Future Home of the Living God

In the middle of the night, we are awakened by someone tapping on our window. The wind is scraping the branches together and a low voice burbles behind the glass. I roll out of bed and crouch on the floor, my dreams still heavy, some sort of endless chase, dramatic and confused. We don’t dare look outside. Phil puts his hand on my back and whispers, “Stay down.” I hear him take the loaded Rossi out of the bedside table drawer. He sneaks into the kitchen. The wind shuts off. Someone’s talking. Then I recognize Eddy calling out, “It’s me, Eddy,” and “Me and Sweetie are looking for Cedar.” Phil crawls back to me—I am hiding in the closet. “It might be Eddy,” he whispers. And I say, “Of course it’s Eddy,” because I knew somehow that he and Sweetie would come.

  “Let him in.”

  So Phil eases the door open and Eddy slides into the kitchen. I light a candle and there is Eddy’s fox face. He’s grinning, shy, glad to see me like he’s just paying a normal family visit.

  “Hey!” He shakes Phil’s hand and nods, awkward and pleased with himself.

  “You hungry?” I ask.

  “Does the pope shit in the woods?”

  As Phil turns away, I see that Eddy is sizing him up, deciding whether he’s going to be cool with Phil being the father of my baby. He’s watching everything that Phil does, eyes narrow, folding his arms and stroking the side of his face. This seems like an instinctively fatherly thing to do, but even though Eddy hasn’t earned the right, I’m not upset.

  I make sure the blinds are all pulled, then sit Eddy down at the kitchen table.

  Yesterday, Phil got hold of a case of Cup Noodles, and now I heat up six containers, two for each of us. The gas went out on the gas stove and we don’t know how to get more, but with the electricity still going, our microwave works. Soon we have hot noodles, and we sit around the candle, slowly spooning them into our mouths.

  “Salty,” says Eddy. “And good.”

  He goes on, “I had to ditch my car. Just one or two cars on the road. Didn’t want to stick out, draw attention to your house, so I left my car at an old buddy’s. Inside of his garage. I walked over here, about six miles.”

  “Just to visit?”

  “Plus other reasons. Hello from your mom and so on, and Little Mary, too.”

  “She probably sent me a double-index-finger greeting, right?”

  Eddy opens his eyes, nods a little, like You know her well. But only says, “On the contrary, she’s hoping you’ll clean her room again. Grandma sent this.”

  It looks like the red finger-woven sash she had been working on, only I see she’s made it much wider and longer.

  “It’s a baby carrier,” says Eddy. “She’s working on your cradle board, too. But this is for starters, I guess. And me, I’m here because I’ve been thinking of a plan to get you out, the way I helped Glen and Sera.”

  “I’m assuming that you got them across the border.”

  “Yeah, it worked out. I got hold of some buddies I know up there. We take a canoe out on the south side of Rainy, in the dark, not using a light, and we paddle it up across the border. Major workout. It’s pretty hard to patrol that whole area, and we’ve got some slick ways of disappearing behind those islands. Take lots of camping gear and you could last a month, still heading north. Sera and Glen will know where to pick you up. They’re getting to be old hands.”

  “So they’re up there, safe, you’re positive.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  My whole body feels lighter, with relief, and you tumble to one side, jut an elbow out, kick me gently in the ribs. I put my hand over you and smile.

  Eddy puts down his first cup with a little sigh, starts spooning up the second. “The water’s open year-round now, still it gets below freezing once in a while. We have to plan this pretty quick. I mean, you’ve got to get up there in the next couple of weeks. You’re due late December, I know that. We’ve got to get you settled in.”

  “We should go tonight,” I say.

  Eddy strokes his face, thinking again. “Maybe.”

  “There’s lots more stuff we need to get together,” says Phil. “What about the cold-weather camping gear? I don’t want to find ourselves out there unprepared. I’ve got a place I can go for subzero sleeping bags.”

  “It won’t really be that cold,” says Eddy.

  Phil keeps arguing. “But I need more ammo for the guns. We’ve got to have some powdered food for emergencies, and a lot of stuff, my God, a lot of stuff.”

  “We’ve got a good tent,” I tell him.

