There is a thin line between humour and horror, and The Joke takes that theme head on.
The humour in this story is the dark kind. The things that you can’t joke about, or feel bad joking about, but precisely because they are so horrible, you have to say something. Anything. Break up the terror with a laugh–or a scream.
The story also discusses new ideas about haunted houses–like a haunted campus bar, based on a real life bar on the University of Waterloo’s campus–and some body horror, too. But it’s the joke at the centre of the story that I was genuinely concerned about and would make this story unpublishable.
Not so much!
I think I maybe sent this story out twice before Vanishing Point wanted it immediately. Even the editor’s wife said she liked it, and to me, writing as a new mom about things you really couldn’t joke about, having a woman find the things I said to be good and not just plain upsetting… well, that was a relief!
I hope you all laugh, too. Or at the very least, keep in mind that it’s just a joke. 😉
The Joke
By Eve Morton
When the Graduate House began renovations on the upper level, to expand the antique farmhouse structure to include a patio where students and profs alike could get hammered after handing in dissertations in the afternoon sun, they found a body. It was so small at first the construction workers had no idea what they’d stumbled upon. Then, once they’d unwrapped the strange package that had been sealed into a wall–as if it was a loaf of bread someone forgot on the windowsill–they stared face to face with the small, mummified body of a child.
“A baby, actually,” Emily the day manager corrected once the workers brought the issue to her attention. “That’s a newborn. No more than a couple days old.”
Her stomach flipped with grief and disgust, while her voice remained utterly implacable. Two of the construction workers had returned from their worksite no more than fifteen minutes after arriving and asked her what to do about this. They’d said “this” and held out the infant swaddled in a quilt, dusty with age, but clearly made in another era where fine stitching was done by hand and not machine. She held the package–it really did look like a loaf of bread, the smell almost akin to the sourdough kind that the students in her bar were talking about endlessly a few years back–and fought the urge to cradle it. She fought the urge to think back to her own student days, high school rather than graduate studies, where she’d held her own child for an hour before giving it away. She tried to focus on the moment. She was thirty-seven. She was in-charge. She was–
“Ma’am.” One of the workers, a tall skinny kid with a buzz cut, interrupted her thoughts. The other worker had disappeared. She heard retching from the bathrooms on the first floor. He had ducked behind the men’s room sign, still plastered with dance notices for the summer session. “What should we be doing here?”
“Call the police,” Emily said. “And stop all construction.”
The answer had been so obvious to her, she couldn’t believe the man in front of her had not done it first. Wouldn’t you grab your cell phone and dial 911 the moment you found a dead kid in a wall, partially mummified and smelling of sourdough? But no. She was the one in-charge. She was the one who had to make the call to make the call–and then literally make the call. The construction worker stared at her with blank, youthful eyes, blinking away after he’d nodded. This was probably the worst thing he’d ever seen. And while it was no walk in the park for her, the ten years between them made it so she could at least swallow back some of her own revulsion and keep that ever-implacable voice that had allowed her to work her way from waitress to bartender to assistant manager to day manager at a social club designated for graduate students and professors with PhDs, when all she had was a GED.
“I’ll do it. You guys all rest.” Emily walked into her office on the second floor of the farmhouse. It was only as she closed the door that she realized she still held the baby’s body. She looked around the room, wondering where to set it down, but all places–desk, still-outdated fax machine, windowsill–all seemed horribly out-of-place. So she held it in her arms, against her small chest and still-quaking abdomen, as she dialed the police.
*
The police, of course, wished that they had not moved the body. “But we understand that you had no idea what it was,” the officer, another man who seemed infinitely younger than Emily, had said. “It’s also clear that this happened a long time ago. Least a hundred years.”
“Oh yeah, look at that stitching,” Emily said too eagerly, gesturing to the quilt. She bit her tongue. That was a dumb thing to say. It was a young thing to say, something that swelled up from inside of her, desperate to deflect attention and possible upset from authority figures, though she was one now. As the police officer went over her statement and the construction workers’ statements again and again, she continually repeated in the back of her mind: I am an adult now. I am in charge here. I am Emily Jenkins, no longer Emmy, and I am not in trouble.
She continued to repeat this to herself as the Dean of the university showed up, as well as the night manager, Dan, who acted as if he was her boss–since he was the main one in charge of the cash at the end of the day, but who was not, actually, her boss in any official way. The Dean, a man named Gary with a bad comb over and the absolute definition of a stereotypical academic, was her boss. The student’s tuition paid for the bar and subsidized the food they served, and if there was anything to fear, it would be no one wanting to eat here after a dead baby had been found, and so the tuition money dried up, and she would be looking for another job again.
