Hazard Page 22

  I shook my head, lowered the basket, and straightened again. Yes, it was still there, poised at the window, unhurried, arrested, waiting. Its form was not fully drawn. More like a gesture, edgeless and suggestive. Without mass. Female.

  Nothing moved. Time yawned around me; I stood, breathing, weightless, the light in my eyes striated with dust, a static buzz to my skin. How silly, I thought, trembling. What is wrong with me?

  The figure shifted, or rather, lifted. It was featureless. How did I know she was looking at me?

  “Audrey?” I spoke, not sure if I had said this out loud.

  A slight metallic cast hung in the air and I tasted iron on my tongue. A spattering of dots blinded the edges of my vision. Suddenly, a wave of sickness surged in my gut. I lunged to the bathroom, diving for the toilet, spitting vomit into the bowl. I was still hanging over the rim, hair dangling and clumped with throw up, when I heard the door whine. Startled, I looked up. Dylan stood in the doorway, peering at me with wide blue eyes, his blanket pressed up on his mouth and nose.

  “It’s okay, honey,” I said, still on my knees. “Mommy’s okay.”

  I was reassuring myself as much as Dylan. My stomach felt raw, my insides too large. Nature was proving too big for me with this baby, too uncontrollable, just like the first time. And now, this haunt of a woman.

  Shakily, I rinsed out my mouth with water and mouthwash. Then, I took Dylan’s hand and walked steadily out into the hallway, glancing furtively at the now-empty alcove as we went down the stairs, out the back door, into the yard. I felt an urgent need for the mundane, the reality of touched things, of real bugs and flowers and bird feathers.

  What had I just seen? Clairvoyance had never been a part of me. I had always relished hearing about ghosts, whether they were conjured by Charles Dickens or a camp counselor, lit by a bonfire. As a Baptist child, I had been taught that souls either flew up to heaven or down to hell. That was that. They didn’t stick around. Some years ago, I had jettisoned Baptist dogma and, along with it, the idea of souls dwelling anywhere after death, whether in some burning pit or foamy cloud. If a soul lingered anywhere, it was in our minds. In my mind.

  Still, I had sensed this presence before. Not in the dark silences of night, as I padded around from bedroom to kitchen to parlor, searching vainly for sleep, but oddly, in the late afternoon, just like now, when the dense August heat collected on the landing and the slow light teased along the banister.

  For the rest of the afternoon I avoided going back inside, searching for bugs and digging up worms with Dylan until daylight dimmed and Don appeared for dinner. I didn’t tell Don about the sighting. I prided myself on being the sane one in this extended family, the one who wasn’t prone to drama or hysterics. Still, I cajoled him into taking a night off from the studio and driving over to the Aberdeen burger shack for dinner, then staying around as darkness fell. For the first time, I didn’t want to be alone in the house.

  Over the next few days, I clomped noisily up the stairs and spoke out loud, as if noise were some kind of ghost deterrent. “Heading upstairs,” I announced, or “Off to the kitchen.”

  Dylan copied me, cupping his hands around his mouth like a bullhorn. “Going poddy!” he called. I let him abandon his rest time and, instead, play games with me, putting together puzzles in the parlor or, preferably, outside on the front porch. The more I avoided being alone, the more I seemed incapable of shutting the alcove out of my mind. I couldn’t let go of what I’d seen or shake the notion of Audrey. She hadn’t felt like a ghost; she’d felt like a person trying to tell me something. What was the connection between her layer of life and mine? Was she an omen?

  I thought of my child in the pouch of my body. For the first time in a long while, my mind turned to my brother. In my mother’s womb, Roddy had already harbored his affliction. No matter what nutrition my mother partook, or how diligently she cared for herself, or how obediently tended to her duties as a wife and mother and Christian woman, her fate was coming: she would bear a severely disabled child. This would determine everything in her future and mine. It would root deeply in my gut and, as it was doing now, bloom my fear.

