Therese called the doctor in the middle of the night, and he agreed to meet them at the hospital. Bill remembered the ride to the hospital-no ambulance, no sirens-just the quiet, dark minutes in the Jeep with Bill imagining how he would apologize to Dr. Stevenson for dragging him out of bed for no reason. It’s our first time, he’d say. We’re just a little nervous.
But an apology wasn’t necessary: The baby was dead. Dr. Stevenson induced labor and for thirteen hours Therese pushed-Bill at her side-both of them crying, Therese screaming out, It isn’t fair! Bill was thinking and maybe Therese too (Bill would never know), What if the doctor is mistaken? What if the baby is alive? Therese flung her arms against the metal rails of the bed, trying to hurt herself. It isn’t fair, she screamed, and no one-not Bill, not the nurses, not Dr. Stevenson-told her she was wrong.
The baby was a boy. A perfectly shaped, normal-seeming little boy, except his skin was gray and when Bill held him he was cool to the touch, like a baby made of porcelain. The nurse left them alone in the room with the baby; she told Bill they should hold the baby for as long as they wanted. “It makes the grieving easier,” she said. “Most couples who miscarry never get a chance to hold their baby.” Bill and Therese both held the baby. They held him separately; they held him together-for a few minutes, a complete family.
Bill found it impossible to believe that holding his son made his grieving easier. Even now, twenty-eight years later with his wife in his arms, in their warm bed, he could remember what it felt like to hold his dead son. They named him W.T. Elliott-William Therese Elliott-and buried him in a plot in the cemetery on Somerset Road, even though everyone in Bill’s family had always been cremated. But cremating the baby was unthinkable. What would he amount to? A handful of ashes that they would fling out into the sea? It would be too horrible to watch the ashes float away; it would be too much as if he never existed.
After they buried the baby, Bill vowed to make love to Therese in the mornings. At first he had to make himself go through the motions. He was afraid of getting Therese pregnant again-and he was afraid of not getting her pregnant. But making love to Therese was the best way he knew to show his devotion, and it became as natural for him as waking up, opening his eyes.
Ten years later when Therese was forty and Bill was forty-two, and Bill, at least, had given up hope of a child, Therese got pregnant again. It was impossible to feel joyful about this pregnancy-it was, Bill remembered, nine months of unspoken fear. But in the end, they had Cecily, who came out of the womb with red hair like her mother. She was kicking and screaming, undeniably alive.
After their lovemaking, Therese rose from the bed, blew her nose into a Kleenex and said, “I love him. This is Memorial Day. I remember him.”
Bill said, “I know. Me too.”
He lay in bed a few minutes longer, listening to the sound of his wife in the shower, and he said, in a whisper,
“‘They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars-on stars where no human race is
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.’”
“My own desert places.” Bill loved his wife and daughter until his heart and lungs and liver and brain stretched and ached and pressed at their boundaries. But he had one desert place: he wanted a son. Sometimes Bill heard Mack’s voice or saw Mack throw his head back and laugh, and he thought, My son would be almost this age. This could be my son fixing the lamppost, driving the Jeep. This could be my son. Why couldn’t this be my son?
Mack didn’t have an hour or even fifteen minutes on Memorial Day to meditate about his parents, but he thought of them more than usual. Maribel had asked him late one night, “If you could have your parents back for an hour, would you do it?” The question upset him so much, he turned away from her in the dark. Mack wanted to pluck his parents out of Oblivion and tell them, face to face, I miss you, every day I miss you, and I love you. Who wouldn’t want that? But even if it were possible, he would never do it. To have his parents back for an hour meant giving them up after an hour, and that was a loss from which he would never recover. He couldn’t stand the thought of losing them again.
Maribel was the only one to ever ask questions about the night of the accident. Mack had been out with friends, seeing a movie. When his friend Josh Pavel pulled down the long dirt road that led through cornfields to the Petersens’ farmhouse, Mack saw the sheriff’s car in his driveway. There were no flashing lights, nothing like you saw on TV, only the sheriff, a man Mack knew from school assemblies, sitting on the front porch steps, his hat resting on his knees. The sheriff stood up, put his hands on Mack’s shoulders, and said, “Your mother and dad are gone. They’ve been killed.”
“And how did you feel at that moment?” Maribel asked him.
Mack stared at her blankly. “What moment?”
“The moment you learned they were gone.”
He swallowed. “I don’t know. I can’t remember the exact moment. It’s nothing I think about. It was the worst moment of my life. I don’t want to reexamine it.”
“You’ve blocked it out,” she said.
“I remember I threw up,” he said. “I vomited into my mother’s rhododendrons. I remember being embarrassed about that, in front of the sheriff.”
“Did you cry?” Maribel asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You must have cried.”
“I don’t know if I cried right then. I’m telling you, I can’t remember much. I remember the sheriff waiting for me on the porch, his hat on his knees.”
Ever since David Pringle’s phone call, Mack found himself thinking about the farm-the smell of the soil, the barn, the hog pen. The rough, hairy skin of a sow’s back, and the way the pigs squealed like children. To this day, Mack’s house had been left just as it was-Mack’s bedroom with his Iowa Hawkeyes pennants and his 1985 Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar hanging on the wall. A valentine from Michele Waikowski thumbtacked to his bulletin board.
His parents’ room too had been left as it was-his father’s Carhartt overalls in the closet, and his mother’s dresses. His mother’s pale hair still in her hairbrush. The food in the kitchen had been cleaned out, except for Mack’s mother’s refrigerator pickles. “Leave the refrigerator pickles,” Mack told David Pringle. His mother used to say they would last forever.
Mack knew it was odd to keep things as they were, crazy, even. He supposed the farm hands gossiped about the house, along with the people in Swisher, along with people simply passing through Swisher; by now, it was legend. The farmhouse, untouched since the couple was killed in a car crash twelve years ago. Haunted? The woman’s hair still in her hairbrush. For years, David Pringle had been urging Mack to clean out the house and rent it, but Mack refused. Mack’s life with his parents was, in fact, frozen. The house was a museum of sorts, a museum Mack could visit if he ever found the desire, or the courage, to return.
Because it was Memorial Day, Mack let Love go home early-she’d been swamped all weekend-and he took over behind the front desk and imagined his parents standing there with him. Here is the lobby, the quilts Mack hung every year. Look out at the ocean, the ferry taking a crowd of people back to the mainland. Listen to this couple here checking out. They were sunburned across their cheeks, bike helmets tucked into their duffel bags.