Once We Had a Country (27 page)

She calls the doctor’s office at nine, only to be told by the secretary that the results still aren’t in; there’s been a problem at the lab. Probably they won’t need a retest, but it could take another week. “So why are you telling people I’m pregnant?” Maggie wants to ask, but she can’t bring herself to do it. When she steps on the bathroom scales, they say she’s gained another pound.

She spends the morning in the garden among the pumpkins, less because they need tending than for the sake of a distraction. Her hands and knees grow slick with muck, while her feet bang around in her rubber boots until they
blister and the blisters pop. For a long time she watches the bird feeder near the house, which has become an airport for chickadees, each one winging in and pecking for its seed before bursting away to eat in a private place. There’s a desire to record them that she regrets, because such wishes take her back to the box of Super 8 equipment sitting someplace in Boston.

No sign of George Ray. Perhaps last night was too much for him and he’s left for good—except he has no car and presumably no money, so until Morgan Sugar pays for his ticket home next month, he might as well be a captive here. And what of her? The camper van is Fletcher’s, and the money in the bank is mostly his. Next week October will arrive and he’ll return. He’ll help her harvest the pumpkins, which should bring them some cash, and he’ll be impressed by how little she has spent since he left. By that point she’ll have heard from her father, too.

She thinks she hears the phone ringing. As she runs toward the farmhouse, the popped blisters make her wince. Then the ringing stops.

Maybe Lenka’s right. Maybe she should have an abortion.

Yia Pao and Gordon lay huddled on the ground with Xang between them, besieged by rain. They have covered themselves with banana leaves, but all three are shivering. Yia Pao gives loud, hacking coughs, and every few seconds Xang whimpers.

“Can you sleep?” asks Gordon. Yia Pao says he can’t. “Neither can I. Let’s keep going.”

They continue on through knee-high mud. After a few miles Yia Pao takes off his boots to inspect his feet. They’re covered with bruises and pus-filled pockets of infection. Gordon raises his pant leg and finds half a dozen leeches fixed to his calf. When he tries to pull one off, the body elongates, then snaps, while the mouth remains dug into his flesh and blood streams from the wound. Yia Pao gestures for him to keep moving.

They hear the river before they see it. The water runs high and coffee brown through a narrow gorge, the banks rocky on both sides. At the edge, they fall on their knees to drink, Xang crying on the ground behind them. Then Yia Pao scoops water into his palms and brings it to his son’s mouth.

“If we can get to the other side, they’ll have a hard time tracking us,” says Yia Pao. But the river is too deep and quick to ford, so for a mile they follow it downstream until the track dead-ends. The water is calmer here, and someone has strung a thick rope from one bank to the other. Still, the current looks powerful.

Gordon offers to carry the baby across. He points out that he’s taller than Yia Pao and in better health, but Yia Pao insists that he’s the father and will take responsibility. Finally Gordon relents and starts for the other side. The rope is slimy, and he gasps that the water is freezing. A few feet out, it paralyzes him. Yia Pao has to urge him onward.

In the middle, he stumbles and loses his footing. His head submerges; the noise of the world is reduced to an underwater roar. When he comes up sputtering, Yia Pao
shouts to him from the bank, and he calls back that he’s all right, clinging to the rope in the same way the leech stayed fastened to his skin.

After dragging himself onto the far shore, he looks back and sees Yia Pao is already more than halfway across, the water up to his chest, holding Xang with one arm while hooking the rope with the other. It seems he’ll manage it on his own, but as he draws near he gives a shout, and Gordon rushes back into the water. He tries to reach for the baby while still grasping the rope. Yia Pao tips forward and pushes Xang into Gordon’s chest. The force sends Gordon underwater once more. When he comes back up, he’s holding on to the rope and infant at once. But Yia Pao is gone.

Gordon turns to see him being swept down the canyon by the current. Yia Pao’s head bobs and disappears, resurfaces. The river pins him against a rock, and Gordon can see his scrunched eyes as the water pounds him. Then he’s sucked back into the water and carried away.

On the bank, Gordon struggles for air even as he checks the silent baby. Xang is breathing but stupefied, too sickly to complain about his near drowning. He only stares into the treetops as if he has been waiting a long time for a decision to be made about his fate and is resigned to waiting for a long time still.

