Lullaby

Patrick.

The frost around the edges of the window has started to melt, and water drips down the cabinet.

And Helen says, "You're here," and her voice is blurry and thick. Blood spills out of her mouth.

Just looking at her, my foot aches.

I'm okay, I say.

And Helen says, "I'm glad."

Her cosmetic case is dumped out on the floor. Among the shards of color are twisted chains and settings, gold and platinum. Helen says, "I tried to break the biggest ones," and she coughs into her hand. "The rest I tried to chew," she says, and coughs until her palm is filled with blood and slivers of white.

Next to the cosmetic case is a spilled bottle of liquid drain cleaner, the spill a green puddle around it.

Her teeth are shattered, bloody gaps, and pits show inside her mouth. She puts her face against the gray window. Her breath fogging the glass, her bloody hand goes to the side of her skirt.

"I don't want to go back to how it was before," she says, "the way my life was before I met you." She wipes her bloody hand and keeps wiping it on her skirt. "Even with all the power in the world."

I say, we need to get her to a hospital.

And Helen smiles a bloody smile and says, "This is a hospital."

It's nothing personal, she says. She just needed someone. Even if she could bring Patrick back, she'd never want to ruin his life by sharing the culling spell. Even if it meant living alone again, she'd never want Patrick to have that power.

"Look at him," she says, and touches the gray glass with her pink fingernails. "He's so perfect."

She swallows, blood and shattered diamonds and teeth, and makes a terrible wrinkled face. Her hands clutch her stomach, and she leans on the steel cabinet, the gray window. Blood and condensation run down from the little window.

With one shaking hand, Helen snaps open her purse and takes out a lipstick. She touches it around her lips and the pink lipstick comes away smeared with blood.

She says she's unplugged the cryogenic unit. Disco

She wants it to end here. The culling spell. The power. The loneliness. She wants to destroy all the jewels that people think will save them. All the residue that outlasts the talent and intelligence and beauty. All the decorative junk left behind by real accomplishment and success. She wants to destroy all the lovely parasites that outlive their human hosts.

The purse drops out of her hands. On the floor, the gray rock rolls out of the purse. For whatever reason, Oyster comes to mind.

Helen belches. She takes a tissue from her purse and cups it under her mouth and spits out blood and bile and broken emeralds. Flashing inside her mouth, stuck in the shredded meat of her gums are jagged pink sapphires and shattered orange beryls. Lodged in the roof of her mouth are fragments of purple spinels. Sunk in her tongue are shards of black bort diamond.

And Helen smiles and says, "I want to be with my family." She wraps the bloody tissue into a ball and tucks it inside the cuff of her suit. Her earrings, her necklaces, her rings, it's all gone.

The details of her suit are, it's some color. It's a suit. It's ruined.

She says, "Please. Just hold me."

Inside the gray window, the perfect infant is curled on its side in a pillow of white plastic. One thumb is in its mouth. Perfect and pale as blue ice.

I put my arms around Helen and she winces.

Her knees start to fold, and I lower her to the floor. Helen Hoover Boyle closes her eyes. She says, "Thank you, Mr. Streator."

With the gray rock in my fist, I punch through the cold gray window. My hands bleeding, I lift out Patrick, cold and pale. My blood on Patrick, I put him in Helen's arms. I put my arms around Helen.

My blood and hers, mixed now.

Lying in my arms, Helen closes her eyes and grinds her head into my lap. She smiles and says, "Didn't it feel too coincidental when Mona found the grimoire?"

Leering at me, she opens her eyes and says, "Wasn't it just a little too neat and tidy, the fact that we'd been traveling along with the grimoire the whole time?"

Helen lying in my arms, she cradles Patrick. Then it happens. She reaches up and pinches my cheek. Helen looks up at me and smiles with just half her mouth, a leer with blood and green bile between her lips. She winks and says, "Gotcha, Dad!"

My whole body, one muscle spasm wet with sweat.

Helen says, "Did you really think Mom would off herself over you? And trash her precious fucking jewels? And thaw this frozen piece of meat?" She laughs, blood and drain cleaner bubbling in her throat, and says, "Did you really think Mom would chew her fucking diamonds because you didn't love her?"

I say, Oyster?

"In the flesh," Helen says, Oyster says with Helen's mouth, Helen's voice. "Well, I'm in Mrs. Boyle's flesh, but I bet you've been inside her yourself."

Helen raises Patrick in her hands. Her child, cold and blue as porcelain. Frozen fragile as glass.

