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part 2 of the story
Crashing Down

Edna C. Horning

    Throughout the months of expectation, Olivia’s spirits were boosted by the preparations. She had chosen a front-facing room to be the nursery because it seemed eminently suitable for a baby, sunny and airy and painted a cheery yellow, and just outside the window was a flowering dogwood that waved beautiful, lacy shadows on the walls during a breeze.
    She proceeded to furnish it with the very best: crib and dresser and changing table and rocking chair all in sturdy blond wood; sheets and blankets and pillows and stuffed toys and dangling mobiles adorned with cuddly pink and blue animals.
    She situated the crib in the exact center on advice of yet another of the many baby books studied during pregnancy; it asserted that such an arrangement, rather than placement against a wall, was far more stimulating for an infant’s developing brain.
    The room’s one and only fixture out of place with the baby land aura was the large, ornamental chandelier. It had come with the house and had not, possibly for historic considerations, been replaced by the restoration, and clearly identified the room’s original function as a second parlor.
    In its glory days, the chandelier had obviously been an item of elegance but was now in decline. While it still fulfilled its illuminative function, a number of prisms were chipped or split or missing altogether, and she and Snapper both had mentioned the possibility of replacing it once more important purchases were out of the way.
    But for the time being it stayed.
    After Rosalie was born and Olivia had fully recovered from the Caesarean – Snapper had wanted a boy and openly wore his disappointment at a daughter – she was faced with the grim fact that, if anything, Snapper was more heedless than ever, and once again Olivia began grasping at ways to shore up her sagging resolve.
    It wasn’t that she had nowhere to go. Her parents would certainly if regrettably take the two of them in, but in recent months the marital track record in her immediate family was proving less than stellar, and she was loath to sully it further. With decades to their credit, her own parents’ union was still intact, but her older brother’s marriage, to the dismay of the elders, had lately landed on the rocks, and close on its heels her older sister had announced her separation and might be needing asylum herself.
    Olivia was desperate to steel her nerve, but with each passing day her inertia deepened, and she feared it would take something stupefying – something truly appalling – to jolt her out of it. But dear God, what could that be? Thunderbolts from above?

