“But I mean physically,” Bev said now. “Are you physically okay? You still bleeding at all? The incision still sore?”
“Tender,” Dottie said, and lit a cigarette.
“Hate to see you smoking again,” Bev added, lighting up herself, and Dottie simply tossed her a disparaging look that said clearly she was one to talk. “You were my inspiration,” Bev explained. “I always figured when the day came to quit I could do it because you had.”
“Well, I’m not inspiration for anything,” Dottie said, placing her cigarette carefully in the glass ashtray, then touching her finger quickly to her tongue before flipping through a stack of invoices. “You can forget that, thank you very much.”
Fat Bev exhaled slowly and studied her fingernails. “How’s Wally? He being nice about all this stuff?”
“What stuff?”
“You having a hysterectomy and everything. You hear sometimes about how men get queer. I knew a man who actually cried when the doctor said he’d taken out his wife’s ovaries. Great big brick of a man actually broke down and cried. And then never slept with her again.”
“They’re babies, all of them.” Dottie reached for her cigarette.
“Yuh, I guess that’s true.” She ought to come right out and tell Dottie that she was having trouble believing the UFO thing, and that she felt bad about it. They’d been friends so long they ought to be able to talk this one through.
“Whew,” said Bev, leaning across her desk toward Dottie. “My insides are going bonkers.” She scraped her chair back and stood up. “ ‘Scuse me,” she said, “while I try and shit a watermelon.”
She saw tears spring to Dottie’s eyes, and if it weren’t for the fact that she feared this watermelon might explode, Bev would have sat back down.
“STACY HAD HER baby,” Amy said.
Isabelle looked up from her plate and gazed open-faced at Amy. “She did?”
Amy nodded.
“She did?” Isabelle repeated. “She had the baby?”
“Yes. She had the baby. Her mother called.” Amy stood up and began clearing away the dishes.
“Tell me.” Isabelle’s eyes followed Amy back and forth, her face pale and importuning.
“There’s nothing to tell,” Amy responded with a slight shrugging of her bare young shoulders, which glimmered as she reached forward in her sleeveless shirt. “She had the baby. The end.” It was odd, speaking to her mother the way she sometimes did these days, openly rude, contemptuous. Before this summer she would not have dared.
“It’s hardly the end,” Isabelle said. “Hardly that.”
Amy didn’t answer, hating the way her mother could make pronouncements this way—smug, know-it-all remarks dropped casually into the humid air of the kitchen. “I know a thing or two that you don’t know,” her mother would sometimes say when Amy was growing up, then leave it at that—as though, in the superiority of knowledge and experience that was rightfully hers, Isabelle found Amy not worth explaining things to.
“Does Stacy ever talk about it?” Isabelle asked tentatively, twisting part of her paper napkin into a tight roll, glancing from the corner of her eye at Amy, who continued to clear the table.
“Talk about what.”
“Giving the baby up.”
Amy’s face went blank for a moment, as though she couldn’t recall what Stacy might have said. “I think she was scared about the birth part,” she admitted, moving the plates into the kitchen sink. “She never exactly said it, but I think she was scared it would hurt. Her mom told me she did okay, though.” Amy pictured the woman in the movie that Stacy’s father had brought home; a face twisted ferociously, the deep grunts of pain. “Does it hurt that much?” Amy turned from the sink, asking her mother this question with sudden sincerity.
“It’s uncomfortable, certainly.” Isabelle stopped twisting the napkin and looked out the window. Her face—in the glance Amy had of it before she turned away—looked troubled and exceedingly vulnerable; Amy felt a jolt of anxiety: her mother was trying not to cry.
For a brief while there was only the sound of dishes being washed, water running, the squeak of the faucet as it got turned off, silverware dropped into the dish drainer.
Isabelle spoke. Amy, standing at the sink, could tell from the sound that her mother was still looking out the window. “So Stacy never talked about what it felt like, that she was giving the baby up?”
