Barbara Kingsolver (14 page)

“Okay,” I said, feeling happy. I was sure no other man I’d ever known would have concerned himself with what animals dream about. “I’m going to sleep now, and I’ll give you a report.” I settled my head back down on his chest. His heartbeat moved faintly against my ear as I looked out across the ground. I saw my silver earring gleaming in the grass.

H
is name is gone. He understands that this is his
own fault. He took a pen to paper and changed it, canceled his ancestors, and now his grandchild—Codi’s child—has been erased like something in writing too, rather than flesh and blood. He knows she’s no longer carrying it. He’s aware of the signs.

The red darkroom light burns like a dying sun, very old: red dwarfs, they call them when they reach that stage. He sometimes reads astronomy now, when he can’t sleep. But at this moment, outside this sealed room, it’s daytime. He considers carefully the time of day and of year, and his daughters’ ages, a ritual he performs a dozen times daily to keep himself rooted in time. That was nearly twenty years ago, when Codi lost the baby. He has photographed the eyes of so many babies. He gets lost among years now, the way he used to lose track when he sat in the dark movie theater for too many hours. He has always loved the dark.

The liquid feels cool on his hands, though it’s a chemical bath, not particularly good for the elasticity of human skin. He should use the Piper forceps from the kitchen, but he has misplaced them. He
moves the photograph into the fixative and stares at the lines. And frowns. They are a precise copy of what the real world offered his camera, and nothing more: the branched shadow of a cane cholla falling across a square of pale, cracked ground. He found the image while walking in the arroyo, and immediately saw the illusion he could draw out of it: a river in the desert. He’d seen exactly this sight, in aerial view. It was years ago, in wartime—they had taken him in a small plane over the bombing range near Yuma; a soldier lay wounded out there and couldn’t be moved. They flew the quickest route, over the Algodones dunes, a dead ocean of undulating sand. The pilot said it was harder to fly over dunes on a hot day than through a tornado; the plane shuddered until its rivets creaked. Then suddenly they were over the Colorado River agricultural plain. He marveled, feeling lucky as a spaceman. Surely no one had ever seen this amazing sight, a complex river fretted with canals cutting an unearthly path through the bone-dry land.

He can’t remember the wounded soldier. He closes his eyes and tries, but he can’t. Possibly some chest wound, a punctured lung? No, he can’t bring the soldier back. But he remembers the vision of that water. He gently agitates the photograph in its stop bath, lost in technical possibilities. He knows there must be a way to transfigure this cactus shadow into that other vision, which no longer exists outside his mind. All his photographs begin in his memory. That is the point. He might be the only man on earth who can photograph the past.

He stops suddenly, feeling a presence outside the door.

“Codi?” He listens. “I’m printing, it will be a few more minutes. Codi, are you there?” He hears nothing. It’s a Monday morning, she can’t be here. She’s teaching school. He drops the print into the fixer, annoyed, and goes back to the enlarger to try again. He should lock that door to guard against accidents. What a shock that would be to the girls, a locked door. They have always had rules about this; a closed door is a sacred thing. Privacy is respected. There is no call for bolted doors in the Noline household. But she still locked him
out—she was in the bathroom that night for more than four hours. When he walked by he could see that the upper bolt was turned. She’d gone in right after dinner. There are rules about this.

“Codi?”

He listens again, but there is no sound at all.

He knocks. “I just want to know that you’re all right.”

“I’m all right.”

She is crying softly. “I can hear that you’re crying,” he says. “Your sister is concerned. You could just tell us what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just a crybaby. You’re always telling me I’m a crybaby, so you’re right.”

That isn’t true, he doesn’t use that word. He tells them they should try to be grown-up girls. But he hasn’t needed to tell them that for years.

In another minute she calls out quietly, “Is Hallie out there? I need to talk to her.”