  Three years before, when Dylan was in my womb, I had opted for every medical screening. Each procedure soothed me, ruling out spina bifida, Down syndrome, heart anomalies. Each negative result I celebrated with Don over a candlelit dinner. But none of the tests could detect or rule out autism, or aphasia, or developmental delay. The moment Dylan was in my arms I checked him for signs, tracking his eyes, his touch, and later, the sounds rolling off his tongue. Only recently, with the flutter of this new child in my womb, had I allowed myself to believe that Dylan was out of danger and I had been spared my mother’s heartbreak. Now, here came another child, and I was even more suspicious with this pregnancy, more vulnerable. Birth defects were a random game of chance and ill fortune, a kind of Russian roulette, where you dodged harm on the first few rounds but, inevitably, your luck ran out. The more you spun the barrel and pointed the muzzle, the more certain a dire outcome.

  I had never mentioned this fear to my mother. Partly because I sensed it would stir up memories for her and distress her to know her daughter was nerve-wracked about becoming a mother. But more so, it was my mother’s religiosity that kept me at a distance. She still believed these things were determined by God and weren’t to be questioned or even to be prevented. I hadn’t told her I tested for birth defects during my pregnancy with Dylan or that I was waiting for test results for this new baby.

  The next Saturday afternoon I found myself pacing around the backyard while Dylan dug in the dirt. I couldn’t rid my thoughts of Audrey and, inexplicably, decided to find out more about her. Putting Dylan in the car, I drove to the McHale place, two farms away. Junior McHale, an eighty-year-old farmer, had known the McAlister family well. He had even helped dig Audrey’s grave. He was a yarn-spinner and an ardent believer in ghosts—so vividly that he made sure never to drive down his two-mile lane after dark, in case the headless horseman burst from the trees into his headlights. He had revealed this with a chuckle but also a wary look in his eyes.

  Bumping down the rutted lane, I realized why Junior was so skittish: his lane was barely six feet wide, encroached upon by trees on both sides, many of which clasped branches overhead, blocking out the sun and cloaking the road in shadow. I had never driven down this lane without Don and, suddenly, I felt uneasy. Stop it, I said to myself. You’re being foolish.

  “What’s ‘foolish’?” piped Dylan, from the back seat.

  “Oh, Mommy’s thinking out loud. Foolish means silly.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “No, no, not at all. Silly is fine. It’s actually downright appropriate at times.”

  But was it fine for a thirty-four-year-old woman? When did it mean some sort of slippage on my part?

  The lane opened out into the farmyard, and as we pulled up to the ramshackle house, Junior appeared out of nowhere. He stood and greeted me awkwardly, his wizened frame like an old gnarl. He wore pants hitched with a rope, scuffed and manured boots, and a plaid shirt with wash-faded patches at the elbows. He wasn’t accustomed to seeing me without Don. I could tell from his expression he wondered what in the world I was doing there.

  “Just dropping by,” I sang out, hoisting Dylan onto my hip. “Dylan wanted to see the cows. Do you mind?”

  “Nope, nope. We got cows,” he said, rustling his bent fingers in the air.

  We made the rounds, first into the calf barn, then to the fence where we watched the cows watching us, their big jaws grinding. Finally, Junior invited us inside and, sitting down to the kitchen table with tea and freezer-burned Blondies, I cajoled the story out of him, pulling my reporter’s pencil and small notebook from my pocket.

  What I had suspected was true: Audrey had been unhappy. She took over the farm but didn’t own it; laws at the time disallowed married women from owning property. Her husband, Val, swiftly lost his charming ways and was often spotted in town
with a woman on his arm, leaving Audrey out at Rocky Point, alone, to manage the everyday farm chores. When she was thirty-three, Audrey gave birth to a daughter at home, and not three days later she was up and about, doing chores. As she strode across the backyard, hauling two heavy buckets of potatoes, she called out to Val to open the gate for her.

  “Open it yourself!” Val had yelled from high on the tractor. “I’m busy!”

  She stood still, not responding.

  “Aw go on, jump over it!” Val yelled again, exasperated.

  In the next instant, Audrey dropped, crumpling to the ground.

  “Gone, she was,” said Junior, snapping his callused fingers. “That quick.”

  “You mean, she died—right there?” I asked, horrified.

  “Yes, ma’am. Blood clot in her brain.”

  Something clattered to the floor in the next room. I sprang up from the chair and through the door to find Dylan frozen by the couch, shards of a broken candy dish at his feet, a look of terror on his face.

