The Shore (25 page)

It takes Tamara days to wade through the books, mostly because she finds herself rereading things that don't make sense. Women's health was once about preventing pregnancy as much as encouraging it, and she can't believe that it had all more or
less been common knowledge, that women shared cures around and tended to their own insides, and only went to a doctor when something was really wrong. But then, many of the books had been published when abortions were still legal, before the country had gotten right with God again. Perhaps they had only escaped pulping because no one had read them, because her crazy Great-Aunt Sally had kept them in her crazy old house, waiting for Tamara to find them.

As she reads the books, Tamara begins marshaling pills, lining the bottles up in neat rows across the floor. Antibiotics, just in case she has something that will hurt the baby. Vitamin C, but not too much because it can cause a miscarriage. Pills to stimulate ovulation, and extra-strong vitamins, and a whole bunch of things that she doesn't really understand but figures are good because she remembers them being given to pregnant women when she and Willie looked them up online. Halfway through her reading she goes out again, breaks into a CVS out along the highway that has already been raided, and takes the morning-sickness pills and iron pills, and a couple of other kinds of pills she figures might be useful, and adds them to her ranks of amber bottles across the floor. She starts with Clomid, because she wants it to take the first time, but then she starts worrying, since she's not gotten pregnant by accident nearly as much as most girls seemed to, that it will be especially hard. So she adds Heparin, then doubles the amount she's taking, just in case. Also just in case, even though she knows it's silly, she hangs the charm around her neck, the one her grandmother had made her mother wear when she'd wanted a son after three miscarriages. It was carved out of a tooth that her grandmother
had found on top of a mountain, years before, and even though Tamara doesn't believe in that sort of thing, her mom had had a baby boy, and it never hurt to try. As the days pass she feels more and more confident that she is doing the right thing, even though the pills make her nauseous. She has to have a baby. She deserves to have a baby.

When the day comes, Tamara knows it. She dresses slowly, playing with clothes and makeup until she feels, not like herself, but like a woman again, at least. A handle of whiskey goes into her favorite backpack, along with condoms that she's carefully pricked full of holes, and a bottle of water. It's strange, a woman showing up at his doorstep offering whiskey and demanding sex, but she hopes that Mr. Todd won't find it so strange that he turns her away.

Willie had told her where to find the hidden entrance to his dad's bunker, and to get to it she hikes across the sunburned potato fields, now gone to overgrown grass, past the creek and toward the highway. It's nice being out in the daylight, even if it is weak spring daylight and the slanting sun is in her face. It's been weeks since she left the shack in daylight. Something feral in her likes the dark corners, the hidden places, doesn't take risks and doesn't go out in full sun. And besides, she doesn't need any more than what she already has in the shack, except for a baby.

As she draws near the place, Tamara begins to wonder if Mr. Todd is dead. His trailer still stands underneath the pecan trees like she remembers, but it leans in on itself in the drunken way that shows no one lives there, much less the kind of handy man that would still be alive in such circumstances. She wanders
around in circles for a bit, calling out softly, looking for some indication that he is still around. Maybe he's dead, of the rot or something else, and she'll never have Scott's baby.

Then a potato sack comes down over her face.

The bunker is underground, just the way Willie said it would be. She expected a hole covered with a tarp, a dirty sleeping bag, dampness and spiders, but when Mr. Todd takes the bag off her face she sees that she is only correct about the dampness.

It's larger than she'd expected, perhaps sixteen feet cubed, with concrete floor, walls, and ceiling. He brags that he'd had it made special by a company that did septic tanks and burial vaults. There is a second one too, just full of canned fish and long-life milk and boxes of water-purification tablets, even though he has his own well, off in one corner of the floor, that taps directly into the freshwater recharge spine. But she had guessed right in one regard: the single biggest thing that he hadn't thought to stockpile was booze.

He insists on making her dinner before uncapping the bottle, and she sits on the edge of his bed while he fries canned meat over a camp stove. It's neat and comfortable, with the bed up against one wall and a cooking area against the other, surveillance equipment and a radio dominating the space. There isn't much in the way of entertainment, though, or any signs of company, but as he adds vegetables to the frying pan he regales her with stories of sneaking through the abandoned villages in broad daylight, finding what he needs while hiding from the bands of survivors. They've fortified the villages, made war on each other in a perfunctory but brutal way for food and medicine,
and women that aren't tainted with disease; the largest group was isolated on Chincoteague and Assateague Islands, since a storm destroyed the causeway. He's traded a bit with some of them, shot those who tried to steal from him; he's surprised that she's still making it on her own.