Hallie is in her room, reading. She doesn’t seem especially concerned; Codi has been so moody of late that Hallie leaves her alone. They don’t argue but there is a new distance between them. A gulf. Codi crossed over into adolescence, leaving Hallie behind for the time being. They both seem lost. All three of them, really: a marooned family, shipwrecked on three separate islands. Before, when the girls were close, he worried about what would happen when they lost each other. Now they have.

“Hallie.” He stands in the doorway to their room and repeats her name quietly. “Hallie.” She is reading in poor light, ruining her eyes. She looks up, her eyes nearly marble-white under the small, high-intensity lamp above her bed.

“Your sister has asked for you. Can you please find out what she needs?”

She puts her open book face down on the bed and gets up without a word. The two of them confer through the bathroom door. He tries to hear their whispers from the kitchen. He sees that Codi is not letting her in.

“The black one. That old one that was mother’s.”

Hallie is gone for only a minute, then comes back. “I can’t find it. I got your green jacket.”

“No!” Codi says something else that he can’t hear. He washes the cast-iron skillet and sets it on the stove on low heat, to drive out the moisture. He goes into the living room, where he can’t see but can hear better. Hallie glances up as he walks past her in the hall, and she lowers her voice.

“Why do you have to have that exact sweater, Codi? Are you going outside? It’s not even cold.”

“Just bring me the black sweater. I mean it, Hallie, find it. It’s in the bottom of one of my drawers.”

After a long while Hallie comes back with it. He hears the bolt slide back, then lock again; the door was not open even for a full second. Hallie returns to her reading.

In another fifteen minutes he hears scrubbing. She is cleaning the floor. The toilet has flushed more than two dozen times. There are rules concerning all of these things.

Much later he watches without lamplight from the living room. The house is dark. Her curtain of hair falls as she leans out, looking down toward the kitchen. She comes out. The small bundle in her arms she carries in the curl of her upper body, her spine hunched like a dowager’s, as if this black sweater weighed as much as herself. When he understands what she has, he puts his knuckle to his mouth to keep from making a sound. Quiet as a cat she has slipped out the kitchen door.

He follows her down to the arroyo. She takes the animal path that cuts steeply down the bank. Round volcanic boulders flank her, their surfaces glowing like skin in the moonlight. She is going down to the same dry river where they nearly drowned ten years ago, in the flood. This tributary carved out Tortoise Canyon; it would be the Tortoise River if it had a name, but it never runs. It did years ago when he was a boy, hiking these banks to escape his mother’s pot-black kitchen, but now it does not run except during storms. The land around Grace is drying up.

He stands a hundred yards away from Codi, above her, in the shadow of cottonwood trees. She has reached the spot where the rock bank gives over to the gravel and silt of riverbed. Even in the semi-dark there is a clear demarcation where the vegetation changes. She stoops down into the low acacias and he can see nothing but her back to him, her bent spine through the sleeveless cotton blouse. It is a small white square, like a handkerchief. In better light he could photograph it and make it into that, or into a sheet on a clothesline. It’s shaking just exactly that way, like a forgotten sheet left out in a windstorm. She stays kneeling there for a long time being whipped like that.

Then her head pushes up through the fringe of acacias and she moves toward him, her face shining beautifully with its own privacy of tears. He sees how deeply it would hurt her if she understood what he knows: that his observations have stolen the secrets she chose not to tell. She is a child with the dignity of an old woman. He moves back up through the cottonwoods and into the house, into his workroom. He can’t know who she has buried down there but he can mark the place for her. At least he can do that. To save it from animals. Before he goes to bed he’ll cover it with a pile of stones, the heaviest he can move.

He pretends for a long time to be busy in his workroom, periodically coming out to feign a need in the kitchen. Where has he put the Piper forceps? Codi is emptied out and exhausted and still stays up half the night doing homework. Six volumes of the
Britannica
lie open on the kitchen table; she states that she is doing a report on the marsupial mammals.

