“How’re the hands?” I hear my father ask.
“A little numb,” she says.
“Keep the ice on them. I should have told Nicky I was sleeping here before you both went to bed.”
“I didn’t see you.”
I slide down the wall and sit on the floor. I draw my knees up to my chin.
“You warm enough?” my father asks.
“I’m all right,” Charlotte says.
I imagine Charlotte with her head tilted back against the cabinets, possibly with her eyes closed.
“You’ll be going tomorrow,” my father says after a time. “The plow should get here in the afternoon.”
There is a long silence in the kitchen.
“It was never our plan to abandon the baby,” Charlotte says. “I want you to know that.”
My father says nothing.
“James just kept saying, ‘We’ll take it one step at a time.’ That’s what he’d say whenever I’d mention the future. I thought he would know what to do when the time came. He’d worked in a hospital for a semester, and he was going to medical school.”
I hear the clink of ice cubes in a plastic bag. I’m breathing so shallowly I have to take a gulp of air.
“I suppose you thought you loved him,” my father says.
“I did love him,” she says.
“You’re how old?” my father asks.
“Nineteen.”
“Old enough to think for yourself. Didn’t it ever occur to you that you might be endangering the life of the child by not telling anyone beforehand?”
“You mean, like, a doctor,” Charlotte says.
“Yes, a doctor.”
“I thought about it,” Charlotte says. “I went to the library and read about pregnancy and birth. I was sick during the early part of the summer. Morning sickness, except that it lasted all day. I was worried about that. But if I went to a doctor, I was afraid either my parents would find out or the school would.”
“There are clinics,” my father says.
It’s cold in the hallway, and I don’t have the sleeping bag. I draw myself together in a ball.
“I worked as a temp with an insurance agency,” Charlotte says. “I moved from office to office, subbing for people who went on vacation. I was living with James by then. My parents thought I was sharing an apartment with another girl. Once they came to visit, and we had to put all of James’s stuff in his car for the weekend. My father found an issue of Sports Illustrated in the bathroom, and I had to go on this riff about how I’d just become a baseball fan.”
Charlotte pauses.
“In the fall,” she continues, “I pretty much stopped going to my classes. I took long walks, and I learned to cook a couple of things.”
“You were playing house,” my father says dismissively.
“I suppose.”
“Where do your parents live?”
Charlotte doesn’t answer.
“I’m not going to call them, if that’s what you’re worried about,” my father says.
“No, it’s just that . . .”
“I’m not going to call in the police either,” he adds. “If I were going to do that, I’d have done it already. That’s a decision you’re going to have to make.”
In the hallway I begin to shiver from the cold. I want to blow on my hands, but I don’t dare for fear of giving myself away. My father will be furious if he finds out I am listening.
“They live in Rutland,” Charlotte says.
“Vermont?”
“Yes. They worked in a paper mill,” Charlotte says. “They got laid off. Now my mother works at a drugstore, but my father’s still unemployed.”
“Paying for school must have been a struggle,” he says.
“One of my brothers is helping. Was helping. And I had loans, though I probably don’t anymore.”
“And the car?”
“It was my brother’s. His old one. He gave it to me.”
“Where’s the school?”
“UVM.”
“You’re a long way from Burlington,” my father says.
I know where Burlington is. I’ve skied Stowe, which isn’t far from the northern Vermont city.
“When the labor started,” Charlotte says, “we got in the car. James wanted to get as far away from the college as possible. And then the labor stopped for a while, so we kept going. When it started up again, we looked for signs for a motel. That was James’s plan. To go to a motel and have the baby ourselves. If there was any sign of trouble, James said, he’d make sure we’d be only a few minutes away from a hospital. But if we didn’t have to go, why should we risk it?”
My father makes a sound of disgust.
“And yes,” Charlotte says, “I guess I was playing house. I convinced myself that James and I would get married, and I’d have the baby, and we’d live in his apartment, and he’d go to medical school, and everything would be great. The fact that it was secret just made it . . . just made it seem all the more romantic.”
I imagine my father shaking his head.
“And no matter what happened afterward,” Charlotte says with a quaver in her voice, “or what happens from here on out . . .” She takes a breath to collect herself. “That will always be a good memory for me. The time I spent with her. With the baby. Because she was inside me, and I talked to her, and . . .”
I hear a rip of paper towel.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte says.
“Here, use this,” I hear my father say.
Charlotte blows her nose. “Thank you,” she says.
“Where’s he from?” From the sound of my father’s voice, it seems that he’s leaning against the counter again.
“You won’t . . . ?”
“I told you I wouldn’t.”
“His father’s a doctor. They live just outside of Boston. I’ve never met them.”
“He didn’t want his parents to know.”
“That’s the thing he was most afraid of.”
“How was he going to explain you and the baby? Eventually?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
My father clears his throat. “Are you thinking about trying to get the baby back?” he asks.
“Part of me wants to,” Charlotte says.
“Can you take care of her?”
“No.”