Gathering himself, Gordon discovers there’s no path on this side of the river either. The bank on which he sits is crowded by jungle. He couldn’t chase after Yia Pao even if he had the strength.

He sits until the mosquitoes begin to circle and he has
to shoo them from Xang’s face. Finally he rises and starts into the jungle with the little boy in his arms.

When Maggie walks out to check the mail that afternoon, she sees an unfamiliar object at the end of the driveway: a placard not more than two feet across held up by thin metal poles. The sight of it sets her stomach grinding, but the sign is oriented toward the road, so she has to wait until the last moment before the words become plain.

FOR SALE
.

The bastard. He didn’t even warn her.

To make sure it isn’t an error, she phones the realtor listed on the sign. Then she calls Fletcher at his parents’ house. It’s his father’s doing, it must be. If the man answers, she doesn’t know what she’ll say to him. But it’s Fletcher who picks up.

“How are you?” he asks. The line whispers overtop of silence. “What is it? Are you all right?” She hates the way he says it. He’s never coming back, she can tell just from his tone.

“Somebody put a For Sale sign out front today.” On the other end there’s an exclamation of surprise. “You didn’t know?”

“It must be a mistake.” He sounds genuinely upset. A month ago she would have taken him at his word. “I’ll talk to Dad. We’ll get it sorted out.”

“Why don’t you let me speak with him?”

“You mean right now? I don’t think he’s here.” He says it too hastily.

“You knew about this, didn’t you? Or was it your idea?”

“Really, he didn’t say anything.” He clears his throat before continuing. “All he told me was that if I couldn’t show him a viable plan, he wouldn’t be able to defend continued ownership.”

She hates the way he lapses into his father’s business-talk. “So you showed him a plan?”

“First I wanted to talk with you. I don’t know whether things are feasible.”

She hates words like “feasible.” He doesn’t call unless she badgers him. He lets her live on his father’s money to salve his conscience while he lounges in Boston, and all because he was crazy enough to think she’d be turned on by that film.

Maggie still hasn’t told him about being tested; she hasn’t even reminded him about her missing period. Until now she has thought it would be unbearable if he were to come back early for the sake of someone who isn’t born yet, a mere hypothesis, when he’s decided not to return for her.

“Fletcher, I got tested,” she says. “I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant.”

At first she wonders if he has hung up. Then his voice comes over the line again.

“Why only pretty sure?” He sounds anything but loving.

“It’s a long story. The results aren’t official yet.”

“Shouldn’t we wait until they are before we get worked up about it?” He says it as though the results are a credit card bill that doesn’t need paying until the end of the month.

“The doctor’s secretary said it was positive! I told you I
was late three weeks ago, but you didn’t take me seriously. You just ran away.”

“It wasn’t like that,” he begins before cutting himself off. “All right,” he says in a clipped, low voice. “Tell me what you want to do.”

As the statement sits there between them, a buzzing starts in her brain.

“You think I should get rid of it.” Part of her is impressed that she can be so forthright. Fletcher seems surprised too.

“I didn’t say that, I just … It’s a bit of a shock, that’s all. We never talked about a baby.”

“What do you mean? We’ve both said we wanted a family.”

“Not this way.”

He doesn’t even ask her to come back to Boston anymore. He’d rather keep her hidden in this attic of a country. Suddenly she has never felt so dedicated to the place.

“I’m going to have the baby,” she tells him, “and I’m not leaving this house.” Before he can reply, she adds, “Thanks for the support.” After rushing the receiver back to its cradle, she goes to the living room and turns on the television.

It takes him an hour to call. When he does, he says he’s talked with his father and there’s good news: he and Maggie will be allowed to keep working the farm. He says he’ll be up in a week, as they planned. Sounding pleased with himself, he asks her when the results of the pregnancy test are going to be confirmed.

“They said maybe a week,” she mumbles.

“Okay.” He sounds unsure, as if it might be a point to argue. “Call me if you hear.”