“Are you okay?” Gary asked once the police left. They were in her office. The baby’s body had been taken by a paramedic team who had also shown up with the police cars, but obviously, there was no need for reviving that infant. They had put the body in a tiny bag and driven it away to the morgue, where the cause of death would be investigated. The construction workers had all gone home, and the Graduate House was closed for the rest of the day. Most likely the rest of the week.
“Emily,” Gary repeated. He put a hand on her desk. He sat in front of her, while she seemed to stare at a set of blue pens she’d just unwrapped.
“I’m fine.”
“It’s been a difficult day. You can go home.”
“I still need to do inventory. I still need to–“
“That can wait.”
Emily bit her lip. “Do I still have a job here?”
Gary’s face blanched. Then he smiled kindly, in a way that reminded her so much of the guidance counselor she’d had in high school. “Of course you do. Why wouldn’t you?”
She stopped and started her explanation several times, before she finally said it in the crass way it came to her: “Will someone really want to eat at the dead baby restaurant? It’s like those bad jokes from the 1990s. I can’t stand it.”
Gary nodded sympathetically. For a moment, a flash of delight danced on his face. Was he thinking of one of those terrible jokes, too? She couldn’t get the horrific one she’d heard when she was in the hospital, during labor, out of her mind. It wasn’t funny at all, but in the midst of pain and terror and the unknown, she had grasped at it like a cord that connected her to another world. A peak experience, one of the grad students who came in for the same beer every week while grading–that’s what he had called giving birth. The top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. So at sixteen, she’d already experienced self-actualization. Even if she gave her baby up for adoption, it didn’t matter. She still had the joke to remember the experience by.
Emily wanted to throw up.
“You look pale, Em,” Gary said. “Take the week off. The construction crew is taking it off. And don’t worry–I already see the fear about being fired. And you won’t be. As far as I’m concerned, I want to give you a raise.”
“But–I… I did everything wrong.”
“You did everything a reasonable person would do. So what if the cops were a little harsh about moving the body? I would have done the same thing. And I really don’t think we need to worry about the Grad House getting a bad reputation. A reputation, yes, but I think this may actually make it more popular.”
Emily’s stomach flipped again. “What? Why?”
“Curiosity. We may not have dead baby jokes anymore–and those were popular in the 1960s, by the way, not so much the 1990s. It’s theorized that they became popular due to the second-wave feminist movement speaking more openly about contraceptives and abortion.”
Again, another flip. Another feeling like a worm was inside of her. “What?”
“Also Vietnam, and those crimes against children there. Anything to take away the pain, you know? Gallows humor. Anyway,” Gary said, quickly dismissing his minor history lesson with a wave of his hand. “Jokes aside, kids now listen to true crime podcasts. You know how many profs are pitching courses on true crime now, too? Or local history, or local hauntings. The things that are macabre always interest us.”
“But… this isn’t a ghost story. That was a real baby. It had a mother. It–“
“I know. I’m not saying it’s right or that it’s good. Just that it is. And that’s okay.” Gary reached his hand across Emily’s desk. He seemed to want to put his pam over her own hand, to comfort her through touch, but held back because of the numerous workshops they’d been given about harassment and boundaries. She wished he could touch her, though. She hadn’t touched anyone today but the dead baby. And before then, probably not since her thirty-fifth birthday party.
Emily wanted to say something–touch me, fuck me, fire me, anything–but she just nodded. It is what it is, huh. Such a cop out of a response, but she was used to it. Why did things happen how they did? They just did. Why did sixteen year olds get pregnant? Either they were whores or victims, or it sometimes just happened. And you solved the problem.
How could she solve this problem? She should take her paid vacation time and just go home. Watch some Lifetime movies and maybe smoke a joint to relax, because thankfully, it was legal in Canada now. Thankfully, she wasn’t sixteen anymore.
Emily thanked Gary once again before she left her office. He followed her out the door, but said he was going to stay around and look at the beginning of the renovations.
“I used to be a history professor, you know,” he said. “This really was a farmhouse. I’m wondering if I can find anything else of note here, just to get the story together again. Maybe add it to another book.”
“Oh. Sounds interesting,” she said, and meant it as much as she could. Down the stairs and passed the front bar, she noticed Dan the night manager on his phone. She was surprised he was still here. When he caught sight of her, he grinned widely.
