THIS IS WHAT Darnell imagines:
In a movie, the director would use a jump-cut shot to compress time and heighten tension: the father character (early fifties, graying) working in his woodshop with a skill saw and lathe. Sawdust in the air. He’s wearing earplugs, so instead of the tool’s high-pitched whine we hear only a distant humming. He won’t hear the detectives knocking at his front door or calling his cell phone. The father is building something in the shape of something else, a movie prop. A Comanche bow or a roadhouse sign or a weathervane. A likeness to anchor the movie in time and space. Here we might see a cutaway shot of the father’s hands at work—callused, sun-freckled. His hands the steadying forces of his life, you’d think. Never still. Then we’d pull in close: the father’s face concentrated, eyes behind protective glasses narrowed to blade and board, the penciled line where they meet. Closer still, an eye fills the screen and we see, reflected in its blue iris, tiny particles of sawdust that whirl about his face. Inside the iris, these particles miraculously recombine to form a younger, dark-haired version of the father and his former wife down on their knees, giving their two boys a bath. The boys—three and six—make faces, splash water out of the tub. The younger one is fussy, ready for bed. The older one, always testing them, is climbing out. The boys’ mother—arms outstretched—tries to coax him back into the tub. The father leans back from all the splashing, the commotion, turns his head. A bemused smile on his face. He could be any father, really, helping out with the kids at the end of the day. Fears and hopes roiling through him. We might see in the father’s turning away, his bemused smile, something portentous. But the father and his family aren’t watching the movie; they’re in it. They’re not even aware yet of the forces tugging at them. How one thing will pull another along. Floating there in the father’s iris, the rest of their lives can’t be imagined.
55
MARGO LEANS AGAINST a pillar in the pool bathhouse, braces for the next contraction. The limestone is cool against her face. She’s left her cell phone in her knit bag down by the Springs. She often swims her laps here alone after closing to avoid the crowds. She’d begun to feel more buoyant in her seventh month, despite her doctor’s warnings about hypertension. As if the baby is making slow peace with inside becoming outside. Water seeking its own level. But right now her bowels are filling with concrete. Panting here in the dusky light, she’s seized by the thought that Darnell has done this to her—scooped pails of sand from the collapsed backyard sandbox, mixed it, and spoon-fed her in bed. She’d tried to say something to him about it, but her tongue was stifled by the spoon, her teeth grinding against grit. Just a little more, Darnell would say. To keep up your strength. He’d touched the side of her cheek with the spoon to get her to open, the way you’d do a baby. Darnell was patient. He was building a monument to patience inside her bowels. Patience abides. Its weight holding you steady and balanced in the water, like ballast for a ship.
But then it isn’t Darnell at all, who she knows she’ll soon leave. It isn’t Darnell’s sons’ undoing, isn’t her worry over Alice back with her unsteady mother, or Margo’s own mother and father, fading quickly now, paper-thin versions of the people they’d been. It isn’t Kate, who’d called her about Michael that morning, her voice a mix of sympathy and accusation. Who was it then, filling her up this way?
The next contraction hits, doubles her over. She steadies herself against the pillar. Calls out. Someone will hear, she thinks, someone will come. One of her fingernails bites into the flesh of her palm, but she hardly notices. And it occurs to her that it’s her own doing. That she’s filled up with herself but will always feel empty. It’s a sleight of hand. A box with a false-bottom mirror where you could hide anything. How could she have forgotten? She’s conceived herself.
Her breath comes in great heaves now. In the bruised last-light, she leans against the pillar in the great temple knowing she can bring it down or hold it up—it’s up to her. Only she is left to tell the tale.
56