A Safe Home for Baby by Amy Lane
They were lurking everywhere. They were in the back corners of her can cupboards, where beans dated 1989 sat rusting in the dust. They were in the unexplored reaches of her den, where tax returns from her single college days vied for space with the craft remains of last Christmas. They hid under the porch, and peeked out from the behind the hanging fuschia plants and the around the bunches of mums and from within the bougainvillea in the garden. They crept in with fog and stayed in the green shaded sunbeams. They were everywhere in the San Carlos, and she knew it, and yet she hadn’t seen a one.
“What’s that?” Her husband said as she was washing dishes.
“You saw it too?”
“Saw what—I was talking about that song. What song are you singing?”
Tanya eased her widening body out from behind the sink and sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. The wooden joints creaked, and she cheerfully could have kicked it—if her 9 month pregnant body would have allowed her to see her feet. Song? Carefully, Tanya thought back to the previous few moments and began humming.
“Love me, touch me, hold me, kiss me, squeeze me,
I think the world about you…
Snuggle, cuddle, muddle, but don’t tease me,
I’m not the least that you can do.”
She frowned and squinted at Jeff, her freckles bunching up on her nose. “That it?” She asked.
“Yeah…”
“I’ve never heard it before.” She said, oddly.
“Me neither… did you just make that up?”
“I must have… I woke up humming it.”
Jeff smiled and shook his head, then came up behind her to rub her shoulders. He batted playfully at her brownish ponytail before he settled down to business. “Are you composing songs in your sleep? What does the book say about that?”
She sighed and leaned her head back. “It says that any husband who gives shoulder rubs like yours should be nominated for Sainthood. It also says that if you add a foot rub to that, the vote’s a lock!” But as his hands kneaded into tense shoulders, and then, with a shift to the couch, to tense arches, she refused to forget what Jeff hadn’t seen: the wrinkled, asymmetrical face that had popped out of the fern that hung over the sink. Whatever it had been, it had been good humored, and it had the audacity to wink at her before it disappeared again.
The next day was Monday, and Jeff had to be back at Moffet Field again. She stayed home, as she had every day for a month. Her pregnancy leave had started early—she was thirty-five, and this was her first baby. She had a degree in sociology, but worked in a bar—when she and Jeff met, she told him it was research for her Masters, only semi-facetiously. But now, it just didn’t seem right to tempt fate by bartending right up until her water broke. Besides, the military would cover it. He was an officer in the Navy. He didn’t make scads of money, but if she didn’t want to, she didn’t need to go back to work until this one went to college. However, that left her alone, after his final kiss and a jaunty wave in his dress whites, in this little house with the small English Garden back yard, and whoever it was who kept her company.
She surveyed the house after he had gone. It was cluttered with yards of fabric and cardboard—this year she was into stuffed fabric photo frames. She suspected that next year it would be scrapbooking. There were neat piles of books and neat piles of magazines and neat piles of videos, and neat piles of c.d.’s, and in fact, so many neat piles of stuff as to make organization almost impossible. And behind everything, in every corner she couldn’t see, behind every pile, no matter how densely packed, they crouched and hid. Sometimes, she could swear she saw one, and then his body just… blended. Changed the colors of the c.d. backs, melted into the carped. Disappeared. She blinked at the mess hopelessly, grabbed her keys, and fled.
She returned to the house with a stack of books, and six sets of cheap plywood bookshelves. Her two cats, Mortimer and Snerd watched curiously as she spent the rest of the day moving the stacks of things to the shelves. They were probably, she thought sourly, wondering why it had taken her a year to organize the little two-bedroom that they had bought when they married.
“You didn’t like housekeeping.” Jeff told her when she asked during dinner. “You were busy with other things. I mean, look at the garden—it’s beautiful.” He was being extremely understanding, for a man who usually had to wade to the couch to watch television at night.
“Then why am I June Lockhart now?” She asked pugnaciously.
Jeff shrugged. “Making a safe place for the baby?” He suggested on verbal tip-toe. I’m not domestic. She had warned when they first met. I don’t cook, I don’t clean, I don’t nest. I’m sorry—I live like a gentleman professor, without the devoted housekeeper. Take it or leave it. He had taken it. He had actually enjoyed it. Tanya was fierce and independent. She really didn’t need him for anything. But he could cook, and do dishes and once a week he cleaned the house, and she lit up with joy and sweetness whenever he did. He reckoned a woman would do about anything for a man who cleaned the house—but that didn’t mean he minded her taking an interest.
Tanya cringed a little, and played with the take-out noodles on her plate. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I won’t be a good mother. I’m a slob. I’ll lose the baby in the mess. I’ll run out of dishes to eat off of and make it live on baloney sandwiches until it runs away as a troubled teenager…” Her voice was starting to sound wobbly and hormonal, even to her ears.
“You decorated the nursery. It’s beautiful.” It was, too. It was done in greens and lavenders and sky blues and sun yellows—the whole thing looked like an English Expressionist painting.
“I read that babies only like primary colors.” She sniffled.
