Ruptured

Dull rain lit like ash on the windowsill. A dolorous roll of baritone thunder murmured something urgent and unintelligible into the ear of a girl sprawled quite indecently over blanket and sheets, wrapping herself around the glorious few seconds between sleeping and waking. The pale blue walls of the apartment sharpened into focus, reflecting the grey day forming outside. The girl rolled onto her side, allowing the still-damp strands of her hair to swing softly down the back of her neck. The ceiling fan swung calmly round, rustling her bangs, sending grey twilight children flickering merrily onto the glossy grey walls. She lay placidly on the wrinkled white sheets, opening her eyes just as the illuminated numbers on her clock morphed to an angry red 6:30 AM. A menacing buzz clanged loudly in the chambers of her head. With a bare arm she reached for the snooze, dully sighing as her hand limply met the black plastic.

Just then-- a cacophonous crack startled her from her cottony haze into the damp reality of the early morning apartment. She gripped the bedpost, a thick panic swelling in her throat as her eyes adjusted to the white wooden crib on the far side of the room. A bare nail stood sheepishly empty against the stark, slick wall; a heavy wooden picture frame lay conspicuously sprawled in three splintered pieces against the cherry hardwood.

A sleepy murmur ruffled through the quiet, and the pink ribbons on the side of the crib began to rumple and sway with the waking of the baby's tiny new fingers. With an inclement release of air the girl felt the paralysis dissolve from her limbs, and she moved quickly through the damp February air to lean against the wall beside the crib.

How small the baby's face was! How each fold of skin crinkled into itself, the cloudy blue eyes looking with sage intensity into her mother's. They were blue like the rocks near her grandmother's house in Cape Cod, right before a storm; they were the exact color of her father's when he was tired or moody.

John. His eyes tickled the back of her mind in the color of the blue-grey smog sticking to the apartment window; they stared solemnly at her from the puckered face of this small child.

The girl moved to the window, collecting under her fingernail a wide ribbon of the white paint peeling from the windowsill. His face grew fuzzy now; a damp mold had begun to grow on his memory. She squeezed from her mind a picture of the last day: he sat there, in the green kitchen chair-- just so-- his feet propped on the seat of the blue chair, business section of the newspaper in hand, the white oval sticker from a piece of fruit hanging from the front of his lapel. He was there for a moment in painful clarity-- tufts of raucous brown hair sticking precariously from his soft white scalp-- and just as quickly he was gone.

He was becoming blurry-- browning at the edges; growing a film. But the receptionist was very lucid. She couldn't have been over eighteen, the ambitious little tramp, with her smooth white face and her jade-green carpetbag, running appraising cold-green eyes over the eight-month belly of the professor's wife and smiling smugly to herself with those cherry-tinted lips. Virginia. What a wretched name. The girl tightened her grip on the windowsill, the grey rain-mist sending chills of paper-thin lightening down her spine. Virginia. How he had adored her.

The girl unclamped her hand from the window, shutting out with a little rattle the ruffle of car horns and the moody black sky. She hadn't had the spirit to remove his chair from the table-- the black coffee mug with the three little chips on the lip still sat, just so-- the wicker basket filled with business charters and the red-and-green arrows of stock market reports. The black stump of an empty cigarette still sat crumpled by his placemat, cold.

He had wilted. He had no spirit for the world of ironed grey suits and chipped ceramic coffee cups; for domestic housewives in white cotton aprons and the petulant wails of fragile and unwanted children. He did not want bran with his coffee and eggs; he wanted fire.

The girl's feet thumped dully against the floor as she moved toward the three broken shards of the picture frame that sprawled beside the crib. She picked up each separately, carefully; storing the first two on a shelf beneath the windowsill. She painstakingly cradled the third, but it slipped from her hands, hitting the hardwood with a wild crack; shattering into innumerable splintered fragments. The girl bit her lip, shell-shocked, until it drew blood. The baby began to cry.

"No", he had said, when she tried to hand him her coat. He stood starkly in the doorway, the beautiful lines of his forehead creased into a well-rehearsed mask of white pottery. Ugly pottery. No sobs ripped her, her body did not wrench, nor her teeth rattle feverishly; her eyelids did not swell with water. She sat white-faced in the green kitchen chair, wisps of sleep-matted hair falling to her face; a slight tremor rippling through the hand resting on her belly. She had handed him her coat.

"It's cold out there," she said levelly. His eyes met hers with a sort of desperate bitterness as he turned to the door.

"Tomorrow will be colder."