SIX
SUMMER AIR CHOKED WITH THE SMELL OF charcoal. Green grass growing wild in an unkempt backyard tickling and scratching young legs. The crash of drums from window-bound speakers, the increasing volume of the voices, the laughter at Rebecca Wilson’s terrible jokes. Liquor spilled down knuckles as poorly made hamburger patties crackled on the grill. The speakers roared as the needle somewhere inside the house traced its narrowing gyre. Bees lobbed themselves at honeysuckle. Ants in chains along cracked cement walks. Daddy-long-legs invisible against gray bark and lichen and she closed her eyes, tipped her head back, baked her face in the sunlight and felt the blood in her head rush to the back of her skull. She told jokes, one after the other, increasingly filthy, dozens and dozens, increasingly bizarre, the stranger of her own construction. A young man, panting from running after a ball no one could keep their hands on, sat next to her in the grass, legs Indian style, and they talked. Barefoot. This friend of a friend or a cousin or other touched her wrist and her elbow and her shoulder, and his warm breath wafted over her warm face. And the sun set and the songs spun and the magnets moved air. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,” she said. He didn’t stop her. At some point, in the dark of the night, the music unable to obliterate the saw-bladed grasshoppers, Rebecca and this cousin of a friend of a friend rolled in the host’s bed and then passed out on the back porch, curled up on artificial grass that covered cement.
And so on an afternoon two months later, Rebecca called the host of the party and got the name of the friend with the cousin, embarrassed that she didn’t even know his name and had to describe him three times before her friend could figure out whom she meant, and she called the cousin of the friend of the host and asked him to meet her for lunch. They met, hugged, he beamed and held the door open and told her that he was really happy to hear from her because he had a really nice time and she stopped him and said, “Listen, William, I need to tell you something,” and he frowned, afraid, as though something unspeakably terrible were about to happen and Rebecca told him that she was pregnant. The young man silent for a second. He looked at her face and thought about how beautiful she was, how pale and wide her eyes were, how her hair fell in complex patterns around her ears and shoulders, about her long neck and the galaxy of freckles across her face and he said, “What do you want to do?” and she said she didn’t know and the young man asked if she wanted to get married and Rebecca said, “I don’t even know you. I didn’t even remember your name.” He looked hurt for a moment, fully realizing that she hadn’t called him because she’d been thinking of him, unable to forget the fun they’d had that evening hanging out in the sun together. She’d only called him because they’d made a mistake. He sighed and said, “Whatever you want to do, I’ll do it.” She told him that she’d think about it and in the end, what could they do? They married in the summer of 1971 and she became Mrs. William Shepherd and they waited for the baby to come, but there was a problem and the thing was lost.
A year later, Rebecca lay in a room at the Ephraim McDowell Medical Center in downtown Crow Station, a brand new baby daughter that they named Leah. It was a Monday and the baby had come quickly, sluicing out like a wet potato out of wet hands, only thirty minutes after they arrived at the hospital. In the early days of Leah’s life, when Rebecca thought about the child, she would think, ‘it wriggled’ or ‘it is not making a sound’ and then have to correct herself and think ‘she wriggled’ or ‘she is not making a sound.’ After so many months of thinking of the baby as some indeterminately gendered object that had set up residence in her uterus, it was difficult to think of the baby as a ‘she.’
Rebecca kissed Leah’s forehead. A bare dome still soft. She sniffed about the writhing red bean’s features, trying to identify the unidentifiable baby smell, a smell that smelled the way terrycloth felt.
Neither Rebecca nor William Shepherd thought about the first pregnancy very often, until after Jacob disappeared. Though they never talked about it, that unnamed potential child would abruptly intrude upon their thoughts. Some nights, Rebecca would wake, certain she felt something inside of her move and she would start, worried about the baby, only to remember that she wasn’t pregnant and that Jacob was gone.
A man called the nonprofit and asked the receptionist if she could answer some questions about Leah Shepherd. “I’m writing a newspaper article about her.”
“They already did an article in the paper, didn’t they?”
A pause and then, “I’m calling from the Courier. It is a special thing to celebrate her work, so if we could keep this a secret for now.”
The receptionist loved secrets.
Who can see her crying? Who can feel the shuddering shoulders? The body shaking? Who can feel the damp cheeks, cool in the warm air, drying sticky like sweat? Light from windows. The sound of rain. By the soft light of an open window, coffee cooling, rainbows swirling on the surface, cold.
The world choked with wolves ranging the neighborhood. With phantoms slipping from beneath bushes with long white hands to grasp young ankles. With men in coats with tape and box cutters. With pools of blood. With unheard screams. Some jowly pervert, eyes like empty sockets behind thick lenses, wagging himself at a passing school bus, ruining children. Homeless people even in a town like Crow Station, filthy things living out in the woods by the stream, slumping around town, reeking of human bodies, the knees of their ruined clothes betraying how they make ends meet. The world’s mouth is open and it devours. The coffee cold and poured into the sink’s black eye.
Her boy gone forever, her girl grown and she never calls, both emptied out to who knows where and Mrs. Shepherd says their names seven times in a row, quietly so as to not upset her husband, seeming to sleep nearby.
Lifting the receiver, she waited and then said, “Leah, honey, it’s your mother.”
What causes the bird to sing the night through? Mrs. Shepherd wondered. Spring rain flooded the basement and filled the house with the cold smell of new mold. A brain disease? she wonders. A glaring of cats? A fit of avian insanity? A glass horse held the basement door closed.
If daylight traffic noise is too great, it drowns the mating songs, forcing the birds to sing to one another at night, yet this bird sang alone. Just one voice outside of the open window, in the dark branches of a dark tree in the dark. If it is hoping to mate, it is out of luck. The windows had to be open because it is far too warm already to leave them closed, sealed up with the smell from the basement.
The one bird sang its one song and Mrs. Shepherd listened, certain that she was the one person awake in the neighborhood who could hear it. She rolled to find a comfortable spot between her husband and the wall.
Then one night, the singing was gone, but she was still awake, only now, listening to nothing. Distant cars. Voices. Dry leaves.