She looked at him, the sweat from their lovemaking still glistening on her face, and smiled. “You know, I just don’t know. I mean, I think about it from time to time, but never really seriously. And it’s not like we’ve talked about it or anything.”
“Is that what we’re doing now?” he asked. “Talking about it?”
“Would you want another baby?”
He thought about it for a second. “I’m forty years old,” he said. “And not to point out the obvious, your highness, but you’re just a few years younger than me. Is it even safe?”
“Women are having babies later in life now,” she said. “There are risks, but then there are risks with any pregnancy. There were complications with Ellie at the end, remember?”
The umbilical cord had gotten wrapped around Ellie’s neck during labor. They’d had a monitor on her, and with each contraction and subsequent push, David had watched his unborn daughter’s blood pressure drop on the computer screen beside Kathy’s bed. In the end, the doctor had to take Ellie out via emergency cesarean. Even more terrifying was that she came out in silence, not making a sound. It wasn’t until she was aspirated that she started to cry, but even then it had been a few short bleats, and she quieted right up to the moment she was placed in Kathy’s arms, those deep obsidian eyes surveying them both from beneath a pink and furrowed brow.
But those complications hadn’t just been at the end. They’d spent nearly two years trying to get pregnant, had visited countless fertility doctors. Kathy had been on a strict regimen of prenatal vitamins. There had been no medical reason why they shouldn’t be able to conceive, yet conception eluded them for the longest time . . . until that one morning when both pregnancy tests turned up positive and a visit to the obstetrician confirmed it. Ellie—their Miracle Baby.
“Sounds like you’ve given this more than just a passing thought,” he said.
“What about you?” she said. “Will you give it more than just a passing thought, too?”
He chewed his lower lip for a moment. “Yeah, okay. I will.”
Kathy’s smile widened. David admired the sweat at her temples, dampening her hair. When she eased back down into her pillows, he could smell the sex on her, wafting over to his side of the bed.
“So, do you want to see it?” Kathy said.
“See what?”
“What she bought.”
“I thought she didn’t tell you.”
“Not right away. But when we got home, she wrapped it in construction paper and gave it to me as a gift.” Kathy rolled over and opened the drawer to her nightstand. When she turned back toward him, she was cupping a small, shiny sliver of metal in the palm of her hand.
David leaned forward for a better look. “It’s a spoon,” he said.
“Well, it’s a charm,” Kathy said. “Like for a bracelet. But yeah, it’s a spoon. It was the sweetest thing.”
David smiled and shook his head.
Kathy returned the tiny spoon to the nightstand, then made a sleepy purring sound while her cool foot found one of his sweaty legs beneath the sheet. David opened the book and skimmed the same sentence several times, not really paying attention to it. Deep inside the belly of the house, the furnace kicked on.
“Hey.” Kathy sat up on one elbow. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Shhh,” she said. “Listen.”
He listened but heard nothing.
“Sounds like music,” Kathy said.
“Music? I don’t—” But he cut himself off as he heard it, too: the faint and discordant jangle of chimes set to some familiar tune. It took David just a few seconds to place it—“Yankee Doodle.” But it wasn’t the music itself that he found most peculiar; it was that he recognized where it was coming from, that prerecorded jangling melody, incongruous in the middle of a December night.
“Oh,” Kathy said, sitting up in bed fully now. “That’s eerie as hell.” Which meant she recognized it, too.
The music grew louder, louder, until it was right outside the house in the street. In the summertime, that jocular little melody would send the neighborhood kids flooding into Columbus Court, anxious for a Rocket Pop or an Italian ice. But now, in the dead of winter and in the middle of the night—David glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand and saw that it was well after midnight—the sound of that tune unnerved him.
“That’s the strangest damn thing,” he said, and climbed out of bed. He tugged on a pair of sweatpants and an undershirt, then went to one of the bedroom windows. He lifted the blinds and peered out into the night.
“What?” Kathy said.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s the freakin’ ice cream man.”
Much of his view was blocked by the Walkers’ house next door, but he was able to make out the rear bumper of the Freez-E-Friend ice cream truck with perfect clarity. It sat idling in the middle of the cul-de-sac, its tailpipe expelling clouds of vapor into the cold night air. The brake lights were on.
Kathy joined him at the window. “Is this some kind of joke?” she said, her breath fogging up the glass.
“Well, as far as jokes go, it’s the creepiest one I’ve ever seen.”