So many times he comes close to speaking, but the sentences take absurd forms in his mind: “I notice that you’ve been pregnant for the last six months. I meant to talk with you about this earlier.” He would sell his soul to back up the time, but even if he could do that, could begin where he chose, he can’t locate the point where it would have been safe to start. Not ten weeks ago, or ten years. If he has failed his daughters he’s failed them uniformly. For their whole lives, since Alice died, they’ve been too far away to touch. It’s as if
she pulled them with her through a knothole halfway into the other world, and then at the last minute left them behind, two babies stranded together in this stone cold canyon.

He can’t think of anything more to do in the kitchen, and she’s still working. There are dark depressions under her eyes, like thumbprints on her white face. She tells him she has a headache, asks for aspirin, and he goes immediately to the closet where he keeps the medications. He stands for a long time staring at the bottles and thinking. Aspirin would increase the bleeding, if she’s still hemorrhaging, which is likely from the look of her. But he would know if she were in danger, he tells himself. It was probably uncomplicated as stillbirths go; it would have been extremely small even at six months. She is so malnourished, he could have predicted toxemia, even placenta abruptio. He continues to stare into the closet, tapping a finger against his chin. He can’t even give her Percodan—it contains aspirin. Demerol. That, for the pain, and something else for the cramping. What? He wishes he could give her a shot of Pitocin, but doesn’t see how he can.

He returns to the kitchen and hands her the pills with a glass of water. Four pills, two yellow and two blue, when she’s only asked for aspirin, but she swallows them without comment, one after another, without looking up from her books. This much she’ll take from him. This is the full measure of love he is qualified to dispense.

He bends down again
over the developer bath, his face so near the chemicals that his eyes water. The picture slowly gives up its soul to him as it lies in the pan, like someone drowned at the bottom of a pool. It’s still the same: plain shadows on dust. Damn. What he is trying for is the luminous quality that water has, even dark water seen from a distance. There is a surface on it he just can’t draw out of these dry shadows.

He straightens up, his eyes still running, and pats his pockets for his handkerchief. He locates it finally in the wrong pocket and blows his nose. He has manipulated this photograph in every possible way,
and none of it has yielded what he wants. He sees now that the problem isn’t in the development; the initial conception was a mistake. He fails in the darkroom so seldom that it’s hard for him to give up, but he does. For once he lets go of the need to work his will. He clicks off the old red dwarf and turns on the bright overhead light, and the unfixed prints lying in the bath all darken to black. It doesn’t matter. The truth of that image can’t be corrected.

O
n the last Monday of October Rita Cardenal
made three announcements to the class: she was quitting school, this was her last day, and if anybody wanted her fetal pig they could have it, it was good as new.

We’d plowed right through the animal kingdom in record time, having had nothing to look at in the way of protozoans. We’d made a couple of trips back to the river and had given due attention to the amphibians and Mr. Bad Fish, whose glass home grew more elaborate with each field trip and was now called the Frog Club Med. There were fern palm trees and a mossy golf green, and the frogs obligingly did high-impact aerobics all over everything. Now we were up to exploring the inner mysteries of an unborn mammal, which had to be purchased mail order.

But Rita hadn’t had the stomach to cut into hers, and I couldn’t blame her, all things considered. She was expecting twins. She said she was dropping out because she felt too tired to get her homework done; I feared for these children’s future.

Rita wore about half a dozen earrings in one ear and had a tough-cookie attitude, and I liked her. She’d been a good student. She seemed sorry to go but also resigned to her fate, in that uniquely teenage way of looking at life, as if the whole production were a thing inflicted on young people by some humorless committee of grownups with bad fashion sense. I was disappointed but unsurprised to lose Rita. I’d been watching her jeans get tight. The pregnancy dropout rate in Grace was way ahead of motor-vehicle accidents, as a teenage hazard. Rita was a statistic. On Tuesday I made my own announcement: we were doing an unscheduled unit on birth control.

