Strange Seed (17 page)

Oh, but she was being maudlin, wasn’t she?
 
Maudlin and dreary and…

But that was to be expected.
 
Death made everyone maudlin.

“Rachel?”

She turned her head sharply.
 
Paul stood at the top of the steps.
 
She half expected to see the boy’s body in his arms.

“Paul…”

“Did I startled you?”

She grinned, embarrassed.
 
“Yes.”
 
She thought a moment.
 
“What are we going to do with him?”
 
The question, she could see—or, she amended, the mere fact that she’d asked it—confused him.
 
She fought down a larger grin.
 

“
Do
with him?” Paul asked.

“Yes.”
 
She stood.
 
“Are we going to take him into town?
 
That would be the right thing, wouldn’t it?
 
Or are we going to bury him”—she turned her head briefly, nodded—“out there somewhere?”

“I don’t know, Rachel.”
 
It was apparent by his tone that it was not, at the moment, what concerned him.

“Well, we’ve got to think about it, don’t we, Paul?”
 
It was more a statement than a question.

“Yes, of course.
 
It’s just that…”

“It’s just that,” Rachel cut in, “you don’t understand my attitude.
 
And I don’t blame you.
 
I don’t understand it, either.
 
If you’d prefer, I could go into shock…”

“Rachel, please!”

“But I’ve read that the complete lack of emotion at times like these can be a form of shock.”

“Rachel, listen to yourself.”
 
He took a few steps toward her.
 
“Do you know what you sound like?”

“I imagine I sound awful.
 
I’m sorry.
 
But facts are facts and we’ve got to face them.
 
And the bald and unattractive fact is that there’s a body lying dead up in that room”—she nodded at the upstairs window; Paul took another step toward her—“and we’ve got to do something with it.
 
Now, if we took it into town, we both know there’d be lots of uncomfortable questions, maybe even some accusations, and we don’t want
that
, do we?
 
No.
 
At least,
I
don’t want it.”
 
She smiled at him.
 
“I can’t speak for you and never would.”

“Rachel, you’re babbling.”

“Babbling?
 
No.
 
Merely thinking out loud.
 
And thoughts are sometimes less than coherent.
 
Mine are, at any rate.
 
Speech is, too.
 
Lumas was quite often coherent.
 
Do you remember?”
 
She looked questioningly at Paul; he was within a few steps of her and moving very slowly.

“Yes,” he said soothingly.
 
“I remember.”

“All that crap about
the land
and
creation.”
 
She chuckled derisively.
 
“If you ask me, Paul, he was loony.
 
Positively out of his gourd.
 
Though, on second thought, maybe he was just senile, as you said.
 
Or maybe he had syphilis—did you ever think of that?
 
It’s possible.”

“Sure,” Paul, said; he was only a step above her, now.
 
“It’s possible.”

And as for the boy, eh was never incoherent.
 
He didn’t have the vocabulary for it.
 
He was as coherent as…as that sky.”
 
She nodded at it.
 
“Of course, you weren’t with him much so you didn’t know him as well as I.
 
He was quite single-minded—“

In the weeks that followed, Rachel would reflect that it was probably Paul’s touch—his hand gently on hers on the railing—that sparked her short-lived breakdown.
 
She remember none of her words—“Oh God, thank you, thank you.”
 
And, “It’s over, isn’t it, Paul?” were the most telling—and Paul, though she begged him for the details of her breakdown, said nothing.

October 3

Nothing marked the spot—no crudely improvised cross, no stone.
 
All Rachel knew, as she looked out their bedroom window, her hand holding the heavy curtain aside, was that the boy had been buried “north of the house.”
 
Although she had—uncertain why—asked Paul to show her the exact spot, he had told her, “North of the house.
 
It’s all you need to know, darling.”
 
She was, she knew, grateful he had been so close-mouthed; if she had been with him at the burial and knew the spot, she would have made daily forays to it—perhaps to mutter, “I’m sorry,” over and over again, as she had done before, or perhaps merely to remember and regret.
 
This way—“North of the house”—she could almost convince herself that the boy hadn’t been buried at all, that, in fact, he hadn’t even died, that when Paul had led her back into the house that morning—led her into the bedroom and told her to rest, “I’ll do what’s got to be done.”—he had gone back upstairs and found the boy alive, miraculously resurrected, and had set him free.
 
It was a comforting and strong fantasy.
 
Once, a couple of days after the boy’s death, she remember, when she had recovered from her breakdown and the fantasy was just beginning to take hold, she had even imagined that she had seen him “north of the house”—his head, at least, though dimly because, as now, it was dusk.
 
It—the illusion, the imagining—had first appeared at the periphery of her vision, and when she had turned her full gaze on it, it had held for a second—the dark face, the darker hair—then had vanished into the shoulder-high weeds.

She let the curtain fall.
 
Someday, she vowed, she would tell Paul about that vision.
 
Someday far into the future, when they were very old and their whole experience with the boy could be looked upon as something that might or might not have happened:
 
Did it really happen, Paul?
 
I think it happened, but I’m not sure anymore.
 
I don’t know, Rachel.
 
I wish there were someone we could ask about it.
She smiled a self-pitying smile; it would never come to that, would it?
 
