Twenty-Eight

Colleen sat up, instantly awake, heart racing; clutching the gun, her finger on the trigger. She stood up, and her brain spun behind her eyes.

The curtains were drawn, and the light coming in through them wasn’t very bright, though she felt as if she’d slept for hours.

Embeth lay on her back. Her bound hands rested upon her stomach, and there was a pillow beneath her head. There was no sign of Sally, who’d fallen asleep beside Colleen some six hours ago.

Gun raised, Colleen was halfway to the kitchen when the sound of laughter fluttered within the nursery. The door opened and Mathilda stepped out.

“Whoa,” she said, raising her hands, motioning for Colleen to lower her weapon.

“I’m sorry,” Colleen said, pointing her gun at the floor. “What’s going on? What time is it?”

“It’s a little after noon.”

Colleen looked at the curtains again.

“It’s cloudy,” Mathilda said. “Been raining off and on all morning.”

“Oh,” Colleen said, suddenly eager to get rid of the gun growing sweaty in her hand. She set it on the kitchen counter and dried her hand on her shirt.

“Sally is in labor.”

“Oh.” It was no real surprise—the woman was immense, clearly ready to pop—but the reality of it nearly stung: there would soon be another baby in this house, in this world. “Is there anything I can do?”

“For Sally? Not at the moment,” Mathilda said. “I’ll need you soon enough. For now, you can go say hi to the kids. Lissa is taking good care of them all. She’s a good girl.”

“What are we going to do?”

“One thing at a time.”

“She waking up soon?” Colleen asked, looking at Embeth, who hadn’t moved since Colleen had risen from the couch.

“Any time now, I think,” Mathilda said, eying the unconscious woman. “I hope she doesn’t give us trouble.”

From somewhere in the back, Sally spoke, though Colleen could not make out her words.

“Go see her,” Mathilda said.

Sally lay propped up on pillows in what must have been the bedroom that Mathilda had shared with Evie, a bedroom much like the one meant for Colleen and Sally—two beds, a simple dresser, and a single window. A few books on the dresser, no rhyme or reason: A Bible, a book on advanced trig, a dog-eared paperback of something seedy titled Lust Slum.

“Hey,” Sally said, smiling. An open book lay on the swell of her massive stomach. Her gun—Huff’s gun—was within reach.

“Hey,” Colleen said. She glanced at the book on Sally’s stomach. “What are you reading?” It was a perfectly normal question, the kind you asked when everything in the world was as it should be.

Sally held up the book so that Colleen could see the title on the cover: Lolita.

“I’ve never read it,” Colleen said.

“It’s my fourth time,” the pregnant woman said, closing the book. “I think it might be my favorite book. I asked Huff to get this for me on one of his trips to San Francisco.” She smiled and shook her head, handed the book to Colleen. “Look at the title page.

Colleen opened the book. A hand written note was scrawled beneath Lolita in blunt, graceless letters:

 

 

 

 

 

 

“He was a sick bastard,” Sally said.

“Yeah,” Colleen said.

“How are you?”

“I’ll live,” Colleen said, looking down. She could still feel the knife in her hand.

“You did good.”

Colleen’s voice dropped. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”

She frowned, fell silent.

Sally looked down at the book in her hands.

“Kimberly hated it.”

“What?” Sally asked, and then a look of realization flashed across her face. “Oh, this. Yeah.” She nodded, and the look in her eyes went a little distant. Colleen could tell that she was thinking about the book, not about everything else.

“Yeah. Some people do, but I think there’s something beautiful about it. And the language. You’ve never heard a blow job described like that.”

Colleen smiled. “My high school lit teacher said that the main guy—”

“Humbert Humbert. Crazy name.”

“Yeah—she said that Humbert was Europe, and that Lolita was America, that the whole thing was a metaphor.”

“For old Europe fucking young America?”

“I don’t know,” Colleen said, and it was true. She wasn’t sure what her teacher had meant, based on her limited knowledge of the novel.

“It makes sense, I guess,” Sally said, looking genuinely surprised. “Never thought of that.”

“How are you feeling?”

Sally shrugged. “I feel fine, I guess.” The look on her face changed. Before, there’d been a touch of hope, perhaps something like good cheer, but now there was nothing. “I’m a little worried.”

“About?”

“Everything. He was pretty messed up, wasn’t he?”

“Who?”

“Samson.”

“Oh,” Colleen said. “Yeah.”

“Huff put a hurting on him?”

“He did. A serious hurting.”

