Windfalls: A Novel Read online

  But even if she managed to satisfy Rita and find herself a husband, she didn’t like the thought of having to share Melody with someone else. She didn’t want to have to divide her weekends between her daughter and some stranger Melody was supposed to call Dad. She didn’t want to risk changing the way her life was now by trying to make it better. Besides, hadn’t Melody herself just said she’d never leave her in a million years? And even if Melody did change her mind someday, even if she grew up and moved away, wasn’t that all the more reason for Cerise to spend every minute that she could with Melody, right now?

  A WEEK AGO THEY’ D TAKEN A TOUR OF THE LABOR AND DELIVERY WING at the Salish hospital, Anna and Eliot and the other members of their childbirth class shuffling along behind their instructor like curious tourists, all of them shy and awkward and a little awed by the hurrying nurses, the gleaming halls and looming machines. Their childbirth instructor was a crisp, warm woman with a boyish haircut and a waist that seemed to grow smaller with each class meeting. At the end of the hall beyond the nurses’ station, she’d stopped in front of a closed door and waited while her class clustered around her, the women with their lank hair and placid faces, the men looking small and cowed beside their swollen wives.

  “This is our birthing room,” she’d said, motioning to the door behind her. “I’d like for you to be able to see inside, but it’s being used right now. If you want, you’re welcome to stop by later and have a peek.” As she continued talking, Anna’s attention had been drawn from the instructor’s description of the birthing bed to the sound that was coming from behind the closed door. At first it was so low, she wondered if she were really hearing anything at all, but slowly it grew in volume and urgency, increasing until it seemed to fill the hall. It was disturbing and embarrassing, the sound of something mating or someone dying. On and on it went, raw, unceasing, increasingly impossible to ignore as it forced its way through the scrubbed air. A wave of nervous giggles swept the class, and Anna felt hot and dizzy and exposed. Finally, with one last grinding exhalation, the moan had ended, although the echo of it seemed to linger around them like a foul smell.

  Now she was inside that room herself, though it looked more like a medieval torture chamber than the pleasant place the childbirth instructor had described. Its walls were hung with chains and spikes and iron hooks, its floor was blotched with sinister stains, and instead of the oak birthing bed the instructor had mentioned, a rough wooden table dominated the room. Anna didn’t feel any of the symptoms she and Eliot had learned about in their childbirth class, but she knew that she was supposed to be in labor, knew that she was expected to give birth as soon as she could because there were other pregnant women waiting outside the door. Obediently she climbed onto the table and lay back on the rough-hewn boards.

  Hurry, came a voice, either from somewhere inside herself or from somewhere beyond the stone walls of the room. But although she strained her legs and tightened her stomach, she realized she had no idea how to get her body to produce a baby. She raised her head and looked around for Eliot. But the room was empty, and when she opened her mouth to call his name, no sound came out. An answer came to her anyway, from that same disembodied voice that was both her own and that of some distant authority. Forget about Eliot, it said. No one else can do this for you.

  I can’t do it alone, she pleaded. I don’t know how.

  You asked for this, the voice answered dispassionately. You said you wanted it.

  She realized that in order for the baby to be born, she would have to give up some part of her own body—an eye, maybe, or an arm or a leg, or even her head. But though she wanted to do anything that would allow her to leave that room, she couldn’t decide what piece of herself she could bear to lose. I need my whole self, she pleaded. I can’t be a mother if I’m not all there.

  In desperation she clambered off the table and grabbed one of the heavy iron hooks from the wall. Scrambling back up, she lay down again and, ignoring her bulging belly, plunged the hook directly into her heart. The baby can come out here, she thought with satisfaction, stabbing the hook into her chest, hacking herself open, jabbing deeper. She felt no pain, but when she craned her neck to look down at what she had done, she was suddenly appalled by the mess she’d made. A red hole gaped where her heart had been, the meat of it torn and raw and oozing, and she realized with a thickening horror that she would never again be the same.