The reaction in the ranks was equal parts embarrassment and amazement. You’d think I’d suggested orgies in study hall. There was some hysteria when I got to the visual aids. “Look, there’s nothing funny about a condom,” I said, pretending to be puzzled by their laughter. “It’s a piece of equipment with a practical purpose, like a…” Only the most unfortunate analogies came to mind. Shower cap. Tea cozy. “Like a glove,” I said, settling for the cliché. I turned from the blackboard and narrowed my eyes. “If you think this thing is funny, you should see the ridiculous-looking piece of equipment it fits over.” The guys widened their eyes at each other but shut up. I was getting the hang of this.

“Miss,” said Raymo. They’d never learned to call me Codi.

“What is it?”

“You’re gonna get busted for this.”

I finished my diagram, which looked somewhat more obscene than I would have liked. I brushed my chalk-dusty hands on my jeans and hopped up to sit on the tall lab bench that served as my desk. “I know some of your parents might not be too thrilled about this field of study,” I said, thinking it over. “I didn’t get permission from the school board. But I think we’d better take a chance. It’s important.”

“Okay then, tell us something we don’t know,” said Connie Muñoz, who had even more holes punched in her left ear than Rita. I wondered if this was some kind of secret promiscuity index.

“Shut up, Connie!” said Marta. (Pearl studs, one per earlobe.) “My dad would kill me if he thought I knew this stuff.”

“What you
do
is between you and your dad,” I said. “Or not. Whatever. But what you
know
is my business. Obviously you don’t need to put everything you know into practice, just like you don’t have to go spraying the fire extinguisher around because you know how to use it. But if your house is already on fire, kiddos, I don’t want you burning down with it just because nobody ever taught you what was what.”

Raymo shook his head slowly and said again, “Busted.” He drew the laugh he wanted.

“You know what, Raymo?” I asked, tapping a pencil thoughtfully against my teeth.

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter a whole lot what the school board thinks.” This dawned on me forcefully as I said it. I understood this power: telling off my boss at the 7-Eleven, for example, two days before I left Tucson. The invulnerability of the transient. “There’s nobody else to teach this course,” I said. “And I only have a one-year contract, which I wasn’t planning on renewing anyway. I’m not even a real teacher. I’ve just got this provisional certification deal. So that’s the way it is. We’re studying the reproductive system of higher mammals. If I’m offending anybody’s religion or moral turpitude here, I apologize, but please take notes anyway because you never know.”

They were completely quiet, but toward the end of the day you really can’t tell what that means. It could be awe or brain death, the symptoms are identical.

“Miss?” It was Barbara, a tall, thin, shy student (ears unpierced), whose posture tried always to atone for her height. She’d latched onto me early in the semester, as if she’d immediately sniffed out my own high-school persona. “You aren’t coming back next year?”

“Nope,” I said. “I’m outta here, just like a senior. Only difference between you and me is I don’t get a diploma.” I gave them an apologetic smile, meant for Barbara especially. “It’s nothing personal. That’s just my
modus operandi
.”

The kids blinked at this, no doubt wondering if it was a Latin name they needed to write down.

“Your
modus operandi
is the way you work,” I said. “It’s what you leave behind when you split the scene of a crime.”

At Grace High
I taught Biology I, Biology II, two study halls, and I also pinch-hit an algebra class for a fellow teacher who was frequently absent on account of a tricky pregnancy. My favorite class was Biology II, my seniors—Raymo and Marta and Connie Muñoz and Barbara—but on that day I had a mission and didn’t discriminate among souls. I gave everybody the lecture on baby prevention. Barbara, who was in my study hall and also in the algebra class, got to hear it three times, poor child, and I imagine she was the least in need.

It surprised me as much as the kids, this crusade, and I suspected my motives; what did I care if the whole class had twins? More likely I wanted to be sure of a terminal contract. After the last bell rang I erased the blackboard and stood for a minute sharing the quiet with the bones of my Illinois compatriot, Mrs. Josephine Nash. Our day was over. She gave me her silent, wide-jawed smile. Here was a resident of Grace who had never hurt me in childhood, didn’t make me rack my memory for her name (she wore it on her pelvis), had thrown no spitballs at me nor asked for extra credit, and didn’t suggest that I belonged in Paris, France, or a rock ’n’ roll band.

