“Um, not really. But you have some,” she says.
I remember how sick I felt yesterday. I can hear my father shoveling outside.
“But if you have another game or something, I’ll play it with you,” she adds.
“What did you used to do at night?” I ask. “When you lived with James?”
As soon as I ask the question, I’m embarrassed. Probably they had sex all night.
“He’d get home from practice late. We’d eat. We might listen to music for a while. Then he’d study. I might read or watch TV. Sometimes I’d knit.”
“You knit?” I ask, surprised.
She nods.
“I knit all the time,” I say, barely able to contain my excitement. “That hat you wore today? The purple-and-white one? I knit that, like, a year ago.”
“Cool,” she says.
“I never meet anyone who knits. Except old ladies. Marion down at the store knits.”
“Who taught you?”
“My mother.”
“My grandmother taught me,” Charlotte says. “She taught me to knit and to paint and to sew. She used to insist that I speak only French to her.”
“Not your mother?” I ask.
“My mother’s always worked at the mill.” Charlotte puts all the dirty dishes in the sink. She wipes off the trays and sets them onto the top of the fridge. “In the summer James and I would sit in the backyard. The landlord let me have a garden. I had some vegetables, but mostly flowers.”
My father has set the stove to two hundred degrees, which is enough to warm the kitchen, but there are no chairs in the room on which to sit. I return to the den, just as my father is bringing in a load of wood. He sets it by the fire without a word and goes outside again. After a time, Charlotte joins me by the fire.
“What year are you in school?” I ask.
“Sophomore,” she says.
“You won’t go back?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “Not there anyway.”
“Because he might be there?”
“He plays hockey. He’s on a scholarship for it.” She pauses. “He wants to go to medical school.”
“Wow,” I say, picking at the rug.
“It’s why I couldn’t tell anyone,” she says.
“Didn’t anyone notice?”
“I wore loose sweatshirts and sweatpants,” she says. “I had one seminar course, which I dropped. The rest were lecture courses in auditoriums. Eventually I dropped those, too.”
“But didn’t your friends or roommate say anything?”
“I spent all my time at James’s apartment. I hardly ever saw my roommate. Maybe she thought I was putting on weight, I don’t know. I gained weight all over. You probably wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I’m supposed to be skinny.”
I cannot imagine it. Charlotte looks perfect as she is.
“People probably would have begun to notice except that the baby came early,” she says. “A month, I think.”
“You don’t know?” I ask.
“Not really.”
“Your family didn’t know about the baby?”
“My parents would have killed me. They’re strict Catholics. And my brothers—I can’t even think what my brothers would have done.” She shakes her head once quickly. “I know this is kind of hard to understand,” she says, looking straight at me. “But I kind of gave myself over to him. To James.”
“You did?”
“And Nicky?”
“Yes?”
“I wanted the baby. I really wanted it.”
“What’s it feel like?” I ask.
She tilts her head and studies me. “You don’t have anyone to talk to about this, do you?”
“No.”
“You can’t ask your father.”
“No.”
“A friend?” she asks.
I think about Jo, the Viking goddess. “I don’t think she knows any more than I do,” I say.
Charlotte brings her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around them. The position must hurt, though, because she immediately sets her legs to one side. “It’s unlike anything you can ever imagine,” she says.
The world outside our house is silent—no humming of motors, no groans from the furnace, only the fire snaps. Occasionally, through the windows, I can hear the scrape of a shovel against the snow.
“You know that something is, I won’t say wrong, but different,” she says. “Right away. Food doesn’t taste right.” She touches her throat. “There’s a kind of metallic taste right here. Foods you used to like a lot smell bad. And your breasts hurt. They get swollen and tender. And then you realize you didn’t get your period when you were supposed to. So I bought a test. In a drugstore? And there it was, big as life. The pink doughnut.”
I am pretty sure I know what the pink doughnut means.
“I waited another couple of weeks before I told James. By then I wasn’t feeling well. I was queasy, not just in the mornings, either. It’s sort of a headachy, sick-to-your-stomach feeling.”
“So then you told him?” I asked.
“I did,” she says.
“And what did he say?”
“He was shocked at first and kept asking how this could have happened. We had always been pretty careful.” She glances at me to see whether or not I know what being careful means. I nod, though I’m a little fuzzy on the details.
“He paced a lot,” she says. “Sometimes he’d say, ‘What are we going to do?’ and then he’d ask me how I was. He wasn’t happy about it. I think he could see his whole life draining away.”
I hate James even more than I did before. “But what about your life?” I ask. “Did he care about that?”
“He cared,” she says, “of course he cared. He didn’t ask me to get rid of the baby. He’s Catholic, too, and I think he knew enough not to ask me to do that. But he did talk about giving the baby up when it was born. He just kept saying, ‘We’ll take this one step at a time.’” She stops for a moment and arches her back. I have the feeling that it’s hurting her. “The morning sickness goes away, and it feels . . . it just feels . . . so wonderful, I can’t explain it. You feel the baby kick,” she says. “It’s an inside tickle, like gas bubbles moving around. But different. Everything is different from anything you’ve ever felt before. And you feel . . . full. Just full.” She smiles. “Even though you’re always hungry. I craved doughnuts most of all. Nothing on them, just the plain, but hot, with a crispy outside. I ate them with milk.”