  She woke with a gasp and a shudder. She was lying on her side like a beached whale, breathing as heavily as though she’d been running up a hill. For a long moment she could still feel the hole in her chest, and she was sick with fright. But slowly that sensation began to yield to the feel of sheets, the press of blankets, the stir of cool night air against her face. A dream, she thought, relief pouring through her like brandy. She opened her eyes, saw the room that had been her bedroom for the last three years and her grandparents’ bedroom for the sixty years before that and felt a surge of gratitude for those uncurtained windows and moonlit walls, for the gift of her intact chest, and the baby still safe inside her, for the warm bulk of her husband next to her on the bed.

  Eliot, she thought, and heard his patient breathing answering her. She turned to face him, heaving herself over like a seal on a dock. Wriggling as close to him as her belly would allow, she tucked his butt into what was left of her lap, bent her knees to fit inside the crook of his, and draped her arm across his chest.

  “Umph,” he groaned.

  “I had a dream,” she said, speaking into the back of his neck.

  Deep in his throat he made a sympathetic noise.

  “I shouldn’t wake you,” she said remorsefully.

  Reaching back, he gave her hip a drowsy pat. “’s good practice,” he mumbled, his voice sticky with sleep.

  “Good practice?”

  “When the baby comes,” he answered vaguely.

  “I couldn’t get it out,” she said.

  “Uh?”

  “The baby. In my dream, I didn’t know how to get it born.” She stopped, and then blurted the thing she’d been afraid to say before. “What if I can’t?”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Can’t have the baby.” She shuddered, remembering the table like a chopping block or a sacrificial altar, remembering the bloody hook.

  “You have the baby already,” Eliot answered, his voice beginning to come into focus.

  “What?”

  Reaching behind him again, he placed his hand on her stomach, rubbed it as though he were polishing a great brass bowl. “The baby’s right here.”

  “I mean, get it born,” she insisted.

  “You’ll do fine.”

  “In my dream I didn’t.” She winced at the whine of fear her voice held.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” He turned to face her, his face a pale shadow in the moonlit room.

  “I guess so, yes.”

  For a moment he was so silent, it seemed to Anna she could hear the hush of the dark fields beyond the house. Then he said, “Remember how well we got that baby into you?”

  “How well we got the baby in?”

  “Last summer? Remember?”

  “Yes, but that’s diff—”

  “Remember?” he said, his voice firm and warm. “On the butte?”

  In the long dusk of a late June day they’d hiked up the western flank of the butte that rose behind the house like an island above the ocean of hills. They’d arranged their quilt so that the whole world seemed to spread out beneath them, green and clean and hazy with evening, and then, as the sunset flared behind the distant mountains, they’d shared a meal of bread and wine and cheese and the garden’s first tomatoes.

  Undressed, their bodies seemed more naked than they ever did inside, both of them pale and vulnerable, ephemeral as flowers. When he entered her, she’d felt the delicious shock of it in every cell. Eliot inside me, she’d marveled, rising up to welcome him. Above them in the darkening sky she could almost see the shimmer of the c
oming stars, could almost feel the little ache of their near-presence. Deeper and deeper inside herself Eliot took her, down into the dark cave of her own being, down to the molten want at her core, down until she’d forgotten the distant fields the deepening shadows the gathering stars forgotten the poke of the weeds beneath the quilt forgotten the sharp stones against her spine the air licking her thighs her toes digging into the earth until in the whole sweet evening it was only the two of them only the one of them and she’d given herself up to that one opened so wide it seemed the whole world came shuddering in I want it all, she’d thought or said or yelled, Everything.

  “Remember?” Eliot asked gently, dangling his fingers along the place where her waist was hidden, tracing the underside of her swelling belly, fitting his palm to hold the curve that held their child.

  She nodded against his chest. She remembered the pure sound of their coming ringing in the twilit air and how, a second later, a robin had cried out as though it were answering them, its voice piercing the evening like the star that was suddenly in the sky above them—the star that had been above them all along.