From the back of the room I could hear the frogs clicking against the sides of their terrarium, constant as a clock: up and down, up and down, exposing soft white bellies. This time next year there would not even be fish or frogs in the river; these particular representatives of the animal kingdom were headed for extinction. Whoever taught this class would have to write Carolina Biological Supply and order those stiff preserved frogs that smell of formaldehyde, their little feet splayed like hands and their hearts exposed.

I stood over the terrarium and peered down into it from above, like a god. The fish hung motionless in its small lake. Droplets of
condensation were forming on the underside of the glass top. Getting ready to rain in there. I’d grown fond of this miniature world, along with the kids, and had added my own touches: a clump of bright red toadstools that popped up in Emelina’s courtyard, and a resurrection fern from the cliff behind my house. The terrarium was like a time capsule. I think everybody was trying to save little bits of Grace.

I slid the glass to one side, hating to disrupt the ecosystem but needing to feed the fish. The humid smells of mud and moss came up to meet my nose, and I thought of Hallie in the tropics. What would she do about these troubles if she were here? Well, stay, for one thing, whereas I wouldn’t. I had come here with some sense of its being the end of the line, maybe in a positive way, but I found I had no claim on Grace. Seeing it as “home” was a hopeful construction, fake, like the terrarium. I’d deal with Doc Homer insofar as that was possible in one year, and then I’d rejoin Carlo, or think about another research job; I had no specifics in mind. My future was mapped in negatives. Next year I could be anywhere but here.

I’d told Hallie about my bold, ridiculous little deposition on the pH of the river, and a few days later I’d had to follow up with the news of the river’s getting dammed—questions of pH being entirely academic. I felt humiliated. Eventually she wrote back to say: “Think of how we grew up. You can’t live through something like that, and not take risks now. There’s no getting around it.” She was admonishing me, I guess. I should have more loyalty to my hometown. I wasn’t brave; I was still trying to get around it. A good citizen of the nation in love with forgetting. I pelleted the surface of the water with goldfish flakes. In nature there are animals that fight and those that flee; I was a flighty beast. Hallie seemed to think I’d crossed over—she claimed I was the one who’d once wanted to dig in and fight to save the coyote pups. Emelina thought I’d been ringleader in campaigns to save stewing hens. In my years of clear recall there was no such picture. When Hallie and I lived in Tucson, in the time of the refugees, she would stay up all night rubbing the backs of people’s hands and holding their shell-shocked babies. I couldn’t.
I would cross my arms over my chest and go to bed. Later, after my second year of med school, I’d been able to address their external wounds but no more than that.

The people of Grace would soon be refugees too, turned out from here like pennies from a pocket. Their history would dissolve as families made their separate ways to Tucson or Phoenix, where there were jobs. I tried to imagine Emelina’s bunch in a tract house, her neighbors all keeping a nervous eye on the color coordination of her flowerbeds. And my wonderfully overconfident high-school kids being swallowed alive by city schools where they’d all learn to walk like Barbara, suffering for their small-town accents and inadequate toughness. It was easy to be tough enough in Grace.

Well, at least they’d know how to use condoms. I could give them that to carry through life. I settled the glass lid back over the terrarium and turned out the lights. I would be long gone before the ruination of Grace; I had a one-year contract. Now I’d made sure of it.

Rita Cardenal called me
up on the phone. She hesitated for a second before speaking. “I don’t think your old man has all his tires on the road.”

“It’s possible.” I sat down in my living-room chair and waited for her to go on.

“Did you tell him about me? About dropping out?”

“Rita, no. I wouldn’t do that.”

Silence. She didn’t believe me. To Rita we were both authority figures—but at least she’d called. “My father and I aren’t real close,” I said. “I go up to see him every week, but we don’t exactly talk.” A pregnant teen could surely buy that.