“It’ll get Monet and like it.” Jeff replied firmly. He took a mouthful of sweet-sour in a matter of fact way, as though to reassure her. “Now what did you get at the bookstore?”
Tanya’s eyes lit up for the first time since he’d walked through the door. “J.R.R. Tolkien.” She crowed. “Do you realize I’ve never read him? And C.J. Cherrye and Patricia McKillip and Guy Gavriel Kay…” She trailed off. Jeff had a peculiar expression on his face, one she couldn’t remember seeing. “What—don’t you like escapism?”
“I like it fine.” He said, oddly. “I read a lot of it in South America.”
Tanya stilled. “In special ops?” Jeff didn’t talk about that. Ever.
I was in Special Ops for a while. He’d said. They’d been talking about their lives in general. Courtship conversation. Ooh, were you an assassin? A Navy Seal? A Paladin of our times? She’d been cheerfully intrigued. I was in special ops. That’s all. And his face closed, and nothing else had been said. Sometimes he woke up suddenly, with every muscle tensed, crouching on the bed like a cat. Tanya had learned the hard way to stay very, very still during those times.
“Yeah.” He said, after a silence, his face still closed. “In special ops. You know, much of the military is hurry up and wait. I waited.”
“So—should I read the books?” And now she waited. She waited for her husband to come back to her, from wherever he’d gone. Handsome, rake-hell Jeff, with merry blue eyes and a kind of innocence in his jaw, and now he looked like a stranger. He looked like a soldier. She waited anxiously for her Jeff to show up from behind that closed face.
He snapped back with a suddenness that made her flinch. “Yeah. Go ahead—you’ll like them, I think. Very English Country.”
“You’ve been to England?” She asked enviously. She’d rarely left Northern California. He’d been in the service for 18 years—odds were pretty good that he’d been almost everywhere.
“Yeah.” He said, his voice softened. He looked at her directly, as though his next words would mean something. “Right before special ops training.”
Tanya was dusting, which was odd enough, but she was also singing in time to the feather duster.
The man and the moon, he made a mistake,
What, made a mistake?
He jumped in a lake,
The man and the moon, he made a mistake
And I don’t think I need worry,
No more.
It was a catchy little tune with a Jamaican beat that went well with housework. She’d dreamt about the cat in the fiddle, and had awakened singing about the man in the moon. She shook her hips and tapped time on her tummy, totally offending the two cats but enjoying herself very much. It was in the middle of the fourth verse—impromptu, arriving in her mind with inspired timing, that she noticed she wasn’t the only one dancing. This time, she kept her cool, and kept singing.
The man in the moon, he bought a new boat
Can you see that he gloats?
He bought a new boat…
(she peeked from behind the pale faux oak bookshelf)
The man on the moon, he bought a new boat
(she whirled and peered behind her only surviving fern)
And I don’t think I need worry,
No more.
”Okay, everybody, I see you.” She said dryly, facing the weird assortment of tiny people dancing on her carpet. “Can you tell me why you’re here?”
They froze, looking at her in shock and surprise. They were all shapes and sizes, and a stunning variety of colors. They were as blue as the drapes, and as brown as the carpet, as black as the stereo system and as delicately seal colored as Mortimer and Snerd. They had wrinkled faces and gnarled limbs, and beautiful faces with gossamer wings, and clothes made of everything from rayon to velvet , from spider webs to flower petals, from dancing flames to air. And until she had spoken, they were all doing reggae in her living room. But now, the silence was deafening, and over in a heartbeat.
Aieeeeeee!
They flew, flitted, scurried, whirled, becoming butterflies, gnats, dust devils and mice on their way. They blew by Tanya in a tiny whoosh of movement, and out the open back door, seeking sanctuary in the garden.
“No—no come back… I didn’t mean to scare you! Come back!” She wailed, and when there wasn’t a sound, she felt her lower lip begin to quiver. “Please?” She whispered, and her voice cracked. The house felt more alone and silent than it ever had, and to her horror, she found herself weeping like an abandoned child. “No, no no no… please come back. I’m sorry…” she sobbed, sinking onto the couch and hugging a pillow to herself. She cried until she was exhausted. When Jeff returned from work that night, he found herself asleep on the couch, hiccuping like an infant.
She refused to tell Jeff what had happened, but she did tell her gynecologist.
“The house feels odd—like there’s other, little people there.” She did not mention the reggae party on her c.d. shelf. She very well might have been losing her mind, but she wasn’t going to be stupid about it.
“That’s normal.” The ob-gyn’s voice was muffled for a moment while she performed the exam. These conversations always bothered Tanya, but the woman had asked how she was preparing the house for the baby.
“Normal?” As soon as the doctor shucked her gloves, Tanya sat up and crossed her legs and her arms. “I thought it was nuts.”
“No—you’re getting ready to share your life with a new little person. A lot of people feel invaded about now.”
“But… it’s… I compose songs while I sleep.” She said baldly.
The doctor laughed a little. She was a small woman, with a rapidly Americanizing Polish accent. She had laugh lines around her eyes and mouth, and red hair flecked with gray. She was probably the only gynecologist Tanya trusted on sight.
