Taltos

Ten

“THERE’S NO QUESTION,” said Dr. Salter. She set down the manila folder on the edge of the desk. “But it didn’t happen six weeks ago.”

“Why do you say that?” said Mona. She hated this little examining room because it didn’t have any windows. Made her feel she was going to smother.

“Because you’re almost three months along, that’s why.” The doctor approached the table. “Here, you want to feel it yourself? Give me your hand.”

Mona let the doctor lift her wrist and then place her hand on her own belly.

“Press hard. You feel that? That’s the baby. Why do you think you’re wearing that loose thing? You can’t stand anything tight against your waist, now, can you?”

“Look, my aunt bought me these clothes. They were hanging there, or it was hanging there.” What was it, damn it, oh yeah, linen, black for funerals, or for looking nifty with fancy high-heeled black-and-white string shoes. “I can’t be that pregnant,” said Mona. “That’s just not possible.”

“Go home and check your computer log, Mona. You are.”

Mona sat up, and jumped down from the table, smoothing down the black skirt and quickly slipping into the fancy shoes. No need to lace or unlace, though if Aunt Gifford had seen her stuffing her foot like that into an expensive shoe, she would have screamed.

“I gotta go,” she said. “I’m expected at a funeral.”

“Not that poor man who married your cousin, the one killed by the car?”

“Yep, that poor man. Listen, Annelle. Can we do one of those tests where you see the fetus?”

“Yes, and it will confirm exactly what I’ve been telling you-that you’re twelve weeks along. Now listen, you have to take all the supplements I’m giving you. A thirteen-year-old body is not ready to have a baby.”

“Okay, I want to make an appointment for that test where we look at it.” Mona started for the door, and had her hand on the knob when she stopped. “On second thought,” she said, “I’d rather not.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. Let’s just leave it alone in there for a while. Tests can be scary, can’t they?”

“My God, you’re turning white.”

“No, I’m not, I’m just going to faint like women in the movies.”

She went out, passing through the small, carpeted outer office, and out the door, though the doctor was calling to her. The door swished shut heavily, and she hurried through the glass-enclosed lobby.

The car was waiting at the curb. Ryan stood beside it, arms folded. Dressed in dark blue for the funeral, he looked almost the same as always, except that his eyes were watery now, and he was plainly very tired. He opened the door for her.

“Well, what did Dr. Salter say?” he asked. He turned to look at her, up and down and with care.

She really wished everybody would stop looking at her.

“I’m pregnant all right,” said Mona. “Everything’s OK. Let’s get out of here.”

“We’re going. Are you unhappy? Perhaps this has all begun to sink in.”

“Of course I’m not unhappy. Why would I be unhappy? I’m thinking about Aaron. Has Michael or Rowan called?”

“No, not yet. They’re probably asleep right now. What’s the matter, Mona?”

“Ryan, chill, OK? People keep asking me what’s the matter. Nothing’s the matter. Things are just happening … awfully fast.”

“You have a very uncharacteristic look on your face,” said Ryan. “You look frightened.”

“Naw, just wondering what it’s going to be like. My own child. You did tell everybody, didn’t you? No sermons or lectures.”

“It wasn’t necessary,” he said. “You’re the designee. No one is going to say anything to you. If anyone were likely, it would be me. But I can’t bring myself to make the requisite speeches, to issue the usual warnings and reservations.”

“Good,” she said.

“We’ve lost so many, and this is a brand-new life, and I see it rather like a flame, and I keep wanting to cup my hands around it and protect it.”

“You’re flipping out, Ryan. You’re really tired. You need to rest for a while.”

“Do you want to tell me now?”

“Tell you what?”

“The identity of the father, Mona. You do plan to tell us, don’t you? Is it your cousin David?”

“No, it’s not David. Forget about David.”

“Yuri?”

“What is this? Twenty questions? I know who the father is, if that’s what you’re wondering, but I don’t want to talk about it now. And the identity of the father can be confirmed as soon as the baby’s born.”

“Before then.”

“I don’t want any needles going into this baby! I don’t want any threat to it. I told you I know who the father is. I’ll tell you when it’s … when I think it’s time.”

“It’s Michael Curry, isn’t it?”

She turned and glared at him. Too late now to field the question. He had seen it in her face. And he looked so exhausted, so without the usual backbone. He was like a man on strong medicine, a little punchy, and more open than usual. Good thing they were in the limo, and he wasn’t driving. He would go straight into a fence.

“Gifford told me,” he said, speaking slowly, in the same druggy fashion. He looked out the window. They were driving slowly down St. Charles Avenue, the prettiest stretch of newer mansions and very old trees.

