Grow Up

by Jake Stein

(originally published in OFIC Magazine)

 

Dinner was terrific—until my wife noticed the single red balloon in the corner of the ceiling, a balloon which neither of us had purchased, much less inflated.                                            

“Are you sure it wasn’t you?” Becka asked, putting down her fork.  I scooted my chair back and stared up at the thing. Shining like a glossy cherry in the light. No string attached to it. “Why would I blow up a balloon?” My wife gave her lasagna a tenuous smile, red-cheeked. “Thought maybe you figured out the news on your own.”

The news? Interest piqued, I swirled my pinot noir, trying to discern if it smelled fancier than our twelve-dollar usual. Becka’s smirk warned of wondrous tidings, and an air of triumph filled the dining room. Suddenly it made sense why she hadn’t poured herself a glass.

I said, “You mean...”                                                 

She gave a smiling nod, and an enormous pressure lifted from my heart. We’d been trying for years now, making midnight trips to the pharmacy for pregnancy tests, crying over periods—while all our friends raised perfect, effortless families. To finally learn that the miracle of life was inside this woman, my wife, Rebecka Haymill... I laughed until I couldn’t breathe. Dinner forgotten, I put my hand on her belly, asking a million stupid questions and panicking about setting up a doctor’s appointment. Becka calmed me with a hug and told me to finish eating, the baby could wait.                                         

The baby, I thought, and smiled so hard my face hurt.                     

But pregnancy aside, neither of us could explain the balloon.  “You swear you didn’t do it?” I asked after dinner, while we washed dishes.                                               

Becka stared at that red latex bubble stuck lazily on the ceiling. The intruder. “Maybe it drifted through a window?”                                                  

“What are the chances?”

 “You don’t think...” She paused.                                                      

Before she finished, I was already checking the safe in our bedroom closet. It appeared untouched; the combination lock was appropriately dusty, and inside I found all the usual papers. Nothing missing. I let out a sigh of relief, because how ridiculous would it be to break into a house just to inflate a single balloon, leaving nothing stolen? But if someone hadn’t put the balloon here, then...                                                 

Refusing to consider the possibility of a supernatural occurrence, I climbed onto a chair and took the balloon down. I popped it using my car key and tossed the sad, deflated thing in the trash. I would not, I decided, worry about this aberration. Not on this special night.

“Maybe it’s a miracle,” Becka suggested. She almost seemed sad that I’d popped the balloon.                    

“Maybe.” But I pushed the conversation in the direction of baby names, and Becka giggled at my suggestion of “Engelbert” if it was a boy. (We both knew Becka already had her mind set on “Clarence,” after her grandfather.) We lounged as I drank my third glass of wine—a feat nearly as rare as discovering an unexplained balloon, or pregnancy—and we talked about Clarence and how beautiful he would be, our son, our greatest accomplishment in our pleasant little lives, and we did not allow ourselves to discuss the foreign rubber object crumpled in the garbage.                                             

But later, as we lay in bed, the subject of the balloon expanded into heavy silence between us.   

“Do you think it’s some kind of magic?” Becka asked, rolling over in the sheets to face me.                     

My hand found her belly. “We have better things to worry about now.”

She showed me her back, and we arrived at an unspoken agreement to simply carve the balloon out of our lives; to treat it like that time I’d dated her roommate in college. To completely avoid it and never discuss it again.                                              

Fuzzy from sleep, I cracked two eggs for breakfast. I tried not to look in the trash. (The mystery balloon was calling me, an itch in the back of my mind.) I told myself: Happy day today. Becka’s pregnant, remember? I forced a grin; I turned up the heat on the eggs. It wasn’t until I reached for a spatula that I noticed the birthday cake sitting on the counter.       

A birthday cake. Sitting on the counter.

 I blinked twice. The eggs sizzled.

A birthday cake.

I approached it with the cautious steps of a bomb defuser. Clearly the cake was meant for a child. Colorful sprinkles decorated the frosting, and beneath one roaring dinosaur candle was a name scripted in whipped cream. I stared at that name for the longest moment of my life.      

It said: Clarence.                                            

The eggs started smoking. I fumbled to turn off the burner without taking my eyes off the cake, willing the hallucination to expire. The sun streamed brightly through the window; for millennia, I stood frozen and shivering in that yellow a.m. haze—with the cake watching me—waiting for my brain to come to terms with my new reality, where baked goods and balloons manifested out of thin air.                             

