The Devil Crept In Read online

  There was the post office box to check—no mailman came out to the house. There were the bills; yet another chore Ansel had performed without so much as a complaint. She’d have to start stocking up on cords of wood or start chopping her own for winter. All of these things were destined to become a source of Rosie’s already formidable malcontent.

  Part of her began to hope that, with how tragically Ansel had passed, someone would reach out to her, perhaps offer to be her friend. One of those circling funeral gnats could take pity on her, if only to have something to drone on about behind her back. But they only watched from a distance. Nobody made eye contact, let alone lent a helping hand.

  She spent the next few weeks imagining herself moving to Big Sur, certain that Ras would let her live at his retreat until she got back on her feet. She’d cook, serve as the housekeeper, get that empty place up and running, maybe even turn it into Northern California’s preeminent bed-and-breakfast. But without a car, getting down there would require a bus ticket out of town, and the Greyhound didn’t run into Deer Valley. McMinnville was the closest place with a station. She supposed she could take a cab, but the idea of sitting in a car with a stranger, even for half an hour, was just too much. She’d rather be alone.

  Except that, even in the loneliest of hours after Ansel’s death, she had never truly been by herself.

  The first time she missed her period—only weeks after the funeral—she dismissed it as grief-stricken stress. By the second month, she was spending hours bent over the toilet. Food poisoning, she assured herself. The stomach flu. A terrible diet. I haven’t been eating well since . . . since . . .

  But there were only so many lies she could tell herself. When reality became too obvious to ignore, all she could do was cry.

  Considering all the times she and Ansel had tried, it was a fiendish joke that she should be pregnant now.

  She cursed God, dared him to strike her down. She no longer wanted what she had been so desperate to have, because everything had changed. Even the road that ran alongside the house had started to go quiet, becoming less and less busy until there were only one or two trucks passing per day. It could have been due to the accident—the company pulling out of the area, scared off by the grave. Or the world truly was forsaking her. She had wanted to be alone, and so it would come to pass.

  The stillness was hard to handle. Sadness was replaced by anger. She’d find herself standing naked in the mirror, disgusted by what she saw, revolted by the idea of a human being twisting around inside her like a worm. She did nothing to make the baby’s survival any easier. She dug up a pack of stale cigarettes stashed years before—Ansel had reprimanded her for smoking while upset—and sucked down every last one until she was nicotine sick. She bought bottles of booze during weekly shopping trips. If she drank enough, there was a chance she’d miscarry. Hell, if anything, she’d at least be numb. She stood at the top of the stairs, trying to will herself to let her muscles go lax, to tumble one story down; that ought to take care of the malady, and as a bonus, she very well may break her own neck. But she couldn’t gather up the courage. Instead, she went in and out of the blue-painted room, refusing to set up a stick of furniture in that nursery. If the child survived her negligence, it would be welcome to sleep on a blanket-covered floor. No crib. No comfort. She’d wash it in the kitchen sink like a stray, like something she’d found out in the woods. But treat it like a real child? Not without Ansel. Never.

  She knew all these things were wrong. Wishing bad things on that baby after having spent so long desperately hoping it into existence was cruel. But she couldn’t help but cross her fingers that this pregnancy would end like her last. Abrupt. Painful. If she was lucky, terminating in a double death.

  And yet, there was a tiny seed of optimism refusing to wilt in the shadow of even her darkest thoughts. Ansel had been the most loving person she had known. He had saved her. God had taken him away, yes, but now God was giving her a gift in exchange for her grief. This baby was a godsend, not a curse. A second salvation. Wihout this child, all was lost.

  But those women in town. Those vapid she-snakes. She wouldn’t dare go into Deer Valley without hiding her condition. By her third trimester, baggy clothes would only do so much.

  It was fear of public humiliation—A pregnant widow, how positively tragic—that pushed her to shove a handful of money into an envelope and walk herself to the only used car lot in town. She handed the salesman at Mel’s Motors five thousand crumpled dollars and requested he put her in something reliable.

