Marrow (12 page)

“I don’t have anyone to disappoint,” I say. “That’s nice, I guess.”

“You couldn’t disappoint someone if you tried,” Judah says.

The silence that follows is a black hole. It sucks all of the air from the planet … or maybe just my lungs. I burst into tears. Girl tears. Foul, weak, stereotypical tears. I rub them away immediately, smearing them all over my palms, then rubbing my palms on the legs of my pants. I can feel Judah watching me through the screen that covers the window. I know that if it weren’t there, he’d reach down and touch me. That makes me feel better. Knowing that someone cares enough. Everyone should have someone who cares enough.

“Maggie,” he says. “People—our dads, our moms, our friends—they are so broken they don’t even know that most of what they do reflects that brokenness. They just hurt whoever is in their wake. They don’t sit and think about what their hurt is doing to us. Pain makes humans selfish. Blocked off. Focused inward instead of outward. “

What he’s saying makes sense. But the potency of it hurts nonetheless.

“Just tell me one thing,” he says. “Does your heart still beat … with the ache and pain there? Does it still beat?”

“Yes,” I say.

“That’s because humans are built to live with pain. Weak people let their pain choke them to a slow, emotional death. Strong people use that pain, Margo. They use it as fuel.”

When I go back to the eating house, I find his Rolex on the kitchen table. Tossed like the first day I found it in my mother’s bedroom.

“Fuck you,” I say, but I carry it to my room and hide it under the floorboards anyway.

I WAKE UP WITH MY PAJAMAS DAMP
, and my hair stuck to my forehead. Before I have the chance to swing my feet over the side of the bed, my mother starts screaming. I run to her room, still disoriented, and fling open her door to find her standing at the foot of her bed, naked, her robe pooling around her feet. When she sees me, she points to the far side of the bedroom. I step around her, swiping at the hair falling in my face, almost tripping over the junk she has piled everywhere.

“What?! What is it?!” I ask.

My eyes search the darkness, seeing nothing, before I reach for her drapes and yank them open. Dust spirals in the air as light rushes into the room, hungry to devour the darkness. My mother lets out a little mewl of pain.

“Vampire,” I say under my breath. But then my breath is yanked from my lungs as I stare at the bloody mess in the corner of the room.

I look at my mother, who is clutching her swollen stomach, rocking back and forth. I now notice the bloodstains on her hands and legs that I hadn’t seen before. Shivering in the bright light, the blood on her pale skin looks garish and frightening.

“What is that?” I whisper.

She doesn’t answer me. I take a few steps closer. My hand flies to my mouth as my esophagus swells with vomit. “What have you done?!” My voice rumbles through the small space. I sound demonic as I drop to my knees in front of the baby. A baby. Can you call it that? Tinier than anything I have ever seen, its skin is purple, matted with blood and a foamy white substance. I touch it, pull back, touch it again. No pulse, no breathing. It’s too little. It—a girl. I groan and rock on my heels. How had she hidden it? How had I not seen? A billowing red robe. She no longer asked me to stay with her when she bathed. Had she done this on purpose? Rid herself of the baby. The answer is on her face, relief mixed with the pain. A baby, a little girl. I want to pick her up, carry her somewhere warm and safe.

My mother, gasping for breath and bleeding profusely, falls to the ground behind me. I take one last look at the little girl in the corner and walk out of the room.

I take my time walking to Judah’s house. Delaney has a phone. My mother has a cell phone; I’ve always assumed it’s how she makes her appointments with her various male clients, but there’s a passcode on it. I’m not sure if it will let me call the ambulance. And I want her to die. By the time I reach Judah’s gate, I am sobbing. Delaney opens the door. The smile falls from her face when she sees me. I’m sobbing so hard I can’t get her to understand what I’m saying. I point to the cordless, and she runs to get it.

“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

Suddenly, I am sober of the grief I was feeling. Sober enough to summon words, thick and clumsy.

