Sunny stepped out the door. The afternoon buzzed too brightly around her, all the salt in the water in the air crackling her skin, all the leaves refracting the sunlight into her eyes, the entire neighborhood twisting like an abdominal muscle in distress. She held the side of the porch railing, dragging her feet all the way around to the steps, and then she lurched down them one by one. She needed to keep moving during the contraction in order to avoid falling deep into the panic that was under it. There was a flow from her uterus; it gushed a little as her left foot hit the sidewalk, sending a trickle down the inside of her thigh. She gasped. The belly tightened around the baby, and her spine felt broken in half; in the back of her at her waist there was definitely a knife sticking in. She choked but could not cough, it had gripped her too tightly, and she tried to bend forward to relieve her back, clinging so tightly to the porch railing. From somewhere outside herself, she thought there should be a voice in her ear, telling her to breathe. Otherwise she would pass out. Then it subsided.
She left the house where she had lived. It’s a monster house, she thought. We’re in it, we’re monsters, and we’re making more monsters. It might as well have a bell tower and iron grates across the windows. It might as well have a stone dungeon full of skeletons and a gibbering aunt locked away in an attic. There would be a sitcom about them. In order for the plot to work, they had to live exposed as monsters. The Manns had been keeping undercover, under wraps. The grandma, a murderer. The father, a robot. The mother, a freak. The son, a danger. The daughter, who even knew? Now a newspaper story would be published. Or something like that.
She needed help. I need help, she thought. She couldn’t go, red-faced and straining, to her girlfriends. She needed a stronger arm, a more upright salvation. She couldn’t go down to the main road and lie down in traffic. No one would agree to kill her. She couldn’t go back and crawl under the bed, cry “I want my mother!” She couldn’t sob “Maxon, help me!” The only person she could think of that was stalwart enough to help her, that was unmoving enough to be of assistance, was Les Weathers. It was to his trim and elegant town house that she now drew her sagging body.
ON BUBBER’S BIRTHING DAY, everything was different. She woke up in the middle of the night with a contraction, firm and insistent. There was time to shower before the next one came, time to put on a wig before the next one after that. She tugged Maxon on the shoulder. “It’s time,” she said, just like the women said in movies and on television. “Maxon, it’s time.” He woke up, instantly alert.
“Okay. Let’s get Mother,” said Maxon.
“What? Do we have to?” Sunny said. “Can’t we just go?”
Maxon rubbed his face, pulled on his pants. “She came down here to see the baby being born. Don’t you think she wants to go to the hospital when you’re in labor? That’s where it’s most likely to happen.”
“It’s the middle of the night. She’s asleep.”
“We need her,” Maxon said. Sunny paused. She felt the strange thing happening in her uterus, and felt the foot of the baby roll across her belly just below her ribs. She would like to have her mother there, because she was such a strong supporter. However, her mother would not approve of the wig. She had been disapproving of the wig since the beginning of her visit, when she met Sunny at the airport and said, “Who are you?”
“Oh, fine,” said Sunny. “You get her. I’ll get ready.”
Sunny put on eyebrows, eyelashes, makeup, matching pajamas, a silk robe, and then sat looking at herself in the vanity mirror in her bathroom. She had experienced moments in her life when she realized that she was actually alive and living in the world, instead of watching a movie starring herself, or narrating a book with herself as the main character. This was not one of those moments. She felt like she was drifting one centimeter above her physical self, a spirit at odds with its mechanical counterpart. She stood up carefully. Everything looked just right.
“Is she coming?” she said to Maxon, who had come back into their room, and was putting on a shirt, buttoning it all the way to the top.
“Yes, she’s coming. She’s up.”
“Now you say, ‘I’ll get the car,’ and then you drop your keys, or, no, let me think. You can’t find your keys,” said Sunny, standing by the door, directing the I Love Lucy episode that Maxon clearly hadn’t seen.
“My keys are right here,” said Maxon. “Are you all right? Do you want me to carry you?”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Sunny. Her contractions were weak. “Offer to carry me, but I refuse. I say, this is perfectly normal. Perfectly normal. I say, women have been doing this since the beginning of time. And then you walk into a wall.”
In Maxon’s Audi, a car seat was already installed in the backseat, behind the driver. Her mother got in and sat behind Sunny, both hands on her shoulders. As Maxon sped toward the hospital down that empty street, Sunny cried quietly every time her body hurt, but she was excited, so excited to see the baby, and make sure it had been made properly. She felt she was on her way to receive an award. She was on her way to witness the results of all her hard work. Every time Sunny cried, her mother squeezed her shoulders. When they arrived at the hospital, Sunny threw up in a bucket.
