Unholy Birth

  THE EVIL WITHIN

  I almost fell into a deep sleep, but the phone rang. It’s probably Willy checking up to see if I was okay, I thought, and smiled to myself as I said hello.

  “Get an abortion,” I heard.

  “What?”

  “Before it’s too late. Get an abortion.”

  Even though I heard the caller hang up, I shouted, “Who the hell is this?”

  And then I felt it again.

  A stirring in my abdomen as if there really was a fetus developing within me and it had heard the threat and woke with terror inside my womb.

  ALSO BY ANDREW NEIDERMAN

  Finding Satan

  The Hunted

  Deficiency

  The Baby Squad

  Under Abduction

  Dead Time

  Amnesia

  Curse

  Neighborhood Watch

  In Double Jeopardy

  The Dark

  Duplicates

  Angel of Mercy

  The Solomon

  Organization

  After Life

  Sister, Sister

  The Need

  The Immortals

  The Devil’s Advocate

  Bloodchild

  Perfect Little Angels

  Surrogate Child

  Sight Unseen

  Reflection

  Playmates

  The Maddening

  Teacher’s Pet

  Night Howl

  Love Child

  Imp

  Child’s Play

  Tender, Loving Care

  Someone’s Watching

  Pin

  Brainchild

  Sisters

  Pocket Star Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Andrew Neiderman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6711-0

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-6711-9

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For our children, Melissa and Erik,

  who will always be HOLY BIRTHS to us.

  Unholy Birth

  Prologue

  THE DREAM DREW ME up from the depths of a sleep so deep I thought I had been in a coma.

  My stomach felt as sore as the stomach of a woman who had just suffered severe labor contractions.

  My feet actually were pulled in, my knees up, my legs spread.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Willy asked me.

  She looked back at me over her shoulder, her body on pause, waiting for my answer. She wore an expression of confusion and from the way she gripped the blanket and from the way her body was poised, I thought she might just jump out of the bed to get away from me. Her light-brown untrimmed eyebrows arched, the right side just a little higher as usual. Strands of her recently cut hair curled at the base of her skull.

  Morning sunlight filtered through the curtains threw a sheet of gauze over our king-size four-poster oak bed and the café au lait walls of our bedroom. The ceiling fan set on low looked like it was struggling to push the air. I had kicked the blanket away from myself, and a small part of my portion bundled about the size of a baby beside me.

  My dream was so vivid, I was still too stunned to speak. I didn’t move, didn’t lower my legs, didn’t lift my arms. Because of the way I was holding my head, I felt my neck muscles straining, the dull ache seeping into my shoulders.

  “Huh?” Willy followed, starting to turn now.

  “A dream,” I said.

  “What the hell kind of dream is this?” she asked, nodding at my knees, which were still up, and my legs, which were still spread.

  “I dreamed I gave birth. It was the baby’s cry that woke me,” I said.

  She slapped my right leg sharply and I dropped both my legs to the bed.

  “You’re driving me crazy,” she said, and turned over again, tightly wrapping the blanket around herself.

  “I’m getting up,” I told her.

  She grunted a “Whatever.”

  I went to the bathroom and stood by the cream and brown granite counter covered with my beauty aids and stared at myself in the large oval mirror. My face looked sunburned, red blotches over my cheeks and my forehead. There were even some on my neck. I was cold from sweating. I pulled my nightshirt over my head, surprised at how damp it was from my perspiration. I dropped it into the hamper and then stepped into the shower stall.

  The warm water streamed between my breasts, cascading down over my slightly bulging belly and then along the insides of my thighs. It felt so much like blood that I gazed at the drain expecting to see the red stained water spiraling down through the sewer pipes and into oblivion.

  Leaning up into the flow of the shower, I enjoyed the pummeling over my face and my chest. My breasts ached. A quick review of dates told me it was too soon for a period, and I had always been clockwork regular. Willy was the erratic one. Her whole life, even her bodily functions, was characterized more by spontaneity than was mine. We were not two peas in a pod, but it was precisely the differences between us that brought us together. I believed we each harbored a secret desire to be more like the other, but neither of us would admit to it. There were times when anyone listening to us speak about each other would think we detested each other, not loved each other.

  When I came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a large terry cloth towel with a smaller towel twisted around my hair like a Sikh turban, I found Willy sitting up in bed, her hands behind her head, leaning against the headboard, waiting. The blanket had fallen to her waist. Her perky firm breasts called to me the way they did most mornings. Her nipples were darker, slightly larger than mine, and seemingly always erect.

  She dropped the corners of her mouth, drawing her full upper lip down and over her lower. The dimple in her chin deepened. Her eyes were soaking in suspicion.