“Many women get creative when they are pregnant. You have hormones and expectations and a billion television shows telling you what kind of mother you should be. Maybe, a good mother to you is someone who sings to her child, yes?”
“Yes.” Tanya agreed thoughtfully.
“You’re about a centimeter dilated already—but it’s safe to have the child anytime.” The doctor patted her knee. “You’ll be a good mother, yes?”
When the doctor left her to get shrug into her very tight maternity wear, she mused that it did make sense. A good mother had music and laughter and silly rhymes off the top of her head. Hers had. But whose idea of June Cleaver cavorted with reggae dancing elves and fairies?
She left pans of milk out that night, bending awkwardly to set them down without spilling, and found seven drowned slugs in them the next morning. The next night she tried honey and clover, and she spent the next two days getting rid of the ants in the kitchen. She tried a pie plate of milk and a pie plate of beer the night after that. The milk was gone the next morning, and so was the beer, but the cats kept running into walls so she figured she had to try something else. On Monday, after Jeff had stepped gingerly over brown bread and cheese she’d left on the threshold, she took a trip to Mount Tamalpais over in Marin County. She brought a basket with her. It was difficult, being the size of a Volkswagen and trying to sneak around, but she had to be very careful that no one spotted her molesting the wild life. Eventually, she collected about two dozen of the tiny mushrooms that grew at the base of the trees in the damp. She looked carefully at her field guide to make sure they weren’t toxic—not that she intended to eat them, of course.
She came home and mixed up a potent blend of fertilizer, potting soil, and old salad, and then replanted (she hoped) the mushrooms in a tiny, perfect, circle. When Jeff arrived home and found the mushroom circle on the threshold to the back yard, he finally demanded to know just what in the hell was going on.
She told him, expecting him to laugh at her. Instead, he crossed his arms in front of him protectively, shivering in the sunlight that reached their little back yard. “They’re gone?” He said, sounding forlorn.
Her chin began to wobble. “I’m sorry.” She murmured. “I didn’t realize—I didn’t know they’d be so sensitive…”
“Gone…” He sank wearily into the striped lawn chair, and she put a consoling hand on his shoulder.
“Maybe the toadstool circle will invite them back.” She said optimistically. “And I stitched some little dresses with lace and fabric scraps—they seemed to like those… they were wearing enough of them.”
“Gone.” Jeff repeated. His face lost its sternness, it’s clarity of line. He looked young, and alone, and afraid.
Tanya tried everything to snap him out of it. She cooked his favorite meal, massaged his slack shoulders, and drew him a bath. She tried, in an ungainly way, to make love to him, but he gazed far away, abstractedly, and she gave up, feeling foolish. He sat through it all, miserable and defeated. Yes, that was the word—totally defeated, a soldier who saw death when it was coming. In the end they went to bed silently, and Tanya cradled her swollen stomach, talking to the fluttering movements within, wondering what next.
Jeff shot out of bed in complete darkness, shouting. Tanya held still at first, gasping for breath. She knew from before that if she tried to wake him up, he’d strike out at her before he even heard her voice. Usually, he awoke, crouched for a few moments of tense breath and thundering heartbeats, and then fell back asleep as though shot. He’d never shouted before.
One moment stretched into two, and he crouched at the foot of the bed, shouting some more. She couldn’t understand his words, but she knew their meaning. I know you’re there, m…f… I hear you out there. I’ll get you and slice you and dice you and gut you… I know you’re there.
And she knew fear, real fear. Special ops. He’d said. She had laughed, but she knew now. The books, the movies, the legend. Her Jeff—her beautiful, kind, sweet and dreamy Jeff was nowhere near tonight. He’d left a trained killer in his place, who was currently crawling under the King sized sleigh bed like a man expecting sniper fire. And he wouldn’t wake up.
I hear you up there. I’ll get you. You can’t hide. You’re the enemy and I’m the good guy, don’t even try to get away.
She was so terrified she risked speaking to him. “Jeff, honey, Jeff, it’s me… Tanya, come back to us Jeff…”
He held absolutely still, and snarled. It didn’t sound human. Then the crawling resumed, and she felt a trickle of water down her thigh as she lost control of her precarious bladder. He was going to kill her. He was going to kill her, and their child, and then, because he wouldn’t be able to understand what he’d done, and why, he would kill himself.
Please oh please oh please oh please… She whispered under her breath. Please, help us, somebody, God, somebody… Help him, help me help our child… make it safe…please make us safe…
The word safe echoed around her heart and her head, all of the emotion that she had poured into make a safe home for her family, all of her fear and her effort and her painstaking domesticity served as a sounding board. It reverberated, bounced, echoed, grew, soared through the room. The vibrations of it shook the floorboards under Jeff as he emerged from the bed, adrenaline on high, and it rattled the windows open. Jeff leaped onto the bed quicker than breath, his hands before him as though to attack, just as the fairie children flew through the windows.
Safe safe safe safe…they buzzed it and twittered and fluttered the word. Safe boy, you’re safe boy, you’re safe safe safe safe safe safe… They tornadoed around the room, swarming him, purring the word and the emotion. Safe safe safe safe safe safe…
He held still for a moment, tense, muscles standing out under his skin like rubber bands under a silk sheet, sweat pouring off his body, soaking his briefs, flowing into his eyes. Safe… you’re safe… He crumpled to the bed like a casualty of war.
