That was it exactly. They were acting as though there were some sort of knowledge or plot that they were all in on but had been forbidden to let her or her family know anything about. Molokans were naturally secretive, she knew. It was an understandable by-product of being an oppressed minority. Her own family had always been suspicious and evasive when asked about their religion or ethnic background. But this was something different. There was an added dimension here, something specific to these people and this place, and although it was probably nothing, probably harmless, it nevertheless made her uneasy.
Gregory went to get his mother. She was making arrangements to get together with several other old women to make bread and lopsha noodles, and for that Julia was grateful. Maybe that would finally stop her from moping around the house all day. At the very least, it would do her good to get outside and see some of her old friends.
Julia tried to look at it from that perspective, tried to keep her mind on that aspect of the afternoon, but those other thoughts kept returning, and she was silent as they walked up the canyon road toward home.
3
Jolene started screaming at midnight.
Harlan was yanked out of sleep by the sound and bolted upright in bed next to her. “Is it time?” he asked, instantly awake. “Is it time?”
She could not even answer him. She continued to scream—a high-pitched, nonstop, animal sound unlike anything he had ever heard—and there was no break in the noise, no rhythm to the cry. Something was wrong, he knew. Labor was not supposed to be this painful, and it was supposed to come in bursts, to ebb and flow, not remain constant, not be so relentless.
She was thrashing around on the bed, her body twisting and contorting with agony, the corded muscles of her neck visibly straining, and he reached out to her, tried to touch her, tried to feel her forehead, but her wild movements completely rebuffed him. He reached down and pulled off the twining, bunching covers, and saw what he was praying he would not.
Blood.
He was up like a shot, out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Grabbing the wall phone, he called 911, screamed his address and said that he needed an ambulance. He slammed down the phone, then immediately picked it up again and dialed Lynda. How in the hell had Jolene gotten the wacky idea into her head that a midwife was better than a doctor, that so-called “natural” childbirth was better than modern medicine? And why had he been stupid enough to go along with it? Women used to die during natural childbirth. For a lot of mothers, giving birth had been a fatal experience.
Lynda was already pounding on their front door by the time his call was on the second ring. She’d obviously heard Jolene’s screams and had rushed over on her own, and Harlan dropped the phone and ran over to unlock the dead bolt.
The midwife did not even look at him as she ran inside, racing straight through the living room down the hall to the bedroom.
The sheet was covered with red. Jolene’s legs were spread, and her genitals were obscured by the copiously flowing blood. From someplace far away, Harlan thought he heard the faint sound of a siren.
“Get me some towels and hot water!” Lynda ordered. “Now!”
He ran into the bathroom, turned on the tub’s hot water, grabbed the flattened pink plastic bucket that his wife used to handwash her underwear. He filled up the container, yanked two towels from the rack, and hurried back to the bedroom.
Lynda grabbed a towel, dunked it in the water, and started wiping off Jolene’s pubic area. Harlan thought he saw, amid the flowing blood, a rounded object pushing out from her vagina.
“It’s the baby,” Jolene confirmed.
She shifted position, blocked his view. It was just as well. His palms hurt from digging his fingernails into them, and he did not really want to see any more than he already had. His heart was pounding, and the thoughts racing through his head were all worst-case scenarios.
Jolene was still screaming, had not stopped screaming the entire time, and as Lynda reached between her legs and started working, the screams intensified. He had not thought her cries could get any worse, but he’d been wrong, and it wrenched his heart and terrified him to the depths of his soul to hear the undiluted agony in her voice, the inhuman suffering to which her body was being subjected.
“Oh, my God,” Lynda said, and though she spoke quietly, though her exclamation was little more than a gasp, he had no trouble hearing her over the sound of the screams.
“What is it?” he demanded.
She grabbed both towels, quickly wrapped them around her hands, then reached between Jolene’s legs and pulled.
It was alive for only a second, but in that second he saw it squirm, heard a partial cry.
Lynda backed away, her face white, and dropped the baby.
He stared down at the bed. Lying on the bloody sheet was a small saguaro cactus, bits of vaginal flesh clinging to its oversized spines, green plant skin visible beneath the wet layer of red. The cactus had a face, and the face was frozen in a hideous, distorted grimace.
Lynda ran out of the room.
Outside, the sirens had arrived. Red light pulsed around the edges of the bedroom drapes, and he could hear the crackle of two-way radios, the voices of paramedics shouting orders.
Jolene had stopped screaming and she was propped on her elbows, cackling crazily. She was still bleeding profusely, and the red tide was covering the unmoving body of the cactus baby. “It’s your son!” she said. “It’s your son!” Her laughter spiraled upward in tone and volume and became as nonstop and persistent as her screams had been.
He slapped her once, hard across the face, then ran into the bathroom to throw up.
Five
1
Sasha was grateful for the beginning of school.
Moving to McGuane had been a complete and total disaster, and not a day went by that she didn’t wish she had followed through on her threats to run away. She could have gotten a job, found an apartment. She probably could’ve even stayed with Amy’s family for a few weeks until she got settled. It was not as if she was still a child. She was a senior, almost eighteen, an adult for all intents and purposes, and she could easily have continued on, uninterrupted, with her existing life, sans parents.
And she should have.
But she was a “good girl,” and the truth was that she didn’t have the guts to disobey her mom and dad. In her mind, her future life had always unfolded in a series of orderly steps. She would go to college, then move out of the house and, with the help of her parents, find her own place to live, meet a man, get a good job, get married, and live happily ever after in Newport Beach or Brentwood or someplace like that. There’d been no disruption anywhere in her vision of the future, and this sudden uprooting had caught her totally off guard. She’d never prepared for it and didn’t know how to react to it.
Now she was stuck in the armpit of America, in the middle of this stupid desert, in what was practically a ghost town.
God damn the lottery.
At least school had started, at least she had a chance to meet some other people her own age, backward hill-billies though they might be, and while nothing could erase the horrible mistake her family had made, it did serve to lessen the impact.
Back in California, she’d always gotten good grades, had always hung out with the right crowd, and she didn’t know if it was some type of subconscious rebellion against her family or an attempt to punish her parents for moving here but she now found herself aligning with a different group of students—the losers, the tokers, the sluts, the people who hung out on Turquoise Street, behind the gym. Part of it was practicality. This clique was looser, less organized, more open to new kids and outsiders. But part of it was also the fact that, emotionally, she felt more in tune with the outcasts. A newly developed disdain for play-by-the-rules goody-goodies had tainted her outlook, and she now viewed with scorn the type of perfect little teacher’s-pet students who had until recently been her choice for friends.