Before they began, Jesse Vetter had been meticulous about covering every inch of the nursery’s hardwood floor and baseboards with drop cloths, secured with two rolls’ worth of masking tape. He’d bordered the windows and the doorframe with more tape and tossed another drop cloth over the door itself. Forbidding Olivia to lift a finger, he’d moved all the furniture to the center of the room, with a third translucent drop cloth tossed over the crib and fish mobile, dresser, changing table, standing lamp, and wooden rocking chair, commenting that the whole mass looked like the world’s most ungainly ghost. Only then had they begun to paint the room in aquatic, gender neutral colors, banishing from existence its humdrum off-white walls.
“Really, Olivia,” he’d said before they began, “where’s the mental stimulation for an infant staring into a white void all day?”
Olivia had shrugged, smiling as she played along. With the palm of one hand on the eight-month swell of her abdomen, she’d said, “Maybe the baby will achieve a Zen state.”
“No!” Jesse said. “Who wants a blank slate Zen baby? That’s creepy. There’s a reason chalkboards come with chalk.”
“They use Smart Boards these days.”
“As long as she—or he—finishes school before they decide to implant telepathic gizmos in students’ brains, I’m fine with any kind of board.”
For the messy occasion, she’d tied a scarf over her shoulder-length black hair and dressed in distressed denim maternity bib overalls over a roomy white cotton shirt, both of which she’d picked up for a song at a local thrift shop.
Rather than putting on some clothing well past its prime, Jesse had purchased a white cap and painter coveralls from the hardware store. Olivia had ribbed him mercilessly, calling him the Good Humor man and every so often asking for her Chocolate Eclair or King Cone.
“Is this too blue?” Jesse asked. Two days ago they had painted the base layer the lightest color, Pale Water, from floor to ceiling. The day before they had painted the next darkest color, Pale Adam Jade, in a wave pattern halfway up the wall. But now, for the deepest, and lowest wave, the green verged on blue.
“It’s fine, Jesse,” Olivia said.
“Hard to call it gender neutral if you do blue.”
“I see green,” Olivia assured him.
“If you do blue,” he said, “you have to do pink to cancel it out or be inclusive or something. What do you think about a rainbow on the far wall? Too much?”
“Don’t know if it’s too much,” Olivia said, “but believe me, you don’t want me trying to paint seven side-by-side arcs.”
“Seven?”
“Roy G. Biv,” Olivia said, referring to the mnemonic device. Then in a sing-song voice, “Red, orange, yellow—”
“I know what it stands for,” Jesse interrupted. “We don’t need to be all literal and scientific about it. Three or four colors should be enough.”
“Ah, so you would stimulate this infant’s mind with misinformation, Mr. Vetter.”
“Don’t make me splatter you, Ms. Krum,” Jesse said, waving a loaded paintbrush in front of her face.
“Don’t splat,” she said, hands raised, laughing. “I surrender!”
Smiling, Jesse lowered the paintbrush to the edge of the paint can and, after a moment, his face took on a serious cast. “Other than your paint-speckled nose,” he said, “any regrets?”
With a thumb, she rubbed the edge of her nose and examined the green smear before wiping it on the sheets of newspaper under the paint can. She patted her large abdomen. “Not much I can do about it now.”
Frowning, he asked, “Seriously?”
“I’m kidding,” she said. “Seriously. No regrets.”
They heard footfalls on the stairs outside the nursery.
“You’re both great guys,” she said as Brandon Perreault ducked in through the doorway, tucking in his elbows to avoid getting paint on his pinstriped business suit. “I’ve known you my whole life. You’ll make wonderful fathers.”
Brandon examined the nearly complete paint job, nodding to indicate his appreciation. “Looking good. Sorry I’m late.”
“No, you’re not,” Jesse replied, threatening to flick the still loaded wet paintbrush at his husband’s expensive suit. “You hate painting.”
“That’s not entirely false,” Brandon admitted. “But I have other talents. I can cook dinner.” He looked specifically at Olivia. “Or pick something up, if you’d rather…?”