“There you are. Perfect.” He rushed over to her with his phone, clearly recording. “Can you tell me what it was like to find the body?”
“Why?”
“I’m working on the social media campaign for this. It’ll bring in customers later on, you know. So I want to get the details right.”
Emily wanted to grab the phone and shove it in Dan’s mouth. She wanted to tell him what the closed mummified eyes and skin of the baby felt like against her skin, but she just shook her head. Her hand went reflexively to her stomach. “That’s sick.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Then ask the history professor upstairs.”
Dan let out a dismissive sound, but he was soon taking the steps two by two. Alone in the first floor of the farmhouse, Emily let out a loud sigh. She swore she heard it echo back, like a soul that had not yet been old enough to bless trapped inside the walls.
She ran out the front door and towards her apartment downtown. Halfway home, she remembered the joke she’d told herself during labor. She cackled in the middle of the street. No one looked at her, no one seemed to see her–it was a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of summer when almost all students were gone from the university town–but she still tried to muffle her mirth. She was not able to stop until she got to her empty apartment, and shut herself tightly inside, and the laughter was replaced by tears.
*
Much to Emily’s dismay, Dan and Gary had been right. The moment they had clearance from the historical society and the police to return to the Graduate House to finish the renovations, they also had a boom in customers.
“We’re only at half capacity,” she tried to explain to a party of seven who came in without a reservation, and wanted a full table with alcohol and lunch service. “So the wait times might be a bit longer.”
“That’s fine,” the man–boy, really–who had come into the Grad House said nonchalantly. “We can wait upstairs, right?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No,” Emily repeated, her brows furrowed. The constructor workers had done most of the intense labor on the expansion, but there were still regular sounds of sawing and grinding. “Do you not hear that?”
The kid shrugged. “We just wanted to be close to the ghost.”
“There is no ghost,” Emily spat out. She cleared her mind of her anger and then extended her hand, fake smile on her face, to the adjacent room. “But we can seat you in the dining area to the left.”
The group of boys in front of her shrugged and then spoke animatedly to one another as they went to their place. Emily put their order through the computer system and supervised as the rest of her staff–all grad students themselves–handled the order and the rowdiness of the group.
Then another group came in. A couple on a date. Everyone wanted to go upstairs, and no one seemed to care that it was louder and louder in the Grad House as the day wore on. By the time Dan arrived for his night shift, he was trying to figure out ways to open the second floor since the construction workers would no longer be there, though there was sawdust and plastic sheets everywhere else. Even she had a hard time getting into the second-floor office.
“Seating people upstairs is not safe,” Emily told Dan. “There are nails and saws and who knows what else up there.”
“Like another bouncing baby boy?”
Emily shivered. “So we know it was a boy?”
“Yes we do. The school newspaper put out the story. Died of natural causes, though I don’t know what that means when you’re sealed up in a wall.” Dan shook his head. He went on expanding his plans for the upstairs party area. Emily was no longer listening; she was seeking out a copy of the student newspaper she’d seen earlier in the day. She’d thrown it out, since it was half-grease stained, but now she was desperate for it. She found the page she needed, but didn’t get much more information than what Dan had already told her. The story was your basic student writing, with ridiculously added inaccurate and otherwise embellished details like the fact that the baby had been found with a rattle and now there were other ghost sightings.
“This is ridiculous,” she said and threw out the pages again. She made sure to ball them up, tear them on the weakened parts where the grease was, so they could not be taken back out of the trash. “None of that is true.”
“What is true about true crime?” Dan said, thinking he was being philosophical. “Not even the murderers tell the truth about their crimes. Yet we watch it all.”
“I don’t.”
Dan didn’t respond. He was busy hooking something up to their TV monitors and speaker system. Her shift was already over, but Emily was rooted in place. Dan turned on the movie The Shining. The DVD intro had the image of Danny, the young boy, riding his trike in the hallway until he got to the twins.
Then it started over again, in a repetitive loop.
“This is sick,” Emily said. She clutched at her stomach again, then lower towards her abdomen. She whispered, “I feel sick.”
“This is business.” Dan narrowed his eyes. He seemed as if he was about to ask if she was okay, but she scowled. So he raised a hand and waved. “Buy-bye. Have a good sleep.”
Emily wanted to give him the finger. She wanted to take the rattle that she still had, after almost twenty years in a box in her closet, and leave it on his desk to see if he thought it was so fucking funny and good for business.
But she left. She tried not to be discouraged as she saw students reading the newspaper, or the many other copies she could not tear up and hide away in the trash, as they skittered across the campus in the wind.