  “Oh, honey,” I said quickly, alarmed at the dread in his eyes. The instant he saw me, he sighed and crumpled into tears.

  “It was an accident, sweetie,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  Above Dylan’s sobs I apologized to Junior and asked for a broom and dust pan. He waved me away, so I ferried Dylan and his hiccups out to the car. On the way home, I glanced in the mirror. A deep unease entered me. Dylan had looked too mortified for a child at his tender age. His was an old look of shame and failure.

  “Mama?” he said now, his blanket muffling his voice.

  “What, sweetie?”

  “I won’t tell Daddy.”

  “No, sweetie. You won’t and I won’t.”

  He puffed and leaned back against the seat, blanket up to his nose. Before we were back in our driveway, he fell dead asleep. I had little choice but to let him nap and pass the next few hours alone. Carrying him upstairs, past the yawning alcove, I slipped him under his bed covers. As soon as I closed his door, I scooted through the servants’ quarters and downstairs to the kitchen and outside. I knew exactly where Audrey had fallen in the backyard and in a few quick steps I was there, halting a few feet from what used to be the gate to the barnyard. The gate was gone, now marked only by a slender arched opening in the overgrown hedge: an unassuming place to die.

  I stood still, feeling the body of another woman who had only moments left to live, whose womb was still raw from childbirth and whose husband did not cherish her. I cupped my lower abdomen, noting that I hadn’t felt movement all day. Instinctively, I stepped away from the death spot, through the hedge, and entered the neglected orchard, quickening my pace past the blueberry bushes and heading on down the lane. When I was far enough away, I turned.

  From there, I could see the whole house, including the upstairs windows. The alcove’s window was empty, or at least I thought so. This was the angle at which Junior claimed to have seen a ghost in our window, in the wintertime, when he came to check on the house and its groaning pipes. The glare on the glass made it impossible to see beyond it. But then I saw a movement, some stutter of shadow. Instantly, I felt protective, both of Dylan, asleep in his room, and this new child, asleep within me.

  Hurrying back toward the house and glancing at the window, I half-walked, half-trotted along the red lane. I still couldn’t tell if the light was playing tricks or if the movement was what it had looked like: human. Bounding through the door, I clipped up the stairs, making no effort to be quiet, and stopped on the landing. The alcove was void of anything save the bureau and rocking chair. Cracking Dylan’s door, I saw he was fast asleep, knees tucked under him so he looked like a little snail. Closing the door, gently, I turned and walked straight into the alcove. If this house—or some aspect of this house—was trying to tell me something, I wanted to hear it.

  Standing at the window, looking down on the lane, I held utterly still. I didn’t know if I was in the present or the past. The edges around me felt porous. I sensed a consciousness, the kind you cannot see but feel when you’re outside in the dark, an animal watching you from the shadows, then dissolving, silently, an exhaled breath.

  I did not want to live Audrey’s life: bound by circumstance and trapped in a depleting love. Was this her message? That my husband did not cherish me and he would someday turn away? This thought was so frightening and repellent I pushed it off. All my life, I had held fast to the idea of a warm and steady home, an indestructible fort against the wallops of life, a home fueled by a fierce love between a man and a woman. We had a healthy boy. Surely this meant we were blessed—we were meant to hold.

  A mild breeze puffed through the screen, lifting the sheers. In the distance, squall lines of black rain. Deep inside me, my child moved.

  Chapter 26

  Implosion

  In the earliest hours of morning, Boston’s waterfront was a shadowy jumble of buckled pavement and docksides. The stench of low tide and fish guts assured me that I was in the right place, the soiled black water of the harbor lapping inches away from my feet.

  My nerves hummed. I was late. As a revived radio reporter, I remembered every nook and cranny of the city—the mouse paths, the seedy streets that cut through dark parts of town and deposited me at the scene before anyone else. But on this morning those paths had been cordoned off, forcing me to backtrack twice, take the tunnel route, screech into an industrial parking lot, jump out, and abandon my car.