  “You can pack that around with leaves, make a warm little house,” says Eddy.

  “Hatchet, rope, fishing tackle.” Phil can’t stop.

  “Well, you’ve got a good start,” says Eddy, “so get the stuff together by next week. I just came to see you, really, to get you going. I don’t have a date nailed down with my friends and the boat, but now I’ll get hold of them. Then I’ll come back down and get you. But it’s got to happen quick.”

  “Now,” I say. “I think it would be better to just go now.”

  Desperation chokes me. I want to walk from this house. I want to disappear. The edges of my dream are still with me, the endless running, the chase, the certainty of capture.

  “Please, I know we’ll get caught here.”

  “Take it easy,” says Phil, stroking my back.

  “I won’t take it easy!”

  But Phil convinces me that we just aren’t ready, and after a while I know it is no use arguing. They will not take me up north, out of here. Out of here. And I have this dark sense, then, a weight coming down. That feeling should have told me.

  Plus this: While we are saying good-bye to Eddy, my computer switches on. All by itself. I haven’t touched it. Nobody has touched it. We whirl to it in surprise. It isn’t plugged in and I have let the battery die.

  “Hello dear, this is Mother. How are you tonight? I am worried. We don’t seem to be communicating very well.”

  Phil steps behind the computer, jerks it up, and smashes it on the tile counter. But it won’t disintegrate.

  “Please get in touch with Mother. Please get in touch,” it says, in pieces on the floor.

  Part II

  September 27

  Fairview Riverside Hospital, Room 624

  They have us. We are alone together now and I have only the barest idea what their plans are for us—though I assume not good, I know not good, and a trembling, low-down, crazy, stark anxiety pulls my every nerve. Here is what happened. We were raided, I suppose you’d say. Though there was no physical violence. Phil was gone and there wasn’t any use I could see in putting up resistance. Even now, that I went willingly almost confuses me. The guns were loaded. I could have run to the bedroom as the woman entered the kitchen door. I could have locked myself in and sat on the bed with the Rossi in one hand and the Bushmaster balanced on my arm. I could have made a stand, gone down fighting, at least kicked and clawed. But number one, you would have died with me or at the very least been hurt. I’ve never actually fired either one of those guns, and probably would have screwed up the action. Number two, there would have been no point. And number three, I have this weakness. Nice people paralyze me. Dark-skinned people who are nice, especially. The woman who tapped lightly on the door after she had picked the lock, then opened the door and poked her head around it with a cheery halloo! was round and honey-brown, all sorts of pretty, a mixture of several races. Her face was delicately freckled and her straightened auburn hair was curled softly and sprayed away from her forehead and cheeks in a Betty Crocker halo. She wore jeans, Keds, and a raspberry cotton tunic sweater. She wore a few pieces of clean, contemporary, tasteful gold jewelry, and she carried a covered basket.

  That the basket held a handgun beneath the red and white checkered napkin was something I didn’t learn until I had compared notes with my roommate. Bernice had come for her, too. Only my roommate had put up a struggle and her boyfriend had charged Bernice, who slipped the gun from underneath the checkered napkin and fired, twice.
She said Bernice had stepped aside and let the boyfriend crash into the stove, turning over hot soup, which he hadn’t reacted to, falling, so she thought he was dead. “She killed one of her own,” my roommate mourned. “She murdered my beautiful black boyfriend. So I know they won’t fucking let me keep my baby.” Bernice handcuffed and led my roommate out while she was in shock, so she didn’t know for sure. She keeps repeating the story.

  “She had me out the door before I could go to him. You know, she’s a trained police officer, former U.S. Marine, or some shit.”

  I’m so glad your father wasn’t home.

  Who turned me in? Who tipped off Bernice? I keep wondering if it could have been Hiro. Or maybe the coral-shirted boys, Clark and Emeric, who dropped the invitation off. Little Mary. I suppose it could have been Little Mary. So anxious to get rid of me. Yet, I cleaned her room! In fact, the more I think about it, the easier it is to convince myself that it was definitely my sister, jealous, lying, high or enraged, my sister who called the tip-line, the UPS line, Unborn Protection Society, and offered the following information about me. Cedar Hawk Songmaker. Pregnant. 119 Boutwell Street (Proverbs 10:7), Minneapolis, Minnesota. And had them dispatch Bernice.