Their memory of the boy would be a terrible burden on them for the rest of their lives.
 
A terrible burden on her, at least.
 
Paul seemed to think of the whole thing as an embarrassment, a kind of extended
faux pas.
 
But perhaps that was unfair.
 
Perhaps she wasn’t reading him correctly.
 
Perhaps there was vanity in the way she read him—a vanity that said he couldn’t possibly feel the way she felt, couldn’t possibly possess the overwhelming guilt she possessed.
 
At first, in the hours after the boy’s death, it had been an easy and rational guilt.
 
Then, almost overnight, it had become more than that, had been attended by the knowledge that she had caused the death of an exquisite and vibrantly alive creature.
 
That
wasn’t rational, she knew.
 
She had fed him well, had cleaned up after him, had shown him in many ways that she cared for him.
 
Any other child would have…
 
No, any other child would have survived it.
 
And that was the key to her new guilt—
any other child.
 
That special knowledge was always with her, but so elusive—like trying to remember a specific but rarely used word or a particular name because someone had asked.
 
It would come spontaneously, but only selfdom if an effort were made, and never if the effort were strong.

She turned her head.
 
Paul was standing in the doorway, a vague look of admonishment on his face.

“What are you doing, Rachel?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Thinking, I guess.”

“We’ve got to talk,” he said.
 
“There’s something…”

“And remembering.”

“Punishing yourself, you mean.”

She smiled again, again self-pityingly.
 
“Yes,” she whispered.

He sighed.
 
“We’ve got to talk.”

His tone brought her up short and she resented it; she would have preferred to stay within herself a while longer.
 
She said nothing.
 
Maybe he’d go away.

“There’s something I haven’t told you,” he went on, his tone softer.
 
He waited.
 
Still she said nothing.
 
“I don’t know where to start.”
 
A pause.
 
“Sit down, okay?”
 
He nodded at the bed; she didn’t move from the window.
 
The questioning look in her eyes said,
Continue.
 

He closed his eyes briefly, sighed once more.
 
“I’ve thought about it, Rachel.
 
I’ve thought about it a lot in the last few weeks, ever since the boy died.
 
And I think it’s…I think we’ve got to leave this house.”

“Leave,” she said, though not as a question or a statement, but as if the word were one she’d just learned, and she was trying it out.

“There are…”
 
He stopped, seemed uncertain as to how to continue.
 
He looked questioningly at her, as if she might finish his sentence.
 
She said nothing.
 
“The day before the boy’s death, I saw them, so I know.
 
There are…I mean…others…like him, like the boy, Rachel.”

He hadn’t expected it—her short, brittle laugh; as if it were a physical blow, it stopped his breathing for a moment.

“Are there, Paul?
 
Are there
others
?”
 
She laughed again.

“Yes,” he managed.

“Yes?
 
I thought you’d never notice.”

“Rachel, please…” he had never before heard this harsh sarcasm from her.

“Do you think I’m blind?” she said.
 
“Do you think you’re the only one with any awareness, for Christ’s sake?
 
Do you think you’re telling me something I don’t know?
 
Jesus, I’ve known it for months.”

He shook his head.
 
“No, I…I mean…”
 
He gazed helplessly at her.
 
“Yes,” he continued.
 
“I knew…I simply…”
 
His confusion and helplessness changed abruptly to anger.
 
He said nothing for a long moment, then turned and stalked from the room.

Rachel’s tears started when she heard the screen door slam shut, when Paul was safely beyond the range of her voice.
 
“Oh, God, no,” she murmured.
 
“No!”

*****

“One load,” Paul said.
 
“We’re not coming back.”

They’d acquired little in their brief stay at the house.
 
If they had stayed another year or so, Rachel thought, as she transferred some of the clothes from her dresser drawers to a large, much-used suitcase—they would have had boxes and boxes of miscellaneous things—books, knickknacks, games, potted plants, all the et cetera that accumulates from being in one place, of calling a place home for a long time.
 
But she hadn’t been away from the house since the boy had come to them and Paul’s trips to town had been primarily to restock their cupboards, so leaving the house involved mostly repacking what they had unpacked just four months earlier.

Paul had made a few acquisitions—the rifle, three boxes of ammunition, and some paperback novels to augment the several dozen books they had brought with them.
 
Having no TV or radio, Paul had proposed that when winter started settling in they could use some of their free time by reading to one another.
 
It had been a romantic idea and Rachel had looked forward to it.

She closed the suitcase, locked it, and stood for a moment with her outstretched arms on it.
 
They were wrong, she thought—all those who said a common enemy brought people together.
 
It had brought her and Paul together, it hade put them in their own private, confused and self-protective worlds.
 
Well, that was the operative word, wasn’t it?
 
Confused
.
 
It they had an enemy, they weren’t certain what it was, or even that they could fight it.
 
Perhaps they didn’t share a common enemy after all—they shared only uncertainty and confusion.
 
If so, ending it this way, running from it, might bring them together once again.
 
Perhaps that underscored Paul’s decision to leave, and perhaps he wasn’t even aware of it.
 
She thought about that; it was a happy delusion, she concluded.
 
She could cling to it if necessary.