She says of course she will. Then a thought occurs to her. “What if it’s negative? Will you still come?” He says he will, but she doesn’t believe him. “What did your father say about the baby?” He doesn’t answer. “Did you even tell him?” She isn’t playing this game right, slashing about when she should be conciliatory, but she seems impervious to her own good advice. “Fletcher, I swear, you leave me here, I’ll make this place such a success …”

“Jesus, you’re keeping the farm, you’re having the baby, I’ll be there soon. What else do you want?”

Isn’t it obvious? She wants him to want all these things too.

Afterward, she starts to see it in a better light. He’s coming back in a week, and if he wasn’t thrilled about the baby—well, she couldn’t expect that right away.

She imagines how it could be: the warm bundle in her arms, then eventually a walking, talking child. They’ll have a household of just three, with George Ray to help keep up the farm in the summers. She’ll paper the walls in the playroom to make a nursery but leave the white wall as it is, and one day she’ll screen her films again, this time for their child. Her father will return from Laos and visit them. Perhaps he’ll even stay for good. So taken is she by these thoughts that she almost doesn’t let it bother her when at dinner she and George Ray barely speak.

In the morning, she wakes up shivering and sees her breath in the cold air. Once dressed, she descends to the dirt-floor cellar and tries to start the boiler. There are
minutes of silence, then a terrible clanking as if someone with a wrench is thrashing the pipes, before finally the radiators start to hiss.

Out among the cherry trees, she finds that overnight the landscape has transformed. The world is aflame with goldenrod in flower and bushes bearing red, poisonous-looking berries, while tiny butterflies swirl through the air like bits of paper and grasshoppers take wing to thwack against her leg. The earth seems sharper, more brittle than before, infested by burrs, thistle, and bone white twigs. The air is rank with the urine smell of rotting leaves. Abandoned ladders, scythes, and bushel baskets litter the ground, and a wagon lies covered in a black tarp that flaps in the wind like a sail. The creek is a trickle of water through scummed rocks and dried cress. She kicks through leaf drift worrying that when Fletcher returns he’ll expect her to have raked it all away. After lunch, driving past a yard sale on the way to Virgil, she spots an old-fashioned bassinet and buys it without bothering to haggle.

For the next few days, those times it isn’t raining, there’s a grey gloom that makes her wish it would. The house acquires a pervasive musty smell. When she tries to start a fire in the living room hearth, the room ends up filled with smoke, and there’s the sound of a bird panicking in the chimney. As she scrambles to open the windows, the creature flies into the room and darts about, leaving streaks of soot on the walls before escaping. In the kitchen cupboards she finds fresh mouse turds. She sets traps, and in the night the snap of their springing startles her awake. When she goes to check the next morning, she finds two
tiny furred bodies pinned in the same mechanism, their necks broken and their noses touching.

There’s no more word from Gran, but every night Fletcher phones dutifully, and Maggie spends much of the days anticipating his calls, totting up the things she has done and seen, trying not to let it faze her that each night he asks about the test results. Finally she tells him about her father, and he reassures her it will turn out all right. He says he’ll see if his dad knows anybody over there who might be able to give them some answers. He tells her if she still hasn’t heard anything in a couple of weeks, he’ll fly over to Laos with her and they can go find her father together. It’s foolish bravado, and it makes her angry. Fletcher has spent all this time away, yet now he’s willing to travel across the world for her? He’s the same as Wale.

Each time she hangs up the phone, solitude hurtles in on her. After all the hours of keeping busy, the night undoes the work of the day. She retreats to the television and watches
Truth or Consequences
. She watches
Search for Tomorrow
and
Mary Tyler Moore
. She watches
All in the Family
. One afternoon, finding nothing on the Buffalo stations she can bear to sit through, she resorts to watching a hockey game on the Toronto channel. The Canadians are playing the Russians in Moscow, the last game of a series she hasn’t been following. It’s the final period and the game is tied. When one of the Canadian players scores, there’s jubilation among his teammates, but Maggie isn’t really paying attention to them. Her eyes are on the thousands of Russians in the stands, dressed in suits and ties or dark woollen jackets. The few times the camera shows them,
their faces are unblinking and forlorn. They have the look of children at Christmas who were promised one thing and given another.