“I don’t know the law,” my father says. “I don’t know if they would give her to you. Even after whatever happens in court.”
“When she was inside me, I wanted her so much,” Charlotte says.
“Charlotte,” my father says, his voice low. It’s the first time he has used her name, and it shocks me. “You have your whole life in front of you. No, don’t look away. Listen to me. There will be consequences whatever you decide. Hard consequences. Things you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life. But think first. Think about the baby, about what might be best for her. Maybe you should fight for her, I can’t say. Only you can answer that.”
“You lost a baby,” Charlotte says with a kind of snap.
Her words send an electric zing through the air and around the corner to me. I wait for the sound of footsteps, for the sound of my father leaving the room.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte says at once. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It was different,” my father says.
“Really, I’m sorry,” Charlotte says.
“Very, very different.”
“I know,” Charlotte says, “I know. You weren’t to blame. You didn’t do anything. It just happened to you.”
“You know about the accident,” my father says.
“Yes. Nicky told me.”
“Did she.”
“Just the fact of it. That it happened.”
I hear a creak from upstairs. Wood settling, my father once explained. Even after a hundred and fifty years, the house was still settling into the ground. Burrowing in.
“Maybe you should take those off now,” my father says.
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“I want to tell you what happened in the motel room,” Charlotte says.
“I don’t want to know.”
“Please,” she says. “I want you to understand.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. You found her.”
“Nicky’s asleep?” my father asks.
“She was snoring when I got up.”
My head snaps up. I snore?
“James and I drove a long way,” Charlotte says. “I had to get out once. I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I couldn’t even make it to the woods. I just went on the snowbank. And then there was this terrible shuddering feeling, and I saw that there was blood and . . . other stuff on the snowbank . . . and I got scared, and I started yelling for James. He got out of the car and went white when he saw the blood. I couldn’t get up, the pain from the contractions was so bad, so he hauled me up and got me in the car and we made it to the motel.”
In the hallway I fold my hands like two fists under my chin. My eyes are wide open, even though there’s nothing to see.
“There were maybe two other cars in the lot,” Charlotte says. “Hardly anyone there at all. James went into the office while I stayed in the car. He told me not to yell, so I bit my hand. He came out and got me inside. I can hardly remember what the room looked like. There were these curtains. Green plaid. Ugly.”
“I’ve seen the room,” my father says.
“I lay down on the bed,” she says. “The contractions were every minute or so. There was hardly any time in between. I was grunting. I thought because of the blood the baby would come fast, but it didn’t. It felt like I was there for hours.”
“You didn’t think of getting to a hospital?” my father asks.
“I said once, ‘I need to get to a hospital,’ but the contractions were coming so fast, I thought I would deliver any minute, and I didn’t want it to happen in the car. I was in so much pain, I didn’t know how I’d even get to the car.”
Charlotte pauses. “I didn’t know what it would be like. What was normal to feel. I was scared to death. I thought I was going to die.”
“And what was James doing all this time?”
“Sometimes he sat with me. I remember digging my fingernails into his arm when I was having a contraction. He paced. He’d bought some Demerol from a guy to have on hand for the pain, and he gave me two with a glass of water. And then when it got worse, he gave me two more. I didn’t even care what the right dose was. I’d have taken a hundred of them. I just wanted the pain to go away.”
I can hear my father sighing.
“I started wanting to push,” Charlotte says. “I realized then that I couldn’t get up from that bed and make it to the car. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen in that motel room. And that’s when James really started to fall apart. He kept yelling, ‘What are we going to do? I don’t know what to do.’ So I had to tell him. I had to talk him through it. I asked him if he could see the head. I made him wash his hands. I was just grunting then. I tried to breathe the way they say to in the books, but it didn’t work.”
I wrap my arms around my legs.
“And then I couldn’t stop pushing, and the pain was just unbelievable,” Charlotte says. “I felt as though I was being torn wide open. I was sure I was going to die. I yelled, and it’s amazing someone didn’t hear us.”
In the kitchen there’s a long silence.
“And then she was out,” Charlotte says finally. “The baby was born. James was crying. I told him to pick the baby up and get the mucus out, and she cried right away. She was covered with that white stuff. James thought there was something wrong with her. I told him to cut the cord—the scissors were in my bag in a plastic bag—and he did. And then I told him to wrap her in a towel. I told him to watch for the placenta, the placenta had to come out. There was a lot of pain then, and this surprised me. I think something got torn. I was shivering, and I had a terrible headache.”
There’s another silence.
“I think that’s when I realized how much James didn’t want the baby,” Charlotte says. “I really started to lose it then. I was crying. I told him to pick the baby up and hold her and to check for all her toes and fingers. He seemed calmer then. I said, ‘Give her to me,’ and he did. He just laid her across my stomach. I put my hand on her, but I was drifting by then, drifting in and out. I remember I propped myself up and looked at her. She had her face turned toward me. I had a tremendous feeling of relief. And then I lay back again, just resting for a second. And then I must have passed out.”
“You passed out?” my father asks.