“Yes!” she said. “Been craving Chinese all day.”
“Liv!” Jesse said. “You should have said something.”
“There was work to do,” she said. “I’m not a shirker.”
“Unlike Brandon here.”
“Hey, it’s not like I was feeding pigeons in the park all day.”
“Why are you still standing there, B?” Jesse asked. “Get back in your car and get the food!”
“Right,” Brandon said, turning to Olivia again. “The usual?”
“No,” she said. “I waited too long.” She pursed her lips. “Maybe a little bit of everything? I’m starving!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Brandon said, executing a playful salute. “Anything surrogate mother wants, surrogate mother shall have.”
* * *
Brandon refused to admit to Jesse or Olivia that he had hung around the office later than strictly necessary to finish his work. He’d worked up a to-do list for the next day and completed a few other low-priority tasks, checked on some preliminary vendor bids even though the deadline was two weeks away, because he never joked about disliking painting. He hated getting paint in his hair, under his fingernails or on his clothes, even if they were old or ripped and he intended to toss them in the trash immediately after painting. He hated the anxiety of having wet paint on his person, to be smeared on anything and everything he might bump into or squeeze past.
That was the one area of baby-prep where he fell short of full participation. He’d helped buy and assemble the nursery furniture and he’d gone through endless paint swatches and samples to help pick the final colors with Jesse, but the actual painting, no thanks! He’d rather pay a handyman to do that dirty work. But if Olivia and Jesse for some reason wanted to take on that job, they were more than welcome to it.
He’d play errand boy and pick up the food and clean up afterward. He’d even help clean the nursery, as long as it could wait until after the paint splashed on the tarps and masking tape had completely dried. The idea of peeling off paint-wet tape and rolling up drop cloths with glistening gobs of the stuff ready to soil anything in the vicinity was almost worse than the idea of painting itself.
The nagging guilt gnawing at him, he hurried down the stairs and exited through the kitchen into the garage, jumping into his silver Prius. He pressed the button on the garage door opener clipped to the sun visor, tapping his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel as the wide door trundled open. He turned on the ignition and waited.
The garage door stopped halfway up, maybe high enough for the Prius to squeeze through but just as likely to scrape a layer of paint off the roof, assuming the main spring didn’t snap and drop the door on the car like a guillotine blade as he tried to shoot through the gap.
He recalled the safety sensor on the door, which stopped it from closing if something blocked the infrared beam traveling from one side of the door to the other. That stopped the door from closing on a person or an object left in the door’s path. But in this instance, the door was on the way up, not down. Nevertheless, he jumped out of the car and checked the sensor on both sides to make sure nothing obstructed the invisible beam. Everything seemed fine, so he climbed back into the Prius and pressed the button a second time, which brought the door down without a hitch.
“Okay, let’s try this again,” he said aloud as he pressed the button a third time. Once again the door rumbled its way up and… stopped again, lower than before. This time, if he hoped to escape the confines of the garage while inside his car, he’d have to crash through the door like a Hollywood stuntman. Another button press to close the door.
“Fine,” he said. “You don’t want to work, don’t work.”
Once again he exited the car, but this time he pulled the overhead release cable to switch the chain from motor operation to manual. If he could just get the door open tonight he’d call a repair service in the morning.
Bending at the knees, he gripped the door handle and tugged upward, nearly stumbling when the door remained closed. It hadn’t budged an inch. He glanced up at the main spring, checking for a break but finding none. All the cables were intact. Nothing seemed wrong. He tugged again, grunting with the effort. The door creaked, but wouldn’t budge.
Immediately, he thought of backup plans. He’d need to take a cab to work the next morning and as for picking up dinner tonight, he had three options. Have the food delivered, which would add another delay, borrow Olivia’s red Honda Civic, parked out front, or take Jesse’s Prius, parked across the street.
He leaned into his car through the open driver’s side window and snatched his keys out of the ignition—and caught a strong scent of gingerbread. He inhaled deeply. Always loved the smell. Took him back to his childhood, eating gingerbread cookies fresh out of the oven. But the last thing he expected to smell in his garage, or any garage for that matter, was gingerbread. He’d passed through the kitchen two times since he came home and hadn’t smelled anything baking and, as far as he could recall, the oven hadn’t been turned on. So how—?