And she tosses the dead child across the room where it clatters against the steel cabinet and falls to the floor, spi

And Helen winks and says, "Come on, Dad. Don't flatter yourself."

And I say, damn you.

Oyster occupies Helen, the way an army occupies a city. The way Helen occupied Sarge. The way the past, the media, the world, occupy you.

Helen says, Oyster says through Helen's mouth, "Mona's known about the grimoire for weeks now. The first time she saw Mom's pla

Oyster says, "My thing is music, and Mona's thing is ... well, stupidity is Mona's thing."

With Helen's voice, he says, "This afternoon, Mona woke up in some beauty salon, getting her nails painted pink." He says, "She stormed back to the office, she found Mrs. Boyle facedown on her desk in some kind of a coma."

Helen shudders and grabs her stomach. She says, "Open in front of Mrs. Boyle was a translated spell, called an occupation spell. In fact all the spells were translated."

She says, Oyster says, "God bless Mom and her crossword puzzles. She's in here somewhere, mad as hell."

Oyster says, through Helen's mouth says, "Say hi to Mom for me."

The brittle blue statue, the frozen baby, is shattered, broken among the broken jewels, a busted-off finger here, the broken-off legs there, the shattered head.

I say, so now he and Mona are going to kill everybody and become Adam and Eve?

Every generation wants to be the last.

"Not everybody," Helen says. "We're going to need some slaves."

With Helen's bloody hands, he reaches down and pulls her skirt up. Grabbing her crotch, he says, "Maybe you and Mom will have time for a quickie before she's toast."

And I heave Helen's body off my lap.

My whole body aching more than my foot ever ached.

Helen cries out, a little scream as she slides to the floor. And curled there on the cold linoleum with the shattered gems and fragments of Patrick, she says, "Carl?"

She puts a hand to her mouth, feels the jewels embedded there. She twists to look at me and says, "Carl? Carl, where am I?"

She sees the stainless-steel cabinet, the broken gray window. She sees the little blue arms first. Then the legs. The head. And she says, "No."

Spraying blood, Helen says, "No! No! No!" and crawling through the sharp slivers of broken color, her voice thick and blurred from her ruined teeth, she grabs all the pieces. Sobbing, covered in bile and blood, the room stinking, she clutches the broken blue pieces. The hands and tiny feet, the crushed torso and dented head, she hugs them to her chest and screams, "Oh, Patrick! Patty!"

She screams, "Oh, my Patty-Pat-Pat! No!"

Kissing the dented blue head, squeezing it to her breast, she asks, "What's happening? Carl, help me." She stares at me until a cramp bends her in half and she sees the empty bottle of liquid drain cleaner.

"God, Carl, help me," she says, clutching her child and rocking. "God, please tell me how I got here!"

And I go to her. I take her in my arms and say, at first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor. Never really looked. Not the first time they toured the house. Not when the inspector showed them through it. They'd measured rooms and told the movers where to set the couch and piano, hauled in everything they owned, and never really stopped to look at the living room floor. They pretend.

Helen's head is nodding forward over Patrick. The blood's drooling from her mouth. Her arms are looser, spilling little fingers and toes onto the floor.

In another moment, I'll be alone. This is my life. And I swear, no matter where or when, I'll track down Oyster and Mona.

What's good is this only takes a minute.

It's an old song about animals going to sleep. It's wistful and sentimental, and my face feels livid and hot with oxygenated hemoglobin while I say the poem out loud under the fluorescent lights, with the loose bundle of Helen in my arms, leaning back against the steel cabinet. Patrick's covered in my blood, covered in her blood. Her mouth is open a little, her glittering teeth are real diamonds.

Her name was Helen Hoover Boyle. Her eyes were blue.

My job is to notice the details. To be an impartial witness. Everything is always research. My job isn't to feel anything.

It's called a culling song. In some ancient cultures, they sang it to children during famines or droughts, anytime the tribe had outgrown its land. It was sung to warriors injured in accidents or the very old or anyone dying. It was used to end misery and pain.

It's a lullaby.

I say, everything will be all right. I hold Helen, rocking her, telling her, rest now. Telling her, everything is going to be just fine.

When I was twenty years old, I married a woman named Gina Dinji, and that was supposed to be the rest of my life. A year later, we had a daughter named Katrin, and she was supposed to be the rest of my life. Then Gina and Katrin died. And I ran and became Carl Streator. And I became a journalist. And for twenty more years, that was my life.