Tanya stared at him in the ensuing silence, and then, timidly, because she knew without a doubt that her fear of him had been very real and very true, she touched him on the brow, and the killing glamour left him. He became her Jeff again, and he was sobbing onto the bedclothes in confusion and anguish. She cradled his head against her chest until his breathing stilled and he slept. Then she looked about her at the hovering hordes of wee folk that lingered over the bed.
“Thank you.” She said softly. “Thank you so much.”
A wizened little one—the one that had dropped out of the plant the week before—ventured near her.
“Sssaaaffffeee?” He buzzed. “Waaarrrrior sssaffe?”
“While you’re here.” She replied, truthfully. She didn’t know how, but she knew that these little people had kept him safe from himself for all these years. He’d been to England before he went into Special ops. Maybe he’d met them there, in their homeland. She didn’t know how they had followed him, but she knew without a doubt, that they’d kept him safe for her.
“Yooouu keeep himm ssaaafffe now.” The creature replied.
”No, no.” She shook her head frantically. “He needs you. We need you… you saw what happened…”
The creature shook his head wisely. “Hees ssaaaffe now. Baabbe?”
Tanya blinked, a new panic asserting itself over her slowing heart rate. She had read about changeling children. “You want my baby?”
The wizened little man smiled, but shook his head. “Weee kep baabbe saafffe.”
“Oh, well…” she was surprised. Were they offering, or demanding?
A sorrowful, anxious look passed through the little buzzing, whirring assembly. “Plleeezze?”
She touched her stomach tenderly, felt the first real spasm that told her that she had little time to decide. A safe home for baby—why not? There were worse guardians. “Yes.” She told him. “Should I leave out some milk for you all?”
There was a negative noise. “Lllliikke cllloossse…” He said. And then they were gone.
The silence was watchful, and then she felt another spasm ripple across her belly. She stroked Jeff’s hair and kissed his forehead. The movement sent another gush of water down her legs, and she knew that she hadn’t lost control of her bladder. Her water had broken, and her contractions had started, and she should wake Jeff because he was going to want to be around for the next twelve or so hours. But it would be ten or twelve hours, and for now, she would just sit for a moment, and listen to the silence and know that they were not alone.
Jeff talked to her after they settled in at the hospital. After she had woken him they had showered separately, dressed, and called the doctor. Three hours later, when her contractions had gotten closer, they had checked in, and then the epidermal had kicked in, giving them an hour of blessed, blessed quiet in the sterile, white labor room.
“I met them in England.” He said, “When I was stationed there. I don’t know—I liked the books, I guess, I was ready to believe. I visited a castle one day—there’s hundreds of them. I don’t even remember its name, but it had a garden like you wouldn’t believe—it’s the first thing I thought of when I saw all the plants at your old apartment. I think its why I loved our house at first sight. Anyway, there they were. I kept going back, and, well, we just sort of… knew each other. And then… there was training, and South America and… and fear.” He blew out a chuff of air and scrubbed his hand across his face. His eyes were bloodshot and he’d been distracted since she’d woken him. He’d apologized profusely about his wandering thoughts, but hadn’t said a word about his sleep walk of death. “All good soldiers are afraid—it keeps us alive. I just got… I got sick of being afraid. I started to retreat, you know, in my head. And suddenly there they were again. It was like, I went away in my head one day, and when I came back, there they were. They woke me up when I was in danger, harried the enemy when I was in trouble. Once, one of them even pushed my com button and alerted my commander when it looked like I’d be killed. They kept me safe.”
Tanya nodded, and blew out a little. The epidermal kept away the pain, but she could still feel the pressure. It was going fast now, and she wanted his past behind them when the baby came. “So they followed you here?”
Jeff nodded, and took her hand. “I didn’t want to say anything—I was afraid you’d think I was…”
“Crazy.”
“Yes.”
“Well thanks for letting me think I’d lost my mind, but otherwise that’s okay.” She grasped his hand tightly and looked him dead in the eye. “Will tonight ever happen again? Tell me now, so I know how to prepare.” How would she prepare? A knife under her pillow? A gun? A guard dog in front of the baby’s room? She prayed he’d tell her what she wanted to hear.
He closed her eyes, and then opened them again. “They’re coming back, you said.”
“Yes.”
He searched deep within himself. “Then no…” He paused. “I’ll go to a shrink, if you want, to make sure it doesn’t.”
Tanya panted again, and watched as the little monitor on the machine spiked very, very high. “Good.” She panted, “I’ll take your word on that. Now, love, if you go get the doctor, I think it’s about time to have this baby.”
After another hour, and a little bitching, and a lot of whining, and some hollering at all of the appropriate times, there was a mammoth push, a flick of a toe, and an indignant wail and Tanya held her baby son for the first time. He was beautiful, as all babies are. He was wizened and wrinkled and wise, and for a moment… for just a moment… For a moment, his ears pointed, and his skin assumed a pearlized, greenish cast. For a moment, he had teeth, and they were flat, and pointed, and he had wispy hair, and wide, well-deep eyes without whites. And as her heart stilled with wonder, the glamour eased, and he was a human baby again, accessible to the human heart. Only his eyes remained fathomless.