“Maybe he won’t be back,” Sally said, her eyes downcast. She picked at the spine of her book for a second, looked up, and attempted a smile.

“Maybe,” Colleen said, but like the smile on Sally’s face, Colleen held little hope.

“Ooo,” Sally said, letting go of the book and gripping her stomach.

“Should I get her?” Colleen asked, meaning Mathilda.

“It’ll pass,” Sally said, her face scrunched into a pained knot. As Colleen watched, Sally relaxed, smiled. “See?”

“I’m still worried.”

“I’ve done this before,” Sally said. “Now get out and let me read a bit. America and Europe, huh?”

“Tell me if you need anything.”

“Huh.”

“I mean it.” Colleen left. She locked herself in the bathroom for a little while. She cried, pressing her face into a towel to muffle the sound of her weeping.

 

 

 

The kids were happy to see her. Little Huff stomped over to where she stood, demanded to be held, his small hands opening and closing at the ends of his outstretched arms. She scooped him up, and he rested his head upon her shoulder and sighed.

“Hey, Mama Colleen.” Lissa said, flashing an awkward but endearing smile—a mix of baby teeth, grownup teeth, and missing teeth.

“Hello.”

One of the twins—Colleen could not tell Jack from David—sat quietly pushing wooden blocks back and forth upon the rug while the other tossed an orange foam basketball to Lissa. Laughing, she encouraged the boy, told him how much of a good job he’d done.

The little blond laughed. Lissa rolled the ball toward him, and after much fumbling he seized it and threw it at his brother. It struck the other child’s face and bounced to the floor, vanishing beneath the bed. Both boys laughed, and the one who’d thrown the ball ran to the bed and tossed himself to the floor, wriggled the upper half of his body beneath the bed in search of his lost ball.

“I’m scared,” Lissa said.

“I know. I am too.”

“Mama Thilda said something bad happened.”

“Yes,” Colleen said. “A lot of bad things have happened.”

“What?”

Damn this kid. The look in her eyes, the tone of her voice—there was nothing childish about either. She was a child, but speaking to her now was like speaking to a woman, someone who knew and understood the gravity of adult life. For a second, Colleen considered telling the girl just what was what, but then she remembered Daniel when he was nine or ten. A natural mimic, like all kids, he could do a fairly mean grownup imitation, despite the fact that he was a child who cried when he skinned his knee and sometimes wet the bed.

“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” Colleen said, and the girl stared at her, blinking, her face now entirely unreadable.

“You promise?”

Colleen tried not to miss a beat: “You betcha.”

“Okay,” Lissa said, and she was just a little girl again, no imitative mask of maturity, just a small girl of seven who still believed what the grownups in her life told her.

Little Huff gurgled nonsense into Colleen’s ear, writhing to be set free. She eased him to the floor, and he wobbled away, dropping to all fours and vanishing beneath the crib in which the nameless boy slept. She was happy to be rid of him—an irrational feeling, she knew, but no less real. They were all Huff’s children, as far as she knew or could tell, but he was the only one to bear the man’s name.

The twin who’d taken the ball to the face had gone back to playing with blocks, and his far more adventurous brother scooted out from under the bed with smears of dust on his shirt and the ball in his hand.

“Got it!” He yelled, looking up at Colleen and flashing a lunatic grin.

“Hey,” she said, “look at that,” and clapped.

The boy chortled and once more tossed the ball at his brother. It bounced off his forehead, and this time the other boy bunched his face into a red knot and screamed.

Colleen helped to calm the child, and when he returned to his blocks Colleen excused herself, said that she had to check in on Mama Sally.

“Will you be back?” Lissa asked, and Colleen realized that she didn’t really like the girl. There was nothing specific, and Lissa certainly seemed sincere, but there was something else, a know-it-all-quality that Colleen associated with kids from her childhood, kids she hadn’t liked, for whatever reasons children have for not liking other children.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll come back.”

“Good,” Lissa said, proceeding to make Colleen feel like shit: “I love you so much, Mama Colleen. I’m glad you came.”

Mama Sally was fine, drifting off to sleep with a pained look on her face. Her contractions were roughly thirty minutes apart now, and the window was easing shut.

Outside, the sky opened up, and rain pelted the window. Colleen parted the curtains and stared into the downpour, wondered where Samson was, if he’d survived the beating he’d received.

Please, God, she thought, unmindful of whether or not she still believed in God. Let him be dead.

