The Town Read online

  The kids were not having a great time, either. There were no other children or teenagers, and Sasha, Adam and Teo stuck together, hovering on the edge of the small churchyard, eating from paper plates, talking among themselves and gazing longingly out toward the freedom of the street. In addition to being old, everyone here was speaking in Russian, and Julia knew her son and daughters were bored and desperate to leave. Especially Sasha.

  She understood how they felt—she felt it herself—but this afternoon was not for them, it was for Gregory’s mother, and the least they could do was be polite and put up with it. It would all be over in a few hours.

  A huge copper samovar stood on the lonely picnic table in the middle of the yard, and she walked over to get herself some chai. She remembered as a child using sugar cubes to build a bridge across her cup, placing them in a row and wedging them in, pouring the tea over the bridge to dissolve it. It was an almost universal rite for Russian children, and she had taught her own children how to do it, though none of them had ever been big tea drinkers and the novelty had worn off fairly quickly.

  Gregory sidled up next to her, nudged her with his shoulder. He poured himself some chai. “Having a good time?”

  “Oh, wonderful,” she said.

  He laughed. “We’ll bail as soon as other people start leaving.”

  She shook her head. “It’s okay. Let your mother have her fun.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m willing to stay to the bitter end. Anything for the sake of family unity.”

  “Thanks.” He gave her a quick kiss. “I owe you one.”

  She smiled. “You can pay me back tonight.”

  He grinned, gave her a quick squeeze. “Happy to.”

  Gregory downed his tea, poured himself another cup, then asked her to come and meet Semyon Konyov, the man who had been his father’s best friend. She accompanied him across the yard to a spot under the cottonwood tree where a group of old men stood around eating shashlik. Introductions were made, polite questions were asked, then the conversation turned to church matters, and she excused herself and walked back to the samovar. She didn’t really want anything more to drink, but the picnic table was in a centralized location and offered her a perfect vantage point from which to observe almost everything that was going on. She saw three old women huddled together near the back fence, holding their hands over their mouths as they talked, gossiping. She saw one old man with a gray beard down to his waist, obviously drunk, loudly denouncing both the Russian and the American governments for perceived slights to himself and his family. She saw a group of men gathered around the barbecue, arguing vigorously over something she could not make out.

  In the doorway of the church, Gregory’s mother was emerging from the building, followed closely by Jim Petrovin. The two of them walked down the steps, over to the barbecue, and Julia watched the minister hover around her mother-in-law. Although she’d told Gregory that he was just being paranoid and overprotective, she found herself revising that analysis. He was right, she thought. The minister was after his mother and was making a concerted effort to rekindle the relationship that had ended all those years ago.

  Julia understood how Gregory felt, but she had to admit that it was kind of cute, these two old people taking another stab at romance this late in the game. It was also kind of sad. It was clear that there had been no one else in Jim Petrovin’s life all this time and that her mother-in-law’s return was the fulfillment of a lifelong fantasy.

  Gregory’s mother happened to glance over just at that moment, their eyes met, and they both looked instantly away, embarrassed.

  Finally the party began to wind down. Couples started leaving, drunks were ushered into vehicles and driven home, leftover food was taken into the church.

  Julia and Gregory stood with their kids, saying good-bye, thanking everyone for welcoming them to McGuane. They were polite and everyone was polite to them, but there was a reserved formality to the way in which they were addressed, a definite distance between themselves and everyone else. She’d noticed it earlier, and at first she’d put it down to her own aversion to such events as this, but the truth was that the McGuane Molokans were acting somewhat . . . secretive.

  That was it exactly. They were acting as though there were some sort of knowledge or plot that they were all in on but had been forbidden to let her or her family know anything about. Molokans were naturally secretive, she knew. It was an understandable by-product of being an oppressed minority. Her own family had always been suspicious and evasive when asked about their religion or ethnic background. But this was something different. There was an added dimension here, something specific to these people and this place, and although it was probably nothing, probably harmless, it nevertheless made her uneasy.

  Gregory went to get his mother. She was making arrangements to get together with several other old women to make bread and lopsha noodles, and for that Julia was grateful. Maybe that would finally stop her from moping around the house all day. At the very least, it would do her good to get outside and see some of her old friends.

  Julia tried to look at it from that perspective, tried to keep her mind on that aspect of the afternoon, but those other thoughts kept returning, and she was silent as they walked up the canyon road toward home.

  3

  Jolene started screaming at midnight.

  Harlan was yanked out of sleep by the sound and bolted upright in bed next to her. “Is it time?” he asked, instantly awake. “Is it time?”

  She could not even answer him. She continued to scream—a high-pitched, nonstop, animal sound unlike anything he had ever heard—and there was no break in the noise, no rhythm to the cry. Something was wrong, he knew. Labor was not supposed to be this painful, and it was supposed to come in bursts, to ebb and flow, not remain constant, not be so relentless.

  She was thrashing around on the bed, her body twisting and contorting with agony, the corded muscles of her neck visibly straining, and he reached out to her, tried to touch her, tried to feel her forehead, but her wild movements completely rebuffed him. He reached down and pulled off the twining, bunching covers, and saw what he was praying he would not.

