Soul's Road: A Fiction Collection (3 page)

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

“Really?” she asked. “You wore a dress to pick me up. Maybe that’s a hint.”

Jim deflated, like words were air and he’d exhaled his last. Mary found hope in his uncertainty. “Whatever woman’s trapped inside you,” she said quietly, “she can’t have you. You tell her that.”

“It’s not that simple,” he said.

“Of course it is,” she said. And doubled over in pain.

***

It turned out that squatting in diseased African sewage was a potentially fatal way to have survived. Mary developed complications her pregnancy made difficult to treat. Of the team of medics assigned to her case, the high risk neonatologist Doctor Ranganathan was her favorite. Over her months under his care, she discovered that he was to obstetrics what she’d been to cooking. They became close discussing the pros and cons of obsession while he did his twice-weekly ultrasounds on her. She was no longer certain the bakery would be enough for her and envied the doctor his ability to believe he could chart his own singular course.

Jim came to the hospital to visit her every day after he finished cleaning pools, stopping at home first to change out of the work clothes she loved and into a pretty frock that made him into a grotesque caricature. “I used to be the father,” he told anyone on the hospital staff who stared for too long. No one laughed at his joke.

“You can’t blame them,” said Mary. Her own father and mother had come to visit the hospital once and found Jim anything but funny. They still called from time to time to check in, but they hadn’t been back. Which was okay with Mary. She was too overwhelmed by questions to provide answers.

Like, “Do you really feel better in a dress?”

“I feel like an idiot,” he said.

And, “If you make the change, will you want to be with men or women?”

“I’m not sure I’m having the surgery.”

“But if you do?”

“I think I’d still want to be with you.”

“So will you be gay then, or are you gay now?” she asked. “I mean, you’re a man with a woman trapped inside. Is it you the man or you the trapped woman that wants me? And if you’re a woman, will your wanting me make you gay? I’m not gay. I can’t live as a gay person.”

“You wouldn’t be gay.”

“If you were a woman and we stayed together-”

“It would still be me,” he said. “Think of a soda bottling plant.”

“This is some metaphor your shrink made up, right?”

“If they changed the bottle, it would still be filled with Coke.”

“I like the bottle,” she said.

“But it’s the Coke you drink.”

“It’ll be Coke in a bottle without a penis. I like the bottle with the penis.”

“The bottle likes you too,” he said. “That’s part of why this is such a hard decision.”

“You wrote me a God damn letter,” she said. “How do I ever trust you again?”

“You’re the one with the pain in your heart no one can find,” he said. “It went away in Africa, right? Funny, that.”

***

Mary was miserable, strapped into her hospital bed and tilted so her head was lower than her feet. The terbutaline they gave her to prevent premature contractions gave her sweaty tremors and a headache. It might also have been responsible for her pounding heart, which in combination with everything else the matter with her considerably worried the doctors attempting to cure her while preserving a healthy pregnancy. At moments she felt like she’d have to choose between saving her own life or her baby’s. It was no contest, of course. There came a moment when she asked Jim to promise he’d be a real dad if something happened to her. Not some freak parent. Her baby needed a positive male role model.

“You’re still thinking of this as a choice,” Jim said. All he could tell her for sure was that he wanted to be the baby’s parent no matter which way the sex change went. Abandoning her was out of the question. But Mary’s lengthening silences and Jim’s new-found insecurity formed a bad marriage that birthed twin suspicions in Jim: that the baby was not his, and that Mary was trying to use her causeless heart condition as an excuse to foist the kid on him.

Late at night in the darkened room, soaked and quivering on the tilted bed, Mary felt like she was captive on a pirate ship, about to be slid head-first from her body bag of blankets back into the ocean of refuse. The nurses found her trying to escape the straps and attempted to calm her, but it was like trying to comfort a baby with the night terrors. She needed to hold onto Jim at those moments, but Jim had left hours earlier to attend a support group and then sleep at home. By the time he returned, she’d traded the nightmare from the past for the one she was currently in. She could only see him through the twin lenses of resentment and need, with love suspended precariously in between. Still, she wanted him present in the operating room for the Caesarian that birthed their beautiful breech daughter. Afterwards, Jim climbed carefully onto her hospital bed so they could cuddle their baby together, and with the three bodies touching and the baby purring Mary knew exactly who she was. They agreed to name their baby Jill. Mary was happier than she’d ever been in her life, and tried with all her strength to hide the chest pain caused by their proximity.

