Ashes (20 page)

Because silence crowded this room like death
crowded a coffin. Even though Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven"
jittered forth from the bedroom radio across the hall, even though
the soap opera's music director was sustaining a tense organ chord,
even though Katie's heart was rivaling John Bonham's bass beat,
this room was owned by silence. The absence of sound hit Katie like
a tidal wave, slapped her about the face, crushed the wind from her
lungs. It smothered her.

It accused her.

She could still see the impressions that the
four crib legs had made in the carpet. Peter had taken apart the
crib while she was still in the hospital, trundled it off to some
charity. He'd wanted to remove as many reminders as possible, so
she could more quickly forget. But the one thing he couldn't remove
was the memory that was burned into her eyes.

And any time, like now, that
she cared to try for
utterly
, all she had to do was pull
the vision from somewhere behind her eyelids, rummage in that dark
mental closet with its too-flimsy lock. All those nights of coming
in this room, bending over, smiling in anticipation of that sinless
face with its red cheeks, sniffing to see if the diaper were a one
or a two, reaching to feel the small warmth.

And then the rest of it.

Amanda pale. Amanda's skin far too cool.
Amanda not waking, ever.

Katie blinked away the memory and left the
room, so blinded by tears that she nearly ran into the doorjamb.
She closed the door behind her, softly, because silence was golden
and sleeping babies didn't cry. Her tears hadn't dried by the time
Peter came home.

He took one look at her, then set his
briefcase by the door as if it were fireman's gear and he might
have to douse the flames of a stock run. "You were in there again,
weren't you?"

She stared ahead, thanking God for
television. The greatest invention ever for avoiding people's eyes.
Now if only the couch would swallow her.

"I'm going to buy a damned deadbolt for that
room," he said, going straight to the kitchen for the martini
waiting in the freezer. Mixed in the morning to brace himself for
the effort of balancing vermouth and gin all evening. He made his
usual trek from the refrigerator to the computer, sat down, and was
booted up before he spoke again.

"You shouldn't be doing this to yourself," he
said.

Julia debated thumbing up the volume on the
television remote. No. That would only make him yell louder. Let
him lose himself in his online trading.

"How was your day?" she asked.

"Somewhere between suicide and murder," he
said. "The tech stocks fell off this afternoon. Had clients reaming
out my ear over the phone."

"They can't blame you for things that are out
of your control," she said. She didn't understand how the whole
system worked, people trading bits of paper and hope, all of it
seeming remote from the real world and money.

"Yeah, but they pay me to know," Peter said,
the martini already two-thirds vanished, his fingers going from
keyboard to mouse and back again. "Any idiot can guess or play a
hunch. But I'm supposed to outperform the market."

"I'm going to paint the nursery."

"Damn. SofTech dropped another three
points."

Peter used to bring Amanda down in the
mornings, have her at his feet while he caught up on the overnight
trading in Japan. He would let Katie have an extra half-hour's
sleep. But the moment Amanda started crying, Peter would hustle her
up the stairs, drop her between Katie's breasts, and head back to
the computer. "Can't concentrate with her making that racket," was
one of his favorite sayings.

Katie suddenly pictured one of those
"dial-and-say" toys, where you pulled the string and the little
arrow spun around. If Peter had made the toy, it would stop on a
square and give one of his half-dozen patented lines: "You
shouldn't be doing this to yourself" or "Just put it behind you and
move on" or "We can always try again later, when you're over
it."

"I was reading an article today," she said.
"It said SIDS could be caused by—"

"I told you to stop with those damned
parenting magazines."

SIDS could be caused by several things.
Linked to smoking, bottle feeding, stomach-sleeping, overheating.
Or nothing at all. There were reports of mothers whose babies had
simply stopped breathing while being held.

Sometimes babies died for no apparent reason,
through nobody's fault. The doctors had told her so a dozen
times.

Then why couldn't she put it behind her?

