If it hadn’t been for little Cody, Shepherd Clayton would have lost his mind, gone completely insane. They’d a had to haul him off to the looney bin in chains.
His baby son needed him and that kept him going, from one minute to the next. Without that need to hold himself together, Shep woulda fallen apart. He wasn’t strong as Abby, not near as strong as Abby and without her by his side …
After a while, he couldn’t even decide anymore what was the craziest — what had happened or that didn’t nobody care what had happened.
He and Cody’d waited at the hospital all that morning for Abby to come and get them. Had it been two weeks ago? How could it have been two weeks? It had, though. Felt like just yesterday that he’d been eager to see his wife pick up their baby son, snuggle him and nurse him. She’d been so excited. They’d been feeding him her breast milk, but from bottles ‘cause he was so little and weak at first he couldn’t nurse. Before they took him home, she was gonna nurse him for real for the first time.
They’d waited. And waited.
Truth be told, Shep was stunned she’d been able to stay away as long as she had. It’d taken every bit of arm-twisting he could apply to get her to go home for one night, just one night, to rest up before she was up and down at all hours feeding the baby. Abby didn’t even know how puny she’d got since Cody was born. She hadn’t never been bigger’n a minute and after she had such a hard pregnancy, she’d fallen off to near nothing. Clothes just hung on her.
But what he’d seen then had made him love her even more’n he did, and she was the only girl he had ever in his life cared about. When she got down so skinny, staying by that baby’s side in the hospital neonatal care unit, refusing to leave except to go to the bathroom, eat a sandwich or a candy bar when Shep could stuff it down her. All her attention was focused on Cody.
What he seen then was like them things he’d seen on television once — fiberoptic cables. Just strands of pure bright light. That was Abby. Everything else was gone and she was just pure light.
He knew soon’s she got him home she’d hover over that baby night and day and he wanted her to get one night of rest, just one night of uninterrupted sleep in a bed — she’d slept sitting up in a chair for months. A good night of sleep would give her some strength for what was coming.
They hadn’t had time to do much of anything after Abby found out she was pregnant. She got that pre-eclampsia and was so sick she had to stay in bed and then Cody’d come early. From the moment she went into labor and they headed off to Lexington so scared couldn’t either one of them hardly breathe, she never set foot back in their house in Poorfolk Hollow. That’d been months ago. He figured it’d do her good to put up them pictures — little kids with great big eyes — her sister’d had on the wall in Wally’s room when he was a baby. Couldn’t put much on Cody’s wall ‘cause the room was so little — they called it a nursery but it wasn’t really nothing but a walk-in closet.
They didn’t have no proper baby bed, but Abby’d fixed up a little cardboard box with blankets and it’d suit just fine.
Even so, Shep figured she’d go home and get that room ready and then she would drive on back to Lexington, not even stay the night ‘cause she didn’t want to be away.
He’d been proud of her that she had done the smart thing, got herself some rest, was gonna come all full of energy and love and … and …
She’d told him she’d be there in time so’s she could feed the baby before they went home. She wanted to nurse him his first time there, where the neonatal nurses would be around to help out and … mostly just to cheer her on.
When the morning come full on and she wasn’t there yet, he figured she’d either got stuck in traffic — Abby wasn’t used to driving in the big city — or she’d had car trouble. That poor old truck was like to fall apart any second. Assorted members of Shep’s huge family had come up to Lexington to be there to welcome Cody and Abby when they wheeled the two of them out to the car. They’d all stayed at his brother’s house so there’d be plenty of folks to go get her soon’s she called and said where she’d broke down.
But she didn’t call.
And she didn’t come.
When the nurse come in and said they’s gonna have to go ahead and feed Cody because he was crying real hard, Shep’d knowed right then in his gut that something was wrong. Bad wrong.
By noon, he was so frantic he couldn’t sit still. They’d tried to call the neighbors and her sisters and brother to see if they knew where she was but something was wrong with the phones. They just rang but didn’t nobody answer.
They checked Cody out and Shep rode in the front of his brother Roger’s truck, holdin’ that baby — they was gonna get a carseat and all that, but right now — kept his head ducked down kinda covered up in the baby’s blankets so his brother wouldn’t see that he was crying.
When they turned off Sawmill Lane onto that little road that didn’t have no name where their house was …
Everything after that was crazy jumbled up in Shep’s head and he couldn’t sort it out now, figure out what had happened when.
He remembered scraps of it pretty well — remembered his mama holding Cody, standing by the front of Roger’s truck while Shep screamed and kicked in the back door of somebody’s black Ford Tempo. He didn’t know whose it was. He didn’t remember nothing about the Kentucky State Police, but somebody said they’d called them. Said they come and looked and took down stuff on forms on a clipboard and said they’d get right on it.
Didn’t nothing come of it, though.
He remembered his mama setting him down in that old rocking chair on her porch that had a view back into Nower County from Flatrock Ridge in Beaufort County. She’d handed him Cody and told him — with tears in her eyes — that he had to look after his baby son best as he could and the whole family would help.
He sat there and rocked, just rocked. He didn’t seem to be able to think what to do so they all told him he needed to eat, or sleep — but he didn’t do neither one of them. Mostly, he just held Cody, fed him when his mama give him a warmed-up bottle of formula that didn’t set well with the little fella’s stomach and he puked up most of it.
Didn’t matter no more that Shep didn’t go to work. They’d laid him off, said it wasn’t the same as firing him but it still meant he didn’t have no job. Not that he could blame them — they was work to be done and Shep wasn’t never there when he was supposed to be to do it.
It wasn’t until he went over to his and Abby’s house, made himself go, that a tiny thread of sense began to pull free of the insanity. Went by himself ‘cause he didn’t have no idea how he was gonna respond to it or what he might do and he didn’t want nobody around to see. What he done was just sit there. Didn’t cry nor scream nor talk … didn’t even think, really. He just sat there. And once he’d got real quiet, he seen how quiet the place was. A funny kind of quiet that wasn’t hollow sounding like most quiet. Echo-y like, the way the church building sounded when you was the last one to leave and you cut off the lights and walked up the aisle through the sanctuary in the dark. That silence sounded big and empty.
The silence in his house where his wife and baby son was supposed to be but wasn’t, was not empty silence. It was full, swollen silence. Silence stretched so tight over sound that it was bulging out on all the sides, about to pop.
You could put your ear up to that kind of silence and if you’s real quiet, you could hear the sounds in the silence. No, on the other side of the silence. The voices. Whispering.
The whispers sounded like the not-sound of sand blowing across rocks. Or death beetles scrambling, scarabs they was called.
And after a while, Shep got where he could pick out one voice in particular in all the whispers. Abby’s.