Glimmering

The power had been down for almost a month, autumn skidding into winter, October so fast Jack would have missed it, save for Marzana’s swelling stomach. November an uneasy dream of lurid yellow skies, bare trees and smell of burning and a harsh northeast wind that tore the shingles from Lazyland’s gables. He felt well these days, thin but strong, untroubled by coughs or fevers, though his eyesight did blur sometimes, there was always that sense of things half-seen, motes of living matter swimming across his cornea. He received a courier-delivered postcard and a book from Emma, telling him that she had sent the odd samples off to several labs for identification. One sample had been lost, but she hoped to hear about the other, someday, soon. That had been in early October; he had no news since from either Emma or Jule. Whatever the peculiar granular encrustations had been, they seemed to clear up by November. He checked his throat and eyes several times a day, scraping at the inside of his mouth so much he had a raw spot there that took a while to heal. But it did heal, and the crystalline matter did disappear. One day it was just gone and never recurred. Jack chalked it up to the extra vitamins Emma had left, and was relieved.

A stoic calm claimed Lazyland as winter approached. The weather was awful, the air smoke-filled when not thick with greasy rain. Jack spent most of his time indoors, reading by lamplight in his grandfather’s study, or walking around the mansion flicking electrical switches and lifting telephone receivers as apprehensively as he examined his throat and eyes. It was like an endless restless rainy afternoon, unrelieved by sun or weather reports promising a break in the clouds. One day he found a crop of tiny orange mushrooms growing along the edge of one of the silk Chinese carpets. After that he added a Fungus Alert to his list of things to watch for on his rambles around the house.

He took to visiting the girl each morning, and again at night on his way to bed. Rapping softly at the door to her room, because sometimes she slept later than he did, and it was important (his grandmother and Mrs. Iverson reminded him sternly, nightly, giving him cups of chamomile tea to carry up to her bed), VERY Important, that an Expectant Mother get enough rest. He wondered, often, how it was babies had been born all these years, without him; without the entire world going on leave to take care of all those mothers. The book Emma had sent was a worn paperback guide to the oft-charted territories of pregnancy. Jack read it at night, in bed, tracking week by week the body’s journey into this terra infirma, bemused and occasionally awed by what could be found there—you can do that? With THAT? Then next morning, perched at the end of Marz’s four-poster, ersatz coffee for him, oatmeal and soy powder for her, reading the pertinent sections aloud and thinking how this wasn’t so strange, really, it was a little bit like traveling in Thailand or rural Italy with Leonard, learning about the monasteries the day before a visit, trying not to be grossed out by the local customs. Like, Marz’s gums bled easily, because there was so much more blood now, everywhere inside her. And her hair grew longer and thicker, because of the protein supplements (also courtesy of Emma). Her pale peaked face grew rounder, and pink, though the rest of her remained thin, save of course her belly, which seemed absolutely enormous.

“Feel it?” She pulled up her flannel nightdress, grabbed his hand, and put it on her stomach. “Ow, you’re cold, Jack!”

“Sorry,” he smiled. “Cold hands, warm heart; dirty feet, no sweetheart.”

She laughed; that, too, was new. “Can you tell? It has the hiccups.” Her stomach distending grotesquely as the baby kicked, Jack resisting the urge to say this reminded him of that scene in Alien. Moving his fingers across the taut bulge until they picked up an arrhythmic tap-tap. How could it have the hiccups, when it couldn’t even breathe?

Biology was amazing.

Toward the end of the month they had a Thanksgiving celebration, on what Jack was pretty sure would have been Thanksgiving Day. No turkey, but some Italian sausages he had gotten from Delmonico’s in October, and saved for a special occasion. Sausage sputtering dangerously on the Coleman stove while Jack poked at them, grease flying everywhere and the occasional dramatic burst of flame. Then sitting down to dinner at the formal dining-room table beneath the Viennese crystal chandelier, unlit but its prisms twinkling magnificently in the glow of candles and Coleman lanterns. Cut-glass bowls of pickles, olives, even some canned jellied cranberry sauce.

“It’s beautiful, dear,” Keeley murmured, as Jack helped her into her armchair. The four of them sat at one end of the table, with Keeley at its head. “Just beautiful.”