“You should close the curtains,” Mathilda said. Colleen looked at the older woman, imagined bullets smashing through the glass. She closed the curtains.

Mathilda prepared lunch for the kids just before two, and brought it in to them. Colleen sat and stared at a book she’d taken from the large bookcase, a nonsense horror story from the thirties with writing so dense that she’d taken ten minutes to work through the first three pages before giving up.

She looked up from the cover of the book to see Embeth lying there upon the floor, eyes open, staring at her.

“Oh,” Colleen said, tossing aside the book and leaning forward. “Are you…” Her words trailed into nothing, and she struggled for something, anything, that would make some kind of sense. Finding no such thing, she closed her mouth. Embeth looked around, back to Colleen.

“You tied me up.”

“We did,” Colleen said, sliding from the couch and to her knees. She reached toward Embeth, froze, drew back her hand, as if the bound woman were dangerously hot to the touch. “You were upset.” She said this a little louder than she needed to, in the hope that Mathilda would hear her.

“Huff,” said the woman, her bloodshot eyes spilling tears. Her bottom lip quivered. “He’s really dead.”

It wasn’t a question, but Colleen answered her anyway. “Yes.” She steadied herself. “Samson killed him.”

“Oh, God,” Embeth said, and just when she seemed poised to collapse into hysterics, she composed herself, took a deep, snot-choked breath. “Samson...”

“Yes. He killed Evie and Max, too.”

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Samson.”

“We don’t know,” Colleen said, glancing at Mathilda, who’d just entered the room and stood with her arms crossed. “We’re hoping…”

“Hoping what?” Embeth said.

“Hoping he’s dead,” Mathilda said. “Huff hurt him.”

“He did?” The nerves in her face did a little dance, and for a second she looked immensely proud.

“Yes. How do you feel?” Mathilda asked, walking toward them, looking down at Embeth.

“Dizzy and hungry.” She licked her lips. “Thirsty. Why should I be tied up? Untie me.”

Mathilda walked to the kitchen, returned with a glass of water. With Colleen’s help, the bound woman sat up. Mathilda pressed the glass to Embeth’s mouth.

“Stop that.” She jerked away. “What are you doing? Untie me!”

Mathilda drew a long breath. “You need water, come on.” Embeth still resisted, and she sighed. “We can’t have you freaking out again. We need you to keep your head together, if we’re all going to get out of this.” She paused, and Colleen wasn’t sure if she meant what she said next, or if she were just trying to calm Embeth: “Huff would want it that way.”

“I’m okay. I just want to see my babies,” Embeth said, and Colleen realized for the first time that she had no idea who’d given birth to each of the children, with the exception the unnamed boy, who was Mathilda’s.

“Sally is in labor.”

“Now?” Embeth asked, eyes wide, and Colleen feared that something was wrong. The woman was off-kilter. By now, they were all a little off-kilter, but Embeth was the only one who’d sat clutching the severed head of her kidnapper, her husband of nearly two decades, the man she loved—or had been brainwashed into loving—cradling it to her chest.

We shouldn’t, Colleen thought, wanted to say, but she couldn’t, because maybe she was just being paranoid. And maybe they’d need help soon, and they were short on hands. Besides, it just wasn’t right, keeping her tied up like that. How long could they keep it up?

“I’ll need your help,” Mathilda said. “Colleen and I can’t do this alone. She hasn’t delivered a child.” She looked up at Colleen. “Have you?”

“No. Puppies.”

“You have,” Mathilda told Embeth. Her face hardened. “Where are his guns?”

“Whose guns?”

“Huff’s.” She looked away.

“I don’t,” Embeth began, frowning, considering what she could and couldn’t say, should or shouldn’t. “I don’t know—”

“You do,” Mathilda said, leaning in close, a crease forming between her eyebrows. “I’m not untying you unless you tell me.”

“But this—”

“We’re in trouble, Beth,” Mathilda said. In the back room, Sally yelled something about pain, dammit—it was really starting to hurt. Mathilda looked over her shoulder, toward the back, and yelled, “Be there in a minute.” She looked back at Embeth. “Even if Samson is dead, we’re going to need those guns eventually. With all that’s happening out there.”

“Okay,” Embeth said, swallowing. She licked her lips again and looked around. “You’re right. They’re in the house. He keeps them locked up.”

As far as Colleen knew, there was only one house on the property—the deserted ranch-style house they’d gone into shortly after arriving. She remembered the locked door at the end of the hall.

“Okay,” Mathilda said. “The keys?”