Charlotte stretches her legs in front of her and leans back, propping herself up with her elbows. She yawns. “It’ll be different for you,” she says, looking at me. “It will be wonderful and perfect, and it won’t have a bad ending. I’m sure of that.”
Charlotte yawns again. “Thank you for taking me to the place,” she says. “I’m sorry it got you in trouble with your dad.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “He’ll get over it.”
I sit to one side of the fire, poking it from time to time to make the flames burn brighter. I put on another log. I remember that I still need to finish my grandmother’s necklace.
I reach for the flashlight and stand. “I have to go up to my room,” I tell Charlotte, “and get my beads.”
Charlotte yawns again. “The fire is making me sleepy.”
I could find my way without a flashlight, but I use it anyway. I locate the shoebox of beads and rawhide and bring it down to the den. I set it near the hearth so that I can distinguish the beads in the firelight. I rummage around in the box to find a crimp.
“That’s beautiful,” Charlotte says.
“It’s for my grandmother.”
The necklace has six round black Kenyan beads with a silver pendant in the center.
“I’d wear that,” Charlotte says. “You must have a very cool grandmother.”
Charlotte watches me fuss with the crimp, always the hardest part of making a necklace. “I have to fit this rawhide into this little thingy here,” I
say, “and then clamp it down so the rawhide won’t come out. This makes the catch.”
“Oh,” she says.
I slide the end of the fine rawhide into the crimp. I use the crimper to flatten it. When I’m done, I pull on the rawhide to make sure the crimp worked. The rawhide springs free. “Crap,” I say.
I search through the beads in my box for another crimp. I might have one in my desk drawer upstairs, but I don’t want to have to go all the way up there again.
The beads in the box flicker and catch the firelight. I have glass pony beads and crow beads, seed beads and Bali silver beads. “What’s this one?” Charlotte asks, holding a blue glass bead up to the light.
“It’s Czechoslovakian. It’s a fire-polished bead.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s beautiful,” she says.
“You should see it in the daylight. Do you want it?”
“Oh, no,” she says, dropping the bead into the box.
I take it out again. “I have six of them,” I say. “You could make a necklace, too.”
“But they’re your beads,” Charlotte says.
“I have a lot of beads,” I say.
Charlotte looks at me and tilts her head the way she often does. “Thanks,” she says.
I hand her a coil of rawhide. I search the box for the remaining five blue glass beads. The color is hard to detect in the dark, but the beads have a distinctive shape—round and multifaceted. Charlotte sets the beads on the floor and then begins to string them.
I pick up my grandmother’s necklace and hold it up to the firelight. There’s a sheen on the beads and the pendant is perfectly centered.
I glance over at Charlotte. She has strung the beads on the rawhide. “Wait a sec,” I say. “I should have told you. If you do it like that, the beads will slide around and the clasp will end up in the front. What you have to do is put a knot on either side of each bead. Because you have six beads, you have to put your first knot in the exact center of the string.”
I reach over to show her. I make a simple overhand knot.
“Okay,” she says.
I hand her the rawhide. I watch as she slides a bead on. Her delicate fingers make an easy knot, nicely placed. Her hair hangs down around her face, and she has to flip it to one side so that she can see in the firelight. I watch as she strings another bead and another and then begins on the opposite side. It’s a simple necklace to make—they’re all simple, really—but it’s her first, and spacing the knots on the opposite side to match the first side is sometimes a little tricky.
For a while I simply observe. Charlotte’s face is tight with concentration. She must look like this when she’s studying, I think.
When she has strung the last bead, she holds the necklace up to the light. The facets sparkle. “Looks great,” I say.
Charlotte lays the necklace against the small triangle of skin inside the collar of her white shirt and my father’s V-neck sweater.
“You’ll love it in the morning,” I add.
Earlier, when I was rummaging through the box for the six blue beads, I felt a second crimp under my fingers. “I think I’ve got one in here somewhere,” I say, holding the box up and tipping it toward the light. I sift through the beads. A bit of silver catches the light. “So here’s the hard part,” I say.
The telephone rings. Again, it seems wrong in the cozy firelight, as if something from one century had crept into another. I glance over at the kitchen. “Jo again,” I say, standing. “I’ll be right back.”
I walk into the kitchen and pick up the phone. “Hi,” I say.
“Nicky?”
I spin around, my back to the den.
“This is Detective Warren. Is your dad there?”
I hear the rhythmic scrape of the shovel outside. I take a quick breath.
“No,” I say. “He’s in the shower.”
I can hear Charlotte behind me in the doorway.
“Tell him to call me when he gets out, okay?” Warren asks.
“Sure.”
“Let me give you the number.”
Detective Warren gives me a phone number, which I don’t write down.
“Your power out?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Here, too. Stay warm.”
“We will,” I say.
I hang up the phone. I turn and look at Charlotte.
“Oh God,” I say.
“What?” Charlotte asks.