“My mother,” I say. “She’s … had a miscarriage. I’m afraid she might bleed to death.” I hand the phone back to Delaney, who looks at me in shock, then repeats my address into the receiver. I walk home, soulless.

The ambulance comes; its wail cuts through the warm Wessex day like a thunderstorm, calling people to their windows and doors. I sit on the step and wait as the paramedics pound up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom. I don’t know if she will leave the eating house alive or dead. After I leave Delaney’s, I don’t go back upstairs. The paramedics leave.

They come to see my mother’s body—two men in navy blue uniforms with stars on their chests. Policemen. I want to clean away the blood on her face and hands, but they tell me to leave it. The morgue will take care of all of that after the autopsy. They’re asking me questions, wanting to know if I’m the one to contact about the autopsy, and if I’ll be making arrangements for her funeral.

“The autopsy?” I ask in a hollow voice.

“Standard procedure. You need one to be able issue a death certificate,” one of the cops tells me.

I look at the bottles of pills next to her bed, overturned and empty.

“My mother wanted to be cremated,” I tell them. My mother wanted no such thing. Or maybe she did, but she never told me. I don’t want to deal with her body—coffins and gravestones. Give her back to me as ash in an urn, and I’ll be happy. They ask me how old I am.

“Eighteen,” I tell them. They ask to see my driver’s license, but I don’t have one. I show them my school ID, and they look almost disappointed that they can’t cart me off to a group home. They won’t be putting me in the system tonight, or any other. I’ve never been so grateful to not be a minor. They hand me a stack of papers, some brochures for funeral homes and crematoriums. There is one with a flower on the cover that is for a grief support group. I watch the police talk to the two guys from the morgue who have come for their bodies, leaning against the rotted siding of the eating house. Judah finds me there, his face drawn and concerned. “The morgue is here to pick up the bodies.”

“My mom told me,” he says. “She wants you to come spend the night at our house.”

I look past him to the bad people house. All of the bad people are outside, drinking beer and waiting for the body bag. Some of them are shirtless; a man and a woman are kissing by the back door, coming up for air every few to look toward the eating house.

“That’s the difference between the rich and poor,” Judah says, following my eyes. “The rich peek through their drapes to see the neighborhood tragedy, while the poor don’t try to hide the fact that they’re looking.”

“Thank you,” I say. “But I’d prefer to stay here.”

“I’ll stay with you,” he says quickly. “Just let me wheel home to get some of my shit.”

I think about saying no, but, in the end, the idea of sleeping in the eating house frightens me. I nod. I watch him go, the muscles in his arms pressing against his T-shirt as they work the wheels of his chair. He stops when he reaches the bad people house. A couple guys swagger up to where he’s stopped, giving him daps and offering him a beer.

Everyone likes that goddamn cripple.

I smile a little, but then my mother is wheeled out the door, and I have to use the eating house to hold myself up. There is a smaller bag for the baby. The second of the two morgue technicians carries that one out in his hands. He has gloves on, and he carries her, slightly extended from his body like an offering for some god who eats dead babies. It’s her, that little baby girl, who I’ll grieve for in the coming days. A child, wanted by her half-dead sibling, murdered by her already dead mother.

When they are gone, I go into the house to clean the mess the bodies left behind. The eating house is quiet. I wait for the grief, but it doesn’t come. I want to feel something so I know I’m still human. But, I don’t know how to grieve someone I didn’t know. I knew Nevaeh. I didn’t know my mother.

Delaney comes to help me, carrying buckets of hot water and Pine-Sol up the stairs. We work without talk, using my mother’s sheets as rags, sopping up the blood until they are stained, and the smell of pine pervades the house. We carry the buckets outside, dumping the pink water into the grass. I hug Delaney, an ungainly hug, to thank her for not making me do that alone. Her eyes are pink-rimmed when she steps back. Her lips trembling. They share the same plumpness as Judah’s lips, but hers are not sensual like his. They look almost clumsy now as she struggles to know what to say.