***

    That night was forecast to be one of the warmest May evenings on record, and Olivia opted to serve supper on the screened porch where the couple dined on Waldorf salad, poached salmon, and asparagus with Hollandaise accompanied by a newly opened chardonnay.
    Whereas Olivia had consumed one scant glassful, Snapper had had no trouble polishing off the rest of the bottle. This stirred both alarm and resentment in Olivia: alarm because this level of consumption was becoming more frequent, tavern or no tavern, and resentment due to Snapper’s remarks about her father’s very occasional tippling, hypocrisy that Snapper, supremely lacking in self-knowledge, was unaware of.
    When they were done, Snapper, as always, retreated to his office and shut the door while Olivia cleared the table and put Rosie down for the night. After rocking her and placing her in the crib, Olivia stroked the baby girl’s back until her movements became fewer and quieter.
    While Rosie rarely cried after her tuck-in, a vigilant Olivia checked on her regularly but surreptitiously, being careful not to make eye contact if she was not quite asleep. That was to be Rosie’s first lesson in life and discipline: nighttime was for sleeping.
    And to all appearances, Rosie was in total compliance. Except at the very beginning, she had never really needed the infamous two o’clock feeding and began sleeping through it. A good baby from the beginning. A very good baby.
    Maybe it was the unseasonably warm weather in combination with the strenuous labor she had invested in her flower beds that afternoon during Rosie’s nap, but whatever the cause, Olivia began yawning earlier than normal. She tried reading to fend off drowsiness a bit longer, but her concentration drifted in and out, and when the words began to dance on the page, she closed her book, undressed, and got into bed. When Snapper eventually slipped in beside her, she was sleeping soundly enough not to notice.
    Dreamless hours passed until, one by one, images began to populate her slumber, pictures neutral in the beginning but shortly transmuted into horror.
    Olivia started to moan and toss as the nightmare unfolded and finally startled her awake, yanking her upright in a single motion. Badly disoriented for the first few seconds, she sat hugging herself with both arms while an elevated heartbeat throbbed in her ears, and her breathing resembled the gulps of a long-submerged swimmer who suddenly breaks the surface.
    Her agitation had not awakened Snapper, more commonly the lighter sleeper. After regaining a degree of normality, she flicked on the bedside lamp and gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze.
    He rolled over, squinting and screwing up his face at the sudden, unwelcome brightness.
    “What the hell?” he queried groggily. “What’s wrong?”
    “Snapper! It was so real! More real than – than –”. Olivia struggled for words equal to the task. “Thuh— thuh— chandelier! The chandelier in Rosie’s room came loose!” she gasped. “It came loose from the ceiling and killed her! I tried to revive her, but it was no use! She was dead!”
    The disjointed narration, punctuated by jerky sobs, was not entirely coherent and re-stoked her panic, and her half-asleep husband shaded his eyes and listened without further comment until he grasped that his wife was talking about a dream. At that point his bemused expression changed to an angry frown.
    “You woke me because of a dream? A silly dream?”
    “You can’t imagine how real it was, more than any other nightmare I’ve ever had! You can’t imagine—.”
    “I don’t care if it was in stereophonics and technicolor. I have a presentation tomorrow, and rumor has it the regional VP will be paying us one of his notorious little surprise visits, the bastard. I need my rest if I’m going to make an impression. A favorable impression, that is.”
    “Well, I’m sorry, but Valerie once told me it’s been documented, documented by scientists, that realistic dreams are the most common type of precognitive warning and —”
    “And who would those ‘scientists’ be? A passel of New Age ninnies like herself, no doubt. What’s she going to sucker you with next, Livy? Ouija boards? Tarot cards? Chicken guts? Go back to sleep. And don’t bother me again!” he barked and rolled over to his former position. “God Almighty,” he muttered, and then fell silent.
    Fearful of an additional outburst, Olivia switched off the lamp. But she continued sitting for an extended period before finally lying back, and unable to erase the gruesome recall, she began a review of the horror.
    In it, the two of them rushed to the nursery after being jarred awake by a loud crash. The clock on the dresser read five-fifteen, and outside a thunderstorm howled in the darkness, its wind and rain beating against the windowpanes. The chandelier was in the crib, and Rosie lay crushed lifeless, one tiny, motionless, perfectly formed hand extending from underneath. Olivia had been awakened by the sound of her own screaming.
    Olivia’s eyes oozed tears onto her pillow at the memory. Slowly her weeping was replaced by a smoldering anger at the stark contrast to Snapper’s lack of concern for her distress and his all but instantaneous return to a slumber now unattainable by her.
    She rose gingerly and strode in bare, soundless feet to the window. Peering out, she could see by the light of a full moon that the weather was all tranquility. Not so much as a leaf was stirring, a radically different scene from her dream. She stood frozen to the spot until her racing thoughts resolved themselves, and she turned away.
    As the early morning hours broke, a powerful storm system from the west moved into the area fracturing branches off grown trees and pulling saplings from the ground. Thunder resounded through the house, and from the nursery there came the unmistakable sound of shattering glass.
    The couple leapt from bed and rushed to the source. The clock on the baby’s dresser read five-fifteen, and there in Rosie’s cot was the chandelier, now a smashup of cracked prisms and twisted metal. Snapper began clawing at the wreckage while Olivia stood silent and motionless just inside the door.
    “For God’s sake, help me!” he screamed over his shoulder.
    Olivia didn’t budge. Then, in a low, toneless voice, she said, “Rosie’s not in the cot, Snapper. I brought her into our bed after my dream. She’s still there.”
