Bloodchild (15 page)

"No. I think I'll just go lay down now, Mother. Don't be angry."

"I'm not angry, Dana. Far from it. Of course, if you're tired… We'll have a good talk in the morning, and I'll be with you when you go to see the doctor."

"Thank you. You're so sweet. I'm lucky to have you around, I know."

"You don't have to thank me, honey. Just let me help you."

Dana nodded. They embraced again and then started out of the baby's room. Dana looked back once before closing the door partway.

"Sure you don't want anything?" Jillian asked.

"No, nothing, thank you. I'll just try to read for a while and then get some rest."

"Okay. I'll be nearby if you need anything. Just shout."

"Thanks, Mom."

They kissed again and Jillian watched her go into her bedroom. She looked back at the baby's room and then went downstairs.

Colleen looked up immediately when she entered.

"She's going to read a little and then sleep," Jillian said.

"What about…"

"She was angry at first, upset that we would think she would hide such a thing, but she calmed down quickly."

"And the baby?"

"Nothing," Jillian said. "Thank God about that."

"What do you mean?"

"You must have imagined it, honey. I saw the sheet myself. No stains. Nothing."

"That's what I thought the first time, but this was different. I saw something between the baby's lips," Colleen said.

Jillian just stared at her. "I don't know. Sometimes, when you look at something bright and then look away, an image stays on your retina. Something like that… I read it somewhere," Jillian said after a moment.

"I didn't look at anything bright. I touched it too," Colleen added. "I know I did."

"Well, all I can tell you, Colleen, is that there was no stain, and I must admit that the baby did look fine to me. My God," Jillian said, shaking her head, "this has all given me quite a headache. I think I'm going to follow Dana's lead and go to bed. I'll take a couple of aspirins."

"I'm sorry," Colleen said. "I didn't think I imagined it."

"It's all right. Forget it for now. She is riding on quite an emotional roller coaster. One minute she's nasty and tight-lipped, and the next she's crying and kissing me. We'll see how it goes after the doctor visit." Jillian looked around a moment and then smiled. "Good night, honey."

" 'Night," Colleen said in a small voice. She watched Jillian go off, and then she got up and put out the kitchen light. She started for the stairway herself, then stopped abruptly in the hallway.

Why it should occur to her to do this, she did not know. She only knew that she had to see for herself. In the upstairs hallway, right next to the upstairs bathroom, there was a small cabinet door that opened on a metal shaft. They could drop dirty clothing and linen in it and the garments would fall directly into the laundry room, which was right off the kitchen pantry. It made things very convenient.

She went back through the kitchen without putting on the light, but she did put on the light in the laundry room and looked into the vat that caught the dirty clothing and linen. The bin was about one-quarter full, so it took her a few seconds to sift through it all.

She stopped when she found the crib sheet. The heat that rose up in her body nearly put her into a faint. She actually staggered.

Why would Dana lie, and how important was it to point this out to Jillian? Would Dana hate her for it?

The sheet actually felt hot in her hands. She folded it neatly, taking care not to touch the dried bloodstain, and then made a quick decision. She would say nothing for now, but she would hide this sheet so that later, if it became necessary, she could show Jillian she wasn't imagining things.

She decided to hide it at the bottom of her closet in her room. She put out the light in the laundry room, and then, with the sheet under her arm, she hurried like a thief through the kitchen and upstairs. Her heart was beating so fast, she found it hard to breathe. She had just reached the top of the stairway and turned toward her room when Dana appeared.

Miraculously she didn't turn toward Colleen. She walked like a somnambulist toward the baby's room, and Colleen, for once happy that Dana was moving in a daze, slipped quickly into her own room.

She closed the door behind her immediately and caught her breath. Then, handling the small sheet as if it were something fragile, she knelt down at the foot of her closet and stuffed it under a carton filled with old shoes and sneakers.

