All I know is that she was in there for ages. You’re not supposed to comment when a lady is spending an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom. But, then, my wife was a plumber.

Laura and her work had occupied the bathroom for six weeks, camped out in there like it was under siege. There was a minor problem in that we only had one set of facilities in our apartment, a three decker in the Vernon Hill neighborhood of Worcester, Massachusetts. I had been forced, on occasion, to ask our upstairs and downstairs neighbors to borrow theirs for a period of time. Sure, they were distant cousins to my mother, but it’s still a little different than borrowing a cup of sugar.

On the morning of the incident I lay in bed, unnaturally alert, and while I had some clarity I thought about how I might broach the subject of the skeleton-like construction hulking in the tub and its nebulous timeline as tactfully as I could. But she beat me to it, turning to me with a little bounce.

"Hey, can you go into work a bit late today?"

I mentally backed out of the arguments I’d intended to make about the mess and a lizard part of my brain somewhere lit up, sensing the possibility of some action. "Umm, sure."

"Good, I have something to show you."

She bounced once more, gave me a kiss on the nose, and slid out of bed, then into the offending room. I could hear water running in Phyllis and Gerry’s apartment upstairs, so I had nothing to do but lie back on the pillow and work on my case for closing down the interminable worksite.

At 7 o’clock the doorbell rang. Laura was still in there, getting ready or tinkering with her machinery, so I buzzed the person in. On Wednesday mornings Laura’s old college buddy, Eli Whitney went for a run around Gaskill Field at the top of the hill and she would stop by for breakfast before her classes started over at Holy Cross.

This Eli Whitney wasn’t the eighteenth century inventor, but his great-great-granddaughter. Every single child in the family tree was named Eli, even the girls, which made things easy and hard at the same time.

She came up the stairs and let herself into our apartment, went directly to the kitchen and slumped down at the table, where I slid a cup of coffee over for her.

"Will," she said, "you guys should swap with Natalie and Chet." Natalie and Chet lived in the downstairs apartment. Eli said this every Wednesday morning she came over, like her own recurring joke in a sitcom.

Laura emerged from the bedroom, hair still damp. I had no idea how she was showering in and amongst all the junk in the tub, but she managed it, with her womanly wiles. On her circuit of the kitchen she gave a quick bang on the door to Sadie’s room and a curt little "Kiddo, time to get up."

I took my turn in the bathroom.

Before you judge that I’m dramatizing the extent of the construction, our home team showers at the Worcester Centrum often served as the storage room for the Zamboni, backup ice machines, and stages, amongst other things. The season before I retired they were upgrading the building and workmen’s tools littered the benches in front of our lockers, saw blades rested on top of plastic buckets and other surfaces throughout the room. We lost our top right wing to a laceration of his big toe thanks to a razor blade left behind from someone cutting carpet on a game day. So I was used to showering hazards.

In our bathroom, the floor, vanity, and mirror were covered in a fine dust, a dust that wafted around the room like you’d opened the door onto an Egyptian tomb and not the compact washroom of a three decker apartment. The only thing that wasn’t covered in dust was the tub, which somehow remained pristine.

The primary resident of the tub had grown into a white picket trellis, like one you’d see in a quaint English garden, only this was parked, incongruously, in a bathtub. Copper pipes peeked out from beneath the wooden beams. The gate crouched just below the ceiling, giving it the appearance of a grumpy copper and wood-encrusted hunchback. You could get into the tub by climbing under the archway, you just couldn’t reach the knobs on the shower to turn on the water or adjust the heat of it. And even if you did manage to get the water flowing, it was guesswork as to where it would come out, since the shower head was entombed in the tangle of pipes. Nearest the window smoke poured ominously off the top of a drum at all hours of the day. I had asked Laura if it was safe to keep in the house, and she assured me that it was. That was my first attempt to gently raise the subject of relocating her workshop on this particular project out of our personal bathroom.

