THE SCREAMING HOUSE
April 1968
The girl could still taste the kerosene on her lips. Her name was Nadine and she had been feverish for the past four nights. The decision had not been made by her, but by her lover. She hadn't wanted to go through with it; she had no energy to resist. Just the throbbing pain, the leaking blood. If she'd been coherent, this seventeen-year-old girl would've told them that her baby was going to be all right, that she knew the baby would be all right, even if she herself died. She was not afraid of death if it meant her baby would breathe and grow.
She lay down in something cool and hard like stone, a large basin. The room smelled of rubbing alcohol and soap; the odor of kerosene and vinegar still lingered. The perfume of death or of birth? Above her were the most beautiful dark eyes she'd ever seen, so warm and cool at the same time; eyes that looked into her to find the root of this pain, this illness. Her own vision wavered, and the world around her became transparent, empty, as she tried to look beyond this shadowy room, through these beautiful eyes into another existence, into a dream where there was no pain. She saw no faces in the room, only eyes, only hands, only lips curling in smiles and anger.
Someone above her, a white hand, wiped her brow with a cold, wet hand towel. Nadine shivered; it was like ice on her forehead. These people surrounding her in this small room were no more substantial than the dreams she had at night: she thought she could pass her hand through them like ghosts. Who was here with her? Who would help with the birth of her child?
A man, her lover she thought, said, "The whole fucking block's going up. What the hell's this going to do to property values?" But the man to whom the beautiful eyes belonged, the man who watched over her as the spasms hit, grasped her hand as she tried to pass her fingers through him. "Have faith, your child shall be born." His large black hand seemed to swallow hers alive like a hawk devouring a fish. She felt his pulse pounding drum. It beat steadily, hopefully against the ever weakening sound of her own heart. Where was her mother? Her mother had promised to stay with her. To hold her hand the way this man held her hand. Her mother's hand was warmer than this man's, warmer and softer, open, unfolding. Her mother was there among the smoky shadows, but why wasn't she beside Nadine now?
Why would a mother hide from her daughter?
Her lover, out in that misty darkness of the room, muttered, "Jesus, do you think this could go a little faster?"
"Baron Samedi," Nadine gasped. It was a plea; the pain was clutching the baby inside her, the room was dislodging itself from the earth and running away, her womb would burst with overripe, fermented fruit.
"Baron Samedi, I pray…
Her lover whispered, "I'm not going to wait around here for some lunatic to shoot out the window!"
"Please," Nadine gasped to the woman she could not see who stood above her. Her ribs were chafing against her skin as if they longed to break free of her.
She knew then that she was going to die. She wasn't scared, not with the man with the dark eyes holding her, leaning toward her. They called him Baron Samedi, guardian of the graveyards and the dead. She did not believe, not like her mother believed, but if it saved her baby, Nadine would, if he could save her baby…
The man above her grinned. His teeth seemed huge, but that was her fever. His teeth seemed to be coming down for her, down for her baby, down to find the place inside her where her baby's heart beat. Her lover screamed, "Fucking animals is what you are!" Then her mother (She's here/She's with me. She will protect me!) screamed,
"My baby, what you doin' to my baby girl?" Then Nadine felt and heard nothing. Her breathing stopped and what little life there was in her empty body ran out in a warm, red pool from between her legs.
April 1989
"Maybe it's a blessing in disguise," Hugh whispered. "Maybe it's just as well, Scout."
Rachel knew that he wasn't about to do his Let's Pretend line: Let's Pretend Scout, that you're the mommy and I'm the daddy and we have a whole mess of kiddos, an acre of kiddos, and I'm coming home from work at the end of a hard day and you're exhausted and we sit up and read them bedtime stories 'til they fall asleep… Nope, Let's Pretend went out the window when you got a miscarriage in the family. A blessing in disguise. She'd cried for three weeks over this particular blessing, soon followed by a therapist, two group sessions a day for three weeks, a psychiatrist, a brief (and less than heavenly) flirtation with antidepressants. She still kept the leftover pills in a shoe box beneath the bathroom sink on the off chance that she might get the urge to jump out a window again. It had been great fun, if useless, getting all the medical attention over what she basically felt was a fact of Normal Life (lots of nice folks have miscarriages, although Rachel herself didn't seem to know any of them). And even if she did start crying every time she saw babies, or when she accidentally wandered into the baby supply area of Dart Drug and caught herself buying Pampers, or in Safeway picking up Gerber's baby chicken. Only her work seemed to keep her from forgetting what Hugh had called "a minor glitch."
“It's just as well," Hugh said (had said, would continue to say). Rachel hated him for that and also loved him for that. He even promised he would make it up to her, that he would kiss it and make it better, that this was a blow, certainly, no one would deny how tragic it was, but couldn't they turn it around? Couldn't they try to see it as a momentary setback, but in the long run an advantage? Wouldn't there be things to compensate?
She didn't really hear him say all this. She heard the words the way she would listen to the radio while ironing or eating breakfast. Instead she wondered if she really wanted to be married at all, except to have children; how she could've just lived with Hugh and that would've been enough, except she'd been pregnant, except she'd wanted a child, and now for some reason that child had chosen not to be born of her.
"Nature took care of it, Scout, it must be for the better. You have to try and see it that way," Hugh droned on, and no doubt her doctor had prepped him on the sorts of lines to feed her, and she loved him for it, and she despised him for these spineless rationalizations, but she loved him, too.
She loved him because when she didn't love him she hated herself and remembered the other woman, the one who was dead. Hugh's first wife. Hugh always emphasized that they weren't financially ready for a baby, not yet, his feet weren't on the ground, he still had to try the bar for one more go 'round, his job as a consultant in a tax lawyer's office was only for six months and would be over soon, and how could she really afford to leave her firm so soon, anyway? Just a year or so at the outside and then, yes, a whole litter of babies if you want, so you see it's just as well. Although Hugh wouldn't say babies, because it was a word they both avoided.
He would blanket her with hugs and kisses while she turned her face into the pillow. It's not a baby, it's just a little sphere, a little subdividing sphere, a glitch in the system. Rachel loved her husband then and hated him more than she'd ever hated anyone; and she hated her body for betraying her like that. Later, when she was feeling less tired and Hugh brought in a large bowl of ice cream, he told her about the house his father was giving them as a late wedding present.
Rachel sniffed at the ice cream as if smelling it might make her feel better. What I really want is a cigarette, but I guess I’ll just get healthy and fat.
She was purposefully trying not to act too excited about getting the house. That would kill it if she acted too excited; perhaps her excitement had killed her little sphere, too. Hugh didn't like it when she was enthusiastic; he didn't trust liking anything too much. She said, "See, your dad's coming around, I knew he would."
Hugh didn't respond. He pretended to read the paper; chocolate ice cream on his upper lip. She knew that he had only accepted the gift as a means of compensating for the miscarriage. This was part of Hugh Adair's sense of fair play, and which Rachel knew was the underlying reason he had trouble with the concept of being a lawyer: fair play was rarely involved. He thrived on frustrating himself. He wanted very little to do with his father, but he would accept the house for Rachel's sake, and then get numerous headaches concerning how miserable he was knowing he'd let the Old Man, as he called his father, buy them this way.
For a split second Rachel considered that she could avoid a lot of trouble about this wonderful if tardy wedding gift by simply saying,
"Oh, Hugh, let's wait until we can really afford a house on our own terms. Let's not have the Old Man hording it over us, let's not compromise our integrity.
But it was only a split second, and then Rachel came to her senses. She put the bowl of ice cream aside. "Our very first house. Is it in a good neighborhood?"