*
The next week was off-set with thunderstorms, complete with massive rains and flooding in some of the other buildings on campus. The construction needed to be put on hold, yet again, and now the Dean was visiting more and more frequently, worried that the additions would not be completed in time for the Fall semester. There was nothing that Emily, or even Dan could do to assuage his fear, though, so they merely buried themselves in the upkeep of the restaurant part of the business.
Customers were still trending upwards, so Emily’s staff had plenty enough to keep themselves focused on. Meanwhile, Emily had taken to hiding out in the basement of the farmhouse, where most of the inventory was kept. She didn’t have to interact with customers that way. She didn’t have to hear a half dozen student and stupid stories about the baby in the wall, and the woman who had had postpartum depression, and sealed herself away in another part of the farmhouse after drinking cyanide.
Emily knew that story wasn’t true, anyway. She’d now read Gary’s book on the history of the campus, and this strange farmhouse that had once been owned by a founding member of the town but had since been turned into a bar where drinking contests were held every Thursday night during exam season. Gary’s book was titled The Underside of Uptown; it was a slim book and that had not been checked out very much at all at the local library. Emily had been the first person to crack it’s spine. To spill coffee on its pages. And since she was already defacing an old book whose glue was starting to come loose, she’d written in between some of the lines instead. Just in pencil, but she’d been compelled to fix typos and errors in grammar. Like she’d been compelled to underline the name Mary Roden three times when she’d stumbled across it.
Mary Roden was the farmer’s daughter. She was the fourth out of seven kids, six of whom survived (the first son, the second born, died of complications at birth). She was the most likely mother of the child. At least, according to Emily. While most of the students believed it was the mother, Agatha Roden, who had sealed the baby up in the wall, or even possibly a peasant woman that the Rodens had found sleeping with their horses one morning, Emily knew it was Mary. Not any of the other daughters, but Mary. She had nothing to fall back on for her decision, but the longing stare in the girl’s eyes in archival photos. The large dresses she wore. And the fact that she was sixteen when the baby was most likely dated to have been born, according to the coroner.
Mary Roden had also never married. She left her father’s farmhouse at eighteen for the convent, but soon changed her mind and went into teaching. She lived as a religious teacher in a Catholic high school for some time, before she became a painter in the last years of her life. She never left the university town.
Much to Emily’s dismay, Gary barely spent any time at all on the latter half of Mary’s life, especially her painting career. He spent very little time at all on the Roden women, mostly focusing on the history of the farmland the men handled, the travels that led them to the town, and all the other historic stuff that made them part of local legend. Emily supposed that only made sense–Gary’s prerogative was different than hers.
So she went out on her own and got to know Mary. It was hard, at first, to find anything beyond the archival photos reprinted in Gary’s work. Even harder to locate any record of her paintings. But she’d gotten lucky on one of her day’s off. After visiting one of the other historic sites in the city, she’d noticed a painting on a wall. A small scrawled signature in one corner and a familiar landscape pattern pulled her in closer and made her fetch the curator behind the front desk.
“Who painted this?” Emily asked. “And what is it?”
“That’s the sun over the river, visible from the farmhouse that’s now on the university campus,” the curator explained. “And it was painted by the founder’s daughter.”
“Mary Roden.”
“Yes,” the curator answered, though Emily had not asked it as a question. “How did you know?”
“I work at the Graduate House,” Emily said. The conversation ended there. The curator’s face had gone ashen. The dead baby. Its mention always made people go mute, go crazy, or laugh.
So Emily’s research could only go so far.
Maybe that was why she spent more time in the basement. It helped to escape the rubber-necking student crowd, but it also gave her time to contemplate the life this girl must have lived. She painted landscapes, which was to say, she painted what she saw from her farmhouse window. She painted what she lived day in and day out, and she was the one who probably made the quilt she wrapped her child in. A last creation–or maybe her first? Emily didn’t know. But she liked to think about the woman who had given birth, maybe right here, maybe where the ice machine and the giant cans of chickpeas were located. Maybe she’d been raped by a stranger or had sex willingly with a farmhand or someone else forbidden, and it had been in the same place where she had given birth. Had she felt her baby move as she stitched her quilt? And when she gave birth, did that baby live very long after?
