Early Warning

She glanced at the clock: six-forty-five. The weather had been nice all fall, and she could tell as the window brightened that it would be another pleasant day; she could put Emily in the Snugli and walk across Burlington, take a stroll down Clinton and Dubuque, and maybe get all the way to the Hamburg Inn for an early lunch — Emily was sucking the pounds off Janet so quickly that she owed herself a cheeseburger, not to mention some French toast for breakfast. She kissed Jared on his bare shoulder (he wore only shorts to bed, nicely exposing his muscular but supple thirty-year-old chest, and wasn’t thirty the best age for a husband, especially if you yourself were twenty-eight? And he was a Gemini to her Libra, nothing better than that), eased out of bed, sneaked past Emily, who was sleeping with her mouth slightly open and her lips, which were divinely full, shaped into a sort of a kiss. She half closed the kitchen door and hefted the kettle — full. She turned on the gas, yawned, and decided that it was perfectly acceptable to go quietly down the hall steps in her pajamas, and even to open the front door and get the paper off the stoop. She set a cup and the instant coffee on the counter, and tiptoed once again past the sleeping baby, and then past the door to her room, and down. Six weeks after delivery, going down the steps was practically like flying compared with the last six weeks of her pregnancy, when the pains in her lower belly made her gasp. Tendons? Ligaments? Something in there was screaming in protest at carrying a thirty-five-pound load that it was not designed to handle. She glanced at the Harrisons’ closed door, then slowly turned the knob of the front entrance. The paper was lying there. She grabbed it, noticing as well the bare branches and the drift of brown leaves in the gutters — a melancholy sight. She clutched The Des Moines Register (they also got the Press-Citizen in the afternoon) and tiptoed back up in time for the first cry.

Penelope Leach said that you should answer the first cry — babies only cry for a reason, and to ignore them is to impress upon them the futility of communication — so she threw the paper onto the kitchen table and went to the cradle. After she picked up Emily, she eased over to the bedroom door and drew it shut, letting Jared know that he could keep sleeping if he wanted to. He didn’t have to be at work at the U of I computer lab until noon; Mondays, he was on until eight-thirty, advising lost and confused professors how to stack their punch cards and input data. It was a well-paid job, and Jared liked it — he said that every iota of computer competence he introduced into the brains of old men and women was a positive social good, a point in his favor in the mind of the Grand Intelligence that was the universe. Janet had quit her job at Things, Things, and Things when the steps in the shop got too taxing, but they were doing well enough on Jared’s salary. She would go back to school in the spring semester, at least at night. Debbie said that teaching fit right into having kids, even two kids, which she now had, so Janet thought she would do that: have two kids, live wherever Jared worked, teach French in high school. This made her think of Marla, who had written from Paris in the summer. She sat down at the kitchen table and, after putting Emily to the breast, flipped open the paper.

The front-page article did not say that they were all dead, only three to four hundred. The article did not say that American soldiers had raided the Guyana compound and mowed everyone down with machine guns, which was Janet’s instant thought as her eye raced down the page. When she read it more slowly, she saw that American soldiers were actually nowhere in the vicinity, that everyone was using the words “mass suicide,” and Janet’s next instant thought was, how did Reverend Jones persuade Lucas to kill himself? Such a thing was not possible. Emily pulled away, and Janet shifted her to the other breast. She read it again. Most of the article was about a congressman killed in Jonestown along with some other people, including a TV cameraman who had been shot while in the act of filming the shooting. The witness to this said he had seen the cameraman’s brains “blown out of his head.” Janet read that twice and then read the next part again, about the congressman visiting the camp the previous day, about some of the members wanting to leave with him and go back to California. Her body jerked, bumping Emily’s head on the edge of the kitchen table. She came to. Emily did not cry, but as Janet looked down at her face, her dark hair and her wide eyes, she felt herself fall into a well of guilt. She smoothed the small head; the baby was fine.