The food is good. The whiskey is better. As it slides down Mr. Todd gets more and more friendly, inviting her to cuddle up next to him on the bed, running his hand over her back and shoulders, his laugh getting louder and more boisterous. He does look just like Scott, Tamara thinks, and it's Scott's face that she has in her mind's eye when she leans in and kisses him.

It takes three weeks for the purple rash to begin showing in Mr. Todd's groin, but that is more than long enough for Tamara. They barely leave the bed in that time, sliding out from under the sheet only for necessities. If it's been a while for Tamara, it's been even longer for Mr. Todd, and she doubts that even if he noticed the purpling he would let her leave. She slips out, sans backpack, while he's passed out asleep after a particularly vigorous session.

She has no doubt that she's pregnant. She can feel it in her middle, a pressure, or maybe just a hope, slowly building. Her baby is growing inside her. Scott's baby. Their baby.

Summer comes and goes, and Tamara barricades herself inside her house. Being alone doesn't bother her anymore, because she isn't alone. She moves sluggishly around the shack, following the sunshine, lazing, as her belly slowly grows firm, then starts
to expand. As summer moves into fall, and then to winter, she piles on clothing and spreads a clear plastic tarp across the hole in the roof. There is a little frost inside in the mornings, but it doesn't get bitterly cold. She is safe and warm enough.

The pregnancy book from her great-aunt's library says she'll be hungry, but she finds that even with a reason to eat she simply can't stomach one more can of creamed corn. She takes pills instead; the prenatal vitamins and the anti-nausea pills and anything that seems like it will help her feel better or the baby grow faster. Some of them space her out, leave her watching the patterns on the walls as the light changes, and even though she uses them sparingly they are her favorite ones.

She doesn't know what happened to Mr. Todd after she left. Maybe she'd been mistaken about the purpling, about having given him the disease. Maybe he was just bruised from all they'd gotten up to, and she could have stayed. He could have taken care of her. They could have had the baby together. But then it would have been Mr. Todd's baby, not Scott's baby. Mr. Todd had only been the sperm donor, she reasons. This baby is Scott's. It will look just like him. She knows it.

She also knows that there is nothing, besides this, to wait for. Mr. Todd had told her there was no army of humanitarians coming with a cure to rescue them. Most of the country is dead, not just the Shore; the straggling handfuls of people left quarantined by ocean on either side, Canada and Mexico to the north and south. Everyone is suspected as a vector, and anyone who tries to get out is shot, women especially because it is harder to tell if they have the disease at a glance. He'd said it was only a matter of time before the plague spread, nowhere was immune, and nowhere was far enough away. It was like Noah's flood,
like smallpox, like bubonic plague, and maybe humanity would rise up again after it, but not in her lifetime.

As her belly swells Tamara begins to wonder just how her little boy will get out of her. Or little girl, she reminds herself, but her first thought is always boy. She wants a boy. She knows how it works when there aren't doctors around to put you under in a clean hospital bed and take the baby out the way it was meant to be done, like picking a fruit, but she hadn't thought when she'd gotten pregnant that she'd actually be pushing the baby out on her own. She hadn't assumed that some doctor would show up with a scalpel and anesthesia and get it out for her, of course, she just hadn't thought much about it. She counts the weeks anxiously, reads the pregnancy book, and wonders what to do.

When it happens, it's completely unexpected. At first she thinks it's a stomachache, dull and cramping, but the feeling is too regular, too persistent. It doubles her up on the cool cement floor, moaning quietly because that seems to make it feel better, swallowing painkillers with long-life milk. Then she feels wetness between her thighs, and realizes what is happening. And panics.

It's too soon, nearly a month too soon. The aching and tearing feeling that lightning-bolts through her and makes her want to throw up with pain, can't be the beginnings of childbirth. It's a nice thing, a natural thing, it can't feel like this. She counts the weeks again, tallied in permanent marker on the white plaster wall, and swallows handfuls of pills to deal with the pain. She paces the floor, doubling up with the contractions, trying and failing to think of a solution, a fix, a way out.

Gradually the pain fades, or not so much fades as becomes
too much to think about, and she begins to focus on the patterns on the walls, the tiny ridges the brush has left in the paint. Her body isn't hers anymore, but something she is only vaguely attached to, like her clothes or her third-grade report card.

