The Second Circleby J. Michael Keith |
Part 1 and Part 3 appear in this issue. |
| part 2 of 3 |
I walked with Charlie and his sister along the trails of Skagit Valley, a mountain range in western Washington. There was a strange beauty about the trails, the way they snaked themselves up and down the mountainside, the way the trails would ascend to the clouds but once you reached the summit, the clouds would always be higher and farther away. The strangeness, the utter mystique of the place, reminded me of Betty Jo.
I desperately missed her. I walked out alone in the cold nights, looking up from the valley past the still mountains to a treasure chest of glimmering stars. I wondered if she could see these same stars from her islands. And I prayed that she felt the “pulling” as much as I did.
* * *
When she returned from the islands, she was a different woman.
Her stomach ballooned out of her shirt and pants. She was actually showing.
Betty Jo’s face looked fuller and rounded. I’d always liked the sharp edges of her face, but I loved soft curvy textures even more. When she told me it would be a girl, I could feel my cheeks flushing red and my eyes tearing.
“Betty Jo,” I said, “I should have gone with you.”
“It’s okay,” she said, kissing me gently. “Thomas, I thought about you every day, every hour, and minute.”
I almost cried as I pulled her into my arms. My prayers had been answered. I suddenly couldn’t help myself. I was so excited that I started jumping up and down and running around our apartment in a frenzy.
Then we picked a name. I suggested it first and she grinned. She embraced me and I felt her rounded belly pushing into me. She whispered the name in my ear: Lizzy...
But as the weeks passed, the bulge in her tummy grew smaller. In fact, to my sad confusion, it receded back into her waist. Over and over I tried to talk to her about it but she only changed the subject. Stranger still, her spirits remained upbeat, as if nothing was wrong. She seemed to be enjoying the fact that she didn’t have to carry the extra weight. She would take walks and come back refreshed, laughing, joking. Each week, each day, the bulge grew smaller and smaller until...
One night, she lay on the bed gazing at a picture in a photo album. The photograph was a picture of elderly lady smiling, sitting at a table with a birthday cake on it. A half-dozen other senior citizens sat around her. I recognized it to be a party at an old folk’s home, no big deal. But what confused me was how Betty Jo kept staring at the picture.
“Do you think she’s beautiful?” she finally asked.
“Who?”
“This lady here. Don’t you think she’s the most adorable thing?”
I shrugged. “If you say so.”
She rolled her eyes and sighed, closing the album.
Obviously, I wasn’t in a nostalgic mood. I laid down beside her on the bed, my hand slowly caressing her flat stomach, sliding across her smooth, brown skin. She watched me with those brilliant eyes of hers. She gently put her hand on mine and held it there still.
“You’ve been very patient. I’ll always love you for that.” She sat up and beamed at me. “Thomas, we can go back now. But we have to stay there for a while, okay?”
“You mean the islands?”
“Yes. I want you to come.” Then she smiled with such delight that it triggered a memory of the skating rink, when we skated in the circles and I first kissed her. It was at that moment, with my hand gently stroking her stomach, she whispered the words I’ll never forget.
“Our daughter will be born to us.”
I sat up immediately. Stared back at her.
“I need you to come,” she said. “Please say you will come!”
“My God, Betty Jo. What do you mean...our daughter?”
She just looked at me with that vulnerable stare, that look-into-my-heart gaze.
“Betty Jo,” I shook my head angrily, “you have to tell me what’s going on. First you’re pregnant, and then you’re not. I mean, it’s pretty obvious, right? What the hell gives you the right to have an abortion without-”
“I didn’t have an abortion!” She slid backwards off the bed, turning away from me as she stood. Her hands reached up to covered her face. Groaning, her fingers pulled violently at her chestnut hair, as if she was helpless.
I moved over to her, wrapped her in my arms. I felt the jerky rhythm of her sobbing.
“I’ll come, Betty Jo,” I whispered. I felt like crying myself; my throat was tight. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
She pulled tight against me, burying her head in my chest.
I said, “But you have to trust me, okay. Just tell me exactly what went wrong with the baby.”
Betty Jo pulled back so we stood face to face. Her red-trimmed eyes raised until they were level with mine. “Nothing went wrong,” she said.
