Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips Page A

forgets he’s injured, forgets how urgently he needs to survive, to be conscious, how little time there is. It’s night now, he tells Lola, whispering. He’s touching her, he’s made it back, and then it’s a sex dream, swirling into the instant she was pregnant, opening like a vortex that pulls them both all the way into her. It’s warm here, safe. She knew, she’d told him, immediately. Pregnant felt like nothing else. Not tired exactly, not sick or nervous, but edgy, distinct. Focused tight, in sync, like when you’ve hit a phrase in a song just right and it lays itself out through your throat, moving from you across the lights into faces you can’t see in the dark, faces whose eyes you feel play across you. Like a unit on alert, he’d said, and she laughed. Yeah, that was it. Ready, waiting. Perfect? he’d asked. Perfect didn’t matter, wasn’t that kind of question. Inevitable? Evi- dently, she told him, fucking college boy. The hell, he said. Course you will, she assured him, after the service, the GI Bill will send you, and I will. That so? he’d teased. She turns away from him in utter silence as though he’s asked the wrong question; she disappears into a quiet that stills all sound.
    He waits, willing her back to him, his breathing shallow, and when he feels her move under him again, against him, her belly is huge and tight. The bed is in a meadow but there are shade trees above them, and filtered sun; the trees have grown up to protect and conceal them. They’re naked and fragrant like just-bathed children and she lies back to show him how big she is, how ready to give birth, moving his hands along the hard distended mound of her pregnancy. He can feel the baby move, see a globular shift of head or butt under her tight skin, hard against her dappled belly. A yellow pitcher of summer flowers, lilac and delphinium, turns slowly at the foot of the bed as though eddied on a current. The blue of the flowers drips onto the grass and he understands the meadow is afloat. The hardwood chest of Lola’s Lenox silver service is beside them, suspended in the water despite its weight. The girls at Onslow’s had chipped in to give them a wedding present worthy of a hopeful debutante: a silver-plate service for eight. Lola reaches over carefully with one hand, opens the chest to show him the spoons and knives in their lined trays, the serving pieces in their velvet sleeves. They’d given her a set of perfumes too, small stoppered novelty bottles in a box illustrated with a diagram of the solar system. The little porcelain bottles drift by now, one by one, each bearing a planetary color and an aspect of a face: pink Venus, pale Neptune, jolly yellow moon. Lola doesn’t care, she lets them go. She tells him it was so hard to reach him and they don’t have long. The bed is beginning to move. She lies back and he curves himself into her, holds her as he feels the baby, helpless to turn or move, push from inside her. Water rises over the grass, and the trees dip their leafy branches, pulsing; they’re sighing, groaning, working. He puts his hands on Lola. These are contractions. She’s in labor and she cries out, and the piercing sound cuts them apart.
    He’s alone. It was his cry, his voice. His revolver is in his hand. He clutches it tightly but knows he blacked out. Time has passed. Hours. He sees the inverted face of the girl over him, and the face of the boy on her back. She’s waited until dusk and now she’s touching him, moving him, pulling him deeper into the tunnel. The boy clasps her neck from behind with his locked arms, nearly flattened against her as she crouches over Leavitt. Her hands are in Leavitt’s armpits, and her long black hair has come unbound and swings against his throat, enclosing their faces like a moving curtain, dragging the ground. He sees her through it and her eyes are wide with terror. She’s panting with exertion. He’s dead weight.
    No, he says, anyo, and then more loudly,