Embeth looked toward the bedroom in which Huff’s body and head lay, and once more Colleen was certain the woman was about to crack. She said, “He has them,” and that was all.

They untied her, and Embeth moved from the floor to the couch, and let herself break down. She wept, her shoulders hitching, tears streaming down her face. Mathilda wiped tears from her own eyes, sat beside Embeth and held her and stroked her hair.

Colleen left them, drifted past the door to the room containing the bodies. The keys—she had to search Huff’s body for a key-ring, but she wasn’t ready.

“What’s going on?” Sally asked as Colleen entered the room in which she lay waiting to give birth.

“We untied Embeth. Can I get you anything?”

“How is she?”

“They’re both crying,” Colleen said, shrugging.

“They loved him,” Sally said. “They’ve been here so long.”

“It kind of worries me. I don’t know what we should do.”

“Do?”

“What if they, I don’t know—freak out?” Colleen said.

“We keep an eye on them. We do what we have to do,” Sally said, and Colleen didn’t like the look on her face. “We take care of them if we have to.”

Colleen’s shoulders fell a half inch and she nodded.

“Do you think you’ll be able to, if it comes to that?”

“Yes,” Colleen said, and the word was out before the realization had an opportunity to make itself at home. She may die soon, and in some horrible way, but she would no longer be a victim of Huffington Niebolt’s insanity. “I’ll do what I have to do. You know I will.”

Sally assessed her, and Colleen wondered just how long the woman had been this way. Had her time here hardened her, or did it go back to her life before? “We need Mathilda. I won’t get through this without her.”

“She’s taking it okay. Embeth?” Colleen shook her head. “I’m not so sure about her.”

“We’ll take it as it, oh—” Mathilda scrunched up her face, eyes squeezed shut, fists clutching the thin blanket draped over her stomach. When the contraction passed, she looked Colleen in the eyes. “Getting shorter. What? What’s that look on your face?”

“I don’t think Samson is dead.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I’ve been thinking. The dead ones I saw in town, at the little store, they’d come from the other town.”

“Beistle?”

“Yeah, they came from Beistle but they were from right there in Harlow.”

“They came home.”

“Seems like it.”

“If he were dead, you think he’d have come right back here?”

“Maybe,” Colleen said. “I don’t know.”

“You might be right,” Sally said. “But this isn’t his home. It’s ours. He’s rarely here.”

“He’s got his own apartment, right?”

“Yes,” Sally said. Colleen thought of the three small apartments they’d encountered following the exhausting uphill walk with Samson, the trap he’d led them to, the attack that followed.

“Then he’s probably there,” Colleen said. “We need to get to the guns before he does. I need to find him. I need to kill him.”

“You’re right,” Mathilda said, appearing beside her. She no longer cried, but her moist eyes were red, the skin around them puffy. “But this comes first.” She looked at Sally. “How are you?”

“About twenty minutes apart.”

“Good,” Mathilda said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “The sooner we get this one out of there the better.”

“How is she doing?” Colleen asked.

“She’s having a drink,” Mathilda said, “She can’t believe he’s dead,” and now her eyes were on Colleen, pinning her in place. Mathilda looked old and tired. “I can’t either.”

The seconds ticked by without response, and Colleen suspected that Sally’s reasons for silence were much the same as her own—so as to not say anything that had the potential to set off Mathilda.

“He was insane,” Mathilda said. “I know that. You know that, Colleen—you just got here. Sally, too. But me and Beth and Evie, we’ve been here so long. Evie suspected it was all a farce, but Embeth? She fell for it a long time ago. She was his, pure and simple. She was his.”

“And you?” Colleen said.

“Sometimes it made it easier to believe. I loved him, yeah, as sick as that is, and as much as it hurts me to admit it, but I did,” Mathilda said, and then she laughed without humor. “I loved the son of a bitch. He was good to me. And some part of me, the part that remembers when he took me—that part of me wishes I’d been there to see him die.

“So,” she looked at Sally. “You popping soon?”

“Soon enough.”

“Okay,” Mathilda said, placing a hand on Colleen’s shoulder, squeezing once. “I’m gonna check on her.”

Sally waited until Mathilda was gone to speak in hushed tones: “She can’t know what we did. Not ever.”

“She doesn’t have to.”

They talked nonsense for a little while, mostly about the book that Sally was reading, and whether or not it was genuinely sexy, whether or not it was right to find it sexy. Mathilda held up her right forefinger in a just-you-wait gesture, and fanned through the pages. Finding what she was looking for, she read aloud. A few words into the passage, somebody screamed.

