The Mothers of Voorhisville (17 page)

 

T
HE
M
OTHERS

What was it about him? The mothers still cannot agree. Was it his blue eyes? The shape of his hands? The way he moved? Or was it something closer to what Elli said, something holy? Was it something evil? We simply do not know.

 

T
AMARA

Once, Tamara answered the house phone and spoke to a reporter.

“My name is Fort Todd. I wonder if you care to comment on some information I've uncovered about someone you might be interested in. He's a wanted man, you know.”

“Who? My husband?”

“No, no, not him. Oxenhash. Jeffrey.”

“I don't know who you're talking about,” Tamara said.

“I've uncovered a great deal of information about these winged creatures.”

“What winged creatures?”

“People mistake them for angels, but they aren't. Apparently this is one of the ages.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“They're coming into fruition. There have always been some, but we live in a time where there are going to be thousands.”

“What do they want?”

“I thought if we could talk—”

Tamara hung up, which she sometimes regrets. She often thinks of turning herself in. What does she have to lose? Her baby is dead, and her husband has abandoned her, saying things like, “Just walk out, honey; nobody will hurt you.” How can he, despite all that has happened, remain so naïve? So she stays with the other mothers who share the secret the authorities have not yet figured out: the babies are gone.

Tamara stays with the mothers out of
choice.
She's given up her freedom, though not for them. It's for the children.

 

T
HE
M
OTHERS

On this, all the mothers agree. As long as the authorities think the babies are in here with us, well, the babies are safe. We hope.

(If you see one, his small wings mashed against his back, perhaps sleeping in your vegetable garden, or flying past your window, please consider raising him. We worry what will happen if they go wild. You don't need to be afraid. They are good babies, for the most part.)

 

T
AMARA

Emily paces throughout the house with the gun slung between her breasts. Perhaps Shreve was right all along, Emily thinks, though their friendship has been strained lately.
Maybe it
is
all an illusion.
Certainly the men and women pointing guns at the house are under the impression that there are babies inside. Emily is convinced that that's the only reason why any of them are alive. “There ain't gonna be another Waco here, that's for sure,” the sheriff said, when he was interviewed on Channel Six.

One night there was a special report about the standoff at Waco, Texas. The mothers sat and watched, for once not arguing about whose head was in the way, or who didn't put the lid back on the peanut butter jar, or who left the toilet paper roll almost empty and didn't bother to change it. (Thinking about this now, Tamara smiles at the quaint memory of toilet paper.
Wouldn't that be nice
, she thinks.)

When it got to the part where they showed the charred bodies—the tiny little bones of children's hands and feet, the blackened remains—the mothers wept and blew their noses. Some swore. Others prayed. It was up to Emily to point out what it meant. “They are not going to make that mistake again. As long as they think we still have the babies, we are safe. And so are our babies.”

Before that night, Maddy didn't know a thing about Waco, Texas, and she's still not sure how it's connected to the mothers. But the mothers are convinced that they must stay locked behind boarded-up windows and doors; that this is the best thing they can do for the babies. Maddy isn't even convinced that the babies all got away, but she hopes they did. She walks through the house, trying to stay behind Emily, since she has the gun, keeping out of the way of Elli Ratcher, who sort of haunts the place—though she's not dead, of course.

Lately, Maddy has gotten so hungry she's begun eating the house. She pulls off little slivers of wood and chews them until they turn into pulp. She has to be careful to peel the slivers off just right. She's cut her tongue and lips several times. Maddy thinks she never would have guessed she'd start eating a house, but she never would have guessed she'd give birth to a baby with wings, either. When Maddy thinks about JoJo, she stops peeling a sliver of gray wood from the upstairs hallway and stares at the yellow flowers in the wallpaper, trying to remember his face. “Please,” she whispers.

“It won't do any good to pray,” Elli says.

Maddy jumps. Of all the people to find her talking to herself, why'd it have to be Elli Ratcher?

“I ain't praying,” she says.

“That's good. 'Cause it won't help.”

Elli stands there, staring at Maddy until she finally says, “What are you looking at?”

“Did you know I had
two
babies?”

Maddy shrugs.

Elli nods. “My dad killed
one
of them. And the other is in my closet.”

“Well, it's been great to have you visiting us on Planet Earth for a while, but I got some stuff I gotta do.”

“You better be careful. If Emily finds out you're eating the house, she's going to kill you.”

“I ain't eating the house,” Maddy says. “Besides, you're the one who should be careful. The mothers know you keep stealing the notebook.”

“What notebook?”

Maddy rolls her eyes.

If Emily knew how afraid everyone was of her, she would be insulted. Even Shreve is nervous around Emily now. She didn't know, she honestly didn't
know
: if Emily found them in the kitchen, would she shoot all of them, or just Lara and Jan, who were the ones wasting the jelly? “Maybe you should put that away,” Shreve said, but they ignored her.
It's like I'm not even real
, she thought.
It's like I'm the illusion.
Shreve wondered if this was what was meant by being enlightened. She looked at her surroundings: the dark little kitchen with the boarded-up windows and door, the bullet holes, Sylvia sitting in the straight-backed chair, Lara painting with jelly, and Jan Morris licking the wall in her wake, pausing once to say, “This is true art.”

Maybe I have
never
been here
, Shreve thought.
Maybe my entire life was an illusion: the death of my fiancé, the birth of my winged child, the couple who died in the barn, the babies, everything. Maybe everything is nothing at all, including me. Maybe I never existed.
She felt like she was being swallowed, but not by something dark and frightening, not by a beast, but more like something with wings, something innocent she'd always been a part of but only now recognized. She wanted to tell the others what she was feeling, but she worried that speaking would break the spell. Instead, she closed her eyes, until Cathy Vecker came into the room and said, “Have you all gone crazy? What do you think Emily's going to do when she finds out?”

When Emily walked past the kitchen, she quickly looked the other way. She hoped the mothers would get their act together and clean up the mess. The last thing she wanted was to have to confront the issue. If she did, they might wonder why she didn't shoot anyone, and that might cause them to become suspicious that there were no more bullets. She heard Cathy say, “We have to clean this up before Emily finds out. Do you want to
die
?” That got their attention. They all started talking at once about how, since the day Elli threw their babies out the window, they didn't really care if they lived or not.

 

E
LLI

We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
That's what I whispered to each one, as though I was a fairy godmother, as I pushed them out the window, the mothers standing behind me, crying.

“You do it,” they said. “Please. We can't.”

“Why don't you ask Tamara
?
She's got a dead baby, too.”

“She's writing about all this and interviewing everyone. She doesn't have time to actually
do
anything; she's too busy chronicling us.”

“But I hate all of you.”

“That's why it has to be you,” they said, using their crazy mother-logic on me. “You won't let your emotions get in the way.”

They were wrong. All those babies with Timmy's dimples, and Timmy's little round body, and Timmy's eyes looking at me. I saw him in every one of them, and I felt the strangest emotion of all: a combination of love, hate, envy, joy, and sorrow. The more I dropped Timmies out the window, watching them sprout wings and dart across the starry sky, the more I felt my own wings—small, fluttering, just a tremor at first—sprouting from my back. I kept waiting for the mothers to notice, but they were too busy holding their babies tight, kissing them all over, crying on them. More than once, the baby was soaked and slippery by the time he was handed to me. Even though I wore my mother's old winter gloves, there were several babies I did not toss, but dropped. They did not get to hear my blessing, though I whispered it into the air.