“The next thing I knew was James was in my face, and he was saying, ‘Get up. We have to get out of here. We have to get you to the car.’ And I said, ‘Where’s the baby?’ and he said, ‘She’s in the car. She’s sleeping in the basket we brought. But it’s cold out there, and we have to get going.’
“He helped me up. I was sore and could hardly move. ‘Walk like there’s nothing wrong,’ he said. He locked the door of the motel and kept the key. He put me in the passenger side. He opened the back door and bent over the basket like he was tucking the baby in, checking on her, and he said, ‘She’s sleeping now.’ And I said, ‘I have to feed her.’ And he said, ‘When she wakes up.’ I remember I turned around, and I saw the basket mounded up with the blankets we’d brought, and I thought she was in there. I had to reach around to put my hand on the blankets. James put the key in the ignition and started the car. I drifted off again. I woke once, I don’t know how far we’d gone, and I said, ‘She’s still sleeping?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ That was all. Just ‘Yes.’
“And then I fell asleep again.”
“You never saw her,” my father says.
“Just that one time when she was on my stomach,” Charlotte says.
“Then what happened?” my father asks, his voice steady, even a little relentless.
“When we pulled into the driveway of our apartment, I woke up. I said, ‘Get the baby. Maybe something’s wrong. I don’t hear her.’ And James said, ‘She woke up once. You were sleeping. She’s fine.’ And I said, ‘She did?’ And he said, ‘Let’s get you in first. Then I’ll get the baby.’
“So he came around to my side and helped me out and up the steps and into the apartment, and all the time, I’m saying, ‘I’m fine, just get the baby.’ He helped me get my coat off and I sat down on the sofa, and he went out to get the baby, and that was that.”
The silence is long, and I think that maybe Charlotte has finished her story.
“I must have drifted off again for a few minutes,” Charlotte says after a time, “because when I woke up, James was sitting across from me, and he was crying.”
Charlotte’s voice is so low now, I have to strain to hear her.
“I knew right away it was terrible. I started saying, ‘What is it? What is it?’ And James told me the baby had died. ‘It’s not true!’ I said. ‘I heard her cry.’ He said she was alive for a few minutes, but that she died. He said he tried to revive her, he did CPR or something, but that she was dead. He said he panicked and wrapped her up in a towel and took her out behind the motel and left her body in a sleeping bag he had in the trunk.
“I went crazy. I hit him in the face. I fell on the floor. ‘She might have been alive,’ I kept screaming.
“‘No,’ he said, ‘she wasn’t.’
“‘Then what was in the basket?’ I yelled. And he said, ‘Nothing.’ And I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And he said, ‘I thought you’d go crazy and I wouldn’t be able to get you into the car. I wanted to get you home first.’
“And I said, ‘Home? I’d rather be dead.’”
In the hallway I bend my forehead to my knees.
“And then I realized that James was crying, too, just as much as I was, and that really scared me because then I believed him. I knew it was all true, and, oh God, I was so sad. . . .”
I wrap my arms around my head.
“‘It’s puni
shment,’ I said to James,” Charlotte continues. “‘Punishment for what?’ James said. ‘For doing it the way we did. For not telling anyone. For not going to a hospital. If we’d gone to a hospital, she’d be alive.’ He said we didn’t know that. But I was sure of it. It just made it all so much worse.
“He stayed with me that night and most of the next day. But then he said he had to go home to his parents. It was Christmas break, and he’d already had to make too many excuses why he wasn’t home yet. I said I’d be fine. I wanted him to go. I just wanted to be alone. James packed his duffle bag and said good-bye, and I remember that we didn’t even kiss. I remember thinking, This means something. I knew he wanted to get away from me just as much as I wanted him to go.” She pauses. “He didn’t love me, did he?”
“No,” my father says.
“You wouldn’t do this to someone you loved, would you?”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
Charlotte begins to cry again. After a time, I hear her blow her nose. “About an hour later, I walked into the bedroom to lie down, and the radio was on. I remember this surprised me. I didn’t have the energy to walk around the bed and turn it off. I just climbed in and pulled the covers over my head. When the news came on, I heard something about an abandoned baby being in stable condition. I sat up. The announcer said Shepherd, New Hampshire. I hadn’t known the name of the town where the motel was. I had a map of New England in my car. I went out to get it. I looked up where Shepherd was. I ran back in and got my keys and drove to the store and bought a newspaper. There was a story in it about the baby. I was just so happy. So happy she wasn’t dead.” Charlotte pauses. “And that’s when it hit me. I realized what James had done. He’d left her to die. At first I couldn’t believe it. I told myself that he’d just made a horrible mistake. He’d thought she was dead but she wasn’t really. And then slowly I realized he had to have known she was alive, and still he’d traipsed out into the snow and left her there. I could hardly breathe. I didn’t cry. I couldn’t scream. It was just nothing.”
“He did it deliberately,” my father says. “He knew she was alive.”
Charlotte is silent.
“He planned it all along,” my father says.