With one careful finger, I touched the frosting.

It felt cold.

Real.

My instinct was to throw the cake away, like I’d done with the balloon. A sliver of relief pierced my existential panic as I realized, of course, this had to be a prank Becka was playing. There was no other explanation. But when I called her into the kitchen, her eyes said it all—she wasn’t pulling anything.

“Do you swear to God you didn’t do this?” Becka asked.

“We don’t even have the ingredients for a cake,” I said. “I’ve never baked anything in my life.”

“You could have bought it from the store.” She wrung her hands, not sure whether to be excited or terrified.

“Maybe it’s a mistake or coincidence.” I touched the cake again. It was still real.

“Have you told anyone about the name Clarence?”

I locked eyes with her then. “Not even my mother,” I said.             

Becka’s face ran white as reality sank in. “What is going on? I mean, just what exactly is going on? How is there a cake with our unborn child’s name on it?” She was breathing hard. “We’re calling the police.”           

“Nobody broke in.”

“How do you know?”                                    

I gestured around. The locked doors. The shut windows. “Nobody broke in.” With dread, my gaze fell upon the cake again. Clarence. “This is... something else.”  

We talked through the afternoon, trying to come up with an answer. We could only think that this was some kind of sick joke being played on us—but by whom? And how had they gotten inside? The other option: it was something otherworldly, something apparitional. I remembered Becka mentioning magic...                                   

Around three in the afternoon, while pacing the living room, I stumbled across a pair of small muddy boots on the floor by the front door.                                      

A toddler’s boots. Worn.

“Impossible,” I said aloud, speaking as much to God or the universe as to myself or my wife. But Becka heard me and came running over, and when she saw the boots she gasped, tears glistening on her cheeks. I put my arm around her and squeezed. Both of us were too scared to touch the boots. We could only gawk at them in horror. For as long as we’d lived here, there had never been a child in this house. Yet…

Here was a child’s used footwear.

Becka whispered, “Feel like I might pass out.”

I held her until she was steady. Then, gently, “Go get something to eat.”

She hurried out of the room, but I remained, my eyes searching the boots for some clue as to how they’d gotten here. I wanted simply to wake up from this nightmare. Wake up. But this was real, damn it, not a dream, and eventually it dawned on me that I couldn’t just leave these boots here, these muddy little boots from God-knows-where. So I got a broom and a trash bag, and—                                       

A scream from the kitchen.                           

I turned the corner at full speed, knocking over our potted azalea. It shattered, shooting ceramic everywhere, but I didn’t notice. Now in the kitchen, the cake caught my full attention. Not the first cake, but the second one, sitting there next to the first.

Two cakes now. Two. And the new one had three candles. Written on top, similar to the first: Happy Birthday, Clarence!                

“The candles are years,” Becka said. She was shaking violently, cowering in the corner of the kitchen—as far from the cakes as she could physically put herself. I’d never seen her like this. “We’re watching him grow up.”                                

I said, “We’re what?”

“We’re watching Clarence grow up.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s like a time jump,” she insisted, her voice ragged, manic. Her hair—never a mess—now stood up at various odd angles like she’d touched a live wire. “These things are coming from the future.”

“No.” My knees lost all strength, and I slid down the wall to sit on the floor across from my wife. Portents sent from God. The words appeared in my mind, but immediately I cast them aside. It’s just cake, just flour and eggs and—                                          

Becka plunged her fist into the second cake, scooping up a handful, the frosting oozing between her fingers. “These cakes. The boots. The balloon. They’re all... they’re all artifacts from the future. Pieces of our future with Clarence, sent back.”                              

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Think about it.”

“I can’t.” A painful rumbling reverberated from my gut. The sweet stench of frosting was sickening. “Why are we being made to see these things? Is it a warning? A curse? What if we...” My words failed me, for I felt something brush the top of my head and graze my ears, something light, like a fly, but this was not a fly, I could tell from the way Becka was looking at it, this object, whatever it was, which now sat atop my hair.                                        

With trembling fingers, I reached up and took off a party hat, lifting the elastic strap from around my chin. I held the paper hat in my hand with sheer disbelief. A cheap, ordinary party hat, with a big red “4” printed on it.                           

It was Becka who broke the silence. “That hat just...” She struggled for the word. “...materialized right on top of your head. I’ve never seen anything like that.”                 