* * *
The plane begins its decent. The seat belt sign is flashing above me. Betty Jo squeezes her head next to mine so she can see out. Her hand moves to the window, pointing to the chain of islands coming into view. The excitement in her voice is so sparkly and genuine; it’s like colors dancing around her every word.
She explains how the islands, eighteen of them in all, are connected by a lattice of bridges. She tells me her family lives in a cozy stucco house on the tenth island. Then she points to the island beyond all the others, the one covered with a black-green forest.
She says, “That’s where our baby awaits us.”
I wince, swallow yet another dose of confusion...but more than anything, I’m afraid.
After we land, Rodney drives us to their house. He sits in a special, elevated seat and his little legs are pressing these extensions that activate the gas pedal and brakes. It’s a startling sight because the man looks like he is only ten years old.
“Robin and Rodney.”
“Yes, what about them, Betty Joe?”
“They’re my parents.”
I scan the backdrop, look out at the ocean as we cross the third bridge. I notice a green tint in the water, which becomes darker and more pronounced as we cross each upcoming bridge. We drive across nine bridges in all and I’m too confused, too afraid, to see the beauty of the place.
After we arrive at their stucco ranch, I keep looking for them. Jake and Sylvia.
We walk out to an ocean view backyard and Robin and Betty Jo kneel down and chit chat as they pluck up some tomatoes and corn from the garden. As the evening arrives, we eat a full dinner, the four of us, making slow conversation on the front porch until the pink skies become purple and black.
The two older ones, the man and women I had read to, never came.
Early the next morning, Rodney drives me out to the dark brooding island that we spied from the plane. Betty Jo and Robin had left earlier, well before I awoke. As he drives, the silvery metallic extensions to the car’s pedals shimmer with the morning rays. The two of us converse, well sort of. Rodney is doing the talking and I’m struggling to understand anything.
“They used Betty Jo’s energy to find the birth place,” he says, raising his brow. “Okay, it’s not really her energy, that’s only folklore, but there’s a chemical pattern in her blood that matches the seed.”
There’s that word again: seed. I glance at him out the corner of my eye.
“Modern science sure is amazing, eh’?”
“Sure is,” I comply, staring at the darkening water as we cross yet another bridge.
“Thomas, they could have just as easily used your blood. The seed is half yours.”
I sit up erect. “What exactly do you mean, half mine?”
He chuckles in his little-boy voice. “Thomas, you fertilized her egg. Then they extracted it from Betty Jo and did some spring planting.”
I shake my head slowly in disbelief. “Oh my god.”
“Give it time, Thomas.” He winks at me. “Give it time and all your confusion will settle out nice and proper.”
“But why didn’t Betty Jo tell me any of this?”
He draws in a breath. “Because words can’t describe it. And because she’s afraid, just like you are.” He eyes the road and then turns to me and glares. “Thomas, I notice how you look at Robin and me. You think we’re so different. But we’re not.” He eyes the road and his voice gets softer. “There’s only one gene, one tiny difference in our DNA; that’s what controls how we change. And when Betty Jo came out to the islands in the spring, we didn’t know if the baby would be like you or one of us. So she went to her doctor and found out.”
I whisper, “She didn’t tell me about seeing any doctors.”
He groans a bit, turning the steering wheel, taking us inland along a narrow road. Lanky trees lean inward and over the road, casting it in shade. “Not much longer, son.” Rodney looks over at me now wearing a big old grin and laughs. “And I’m sure Betty Jo is already there and glowing like a Christmas tree.”
* * *
Rodney pulls up to a white stucco building planted in front of a tall line of trees. On a marble floor, we walk to a large desk and sign the obligatory forms. They tell us to sit down and wait to be called.
We’re waiting now, for almost an hour, in a giant room that’s filled with rows and rows of people. Rodney pulls out his trusty miniature chess set. The pieces are so small, and I’m so nervous and flustered, that it’s hard for me to maneuver them. So I just voice my moves and the little man moves the pieces for us both. His play is much improved since their visit to Clifton. I win the first game, but then Rodney goes on a tear and wins two games in a row. I’m starting to see his strategy when they call.
They escort us out a back door to a driving cart, a small vehicle with open seats. There’s a short fellow who’s driving it, and like Rodney, he’s using a mechanical extension to push the gas pedal.
He looks over at me and smiles. “Your wife’s doing well. She’s been wonderful.”
