Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,123

she’d hiss, her hands snarled in her twisting brown hair as though she were going to rip it out like weeds.

“Fuck you, of course I care.”

“It doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“It means what it means. It means we tried, and it didn’t work, and it’s awful, and the doctors say it happens all the time, and we need to try again. It’s awful but we have to deal with it, we have no choice if we want—”

“It means we lost a child. It means our child died. You asshole.”

Once—one time—I handled that moment right. I looked down at my wife, my playmate since junior high, the perpetually sad person I make happy, sometimes, and who makes everyone around her happy even though she’s sad, and I saw her hands twist harder in her hair, and I saw her shoulders cave in toward her knees, and I just blurted it out.

“You look like a lint ball,” I told her.

Her face flew off her chest, and she glared at me. Then she threw her arms out, not smiling, not free of anything, but wanting me with her. Down I came. We were lint balls together.

Every single other time, I blew it. I stalked away. Or I started to cry. Or I fought back.

“Let’s say that’s true,” I’d say. “We lost a child. I’ll admit it, I can see how one could choose to see it that way. But I don’t feel that. By the grace of God, it doesn’t quite feel like that to me.”

“That’s because it wasn’t inside you.”

“That’s such…” I’d start, then stop, because I didn’t really think it was. And it wasn’t what I was trying to say, anyway. “Lizzie. God. I’m just…I’m trying to do this well. I’m trying to get us to the place where we can try again. Where we can have a child. One that lives. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s the ultimate goal?”

“Honey, this one just wasn’t meant to be,” Lizzie would sneer, imitating her mom, or maybe my mom, or any one of a dozen people we knew. “Is that what you want to say next?”

“You know it isn’t.”

“How about, The body knows. Something just wasn’t right. These things do happen for a reason.”

“Lizzie, stop.”

“Or, Years from now, you’ll look at your child, your living, breathing, beautiful child, and you’ll realize that you wouldn’t have had him or her if the first one had survived. There’d be a completely different creature there. How about that one?”

“Lizzie, Goddamnit. Just shut up. I’m saying none of those things, and you know it. I’m saying I wish this had never happened. And now that it has happened, I want it to be something that happened in the past. Because I still want to have a baby with you.”

Usually, most nights, she’d sit up, then. I’d hand her her glasses, and she’d fix them on her face and blink as the world rushed forward. Then she’d look at me, not unkindly. More than once, I’d thought she was going to touch my face or my hand.

Instead, what she said was, “Jake. You have to understand.” Looking through her lenses at those moments was like peering through a storm window, something I would never again get open, and through it I could see the shadows of everything Lizzie carried with her and could not bury and didn’t seem to want to. “Of all the things that have happened to me. All of them. You’re probably the best. And this is the worst.”

Then she’d get up, step around me, and go to bed. And I’d go out to walk, past the Cliff House, past the Musee, sometimes all the way down to the ruins of the Baths, where I’d stroll along the crumbling concrete walls which once had framed the largest public bathing pool in the United States and now framed nothing but marsh grass and drain-water and echo. Some times, the fog would roll over me, a long, gray ghost-tide, and I’d float off on it, in it, just another trail of living vapor combing the earth in search of a world we’d all gotten the idea was here somewhere. Where, I wonder, had that idea come from, and how did so many of us get it?

“But that isn’t what you want to hear,” I say suddenly to the not-quite-empty workroom, the cribless floor. “Is it?” For a second, I panic, fight down the urge to leap for my feet and race for Lizzie. If they’ve