“Come again?” she asked. “Gifford told you? Ryan, are you OK?” What would happen to this family if Ryan went off his rocker? She had enough to worry about as it was. “Ryan, answer me.”

“It was a dream I had last night,” he said, turning to her finally. “Gifford said the father was Michael Curry.”

“Was Gifford happy or sad?”

“Happy or sad.” He pondered. “Actually, I don’t remember.”

“Oh, so that’s great,” said Mona. “Even now that she’s dead, no one is paying attention to what she says. She comes in a dream, and you don’t even pay attention.”

This startled him, but only a little. He took no offense, as far as she could tell. When he looked at her, his eyes were remote and very peaceful.

“It was a nice dream, a good dream. We were together.”

“What did she look like?” There was really something wrong with him. I’m alone, she thought. Aaron’s been murdered. Bea needs our sympathy; Rowan and Michael haven’t called in yet, we’re all scared, and now Ryan is drifting, and maybe, just maybe, that is all for the best.

“What did Gifford look like?” she asked again.

“Pretty, the way she always looked. She always looked the same to me, you know, whether she was twenty-five or thirty-five, or fifteen even. She was my Gifford.”

“What was she doing?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I believe in dreams. Ryan, please tell me. Think back-was Gifford doing anything?”

He shrugged, and gave a little smile. “She was digging a hole, actually. I think it was under a tree. I believe it was Deirdre’s oak. Yes, that’s what it was, and the dirt was piled high all around her.”

For a moment Mona didn’t answer. She was so shaken she didn’t trust her voice.

He drifted away again, looking out the window, as if he’d already forgotten they were talking.

She felt a pain in her head, very sharp, through both temples. Maybe the movement of the car was making her sick. That happened when you were pregnant, even if the baby was normal.

“Uncle Ryan, I can’t go to Aaron’s funeral,” she said suddenly. “The car is making me feel sick. I want to go, but I can’t. I have to go home. I know it sounds stupid and self-centered, but …”

“I’ll take you right home,” he said gallantly. He reached up and pressed the intercom. “Clem, take Mona to First Street.” He shut off the intercom. “You did mean First Street, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I certainly did,” said Mona. She had promised Rowan and Michael she would move in immediately, and she had. Besides, it was more home than Amelia Street, with her mother gone, and her father dead drunk now, only getting up occasionally at night to look for his bottles or his cigarettes, or his dead wife.

“I’m going to call Shelby to stay with you,” said Ryan. “If Beatrice didn’t need me, I’d stay with you myself.”

He was very concerned. This certainly was a whole new ball game. He was positively doting on her, the way he used to do when she was very little, and Gifford would dress her in lace and ribbons. She should have known he would react like this. He loved babies. He loved children. They all did.

And I’m not a child anymore to them, not at all.

“No, I don’t need Shelby,” she said. “I mean, I want to be alone. Just alone up there, with only Eugenia. I’ll be all right. I’ll take a nap. That’s a beautiful room up there, to nap in. I’ve never been there alone before. I have to think and sort of feel things. And besides, the fences are being patrolled by a force equivalent to the French Foreign Legion. Nobody’s going to get in there.”

“You don’t mind being in the house itself alone?”

Obviously he was not thinking of intruders, but old stories, stories that had always excited her in the past. They now seemed remote, romantic.

“No, why should I?” she said impatiently.

“Mona, you are some young woman,” he said, and he smiled in a way that she’d seldom seen him smile. Perhaps it took exhaustion and grief to bring him to the point where something so spontaneous could happen with him. “You’re not afraid of the baby, and not afraid of the house.”

“Ryan, I was never afraid of the house. Never. And as for the baby, the baby’s making me sick right now. I’m going to throw up.”

“But you’re afraid of something, Mona,” he said sincerely.

She had to make this good. She couldn’t go on like this, with these questions. She turned to him and put her right hand on his knee.

“Uncle Ryan, I’m thirteen. I have to think, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with me, and I don’t know what scared or frightened means, except for what I have read of those words in the dictionary, OK? Worry about Bea. Worry about who killed Aaron. That’s something to worry about.”

“OK, Mona dear,” he said with another smile.

“You miss Gifford.”

“You didn’t think I would?” He looked out the window again, not waiting for an answer. “Now, Aaron is with Gifford, isn’t he?”

Mona shook her head. He was really bad off. Pierce and Shelby must know how their father needed them.

They had just turned the corner of First Street.

“You have to tell me the minute that Rowan or Michael calls,” Mona said. She gathered her handbag and prepared to jump out. “And … and kiss Bea for me … and … Aaron.”

“I will,” he said. “You’re sure you can stay here alone? What if Eugenia isn’t here?”