Because Amanda had Katie's eyes. Even dead,
even swaddled under six feet of dirt, even with eyelids
butterfly-stitched in eternal slumber, those eyes stared through
the earth and sky and walls to pierce Katie. They peeked in dreams
and they blinked in those long black stretches of insomnia and they
peered in from the windows of the house.

Those begging, silent eyes.

The eyes that, on dark nights when Peter was
sound asleep, watched from the nursery.

No, Katie, that's no way to think. Babies
don't come back, not when they're gone. Just think of her as
SLEEPING.

Katie changed channels. Wheel of Fortune.
Suitably vapid. Peter's fingers clicked over some keys, another
fast-breaking deal.

She glanced at him, his face bright from the
glow of the computer screen. He didn't look like a millionaire.
Neither did she. But they were, or soon would be. As soon as the
insurance money came in.

She almost hated Peter for that. Always
insuring everything to the max. House, cars, people. They each had
million-dollar life policies, and he'd insisted on taking one out
for Amanda.

"It's not morbid," he'd said. "Think of it as
life's little lottery tickets."

And even with the million due any day now,
since the medical examiner had determined that the death was
natural, Peter still had to toy with those stocks. As addicted as
any slot-machine junkie. He'd scarcely had time for sorrow. He
hadn't even cried since the funeral.

But then, Peter knew how to get over it, how
to put it behind him.

"I'm going up," she said. "I'm tired."

"Good, honey. You should get some rest." Not
looking away from the screen.

Katie went past him, not stooping for a kiss.
He'd hardly even mentioned the million.

She went up the stairs, looked at the door to
the nursery. She shuddered, went into the bedroom, and turned off
the radio. A faint hissing filled the sonic void, like air leaking
from a tire. The monitor.

She could have sworn she'd turned it off.
Peter would be angry if he knew she'd been listening in on the
nursery again. But Peter was downstairs. The silence from the empty
room couldn't bother him.

Only her. She sat on the bed and listened for
the cries that didn't come, for the tiny coos that melted a
mother's heart, for the squeals that could mean either delight or
hunger. Amanda. A month old. So innocent.

And Katie, so guilty. The doctors said it
wasn't her fault, but what did they know? All they saw were blood
tests, autopsy reports, charts, the evidence after the fact. They'd
never held the living, breathing Amanda in their arms.

The medical examiner had admitted that crib
death was a "diagnosis of exclusion." A label they stuck on the
corpse of a baby when no other cause was found. She tried not to
think of the ME in the autopsy room, running his scalpel down the
line of Amanda's tiny chest.

Katie stood, her heart pounding. Had that
been a cry? She strained to hear, but the monitor only vomited its
soft static. Its accusing silence.

She switched off the monitor, fingers
trembling.

If she started hearing
sounds now, little baby squeaks, the rustle of small blankets, then
she might start screaming and never stop. She might go
utterly
, beyond the reach
of those brightly colored pills the doctors had prescribed. She got
under the blankets and buried her head beneath the
pillows.

Peter came up after an hour or so. He
undressed without speaking, slid in next to her, his body cold. He
put an arm around her.

"Honey?" he whispered. "You awake?"

She nodded in the darkness.

"SofTech closed with a gain." His breath
reeked of alcohol, though his speech wasn't slurred.

"Good for you, honey," she whispered.

"I know you've been putting off talking about
it, but we really need to."

Could she? Could she finally describe the
dead hollow in her heart, the horror of a blue-skinned baby, the
monstrous memory of watching emergency responders trying to
resuscitate Amanda?

"Do we have to?" she asked. She choked on
tears that wouldn't seep from her eyes.

"Nothing will bring her back." He paused, the
wait made larger by the silence. "But we still need to do something
about the money."

Money. A million dollars against the life of
her child.

He hurried on before she could get mad or
break down. "We really should invest it, you know. Tech stocks are
a little uneven right now, but I think they're going to skyrocket
in the next six months. We might be able to afford to move out of
the city."

She stiffened and turned away from him.