  “Just something that works when I turn the key,” she said. No specifics, just in and out as quickly as possible. The man—was it Mel himself?—had no office to speak of, so she was forced to stand in the lot with him, which was on Deer Valley’s main strip. Little plastic flags whipped above her head in the wind. Cars drove by. People looked out their windows, staring at her. Is that the Aleksander woman? How dare she show her ugly face around here. Buying a fancy car with her dead husband’s money, no doubt.

  Maybe-Mel pointed her to a sedan with a giant $1,400 soaped onto the windshield.

  “I don’t want something for fourteen hundred,” Rosie told him. “I want something for five thousand. Something dependable.” The more money she spent, the longer the car would last, right? She wanted it to run forever, if it could.

  “Right-O!” Maybe-Mel said, but despite his enthusiasm, he looked dubious in his lime-green polo shirt and bright red button—NO CREDIT CHECK!. After a moment of thought, he motioned for her to follow him across the lot. “Come on down. I’ll show you the best goshdarn car I’ve got.”

  It was a four-door Ford. The dark blue paint appeared to be in relatively good shape, but overall it looked skimpier than Rosie had expected for five grand. A big $2,500 price tag stood out against the glass.

  “This?” she asked. Was he purposefully ignoring her request? Or maybe he thought she was as stupid as she was unalluring? Perhaps he knew exactly who she was, and he wasn’t about to make her buying experience easy. Murderess! She looked away from him and back to the car, mortified by how picky she was being. She should just choose something and get out of there . . .

  “Yes, ma’am. And lookie here, its right in your price range.”

  “But I have five thousand . . . ,” she reminded him, the envelope held fast in her hands.

  “Oh, the price on the windshield isn’t the total price of the car, ma’am,” he explained, his smile as wide as a watermelon slice. “That’s just how much you pay to get it off the lot, you see? We call that a down payment.” He enunciated those two words nice and slow for her—a highly educated man speaking to a losing-her-wits broad. “This one’s got only one payment after the initial down, which is great. Three thousand bucks after the down brings you to fifty-five hundred total.”

  Rosamund frowned, certain that this man thought she was born yesterday. She had told him five thousand, tops, and here he was trying to squeeze her for more. This town, she thought. If I could only get out of this town . . .

  “But, because you’re demanding the best, and because I can tell you’re a lady who knows her cars, I’m knocking five hundred off the price, no questions asked. You can take this baby for five thousand flat. I won’t even charge you for taxes or plates.” His smile somehow became even more triumphant, and he slapped the hood like a cowboy slapping the flank of a horse. Giddyup.

  Rosamund hesitated for half a second, then handed him the cash. Something about Maybe-Mel made her think he was taking her for a ride, but she didn’t exactly have much choice. She needed a car, and this whole ordeal was taking much longer than she had anticipated. Suddenly, the Ford looked fine, just fine. All she wanted was to crawl inside it and drive away.

  One signature later, she nervously pulled the car to where the curb met the road. Rosie glanced into the rearview mirror just in time to catch Maybe-Mel tucking some of the cash into the back pocket of his crumpled khaki pants. She didn’t like the way he had treated her—li
ke she was an uneducated dimwit. And now he was pocketing her husband’s hard-earned money for himself? She imagined throwing the car in reverse, confronting him—Excuse me, but are you the owner of this establishment? That fantasy vanished with the blaring of a horn.

  A passing car squealed its brakes and Rosie bleated out a startled scream. She had drifted into the middle of Main Street, too distracted by the salesman in her rearview to notice she’d put herself in the path of oncoming traffic. Mortified, she stared at the man in a giant pickup a few feet from her front fender. He was yelling, gesticulating with his hands. She was no lip-reader, but his insults were a no-brainer. Crazy bitch! Goddamn moron! Shaken, she forced her attention forward and guided the car in the right direction, slowly driving away, snippets of Elton John singing beneath the crackling static of the radio. She tried to keep her tears at bay, but it was hard, because the last time she’d driven anything, it had been Ansel’s car, and Elton had been on the radio then, too.