  Blood.

  He was up like a shot, out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Grabbing the wall phone, he called 911, screamed his address and said that he needed an ambulance. He slammed down the phone, then immediately picked it up again and dialed Lynda. How in the hell had Jolene gotten the wacky idea into her head that a midwife was better than a doctor, that so-called “natural” childbirth was better than modern medicine? And why had he been stupid enough to go along with it? Women used to die during natural childbirth. For a lot of mothers, giving birth had been a fatal experience.

  Lynda was already pounding on their front door by the time his call was on the second ring. She’d obviously heard Jolene’s screams and had rushed over on her own, and Harlan dropped the phone and ran over to unlock the dead bolt.

  The midwife did not even look at him as she ran inside, racing straight through the living room down the hall to the bedroom.

  The sheet was covered with red. Jolene’s legs were spread, and her genitals were obscured by the copiously flowing blood. From someplace far away, Harlan thought he heard the faint sound of a siren.

  “Get me some towels and hot water!” Lynda ordered. “Now!”

  He ran into the bathroom, turned on the tub’s hot water, grabbed the flattened pink plastic bucket that his wife used to handwash her underwear. He filled up the container, yanked two towels from the rack, and hurried back to the bedroom.

  Lynda grabbed a towel, dunked it in the water, and started wiping off Jolene’s pubic area. Harlan thought he saw, amid the flowing blood, a rounded object pushing out from her vagina.

  “It’s the baby,” Jolene confirmed.

  She shifted position, blocked his view. It was just as well. His palms hurt from digging his fingernails into them, and he did not really want to see any more than h
e already had. His heart was pounding, and the thoughts racing through his head were all worst-case scenarios.

  Jolene was still screaming, had not stopped screaming the entire time, and as Lynda reached between her legs and started working, the screams intensified. He had not thought her cries could get any worse, but he’d been wrong, and it wrenched his heart and terrified him to the depths of his soul to hear the undiluted agony in her voice, the inhuman suffering to which her body was being subjected.

  “Oh, my God,” Lynda said, and though she spoke quietly, though her exclamation was little more than a gasp, he had no trouble hearing her over the sound of the screams.

  “What is it?” he demanded.

  She grabbed both towels, quickly wrapped them around her hands, then reached between Jolene’s legs and pulled.

  It was alive for only a second, but in that second he saw it squirm, heard a partial cry.

  Lynda backed away, her face white, and dropped the baby.

  He stared down at the bed. Lying on the bloody sheet was a small saguaro cactus, bits of vaginal flesh clinging to its oversized spines, green plant skin visible beneath the wet layer of red. The cactus had a face, and the face was frozen in a hideous, distorted grimace.

  Lynda ran out of the room.

  Outside, the sirens had arrived. Red light pulsed around the edges of the bedroom drapes, and he could hear the crackle of two-way radios, the voices of paramedics shouting orders.

  Jolene had stopped screaming and she was propped on her elbows, cackling crazily. She was still bleeding profusely, and the red tide was covering the unmoving body of the cactus baby. “It’s your son!” she said. “It’s your son!” Her laughter spiraled upward in tone and volume and became as nonstop and persistent as her screams had been.

  He slapped her once, hard across the face, then ran into the bathroom to throw up.

  Five

  1

  Sasha was grateful for the beginning of school.

  Moving to McGuane had been a complete and total disaster, and not a day went by that she didn’t wish she had followed through on her threats to run away. She could have gotten a job, found an apartment. She probably could’ve even stayed with Amy’s family for a few weeks until she got settled. It was not as if she was still a child. She was a senior, almost eighteen, an adult for all intents and purposes, and she could easily have continued on, uninterrupted, with her existing life, sans parents.

  And she should have.

  But she was a “good girl,” and the truth was that she didn’t have the guts to disobey her mom and dad. In her mind, her future life had always unfolded in a series of orderly steps. She would go to college, then move out of the house and, with the help of her parents, find her own place to live, meet a man, get a good job, get married, and live happily ever after in Newport Beach or Brentwood or someplace like that. There’d been no disruption anywhere in her vision of the future, and this sudden uprooting had caught her totally off guard. She’d never prepared for it and didn’t know how to react to it.

  Now she was stuck in the armpit of America, in the middle of this stupid desert, in what was practically a ghost town.

  God damn the lottery.

  At least school had started, at least she had a chance to meet some other people her own age, backward hill-billies though they might be, and while nothing could erase the horrible mistake her family had made, it did serve to lessen the impact.

  Back in California, she’d always gotten good grades, had always hung out with the right crowd, and she didn’t know if it was some type of subconscious rebellion against her family or an attempt to punish her parents for moving here but she now found herself aligning with a different group of students—the losers, the tokers, the sluts, the people who hung out on Turquoise Street, behind the gym. Part of it was practicality. This clique was looser, less organized, more open to new kids and outsiders. But part of it was also the fact that, emotionally, she felt more in tune with the outcasts. A newly developed disdain for play-by-the-rules goody-goodies had tainted her outlook, and she now viewed with scorn the type of perfect little teacher’s-pet students who had until recently been her choice for friends.

