ANYWAY, YEARS LATER, I wasn’t even sure if the incident with the poor man’s toe had really happened. It had been so long ago, and I had been so young, and I hadn’t thought about it in some time. But I had been remembering it and trying to recall the details when I had the disturbing thought that I may have invented it all. I asked my mother if she remembered it. She was eating a piece of toast at the breakfast table, so I suppose my timing wasn’t good. She stopped chewing, as if stomach acid had suddenly boiled into her esophagus, and her eyes took on that vaguely alarmed and unfocused look she got when she was presented with something horrible. But then it passed, and she swallowed.
It was his big toe, she said.
I found that hard to believe and said so. I asked was she certain.
I’m certain, she said. That’s what made it so horrible.
I saw my father a couple of weeks later, though, and put the question to him. I told him what my mother said. He scoffed.
It wasn’t his big toe, he said, that would’ve been impossible. It was his little toe.
I didn’t say anything.
It’s just like your mother to make it into something worse than it actually was, he said.
SO, WE WENT BACK home that very afternoon of the accident, and a storm had passed through. A tornado had hopped right over our neighborhood, which was in a low area between two modest ridges, and had snapped off the tops of several tall pines. One of the pine tops lay in our backyard, another in the street in front of our house. The air was gray and you could smell the spent, burned residue of destructive energy in the air, feel it prickling the skin, as if we were inside a big discharged gun barrel. Green leaves and small limbs were strewn across yards and in the street and on rooftops. A telephone pole leaned toward the ground, the wires on one side taut, those on the other side loose and hanging low toward the damp grass. Everything was wet and smoking.
Some incredible violence had occurred, and yet almost everything remained intact. There sat our little brick ranch-style house. There, the pair of mimosas in the yard where I crouched concealed in the fernlike leaves, dreaming of Tarzan. There, the azaleas beneath mine and Ray’s bedroom window where every year our mother took an Easter photo of her boys, our bow ties and vests and hair flipped up in front. There, the picture window of the living room we used only at Christmas or when she and our father hosted their supper club. There, the inexplicable everyday, the oddness of being, the senseless belonging to this and not that. I was barely able to contain myself. Something in me wished it had all been blown to smithereens.
Noon
THE DOCTORS HAD DELIVERED BETH AND TEX’S ONLY child stillborn, in breech, and the child had come apart. Their voices seemed to travel to her from a great distance and then open up quietly, beside her ear. She felt the strength leave Tex’s grip on her hand as if his heart had stopped, the blood in his body going still. She looked up at him, but he turned away. Then the drugs had taken over, what they’d given her after so much reluctant labor, and she drifted off.
They allowed the funeral home to take their child, and to fix her, though they’d never had any intention of opening the casket or even having a public service. And neither did they view the man’s work at all, despite his professional disappointment. He understood they wouldn’t want others to view her, but seemed to think they’d want to see her themselves. He was a soft and pale supplicant, Mr. Pond, who kind of looked like a sad baby himself, with wet lips and lost eyes. They explained, as best they could, that they’d wanted only to have her as whole again as she could possibly be, never having been whole and out in the world. But Beth couldn’t bear to see it, to see her looking like some kind of ghoulish doll. They’d named her Sarah, after Beth’s mother, who’d died the year before. Beth found a fading black-and-white photograph of her mother as an infant on a blanket beside a flowering gardenia bush. She placed it in her wallet’s secret compartment. This was what her Sarah would have looked like.
THEY’D MADE HIM DECIDE what to do, and he’d decided to save her more risk. She made him tell her about it, next day. He stood beside her hospital bed, hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans, hair lopsided from sleep.
“It was getting a little dangerous for you,” he said. “It was either pull her out somehow or cut you, and they asked me what we wanted to do. You were kind of out of it.
“I understood what they meant,” he said. “You were having some problems. It was dangerous. I said to go ahead and pull her out, to get it over with as quickly as they could.
“I was afraid for you,” he said. “Something in the doctors’ voices made me afraid. I told them to get it over with and to hurry. So they did.”
What he was saying moved through her like settling, spreading fluid.
“I don’t want to dwell on it,” Tex said after a moment. He sounded angry, as if he were angry at her for wanting to know. “There wasn’t anything they could do. She was already gone and it was an emergency. There was nothing anyone could do about that.”
He stood there looking at the sheet beside her as if determined to see something in it, words printed there in invisible ink.
“She broke,” she whispered. Her throat swollen and too tight to speak.
He looked at her, unfocused. She understood he could not comprehend what he’d seen.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “She was already gone.”
“It means something,” she said. “It means the world is a horrible place, where things like that can happen.”
They went home. They arranged the funeral and attended it with his parents and her father, who came with her two sisters. No one had very much to say and everyone went home that afternoon.
In the house over the next few weeks they seemed to walk through one another like shadows. One night she woke up from a dream so far from her own life she couldn’t shake it and didn’t know herself or who slept beside her. A long moment of terror before she returned to herself with dizzying speed. She lay awake watching him as calm was restored to her bloodstream, quiet to her inner ear. Her heartbeat made an aspirant sound in her chest. She gently tugged the covers from beneath his arms. Their skins were a pale, granular gray in the bedroom’s dim moonlight, which failed in silent moments as if an opaque eyelid were being lowered over its surface. She gathered his image to her mind swiftly, as if to save it from oblivion. But he seemed a collection of parts linked by shadows in the creases of his joints, pieces of a man put together in a dream, escaping her memory more swiftly than she could gather it in. In a moment he would be gone.
JULIE VERNER AND MAY MILLER had lost theirs, too, at about the same time. Miscarriages. They were all in their mid-to late thirties, friends for close to ten years now, ever since they were young and happily childless.
It was May’s first, but Julie and Beth had each lost two, so they were like a club, with a certain cursed and morbid exclusivity. Their friends with children drew away, or they drew away from the friends. They speculated about what it was they may have done that made them all prone to lose babies, and came up with nothing much. They hadn’t smoked or drunk alcohol or even fought with their husbands much while pregnant. They’d had good obstetricians. They hadn’t even drunk the local water, just in case. It seemed like plain bad luck, or bad genes.
On Friday nights the three of them went out to drink at the student bars near the college. They smoked, what the hell. Julie smoked now anyway but Beth and May smoked only on Fridays, in the bars. They smoked self-consciously, like people in the movies. Saturdays, they slept in and their husbands went golfing or fishing or hunting. Tex was purely the fisherman, and he would rise before dawn and go to the quiet, still lakes in the piney woods, where he tossed fluke-tailed artificial worms toward largemouth bass. When he returned in the afternoons he cleaned his catch on a little table beneath the pecan tree out back. He kept only those yearlings the perfect size for pan-frying in butter and garlic. On days he didn’t fish he sometimes practiced his casting in the backyard, tossing lures with the barbs removed from their hooks toward an orthopedic donut pillow Beth had bought and used for postpartum hemorrhoids.