“No.” Amy did not turn around. She rinsed a cup under the faucet, put it in the drainer. “But I sometimes wondered,” Amy added truthfully. “I mean, she might walk past it on the street when she’s forty-five years old and not even know it. That’s pretty weird, I think. But I never asked her if she thought of that.”
There was no answer from Isabelle.
“I just didn’t think I should ask her, you know.” Amy turned, her hands still soapy in the water. Her mother was still looking out the window, her flattened French twist losing its shape at this time of day, straggles of hair slipping from it down her long white neck.
“Mom?”
“No. I think you were right not to ask.” Isabelle turned, smiling apologetically, for there were indeed tears on her cheeks. She patted her face quickly with the napkin that was still in her hands. “No, you were quite right,” she repeated. “One doesn’t ask needless questions that might cause people pain.” She seemed to be recovering herself now, blowing her nose, rising from the table, dropping the napkin into the wastebasket.
“You should go visit her,” Isabelle stated, clearing the few things that had been left on the table. “What hospital is she in?”
“You mean visit her in the hospital?”
“Well, yes. I think so. I really do.”
“She’s in Arundy. Not Hennecock.” Amy rinsed another cup, moving her body aside as her mother placed more silverware in the sink.
“Call up and see about visiting hours,” Isabelle said officiously, wiping at the counter with the sponge. “I’ll drive you over tonight. Don’t worry,” she added, as though reading Amy’s mind, “I won’t come in with you. I’ll stay in the car.”
“You sure?” Amy asked. “You wouldn’t mind?”
“Go.” Her mother motioned with her head. “Change your shirt, that one looks a little grimy.” (In fact it revealed the young glimmering shoulders of the girl in a way that made Isabelle slightly uncomfortable.) “I’ll call the hospital for you.”
When Amy descended the stairs a few minutes later with a fresh blouse and her hair combed—it had grown just enough now to curl below her ears—she found Isabelle standing in the kitchen going through the cupboards. “Eight o’clock,” Isabelle said. “But you need to take her something.”
“Like what,” Amy said. “I don’t know what to take her.”
“Here it is.” Isabelle brought a small basket from the cupboard. “Let’s take some flowers from the garden and bring her this.”
For the next few minutes they worked together; or rather Isabelle worked while Amy watched. Isabelle lined the basket with aluminum foil, and then taking a trowel they went down the back steps to the garden, where Isabelle knelt and dug up a small clump of marigolds and bluebells, tucking the soil tightly into the basket. She worked with a certain fervor, sweat stood out above her lip and also in the pockets below her eyes; Amy, watching her mother’s face, had to look away.
“They’ll last a little longer this way,” Isabelle said, straightening up, wiping her face with the back of her hand, “than if we just picked them.”
“Plus it looks nicer.” Amy gazed at the basket, impressed.
“Does look nice, doesn’t it.” Isabelle squinted at the basket as she turned it slowly around. They went back inside the house, where Isabelle found some white ribbon that she tied in a bow around the basket’s handle, and then with the shears (neither she nor Amy remembered at the moment that these were the shears that had cut Amy’s hair) she curled the ends of the ribbon, so that two white springy curls dangled above the blue and yell
ow flowers.
THE HOSPITAL WAS private and not old. It looked more like some discreet modern office building than a hospital. Sprawled back from the road, it was only two floors high and a series of small windows ran in straight lines across its cement walls. The front doors were made of glass, but darkened, and to the anxious Amy peering through the windshield, they appeared somewhat formidable. Isabelle parked in the corner of the parking lot.
“What do I do?” Amy asked, holding the basket of marigolds and bluebells on her lap—a moistness was beginning to creep through and be felt on her thigh. “I’ve never been inside a hospital before.”
“Just tell them you’re here to see Stacy what’s her name.”
“Burrows. Do they let kids in?”
“You’re sixteen,” Isabelle said, her eyes running lightly over Amy, appraising her. “But if anyone asks I suppose you could try and say you’re eighteen. You could pass.”
Amy glanced at her mother; it was unusual for Isabelle to suggest any kind of lie. She started to open the door, then hesitated. “What if in Stacy’s case—I mean because she had a baby and she’s not supposed to—they don’t allow her any visitors?”