The driver takes us along a narrow path into the woods and the smell is alarming.
It smells like seafood, and it smells alive because the aroma itself is changing: weakening then strengthening, becoming bitter and then sour. After a few hundred yards, the canopy of trees begins to clear and I’m seeing a thousand mounds of dirt, rows and rows of them, which extend far out into the sea as far as I can see.
The mist turns to rain; the shallow gray sky falls down to the horizon. I manage to look downward to see the green water of the ocean trickling its way between the tiny hills. The ride is bumpy roving over these endless mounds. All of a sudden, Rodney points out to our right and we see little Robin who’s eagerly waving her arms and shouting for us to hurry.
The odor gets worse, almost like a dead fish smell now. My shaky hands feel weak. They tremble as I help lift Rodney’s meager fifty-pound body off the cart and down to the damp muddy surface. Robin hastily pulls at my hand and walks with me up the muddy hill.
We get to the top and I look downward into a giant pit.
Below us are a half-dozen people, and an impressive collection of lights and equipment. In the middle is Betty Jo and she’s gleaming with a radiance I’ve never seen. She’s lying on the ground and reaching out, extending her hands into a mound of earth that has bulged up beside her like a cocoon made from the sweating green clay. Rodney comes up beside us, takes Robin’s hand and the two of them slowly inch their way down to the bottom.
Most of the figures surrounding Betty Jo appear to be doctors and nurses. One nurse checks a probe that’s attached to the cocoon. Every few seconds she rattles off a chain of numbers to a doctor next to her. A technician about ten feet above them abruptly activates a giant grill that shoots down a thick beam of light. I can feel the heat of the illumination right away, and now in plain sight, there’s a cloud of mist and a sea of flies seething up from the ground near Betty Jo.
The thick aroma is barely tolerable. My hands cover my mouth and nose but it’s not helping. Everyone is eagerly shouting as the dark shape, a torso, legs, hands, feet, and now a muddy head emerges into Betty Jo’s outstretched arms.
Rodney’s voice sounds triumphant. “It’s a girl, Betty Jo, it’s a girl!”
Robin lets go of his hand and moves down to Betty Jo, kneeling beside her and whispering sweet nothings in her ear.
The doctors and nurses attach an oxygen mask to the creature’s face as they repeatedly check its vital signs. Abruptly, the technician activates a machine that digs down underneath the body and lifts both of them upward. The lifting surface is porous, allowing the rotating water-sprayer to wisp away the maggots and the dark green dirt from the body’s flesh.
When the mud is cleansed, I finally see the old woman and I’m starting to gag. Yet Betty Jo is still touching it. To my utter horror, she’s nestling her arms around it, caressing its wrinkled flesh with her bare hands. The smell is so repulsive that I turn back, run down the hill and kneel down behind the driving cart. And now I explode, releasing myself to this foul place. I vomit repeatedly until there is nothing left to bring up.
* * *
I’m standing away from Betty Jo in the recovery room. She’s propped up in a hospital bed, her face peaceful, while the old lady/thing is sleeping in the next partition. I refuse to look at it. Rodney reaches into his coat and pulls out his miniature chessboard. With his little-boy fingers, he places the board and the pieces on the end of the bed.
I look over to Robin before tapping Rodney on the shoulder. “Hey you two, could I have a word with Betty Jo? Alone?”
“Sure Thomas.” Rodney leaves the pieces on the bed. He pulls at my arm, motioning me to bend down to him. “Things will settle out, I promise.”
I just stare off at the walls, fuming as they leave. Closing the door behind them, I sit down in the hard oak chair across from the bed. I can feel Betty Jo’s eyes all over me.
“I tried,” she begins, “I tried to tell you this was coming.”
I finally look at her.
“Would you have believed me?” she asks.
“How could you-” I glance over at the old woman. “Everything I felt about you... it has no meaning now.”
She looks at me. That look-into-my-heart-Thomas gaze. But I only feel anger. I only feel a power that will easily push me away from this horrifying place. “Why didn’t you take me here in the spring?”
She shakes her head, as if denying everything.
My voice grows louder. “So they extracted the egg, our god-forsaken egg, and they planted it in the ground as a seed, and used it to grow that!” I pointed back to the hideous creature behind the curtain.
Copyright © 2007 by J. Michael Keith
