The Monsters of Templeton (37 page)

But I found nothing at all about women. No adulterer appeared in any of the books. No mistress is mentioned at all. Women are pristine and innocent in the world of Jacob Franklin Temple, the best of them both chaste and courageous.

Still, I was not without hope. When I called Clarissa the day before, her voice had been rich with excitement. "I just put something in the mail," she said. "I don't know what you're looking for, but it was pretty fascinating to me." And, though I pried and coerced and threatened her, she just chuckled and refused to tell me what it was. "You'll see," she kept laughing. "Wilhelmina Upton, just you wait and see. It's good. Oh, boy, is it weird."

In the meantime, waiting for her package, I sat in the library, searching, searching. That afternoon stretched long before me, and when at last Hazel's goaty bleats turned loud enough to chase me out of the library, I yawned and stretched and ran my fingers through my hair. All day, my stomach had cramped, but I was fixated enough on the books not to pay attention. Now, though, I had nothing else to think of, and so when I put my arms down, I felt the insistent cramps now like dagger-jabs in my stomach. I pressed my hands to them and closed my eyes.

When I opened them, it was to Zeke Felcher, bright golden in a beam of light on the far end of the library, in a chair, watching me. He had a Jacob Franklin Temple book in his lap. He saw me watching and gave a smile and the far cheek seemed to dimple. Like that, I didn't notice the Carhartt jumpsuit; like that, I didn't notice his thinning hair.

But he said nothing until I began to smile, too, and I said, "Ezekiel."

"Wilhelmina," he said.

There was a very long silence between us. Outside the lake glittered. A flock of white seagulls fell like scraps of paper onto the lawn. Hazel wheeled the squeaky cart into the back room and, still, we looked at each other, beginning to smile like fools, and that is when another spasm came.

I winced and pressed my hands to my gut again.

"Willie?" said Ezekiel Felcher now by my side. "You okay?"

I groaned and said, "No."

"I'll take you home," he said, and his arm was around my shoulder, and I had a moment to sweep a pile of books into my bag, and then we were out of the musty library and into the day, and he was helping me up into the messy truck with its bobble-headed Pirates player on the dash. The cramp passed. We were out on West Lake Road already when I opened my eyes to see the Farmers' Museum passing on my right.

"Ugh," I said.

"You okay?" he said. "You'll be back soon."

"I'm okay for now," I said. "I must have just had a bad lunch."

"Gross," he said, and gave me a tiny smile of concern.

Out the window, the Otesaga Hotel slid by, all red-gold in that light. We went up Lake Street, past the mansions, and into the driveway of the Averell Cottage.

Then Ezekiel Felcher very deliberately turned off his truck and turned to me and seemed to want to say something but didn't, but then leaned close, then closer, and I could smell the metal of his breath before his lips touched mine. I was still staring straight ahead, surprised, when I saw my mother run out of the house only in the top part of her nursing scrubs, her vast white underwear like a button-top mushroom above her fleshy thighs.

She knocked on the window, and Ezekiel pulled away, flushing red. I hopped out of the truck, and my mother said, breathless, "Sunshine, Clarissa's on the phone, and she sounds bad. She didn't say why."

"Shit," I said and ran inside, leaving Ezekiel in his great tow truck, and Vi, semiobscene in her seminudity, staring at each other, one full beat behind me.

I GRABBED UP the telephone in a moment, and could hear nothing on the other end. "Honey?" I said. "Clarissa?"

"I think, Willie," Clarissa said, in the almost clinical voice she used when she was deeply upset, "that Sully maybe just left me."

"Wait," I said. "What?"

"Sully," she said. "Just definitely left me. For a yoga instructor who works in Arizona. Ten minutes ago. She carried all his shit down to the car for him as he broke up with me."

I took a deep breath. "Holy shit," I said.

"I don't know what to do," she said.

"Holy shit," I said again.