    The muscles in Snapper’s terrorized face twitched and shivered until he saw for himself that there was no baby in the crib. He kept switching his bewildered gaze from Olivia to the wreckage and back to Olivia until she stepped forward and glanced at his hands.
    “You’ve cut yourself. You’re bleeding,” she observed without much feeling. “Go to the bathroom, and I’ll get something for it.”
    As Olivia disinfected and bandaged Snapper’s hands, the two said little. It was not yet dawn when she tied off the last strip of gauze, but a return to bed seemed absurdly out of the question. And so, after making sure Rosie was still safely situated in the center of the king-sized marriage bed, Olivia made eggs and toast while Snapper sat at the kitchen table sipping coffee with his less injured hand.
    When the first light broke, Snapper gingerly dressed himself with minimal help from Olivia. Her current mood, to which he usually did not pay overmuch attention, was difficult to read and had him more than a little troubled. Far from the hysteria he considered appropriate for the intrinsically unstable female personality, her deportment seemed oddly detached, even cold. He made a few lame efforts at conversation about trivial topics, but she remained mostly uncommunicative, and he stopped trying.
    After breakfast, he said, “I could stay home, you know. Call in with a family emergency. Which, of course,” he said, shrugging, “is sort of true.”
    Olivia raised her eyebrows. “What about your presentation?” she challenged.
    He appeared momentarily confused and then recovered. “Oh, right,” he sighed. “I’d completely forgotten.”
    Ordinarily she handed him his briefcase at the door, but not today. Attired in robe and slippers, she stood passively, arms at her side, and he noticed that her eyes, normally a softer, nondescript gray, had darkened almost to black. But perhaps he was imagining things.
    When Olivia failed to pick up his briefcase, he reached for it himself and made one final effort.
    “Please don’t try to clean up the, uh, mess,” he advised. “You could wind up cutting yourself like I did. I’ll call someone to come take care of it, and I’ll make sure they know it has to be done today.”
    “Fine,” she murmured, her lips hardly moving, her eyes unblinking.
    He hesitated, and when she made no further comment, he left.
    No sooner had he departed than Rosie began proclaiming her hunger. Olivia carried her to the kitchen on one arm and with the other removed an already filled bottle from the refrigerator and placed it in the microwave. When it was ready, she headed for the bedroom but stopped abruptly. Turning aside, she redirected to the nursery, surveyed the spectacle from the door, and walked in.
    The rocking chair, situated nearer the corner, appeared to the naked eye free of stray shards, but to make sure Olivia took a soft, clean cloth from the dresser and wiped the seat and arm rests before sitting down.
    Strangely enough, the awful sight before her failed to stir up memories of the dream and its hideous images; indeed, she assessed her own state of mind as calm, even serene, as though an oppressive fog had evaporated to reveal a poem perfect day.
    “Rosalie Celeste,” she cooed as she began to rock, “ever since you were born, I’ve been keeping something from your father. He chose your first name for one of his grandmothers, which was fine with me. But I picked your middle name because it happens to be your godmother Valerie’s middle name, and he didn’t know that. Doesn’t know it even now. I sneaked that one past him.”
    Olivia couldn’t resist chuckling at her cleverness while Rosie noisily sucked away. “You’ll meet her soon, very soon, although she isn’t your godmother by the strictly religious definition. I wanted you christened, but your father thinks religion ‘a pile of manure,’ except he didn’t say ‘manure’. He called it something cruder and almost hit the ceiling.” She paused and glanced up, shaking her head. “His cursed, ten-foot ceiling. But no matter. I told Valerie you were her godchild just the same. It’s been our little secret. And now yours.”
    Her rocking slowed and then ceased, and Olivia returned the now-dozing infant to the unscathed safety of the master bedroom. The burst of energy fueled by the intensity of recent events was beginning to wear off, tempting her to stretch out beside her daughter, when a buzz from the pocket of her robe snapped her back to attention. She fumbled her cell phone out, but before she could say a word, she heard Valerie’s distinctive, husky voice asking, “Are you okay, for God’s sake?”
    “Well, yes,” Olivia responded tiredly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
    “Not exactly sure,” Val replied. “I was startled wide awake a little after five, and for some reason my thoughts ran to you. I’m sure of the time because I looked at the clock. I almost called then but was afraid it might be a false alarm.”
    “Where are you, anyway?” Olivia asked, suddenly curious. “This may be the clearest connection I’ve ever heard from that second-rate phone of yours.”
    “That’s because I’m right outside.”
    Olivia hurried to the front porch and saw Valerie’s ugly, orange car, unquestionably the last Datsun on the road, in the driveway. She waved her in and told Valerie everything as she led her to the nursery and showed her the mess.
    “Sweet, suffering Jesus,” Valerie said, shaking her head.
    In the breakfast nook, the friends drank tea and nibbled banana muffins and conversed at length until Valerie consulted her watch and said, “Have to go. I’m already late.” She stood and stretched. “I’ll tell them Waylon and Stagger Lee dug out under the fence, and it took me a while to find them.”
    “Methinks your boss knows you live in a walk-up, Val.”
    She shrugged, unconcerned. “Yeah, well, the devil’s always in the details.”
    After Valerie’s departure, Olivia lingered over more tea before her morning shower. As with many older style homes, the bath was not en suite but situated off the hallway, and on the way she checked once more on her sleeping daughter.
    “Rosie,” she whispered, “Valerie was right about this house. It’s jinxed. And not just the house.”
    She proceeded on to her bath but not before placing a suitcase, the same one she had almost used before, at the foot of the bed.

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