  · · ·

  By the time she started showing, Rosie had grown accustomed to the thirty-mile drive into McMinnville. The trip had its benefits. McMinnville had better stores, and the cute downtown area was just small enough, with strangers distant enough, to keep her anxiety relatively in check. There was a pretty park in the middle of town, one that sported a jungle gym in the shape of a dragon that she imagined Little Ansel playing on when he was old enough. McMinnville could be the place where she would scatter her loneliness to the wind and finally find a friend—a shopkeeper, or a park regular, another new mother attentively watching her firstborn from the shade of Douglas firs. But despite these daydreams, Rosie rarely ventured off course. It was to the grocery store and back—never ever the grocery store in Deer Valley despite how much closer it was. Sometimes she’d stop to fuel up the car, but otherwise it was a straight shot onto the highway. The faster she got home, the quicker her nerves would abate.

  The fact that nobody knew her made no difference in the end. She failed to schedule a doctor’s visit, afraid that the nurse would ask about the baby’s father, force her to rehash the painful story. And for what? It wasn’t as if Rosie would be able to drive herself thirty-plus miles while in the throes of labor. A doctor could tell her whether the baby was healthy, but that didn’t matter. If the baby was born sick, she’d take care of it. If it was born with no arms, she’d figure out how to deal with that, too.

  Rosie didn’t know a thing about being a mother, but one thing was certain. She was alone in this. Nobody would help her. To expect anything from anyone was a mistake.

  She was in the kitchen when the first contraction struck. It doubled her over the counter and sent her crashing to her knees. She grasped the edge of the sink, squeezed her eyes shut, and thought of how happy Ansel would have been to be a father. It was the only thing that got her upstairs and into bed.

  The pain lasted for what seemed like days, though she couldn’t be sure how long it really was, too delirious to keep track of time. She didn’t hold back the screams, feeling as though the devil himself was tearing her organs free, one artery at a time.

  This was it, then. She was dying.

  She rolled onto her front and pulled her knees beneath her, and with the mattress firmly in her grasp, she took a shuddering breath and exhaled a wail. And then she pushed until the world blurred. Pushed until flashes of memory brought Ras and his striking blue eyes into the forefront of her mind. Pushed until, finally, everything went black.

  When she roused—minutes later? An hour? A day?—the pain was twice as bad. Her hand flew backward, touched the space between her legs, jerked away. There was something there, a bulbous bulge of bone. She shrieked, trying to purge herself of the thing that had grown inside her, every muscle contracting, her breaths coming in gasping, sobbing heaves. Something loosened. Slid. Liquid geysered down her thighs and, again, she reached back to feel. The baby’s head was out, but the body was still firmly seated inside the womb. She rolled onto her back, spun herself around, pressed her bare feet against the headboard, and grabbed the intricately carved dowels of the bed frame with both hands. She pushed. Screamed. Her arms and legs trembled with effort, her entire body covered in sweat.

  But . . . nothing.

  The baby was stuck.

  It would never come out.

  She’d be forced to live out the rest of her life as the woman in perpetual labor—a gruesome pair of conjoined twins; one head where it should have been, another one—smaller, bloody—emerging from between her legs.

  Oh God.

  Panic.

  Oh God, get it out!

  She reached down, recoiled, reached down again and grabbed ahold of the baby’s skull.

  Get it out, get it out!

  She began to pull, scream-weeping through the process, too pained to spend a single second worrying about whether or not she was hurting the child, too horrified by what was happening to her body to care if she was slowly beheading it with every tug. One final yank. Another spout of hot liquid. Rosie gave a concluding yell as she felt the child hit the bed.

  She lay motionless, every muscle in her body quivering with exhaustion. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was sleep, but the silence of the room jarred her eyes open. The baby wasn’t crying, and from what she could feel, it wasn’t moving, either.