“What’s that?” Her husband said as she was washing dishes.
“You saw it too?”
“Saw what—I was talking about that song. What song are you singing?”
Tanya eased her widening body out from behind the sink and sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. The wooden joints creaked, and she cheerfully could have kicked it—if her 9 month pregnant body would have allowed her to see her feet. Song? Carefully, Tanya thought back to the previous few moments and began humming.
“Love me, touch me, hold me, kiss me, squeeze me,
I think the world about you…
Snuggle, cuddle, muddle, but don’t tease me,
I’m not the least that you can do.”
She frowned and squinted at Jeff, her freckles bunching up on her nose. “That it?” She asked.
“Yeah…”
“I’ve never heard it before.” She said, oddly.
“Me neither… did you just make that up?”
“I must have… I woke up humming it.”
Jeff smiled and shook his head, then came up behind her to rub her shoulders. He batted playfully at her brownish ponytail before he settled down to business. “Are you composing songs in your sleep? What does the book say about that?”
She sighed and leaned her head back. “It says that any husband who gives shoulder rubs like yours should be nominated for Sainthood. It also says that if you add a foot rub to that, the vote’s a lock!” But as his hands kneaded into tense shoulders, and then, with a shift to the couch, to tense arches, she refused to forget what Jeff hadn’t seen: the wrinkled, asymmetrical face that had popped out of the fern that hung over the sink. Whatever it had been, it had been good humored, and it had the audacity to wink at her before it disappeared again.
The next day was Monday, and Jeff had to be back at Moffet Field again. She stayed home, as she had every day for a month. Her pregnancy leave had started early—she was thirty-five, and this was her first baby. She had a degree in sociology, but worked in a bar—when she and Jeff met, she told him it was research for her Masters, only semi-facetiously. But now, it just didn’t seem right to tempt fate by bartending right up until her water broke. Besides, the military would cover it. He was an officer in the Navy. He didn’t make scads of money, but if she didn’t want to, she didn’t need to go back to work until this one went to college. However, that left her alone, after his final kiss and a jaunty wave in his dress whites, in this little house with the small English Garden back yard, and whoever it was who kept her company.
She surveyed the house after he had gone. It was cluttered with yards of fabric and cardboard—this year she was into stuffed fabric photo frames. She suspected that next year it would be scrapbooking. There were neat piles of books and neat piles of magazines and neat piles of videos, and neat piles of c.d.’s, and in fact, so many neat piles of stuff as to make organization almost impossible. And behind everything, in every corner she couldn’t see, behind every pile, no matter how densely packed, they crouched and hid. Sometimes, she could swear she saw one, and then his body just… blended. Changed the colors of the c.d. backs, melted into the carped. Disappeared. She blinked at the mess hopelessly, grabbed her keys, and fled.
She returned to the house with a stack of books, and six sets of cheap plywood bookshelves. Her two cats, Mortimer and Snerd watched curiously as she spent the rest of the day moving the stacks of things to the shelves. They were probably, she thought sourly, wondering why it had taken her a year to organize the little two-bedroom that they had bought when they married.
“You didn’t like housekeeping.” Jeff told her when she asked during dinner. “You were busy with other things. I mean, look at the garden—it’s beautiful.” He was being extremely understanding, for a man who usually had to wade to the couch to watch television at night.
“Then why am I June Lockhart now?” She asked pugnaciously.
Jeff shrugged. “Making a safe place for the baby?” He suggested on verbal tip-toe. I’m not domestic. She had warned when they first met. I don’t cook, I don’t clean, I don’t nest. I’m sorry—I live like a gentleman professor, without the devoted housekeeper. Take it or leave it. He had taken it. He had actually enjoyed it. Tanya was fierce and independent. She really didn’t need him for anything. But he could cook, and do dishes and once a week he cleaned the house, and she lit up with joy and sweetness whenever he did. He reckoned a woman would do about anything for a man who cleaned the house—but that didn’t mean he minded her taking an interest.
Tanya cringed a little, and played with the take-out noodles on her plate. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I won’t be a good mother. I’m a slob. I’ll lose the baby in the mess. I’ll run out of dishes to eat off of and make it live on baloney sandwiches until it runs away as a troubled teenager…” Her voice was starting to sound wobbly and hormonal, even to her ears.
“You decorated the nursery. It’s beautiful.” It was, too. It was done in greens and lavenders and sky blues and sun yellows—the whole thing looked like an English Expressionist painting.
“I read that babies only like primary colors.” She sniffled.
“It’ll get Monet and like it.” Jeff replied firmly. He took a mouthful of sweet-sour in a matter of fact way, as though to reassure her. “Now what did you get at the bookstore?”
Tanya’s eyes lit up for the first time since he’d walked through the door. “J.R.R. Tolkien.” She crowed. “Do you realize I’ve never read him? And C.J. Cherrye and Patricia McKillip and Guy Gavriel Kay…” She trailed off. Jeff had a peculiar expression on his face, one she couldn’t remember seeing. “What—don’t you like escapism?”