The scream went on, like a siren, and Colleen bolted from the room, down the hall, and into the living room, where she spun in place, tried to get a fix on the sound of the scream. Looking at the nursery door, she realized with complete clarity and utter lucidity that the sound was not one scream but several, overlapping and weaving into one another.

She burst through the nursery door, gun raised, and her scream joined the chorus. The horrors of the past several days were behind her, but she was not done with horror, nor it with her:

Little Huff and the unnamed child screamed in their cribs, screamed and screamed and screamed, their faces red and quivering, little Huff standing at the wooden bars and looking like a deranged lifer. The nameless boy lay on his back, kicking like a turtle baking in the sun.

One of the twins—she was not sure which and would not learn which for several hours, long after it was all over—lay facedown in a pool of blood, his fat little pink hand twitching like a dying spider.

Mathilda leaned with her hack to the wall, between the cribs containing the wailing children. One of her arms was held before her, fingers splayed and gloved in blood. The other hand was pressed to her face. Blood oozed through her fingers.

Lissa was wrapped around something, wrapped around the other boy, the other giant killer, David or Jack, shielding him as Embeth, raging and screaming, sank the blade of a blood-slicked knife into her back again and again. There was so much blood, and Colleen realized what Embeth had yet to realize, that the girl was dead; that she need only throw her aside to reveal the hysterical child beneath, cringing and screaming, screaming, wailing.

Colleen raised the gun. She jumped, screamed when it roared and spit fire, when a section of the wall above the mad woman’s head burst in a powdery cloud. She squeezed the trigger again and Embeth’s head spat a runny starburst of blood and brains onto the wall. Blood jetting from her skull, the dying woman collapsed in a heap of tangled limbs, pinning the girl and the small boy beneath her.

Mathilda pulled herself from the wall and took an uneven step toward Embeth, and Colleen pushed past her, seizing Embeth’s twitching body by the shoulders and pulling her away from Lissa, who held the surviving twin in her dead arms.

“God,” Colleen said, dropping to her knees beside the children. To her right, the other twin lay dead. The pool of blood around his head had stopped spreading. His small hand no longer moved, the fingers curled and still.

“Blinded me,” Mathilda said, and Colleen looked at her. Mathilda’s right hand was pressed to her right eye. She sucked in air between clutched teeth. “Hurts.” Kneeling beside the dead twin, she checked his pulse with the fingers of her quivering left hand. Her face was deathly white.

“Gah,” Colleen said, her head a mess. She placed her hands on the dead girl’s shoulders and still the small boy screamed and cried.

The knife—a kitchen knife, just a simple steak knife, there was probably a whole drawer of them—jutted from between the girl’s shoulder-blades. Her shirt clung to her back, dark and sticky, and Colleen could not tell how many times Lissa had been stabbed.

As Colleen gently pulled Lissa’s body away from the crying boy, a sigh gurgled within the dead girl’s throat. Her head jerked once, to the right. Colleen grabbed the handle of the knife and tried to pull the blade from the girl’s back. It was wedged between two ribs, and at first it didn’t want to budge. Wincing, Colleen twisted the handle a few times, yanking hard, and the knife slipped free. Blood droplets seem to hang in the air, and Colleen’s stomach clenched. She’d felt the grind of blade against bone, or heard it, or both.

She yelled something incoherent and tossed the knife aside, wiped the back of her hand across her lips, and pulled the wailing twin into her arms; pressed him to her chest. The past few days pressed in. The kids cried and screamed, and Colleen tried not to join them.

“…alive.”

She looked up at Mathilda, tried to make sense of the woman’s words, and the boy, the little blond boy who may have been Jack and may have been David, who’d only a few seconds ago had been lying facedown in his own blood, was on his hands and knees, head hung low and dripping blood. Mathilda knelt beside him, the right side of her face covered in blood. Her hands, now on the child’s shoulders, were also covered in blood, and Colleen fought to hold it all back: the deer, the walking dead on the television and in the parking lot of Misty’s Food and Gas; Guy and Huffington Niebolt’s gurgling screams as she sawed through his larynx.

“He’s still alive,” Mathilda said, drawing her hands away from the child and looking up at Colleen with an utterly helpless look on her face.

“No,” Colleen said, rising to her feet with the crying child in her arms.

“But he—”

His small fingers writhed in the pool of blood around his head, and his tiny feet kicked. His butt rose and fell. He tried to stand, slipped in his blood. His face hit the ground.