"She's really tall. Like six-four. And has wonky teeth. And is not even all that pretty, not at all. But," my best friend said, "she's got one thing going for her. She's healthy. Just bursting with health. Not a lupus-addled pain in the ass, apparently. They met in the hospital cafe while I was getting my treatment. She had an infected splinter," she said, giving one terrible lick of laughter. "In her pinky toe."

The house suddenly became still and quiet, and had I been listening, I would have heard my mother's bare feet stepping up the stairs, the floorboards squeaking, stealing to her own room. "Oh, Clarissa," I said.

"Don't," Clarissa said. "I don't want to start to cry. It's all over if I start to cry."

"I'm coming," I said. "Tonight, I'm coming. I'll be there."

"No," said Clarissa. "I hate this apartment. I hate this city. I can't be here. Reminds me of Sully."

"I hate Sully," I said.

"I love him," she said, and grew wild. "I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do. I swear to God I'll kill him if I see him."

This kind of talk was a precursor, I knew from long experience, to everything falling apart for Clarissa. And when someone as strong as Clarissa falls apart, it is Samson all over again, bringing the pillars of the temple upon himself, a mighty, ugly mess. I sucked in my breath and began to think, which was hard going, because I was about to fall apart, myself.

It was then that my mother, who had been shamelessly eavesdropping from the telephone in her room, spoke up. "Kill Sully?" she said. "Nonsense. You're coming here to Templeton, Clarissa Evans. I'm a nurse, and though I don't work in rheumatology, I can tell you that our facilities here in Templeton are primo, top-notch, first-rate. Plus, I get to take care of you from up close. Not far away, where I can't feed you or take care of you or anything. Your room is waiting for you."

"Oh, Vi," Clarissa said, helpless, over the line. "You're a critical care nurse."

"Oh, Vi," I said, softly. "What the hell are you saying?"

"Stop it, you two," she said. "Big dummies. Of course Clarissa won't be in critical care; she's going to get better here, in Templeton. I'll make the reservations and get an old friend of mine to take you to the airport, Clarissa, honey. He lives in Noe Valley. Give me fifteen minutes," she said.

"I have to go," Clarissa said abruptly. "I just have to." Then there was a click, and my mother and I both said "Clarissa?" into the phone.

I hung on to the line, listening to my mother's breath. "She'll be a-ok," she said. "I'll call back as soon as I've made the arrangements."

"Thank you," I said. "Thank you so much, Vi."

"It's not for you I'm doing this," she said. "So you don't have to thank me."

It was then that I felt the burst and looked down at my bare legs. I felt my heart rise in my throat. "Vi?" I said.

"Willie, what? I have to call the airline."

"Vi," I said. "I need you. Right now. Right now."

I dropped the phone back on the cradle and heard my mother's footsteps as she ran to the stairwell and down. I stood still as she rumbled through the hallway, the formal living room, the dining room, then into the 1970s wing. She burst through the door like a wild woman.

My mother's eyes took in my legs, and her hands rose to her mouth. For the length of one sonorous chime of the grandfather clock, we stood there, in the doorway, both of us staring at my legs, where there were brown streaks of blood to my knees, a bright bloom already drenching the crotch of my shorts.