“I like it fine.” He said, oddly. “I read a lot of it in South America.”
Tanya stilled. “In special ops?” Jeff didn’t talk about that. Ever.
I was in Special Ops for a while. He’d said. They’d been talking about their lives in general. Courtship conversation. Ooh, were you an assassin? A Navy Seal? A Paladin of our times? She’d been cheerfully intrigued. I was in special ops. That’s all. And his face closed, and nothing else had been said. Sometimes he woke up suddenly, with every muscle tensed, crouching on the bed like a cat. Tanya had learned the hard way to stay very, very still during those times.
“Yeah.” He said, after a silence, his face still closed. “In special ops. You know, much of the military is hurry up and wait. I waited.”
“So—should I read the books?” And now she waited. She waited for her husband to come back to her, from wherever he’d gone. Handsome, rake-hell Jeff, with merry blue eyes and a kind of innocence in his jaw, and now he looked like a stranger. He looked like a soldier. She waited anxiously for her Jeff to show up from behind that closed face.
He snapped back with a suddenness that made her flinch. “Yeah. Go ahead—you’ll like them, I think. Very English Country.”
“You’ve been to England?” She asked enviously. She’d rarely left Northern California. He’d been in the service for 18 years—odds were pretty good that he’d been almost everywhere.
“Yeah.” He said, his voice softened. He looked at her directly, as though his next words would mean something. “Right before special ops training.”
Tanya was dusting, which was odd enough, but she was also singing in time to the feather duster.
The man and the moon, he made a mistake,
What, made a mistake?
He jumped in a lake,
The man and the moon, he made a mistake
And I don’t think I need worry,
No more.
It was a catchy little tune with a Jamaican beat that went well with housework. She’d dreamt about the cat in the fiddle, and had awakened singing about the man in the moon. She shook her hips and tapped time on her tummy, totally offending the two cats but enjoying herself very much. It was in the middle of the fourth verse—impromptu, arriving in her mind with inspired timing, that she noticed she wasn’t the only one dancing. This time, she kept her cool, and kept singing.
The man in the moon, he bought a new boat
Can you see that he gloats?
He bought a new boat…
(she peeked from behind the pale faux oak bookshelf)
The man on the moon, he bought a new boat
(she whirled and peered behind her only surviving fern)
And I don’t think I need worry,
No more.
”Okay, everybody, I see you.” She said dryly, facing the weird assortment of tiny people dancing on her carpet. “Can you tell me why you’re here?”
They froze, looking at her in shock and surprise. They were all shapes and sizes, and a stunning variety of colors. They were as blue as the drapes, and as brown as the carpet, as black as the stereo system and as delicately seal colored as Mortimer and Snerd. They had wrinkled faces and gnarled limbs, and beautiful faces with gossamer wings, and clothes made of everything from rayon to velvet , from spider webs to flower petals, from dancing flames to air. And until she had spoken, they were all doing reggae in her living room. But now, the silence was deafening, and over in a heartbeat.
Aieeeeeee!
They flew, flitted, scurried, whirled, becoming butterflies, gnats, dust devils and mice on their way. They blew by Tanya in a tiny whoosh of movement, and out the open back door, seeking sanctuary in the garden.
“No—no come back… I didn’t mean to scare you! Come back!” She wailed, and when there wasn’t a sound, she felt her lower lip begin to quiver. “Please?” She whispered, and her voice cracked. The house felt more alone and silent than it ever had, and to her horror, she found herself weeping like an abandoned child. “No, no no no… please come back. I’m sorry…” she sobbed, sinking onto the couch and hugging a pillow to herself. She cried until she was exhausted. When Jeff returned from work that night, he found herself asleep on the couch, hiccuping like an infant.
She refused to tell Jeff what had happened, but she did tell her gynecologist.
“The house feels odd—like there’s other, little people there.” She did not mention the reggae party on her c.d. shelf. She very well might have been losing her mind, but she wasn’t going to be stupid about it.
“That’s normal.” The ob-gyn’s voice was muffled for a moment while she performed the exam. These conversations always bothered Tanya, but the woman had asked how she was preparing the house for the baby.
“Normal?” As soon as the doctor shucked her gloves, Tanya sat up and crossed her legs and her arms. “I thought it was nuts.”
“No—you’re getting ready to share your life with a new little person. A lot of people feel invaded about now.”
“But… it’s… I compose songs while I sleep.” She said baldly.
The doctor laughed a little. She was a small woman, with a rapidly Americanizing Polish accent. She had laugh lines around her eyes and mouth, and red hair flecked with gray. She was probably the only gynecologist Tanya trusted on sight.
“Many women get creative when they are pregnant. You have hormones and expectations and a billion television shows telling you what kind of mother you should be. Maybe, a good mother to you is someone who sings to her child, yes?”
“Yes.” Tanya agreed thoughtfully.
“You’re about a centimeter dilated already—but it’s safe to have the child anytime.” The doctor patted her knee. “You’ll be a good mother, yes?”