  “You knew what you were doing then,” he said, running his palm up her thigh. “You knew how to make a baby,” he whispered, bending to lick her nipple. “Of course you’ll know how to do what comes next.”

  She let him nuzzle her breast, let his fingers trail between her legs, inhaled his smell. She ran her tongue along his clavicle, tasted the salt of him, his warm skin. She felt his penis stir against her thigh, and she reached down to cup it in her hand, felt the push and press of it inside her palm. He kissed her, his mouth soft and sleepy-tasting. Inside her the baby kicked and stretched. She felt its head against her cervix, banging that disk of muscle that kept it separate from the outside world. Someone else inside me, she marveled, smiling into Eliot’s kiss. His mouth widened, his smile answering hers. They pulled apart to grin at each other, the baby frolicking between them like a puppy.

  This time when he entered her, the baby grew still, not sleepy but attentive, as though it were soaking their tenderness into its forming bones, squirreling their urgency away inside its brand-new brain, as though it were letting their happiness shape its heart.

  Afterward, as they lay askew in each other’s arms, ebbing slowly back from that astonishing beyond, the baby suddenly roused itself and stretched, one foot jamming Anna’s ribs, its head butting against her cervix so firmly that it nudged Eliot’s softening cock, and, in their laughter, he slipped away.

  “See,” he said, nuzzling her shoulder, “You’ll know exactly what to do.”

  “I hope,” she answered gratefully.

  “I’ll be the one who’s clueless,” he said. “I’ll keep asking everyone where I left my cigars.”

  “Go back to sleep,” she groaned.

  “Okay,” he answered instantly, settling into his pillow. Reaching over to give her belly a last companionable pat, he added, “You, too.”

  But long after Eliot’s breath had grown slow and even, Anna lay awake, thinking over the web of choice and chance that had made her life. She lay awake beside her husband in the farmhouse her great-grandfather had built while her great-grandparents and her grandparents lay in the pioneer cemetery west of Salish, and her baby twisted inside her like a salmon. Memories passed through her with a logic that merged on dream. She remembered the first night she and Eliot had spent together in that room, how bereft she’d been to be there without her grandmother, and yet how satisfied she’d felt, too, to be buying the house that had sheltered her family for so long.

  Low in her abdomen, Anna felt the poke of tiny foot or hand. Pressing her own hand against the spot, she thought of her grandmother’s hands as they had been when Anna saw her last, in the nursing home in Spokane where they’d had to move her in the end. Someone—probably an aide or a volunteer—had painted her grandmother’s nails with pink polish, and in her dementia those dabs of color had puzzled and pleased her. “Will you look at that!” she’d exclaimed over and over again, studying her twisted, pink-tipped fingers as though she couldn’t imagine what they were or where on earth they’d come from.

  The baby gave another leap, and Anna’s memory shifted to Eliot’s hands offering her a glass of wine on the night they met. She saw his ragged hair and his eyes as blue almost as glacial ice, but kind and warm. That was six years ago, at a party Spaulding University had hosted for new faculty. The gathering had been stilted and the wine was sour, but twelve months later they were married, and three years after that they’d moved out to the ranch, and even when the rest of the land had to be sold to settle the estate, it had not really troubled her, because she had Eliot and her work and the family home, because she knew she could never not own that land—not as long as she could see it every day.

  “Perennial wheat,” Eliot had answered that first night when Anna asked him what his research interests were, and she’d been enough of her grandfather’s girl to laugh at the paradox of it, enough of her grandmother’s child to let herself be stirred by its promise. “I work with wheat, too,” she’d answered almost coyly, taking a sip of the bad wine and thinking of her photographs. “But I teach in the art department.”

  “It might take a lifetime,” Eliot had explained later that evening as he walked her back to the apartment she was renting at the edge of campus, “to develop a sustainable strain of perennial wheat. But it would be a life well spent. Right now, every bushel of wheat we harvest costs the earth two bushels of eroded soil. We have to find a way to farm sustainably, or our whole civilization will collapse.” He’d been so ardent, saying that, his voice so clear and sure in the autumn darkness, and something inside her had opened in answer.