One of the earliest features of the sculpture in our tub were two ivory inlaid handles. Back when the shower was still marginally usable because you could see where the water came out of and to where it was going, I attempted to use these handles as a towel rack. They turned slightly, under the weight of the towel, and an odd humming started up from somewhere inside the contraption, so I yanked the towel off, reset the handles to their original position, and took an impromptu sponge bath out of the sink. This is what a shower looked like in our house.

When I returned to the kitchen, freshly sponged, Eli and Laura were chatting, and Sadie sat at the table like a tiny, mute atomic bomb. An atomic bomb with a bowl of cereal and glass of orange juice in front of her.

"Morning, Sades," I said.

She didn’t appear to register the greeting at first, but after a long, slow blink her eyes got around to looking in my general direction. It was like looking into a body, waiting to be filled with a soul. I took that as a ’good morning.’ She still had her stuffed elephant squeezed under one arm. Since the ladies were deep in conversation I got myself a bowl of cereal, as well, sat down and dug in.

"Will, baby," Laura had stopped talking to Eli and was staring at me. "You need to get dressed." I was in the habit of wandering around the apartment in little more than my shorts, as if I were still in the locker room. This wasn’t a problem when it was just us, but Laura preferred me to wear a shirt when Eli or other guests were around. I’d once hopped out of the shower after coming back from a beer league game and interrupted the book club meeting Laura hosted that night. Eli was a little more contentious audience because we’d had a brief... thing, in high school, before or between periods with Lor. 

At any rate, it was a long time since I was a teenage hotshot athlete with a six-pack being treated like a piece of meat at hockey combines and camps, inspected for firmness and tone, a few honorable battle wounds marking my torso delicately, like lace. Those marks had grown a little mottled over time, a little bulge that grew in my gut like a miniature Mount Saint Helens distended a patch of angry red scars along my rib cage, some of the final costs of the war. The scars were well earned, but no oil painting. I really should have known better. I grinned at Laura, like a savage grinning at the trainer who would subdue it.

When I failed to make a move to put on a shirt she just came right out with it:

"Will, the people are arriving for a demo in about half an hour."

"Oh," I said, and slipped to the bedroom to get the rest of the way ready for work.

Activity around the house kicked into gear while I was putting on clothes and pulling on my work boots. Sadie was dressed and chipper, the atomic bomb defused, buried deep inside her six year old body, its energy fueled the whirling dervish I now saw spinning in and out of the bathroom with a handheld vacuum cleaner, presumably emptying it every two seconds as its miniature bag filled with dust from the construction site. Eli and Laura got ready in the spare bedroom.

A tour bus pulled up outside on the hill with an awful wail and screech of brakes and disgorged a small army of men in suit jackets and blacksmith aprons. I presume they wore pants underneath the aprons, but I wasn’t about to go verifying that to be sure. The entourage clomped up the stairs, filed through our living room, and into the bathroom. It was tough to see through all the people, but Sadie seemed to have done a great job sucking up all the dust, and the only thing that remained of the mess was the contraption in the bathtub. My heart leapt that I might, once these people cleared out, recover my washroom.

Laura gave me a quick peck on the cheek as she brushed her way past into the bathroom. "Showtime," she said as she, Eli, and Sadie squeezed as deep into the room as they could and stood next to the window and the smoking drum.

A tall, severe gentleman in a suit without a blacksmith’s apron was standing next to Laura, looking the machine up and down like he was going to buy it.

I was under the impression that she had been working on a vaporizer. Eli turned some knobs on the drum from which tendrils of smoke drifted. I had the fleeting thought that perhaps blacksmiths, breathing in the particularly sooty air in which they worked were susceptible to lung infections and needed nebulizers. Sadie had had one when she was small and breathed like Darth Vader when she was sucking on it, surrounded by a crisp fog. When Laura and Sam started working out of the house and monopolized our tub I assumed the vast amounts of vapor puffing from beneath the door contained enough medicine to cure the harshest lung infection.