“Well, then, he’s got a slightly major problem.”

“What did he do?”

“He just sorta went imbalanced. I went in for my five-mouth checkup? And he said the babies were too little, but he was all kind of normal and everything?” She paused. “And then all of a sudden
he just loses it and gets all creeped and makes this major scenario.
Yelling
at me.”

“What did he say?”

“Stuff. Like, that I had to eat better and he was going to make sure I did. He said he wasn’t going to let me go
out of the house
till I shaped up. It was like he just totally went mental. He was using that tape measure thing to measure my stomach and then he just puts it down and there’s tears in his eyes and he puts his hands on my shoulders and kind of pulls me against his chest. He goes, ‘We have to talk about this. Do you have any idea what’s inside of you?’ I got creeped out.”

I felt dizzy. There was a long pause.

“Miss? Codi?”

“Rita, I’m really sorry. What can I tell you? He’s losing his mind. He’s got a disease that makes him confused. I think he was really just trying to do his job, but he got mixed up about what was the appropriate way to talk to you.”

“I heard that. That he had that disease where you go cuckoo and turn back into a baby.”

“Well, that’s not quite the way I’d put it, but it’s true. Occasionally rumors are true.”

“Is it true you’re really a doctor?”

I looked out my east window at the wall of red rock that rose steeply behind the house. “No,” I said. “That isn’t true. Did he tell you that?”

“No.” She paused. “Well, yeah. He said something a real long time ago, that you were in medical school or something. But not this last time. I heard it from somebody else, that you’re a doctor and Doc Homer’s dying and you’re going to take over.”

“Take over?”

“Take over being the doctor for Grace. They said you already saved that baby down at Doña Althea’s restaurant.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ.”

“Look, people say stuff, okay?” Rita said. “This town is full of major mouths. It’s just what I heard.”

“I’m only here till the end of the school year, so you can tell whoever’s spreading that gossip they’re full of shit.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

I regretted snapping at Rita. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not your fault. I’m not used to living in a place where everybody’s into everybody else’s business.”

“It’s the bottom level, isn’t it? My mom found out I was pregnant from a lady that works at the bank. Mom goes, ‘What is the date today?’ and the lady goes, ‘The fourteenth. Your daughter will be due around Valentine’s Day, won’t she? I had a baby on Valentine’s Day.’” Rita paused for my opinion.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s the bottom level.”

“Uh-huh. Mom told me after that she had to tear up three checks in a row before she could make one out right. Like that was
my
fault.”

I set out to find
Doc Homer the minute I hung up the phone, but it took me a long time to track him down, and my energy for drama kind of petered out. First I went to his office in the basement of the old hospital, up on the plateau—it was four o’clock on a Wednesday and he should have been there. But Mrs. Quintana said he’d gone downtown to check on old Mr. Moreno’s oxygen machine because it was making a noise, and then he was going to stop at the grocery to pick up some pork chops. It had been half an hour so I figured I’d catch him if I skipped Mr. Moreno and went straight to the grocery, but I got there too late. The grocer, Mrs. Campbell, said he had come there
first
, having forgotten he needed to go to Mr. Moreno’s. He’d stood for six or eight minutes in canned goods, as if lost, and then it came to him. Mrs. Campbell told me this with a sort of indulgent wink, as if he were Einstein or something and you could forgive it. He’d left for the Moreno’ house, but first was going next door to the pharmacy to pick up Mr. Moreno’s emphysema medication. I skipped the pharmacy and headed for the bright pink Moreno house, thinking
I’d catch him as he came out and we could walk together back up the long hill, past the hospital, to his house. So the war on germs in Grace was being waged by a man who got lost in fruit cocktail. There was a clinic in Morse, just across the state line, and according to Mrs. Quintana a lot of people now drove over there. Disloyally, she had implied; she adored my father. She noted primly that they’d have problems with their state insurance forms.