“That would be too much to hope for,” she said over her shoulder. Two young uniformed guards were at the gate, and one of them had just unlocked it for her. She gave him a nod as she passed.

When she reached the front door, she put her key into the lock, and was inside within seconds. The door closed as always with a deep, muffled, heavy sound, and she collapsed against it with her eyes shut.

Twelve weeks, that was flat-out impossible! This baby had started when she slept with Michael the second time. She knew it! She knew it as surely as she knew anything else. Besides, there just wasn’t anybody between Christmas and Mardi Gras! No, twelve weeks was out of the question! Crisis! Think.

She headed for the library. They had brought her computer over last night and she’d set it up, creating a small station to the right of the big mahogany desk. She flopped in the chair now, and at once booted the system.

Quickly she opened a file: WS MONA SECRET Pediatric.

“Questions that must be asked,” she wrote. “How fast did Rowan’s pregnancy progress? Were there signs of accelerated development? Was she unusually sick? No one knows these answers because no one knew at that time that Rowan was pregnant. Did Rowan appear pregnant? Rowan must still know the chronology of events. Rowan can clarify everything, and wash away these stupid fears. And of course there was the second pregnancy, the one no one else knows about, except Rowan and Michael and me. Do you dare ask Rowan about this second …”

Stupid fears. She stopped. She sat back and rested her hand on her belly. She didn’t press down to feel the hard little lump that Dr. Salter had let her feel. She simply opened her fingers and clasped her belly loosely, realizing that it was altogether bigger than it had ever been.

“My baby,” she whispered. She closed her eyes. “Julien, help me, please.”

But she felt no answer coming to her. That was all past.

She wanted so to talk to Ancient Evelyn, but Ancient Evelyn was still recovering from the stroke. She was surrounded by nurses and equipment in her bedroom at Amelia Street. She probably didn’t even know that they’d brought her home from the hospital at all. It would be too maddening to sit there babbling out her heart to Ancient Evelyn and then realize that Ancient Evelyn couldn’t understand a word she said.

No one, there is no one. Gifford!

She went to the window, the very one that had been opened that day so mysteriously, perhaps by Lasher, she’d never know. She peered out through the green wooden shutters. Guards on the corner. A guard across the street.

She left the library, walking slowly, falling into a dragging rhythm almost, though she didn’t know why, except that she was looking at everything that she passed, and when she stepped out into the garden, it seemed gloriously green and crowded to her, with the spring azaleas almost ready to bloom, and the ginger lilies laden with buds, and the crape myrtles filled with tiny new leaves, making them enormous and dense.

All the bare spaces of winter had been closed. The warmth had unlocked everything, and even the air breathed a sigh of relief.

She stood at the back garden gate, looking at Deirdre’s oak, and the table where Rowan had sat, and the fresh green grass growing there, brighter and more truly green than the grass around it.

“Gifford?” she whispered. “Aunt Gifford.” But she knew she didn’t want a ghost to answer her.

She was actually afraid of a revelation, a vision, a horrible dilemma. She placed her hand on her belly again and just let it stay there, warm, tight.

“The ghosts are gone,” she said. She realized she was talking to the baby as well as herself. “That’s finished. We aren’t going to need those things, you and I. No, never. They’ve gone to slay the dragon, and once the dragon’s dead, the future’s ours-yours and mine-and you’ll never even have to know all that happened before, not till you’re grown and very bright. I wish I knew what sex you were. I wish I knew the color of your hair-that is, if you have any. I should give you a name. Yes, a name.”

She broke off this little monologue.

She had the feeling someone had spoken to her-somebody very close had whispered something-just a tiny fragment of a sentence-and it was gone, and she couldn’t catch it now. She even turned around, spooked suddenly. But of course no one was near her. The guards were around the periphery. Those were their instructions, unless they heard an alarm sound in the house.

She slumped against the iron post of the gate. Her eyes moved over the grass again and up over the thick black arms of the oak. The new leaves burst forth in brilliant mint-green clusters. The old leaves looked dusty and dark and ready perhaps to dry up and drop away. The oaks of New Orleans were never, really barren, thank heaven. But in spring they were reborn.

She turned around and looked to her right, towards the very front of the property. Flash of a blue shirt beyond the front fence. It was more quiet than she’d ever known it to be. Possibly even Eugenia had gone to Aaron’s funeral. She hoped so.

“No ghosts, no spirits,” she said. “No whispers from Aunt Gifford.” Did she really want there to be any? Suddenly, for the first time in her life, she wasn’t so sure. The whole prospect of ghosts and spooks confused her.