Emily was filled with so many questions some afternoons she completely lost track of time. Other afternoons, her curiosity was tinged with nausea that made her wonder if there was mold in the basement. She wanted to throw up, but she didn’t want to move from her spot keeping vigil on a mother and child she knew nothing about, but had lived through as her own history lesson. It was only Dan’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, or her employees’ struggles, that brought her out of her reverie. She liked the basement. It was cold and cool on her back when she leaned against a wall. It reminded her of giving birth in the hospital, and all she’d wanted was the cold and cool ice chips in her mouth.
“Hey girlie,” Dan said. She hadn’t heard his footsteps this afternoon. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
Dan looked at her with true compassion in his eyes. His round face betrayed all of his emotions, including the kind and the callous alike. “You getting sleep? Or are you having bad dreams, too?”
“You’re having bad dreams?”
He shrugged. “Just all the baby stuff. The people. It’s creepy, really.”
“Yes, it is. And no, I’m not having bad dreams because I respect the fucking dead.”
Emily pushed past Dan in the doorway, grabbed her coat from her locker, and stomped up the stairs. She left without saying goodbye or even finishing her inventory. It didn’t matter. Dan would cover for her, and then he’d probably explain her moods away as another form of being haunted, like PMS, though she hadn’t had a period in six weeks.
She was not pregnant. That was impossible without the man to supply something vital. But there was a moment, if only for a second, that she remembered that feeling of maybe. Of possibility, then fear. Was that what Mary had felt, too?
No one at her work or in her current personal life–no one but her parents and that little girl’s adopted family–ever knew she’d had a kid. She’d been so worried having sex for the first time after she’d left her hometown that someone would know. They’d take one look at her vagina or stomach or even her face and just see the trace of motherhood there. The loss of a child, that wasn’t really the loss of a child, because she’d freely given her up.
But no one ever knew.
There was pure freedom, but also despair, in that knowledge.
When Emily stepped outside, the rain was still coming down. She darted away from the farmhouse and into one of the university buildings in the surrounding area. A long time ago, right around the time when the campus was given historical status, a bunch of tunnels underground were discovered. All the university buildings attached to them in some way, so profs and students could walk to and fro and not get pummeled by rain or hail or snow. The tunnels were no longer the rustic treks that servants and other farm workers had used in olden days, but there was still a rustic quality to them. A haunted quality, Emily knew now.
Inside the building that was normally designated for math students, she found the tunnel entrance. If she turned left, she’d keep going underneath the campus and into the parking lot, where she’d emerge on the other side and close to a bus stop that would take her back to her apartment.
But she went right. She walked underground past more math buildings and other entrances to classrooms. She walked and walked in what felt like a never-ending circle, but with a steady gait. She only stopped when she was sure she was directly underneath the farmhouse.
No students were around. Her breath had become shallow. She held it and heard nothing but her own heart. She put her hands against the concrete wall. She was positive this was where her back had been laying all week, as she counted out cans and then daydreamed about her adventures with Mary. As Mary. She felt so much like Mary in that moment she had to shake herself off like a wet dog coming in from the rain. She closed her eyes, saw quilts and paints, and then opened them and felt her own body. Her older body, thirty-seven-almost-thirty-eight and past her prime childbearing years. Yet she also felt that sixteen year old body, so young and skinny, suddenly blooming with life and fecundity. Then, that postpartum body that felt so saggy and like it was always floating, her uterus adrift underneath her stretched skin.
Emily shook violently in the tunnels. Worse than chills from the rain, her body felt as if it was now wracked with labor pains. She’d gotten the epidural at sixteen the moment she could. She wanted nothing to do with natural childbirth. She just wanted it out of her, and so she could hand her off to the family who would adopt her, the family who had taken care of her when her own family kicked her out. The Stevensons. They would not take care of Emily after the baby, she understood even at sixteen, but it didn’t matter then. She’d just focused on one day after another, one step at a time. And when her baby girl was gone from her arms, and no one met her for a ride after she left the hospital, she’d walked.
One step at a time, one foot in front of the other. She’d continued walking until, somehow, she ended up here. Twenty years later, in an underground tunnel. And now the pain had caught up to her.
Emily fell to her knees on the tunnel floor. Bruises bloomed on her kneecaps, but it was nothing compared to the creeping sensation along her spine. The shaking of her legs, absolutely unable to walk. Her back smarted and flooded a warmth towards her front, her pelvis. She shook again, her entire body smarting, and then she blinked black spots. She opened her eyes and saw the yellow-painted tunnel, the school colors. She closed them again and it was dirt under her legs and hands. She saw a man in front of her, a young man, skinny and so much like the students who tried to order alcohol from her, thinking she’d not ID them. She touched the boy’s skin and found it to be warm. She was holding a boy, a live boy, and she longed for him.