“I’m sick!” she cried to her mother.
“It’s all right,” her mother said. “You’re doing fine. But this wig. Surely, you—”
“Don’t you dare take it off me, Mother,” Sunny growled, tightly curled around another contraction. She grabbed the bucket and heaved into it, bile and foam oozing out over her bared teeth. “You don’t touch me. I will put you out of the room.”
A doctor came and asked how Sunny was doing. She asked for an epidural. She asked for a towel, a mirror, and she dabbed at her face, pressing down her eyebrows, counting out the space between the contractions. She puked again, her stomach empty. The room seemed to swirl around her every time she vomited, and when it righted, she had to check that no one had removed her wig. She had to check that her mother was still there. Maxon had gone out into the hall. “Are you okay, Dad?” said the nurse. “No,” said Maxon. “I need to go.” The doctor did a pelvic exam.
“She wants an epidural,” said her mother. “Get it.”
Another doctor came in and made Sunny sit up and lean over. He stuck a pin into her spine, releasing a drug that caused her bottom half to go numb. Instantly, she stopped feeling the contractions. She stopped feeling anything. One more foaming heave, and she was done vomiting, too. Her body gave up, stopped trying to assert itself. It lay still. She closed her eyes.
“I’m cold. Get Maxon,” she said. “The vomiting is over.”
Her mother went out in the hall, and when they both came back in, Sunny had her handbag in her lap and was fixing her makeup, smoothing her hair. Knees bent up on the blanket, hair spread out on the pillow, she wondered if she was ready to become a mother. She pointed to a mirror lying on a countertop.
“Maxon, get that mirror. Stand down at the end of the bed and hold it up.”
“Dearest,” said her mother, “that’s for looking down there when the baby comes out.”
Sunny knew what it was for. That it was for watching the baby’s head emerge. But she needed to see the baby’s mother first, and make sure that the mother was okay. In the mirror, she saw a woman lying on a pillow, dressed in a hospital gown, about to give birth. The woman was flushed, the woman was wide-eyed, the woman was in all ways exactly what her baby needed her to be. Sunny looked sideways into the mirror so that her mother was in the picture, too, long glossy blond hair neatly tied in a bun, eyebrows perfectly groomed, a silk scarf at the throat. She looked at her mother inside the mirror and her mother looked back and smiled. Sunny breathed a deep sigh and lay back on the pillows. The mother put a hand out, as if to touch her on the head, but then drew it back, and patted her on the arm. Maxon put the mirror down.
Two hours later, everything was still perfect. Maxon had fallen asleep in a chair, and the nurse had turned down the lights in the room, saying that Sunny might as well rest. She might as well get ready to push, because the contractions were steady, and things would be moving along. They had punctured her water bag, and had stuck a little curved wire up into her, inserted it under the baby’s skull, where they could monitor his heart rate and humanity. They had wrapped another monitor around Sunny’s belly, so they could measure the contractions. Sunny saw the needles skip across the page, drawing on a paper which fed out from a machine beside her bed. She could feel her belly get hard when the needle skipped up a hill, and feel her belly get soft when the needle dropped back down. It was as if the needle itself were moving her muscles for her, and not the other way around.
She didn’t know if she could push, because she didn’t know what pushing would feel like. She poked absently at her calf, and felt nothing. She couldn’t move her legs. She tried to sleep.
The doctor came back in and felt around inside her, and told her she was ready to push. The lights in the room went up, Maxon was told to stand next to her head to count, and her mother stood on her other side, and held Sunny’s hand. It was all coming into place, every piece of the picture in order, and yet Sunny felt herself floating, drifting away, up out of herself. She tried to anchor, tried to moor herself in the body, in the physical fact, but it was too hard, and she kept rising up, like coming to the surface of the pool, something you can’t seem to stop yourself from doing. It was as if she had been moored to herself by her legs, and once they were numb she was free to drift, whether she wanted to or not. Don’t balloons get kind of scared, floating up through the sky above the grocery-store parking lot? After all, where are they supposed to go now?
“Okay,” said the doctor. “You know what to do. We’re going to push in time with the contractions. We’ll push to ten, and then rest and wait for the next contraction.”
“How will I know when to push?” Sunny asked from far away. “I can’t feel anything.”