  Now I was running. I had the thick box of a tape recorder slung on my shoulder, its weight banging against my hip, and a shotgun mic in one hand. The mic was two feet long, oddly slender, with a tiny funnel at one end, designed to clutch and pull sound from far away. It was my job to get this muzzle positioned in the right place at the right time—as close as I could get to the site of the story: in this case, an implosion. The Travelers Insurance Building, an aging post-Depression-era skyscraper, built in 1959, was scheduled to disintegrate this Sunday morning at nine o’clock.

  I had no idea where I was supposed to be or where I might plant myself to grab the best sound. All I had was the exact time of the detonation, so I was on a tear, in full reporter mode, strapped in equipment, media badge swinging from my neck.

  To anyone glancing my way, I looked the part, but, in fact, I was living a straddled and harried life as the mother of two young sons. Dylan was now four and Zachary, a toddler in diapers. It was the 1980s, not a good decade for childcare, particularly if you lacked the income for a nanny. In truth, I wanted to work. I felt my skills were rusting and I yearned for the gratification of seeking and writing a good story.

  I had convinced the radio station to accept me back part-time, meaning I was taking assignments on weekends and at odd hours no other reporter wanted. In the old days, before children, I nimbly took on any story, fully dressed, composed, speeding around the city and outfoxing obstacles, always arriving on time. I jumped onto trolleys and into cabs and wrote my stories on the run, rushing into the station just in time to go live. Now, I was lucky to get my blouse buttoned.

  A full mile away from the building, I pushed to the front of a thick crowd and bumped into a row of barricades.

  “I’m with the media!” I hollered to the nearest police officer standing beyond the barricade. He was planted with his back to me, arms folded, straddle-legged.

  “Orders are orders,” he said, shaking his head. “One-mile perimeter around the building—off limits to any and everybody.”

  The thought that I might return to the station empty-handed made my stomach roil. My fingertips turned icy, my throat and lips suddenly parched, dry and papery, my tongue swollen. I didn’t know these were signs of a nervous gene that skipped around in my family and settled in different generations. Anxiety was not widely known or talked about then. I assumed everyone panicked this way and had armored myself with a battery of coping mechanisms: inhale deeply three times, distract the mind, count backward, dig in your pocketbook, walk in circles. It hadn’t yet occurred to me
this was the one thing Roddy and I might have in common. His rocking, counting, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors were thought to be driven by anxiety. Fortunately for me, a young woman in her thirties who was not only an introvert but also raised to be ladylike, panic was an ally, unleashing adrenaline in a way that pushed me to be aggressive and audacious, hallmark behaviors for getting the story first. Without panic I wouldn’t have been able to do the job.

  “Can you let me strap my mic to that barricade, the one up there?” I called to the policeman, slipping into a tone that was part pleading, part coy.

  He studied me for a moment, looking me up and down. I had a head of blondish hair, which I hadn’t managed to clamp back into a clip, so I must have appeared like a she-lion, disheveled and wild, determined to stop at nothing. He swung his gaze to the barricade, a good twenty feet closer to the blast site, and waved me in.

  “Make it snappy,” he said.

  I stepped out into the restricted zone. From here, the sixteen-story Traveler’s building appeared comically small, squatting amid a bundle of soaring skyscrapers. I doubted that I’d pick up much of the blast at this distance, even with the shotgun. At best, I might capture a faint popping sound and have to cajole the engineer back at the station to enhance the tone and volume so the blast sounded authentic.

  Exasperated, I fastened the mic to the barricade with a straitjacket of duct tape. Then, I backed away as promised, unwinding five yards of cable to where the crowd pressed up against the barricades. I checked the sound levels, fiddling with the volume. The red needles jogged softly from the ambient noise. Ten minutes to spare.

  Most of what I knew about sound I’d learned while packed into a college lecture hall along with three hundred other college students. The Physics of Sound, a required course for speech pathologists, my college major at the time, had first filled me with dread, given its shady association with math. But by the end of the first class I was spellbound. I saw sound waves push needles across graph paper and control the flames of candles. I studied the whorls of the human ear and the intricate machinery of tiny bones. I marveled that this ghostly invisible force, a rush of molecules, could move and vibrate beyond what my ear could detect, and in the next instant, wash me in melody, moving me to tears. I fell in love with it: the emotion and sensation of voice and tone traveling through the air.