“Mary, almost there,” he said to her.
Emily’s body shook. She blinked and saw the yellow tunnel again. She was not alone. A student–a young man, so much like the lanky boy in the distant vision–was at the other end of the tunnel.
“Are you okay, ma’am?”
She moaned. She wasn’t thirty-seven, a ma’am, anymore. She was herself again at sixteen. She blinked and she was Mary again. She felt the sensation of something being ripped, and then something else dropping out of her. A baby. The sounds of crying.
Then nothing at all.
“I’ll get help,” the boy said in modern day, to this woman that was and was not Emily hunched over and bleeding with pain.
“I’ll get help,” the boy Thomas in front of Mary said. He left her with the baby in her arms, the baby that was turning blue, the baby she’d wanted to name Joshua but told no one else about.
Thomas left. The student left.
In Mary’s vision, the baby died and she wrapped him in her most prized possession, the quilt, and then locked her secret away. She did not talk to Thomas again. She went to the convent. She forgot. But she never forgot, because she painted and she painted.
Emily held nothing in her hands in modern day, but she was bleeding. It pooled between her legs as if she did give birth, and it stained her palms red. The student came back. So did a bunch of other paramedics. They took her away from the school, out into the rain, and she felt it like the cooling balm it was on her face.
She tried to repeat her mantra–I am an adult now. I am in charge here. I am Emily Jenkins, no longer Emmy, and I am not in trouble–but she slept instead.
*
A cyst had burst in Emily’s uterus, which had then led to a nearly fatal hemorrhage. If the student had not come by, she may have died. “Have you ever been pregnant before?” the doctor asked in the hospital when Emily woke up.
To Emily’s surprise, she answered yes.
“That’s probably what happened, then,” the doctor–a young man with the surname of Thomas–said. “Sometimes we don’t get everything after giving birth. A small piece sticks around. Becomes a cyst, a tumor, something else inside. Then for whatever reason, it bursts. You’re lucky.”
She nodded. She wanted to thank Mary, Dan, and Gary. The stupid construction workers. The unknown boy who saved her in the tunnel, and Mary’s child’s father, too. Instead, she asked, “Will I be able to have kids again?”
“Um. I don’t know,” he said. “You still have your uterus, but you’re past age thirty-five. It comes with risks at that age.”
“I know. But it seems like a lot of things come with risks.”
The doctor didn’t argue. He left her in her room to complete her recovery. Dan and Gary both came to see her in the afternoon, but they awkwardly talked around the issue. She would miss the first week back during the new semester, when they would roll out some of the more official changes. “You know, like the patio upstairs now that’s finally been finished. And the presentation from the historical society about the ghost. I mean baby.”
Emily blinked, seemingly in pain. Gary touched her hand–for real this time–to comfort her.
Emily pulled her hand away. “You should put one of Mary’s paintings in the upstairs room. Over the part of the wall where the dead baby was found.”
When Gary showed no sign of comprehension, though he was a historian of the farmhouse, she went on and told him about her own research. He seemed more delighted that she’d read his book than anything else.
“Will you get the painting, though?” Emily asked. “You may have to borrow it.”
“I’ll look into it.”
Emily knew Gary wouldn’t get the painting. Either he’d forget the moment he left the hospital, or he wouldn’t be able to speak to the curator without sounding like an arrogant ass. Emily couldn’t stand the sound of his voice as he and Dan both continued the conversation about opening day at the Graduate House without her participation. All the energy that had once flowed through her, making her experience her life from a new angle, seemed gone. Poof. She ran a hand over her belly but nothing happened. She was empty now, though for a few hours in the tunnel, she’d been so full of life. Pain, too, and haunting, but she sort of liked it.
She thought of holding her girl before she gave her up. Empty, too. And she’d stayed that way for too long after.
Emily turned away from her past and stared at Gary. Too old, she decided. She regarded Dan. He was older than her, unmarried, and she’d never seen him date. Probably because he, like her, was always at work. She considered his kindness–if she could call it that–that day in the basement before she almost died.
She considered his face, round and cherubic. His long arms and legs. His suaveness, his intelligence (at least for marketing and the student body at the school), all his other inheritable traits. She could do worse, she thought. When Dan’s gaze caught her own, she smiled.
“You’re feeling better?” he asked.
“I am,” she said. Then she leaned close, grasping his hand in her own. “Do you want to hear a joke?”
END
Eve Morton 