I gawked at the party hat. I couldn’t move. “Four. Four years old. Becka, what if you’re right? Maybe the first cake was his first birthday. It only had one candle. All these items are counting up in years. Now we’re at four...”

“We have to get out of this house,” Becka said, and she grabbed me, swatting away the party hat. “We have to get out of here.”

Within minutes we were gone, tripping over our unborn child’s boots
 on our way out the door. Outside the house, on the front porch, a brand new bicycle was spontaneously fading into existence, its red handlebars shining in the light of the coming evening. We moved quickly past the bicycle, trying not to acknowledge it, but I thought, Fifth birthday present. And in the car, after I slammed the keys into the ignition, I noticed, in the rearview mirror: a wrapped gift sitting in the back seat, complete with a red bow. Panicking, I threw the birthday gift out of the car without daring to open it. Six. Six years old.

We drove away and we drove for a while, driving nowhere, just driving, with Becka’s hand on mine on the wheel. Cold hands. Real.

No matter how far we drove, my chest wouldn’t stop pounding. At some point I pulled over and got out of the car and walked up and down a street I did not recognize, and when I got back into the car, Becka’s head was cradled in her arms.            

I said, “We should get a hotel.”                     

We stayed at the Embassy Suites for three days. In all that time, we saw no cakes, no balloons, no bicycles. It seemed the spirit of our future-child hadn’t followed us off our property. But in that hotel room we hardly spoke, hardly lived. The days passed with great difficulty, and the nights spared little sleep. Each morning we awoke terrified that we might find a birthday cake on the bedside table, or a red balloon waiting for us in the hotel shower. We were so near to a breaking point that we even considered contacting our respective parents—including my father. (In the end we didn’t, of course; we hadn’t gone that crazy yet.)           

But three days was all Becka could take. “We need to go home and just face it,” she said, biting her nails, which were stained orange by all the “morning mandarins” she’d been eating, a practice she’d adopted since giving up caffeine in preparation for the child. “Whatever it is, we can’t let it ruin our lives. Just when everything was going right...” She rubbed her stomach protectively.

I nodded slowly. I didn’t want to agree—I never wanted to set foot in our house again—but Becka was right: we couldn’t let this supernatural event cast us out like refugees.

Reluctantly, we checked out of the hotel. We were so exhausted, it required fifteen minutes of shambling around zombie-like in the Embassy Suites parking lot until we found our car. I drove home slowly, overly cautious, half-expecting some sort of freak accident on the road. We still didn’t know what we were dealing with. Was this the hand of God, or some type of curse, or the antics of a time traveler from the future—or had we gone mad?                       

When we pulled into our driveway, the red bicycle was still leaning on the front porch. Seeing that bike again, Becka began to cry, but she gathered herself with a deep breath, saying, “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

We crept toward the house like soldiers behind enemy lines. For all we knew, anything could simply materialize anywhere at any time.                             

“Okay,” Becka said, after we’d made it to the front door.

And I said, “Okay.”

She put her hand on the doorknob. “Here goes.”      

“Wait,” I said. “We could just move. Get a new house. It didn’t follow us to the hotel. Maybe it won’t follow us if we move out...”  

But Becka only glared at me, and I saw that fire in her eyes—that fearless soul of the woman I’d fallen in love with. “We’re not letting this thing kick us out,” she said, “whatever the hell it is.” And she flung open the door and stormed inside. I followed, fists clenched, hoping to protect the mother of my unborn child from whatever birthday gifts lurked within.                      

At first glance, it seemed nothing had changed. We searched each room. We opened every drawer. We moved furniture to check underneath, rooted through old clothing, sorted through the trash. We found no newly-manifested materials from the future. If not for the two cakes, the bicycle, the boots, and the party hat, we might have been able to convince ourselves that none of this strange spell had occurred.                     

“Maybe,” said Becka, with a palpable look of relief, “it’s over.”     

“Maybe,” I agreed. But I didn’t believe it. Not yet. There was one place in the house we hadn’t checked. And somehow I knew, even as I spun the combination lock with nervous fingers, that an artifact sent from another time was waiting for us inside the bedroom safe where we kept our important papers. The dusty safe, untouched for years.      

Becka watched over my shoulder while, with quivering hands, I sorted through insurance documents, birth certificates, social security cards... until we came upon something else, something new, something parents should never have to see.

I tasted bile in my throat when I read the words. Certificate of Death. It was dated from the future. And on this piece of paper was the name Clarence Haymill, his birthdate, and the date of his death at seven years old.       