“No one should have to do that,” she whispers. Her hair is damp and sticking to her face. I can see Judah in her features—the broad forehead and graceful slope of her nose.

“You children suffer too much.”

As she walks up Wessex, I watch her, thinking about what she said. Children. Suffer. Yes, maybe more than adults. That’s where we become broken, in our youth. And then we wear it like a shroud for the rest of our lives.

I name the baby Sihn, because she bore the sins of her mother and died for it.

I drag the big, wooden ramp from Judah’s porch over to the eating house, and set it over the steps. When I push him up the makeshift ramp, it wobbles and bends in the middle like it’s going to crack in two. It’s Judah’s first time in the eating house. I leave the door open, letting the light stream across the living room, and I suddenly feel self-conscious of all the rubbish. Not literal rubbish, just the rubbish of my life—the old oldness. The damp dampness, the poor poorness.

The house hums around us, excited at the prospect of a new visitor.
You can’t have him,
I tell it silently.
I know he’s special, but you can’t have Judah.

I fiddle with the buttons on my shirt. “I’ll drag down my mattress,” I say. “You can have the couch. I mean, if that’s okay?”

He nods. “Do you want me to heat you something to eat?” he asks. “My mom sent over shepherd’s pie.”

“I’m not really hungry.” I shrug. He offers up the casserole dish on his lap, and I carry it to the kitchen. I stand at the fridge, out of sight, wishing I hadn’t let him come here. This was what the kids called weird. Like taking a modern piece of furniture into an old crypt, weird; fried chicken in a vegetarian restaurant, weird.

Oh God, oh God.

“
Margo?”

“Yes?”

Oh God…

“There’s a man at the door…”

The casserole dish clatters to the counter. I march past Judah to the front door, where Howard Delafonte stands, just over the threshold, slipping off his raincoat like he belongs here.
It’s Tuesday,
I think.
His regular day to come.
The eating house groans. It doesn’t like him.

My angle is to hurt him.

“The baby,” I say. “Yours?”

He says nothing. He doesn’t have to; I already know. Whatever she took to rid herself of the pregnancy, he brought her.

“How do you know it was yours and not one of the other men’s?” I ask. I mention the other men because I want to hurt him. Let him know he isn’t the only one paying her for sex.

“She didn’t make me use anything,” he says.

I draw back, shocked. His confession is disarming. Intimate. I shouldn’t know something that personal about my mother, but it tells me so much more about her than her words ever did. Did she want to get pregnant with his baby? Maybe she thought that she could have him all the time if she did? That he would leave his life to raise a human with her? My mother wasn’t really into raising humans. Perhaps the eating house just made her crazy, and she didn’t care if she got pregnant.

“The baby was a girl,” I say quietly.

His face blanches.

“Where is she?” he says, heading for the stairs. By her I suppose he is referring to my mother, not his bastard baby. I allow him to run up the stairs. I trace the heavy
whomp whomp whomp
of his shoes across the floor. When he comes back down, there is a look of terror on his face.

“Where is she? What hospital?”

“What hospital,” I repeat, laughing. I look at Judah, who is watching us cautiously, like he’s wondering how to break up a fight if it starts.

“She’s dead.”

My father, by blood alone, stumbles—grabs onto the wall to support himself, and misses. It’s like the eating house moves, shies away from his hands, contracting into itself. He falls, his face contorted and red like he’s run a very long race. I watch impassively, the big hulk of a man on the floor, crying. He loved her. I am surprised. He doesn’t love me, and I am from her. She did not love me either. As I watch him, I wonder if someone like me, who has never been loved, is capable of it—would recognize it if it came along? And then I think that I would rather not be loved than to be loved by a man like Howard Delafonte.

“Get out,” I say. “Get out of my house, you murdering pig.”

And, when he doesn’t move fast enough, I scream it louder and louder until I am sure the entire Bone can hear me.
Get out! Get out! Get out!