“I’ll be watching the tape,” the doctor gestured toward the paper feeding out of the machine next to her, “and I’ll tell you when a contraction is coming on.”
Sunny nodded. She held on to her mother’s hand on one side and Maxon’s hand on the other, like anchors, keeping her down in this body. She pulled hard on them, and pushed hard at the baby inside. Yet between her hands, in the middle, bits of her kept floating away. Up in the air, between the two of them, between their heads, she heard their voices, as if they were talking, taking this moment to have a conversation.
“Maxon,” said Emma. “I have to tell you something.”
“Yes?” Maxon said.
“You know your project, and your research you’re doing now; it’s so interesting.”
“Yes,” Maxon said.
“Push,” said the doctor. “Come on everyone, count! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!”
“And they want you, right, to see it through, don’t they? Don’t they want you to go to the moon?” The mother’s tones were golden, soothing. She was holding Sunny’s hand but it was as if she were taking Maxon by the hand.
“Yes,” Maxon said. “But Sunny doesn’t want it. She told me.”
“I think,” she began, and then her smooth lips pursed together as she paused. “I think that you should go to the moon. You specifically. See it through.”
“Sunny says no. Sunny doesn’t want it,” repeated Maxon.
“Sunny doesn’t know what she wants,” said the mother. “Or what she needs. Do you understand me?”
Maxon said nothing. Sunny, drifting in the air, waited for him to speak. Say something, she wanted to tell him. Tell her no. Tell her you won’t go.
“Sunny needs me to go?” said Maxon.
“Well, the whole world really,” said the mother kindly, generously. “The whole world needs you to go to the moon. But in a sense, Sunny needs it most of all. Don’t you agree? What would you say, if you agreed?”
Sunny’s eyes were squinched tight with the pressure, with the effort of squeezing out the baby. She couldn’t see whether Maxon was frowning, or whether he was making the face he made when he was considering someone’s opinion. Raise your eyebrows just a little bit. Tilt your head to the side.
“I don’t,” said Maxon. Good for you, thought Sunny.
“Well, I do,” said the mother. “I do believe it. And I think that if you don’t go, you will be doing her a great harm.”
Maxon was silent again. Was he looking down at her, at his wife, so deep in love? Could he see her, there in the hospital, under all the hairs? No, she didn’t want him to go. It was too dangerous. But from the way he squeezed her hand, she could tell that he was nodding, slowly, making an arc through the air with his chin, up and down, to show that he agreed. To show that he had accepted the idea.
“I agree,” said Maxon.
Sunny felt a change in her body, down through all the numbness, and a shift of angles somewhere in the room, so that when she held her breath and strained, she felt tension and purpose down below. Whatever was drifting, whatever was floating, came plummeting down and sank right back into her blood, into her bones, into that grainy, pivoting moment around her hips. “Yes,” said the doctor. “I see the head. You’re doing great, Sunny. Come on, Dad, count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten! And rest. And now count!”
And that’s the way it was done. The robots told the doctor, who told Sunny, when to push. The doctor told Maxon, who counted to ten. There was not a single drop of sweat trickling down her face, nor was one eyelash loosened in the process. Hand in hand with her mother on the left and her husband on the right, the perfect mother shape opened up and the perfect baby shape emerged. Bubber was slimy with fluid, strong, loud, and big, bright with orange hair. In the way all normal mothers love their normal babies, she fell for him completely. She would never say, “That didn’t work out quite right.” She would never say, “There is something wrong with my child.” She would never say, “I did not succeed at motherhood.” Because she felt, and she was, so responsible. She would have killed for Bubber, without hesitation.
She had heard her mother and Maxon talking about something. But that memory had drifted away along with her memory of the pain, until she wondered, Did Mother and Maxon really talk about the moon while I was having Bubber? Did I dream the whole thing?
She should have taken the wig off, yes, then and there. She should have flung it out the window of the hospital, or burnt it. She should have let everything change, let Maxon keep bouncing along at the edge of things, let Bubber emerge as orange as his hair, say to her mother, “Yeah, you were right about that, but no, you are wrong about this.” She should have remembered that quiet, terrible conversation, had it out with both of them. Stripped off the layers of her maternal construction and shouted out, “I’m here! I’m alive! You don’t have to send him to the moon, and you don’t have to go.” But instead she took her baby home, installed him in the perfect nursery, fed him the perfect foods, took him to the perfect schools, and kept stumbling along, down the same wiggy path, which put her here at last: no husband, no mother, no son, no hair. Just a big body tearing apart and a hot, empty neighborhood to absorb her bloody pieces.
