Buck’s question was a good one: where was Barb? Though Buck hardly seemed concerned — irritated was more like it, as if he’d expected his mother to spring out of the woodwork and wash his socks or whip him up a lemon meringue pie from scratch. John had already sunk back into the couch, the book clutched like a living thing in his hand, and he just stared up at the glowing ball of his son’s face. “I don’t know,” he said, drawing up his lip and shrugging a little more elaborately than was necessary, “—she went shopping.”
Buck’s face just hung there at the mouth of the dark hallway as if it had been sliced from his shoulders. “Shopping?” he repeated, knitting his brows and working a querulous edge into his voice. “When? When did she leave?”
John felt guilty now — he was the accused, the accused on the witness stand and the district attorney hammering away at him — and he felt afraid suddenly too, afraid for his wife and his son and the whole withering masquerade of his second-rate engineer’s life, numbers turned vile and accusatory, job shopping, one deadening plant after another. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometime this afternoon — or this morning, I mean. Late this morning.”
“This morning? Jesus, Dad, are you losing your mind? That’s a blizzard out there — she could be dead for all we know.”
And now he was standing, his son’s face shining fiercely with the reds and ambers of combustion, and he was ordering his apologies and excuses, ever rational, ever precise, till he realized that Buck was no longer there — he’d receded down the hallway to the refrigerated room, where even now the door slammed behind him in finality. That was when John struggled with himself, when it all came to the surface — his fears, his needs, his love for Barb, or respect for her, or whatever you wanted to call it — and he actually threw on his coat, muffler and hat and went to the little jade box on the mantel for the keys to the MG, before he caught himself. It was a fool’s errand. A recipe for disaster. How could he go out in this — there must have been two and a half feet of snow out there, and it was drifting — and in a car made for summer roads, no less? It was crazy. Irresponsible. And she could be anywhere — what was he supposed to do, go house to house and shop to shop?
Finally, and it was past nine now, he convinced himself that the only rational thing was to wait out the storm. He’d been through blizzards before — he was fifty years old, after all — and they’d always come out right, aside from maybe a fender bender here or there, or a minor case of back strain from leaning into the snow shovel, running out of bread and milk and the like. But the storms always blew themselves out and the sun came back and the snow receded from the roads. No, he’d been right all along — there was nothing to do but wait, to curl up with a good book, and just, well, see what developed, and he’d shrugged off his coat, found his place on the couch and taken up the book again, when he heard the creak of the floorboards in the hall and glanced up.
Bern was standing there, hands at her sides. The primitive light attacked her hair, hair so white it reminded him of death, and she showed him her palms in a humble gesture of submission, amicability, engagement. “Buck’s asleep,” she said.
“Already?” The book was in his lap, his left index finger marking the place. “That was fast.”
“It was a long trip.”
“Yes,” he said, and he didn’t know why he was saying it, “yes.” The wind came up suddenly and twisted round the corner of the house, spraying the windowpanes with compact pellets of snow.
She was in the room now, hovering over the couch. “I was just — I mean, I’m not sleepy at all, and I thought it would be nice, you know, just to sit by the fire … for a while, I mean.”
“Sure,” he said, and she squatted by the fire and threw her head back to curb her hair, and a long moment went by — five minutes, ten, he couldn’t tell — before she spoke again. He’d just folded back the page of the book when she turned round and said, in a low murmur, “Buck’s been very depressed. I mean, like clinically.”
Her face was broad and beautiful, with a high forehead and the nose of a legislator or poet. That face stunned him, so beautiful and new and floating there like an apparition in his living room, and he couldn’t think of how to respond. The snow ticked at the windows. The old dog let out an audible fart. “He can’t—” John began, and then he faltered. “What do you mean, depressed? How? Why?”
She’d been watching him, focusing a clear, steady gaze on him that seemed to say all sorts of things — erotic things, crazy things — but now she dropped her eyes. “He thinks he’s going to die.”
Something clutched suddenly at him, something deep, but he ignored it. He was going to say, “Don’t be ridiculous,” but aimed for something lighter instead. “Well, he is,” he said. “I mean, it’s a rational fear. We’re all going to die.” He stared into her eyes, a pillar of strength and wisdom. “Eventually,” he added, and tried for a smile. “Look at me — I’m fifty already. But Buck — you kids, the two of you — what have you got to worry about? It’s a long way off. Forget about it, enjoy yourselves, dance to the music of life.” Dance to the music of life? The phrase had just jumped into his head, and now he felt a little silly, a little quaint, but seductive too and wise and so full of, of love and maybe fear that he was ready to get up from the couch and embrace her.
The only problem was, she was no longer there. She’d heard something — and he’d heard it too, Buck calling out, the wind dragging its nails across the windowpane — and had risen like a ghost and silently vanished into the black hole of the hallway. John looked round him a moment, listening for the smallest sounds. The snow ticked away at the roof, the gutters, the window frame. The dog groaned in her sleep. He glanced down absently and saw the book there in his lap, turned back the page with a single autonomous sweep of his hand, and began, again, to read.
I’d never wanted to be a father — it was enough to have been father to my own diminishing parents, and I vowed I would never repeat the experience. Sonia felt as I did, and we took precautions to avoid any chance of conception, especially as she began younging and found herself menstruating again. I’d seen my own beloved mother dwindle to the size of a doll, a glove, an acorn, to nothing recognizable except to a scientist with a high-powered microscope, and the idea of it — of parenthood, little people, babies — terrified me.
But what could I do? I loved Sonia with all my being and I’d sworn before the Creator and Father Benitez to minister to her in sickness and health, if not in age and youth. It was my duty and my obligation to care for her when she could no longer care for herself — some would say it was my privilege, and perhaps it was, but it made me no less miserable for all that. For, you see, the inevitable had come to pass and she was an infant now, my Sonia, a baby, a squally, colicky, wide-eyed, little niñita sucking greedily on a bottle of formula and howling through the sleepless nights with miniature tears of rage and impotence rolling down her ugly red cheeks.
“Sonia!” I would cry. “Sonia, snap out of it! I know you’re in there, I know you understand me — now just stop that bawling, stop it right now!”
But, of course, she didn’t. How could she? She was only a baby, eight months old, six months, two. I held her in my arms, my lover, my Sonia, and watched her shrink away from me day by day. I picked her up by her naked ankles as if she were nothing more than a skinned rabbit ready for the pan, and I laid her out on a clean diaper after swabbing her privates and the little cleft that had once been my joy and my life.