  She slammed her locker shut, walked alone through the crowd of students to the sidewalk that circled the school, and started toward the gym. On Turquoise, most of the kids were stubbing out their cigarettes and starting to wander off toward their classes, but Cherie Armstrong leaned against the side of the building, rummaging through her purse, showing no sign that she was planning to leave.

  It was Cherie she had come to see, and Sasha walked over to her. “You going to PE?” she asked.

  Her friend snorted. “What for? So that dyke teacher can check out my crotch while I’m changing? No way.”

  Sasha tried to smile. The thought of going to PE alone did not sit well with her, and although she knew she’d better leave now if she hoped to get to class on time, she hesitated for a moment.

  She looked at Cherie, nonchalantly searching through the contents of her purse. She had never ditched class before, but she had always hated PE, and if she was going to skip a period, this would be a good one to start with.

  The other girl finally found what she was looking for and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

  The bell rang, and there was a last-minute flurry of students running to their classrooms.

  Cherie smacked the pack against her palm, withdrew a cigarette. “Want a smoke?”

  Sasha hesitated only a second, then moved next to her friend and leaned against the gym wall, holding out her hand.

  “Sure,” she said.

  2

  Their new home still made her uncomfortable.

  Julia lay awake, listening to the muted electric hum of the alarm clock on the dresser. It was the only sound in the room, the noise of its imperfect workings absurdly amplified against the silence, and she stared into the darkness, trying not to hear it. She still wasn’t used to the quiet out here, the absence of nighttime traffic and city sounds, and these low, isolated noises seemed more intrusive to her than all of the cacophony of Southern California.

  The electric clock was keeping her awake, making it impossible for her to fall back to sleep.

  Well, that and the fact that her bladder was full.

  But she was afraid to get up and go to the bathroom.

  She was ashamed of herself. She was a mother, for God’s sake. She was supposed to be the one reassuring her children that there were no ghosts or monsters, that the world was the same at night as it was during the day, that darkness hid no terrors.

  But she could not even make herself believe it.

  She did not understand what it was about the house that unsettled her so, that engendered within her this feeling of dread, but it was there, and it had not abated one whit since their arrival. If anything, it had grown stronger. There’d been no incidents since the dishes, no overt examples of anything unusual occurring, but as much as she tried to discount what she felt, as often as she attempted to ignore her feelings and write them off as the result of culture shock or emotional strain, she could not.

  Which was why she was lying awake in the middle of the night, afraid to go to the bathroom.

  Was their new home haunted?

  It was what she kept coming back to.

  She had never been superstitious, had never even been totally convinced of the existence of God. Anything beyond the physical world had been, to her, entirely theoretical and more in the realm of fiction than fact. But that attitude was changing, and, as ridiculous as she would have found it a month ago, she was now seriously considering the possibility that some sort of ghost or spirit was living in their house.

  A ghost or spirit? Was she serious?

  She sighed. Hell, maybe it was stress.

  Earlier, she and Gregory had lain awake for a long time, talking. It was the only time they really got any privacy these days, and once they were in bed, they snuggled together to share the thoughts and feeli
ngs they did not want to discuss in front of Gregory’s mother or the children.

  When he started talking about the café and his plans to make it into a nightspot, an entertainment venue that would lure name acts to this little corner of the state, she suggested that perhaps she would find something to do, too.

  “You want to help me out with the sound system?” he asked.

  She shook her head, smiled. “No. I was thinking more like volunteer work.”

  “I thought you wanted to—”

  “I’ll get around to that,” she said quickly. “But I need some . . . adjusting time.”

  “Volunteer work, huh? Let me guess. At the library.”

  “Or Teo’s school,” she said defensively.

  He chuckled.

  “I want to be here when the kids get home in the afternoon.”

  Gregory nodded, still smiling. He pulled her closer, kissed her forehead. “Whatever you want.”

  His condescending attitude annoyed her, and she dropped the subject, letting him drone on and on about the café before they finally made love and went to sleep.

  Or rather he went to sleep.

  She was still awake.

  And had to go to the bathroom.

  She remained in the bed, wide awake, and it was another half hour before she finally gathered enough courage to get out of bed and walk across the hall to the bathroom, “accidentally” waking Gregory up in the process so that he would be conscious should anything happen. It was another forty-five minutes before fatigue finally overcame her and she fell asleep.

  At breakfast, Gregory’s mother talked about angels.

  She was telling Teo and Adam a story about how a guardian angel had saved her from falling off a boulder into a cactus patch, and between bites of cereal, the kids asked clarifying questions that indicated they believed every word. It was not the first time this had happened, and Julia felt a little uncomfortable having so much religious talk in the house, but she understood that if her mother-in-law was to live with them, this was something that she would have to learn to put up with. She and Gregory exchanged a look, and he shrugged resignedly.