The nurses who came running to Mary’s room discovered a devastated man in a dress screaming that this was not his baby, that his wife had never wanted to be married to him in the first place, that all this chest pain was bullshit and she’d probably had an affair with some native doctor as soon as she’d arrived in Africa and now she was trying to force their child on him so she could return to her sex-and-suffering interlude and he was done, you hear me, done! Like Mary’s heart, Jim could not be quieted through normal channels, and so it was decided then and there to do a DNA test.

Jim stayed away for forty eight hours but returned the day Mary and Jill were to be discharged. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “It’s just, I don’t recognize you. It’s really freaking me out.”

“This from a guy in a gown,” she said, trying to keep it light. He’d gone formal in preparation for carrying their daughter across their threshold.

“Let’s tell them we don’t want the DNA results,” he said.

“Let’s not,” she said. “Let’s put all this to bed once and for all.”

Doctor Ranganathan arrived an hour later. “How are you two?” he asked.

“We’re good,” said Jim. We were thinking of cancelling the test. I mean, it’s silly. There’s only one man who could be the father.”

“It’s definitely your baby,” he said.

“Of course it is,” Jim said.

“Let’s go home,” said Mary.

“Not quite yet,” said Dr. Ranganathan. He seemed utterly unable to find his next sentence.

“Is there something wrong?” asked Mary.

“No one’s sick, you don’t have to worry about that,” he said.

“Then what?” asked Jim.

“You’re definitely the father,” he said and then turned to Mary. “But you’re not the mother.”

“I’m sorry?” she asked.

“Jill is not your baby. The DNA doesn’t match.”

“Of course it’s hers,” said Jim. “I was there for the delivery.”

“Are you telling us the hospital switched babies?” asked Mary.

“That’s not possible,” said the doctor.

“It’s been known to happen,” said Jim.

“Not in this case,” Ranganathan told him. “Not unless you got two women pregnant at around the same time. Remember, Jill is your daughter. ”

“I don’t understand,” said Mary.

“Join the club,” said Dr. Ranganathan.

***

Jim, though mystified by what was going on, found a silver lining in the extra time he had in the hospital learning from the baby nurses while Mary was poked and prodded by various specialists. No one had ever taught him to hold or burp or bathe an infant. He was sleeping there now to protect Mary from the skeezy reporter who’d discovered that Mary was there. His bed was actually a convertible chair so built for discomfort that Jim figured it had to have been invented by the Spanish inquisition, but he had no choice. He said this once as a joke, but Mary’s scar hurt too much from delivering a daughter that wasn’t hers to find much amusing. She watched Jim hold and change his baby with increasing expertise, unable to fathom how the two people she loved most in the world had rejected her in such profound ways. The last straw came when the baby proved unwilling to feed from her and the duty nurse offered to call in the hospital’s lactation specialist. It was the word “lactation” that pushed her over the edge. She had no idea where to turn for solace as she stood in the room’s family-sized shower and wept.

Jim handed off the baby to the nurse, stripped, and went in after her. Naked, he was almost the prince she’d married, and she collapsed into him and sobbed until he feared she’d choke. He held her until she quieted, then took the face he loved in the hands she’d recognized as her salvation and really kissed her for the first time since her return. It was about as far from the Disney image of the fairy tale as they could get, but Mary was awakened from her sorrow all the same. When the kiss finally ended, they just stood there under the water, Mary’s head resting on Jim’s budding, hormone-induced breasts.

They were sitting on the bed, both wrapped in towels and holding hands, when Dr. Ranganathan returned. “You look like you’ve just been to the spa,” he said.

Mary nearly smiled.