  After Bernice radioed her backup help—a UPS truck—that I was cooperating nicely, she sat down with me and talked to me. She listened to my arguments, waited while I told her all of the reasons I was afraid to go along with her in . . . not a squad car. She drives a very clean silver Camry fixed in just one way. The seat belts lock automatically and only unlock when hers is released. This is another fact I would not have known had not my roommate ridden in the Camry, too, and tried to leap out at an intersection.

  My roommate’s name, by the way, is Agnes Starr. She insists that her great-great-grandmother was Belle Starr, the famous outlaw, and that she’s going to break out of the hospital. I’m going with her, even though I’m surprised to find that this place, the maternity ward, is so orderly and shiny, so pleasant. The food is not standard hospital fare but much better. I feel at home here. On some level I don’t want to leave. We’re on the sixth floor and as we’re on a hill, our window has a gorgeous view of the eastern side of the city and the Mississippi River. We can see people crossing the University of Minnesota bridge, little people’s heads bobbing to and fro. I guess maybe they are even still going to school. Or they could be soldiers. There is another rooftop, three, four floors beneath us, and another and another roof, all various heights. Beyond us, trees and more bunches of trees glowing in fall colors all along the river. Russet, hot yellow, pink, orange, and deep bloody red. The thing is, I don’t think the leaves had changed yet when I was captured. They were green, a few were yellow. I am paranoid that I’ve been asleep for weeks, but I’m no bigger. A nurse told me the date. I try to think of another explanation, but soon lose the thread of my thoughts. I watch the sun rise each morning, lighting the steel beams of the bridge, touching the brick walls with hands of fire, passing bars of radiance along the gravel and the asphalt toppings on the roofs below. As the warmth advances, mist lazily floats from the still, green leaves of far-off bushes and giant trees, and swirls in the scarlet and green maples, dogwood, viburnum. The elms are turning gold and come to think of it they must be giving me drugs.

  My experiences are enchantingly visual and spookily intense.

  I have this notebook, your letter, because Bernice helped me get together a bag of special things that I would need in the hospital. I added this, of course. I opened your drawer, the one where I have been keeping your layette, and I took out the newborn one-piece stretch terry jumpers, the package of flowered receiving blankets, the plastic mirror toy/rattle, the tiny fist-sized striped hats, the little bitty newborn diapers and booties. I put them in the bag with my nightgowns and sweater and T-shirts and stretchy bras and tie-waist pants. I slipped my nail file and nail scissors into the lining of the bag—they haven’t found those, yet. I grabbed the Zeal files and the books that happened to be shelved together near my suitcase, and dropped them in: Is That in the Bible? by Dr. Charles Francis Potter; Hildegard of Bingen, by Sabina Flanagan; Raids on the Unspeakable, by Thomas Merton; Saint John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul; The Life of Kateri Tekakwitha by Evelyn M. Brown; and Utterly Mad, a Ballantine paperback that says it is “dangerous as a three-week-old liverwurst sandwich,” edited or authored by William Gaines and bearing on its cover a portrait of Alfred E. Neuman dressed as Napoleon. I also grabbed my favorite rosary, the one made from olive wood from Israel, and stuck it in the pocket of Phil’s jeans. I was wearing one of his flannel shirts, a soft red and gold plaid. Bernice held my hand as we walked out to her car and she said, “Don’t be afraid. Your baby will be beautiful.”

  And I looked at her and thought, Either she is a very good person and incredibly deluded, or else she is completely evil.

  Because they don’t intend to give you to me, I’m sure.

  I have found a slot just inside the heating register where this book just fits. Maybe the nurses know where your book is hidden and maybe they don’t. Maybe they remove it and read it while I am sleeping. I do not care, really, and they probably don’t either. Little one, I think we’re both going to live.

  September 28 Morning

  “Ooh!” says the nurse. “A Christmas baby!”

  She’s got a little notebook computer with my chart inside and she holds the info on her hip. She beams at me, weirdly beneficent. She has noticed your due date and coos again at the idea of December 25, oblivious to the outrage of my roommate. Agnes Starr, black-rooted blond, droopy-lidded, with heavy, snarling hot-red lips, loudly gags.

