The baby kicked, and her breasts began to leak. To quell the acid reflux she downed another pill with more wine.
She watched her shadow self press Play.
Her father’s voice said, “Your father is coming for you right now.”
The child asked, “Where’s my friend?” She asked, “Where’s Mitzi?”
The reflection across the way froze with a wineglass held halfway to her mouth.
Protesting, the child’s words began to falter as her voice in Mitzi’s head said, “Where did Mitzi go?”
In a soft voice the man shushed her. From experience, Mitzi knew he’d be watching the monitor in the studio. He’d be toying with the levels. Adjusting the mics.
The girl said, “Tell Mitzi that I don’t like this game.”
At that, Mitzi rewound the tape. She rewound the tape and erased all of it.
Foster could almost peg the speaker. The voice on the tape, a man’s voice. He rewound a section, glanced at Mitzi Ives working at his elbow, deaf to anything beyond her headphones. He adjusted his own headphones. Pressed Play.
“Jeez, doc,” the man said, “did you have to dirty every knife in the prop room?” Someone else laughed. Several men.
He rewound. Pressed Play. “…dirty every knife in the prop room?” The laughing.
Foster listened until the tape ran out. Rewound, again. He hit Pause after certain words, after “every,” after “room.” Two faces would almost come into focus. Two of the few people he considered friends. He ran an inventory of the men at his office. He surfed his memory for a sound bite of Amber’s father, Paul, and pulled up a snippet. Paul saying, “Merry Christmas!” big and bold at the front door to their house while his wife, Linda, crouched down to hug Lucy.
The voice wasn’t Paul’s. It was no one at the office.
Those were the limits of his life. Then the support group occurred to him. When he ran the faces through his mind, both voices fit as perfectly as a key sliding into a lock. He wondered if there might be voice twins, vocal doppelgangers. Any two men in the world who shared the same voice as exactly as they might share the same fingerprint. The two men on the tape, it couldn’t be. It would be impossible. Foster erased the tape, but the truth of what he had to do next crushed him. It bowed his head and slumped his shoulders. The miserable task that lay before him after the sun set that day.
Mitzi built a garden. When the stranger growing inside her fussed, she did just as her father had done and set up a cot in the sound pit. Within reach of the mixing board, she heaped the cot with old blankets and lay back upon their musty softness, the smell of basement drains and damp laundry left too long in the washer. She stretched an arm to shut off the studio lights, bank by bank, until the dark and silence were absolute. Doing so, she erased the world so she could build it anew.
The stranger within her held still as if curious. Waiting.
As her father had done, Mitzi found knobs by touch alone. She lowered the room temperature. She cued a chorus of nighttime crickets. She brought up the sound of peeping tree frogs. The gushing sound of water she adjusted to a trickle. A melodious trickle like a fountain. The fountain’s tinkle she matched with the sound of wind chimes.
Out of the black, silent void she built the world of a nighttime paradise. Mice rustled through fallen leaves. Tree branches creaked and scraped in the breeze, and an owl hooted twice and took wing through the air above them.
Just as her father had done, Mitzi introduced a quiet family of deer that nipped at rose bushes and snapped off the tender buds. She replaced the flawed, troubled world with tall grass that whispered its blades together.
In this, this soundproof, lightless void, she conjured a paradise. And soon the stranger within her seemed to fall asleep. And as the tinkle of water and wind chimes ran on their endless loop, Mitzi, on her nest of moldering blankets, even she fell asleep.
Foster moved aside the basketball. Gently, he picked up each Teddy bear and carried it a safe distance. As he lifted a stuffed giraffe, it began to play a music box lullaby, a tinkling melody that sounded big in the cold night. The bright notes shrill and unnerving as they echoed back from the surrounding tombstones. To silence the giraffe, he lay it across the grave and beat it with the curved blade of his shovel.
He gathered and set aside the holiday cards, the birthday cards and glass-encased candles labeled with pictures of saints. Pictures of Christ cradling a lamb in his arms. Their wicks burnt down to black stubs, the candles sloshed with water collected from the lawn sprinklers. The plush toys were furred with grass clippings thrown up by the lawn mowers.
Fully uncovered, the headstone glowed in the moonless dark. Trevor Laurence, beloved son of Robb and Mai Laurence. The birth and death dates only months apart.
Foster knelt in front of the grave marker and whispered, “If I’m wrong, I’m very sorry.” He stood and stomped the blade of the shovel into the soft grass. Using the spade, he cut the sod and set it aside in neat squares. Atop these he spread a tarp to collect the loose dirt. With every few shovelfuls he froze and listened. The crickets and frogs had stopped, but now they sang anew. Their din almost drowned out his heavy breathing as he heaved a spade of dirt out of the growing pit. He dug the soil out from beneath his feet until only his head rose above the lip of the hole. Then the shovel struck concrete, the concrete vault to protect the casket. With his bare hands, his fingers caked in wet earth, Foster brushed