"Gentlemen," Laura began and the low murmur of voices grew softer. "Hello. Welcome."

The crowd settled down. I gave Sadie a little wave from outside the room, but I don’t think she saw me through the aproned mob.

"I don’t want speeches. Where’s Sam? Is this finished?" said the tall thin man, the one not wearing an apron.

"It’s nearly finished, Director." Laura flushed. "I was just going to give a quick demonstration of the machine, to show off our progress thus far. Sam is, uhh, indisposed, and couldn’t make it today." She flipped a switch on the side of the machine closest to herself.

The thing began to hum softly, as if it knew the tune of the song but none of the words.

"These men are here to bring the machine back to the Village. Your deadline was last week."

"But it’s not quite done yet. If you wait just a moment I’ll have a demonstration of what we have so far."

A lanky blacksmith sidled up to me. He held down his apron in an unusually prim manner with one hand. "Gotcher popcorn?" he said.

I looked at him in what I hoped was an impassive manner.

"Hey, are... there’s no way. You’re Billy Murphy." I couldn’t make out if it was a question or a statement. "Cool," he said. He nodded his head and looked back to my girls.

Eli had stepped in between Laura and the Director, either to give Laura more time to sort out what it is she had wanted to show off, or to prevent Laura from gouging his eyes out. Laura fiddled with some dials and a few levers on the frame, and the humming got louder, and started to lose even the tune of the song, or perhaps started its own song. Sadie clung to the leg of her mother’s jeans. The six or so blacksmiths crammed nearest the exhibit began to fidget as little gulps of vapor puffed from one end of the machine.

At one point, the point at which everything went wrong, I think, a few things happened:

• Eli had her finger up in the Director’s face and was quite likely lecturing him on something or another, her visage twisted in the passionate, malleable version of Munch’s The Scream I’d seen a few times, and I guess was either her professorial tendency to lecture or her impatience with people who didn’t have famous ancestors on whose laurels they could rest.
• Laura leaned over the tub to flip one ivory-handled lever up, and stumbled ever so slightly, possibly due to the weight of Sadie clutching tight to her leg.
• The Director, apoplectic that this woman was shoving her finger in his face, surged forward, into Eli’s arm, pushing her backwards.
• The kid next to me reached inside his apron, pulled his cupped hands out, and released a tiny blue-winged butterfly just over the threshold of the bathroom.

I saw him release the butterfly and remember being distracted long enough that, when I returned my attention to the scene, the humming had reached a screaming pitch. A gigantic soap bubble stretched across what I thought of as the doorway in the apparatus in our tub. Laura was straightening herself back up when Eli tumbled into her. Laura’s hand clamped tight on Sadie, clutching her to her leg as they teetered over the tub.

The Director lunged at the girls. I’m not sure if he was trying to prevent them from falling or escaping, but he looked like he was about to fight all three of them, using Eli as a battering ram. Sensing the fight, the blacksmiths crowded in the doorway surged forward, which clogged up the door and my way in.

I tore two smiths off the back of the pile before the guy next to me, butterfly guy, put his hand on my shoulder again. And then it all went wrong.

#

Laura hit the bubble first, and the rainbow sheen of it curved around her body, sucked her in, followed by Sadie, who was attached to her mom as if by super-glue. Eli crashed into the last bit of Sadie not in the tub, and she stumbled over the edge, as well, her arms cast upwards to protect her face as if she were going through a pane of glass. The bubble stretched and stretched as it swallowed the girls up.

The machine shrieked, the humming pleasant in retrospect, as the bubble grew until it burst. A violent mist exploded out, knocking the blacksmiths in the bathroom back against the walls, including the Director, who crumpled near the toilet, clutching his arm, half of which seemed to be missing. A stream of blood dripped down from his temple.

This was the last thing I saw before the vapor blasted out into the hallway, like we were in the midst of a candle being blown out. It would be the last time I saw Laura and Sadie.

Next Chapter: Chapter Three