Cradle Lake Read Online Free Page A

see if there was a problem and found out Heather
was
pregnant—that her missed period did indeed signal the arrival of new life. They scheduled an appointment with an obstetrician who inserted a gelled rod into Heather’s body. Squiggly, ill-defined shapes, like the suggestive presence of ghosts, appeared on the ultrasound monitor.
    Mommy books came quickly. Hasty phone calls were made to close family and friends. Alan bought a stack of classical music CDs, which they played on rotation on the portable CD player by their bed at night, because they had heard playing classical music made your fetus smart.
    Then, two months into the pregnancy, Heather sat up in bed—
    â€œAlan?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œAlan … Al—Alan—”
    â€œBabe—”
    â€œI think—”
    â€œHeather—”
    â€œI
think—”
    Under the blankets, his right foot slid in something wet.
    Heather screamed, jumped out of bed, and raced to the bathroom down the hallway of their tiny Manhattan apartment.
    Alan hopped out of bed as well, the sheets tangling around his ankles, and flipped on the light switch. As helistened to Heather’s moaning from the bathroom, he stared in horror at the mattress. A dark crimson smear of blood stood out obscenely on the white sheet. At its center was what looked like a small twist of black fibrous tissue. Alan thought of bloody noses blown into Kleenex.
    In the bathroom, Heather was curled in a fetal position on the floor. Her inner thighs were wet with blood, and there were dark red asterisks on the yellow linoleum tile.
    It had been a horrible evening that segued into a horrible two weeks. Neither of them wanted to talk about what had happened. And neither of them did. Heather put in extra hours at the art gallery, and Alan buried himself in his work at the university.
    Time continued to move on. Clocks ticked.
    (There was no explanation and these things sometimes happened. It was nature’s way, Mother Nature up to her old tricks, and anyway, it was just one of those things and they would get past it and move on from there, everyone said so.)
    They did not make the effort to try as hard this time. They let things happen naturally. Perhaps, Alan thought on occasion, it was the stress of trying to get pregnant that had caused the pregnancy to end prematurely. Even the obstetrician agreed that it was certainly a possibility.
    So there was no stress, no effort to make things happen.
    (these things happen)
    Several months later, Heather discovered she was pregnant again. She told Alan one night over dinner, after having already gone to see the doctor for confirmation on her own. Everything looked fine. They were happy again. More phone calls were made.
    As time progressed, Alan moved his computer and desk out of the spare bedroom and painted the walls a neutral yellow because it was too early to determine the sex of the baby. Heather watched what she ate—no deli meats, no sushi or undercooked food, no more coffee—and, because that was sometimes hard to do, Alan watched what
he
ate in an effort to support her and put up a unified front. So they suffered caffeine withdrawal together. In bed at night, they thought of names. Heather suggested William if it was a boy, but Alan didn’t want to name his child after his father.
    â€œThe first one was a mermaid,” she told him one night as he was about to fall asleep. He was half-dreaming of pastel paintings and great seagoing vessels. Lighthouses and cresting waves.
    â€œHow do you know?” he mumbled.
    â€œI just know.” She pressed her face against him, warm in the cool night. “This one will be a sailor.”
    Heather carried the baby midway through the second trimester before she collapsed one afternoon at the art gallery and was rushed to the hospital. Alan arrived to find her gray and withdrawn in the hospital bed, nearly catatonic. He talked to her and tried to get her to