He’d already started toward the door, to call up to Jesse to ask for his car keys, when he noticed movement in the corner of the garage.
Turning, he saw her standing there, in dirt-smeared tatters, and immediately assumed a homeless person had somehow snuck into their garage and had been hiding among the shelves, ladders, bikes and lawn care supplies. His reflexive fear and sudden sense of violation left no room for sympathy. Whatever he glimpsed in that moment was not a homeless person—its otherness defied classification.
Head bowed slightly within a matted tangle of long, straggly hair, her claws—yes, claws—twitched in anticipation. In that moment, his prior fear at the sight of an intruder was distilled into the primal variety, a deep-seated revulsion to this inhuman entity wearing a human mask. With a strange jerk of lateral motion, she blocked his access to the kitchen door.
Backing away, toward the closed garage door, his intent to place the Prius between him and whatever the clawed thing was, Brandon’s gaze traveled from her strangely hunched torso to her lowered face, a need to identify what stalked him in his own home.
As her head rose ever so slightly, Brandon caught a glimpse of dark, sunken eyes that seemed to boil with hatred beneath the surface, the tension of a coiled spring in her taut features.
Briefly, he considered calling out for help, but what if that brought Jesse or Olivia running to the garage? He could yell to them to call the police, but they might still come to investigate. He had the undeniable sense that any exclamation on his part would trigger an attack. With the garage door stuck, his only option was to put the car between them and then, when she circled to pursue him, escape through the kitchen door.
Again her claws twitched.
His throat utterly dry, he implored, “Don’t… don’t do this.”
Not a flicker of reaction to his words. Nor had he really expected any. The creature seemed beyond reasoning.
As he reached into his jacket pocket, considering the idea of blind-dialing 911 on his cell phone, he took a cautious step back. And another. A third brought him to the corner of the Prius. One more and he could—
With a raspy roar, she leapt into the air and dashed across the roof of the car, her dirty bare feet with claw-like toenails thumping lightly across the silver metal with the sound of a distant drum.
Startled, he had a split second to notice her strange, malformed abdomen before she shoved him forcefully against the garage door, which groaned under the stunning impact, its hinges creaking.
Woozy, he tried to run and wondered why his legs refused to cooperate. Another moment passed before an intense burning sensation registered, prompting him to look down. She hadn’t simply shoved him against the garage door, she’d sunk her claws into him, ripping him open from the bottom of his ribs to his groin, slicing through his clothes, skin and muscle in that first attack.
One clawed hand pinned him upright against the garage door. Otherwise, his legs would not have supported his own weight. He watched in mute horror as her other clawed hand tore into his abdomen, slashing through his organs, slicing and tugging out his intestines. She brought slimy handfuls of organs and flesh to her mouth, gulping greedily. Lower, her swollen abdomen undulated each time she swallowed.
He stared down at the ruin of his body. It looked as if a bomb had exploded in his stomach. The pain was excruciating, a flare of white fire at the center of his consciousness, with rapidly encroaching darkness crumbling the corners of his vision, reducing his whole world to agony and the promise of nothingness.
Slowly, her face rose into his rapidly diminishing field of vision.
He saw his own blood dripping from her cracked lips and pointy teeth.
Then her sunken eyes met his through the veil of her matted hair, but before he could make sense of her half-rotted visage, she shrieked and her blood-drenched claws shot toward his face, digging into his eyes, gouging deep and slamming his head repeatedly against the garage door as she ravaged both sockets.
This new pain was a mere echo of what he’d experienced moments ago, like a memory of recent pain and then an impression of how pain might feel and then only numbness, the sounds of her devouring his flesh fading to wet murmurs and finally silence in his new dark world. Just as, one by one, his senses had abandoned him, his consciousness scattered into bits of disconnected thought, like fireworks fading in the night sky, until the last pinpoint of hope winked out…