Chapter
25

Storm

I SAW IT all clearly, but somehow I wasn't involved; somehow, my brain clicked off and my body moved into action, sliding off the shorts and swabbing myself with the washcloth my mother handed me, taking new underwear and jeans and a maxi pad and putting it all on; and somehow, amid all this, I thought to grab the thick envelope that I'd gotten in the mail that day so I'd have something to read during my hospital wait. I followed my mother outside, meek as a dog, into the car that she threw into reverse and sped with reckless endangerment of the tourists' drosophila lives, squealing by so fast that their ball caps blew off their heads and their cotton candy smeared pink across their chins and the baseball bats that they jauntily carried over their shoulders fell clanging to the ground. We swerved up River Street, and the Susquehanna River roiled on our left, fat from the previous day's storms, and my mother pulled under the carport of the Emergency Room wing. She put me into a wheelchair, and rolled us past the intake desk and under the eye of the attending, who was snapping some small boy's shoulder back into joint, where my mother described what was happening to me in no uncertain terms, and the small boy's eyes grew so wide they almost burst, and I imagined the great fluidy pop that bursting eyeballs would make, like a grape pinched and splitting its skin in a goopy shower of vitreous humor. The attending, wordless, left the dislocated boy to the resident, followed my mother into the examination room and helped her undress me, and then, because my mother's voice had begun to rise in pitch and grow loud then louder, he banished her to the waiting room where one of her thick-ankled friends seized her in a bear hug. As the curtain closed, the doctor with his weary eyes behind the hipster glasses patted me into the paper-coated bed, and with a voice calm and flat as a plate, he told me to lie back and relax, and we'll see what we can do, and relax, darling, let me look and relax and relax and relax, honey, relax...

Chapter
26

Apres Storm

AFTER THE ULTRASOUND, which left a slug trail of goop across my belly, after the strange, crumpled psychiatrist who smelled of popcorn and sleep, I waited, shivering in my paper pinny, to know whether I had lost the Lump. I thought of Clarissa, of Vi, of the ghost in my room drawing thick and warm around me, to keep from imagining the Lump still in there, bleeding from its little wrists because it couldn't bear to be born into the world with such a fool for a mother. I imagined it tying a little noose in the umbilical cord and sliding its mole-star head inside.

Time ticked on in the hospital. On the floor above, I heard a slow pacing, the shuffle-drag-shuffle-drag of a sleepless someone with an IV tower. There were the groans of the nurses' shoes, a low murmur of conversation, once in a while a whiff of coffee from the cafeteria down the labyrinthine hall.

And under the weight of all that time alone, I thought of our lake monster, those centuries under the dark water, its immense solitude, and wanted to weep for the poor, sweet beast. Such a long sweep of time, such cold. Glimmey, looking longingly up at the boats zipping atop the water in the same way we watch movie screens, to see reflections of ourselves.

At last, my mother came in, her head down so I could see the zigzag of her part. I watched her, holding my breath as she took a chair and pulled it to the side of my bed, and sat. She took my hand and kissed it.

"So I lost it," I said. "Okay." I only felt numb, not dismayed, not relieved, either.

But my mother said nothing for a long time, just rocking a little in her chair, her eyes closed, giving, I presumed, a little prayer in her head.

She opened her eyes. She cleared her throat. Then she said, wincing, "When you found out you were pregnant, did you take a test, Sunshine?"

"Oh. No," I said. "No test."

"Why not, honey?" she said.

"My period stopped," I said. "I was nauseated all the time. It was clear."

"Ah," she said, and closed her eyes again.

Again, there rose between us the noises of the hospital and the sound of her foot in its clog tap-tapping on the ground.

Like this, she said, "We don't think, Sunshine. Well, that you ever really were pregnant."

I blinked. "What?" I said.

"Have you ever heard of an hysterical pregnancy? Pseudocyesis, we call it. Grossesse Nerveuse. You can manifest all the symptoms of pregnancy, without actually being pregnant."

"What?" I said. "That's not what happened."

"Unfortunately," my mother said, "it appears to be."

"No," I said. "I'm not crazy, Vi. I missed three periods. I was sick all the time. My belly was growing. No, that's not what happened. I was bleeding. There was a Lump."

"Willie," said my mother. "The blood was excessive menstruation. The rest, well."

"Well?" I said, hearing the panic sharpen my voice.

"Well, the brain is sometimes much, much stronger than the body, and can sometimes trick the body into believing it is wrong. Or, sometimes, it's the fear of pregnancy itself that tricks the endocrine system into believing the wrong thing. The psychiatrist said you had a normal profile. Just that you seemed to be under a tremendous amount of stress."

There was a giant pause and I could hear a nattering television, a cart going by, a small child wailing somewhere that he just wanted to go home.