When the doctor left her to get shrug into her very tight maternity wear, she mused that it did make sense. A good mother had music and laughter and silly rhymes off the top of her head. Hers had. But whose idea of June Cleaver cavorted with reggae dancing elves and fairies?
She left pans of milk out that night, bending awkwardly to set them down without spilling, and found seven drowned slugs in them the next morning. The next night she tried honey and clover, and she spent the next two days getting rid of the ants in the kitchen. She tried a pie plate of milk and a pie plate of beer the night after that. The milk was gone the next morning, and so was the beer, but the cats kept running into walls so she figured she had to try something else. On Monday, after Jeff had stepped gingerly over brown bread and cheese she’d left on the threshold, she took a trip to Mount Tamalpais over in Marin County. She brought a basket with her. It was difficult, being the size of a Volkswagen and trying to sneak around, but she had to be very careful that no one spotted her molesting the wild life. Eventually, she collected about two dozen of the tiny mushrooms that grew at the base of the trees in the damp. She looked carefully at her field guide to make sure they weren’t toxic—not that she intended to eat them, of course.
She came home and mixed up a potent blend of fertilizer, potting soil, and old salad, and then replanted (she hoped) the mushrooms in a tiny, perfect, circle. When Jeff arrived home and found the mushroom circle on the threshold to the back yard, he finally demanded to know just what in the hell was going on.
She told him, expecting him to laugh at her. Instead, he crossed his arms in front of him protectively, shivering in the sunlight that reached their little back yard. “They’re gone?” He said, sounding forlorn.
Her chin began to wobble. “I’m sorry.” She murmured. “I didn’t realize—I didn’t know they’d be so sensitive…”
“Gone…” He sank wearily into the striped lawn chair, and she put a consoling hand on his shoulder.
“Maybe the toadstool circle will invite them back.” She said optimistically. “And I stitched some little dresses with lace and fabric scraps—they seemed to like those… they were wearing enough of them.”
“Gone.” Jeff repeated. His face lost its sternness, it’s clarity of line. He looked young, and alone, and afraid.
Tanya tried everything to snap him out of it. She cooked his favorite meal, massaged his slack shoulders, and drew him a bath. She tried, in an ungainly way, to make love to him, but he gazed far away, abstractedly, and she gave up, feeling foolish. He sat through it all, miserable and defeated. Yes, that was the word—totally defeated, a soldier who saw death when it was coming. In the end they went to bed silently, and Tanya cradled her swollen stomach, talking to the fluttering movements within, wondering what next.
Jeff shot out of bed in complete darkness, shouting. Tanya held still at first, gasping for breath. She knew from before that if she tried to wake him up, he’d strike out at her before he even heard her voice. Usually, he awoke, crouched for a few moments of tense breath and thundering heartbeats, and then fell back asleep as though shot. He’d never shouted before.
One moment stretched into two, and he crouched at the foot of the bed, shouting some more. She couldn’t understand his words, but she knew their meaning. I know you’re there, m…f… I hear you out there. I’ll get you and slice you and dice you and gut you… I know you’re there.
And she knew fear, real fear. Special ops. He’d said. She had laughed, but she knew now. The books, the movies, the legend. Her Jeff—her beautiful, kind, sweet and dreamy Jeff was nowhere near tonight. He’d left a trained killer in his place, who was currently crawling under the King sized sleigh bed like a man expecting sniper fire. And he wouldn’t wake up.
I hear you up there. I’ll get you. You can’t hide. You’re the enemy and I’m the good guy, don’t even try to get away.
She was so terrified she risked speaking to him. “Jeff, honey, Jeff, it’s me… Tanya, come back to us Jeff…”
He held absolutely still, and snarled. It didn’t sound human. Then the crawling resumed, and she felt a trickle of water down her thigh as she lost control of her precarious bladder. He was going to kill her. He was going to kill her, and their child, and then, because he wouldn’t be able to understand what he’d done, and why, he would kill himself.
Please oh please oh please oh please… She whispered under her breath. Please, help us, somebody, God, somebody… Help him, help me help our child… make it safe…please make us safe…
The word safe echoed around her heart and her head, all of the emotion that she had poured into make a safe home for her family, all of her fear and her effort and her painstaking domesticity served as a sounding board. It reverberated, bounced, echoed, grew, soared through the room. The vibrations of it shook the floorboards under Jeff as he emerged from the bed, adrenaline on high, and it rattled the windows open. Jeff leaped onto the bed quicker than breath, his hands before him as though to attack, just as the fairie children flew through the windows.
Safe safe safe safe…they buzzed it and twittered and fluttered the word. Safe boy, you’re safe boy, you’re safe safe safe safe safe safe… They tornadoed around the room, swarming him, purring the word and the emotion. Safe safe safe safe safe safe…
He held still for a moment, tense, muscles standing out under his skin like rubber bands under a silk sheet, sweat pouring off his body, soaking his briefs, flowing into his eyes. Safe… you’re safe… He crumpled to the bed like a casualty of war.