  She was still so immersed in her memories that when the first pang came, she hardly noticed it, a tightening that seemed to crawl across her stomach like the squeeze of a blood-pressure cuff, though it eased before it caused her much pain. But later, when she was finally hovering above sleep’s abyss, it came again—this time a groundswell strong enough to send her bobbing back to consciousness like a cork. It’s probably nothing, she thought, pressing her hands against her belly as the last of it ebbed away.

  It was too soon to wake Eliot, but she knew she couldn’t sleep. As quietly as she could, she heaved herself out of bed, slipped her arms into the sleeves of her robe, and pulled it taut across her great belly. She tucked her feet into the slippers that lay scattered on the floor and shuffled across the hall to the room her grandmother had always called the guest room. Standing in the doorway, she could just make out her grandmother’s rocking chair and the antique dresser Sally had refinished for them, its drawers newly stocked with diapers, tiny T-shirts, and thumb-size socks.

  Another contraction caught her, a stronger one. Leaning against the door frame, she tried to let it pour over her, though she felt a little startled by its force. After it receded, she crossed the room to the rocking chair, tugged it in front of the window, and sat down. The moon had set, and the world the window looked out on was utterly dark. She stared at the blackness in front of her, waiting for morning to come or for another contraction to begin while snippets of thoughts continued to flow and eddy inside her.

  In the early-morning darkness, the room she sat in seemed nearly eerie, waiting less for a guest than for a stranger, a person no one on earth had ever met. “Having a baby is exactly like falling in love,” the art department secretary had said at the baby shower last week, and Anna had smiled and nodded and swallowed another forkful of Sally’s lemon cake. But now those words came back to her cloaked in warning. Gazing through the black glass at the featureless cold, she thought of all the wrong ways there were to fall in love. She thought of all the mistakes she’d made before she met Eliot, of all the insight and oversight it took to keep even her good marriage alive, and it struck her yet again how much was at stake, how precarious one small baby made everything. With a shudder she realized that labor might be the easy part.

  You asked for this, th
e voice in her dream had said. You said you wanted it.

  I thought I did, she answered that dream-voice now. But maybe I didn’t know.

  Perhaps a tentative light had begun to seep into the eastern sky. Gazing out the window, she studied the darkness intently, trying to catch the instant when the land first emerged from the night. But, as always, that one moment slipped past her guard. It was impossible to say precisely when the yard and fields appeared, but suddenly there they were—vague shadows in the slowly brightening morning—and before she’d had a chance to appreciate it, the moment she’d been waiting for was gone. It was like standing in the darkroom, watching for the one second when the first shadows stained the blankness of a sheet of paper drifting in the developer tray.

  She felt a little twist of sorrow, thinking of her darkroom. She hadn’t developed a sheet of film or made a print since before she conceived. At first, she’d tried to appease her need to work by exposing film, even though she knew she would have to wait until the baby was weaned before she could develop or print it. But after a while she’d given up. It had been half a year now since she’d even exposed any film, and though she still yearned for the way her work scrubbed and sharpened her, the way it left her open and awake and made her whole life feel valuable and right, she had also begun to wonder if, once the baby was finally weaned, she would have the time to teach and be a mother and make photographs, too. Sometimes that question made her feel vaguely desperate, as if she, too, were trapped inside her womb, though at other times it was almost appealing to think that her life could be complete without the work of making art.

  Outside, the light was returning more and more texture to the world. Earlier in the week there’d been a Chinook wind, and now the land the dawn revealed was bare of snow. Down in the yard her grandmother’s dormant roses huddled like heaps of sticks beneath their blankets of cold straw. Across the raw hills Anna could make out the merest mist of green—the billion tiny blades of winter wheat waiting to be woken by the longer light of spring. Her grandmother had once longed to let that wheat grow through her bones, and now, looking out on the strengthening morning, Anna remembered how learning of her grandmother’s loss had given her a way to face her own.