We discussed our discovery at the kitchen table. Neither of us had eaten or slept. We were more than shaken; we were half-destroyed.                               

“He’ll die at seven,” Becka said, speaking mostly to the wall. “Seven years old.” Her voice lacked emotion, lacked anything. “Seven years. That’s all.”                        

“We don’t know if it’s true,” I told her.

“Of course it’s true.”

“We don’t know for sure. That death certificate doesn’t mean anything.”

Becka flashed a sad smile. “It’s true. I know it. I can feel it, just like I can feel him inside me. This house is haunted by the ghost of our unborn child.”

I looked at my hands in my lap. “Jesus. Don’t say that.”

“It’s true.”

 “Jesus,” I said again. And I waited, and the clock in the kitchen ticked, ticked, before I voiced the option which weighed painfully on both our minds: “It’s not too late, you know. You’re only about six weeks, right?”                                    

A muscle twitched in my wife’s jaw. “Abort it, you mean. Kill Clarence.”

“All I’m saying is—”

“How long have we wanted this?”

“I want him as much as you.” I cleared my throat painfully. “But if he’s only going to live for seven years—if we’re really supposed to believe Clarence won’t make it longer than...” I felt like I might vomit. “Do we bring a child into the world for only seven years? Are we selfish if we do that?”

“Are we selfish not to do it?” Chewing her orange-stained nails, Becka started to laugh. “You know, this is nuts.”                                       

I gaped at her. “Why are you laughing?”                              

She gave me a lopsided expression which belonged in a white-padded room. “Are we really going to abort our hopes and dreams because of a few birthday cakes?”

“You think we’re reading too far into these events?”

“Reading too far...” Becka echoed, sounding insane.

“This is serious,” I tried to convince her. “This could be... God, or—”

“We don’t know our child will die at seven,” she said firmly. Firm as cracked pavement. “We don’t know for sure. Of course we don’t. We don’t even know he’s going to be a boy. We haven’t even named him Clarence yet!” Becca’s own words fueled her resolve, and she bobbed her head frantically. “Even if we’re dealing with some kind of... ghost... we can’t presume to understand it. Maybe it’s just messing with us?”                                   

“It’s possible...” But inside, I was screaming, No, no, no. Something in the universe had torn open and my life was pouring out. I wanted so badly to believe that Becka wasn’t crazy. That she was right: this was all too nuts to be real, or serious, at any rate...

Then just believe it. For Becka’s sake.                      

In the end, I decided to agree, and forget, lest everything we’d built begin to fall apart. Because I missed the times when the worst discomforts between us were the subjects we didn’t speak about, not the ones we did; I just wanted normal, nice surprises from now on. “You’re right. We shouldn’t try to interpret these things as signs. For all we know, Clarence could grow to be one hundred.”              

Becka was laughing again, rocking in her chair. “He’ll grow up. We’re seeing things clearly now. Our child will survive.”                 

My hands journeyed across the kitchen table and clutched my wife’s, showing her my love, kindling her precious fire. “We’re keeping him, then?”          

Days we spent weighing the decision. No—lifetimes. Dwelling in that gray purgatory of debate over our unborn son’s life, we nearly broke. But there was a thin, almost imperceptible silver lining: while buried under the gravity of this all-important decision, we were no longer interrupted by the phantom of our future child; no more birthdays, no more cakes. For months our lives carried on absent of supernatural interference, and we found joy again, and an appreciation for normalcy, for we had elected to keep the child, to have Clarence after all, and this return to the original plan, to the natural way of things—to reside again in a house which did not magically spawn party favors—vindicated our choice. And the pregnancy went as smoothly as a pregnancy can go, and some months later Becka delivered a perfect baby boy, a perfect piece of us which weighed six pounds and two ounces, and it was the happiest day, the happiest by a long shot, and with remarkable ease we forgot all about that brief dark time when our future had haunted us. And our families were there, our parents, hers and mine. Even my father had come to the hospital—my father. And when I met him in the waiting room, my father, he was holding a bouquet of red balloons. And before my eyes, one of those red balloons disappeared.

 

 

AUTHOR BIO:

 

Jake Stein survives despite all odds in Portland, OR, where he concocts strange tales on his laptop and spends too much time at Powell's Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and The No Sleep Podcast. You can occasionally find him fumbling around twitter: @jakewritesagain