said.

“Please? I’ll be a good mommy, Pearce, you don’t
know what a good mommy I can be. Please? Pretty please?”

It wasn’t as if this was a brand-new topic of
conversation, but this time Pearce thought he ought to consider it.
If she had a baby to obsess over, maybe she’d leave him alone.
“Okay,” he said, but cringed as he did so, as if he were sentencing
his poor, unborn and as-yet unconceived child to a dreadful
life.

Regina caught her breath in disbelief.
“Really?”

“Really.”

“Right
now,
” she said, and climbed on top
of him. As demanding as she was, he found that strangely
stimulating and he responded in spite of himself. When he cried
out, “Oh God,” at the critical moment, he meant it.

The next moment, to his surprise, she got up,
showered, fixed herself up a little bit, then sat, prim and proper
at the breakfast table. She took small bites of the omelet he made,
ate her toast dry, drank a big glass of water, and wiped her mouth
daintily on a paper napkin, which she then folded and laid next to
her plate.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m going to have a baby,” she said. “I need to
go shopping.”

Pearce extracted a twenty from his wallet and
gave it to her, and she jumped up and hugged him with childlike
enthusiasm. Then she smoothed her dress, tucked the twenty into her
little purse, and sat down to wait for the stores to open.
Strangely pleased, Pearce went into his study and began to prepare
Sunday’s sermon.

He heard her leave, and he enjoyed the silence.
Regina was accustomed to leaving him to himself when he was in his
study, but it had taken him many years to train her to leave him
alone, and, while she finally agreed, she never understood. He
always felt her hurt feelings seeping through the cracks around the
door. But when she was out of the house, he felt truly free. In
fact, he resented having to spend this time working. He could watch
television, or read a book in the living room, or just be alone in
the house, without her jumping into his lap or trying to attract
his attention in a million different ways.

She was a joy, she was his joy, but she was also
a burden.

He worked in peace, and about the time he
stretched and was beginning to consider making a pot of coffee, he
heard the front door slam. A moment later, she threw open the door
to his den and stood at the threshold, staring at him with an
accusatory glare made up of pain and hurt and wildfire.

“Honey?”

“I hate you,” she said, turned on her heel and a
moment later, he heard the bedroom door slam.

Oh lord.

He counted to one hundred very slowly, then got
up and went to the bedroom. Instead of the soggy, sopping, sobbing
mess he expected to find on the bed, she was sitting on the edge,
her knees together, her hands folded in her lap. Her face was tear
stained, but composed.

“Hi,” he said.

“I can’t hate you,” she said. “It’s not good for
the baby.”

“Why would you hate me?”

“For bringing me here. For letting me think I
could have a baby.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know what goes on here. You know about the
babies disappearing. You never wanted to have any kids, and your
way of getting around that was by bringing me here so I could have
babies and they’d disappear so that you wouldn’t have to have them
around. It wouldn’t be your fault.” She hiccupped, but kept her
actions under control.

“Honey, I don’t have any idea what you’re
talking about. We’re going to have a baby, I said so. If it didn’t
work last night, we’ll try again tonight. Don’t worry.”

“They disappear, Pearce, the babies in this
place disappear.”

“Disappear?”

“Magic. Evil magic. Witch stuff. That’s why the
church sent us here, don’t you know? They want us to kill the evil
here.”

“Did you have lunch?” he asked. “Let’s go wash
your face, have a little something to eat, then we’ll investigate
this thing about the babies.” He sat down on the bed next to her.
“Nothing’s going to happen to our baby, Regina. I love you and I
love that baby, and we’re going to be a nice little family, the
three of us.”

She looked up at him with trusting, childlike
eyes, and he nodded. A big tear tripped over the lower lid, skidded
down her cheek and fell on the back of his hand. “C’mon now,” he
said. “Let me cook a nice dinner for you and that baby in
there.”

“Okay,” she said, and sniffed.

“If you’re going to have a baby, you’ve got to
let me take care of you,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“I’ll take good care,” he said, and opened his
arms. She fell into them and began to sob all over again. He just
held her tight.

“I want to be a good mom,” she choked out.