SHE CRANKED HER WAY up Les Weathers’s porch steps one by one, feeling huge and slow, like an amoeba rolling toward an underwater cave. The door wreath was gone, and he had not replaced it with any other holiday decor. Safe choice. She picked up the heavy brass knocker and let it fall three times. There was no response. She waited through another contraction, tears squeezing from her eyes at the pain in her back, and then she slammed the knocker fiercely against the door, making a rattle they could surely hear all down the twisted block. The door creaked open a bit. It was not latched.
The house was built like all the town houses in Norfolk and the world, one room leading to the next back through the house with no central hall. The first room she entered was a sitting room, including a semicircle window seat that bulged into the front facade of the house. There was a fireplace there, and on the mantel an assortment of candles in tall holders and wooden picture frames. In the center of the room was a circular table with a marble top, holding a large arrangement of dried flowers.
“Les Weathers! Help!” she called. Maybe he was upstairs.
Moving back through the house to the next room she paused, one foot in the air, and her hand went out to steady her on the chair rail. She stopped because she saw a giant television, lying on its face, front smashed against the floor. She felt a twist of fear slide down around her torso, wrapping itself into the place where the contractions would be. Maybe Les Weathers had been robbed—maybe he was lying upstairs at this moment, dying of a gunshot wound to the back. Maybe she should leave, and save herself and the baby. But go where? She was an animal in need of a cave. She was a sinner in need of salvation. She was a desperate woman in need of a rock solid, unexcitable man. Anyway, the front room had been so tidy. She shuffled toward the back of the house and came to the kitchen.
Once it might have been a rather elegant little room, white and black, with glass-fronted cabinets and a basketweave floor. It was now in shambles, every surface covered. There was murky water on the floor. Sunny turned and faced the refrigerator. On its door she saw a magnet that said, “I don’t want to work! I just want to bang on my drum all day!” Next to it, a postcard-sized poster of Garfield complaining: “I hate Mondays.” On the counter was a smashed television, lying on its face. Next to it, what had once been a melon. Two of the cabinets had been smashed out, and inside one of them there was a telephone lying in shards of glass.
Sunny mounted the stairs, calling, “Les Weathers! Are you all right? Help!” She was in labor and convulsing. But Les Weathers could be bleeding, dying. Or maybe he didn’t really live here. Maybe it was all a front. Someone else must live here, some bad version of Les Weathers, anti-television, anti-clean, anti-golden-hair. Or maybe Les Weathers was a robot that lived in his car, shutting down after the evening news, never entering this sham house, this ruined building. She stepped on the stairs nervously, her heaviness causing them to creak and complain. There was a tilt to the upstairs hallway, the railing crooked and cracked.
There was a bathroom down the hall, full of boxes with the sink unhinged from the wall, and then a dressing room, where she switched on a light. She found his suits there, pressed, perfect. She found a box of old dress shoes, like the kind a grandpa might wear. She spent a full minute lying on her side half in the closet, having a contraction, oozing amniotic fluid onto his floor, but she had to go on. She had to know, what was going on with Les Weathers? Where had he gone? What was he? Was this the house of someone else, someone strange, some terrible twin brother? Some other Les Weathers?
Through the dressing room she found another bathroom, caked with filth, a tub ringed with wax from candles set around the edge, whose wax had stuck together shampoo bottles and filmed over the tiles. There was such dirt inside the tub that two distinct footprints articulated themselves at one end, under the faucets. He sits here, she had to tell herself. He puts his feet into those prints! He lights these candles. He stands on this floor. Were the grime and grunge as old as his wife’s departure? Were the footprints started the day she left? A toothbrush, blue, balanced on the side of the sink. A tube of Aquafresh, squeezed from the middle, lay beside it.
Sunny moved into the bedroom, where she found yet another giant flat-screen television on its face, smashed against the floor. There were piles of newspapers and books, discarded clothes and boxes, an ancient dresser overflowing with linens. The huge bed, covered in what looked like tapestry, was broken. The legs of the top end had collapsed or been furiously kicked out, so there was a steep slope down to the headboard, against the wall. But it was made up with a pillow where it belonged, next to the wall on the low side, the side that had fallen down.