Isabelle looked blank. “That would be wrong of them,” she said.
“Yeah, but what if.”
“Then say you’re family. If you have to.”
“Okay.” Again Amy hesitated. “What’re you going to do? Do you have anything to read?”
Isabelle shook her head. “Go on.”
Watching Amy walk across the parking lot (the navy-blue shorts from Sears looked nice with that white blouse) Isabelle suddenly recognized in Amy’s step a certain tentativeness that had been there even as a small child. In the pleasing symmetry of the legs walking now away from her, Isabelle saw the familiar slight turning-in of Amy’s right foot; a whisper of shyness emerged—as it always had—with this barely noticeable imperfection of gait, as though the girl carried with her the delicate, unspoken words “I’m scared.” It caused a shiver to pass through Isabelle, for it was odd to see momentarily both images at once: the back of the full-grown person with a basket of flowers in her hand, and the small, curly-haired girl walking up the driveway to Esther Hatch’s house, clutching in her tiny fingers the head of a plastic doll.
NO ONE ASKED Amy anything. In the quiet corridors the nurses seemed sleepy, indifferent, waving a hand vaguely to give directions.
Stacy was alone. She sat propped up in bed with a blank, expectant look on her face, which broke into amazement at the sight of Amy. “Hi,” Stacy said. “Oh my God, hi.” She reached her arms out like a child asking to be picked up, and the basket of flowers risked getting crushed in a jumble of nervous laughing and bending and kissing but was saved at the last minute and made it safely into Stacy’s lap. She examined the basket with shining eyes.
“Amy, it’s so pretty.”
Together the girls looked at the little garden there in Stacy’s lap, the vigor of the marigolds, the vaguely-beginning-to-droop reticence of the bluebells. “My mother made it for you,” Amy said.
“Your mother?”
Amy nodded.
“That’s pretty fucking strange.”
Amy nodded again.
“Parents are so weird.” Stacy shook her head slowly, placing the basket on her bedside table. “My parents were real nice when I went into labor, and then this afternoon when I started to get bored—because these fuckhead doctors make you stay here three days—I asked my parents if I could rent the TV here and they said no, they didn’t think so.”
“How come?”
“Who knows. Look, they bind your breasts.” Stacy opened her hospital gown to show Amy how beneath her nightgown her breasts had been wrapped in strips of white cloth. “Hurts like piss.”
“Your parents did that?”
“No, the nurses. Because my milk will come in or something.”
Amy turned and looked around the room; it was angular, sterile, disappointing. She sat tentatively on the edge of a blue vinyl chair that was pushed against the wall, but Stacy said, “No, no. Sit here,” patting the bed and moving her legs over.
Amy got up and sat down on the bed. “You look the same,” she said, studying her friend. “But you still look pregnant.” Through the sheet there was the visible rising of Stacy’s abdomen.
“I know. It takes a while for the uterus to go back down, or something. I’m having these un-fucking-believable period pains. A couple hours ago I had to pee so they put me on this bedpan and this whole clump of bloody stuff came slipping out the size of a grapefruit. I figured I was dying but the nurse says it’s just afterbirth. I guess that’s the stuff the cats eat. I mean, you know, if I was a cat.”
They were silent for a moment. Then Amy said, “Well. It’s good you’re not a cat.”
“Really.” Stacy fiddled with a button that hummed when she pressed it, making the head of the bed rise higher so she was almost sitting up. “Here,” she said, moving over more so that Amy now sat (or half lay) on the bed beside her.
“Let me do it.” Amy pressed the button herself and their torsos moved downward. She pressed again and they came back up. “Where’re your parents?” she asked.
“Home, I guess. I think my mother was drinking all day.” Stacy gazed at Amy’s feet on top of the sheets. “She was supernice and then she fell asleep in that chair. My father dragged her home, stumbling out of here. I think she was really drunk.”