“I was at this fantastic spa once,” the doctor continued. “Ten Thousand Waves, in Santa Fe. I’ve often fantasized about living there.”

“You have news,” said Jim.

“Yes,” he said. “Sorry. So much will make sense. Do you want to get dressed first?”

Mary and Jim just waited for him to continue.

The doctor took a deep breath. “Do you know the term ‘chimera twins’?” he asked.

Mary shook her head.

“I would have been surprised if you had,” said the doctor. “They’re very rare.”

“So our baby is some sort of genetic-?” asked Jim. A look from Mary prevented him from finishing the sentence.

“Not at all,” said the doctor. “It’s your wife who’s the anomaly. Well, come to think of it, in your family maybe not such an anomaly after all.” He turned to Mary. “You too, have a woman trapped inside you.”

Mary was too exhausted to respond.

“You had a sister,” the doctor said. “In your mother’s womb. A twin. But the zygotes merged. You might have become Siamese twins, except in your case they merged completely. It happens. The eggs conflate, and the two threads of DNA each claim different parts of your body. It won’t surprise you to know that your sister claimed your heart. And, apparently, your daughter.”

“So wait,” said Jim. “Mary is her own twin?”

“In a sense.”

“And Jill is really her sister’s daughter?”

“That’s probably a better question for the philosophers,” said Ranganathan.

“So then she’s not really my baby?”

“Of course she’s yours,” said the doctor.

“That’s not what you said when you first delivered this news.”

“That was a mistake,” he said. “Every baby is surprising in some way - some not so nice, by the way. Yours just happens to carry genes from a sister you might have loved. I think you and your daughter are just very lucky.”

“Except that one of her mothers didn’t want a child,” said Jim. “She didn’t even want to be married. That’s what you meant when you said everything would make sense, right? The heart palpitations and all.”

“Maybe,” said the doctor.

Mary shook her head as though trying to throw off a dream. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “She’s not even alive.”

“Alive enough to have taken you to Africa,” said Jim, probably the best person in the hospital to understand Mary’s denial.

“You are carrying your sister’s DNA,” said Dr. Ranganathan, “and, it seems, her soul.”

“You’re sounding more like a priest than a doctor,” she said.

“Which is why I will not be writing that in your chart,” he said.

“This is insane,” said Mary.

“Is it?” asked Jim.

Mary turned to Ranganathan. “What do we do?” she asked.

“You know what science tells us?” the doctor asked. “It tells us that, in the most profound sense, we know almost nothing about the really big questions. Even the inevitability of death may be a myth, according to the futurists. But one thing we know for sure, and that’s the primacy of what you and Jim and now Jill have together. So that’s what you do. You cherish that.”

“But there are two women trying to break us up,” she said, wondering briefly if it was her or her sister, or maybe some third entity conceived while she hid in Uganda, who couldn’t stop thinking about the beautiful African doctor, “and it seems like we’re not going to get rid of either one of them.”

“That’s right,” said the doctor. “You’re not.”

Mary squeezed Jim’s hand for all she was worth.

The reporter who had been hunting Mary finally got his shot with a long lens through the window from the building across the street. People he showed it to saw only a man and a woman who looked, except for the towels they were dressed in, exactly like any other couple consulting with their physician

NATASHA OLIVER

Tax Collector

“YOU NEAR QUOTA?” Mort asked and glanced at his watch.

“Who knows,” Alba said. “You?”

“Fifteen, maybe twenty,” he said and exhaled his cigarette’s last cone of smoke, but a sudden breeze carried it back across his face and in Alba’s direction. She inhaled.

Mort was the top Reclaim Specialist in the Personal Values Reclaim Division of the Internal Revenue Service. The PVRD contacted religious organizations and taxpayers boycotting their taxes in protest of the new Personal Values Bill. The theory was that religion was a multi-billion dollar industry that went untaxed, and with a budget deficit that was described as incalculable, something had to be done to raise revenue for the federal government. Rumor had it Mort was asked to take over as Evening Shift Supervisor, but declined because it would mean a smaller bonus. The truth was Mort didn’t like management. Never had.