  “What are you going to tell me this dream means, Kate?” she asked before I could offer any explanation.

  I shrugged. I didn’t have to say it; I had said it many times, more frequently over the last few months.

  She looked away, took a deep breath and looked back at me.

  “Everything about us, our lives, our style, our pleasures will change. It drives friends away, too. They don’t trust you anymore because you become totally different.”

  “Oh, that’s silly, Willy. Why should our being a bigger family drive anyone away?”

  “The whole country is twisted, hemorrhaging over questions like gay marriage, abortion, stem-cell research, and you want us to raise a child, bring a child into this…” She held her arms out and bounced them in the air as she panned our bedroom, “this mess?”

  “I don’t think it’s such a mess, Willy. We make good money. We’re better equipped to raise a child than most heterosexual couples.”

  “If there is anything you and I know, Kate, it’s that money doesn’t guarantee a good family life.”

  “It’s one of the major things to consider. Besides, we’re more stable than most people we know, aren’t we?”

  She looked away and then she lowered herself under the blanket again.

  “It’s Sunday, Kate
. Our day off. From everything, including obsessions,” she muttered, closed her eyes, slipped down under the cover and turned her back to me.

  “Something bigger than us is telling us to do this,” I said.

  “Not telling us. Telling you. You’re out of your mind. Go to the shrink your parents tried to arrange and pay for when you moved in with me.”

  “Stop it, Willy.”

  She was silent. We didn’t push arguments anywhere near the point of no return. One or the other would simply clam up and leave the room.

  I went out to the kitchen and turned on the coffee maker. While it began perking, I stood there pouting. If I were willing to undergo a pregnancy, why wouldn’t she agree? Why shouldn’t we have something more than ourselves? It was not an admission of failure to want a child in our lives. On the contrary, it was a statement illustrating the strength of our relationship because we were willing to sacrifice and cooperate and work together for greater things. How could I make her see that?

  Maybe I couldn’t.

  Maybe Willy was too selfish to share anything. How could I go on living and loving someone like that?

  On the other hand, I couldn’t envision living without her.

  The conflict put me into a depression.

  She sensed it, of course, and came out. We had ESP when it involved each other’s feelings and moods. She stood in the kitchen doorway, naked, her arms folded under her breasts, just glaring at me. Her neck muscles were taut, her jaw line distinct. Her whole body was clenched like a fist.

  “What?”

  “Just because you’re having such vivid dreams about it, doesn’t mean it’s right for us, Kate. It’s a decision not being made on rational grounds.”

  “Who’s to say what’s rational and what’s not anymore?”

  “Oh brother,” she said. She nodded at me. “You’re willing to go all the way, suffer through it, be a mother?”

  “Hopefully, not alone,” I said.

  “Thanks for the invitation.”

  “It will make us stronger.”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re the one who believes in omens, in that sixth sense crap, but I’ll tell you this,” she said. “It frightens me on a primeval level.”

  “Primeval? Why?”

  “I don’t know why and I’ll never mention it again. Consider yourself forewarned and I’ll consider my responsibility to do that completed. Now you do what you want.”

  “Do what I want? What does that mean, Willy? What are you telling me?”

  “I spoke my piece and that’s all. Now go get pregnant,” she said, and returned to the bedroom.

  “Go get pregnant?”

  I stood there, excited and yet a little terrified.

  Already like a pregnant woman, I thought the combination was wonderful.

  1.

  THE FIRST QUESTION someone like me obviously has to ask herself is how are you going to do it? Making love with a man, even if it were done as impersonally as a medical exam, was abhorrent to me. I could count on the fingers of one hand how many men I had kissed on the lips, much less permitted to touch me anywhere intimate. It was always difficult for me even to imagine a relationship with a man. It never took me long to discover who I was. I never had to go in and out of any closet. It was my parents who kept themselves shut up, and still did. I hated to think of the excuses, the rationale they used to explain my lifestyle. They chose to live in some illusion. I supposed I should be grateful. They could have considered me dead and gone the way some of the parents of gay people I knew considered them.

  Of course I realized that there were women who got married just to have children. The years were nicking away at them and they panicked to the point where they considered themselves sufficiently in love with a man to marry him. Afterward, after the children were born, these women lived what were practically separate lives. Their husbands were just a different sort of deliveryman.

  But even that was clearly not for me.

  What’s more, there was the matter of inherited genes, resemblances. Whenever I looked at our child, would I always see the man I had employed, reminding me of what I had done? I could end up resenting my own child.

  Employed was the kindest word I could use to explain it. It would make me feel like a john, not a prostitute. I’d be paying a man to have intercourse with me. If I didn’t spend actual money, I would spend my self-respect.