  “You fucking hypocrite, you murdering little bitch, don’t pretend everything’s okay.” She speaks in even and calculating tones, with a thrilling dramatic control. Sort of like Little Mary, who turned me in, I remember now.

  “Don’t fucking do this, Fatty! We’re women, too, you slime. I haven’t seen one woman yet take her baby out of the delivery room. What do you do with them?”

  The nurse glances indulgently at Agnes, smiles, then beams harder at the two of us and trills. “Almost lunchtime!”

  “Answer me!” yells Agnes.

  The nurse snaps the lid shut on the computer and hustles out the door.

  “What the fuck do you do with them!” Agnes screams after her. She falls back against the pillows as the doors shut. Agnes is almost thirty-six weeks. She says they schedule the C-section as soon as the baby is viable and that she thinks she is nearly there. They’ve done two ultrasounds this week. She thinks it could be any day. She says I’ve got about six weeks to plan how I’m going to get out of the hospital.

  “I’m busting out tonight,” she says, “and by the way, don’t take the vitamins.”

  I’ve already taken mine this morning.

  “Hide it in your cheek, not under your tongue. Sometimes they make you stick your tongue out. Once the nurse leaves, go take a pee and flush it. You’re feeling good right now, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  I have the most intensely comfortable feeling of peace and order. I am in the center of a glowing configuration, a perfectly safe and clean little habitat. This room has evenly painted golden walls, three photographs of dewy flowers. The sheets are heavy, white, starched cotton. Brilliant white waffle-weave cotton blankets cover both of us, me and Agnes, who is softly radiant.

  “Oh, Agnes! It’s like a five-star hotel!”

  She squints at me, grinning. “You dumb bitch.” There is a black space between her front teeth, a sexy gap. “I felt like that too for about three days. I wasn’t even pissed off about Bernice shooting Mark. You have a guy?”

  “Yes, yes, I do!”

  Guilty start. I haven’t given Phil much thought, she’s right. I try to imagine, now, the scenario of Phil returning to our house and me not being there. He’d be frantic, he’d go nuts, he’d bolt to each room and shout my name into the dissonance of empty but familiar space. I try to keep picturing Phil’s reactions, but
it exhausts me to imagine anything abstract. It seems impossible to feel anything but a calm and pleasurable acceptance of my comforting little hospital world.

  “Does he know where I am?” I ask Agnes. “I mean, do they tell the dads?”

  “Oh, right.” Agnes laughs at me. She gets out of bed and toddles over to the window. She is carrying her baby low and her hips are skinny, so her stomach sticks straight out in a perfect ball. Her thin gown is made of the odd institutional material they use. The old boxer-short stuff, complex blue-figured checks, drapes down her front in a dignified flow.

  “You’re right. I just feel great,” I say. “Nothing’s wrong even though I know on some level that everything is wrong.”

  “Just wait until you flush your happy pill,” says Agnes. “Reality’s a bitch. A heavy bitch. Fuck. I’ll be outta here though.”

  And she is, though not the way she hopes.

  The drug knocks me out around eight p.m. so I don’t know it when she tries to leave that night. She doesn’t make it. When I wake this morning she is tied into the bed next to me, her wrists and ankles bound in hospital restraints. Her face is swollen and pasty pale. Her eyes are shut. She’s deeply asleep, snoring lightly. Breakfast comes, but she doesn’t stir. I only pretend to swallow the vitamin I’m given in a tiny paper cup, and by the time the nurse leaves the room it has begun to dissolve against my back tooth—bitter, metallic, sickening. I spit it out into the toilet and flush it away, then wait.

  Around noon, Agnes starts coughing.

  “Pillow!”

  I bring my pillow over and prop up her head.

  “Thanks.” Her voice is hoarse, her eyes loll backward. Trying to stay awake, she frowns, screws up her face, shakes her head to shed the drug.

  “What happened?”

  “Water, washcloth.”

  I bring her a glass of water, she gulps it down, then I sponge off her face with a cold, wet cloth.

  “Yeah, that’s better.”