She doesn't know how long she stays in that state, floating just outside her body, quiet and preoccupied while it moans and rocks and does God-knows-what on the cement floor. She comes back to it with a snap, a heaviness, and the urge to push back against it. Senses dulled, she does. At the last moment she realizes that the baby is coming out, finds its head with her hands, then its shoulders as it slides free. Everything is blood, and pain, but she lays it on the mound of clean towels she keeps just for this eventuality.

It had gotten dark at some point; her baby is just a shape on the towels. It's supposed to start crying now, isn't it? She knows that much. She holds her own breath until she hears its echo, then a tiny, kittenish mewl. Close enough.

Exhausted, she fumbles for the pack of matches by her bed, for the emergency candles, and kills three matches before she manages to get a taper lit. She is still connected to the baby, it looks like—the book mentioned “umbilical cord,” but it hadn't registered with her that she'd have to find a way to cut it, that there is still a placenta to come and be dealt with and hopefully disposed of where it won't attract the larger predators. That can be taken care of in a minute. She raises the candle high, and looks at her child for the first time.

He—and it is a he—is red with her blood, but when she wipes it away his skin is tight and shiny, like wax. That's all right, she guesses, maybe it's because he's early. But his eyes…They look like skinned plums, bright red and oozing and painful,
not eyes at all. As he kicks and mewls louder, she notices that he has a third leg, bent up and wasted between the healthy two, and two sets of genitalia, one in the crotch of each pair of legs.

She's beyond horror, beyond pain. A few hours earlier she might have screamed, or cried, or done something. Now she just sits there, if only for a moment, looking at what she has borne. His mouth opens wider, the mewl turns nearly to a wail, and her breasts begin to ache. Carefully, she picks him up, pulls him to her body, and lets him eat.

2010

M
ISSING
P
IECES

I
t isn't until I get to Matthew's—or rather, flash by it and catch the sign in the rearview mirror—that I realize that I'm There. You'd think a place would get more crowded in fifteen years, people and stores and all the crap they call civilization popping up like a rash. Instead the Shore's emptied out a lot. The whole drive north from the bridge I've passed houses with boarded windows, post offices that have closed for good, churches with roofs that are caving in and lightning-struck steeples that no one's bothered to fix. Granted, when I was last here there were too many post offices, too many churches, for the number of people that live the year through on the Shore. But there's something about buildings with their windows painted over, parking lots cracked with weeds and the entrance chained off, that makes you believe a place might be dying.

Everything looks familiar now, and at the same time not familiar, and I pull onto the shoulder and lean my forehead on the wheel of the car, because I'm crying tears that I can't feel, that aren't coming from me, just coming from my body. I feel guilty when I do that, because Seth gets worried when I cry, and buzzes around to try and make it better and I want to scream at
him that there's nothing to make better, that I don't feel whatever it is that people feel when they cry but it just happens like a runny nose when you have a cold, so I sit still and let him do what he wants to because there's no point in both of us crying.

Seth was excited when I told him that I felt like I was ready to go back. Dr. McKenna was too, in a more professional way; told me I needed closure in a lot of areas and this trip might help me move on. They had wanted me to do a lot of preparation beforehand, phone people and gather information that way, but I hadn't wanted to wait. On Wednesday I'd decided to go back, on Thursday I'd packed, and on Friday I'd taken off on the eighteen-hour drive from Cairo, Georgia, to the island. Seth was the practical one; he'd Googled the few names and addresses I remembered and read up on the Shore while I was stuffing my overnight bag, finding out things about it that I'd never known to think about. It's been dying slowly, he told me, and that was a surprise. The big boom was in the thirties, when the resort was up and running. I didn't know that we'd had a resort. Now parents come with their kids to the beach, or rich people retire to Onancock so they can keep their yachts tied up behind their million-dollar homes, but the old families are dying out, their kids leaving it behind as soon as they're old enough to go. No one that has a choice wants to work in the chicken plants.

I breathe deep, then start the car again and turn around. I hate driving, and I suck at it, but it's the only way to get here and I didn't want Seth to come. I wanted to do this by myself.

It's weird, going down that gravel road in a car. The first-thing-in-the-morning light streams through the trees, the dust rises up in a cloud around me, and I can hear dogs barking
but for once I'm safe from them. Then the long smooth curve around the cornfield and I can see the farmhouse with the columns, but the white shell road through the cornfield is overgrown. Not that I want to go down there anyway.