  Nevertheless, I realized it might be interesting to consider whom of the men we knew we would choose. He certainly wouldn’t be anyone we had worked with or who worked for us. Would we choose on the basis of his personality or his looks? Money wasn’t a concern.

  Willy and I ran a successful catering business in Palm Springs, California. We had both begun our lives here as waitresses. Her first restaurant went out of business just before the end of the tourist season, and my first restaurant was set on fire either by the owner or by someone who hated him. It was definitely an unsolved arson.

  Nevertheless, both Willy and I wanted to remain in the desert. It had become a comfortable place for the gay community. There were gay people involved in the local government and more and more gay entrepreneurs were opening their own restaurants, clothing stores, bars. There was even a small supermarket owned by two gay men right in the downtown area.

  I didn’t meet Willy in any gay watering hole. We both were hired by the manager of a new restaurant chain that was already known nationally to be a restaurant catering to gay people. The manager himself was not gay, but he did make an effort to staff it with as many gay people as he could find qualified. It was ironic because any restaurant not hiring someone because he or she was gay would be subject to a lawsuit.

  Willy was not quite sure about me when we first met. There was never anything butch about me or anything else that would immediately give away my sexual identity. I wasn’t particularly good at any sport. I had enjoyed acting in high school and during my first two years of college, but I dropped out after that, mainly because I had a disastrous love affair with another girl in my dorm. I liked gourmet cooking, and I was admittedly obsessed about my appearance, chasing a variety of skin products that claimed Fountain of Youth capabilities. I paid a lot of attention to my hair and wore it long, or at least what was considered long, which by now was merely down to the nape of my neck. I was also a clothes junkie, reading fashion magazines as obsessively as some members of the religious right read the Bible.

  In short, I was what is called a femme, a feminine woman who is attracted to masculine women or butches. I was really a high femme, a femme who dresses very femininely, high heels, skirts, makeup, the whole enchilada.

  Whenever we sat around talking about ourselves, Willy enjoyed practicing amateur psychology and accused me of battling myself.

  “You’re still in denial about your sexual identity,” she insisted. I knew she was just trying to bait me, but I couldn’t resist arguing.

  “I am not. That’s ridiculous, especially in light of my personal history, where I am and whom I’m with, Willy.”

  “Not really. You’re still carrying more baggage than I am or ever was. You came from a far, far more conservative world than I did. No matter how independent we claim to be, we still mourn the loss of parental approval. Your brother doesn’t even talk to you anymore, Kate. You told me yourself that he and his wife are too embarrassed to admit you’re related. Don’t sit there and claim none of that wears on you.”

  “I’m not.”

  “It’s all right. We both have our own demons. Just don’t go any deeper into denial. You’re still struggling with this heterosexual, good-girl thing,” she insisted.

  I knew she liked to tease me about it, but I think she was at least half serious when she suggested my sexual confusion was also a major motivation for my wanting to have a child.

  “Nothing makes you more of a heterosexual woman than motherhood,” she said. “Don’t give me that word parent. You don’t want to simply be some generic parent, Kate.
You want to feel like a heterosexual woman inside as well as outside, and nothing will do that for you as well as pregnancy and birth. Otherwise, you would be talking about adoption. You don’t even mention the concept.”

  I suspected that part of the reason why she brought these things up in discussion, whether she did it in a teasing manner or not, was to get me to develop a tougher skin. She wanted me to be more prepared to handle those demons she saw circling our wagons.

  “Face up to this,” she insisted, “otherwise, you’ll spend your life in one form of denial or another and never be happy or comfortable. Believe me, I’ve seen it. It can destroy you.”

  She was always working at getting me to commit fully to our relationship, which ironically was one of my prime motivations for wanting the child in our lives in the first place. Why couldn’t she see that as clearly as I could?

  At times I thought I was so distasteful to her, I wondered why she remained with me. Because of her commitment to me despite my inner conflicts, I felt more assured about her love for me and I loved her more because of it. Although she could be as cold and as cruel to me as she was to anyone else, she wouldn’t permit any other person to come close to saying these negative and nasty things to me.

  She was butch.

  She walked with a prizefighter’s swagger. Her body was as tight and firm and muscular as any gymnast’s body, and as a matter of fact, she had been one in high school and had won awards. At times I thought she could metamorphose into a steel arrow and shoot herself into an argument. I was probably the only soft, feminine thing she had ever permitted in her life. She often took a lot of heat because of me, but she never minded it or complained. In fact, there were occasions when I thought she looked for the arguments, the fights. She could just put on that sort of angry mood the way someone would put on a blouse.

  After we had been together a while, I confessed to having been afraid of her when we first met. I told her she entered the restaurant like a gunslinger searching for a duel in the street and looked at me with some disdain.