“Get them,” Colleen said, nodding toward the cribs, and Lissa opened her eyes and stared at Colleen. The dead girl opened her mouth and frowned, worked her fingers, and sat up.

“Get up,” Colleen said, and Mathilda stared up at her, realization dawning in her remaining eye. The boy pressed to Colleen’s chest wailed and his dead brother rolled onto its side and pawed at its own congealing blood, wriggled its small body toward Mathilda.

“Ur,” Lissa’s corpse said, its drifting gaze settling upon Colleen, who stepped past it and out of the room, where she placed the crying twin onto the couch. Returning to the nursery, she lifted the unnamed boy from his crib, held him to her chest, and looked down at Mathilda, who stared at the dead children before her. Lissa’s corpse was on its knees, its hands hanging uselessly at its sides, its head lolling left and right, as if it weren’t in complete control of its body. The dead twin writhed in its own blood like a worm in mud.

“Come on,” Colleen said, and when Mathilda didn’t acknowledge her, just kept her eyes on the kids, Colleen said it again, louder. Mathilda’s head snapped in her direction. Her face dark with drying blood, she looked at the dead kids again, and then at Colleen.

“Oh,” Mathilda said, getting to her feet. “Oh, God.” They were saying that a lot, Colleen realized, and He didn’t seem to be listening. Daniel would be pleased.

“Come on,” Colleen said, and Mathilda lifted Little Huff from his crib. Out front, the surviving twin wailed, and so too did the unnamed child in Colleen’s arms. Little Huff, on the other hand, fell silent as soon as Mathilda pressed him to her breasts.

“Uuurb,” one of the dead kids on the floor gurgled, and Colleen turned her back on them and left the room, plodding to the couch, where the twin sat, screaming his dissatisfaction, his face bright red, just like it was the first time she’d met him, his yellow eyebrows stark on his livid face. She sat next to him, pulled him into her arms beside the other child.

“Shh,” she said, aware suddenly that Sally was yelling from the other room.

“What’s happening, dammit?”

“It’s okay,” Colleen said, and that was more nonsense, more fucking nonsense. Nothing was okay. Not even close. Also a lie, but closer to the truth: “We’re okay.”

Mathilda emerged from the nursery with Little Huff in her arms, her blind eye oozing blood, the other wide and wild. She looked back at the door, and again to Colleen, pulled the door shut behind her, locked it.

Mathilda placed Little Huff beside Colleen, and though he whimpered and scrunched his face into an ugly knot, he did not cry. Instead, he leaned against her and sighed. The unnamed child would not relent, and the twin had fallen silent. He clung to Colleen and looked around with large and probing eyes.

“Be back,” Mathilda said, pressing her bloody hand to her wounded eye and leaving the room.

Colleen looked around for a pacifier, certain that there had been one on the table beside the couch, finding none. She slid her forefinger into the nameless child’s mouth, and soon he too was quiet.

She sat, her eyes on the locked nursery door, the children pressed close around her. Mathilda emerged from the bathroom, a white band of gauze encircling her head. There was pea-sized spec of red in the gauze above her right eye, and Colleen suspected that, before long, it would be much larger.

She sat across from Colleen, quivering and pale, her arms wrapped around her chest.

“I’m in shock,” she said.

“Yes,” Colleen said.

“This is, I mean—how much—” Her confused words dissolved into broken, hitching sobs. Colleen watched the older woman cry until there were no more tears.

Moving with the measured deliberation of a drunk trying to walk a straight line, Mathilda got up, and walked toward the bedroom. Her right hand sliding across the wall, Mathilda looked at Colleen and was gone. A few seconds later, Colleen heard her talking to Sally, who was in the throes of another painful round of contractions.

She returned a short time later and helped feed the children. Little Huff and the nameless child eagerly sucked from their bottles. The twin stared into space, accepted the food that Mathilda spooned into his mouth with little resistance and no enthusiasm. When the children were fed and burped, Mathilda returned to the bedroom.

Held to her chest, the nameless child closed his eyes and fell asleep. Little Huff did the same beside her, and Colleen heard the bubbling hot sound of his diaper being filled. The twin looked at her, eyes wide, and when she smiled and asked him how he was doing he closed his eyes and lay his head against the armrest.

Something brushed against the other side of the nursery door, and the knob rattled. A short time later, Mathilda stepped into the living room. The look on her face was grave.

“Come on,” she said. “Baby’s coming.”