  I’ve killed it, she thought, and for half a trembling heartbeat, she was glad. But the thought of Ansel’s pain—his face, reliving the horror of another still-born child; the idea of the last remaining piece of him dying right there, next to her—had her scrambling to sit.

  Oh no, oh please.

  She stared down the length of her nightgown, her legs bare and blood-smeared. And there, lying atop sheets saturated in amniotic fluid and blood, was a baby unlike any she’d ever seen. Its head grossly oversized. Its limbs small and twisted, like fleshy tree branches that had coiled and zigzagged as they had grown. Pink. Unmoving. More than likely dead. The shock of what was in front of her rendered her motionless, transfixed by the child’s chimplike hands and feet, by its twitching vestigial tail.

  It stirred, as if waking from a nap rather than having been just born. Rosie pressed her wet, blood-slathered hands to her mouth when it moved. And then, just as she was sure it was going to leap up and snarl at her, it let out a cry. A baby’s cry. Desperate for affection, for its mother’s touch.

  Rosie hesitated. Did she dare? She could leave it. Let it die.

  She reached down, her fingers curling around the umbilical cord that kept the thing tethered to her body, readying herself to pull it free and run. But the moment her hand grazed that cable of flesh, she felt a tiny heartbeat radiate into her palm. It was a reminder of what this boy represented, no matter how deformed he may have been.

  Rosie reached out to the crying child, brought him to her chest and held him close to her heart. And for the first time in her life she felt that she was needed, and that she would forever be justified in her solitude. She hadn’t intended on telling anyone about the baby before, but now no one could ever know.

  15

  * * *

  ROSIE CONSIDERED CALLING the baby Ansel, but something about naming the child after his father felt wrong. Otto seemed more appropriate; a rare name, just as he was a rare creature. It was a name familiar to Sweden—a callback to the child’s long-lost father’s beloved home. The moniker felt like a nickname, a funny alias to give a pet. And while Rosie knew that was a gruesome thing to consider, it made her feel more at ease about how utterly deformed the poor thing was.

  Otto’s ailments weren’t his fault, of course; they were hers. She’d deal with the consequences of nine months of selfishness for the rest of her life. Or only for the rest of Otto’s, because, really, how long could a child like this survive?

  Sasha the cat was less compassionate about Otto’s afflictions. The type to meander through rooms to be close to his owner, Sasha now stayed as far away from both Rosie and the baby as he could. Even when Rosie set out a dish of tuna for the
moody feline, Sasha dared not approach. He skirted the kitchen wall as if considering the risk, ultimately deciding against it whenever Otto started to scream.

  And Otto screamed often.

  He yowled, it seemed, for the entirety of the first three months of his life; silent only when he slept, and even then a strange gurgle bubbled up from his throat. Had he been born normal and his mother not been crippled by her own social anxieties, he would have won himself an immediate trip to the pediatrician. Surely, that noise was a sign of some sort of blockage. He could have been dry-drowning, his insides just as twisted up as his odd-angled arms and legs. His eyes: those, too, were strange. Spaced impossibly far apart, the whites were actually the palest shade of blue, as though the color beyond the iris had bled like an ink drop blooming across the surface of milk.

  But a doctor’s visit was out of the question. It was hard enough putting little Otto in the car when Rosie had to go to the grocery store. She tried to quell her unease with jokes—Otto in the auto—but it only fanned the flames. Her volatility was merciless on shopping day.

  She’d leave him in the car during her supermarket trips, the windows covered with towels, the windshield blocked by a sunshade so no one could see inside. When the weather was warm, she’d blast the air-conditioning for a steady five minutes, shivering in the driver’s seat before making a run for the store. She’d shop the aisles as fast as she could, throwing things into her basket as though she were robbing the place, all the while praying for a checker who didn’t try to make small talk—How’s your day going so far? Can I get someone to help you out with your things?