Soul's Road: A Fiction Collection Read online

  Outwardly, Jim’s reaction to all this was nothing short of astonishing. He appeared to see her malady as nothing more than a manifestation of something that needed to be fixed, and to carry optimism into all of her various appointments. He’d developed Oscar-caliber technique for hiding his desperation.

  And then a customer who’d come to the bakery so she could purchase Mary’s scones to feed her wandering-eyed lover happened to put her magazine down on the counter while she fetched her wallet. Mary, who rarely ventured far enough from the kitchen to have to deal with the public, happened to be out front. She glanced at the photograph of lost African children orphaned by war, famine and AIDS. Her threatening heart stilled for the first time since Jim had proposed.

  Mary gave notice at the bakery, which did spectacular business during the announced final weeks of her tenure there. Jim helped her find the right African volunteer opportunity. They discussed whether he should sign up as well. Mary was ambivalent. There was the part of her that never wanted to be separated from him, ever. And there was the part that felt like this needed to be a solo adventure. Jim eventually tipped the balance in favor of the latter, saying he felt like he could use the solitude to get more in touch with what was banging around inside him. Mary thought he was referring to his music, though it was hard for her to imagine that the way he played for her during the last week before her departure could get much better. Whatever else was going on, Jim loved Mary.

  ***

  In Uganda, Mary tried to explain the dead laptop to the beautiful doctor she’d never have slept with but he was busy saving a child from appendicitis. Mary took strange comfort in the knowledge that something as ordinary as a burst appendix could threaten a life there. At least she understood what it was. Promising to replace the computer at the first opportunity, she took the pregnancy test and locked herself in the latrine. She re-read Jim’s letter one final time, dropped it whole down the toilet, then peed on the stick and waited, certain it was the stress of her work that had stolen her periods. Jim, she now realized, had been possessed throughout their marriage by the woman trapped inside the body she so needed. To her addlepated brain, this meant that their frolicking could not possibly have left her pregnant.

  The minutes ticked by. Mary picked up the stick. Someone screamed just as she understood the test was positive. It took her a moment to realize the shriek belonged to someone else.

  Mary opened the door. Villagers flew around like disturbed bees while distant gunfire lost its distance. Soldiers, many of them pre-pubescent conscriptees, pounced demon-like on anything that moved, killing, kidnapping and hurting, some for the sheer erotic pleasure of knowing that they could, others because they knew they would be shot if they hesitated. Cruel laughter danced with desperate cries to the unpredictable rap of automatic weapons.

  Mary slammed the door as something thudded against the latrine and scratched its final spasm like it was trying to dig its way through the wall. She knew rape and death were close behind, not necessarily in that order. Part of her didn’t care, wanted to race out the door to stomp bad guys and protect the innocent and she would have except that the instinct ignited when her urine mixed with the chemicals on the stick left her hand paralyzed on the latch and her heart hurting for the first time in the eight weeks she’d been in Africa.

  It was the bullet that punched a hole in the door and bloodied her arm that silenced the voice urging martyrdom. Frantic, she flung up the toilet seat and slid through the opening into the shit, stepping on her husband’s floating letter just as one of the things masquerading as human stormed in and dropped his trousers. His smooth teenage bottom was a cloud that snuffed out most of the light where she hid. She thought for a moment that the gods were adding an earthquake to the rest of the mayhem but then realized that the structure was quaking from the boy’s sobs. Mary was actually contemplating the urge to reach up out of her hell to comfort the child when she heard the door to the latrine door swinging open again.

  “You are hiding,” came a deep and deeply calm voice.

  “No,” said the boy. “I am sick.”

  The man yanked the boy off the toilet and tossed him out the door. The boy’s scream was cut short just as the man’s gigantic ass rendered the darkness in Mary’s refuge complete. A saint might have realized the man was merely the boy grown up, possessed by demons he’d never understand. But even a saint’s compassion can be unhinged by a hailstorm of shit. If she’d had a stake, Mary would happily have skewered and stewed the brute for the children to feast on.

  ***

  The tragically beautiful doctor who would never again be intimate with anyone found Mary naked and retching beside the boy who’d been sick on her, pants still around his ankles and head caved in. The doctor had been spared because the invaders had no interest in healing or healers. These were men who knew too well they were right, and harbored no yearning to undo the consequences of their actions. Watching his impotence take root in the face of their antics was enough fun for them.

  The doctor could not have been more gentle as he helped Mary clean herself. Together they reopened the clinic and did what they could for the survivors, which was almost nothing but still more than nothing, before they were both transported out of there forever.

  Mary left Uganda with some trepidation. After her husband’s revelation and the unexpected attack, she knew a third surprise awaited her back home. Bad news always came as triplets.

  ***

  Mary realized as soon as she saw her husband in a dress at the airport that she’d have a plethora of astonishments to choose from as the official third surprise. She hadn’t spoken much since flushing herself from the African toilet, avoiding the reporters that wanted to make her the focus of the story they told about the attack on the camp. She wasn’t certain where to start now and so was grateful for the dress as something on which to focus.

  “Wow, Jim,” she said when they got into his beat-to-crap Toyota.

  “I’m calling myself Jen for now,” he said.

  “Why can’t you be like most guys and just have an affair while your wife’s gone?” she asked.

  That brought a laugh. “I think sex would be a bit much to handle right now, all things considered,” he said.

  “How about parenthood,” she asked. “How do you feel about handling that?”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to be a father. Jen.” She immediately regretted adding the “Jen.”

  Mary stared out the car window for most of the ride home. They passed a familiar plaza where misters atomized water to keep people comfortable in the Sonoran desert. Her revulsion at the waste was surprise number two. She hadn’t been on the ground for an hour.

  ***

  Back in their kitchen, Jim opened a beer. Mary poured herself a glass of wine.

  “Should you be...?” Jim asked.

  Mary sloshed her wine into the sink. Jim eyed the bandage the lovely, lost doctor had applied before he dropped Mary at the airport, probably a week after Jim had started collecting the articles on the decimated volunteer camp that littered the kitchen counter. “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “I was lucky,” said Mary.

  Jim looked skeptical. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “I understand,” he said. “I missed you. I’m glad you came home.”

  “You are?” she asked. “What are you thinking we’ll do?”

  “I thought we’d work it out,” he said.

  Mary had to sit down. “How?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t love you any less. But I also know I look in the mirror and I don’t see me. I don’t know how to be the person I see.”

  “I fell in love with the person you see,” said Mary. “Was he all a fake?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You hated being a man? You hated the sex? Oh God,” she said, suddenly horrified by his enthusiasm for going down on her.

/>   “I loved all of it,” he said. “Which was confusing.”

  “Confusing?” she asked. “You found our first year of marriage confusing? That’s not supposed to happen ‘til the seventh. The first is supposed to be bliss.”

  “Why do you think it was confusing?” he asked.

  “So it was terrific except we can’t be together anymore?” she asked.

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “No? Then what are you saying?”

  “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.