Must be the baby, she thought, and one of those mysterious mental changes that comes over you, even this early, guiding you to a sedentary, unquestioning existence. Spirits were not the thing, now. The baby was everything. She’d read plenty on these physical and mental changes last night in her new books on pregnancy, and she had plenty more to read.

The breeze stole through the shrubbery as it always had, grabbing loose petals and leaves and little blossoms here and there, and tumbling them across the purple flags, then dying away to nothing. A slow warmth rose from the ground.

She turned and walked back inside, and through the empty house to the library.

She sat down at the computer and began to write.

“You would not be human if you did not have these doubts and suspicions. How can you not wonder whether or not the baby is all right, under these circumstances? Undoubtedly, this fear has some hormonal origin, and it is a survival mechanism. But you are not a mindless incubator. Your brain, though flooded with new chemicals and combinations of chemicals, is still your brain. Look at the facts.

“Lasher guided the earlier disaster from the beginning. Without the intervention of Lasher, Rowan might have had a completely healthy and beautiful …”

She stopped. But what did that mean, Lasher’s intervention?

The phone rang, startling her, even hurting her a little. She reached for it hastily, not wanting it to ring again.

“Mona here, start talking,” she said.

There was a laugh on the other end. “That’s a hell of a way to answer, kid.”

“Michael! Thank God. I am pregnant, Dr. Salter says there is absolutely no doubt.”

She heard him sigh. “We love you, sweetheart,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“We’re in some frightfully expensive hotel in a French-style suite full of fruitwood chairs standing on tiptoe. Yuri is well, and Rowan is examining this gunshot wound of his. It’s become infected. I want you to wait on talking to Yuri. He’s overexcited, and talking out of his head a little, but otherwise OK.”

“Yeah, sure. I don’t want to tell him now about this baby.”

“No, that wouldn’t be good at all.”

“Give me your number.”

He gave her the number.

“Honey, are you okay?”

Here we go again, even he can tell that you’re worried about it. And he knows why you might be worried. But don’t say anything! No, not one word. Something inside her closed up, fearful suddenly of Michael, the very person she’d wanted so to talk to, the very person, along with Rowan, whom she’d felt she could trust.

Play this carefully.

“Yeah, I’m fine, Michael. Ryan’s office has your number?”

“We’re not going to disappear, honey.”

She realized she was staring at the screen, at the questions she had so intelligently and logically listed:

How fast did Rowan’s pregnancy progress? Were there signs of accelerated development?

Michael would know these answers. No, don’t let on.

“I’m going to go, honey. I’ll call you later. We all love you.”

“ ’Bye, Michael.”

She hung up the phone.

She sat quiet for a long time, then began to type rapidly: “It is too early to ask them stupid questions about this baby, too early to have fears which may affect your health and your peace of mind, too early to worry Rowan and Michael, who have on their minds much more important things….”

She broke off.

There had been a whisper near her! It was like somebody right next to her. She looked around and then rose and walked across the room, looking back at it to make certain of what she already knew. There had been no one there, no wispy spooks, no shadows even. Her fluorescent desk lamp had taken care of that.

Guards outside on Chestnut? Maybe. But how could she hear them whispering through eighteen inches of solid brick?

Minutes ticked past.

Was she afraid to move? This is crazy, Mona Mayfair. Who do you think it is? Gifford, or your own mother? Oncle Julien come again? Doesn’t he deserve a rest now? Maybe this goddamned house was just plain haunted, and always had been, by all kinds of spirits, like the ghost of the upstairs maid from 1859 or that of a coachman who fell to his death tragically from the roof in 1872. Could be. The family didn’t write down everything that happened. She started to laugh.

Proletarian ghosts in the Mayfair house on First Street? Ghosts who weren’t blood kin? Boy, what a scandal! Nah, there weren’t any ghosts here at all.

She looked at the gilt frame of the mirror, the dark brown marble mantel, the shelves of old decaying books. A calm descended on her, kind of comfortable and nice. She loved this place best of all, she thought, and there wasn’t any spirit gramophone playing, and no faces in the mirror. You belong here. You’re safe. You’re home.

“Yes, you and me, kid,” she said, talking to the baby again. “This is our house now, with Michael and with Rowan. And I promise you, I will come up with an interesting name.”

She sat down again, and began to type as fast as before: “Nerves on edge. Imagining things. Eat protein, vitamin C for nerves and for general overall condition. Hearing voices whispering in my ear, sounds like … sounds like, unsure, but think it sounds like someone singing or even humming! Kind of maddening. Could be a ghost or a deficiency in vitamin B.

“Aaron’s funeral is presently under way. This no doubt contributes to overall jumpiness.”