She was so hot and sweaty, she had to take a shower before going to bed. Some time later, after she had put out the lights and slipped under her blankets, she turned toward the closet and, for reasons she did not understand, suddenly regretted bringing the sheet into her room. It was as if it could somehow do her harm.

Ridiculous idea, she thought, and turned over in bed so that her back was toward the closet. She fell asleep rather quickly but woke only minutes later because she thought she felt a wet, warm spot in her own bed. When she ran her fingers down the sheet, she thought she felt something, so she got up quickly and put on her lights.

There was nothing there. She shook her head and tried laughing at herself, but after that sleep did not come so easily because she had become afraid of her dreams. Locked in a battle with fatigue, she tossed and turned until the arms of Morpheus embraced her firmly and ended the struggle.

For almost the entire ride home the voices of Harlan's colleagues echoed in his ears. He had to laugh to himself, recalling the fervor and the dramatics with which some of them had spoken. And some of his fellow teachers had the nerve to call him histrionic. That was a laugh. How could he compete with Fred Leshner's don't-crucify-us-on-a-cross-of-legal-paper speech? And what about the way Ted Feldman quoted Martin Lurther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, and then the way Morton Weiss suddenly stood on his chair and shook his fist at the ceiling? No wonder it was difficult for most college teachers to think of themselves in the middle of a labor struggle. This was more like the final act of a Greek tragedy. Why, any moment he'd expected Zeus to appear to them on the end of a bolt of lightning.

Nevertheless, for Harlan the meeting had served its purpose. He'd been able to channel his frustrations and anxieties into the contract dispute and submerge himself in the sea of communal anger. They'd debated in the college cafeteria for well over three hours. A motion finally had to be made to limit the speakers' time. He couldn't believe how simple and to the point he was when he got his turn to speak, but the brevity was appreciated. He was sure some of the thunderous applause was simply in response to that, rather than to the content of his words.

In any case, he left the meeting mentally exhausted and was grateful for the feeling. As he drove along, he thought that surely now he would have little difficulty falling asleep.

Old Centerville Station certainly looked asleep by the time he reached it. The village, which really consisted of only one main street, appropriately named Main Street, had all of its stores closed. Some store owners had left lights on in windows for security reasons. That, plus the dull yellowish glow from the so-called improved streetlights, created a valley of illumination in which he could snake his way through the darkness. After that he had to go about a half a mile before coming to the turn leading into the residential area in which he lived, and the streetlights appeared again.

With the echo of some of the arguments voiced at the meeting dying away slowly, he turned onto his street, Highland Avenue, and then, almost as if he had crossed into another world, he felt his concerns over his job and the labor dispute slip away. Those thoughts fell back deeply into the caverns of his mind and were replaced with concern for Dana. He was like a man rising out of the confusion, an amnesiac returning to himself. The house, the familiar surroundings, the light over. the front door—all of it pulled him out of the quicksand. He had returned.

He imagined that it was the mental turmoil into which he was now reentering that caused him to see the street and the neighboring houses in an ethereal, dreamlike way. The sky had cleared and the shadows cast by the full moon were deeper, longer. Lit windows looked like ghoulish eyes in the faces of houses that had become living, pulsating creatures; sentries guarding the entranceway to his private netherworld.

Everything was coming to life around him, inanimate and animate objects alike. The air was still, yet trees moved their long, twisted, knotty branches like octopi threatening him with their tentacles. The sidewalks undulated; the pavement became hot, the molten macadam gripping his tires and slowing him down. If he stopped, he would be drawn down into the boiling, black, oozing liquid. Before morning it would cool and harden, and no one would ever know that he was buried alive right below the street just outside his home. He had a maddening vision of himself entombed in his car, screaming right up until the moment of his death.

Right before he turned into his driveway, a bat flew so close to the windshield, he actually raised his arms defensively and veered to the right. He seized the steering wheel and hit the brakes, cursing as the car came to a halt. His heart was beating so quickly when he stopped before the garage door that he had to pause for a few moments to catch his breath before pressing the automatic garage-door opener. The door lifted and he drove in.