“You will be,” Pearce said and rocked her back
and forth. “You will be.”

~~~

The next day, when Pearce came home from his
daily search for people to minister to, he found the kitchen filled
with empty grocery bags, the hallway full of aluminum foil boxes
and the spare room covered in foil—walls, ceiling, windows. Regina
started when she heard him at the door, and looked up from where
she was affixing the last bit of foil to the wall with a strip of
duct tape and said, “What do we do about the floor?”

“What are you doing?”

“We’re going to sleep in here from now on. And
the baby will have to stay in here until he’s twelve.”

Pearce looked at the room, which gave him a
headache, and his wife kneeling on the floor, which gave him
indigestion, and turned away. He went to the kitchen and began
folding up the paper sacks. They came, he noted, from all three of
the stores in White Pines Junction. She must have bought them all
out of foil.

Bags stowed, he put water on to boil and began
to mix up a tuna casserole. Why couldn’t she fixate on prenatal
nutrition, or learning nursery rhymes, or finding the best school
in the neighborhood? Instead, she’ll be going to UFO conventions
before long. She’d be speaking at them. She’d dedicate their child
to them. She’d be marshalling the U.S. Army against them, for god’s
sake.

The whole thing gave Pearce a headache. And a
heartache. And it made him nervous about his career. Eventually,
he’d like to settle down with a church and a congregation of his
own, live in the parsonage and raise a whole bagful of kids, but
how was that to be done if Regina wasn’t going to let their
firstborn out of his mirrored room until he was twelve?

She was troubled, and it was becoming time for
him to take some action. They could move from Vargas County, but he
didn’t think that would solve the problem. It would take care of
the current paranoia, but something else would surface.

No, it was up to Pearce to take the situation in
hand and deal with his wife. Firmly, but gently. The way Jesus
would.

“Honey?” he called. “Do you want garlic
cheesebread with your tuna noodle casserole?”

She was by his side in an instant. “Yes, yes,
yes,” she said.

“Okay. I’ll slice the bread and you sprinkle the
cheese.”

She got the canister down from the shelf and
stood next to him, waiting for him to make the first slice so she
could sprinkle.

“Regina, have you taken a pregnancy test
yet?”

“Why?”

“I was just wondering. If we’re going to have a
baby, we ought to know when, so we can prepare.”

“Nine months,” she said.

“I think we should take a test.”

“No tests. The aliens could go through the
garbage and see it. Then they’d know where to come.” She buttered
the bread, then sprinkled the garlic cheese, careful to get both
even, all the way to the edges. “Let’s name him Spartacus.”

“Who?”

“Our baby.”

“What if it’s a girl?”

Regina silently buttered and sprinkled. “Let’s
eat these now,” she said, and looked up at him with the trusting
eyes of a child. “And then let’s have ice cream.”

Pearce looked into those eyes and remembered why
he’d married her. She had been so youthful, so fun, so sweet, and
she looked to be the model of a perfect clergy wife-in-making. But
this disease, or whatever it was that had sprouted in her mind, was
growing more prevalent and turning her maturity clock backwards. He
was afraid for her. “Okay,” he said, and put the bread in with the
casserole. When it came out, they sat down and ate all the toasted
bread and let the casserole bake. Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow
we’ll eat that casserole and then we’ll go to a doctor.

But the next morning, she threw up. Pearce sat
on the floor and held her head while she puked into the toilet, and
his spirits took a serious tumble, along with the realization that
with the morning sickness would surely come a baby. She still
needed some kind of help, although Prozac or something of its ilk
was clearly out of the question now that she was carrying a
child.

Regina grew ever more beautiful in the following
days, while Pearce’s sleep was disturbed by visions of
childproofing their home, and not only for the baby.

He knew she was sick, and would need some type
of treatment, but, for the time being, he could handle it. He just
had to monitor her progress, make sure she ate properly, saw to her
personal hygiene, kept her safe and made certain that she wasn’t
left alone.

As he was fairly new in the community, he wasn’t
much missed. He still found time to prepare sermons, and preached
them to a thin audience on Sunday mornings, Regina prettied up and
sitting in the front pew. Eventually, her condition became obvious,
and she was the first one to poke her belly around at people so
they’d notice. They began to get congratulatory handshakes and a
few invitations to dinner and such, which he discreetly
declined.

Things work out somehow, he thought, and was
glad that they were new enough in the community to be fairly
invisible. They’d be moving on, according to the church, not long
after the baby was born, and that too, was good. They didn’t need
to make any lasting impressions or relationships here. The fewer
questions about the new pastor and his strange wife the better. One
day at a time, he coped increasingly competently as what amounted
to being the single parent of his pregnant wife.

By the time Month Nine rolled around, Regina was
wearing aluminum foil helmets around the house and Pearce had to
keep her inside. She had her moments of lucidity, but they were
fleeting. He worried about the fact that he hadn’t taken her for
prenatal medical help, but she was young and healthy—in body if not
in mind—and he made sure she ate well and got enough sleep. But
what he really worried about was the genetic significance of what
was happening to her, and the chemical imbalance it surely caused
in her system and how it would affect the baby.

Oh well. Nothing to be done about it yet.

But when the pains of childbirth began, Regina
was not to be controlled.

She had spent the day singing at the top of her
lungs, and marching around the house with a wooden spoon, the
tinfoil hat tattered and bent, but securely on her head, while
Pearce was trying his hardest to concentrate on the sermon he was
writing.

“Ow,” Regina said.

Pearce jumped up to see what she’d done to hurt
herself, but what he saw chilled him. She was standing in the
middle of the living room, wooden spoon at her feet, and she had
her hands around the swollen lump of a belly. Her time had come and
he was unprepared. In fact, he had worried over the course of
action, knowing that this day would come, but having never made a
decision about anything, he was totally and completely unprepared.
Now he had to consciously calm himself before he panicked and
scared Regina.

“What’s happening, pumpkin?”

“It hurts me.”

“The baby’s coming,” he said, his mind racing.
If they got in the car right now, he could get her to a hospital in
the next town where nobody knew them. He could make up a doctor’s
name, and say they were just passing through, and the baby was
early. . . .

“Ow!” She hit her stomach with her fists. “Make
it stop.”

Oh man, Pearce thought, she hasn’t seen anything
yet. She’ll need drugs. “C’mon, let’s go to the hospital.”

“Hospital?”

“Yep. That’s where they get the baby out of your
tummy without it hurting.”

“Then we’ll bring it home?”

“Yes.” He moved to hug her, but she dodged
him.

“No. The baby belongs in here.” She opened the
door to the tinfoiled room, where every possible surface, including
the crib mattress, had been covered with foil.