No dog barks when I pull onto the grass in front of the farmhouse, and I would wonder if anyone still lives here if it weren't for the scatter of kids' toys on the front lawn. My first knock goes unanswered, but at the second the door inches open wide enough to show a thin, sun-cooked face that's mostly sharp nose, with a bony body hidden behind it in the shadow of the house.

“I'm not buying any,” she snaps at me.

“Good thing I'm not selling any, then.”

“I like my church and I don't keep cans around.” She begins to shut the door, but I stick my boot in the space.

“Sorry to bother you, ma'am. I'm looking for somebody that used to live around here.”

She doesn't open the door, but she doesn't try to close it farther.

“Mr. Thomas Lumsden used to own this farm? I need to talk to someone that has access to his tenancy records.” My birth certificate and driver's license are in a plastic sleeve in my pocket, and I pull it out and slide it through the gap in the door. She takes it rather than letting it fall. I didn't expect anyone to recognize me, and I'm glad that she doesn't.

The door opens a bit more as she reads, but I'm massively relieved. She only acts old, I realize now that I can see her. Her hair is smooth and straight and streaked heavily with white, but that's premature, she can't be quite forty. Her face hasn't softened much, though. She looks like the absolute last person
I'd expect to be a mom; I hope for the kids' sakes that the toys on the lawn are from babysitting, and don't belong to her own children.

“I do have his tenancy records, as it happens. I'm his granddaughter, Sally Lumsden. What were you looking for, exactly?” All the words that I'd been over in my head the whole drive up from Georgia are gone.

“I…My parents used to rent the little house out on the edge of the marsh, and I was hoping that—I'm looking for someone they used to work with.”

The woman's face blooms with recognition.

“The little house? Then you're—I remember when your parents moved in.” She opens the door and steps back, but I'm waiting for her to remember the rest of it. “Come in.”

I follow her down a hallway, through a kitchen and living room and out the back door into what I think is a garden—less cluttered with kids' toys than the front yard, but they're peeking between the leaves—until I see the ceiling: she's built a massive greenhouse onto the back of the farmhouse, crammed it with plants. She pushes me into a wicker chair near the middle of the room and disappears back inside, saying something about tea. I hadn't expected this kind of reception.

When it happened I'd been a minor, so the newspaper hadn't been allowed to publish my name, and then Social Services decided that it was self-defense and made sure I stayed right out of the brouhaha. They hadn't let us see the papers then, and even though I'd been curious in a weird, sick, self-torturing way, even after I was old enough to make my own choices I hadn't been able to make myself look. I'd figured that a Lumsden, at least, would have known a little better, wouldn't have even let
me in until she'd made sure that I wasn't there to murder her. It's strange that people can look at me and not know right away what happened.

She comes back with two glasses of iced tea with mint sprigs in, and I sip mine to be polite; my stomach is still nervous. The other wicker chairs are covered in mounds of books and magazines—mostly plant- and drug-related, though one of the top magazines has a picture of a DNA strand on the cover, with a headline about chromosome substitution—but she shoves them off onto the cement floor and settles in.

“Now, you're going to have to pardon me if I put my foot in it, but I'm going to at some point.” She takes a sip of tea. “You're the…younger one?”

“Older one.”

“I used to see you walking down the road to Matthew's. Was so upset that my mother wouldn't let me go and visit you when you were born—baby cuddling was my favorite sport. How's your little sister?”

“I don't rightly know. I don't know where she is. We got split up in foster care.”

“Now that's awful. They really should make more of an effort to keep families together.”

“You've got children yourself?”

“Twins, boy and a girl, six years old next month.” She says it in a cadence that sounds like she says it all the time, and I hope she keeps talking about them instead of asking about my family. “They're visiting their daddy on the mainland for two weeks. I can't imagine anyone splitting the two of them up.”

Next subject.

“Was the greenhouse always here?”

“No, I added that when I inherited the house.”

“I wasn't half-surprised to find you still here, thought you'd have sold it off for condos years ago.”

She shakes her head with a big grin. “Conditions of the will. Whoever got the farm had to keep the family name and stay put, no selling out to developers and shipping off to the city. My older brother is still pissed as hell that they wouldn't let him cut it up. Built the greenhouse as a birthday present to myself.”

“Do you take them to flower shows?” I don't know how to talk to someone about her gardening; it's the first thing that comes to me.