Tanya stared at him in the ensuing silence, and then, timidly, because she knew without a doubt that her fear of him had been very real and very true, she touched him on the brow, and the killing glamour left him. He became her Jeff again, and he was sobbing onto the bedclothes in confusion and anguish. She cradled his head against her chest until his breathing stilled and he slept. Then she looked about her at the hovering hordes of wee folk that lingered over the bed.
“Thank you.” She said softly. “Thank you so much.”
A wizened little one—the one that had dropped out of the plant the week before—ventured near her.
“Sssaaaffffeee?” He buzzed. “Waaarrrrior sssaffe?”
“While you’re here.” She replied, truthfully. She didn’t know how, but she knew that these little people had kept him safe from himself for all these years. He’d been to England before he went into Special ops. Maybe he’d met them there, in their homeland. She didn’t know how they had followed him, but she knew without a doubt, that they’d kept him safe for her.
“Yooouu keeep himm ssaaafffe now.” The creature replied.
”No, no.” She shook her head frantically. “He needs you. We need you… you saw what happened…”
The creature shook his head wisely. “Hees ssaaaffe now. Baabbe?”
Tanya blinked, a new panic asserting itself over her slowing heart rate. She had read about changeling children. “You want my baby?”
The wizened little man smiled, but shook his head. “Weee kep baabbe saafffe.”
“Oh, well…” she was surprised. Were they offering, or demanding?
A sorrowful, anxious look passed through the little buzzing, whirring assembly. “Plleeezze?”
She touched her stomach tenderly, felt the first real spasm that told her that she had little time to decide. A safe home for baby—why not? There were worse guardians. “Yes.” She told him. “Should I leave out some milk for you all?”
There was a negative noise. “Lllliikke cllloossse…” He said. And then they were gone.
The silence was watchful, and then she felt another spasm ripple across her belly. She stroked Jeff’s hair and kissed his forehead. The movement sent another gush of water down her legs, and she knew that she hadn’t lost control of her bladder. Her water had broken, and her contractions had started, and she should wake Jeff because he was going to want to be around for the next twelve or so hours. But it would be ten or twelve hours, and for now, she would just sit for a moment, and listen to the silence and know that they were not alone.
Jeff talked to her after they settled in at the hospital. After she had woken him they had showered separately, dressed, and called the doctor. Three hours later, when her contractions had gotten closer, they had checked in, and then the epidermal had kicked in, giving them an hour of blessed, blessed quiet in the sterile, white labor room.
“I met them in England.” He said, “When I was stationed there. I don’t know—I liked the books, I guess, I was ready to believe. I visited a castle one day—there’s hundreds of them. I don’t even remember its name, but it had a garden like you wouldn’t believe—it’s the first thing I thought of when I saw all the plants at your old apartment. I think its why I loved our house at first sight. Anyway, there they were. I kept going back, and, well, we just sort of… knew each other. And then… there was training, and South America and… and fear.” He blew out a chuff of air and scrubbed his hand across his face. His eyes were bloodshot and he’d been distracted since she’d woken him. He’d apologized profusely about his wandering thoughts, but hadn’t said a word about his sleep walk of death. “All good soldiers are afraid—it keeps us alive. I just got… I got sick of being afraid. I started to retreat, you know, in my head. And suddenly there they were again. It was like, I went away in my head one day, and when I came back, there they were. They woke me up when I was in danger, harried the enemy when I was in trouble. Once, one of them even pushed my com button and alerted my commander when it looked like I’d be killed. They kept me safe.”
Tanya nodded, and blew out a little. The epidermal kept away the pain, but she could still feel the pressure. It was going fast now, and she wanted his past behind them when the baby came. “So they followed you here?”
Jeff nodded, and took her hand. “I didn’t want to say anything—I was afraid you’d think I was…”
“Crazy.”
“Yes.”
“Well thanks for letting me think I’d lost my mind, but otherwise that’s okay.” She grasped his hand tightly and looked him dead in the eye. “Will tonight ever happen again? Tell me now, so I know how to prepare.” How would she prepare? A knife under her pillow? A gun? A guard dog in front of the baby’s room? She prayed he’d tell her what she wanted to hear.
He closed her eyes, and then opened them again. “They’re coming back, you said.”
“Yes.”
He searched deep within himself. “Then no…” He paused. “I’ll go to a shrink, if you want, to make sure it doesn’t.”
Tanya panted again, and watched as the little monitor on the machine spiked very, very high. “Good.” She panted, “I’ll take your word on that. Now, love, if you go get the doctor, I think it’s about time to have this baby.”
After another hour, and a little bitching, and a lot of whining, and some hollering at all of the appropriate times, there was a mammoth push, a flick of a toe, and an indignant wail and Tanya held her baby son for the first time. He was beautiful, as all babies are. He was wizened and wrinkled and wise, and for a moment… for just a moment… For a moment, his ears pointed, and his skin assumed a pearlized, greenish cast. For a moment, he had teeth, and they were flat, and pointed, and he had wispy hair, and wide, well-deep eyes without whites. And as her heart stilled with wonder, the glamour eased, and he was a human baby again, accessible to the human heart. Only his eyes remained fathomless.