The house was filled with a disquieting stillness. With not even the slightest breeze outside, there wasn't even the creak of a shutter. The heavy silence made him aware of the tiniest sounds he made: the squeak in his shoes, the passage of air in his nostrils. He felt like someone who lived deep inside his own body, surrounded by this monstrously noisy and awkward structure that was cluttered with vibrations. Bones ground against one another; liquids gurgled; gases churned. He could even hear his skin stretching and snapping.

He checked the rear and front doors to be sure they were locked securely, and then he put out the hall light and started up the stairs, pausing on the lower steps for a moment because he thought he heard something scratching on the window panels of the front door. It sounded like birds flapping their wings against it. He listened hard, but the noise was gone almost as quickly as it had come. Imagination, he thought again. He blamed it on the silence and the moonlight and continued up the stairs.

He paused on the landing. Both Colleen's and Jillian's bedroom doors were closed. There was no light slipping out from under either of them. The darkness made him even more conscious of his movements as he tiptoed toward his own bedroom. He considered looking in on the baby but decided against it, fearing that even the smallest sound might wake him and interrupt Dana's desperately needed rest. He entered their bedroom.

Dana had drawn the shades down so the moonlight couldn't come through the windows and illuminate the room. He knew she wasn't bothered by the moonlight as much as she would be bothered by the morning sunlight. He understood that if she could sleep, she wanted to. She had to catch it when it was available, considering the demands the baby was making on her. So he didn't complain about the way she blocked out the morning.

However, Dana had left the small, wall-outlet night-light on for him. It cast just enough of a glow for him to make out her dark image in the bed. She was on her back, her arms out over the blanket. Shadows over her face made it seem gaunt. The strands of her hair poured out from under her head. Somehow they looked darker, and for a moment it seemed as though she were reclining in a pool of inky liquid.

He decided to change in the bathroom and not risk waking her. After he had done so, he slipped under the blanket gracefully and lay listening to her heavy breathing. Actually he was disappointed that she wasn't awake. He had hoped to amuse her with his review of the meeting. But the rhythm of her breathing, the fatigue that had settled in his muscles, and the darkness that invaded his thoughts made his eyelids heavier and heavier, until he couldn't resist closing them. In moments his breathing rivaled Dana's in terms of its regularity. They slept side by side like twins tranquilized by the night.

Dana's eyes snapped open. Even though Nikos hadn't cried, she sensed that the baby was awake, yet for a long moment Dana didn't move. She lay there staring up into the darkness, listening keenly, anticipating something. She vaguely recalled that she had had this feeling before, but now it was like an old memory, hard to recall on demand.

Her mind had been that way lately. Thoughts and ideas were hard to grasp and then hold on to for very long. Feelings, images, and especially memories drifted in and out of her consciousness. Everything was smoky, thin; even relationships, especially relationships. Sometimes when she looked at Harlan now, he seemed like a complete stranger, and her mother… her mother was more like an illusion, someone not to be taken seriously.

But she could do nothing about it because even her realization that there was something about which she should be concerned didn't last long. It came and went with lightning speed, even now. A moment after she had these thoughts they were gone, and she couldn't remember why she felt disturbed.

Suddenly she heard a faint scratching on the windowpane to her right. Keeping her head stiff, she turned her eyes toward it. The bright moonlight turned the shade into a transparent screen. The silhouetted, winged creature that had pressed itself against the glass grew right before her eyes, until its wings spanned the entire window. It had happened before, and just like before, she wasn't frightened by it; she was intrigued, drawn.

Slowly, almost as if she were a shadow rising out of herself, she sat up in the bed. The shadow of the silhouetted wings on the window fell over her. She raised her hands to accept the warm moonlight, washing her palms in the silvery glow. Then she slipped off the bed, stepping on a shelf of air, as it were, for her feet never felt the floor. She glided to the doorway so silently, it all could have been in her imagination. Indeed, she had to look back at the bed to be sure she wasn't still lying there.