“I'm not really that type of gardener.” She reaches out and snaps a leaf off a bush nearby. “What they can be used for is more interesting to me. Do you recognize this?”

The smell is familiar and the shape is familiar, but I don't know it.

“Catnip. Besides getting cats stoned you can use it for colds, fevers, stomachaches, migraines, to stop bleeding, or to start uterine contractions. Every plant in this building grows wild on the Shore, and every one has a medical use.”

“If you can just go for a walk and pick them, why do you have them all gathered up here?”

“I'm writing a guide to emergency field medicine for rural hikers, for when there isn't anything available but the native plants. Don't want to put anything in that I can't test and make work myself.”

“So you'd be the person to come to when the apocalypse hits and all the drugs run out.”

“You could say that…”

I was joking, but she's looking into space thoughtfully, and I
feel like I'm missing something important. I don't want to keep talking, but I don't want to come right out with what I'm there for; I gulp tea and wait for her to say something.

“Now, what were you hoping to find in the tenancy records?”

“I'm trying to find family, or people that knew them. My parents. They worked together before they got married, so I thought that if the lease mentions who their employer was back then, I can go find him and maybe get someone to tell me…anything, really.”

She nods at me, then gets up and goes back into the house, taking my empty glass with her. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to follow her or stay put, but she doesn't tell me to come with her so I stay in the greenhouse, looking at the plants.

We had decided that leaving it vague was the way to go, that anything I dug up about anyone I was related to would be welcome. My grandmother cut ties with her family before my mother was born, so the full extent of our relations that I'd known growing up were my mom's sister, Aunt Olivia. She'd been the fun kind of aunt, who lived in a little prefab in Belle Haven with a succession of roommates I'd only recently realized were probably her girlfriends, but she'd died of bone cancer when I was a kid.

When Sally Lumsden comes back she's carrying a dark brown hanging file folder, not as thick as I'd hoped it would be, but still pretty thick. My hands are itching for it, but she sits down and opens it up on her knees.

“Can you just remind me real quick when you were born, Chloe?”

“February 1982.”

“This is it, then.” She pulls a Manila folder out of the big brown file, with the dates 1981–1995 penciled on the tab. I had been hoping that the whole file was on us, but this is better than nothing.

Their pictures are stapled to the first page of the rental application. I freeze when I see them. They didn't let me take anything with me, when they took us out of the house. I haven't seen Mama's face in so long.

“Let me get you some more tea,” Sally says, and I mumble a thank-you as she gets up and leaves. We both know that I don't need tea, that she's leaving me alone on purpose. I don't look at his picture.

Their full names are written out under their signatures: Eloise Fitzgerald and Boris Gordy. I flip through the pages slowly, skimming because I'm not sure what I'm looking for, stop for a moment when I see the place where monthly rent has been written in: twenty dollars. Mr. Lumsden rented the little house to a down-and-out couple with a baby on the way for twenty dollars a month, just enough to keep them from feeling like they were taking charity, not so much that they couldn't still afford to eat. I don't know what to say.

I find it eventually, a page that lists my father's places of employ. There's a bunch of them: Perdue and Tyson and the battery farm up the road, but the very first one, from 1978 to 1983, is “Lovett Renovation, LLC.” There is a signature along with Bo's, verifying that he was employed and drew a paycheck: Charles Morgan, with his address given as Temperanceville. I pull out that page and, as the sound of footsteps gets closer, begin copying down the information onto the pocket notepad I brought with me.

“Found what you were looking for?”

“Thank you, ma'am, I did,” I say all chirpy, and hand the folder back to her. She tucks it into the file while giving me a studying look.

“Congratulations,” she says.

“I'm sorry?”

“On the engagement.”

“Oh!” I had forgotten about the ring, wondered now if I should have left it behind. “Thank you.”

“Is that why you're looking now?”

I want to tell her to fuck off and mind her own business, but I'm too flustered. I hadn't thought that anyone would care why I'd decided to come back.

“It's just the right time, is all. Thank you for the help.”

“Well, I'd be very curious to know if you succeed. Drop by before you leave, I'll give you some food for the road.”

I make polite sounds until her front door closes with her on the inside and me on the outside. It feels like she's watching me from behind the curtains, so I don't put my hand in my pocket until I get back in the car, and even then I don't look down. The photograph is stiff, the corners sharp, and feeling it there makes a warm spot in my belly. I have my mama's face again.