“It was that detective.”
Charlotte’s face is expressionless. “What did he want?”
“He wanted my dad.” I feel breathless with my crime. “I said he was in the shower.”
“I’ll go in the morning,” Charlotte says. “You can’t keep this up.”
I think about how my father drove to the police station in back of the post office, how he intended to tell Chief Boyd. If Chief Boyd had been there, Charlotte would be in jail now.
Charlotte turns and walks into the den. I follow her. She stands a minute by the fire. “Maybe I should go to bed,” she says.
I’m not sleepy in the slightest.
She scans the room. “We’re supposed to sleep here?”
I roll out the two sleeping bags. I put hers closest to the fire because that’s the best spot. I think about everything Charlotte told me. How could a man really love a woman and expect her to give up her baby once it was born? The idea of giving up a baby—never mind leaving it to die—is incomprehensible to me. I can’t imagine it. Wouldn’t it just hurt your whole life, just like losing Clara always hurts me even if I don’t think about it every second? It’s why I’ve had to create the idea of Clara still growing, still alive. It’s where I send my thoughts whenever I start to think about her.
Charlotte climbs into her bag and adjusts her pillow. I sit to one side of the fire, poking it from time to time to make the flames burn brighter. I put on another log. I’m still not sleepy.
Charlotte falls asleep at once. I listen as she begins to snore lightly.
I work on Charlotte’s necklace until I’ve finished it. I set it in the box. In the morning I’ll insist she put it on. I climb into my sleeping bag and stare at the ceiling. I think about morning sickness and the pink doughnut. I wonder about a metallic taste at the back of the throat. I glance over at Charlotte and realize once again that she is the mother of a baby that was left to die. She is sleeping in our house, on the floor, right next to me. She might get caught and go to jail. My father and I might go to jail.
I roll over and watch the fire. I might have to lie awake for hours, I decide. I might have to go find my book and read it with the flashlight.
But after a time, I begin to picture a different future—one in which Charlotte doesn’t get caught; one in which she gets her baby back; one in which she and her baby live with my father and me.
I see this future in great detail. A white crib in the guest room; in the den, an old high chair with a red leather seat that I once saw at Sweetser’s. A blue stroller in the back hallway; in Charlotte’s car, a padded baby seat. I’ll go to school during the day, and when I get home Charlotte will be pacing the back hallway with the baby on her hip. She’ll have on her fuzzy pink sweater and a pair of jeans. She’ll have chocolate-chip brownies waiting for me, and she’ll ask me questions about my boyfriend. She’ll have an errand to do, or maybe she’ll go to school in the evenings, and she’ll ask me to babysit. At night, while we do our homework together, we’ll have to talk quietly so we won’t wake the baby up. Charlotte will take me to Hanover to get my hair frosted, and she’ll drive me and my friends to the movies.
There will be no James.
My father will come around.
I’ll make Charlotte an ankle bracelet, and I’ll knit a blanket for the baby out of the pastel multicolor yarn that Marion is always trying to palm off on me and I never take. No, I’ll make it out of the soft yellow yarn I once saw at Ames in Newport. Charlotte will take me
to the store, and I’ll buy the yarn with my own money. I’m thinking about a basket-weave pattern when the warmth of the fire begins to work on me as it must have done on Charlotte. The last sound I hear is that of my father stomping the snow from his boots in the back hallway.
I wake once during the night—there’s a disturbance—but I’m so tired from the shoveling and the hiking and the nervous atmosphere in the house since Charlotte’s arrival that I go back to sleep almost immediately. I wake again, however, just a short time later, to the sound of voices from the kitchen. I don’t want the voices to be there, I want to slip back into my dream, but the fact of the voices makes me open my eyes. Voices? There are murmurs, long strings of syllables, clipped answers, but I can’t actually hear the words. The fire has mostly gone out, and only a few embers glow. Charlotte, I see, is not in her sleeping bag.
Later I will learn that Charlotte, waking during the night and wanting a glass of milk—and not knowing that my father would be sleeping in the kitchen—tripped over the sleeping bag (with my father in it) and smashed her palms hard into the grillwork on the stove. My father woke and examined Charlotte’s hands. He lit the kerosene lantern and made two ice packs with plastic bags. He told Charlotte to sit on the sleeping bag and lean her back against the cabinet and let the ice do its work on her bruised palms.
I squiggle out of the sleeping bag and walk down the hallway. I see Charlotte cradling the ice packs in her palms. My father is standing in the opposite corner, not far from her because the kitchen is so small. He has his back against the counters where they meet at a right angle. I can see them because of the light from the kerosene lantern, but the hallway is dark and they haven’t yet seen me. I am about to step into the kitchen when I hear Charlotte say, “You shouldn’t blame Nicky for what happened today.”
I stop.
“It was all my idea,” Charlotte adds. “I begged her.”
“She should have known better,” my father says. “You both should have known better.”
I turn away from the kitchen and put my back to the wall.
“It was awful,” Charlotte says.
“I imagine it was,” my father says.
I’m not sure what surprises me more—that my father and Charlotte are in the kitchen together or that they’re actually talking.