"Christ, Katie. You really should put it
behind you."

"That article on SIDS," she said. "There's a
link between smog levels and sudden infant death."

"You're going to make yourself crazy if you
keep reading that stuff," he said. "Sometimes, things just happen."
He caressed her shoulder. "We can always try again later, you
know."

She responded with silence, a ten-ton
nothingness that could crush even the strongest flutters of hope.
Peter eventually gave up, his hand sliding from her shoulder, and
was soon snoring.

Katie awoke at three, in the dead stillness
of night. A mother couldn't sleep through the crying of her baby.
As she had so many nights after the birth, she dragged herself out
of bed and went to the nursery. They should have put the crib in
their bedroom, but Peter said they'd be okay with the monitor
on.

Katie's breasts had quit leaking over a week
ago, but now they ached with longing. She closed her robe over them
and went into the hall, quietly so that Peter could get his sleep.
She opened the door and saw the eyes. The small eyes burned bright
with hunger, need, love, loss. Questions.

Katie went to them in the dark, and leaned
over the crib. The small mouth opened, wanting air. The light
flared on, stealing her own breath.

"What are you doing in here?" Peter said.

"I . . . couldn't sleep." She looked down at
the empty carpet, at the small marks where the crib legs had
rested.

Maybe if she cried.

"We should paint this room," Peter said.

She went to him, sagged against his chest as
he hugged her. After she was through sobbing, he led her to the
bedroom. He fell asleep again, but she couldn't. Behind her eyelids
lived that small, gasping mouth and those two silent, begging
eyes.

As she listened to the rhythm of Peter's
breathing, she recalled the line from that movie, the cop thriller
that they'd gone to see when she was seven months' pregnant. The
tough plainclothes detective, who looked like a budget Gene
Hackman, had said, "There's only two ways to get away with murder:
kill yourself, or put a plastic bag over a baby's head."

What a horrible thing to
say
, she'd thought at the time. Only a jerk
Hollywood writer would come up with something like that, so callous
and thoughtless. Peter had later apologized for suggesting the
movie.

"Is it really true?" she'd asked. "About the
plastic bag?"

"Who knows?" he'd said. "I guess they do
research when they write those things. Just forget about it."

Sure. She'd put that behind her, too. She
wondered if Peter had been able to forget it.

He had taken out the insurance policy for
Amanda a week after her birth. Peter had always wanted to be a
millionaire. That's why he played the market. He wanted to hit one
jackpot in his life.

She turned on the lamp and studied Peter's
face.

Amanda had some of his features. The arch of
the eyebrows, the fleshy earlobes, the small chin. But Amanda's
eyes had been all Katie. When those silent eyes looked imploringly
out from Katie's memory, it was like looking into a mirror.

Katie shuddered and blinked away the vision
of that small stare. She pressed her face against the pillow,
mimicking a suffocation. No. She wouldn't be able to smother
herself.

She wrestled with the sheets. Peter was
sweating, even though he wore only pajama bottoms. She pulled the
blanket from him. He sleepily tugged back, oblivious.

She must have fallen asleep, dreamed. Amanda
at the window, brushing softly against the screen. Katie rising
from the bed, pressing her face against the cold glass. Amanda
floating in the night, eyes wide, flesh blue, lips moving in
senseless baby talk. The sounds muffled by the plastic bag over her
head.

When Katie awoke, Peter was in the bathroom,
getting ready for work. He was humming. He was an ace at putting
things behind him. You'd scarcely have known that he'd lost a
daughter.

Why couldn't she show an equally brave
face?

She made her morning trek into the nursery.
No crib, no Amanda. The books were dead on the shelves, words for
nobody. The toys were dusty.

"I'm going to stop by on my way home and pick
up a couple of gallons of paint," Peter said from the doorway. He
put his toothbrush back in his mouth.

"Was she ever real?" Katie asked.

"Shhh," Peter mumbled around the toothbrush.
"It's okay, honey. It wasn't your fault."