In the pillow was a dent, shaped like a head. Next to the pillow was today’s paper. Today’s. She had to acknowledge this. At this depth of her extremity, she had to come to terms with this visual, and accept the fact that as she went about her nightly rituals, taking off her eyebrows, taking off her wig, arranging it on her dresser, considering herself safe for another day, Les Weathers of Action News Reporting was three houses away, sleeping upside down. Les Weathers, the last bastion of urban normalcy, of the square jaw and flawless skin, of the resonant voice and signature finger point, was sleeping upside down in a house where a herd of giant televisions had met their violent end. There was no terrible twin. There was no secret robot. He and this were real at the same time. He was, in fact, just another lunatic. Sunny had to laugh. She laughed, looking out the window on their neighborhood, because it was such a ridiculous thing. All the wives, drooling over him. And all the while, him taking a bath in that tub.
She laughed until another contraction came, and when it had passed, she went back into the hall. She had to find him. Maybe he was in a basement. Maybe he was just now emerging from his Lexus, slamming the car shut, trotting toward her over the pavement. Les Weathers. Looking like the cover of a magazine. She heard a sound from the third floor and put her foot on the first of the attic stairs.
She found him in a room that had been intended for a nursery. The beautiful curtains and the drape around the bassinet were dusty and still. He was sitting on a rocking chair. It was the squeak of the chair that she had heard. In the bassinet was nothing. All around, the things a baby needs: a box of diapers, a dresser with a lamp, a changing pad on a wicker table, a stuffed purple rhinoceros standing watch. Les was wearing his anchorman clothes but his jacket was off, his tie gone, his sleeves opened at the wrist. When he spoke, his voice was low.
“Hey, Sunny, are you all right?” he said.
“Fine, fine,” Sunny choked. “Just going home.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come down to let you in.”
Sunny saw that Les Weathers had been crying.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“Is it bad, this house?” he asked.
“It’s not good,” Sunny said. She went to the window to look out, but as she reached it, she felt the pain tighten around her back, and she went to her knees with another contraction. Just trying to breathe a little bit, she let herself feel the rolling spasm. Her belly, hard as a rock, brushed against the floor as she leaned down and grasped the rug, trying to get the pressure off her back. Les Weathers sprang out of his chair and knelt beside her, holding her in his arms.
“She died, you know,” he said, his voice a moan. “I’m sorry, but she died. She died inside Teresa.”
Teresa was his wife. Sunny, raw to the core from the pain of labor, felt the twist of fear tighten into a need to flee. She was afraid of Les Weathers. She was afraid for Les Weathers.
“Teresa didn’t leave with the baby. She left when the baby was already gone. Dead. Dead inside her. We tried to hide it…”
Sunny rolled onto her side and curled around her alive baby. Les Weathers threw his hands out in an expansive gesture.
“This is what happens!” he said. “This is what happens, Sunny! We tried, but this is what happens!”
As soon as the contraction let go of her and she could move, she began to crawl. She crawled to the door, dragged herself up on the frame, and got out into the hall. She went down the stairs on her butt like a toddler, one at a time. She wished just to get back into her own house, close the door, and be safe. But her pelvic bones were grinding on themselves, and she felt that if she went too fast, she might fall apart, literally, into pieces.
“Do you need to go to the doctor again?”
“Don’t feel good,” Sunny groaned. “Talk later.”
Les was beside her, tall and strong. But inside him, a baby was dead. He had raged around his house to get it out, but it was still in there. He took her by the arm, supported her down the next staircase, his face a perfect rendition of care and concern.
“Can I drive you to the hospital?”
She stared up at him. He looked to her like a gargoyle, some hideously gross miscalculation. And yet he was there, and human. The same man. The same man that lived in all these houses. Even hers. Just a person. Does everybody have to have a bathtub with footprints? Does everyone have his mangled hand, his bald head, his Quasimodo hump?
“No, no,” she said. She knew if she could get her creaking, straining body out the door, down the step, past one sidewalk square, and then the next, and then four more, she would be at the edge of her yard. She felt as though her hips were splitting apart, her pelvis on fire. She wanted to get to her yard before another contraction came. On the porch, she knew she was leaking fluid along the concrete, but she kept her eyes up, kept herself moving along. He followed her.
“Sunny, should I carry you?”
“No,” she said firmly, as she dragged herself across the yard. She was embarrassed for him, that she had recognized him, but she could not undo it. At what point do you say, “It’s no big deal, nothing to be ashamed of” to a person who is sleeping upside down. Is that nothing to be humiliated by? What about head banging? What about murder?
“That was not the right thing to say, Les Weathers. Call an ambulance. Then get back in your house. I’m fine.”