Amy pressed the button and their feet rose slowly. “I didn’t know your mother drank. Mr. Robertson’s mother drank.”
“Who’s Mr. Rob—Oh yeah, that substitute guy. My mother drinks on special occasions.”
Amy sent their feet back down and looked at the ceiling; it was made of white cardboardy stuff with little holes in it. “Anyone tell Paul yet?”
“My mom. He wanted to come to the hospital but we said no way.”
“I saw him the other day,” Amy offered. “He gave me a ride in his new car.”
Stacy waved a hand tiredly in the air. “Paul,” she said. “I don’t want to think about Paul.”
“Okay.” Amy still looked at the ceiling. “I stopped working at the mill. The boss, this asshole Avery Clark, hates me, so he said they ran out of money. You should see him, Stacy. He’s like the most boring guy. You know he hasn’t had sex except maybe once or twice in his life, just to have a kid.”
“You might be surprised,” Stacy said. “People are weird. People have all kinds of secrets you’d never dream of. My father had a patient once—not in Shirley Falls—who was like Mr. Proper, Mr. Normal. He owned a bank or something. And he used to pay really expensive prostitutes just to get naked and roll an egg down a hallway toward him.”
Amy turned her head toward Stacy.
“Weird, huh,” Stacy said. “No sex, just roll an egg down this hallway. I heard my father tell my mother about it one night.”
“I thought psychiatrists weren’t supposed to tell anyone what gets told to them.”
“Bullshit,” Stacy said. “Never trust a shrink. I like your sandals. I’ve always liked those sandals.”
Together they gazed down at Amy’s feet. “I’ve always hated them,” Amy said. “I hate all my clothes. Like these queer shorts from Sears just because my mother won’t let me wear cutoffs.”
“Clothes,” Stacy mused. “In a little while I can wear normal clothes.”
“I hate my mother,” Amy said, suddenly overcome with intense dislike for her shorts. “I mean it was nice of her to make you the basket of flowers, but she’s really a queer. I hate her.”
“Yeah,” Stacy said casually. “I hate my mother too.” She turned her face toward Amy’s. “You know what?” she whispered. “One of the nurses let me hold the baby. I wasn’t supposed to but one of the night nurses really early this morning snuck him in for a while and let me hold him.”
Stacy’s blue eyes stared into Amy’s.
“He’s beautiful,” Stacy whispered. “On your way out take a p
eek through the glass into the nursery. He’s in the back row, right-hand corner. The nurse told me. You’ll know which one he is ’cause he has this huge head of reddish hair.” Stacy shook her head. “He’s really beautiful.”
THEY DROVE HOME in silence. “She’s fine,” Amy had said when she stepped into the car, and after that nothing. Amy kept her face turned toward her window, and Isabelle, who opened her mouth once or twice to ask something, closed it instead. It was dark now. They passed by houses, back lawns, above-ground swimming pools seen dimly through the hazy glow of streetlights and headlights and lights from the windows of the houses themselves.
Where was Mr. Robertson?
The car ahead of them put its blinker on and turned off at the next exit, the small red light still winking as it went down the ramp. Then for a while there were only trees they drove by, spruce trees and pines standing there in the dark. In this milky evening darkness Amy sat silently next to her mother and imagined herself naked, rolling an egg down a long pine-floored hallway where a normal-looking man in a business suit (like one of the deacons who passed the collection plate at church) crouched with desperate longing on his face. “One more,” he whispered, begging her, “roll one more,” and she would; she would be good at it, taking her time, gazing back at him indifferently. The smell of the river came to her then; they were entering Shirley Falls.
“I saw the baby,” she told Isabelle. “I wasn’t allowed to but Stacy told me where he was, so I peeked at him on the way out.” She did not tell her mother that she had stood in the hospital corridor whispering a prayer through the glass, giving the sleeping red-haired baby a blessing that he would never in his lifetime know about, telling him that she had watched him grow in his mother’s stomach out in their lunchtime spot in the woods, and pledging her love to him forever.
Isabelle said nothing. They drove up their dark driveway in silence.
Chapter