Our showerhead broke, and because of the water hitting the stall at the wrong angle paint chipped into the tub, and black mold bloomed across the tile. I went naked into the living room and straddled Drill. Around us the house was a shit storm: the garbage bag we’d been using as a shower curtain since Drill yanked the old one down, and our yard just a rutted ice pit, and in the freezer the frozen buckets of clam bellies, and the pigs eating the rotted ones, and the smell, musky and dark and low tide, that seemed to come from us. All of this was thick and terrible and Drill raking into me, the condom gone dry, I was sick. I was just sick.
When I called Grace the next month it was like she’d never stopped liking me. She wouldn’t loan me money, but she hired me to clean house. She said that, with Mandy no longer living at home, she could use my company.
All of Grace’s glasses were in the sink, rinsed and neatly stacked but dirty. She’d been drinking Ensure, she told me, because with just one person around there was no reason to cook, but she always made a point to pour it into a glass. This made it like a meal. Cleaning her house was like cleaning any other — the drain hair, the yellow stain ringing her toilet bowl, cat fur hidden behind the books on her shelves. The elephant and lion and bear figurines were stuck to the sill like no one had touched them since me. Grace’s mildewed diaries were filled with the meals she and Mandy ate, the trips they took, the weather. I scanned the pages for my name.
In the bathroom I locked the door and climbed into their tub with no water. When I lifted my shirt my stomach looked soft and small, but soon the baby would show for good and my body could tell everyone for me. I picked a paper towel tube out of the trash and tried to press one end to my stomach so I could sing through it to my baby. I felt like the baby had a brain, and could hear me all right, even if the tube didn’t reach. When I got out of the tub and looked in the mirror there was a red ring around my mouth.
Mandy’s room was the same, minus the lipstick and glitter on the mirror and the cutout pictures that had been all over the walls. You could still see the outlines of our glow-in-the-dark solar system, and I scrubbed the glue gone. I crushed the stuffed animals she’d left behind into boxes and lay down on the floor.
When I woke up, at first I thought I was home. It was dark and I was covered with a blanket. There was one glow star left up by mistake, and I ripped it off and put it in my pocket and snuck downstairs.
“It’s late,” Grace said, startled awake from her sleep in front of the television. “Why don’t you stay the night in Mandy’s room?”
“I’m sorry I slept through my time,” I said. “I’ve got to get home.”
She emptied her wallet. “A little extra,” she said, “to tide you over.” She was leaving the next day for a week to visit Mandy. “You’re sure you won’t stay tonight?” she said. “Final offer. It’s nice hearing you move around up there.”
I said Drill was probably fit to kill me as it was, and she gave me a look like I was running away all over again, like I didn’t have a home of my own that was worth making mention of.
Drill was sleeping when I climbed into bed, but his body greeted me, pressed up close, got hard. When I had him awake I pulled his cold hands to my stomach and described each room in Grace’s house. With a pen I drew a blueprint on the back of my hand. In the morning, ink was stamped like bruises on my cheek, on my thigh, on my neck.
We drove into Alma. I knew the roads. I dream about those roads.
Drill looked like a little boy, scabbed knuckles gripping the big wheel. We sped through the dark past the outlines of houses, all of those summer mansions, each one empty.
I knew my baby had eyes on the front of its face by now, and fingers with fingernails, and ears, and could suck its thumb even, and there was a layer of hair over its body to keep it warm, or I’m not sure why, and when it moved inside me, which it hadn’t done yet, it would feel something like butterflies.
The door was unlocked like I knew it would be. Inside, the house was cool and quiet and blue with moonlight. There was a bottle of diazepam on Grace’s bedside table, and I considered taking all the pills in the bottle and lying down under the cool sheets of her neatly made bed. I could hear Drill throwing open drawers, and I opened the top drawer of Grace’s dresser, took out her sweater, and pulled it on. It smelled like the color white. I imagined my baby would smell that way.
I tracked the sound of Drill’s hands as they moved through the house, unlatching the little brass boxes on top of the mantel, the dining room cabinets, the Chinese trunk. I came out of her bedroom and watched him pull silver forks from her dish rack.
“We don’t need to take all that,” I said.
“I’m only taking what a burglar would take,” said Drill. He carried her laptop and her stereo to the car. He unplugged her glass lamp.
“Leave it,” I said. “She loves that.”
“I’ll build that baby the fanciest nursery you’ve ever seen,” he said. “Two of them.” He dumped wilted lilies onto the floor and took the vase. “You going to help, or have you changed your mind?” His voice whined. I took Grace and Mandy’s photographs out of their gold frames.
The animal figurines were heavier than I remembered. I wrapped them up in one of Grace’s scarves and held my hand over my mouth. I was cold with sweat. I didn’t take them all. Drill came over and put his arms around me.
He wore Grace’s big wool coat, and his fingers wiggled inside the pocket and pulled out a silver pocket watch. He grinned, the tops of his teeth white with plaque, and I could see his gums where molars were missing from drinking Coke not milk in his baby bottle, and the scars shimmered on his head. He held me, and his mouth felt like a gouge.
I told him to go start the engine. There was one room in the house I had forgotten, and I opened the closet door and squeezed through the coats to the secret storage space beneath the stairs, where it was so dark I couldn’t see my own hands. I crawled over trash bags of bedding, splitting the plastic to find my own smell. The stale air was over-sweet, like my hair when I don’t wash it. Like my pillows.
I didn’t feel the baby kicking, not a thing, and I didn’t sense it inside me either. When I found the far wall I leaned against it, breathing, thinking about the bath and Grace washing my hair. How good it felt to have my hair washed. How nice it was, to go to bed warm like that.
I waited for Grace to call. To have me come clean the mess, even, or to accuse me. I waited for someone to track us down, while we drove the long, dark stretches of highway, visiting pawnshop after pawnshop. Alone in my bedroom I waited for the police at the door, but mostly I waited for her. My belly grew, and Kimmy was born, and Kimmy learned to walk, and I was still waiting on something.
No matter what. I left Drill to steer the boat today, carried Kimmy to the bow. I didn’t want to tell him I’d seen Mandy. I just wanted to watch the bow cut through the water. The boat is where she naps best, all that white noise and rumbling and wind. When she stirred in my arms, mouth breathing and whimpering, I dug the gold elephant out of my bag, which on most days is her favorite, and tucked it into her fist. Her cheeks were red, almost feverish. I’d have to check her temperature when we got home.
Safe as Houses
“Speak to children about the incident in language they can understand,” said the counselor on last night’s local news. Harold hasn’t quite figured out what language to use with his daughter. She shaved her legs with his razor, which he knew because the dulled blade nicked his neck and the handle smelled of her strawberry shampoo. She had this floral backless dress that she wore last week as they combed the beach, its deep pockets swollen with stones. Glancing up from scanning for blue glass the moment had caught him: Jenny bending toward the shoreline, her hair pulled over one shoulder, and the pale arch of her back belonging to a strange woman.