She closed her eyes, drifting slowly between sleep and waking. A well deep within her was tapped, released. Her milk flowed and, mysteriously, Norah felt herself becoming a river or a wind, encompassing everything: the daffodils on the dresser and the grass growing sweetly and silently outside, the new leaves pressing open against the buds of the trees. Tiny larvae, white as seed pearls and hidden in the ground, transforming themselves into caterpillars, inchworms, bees. Birds in winged flight, calling. All this was hers. Paul clenched his tiny fists below his chin. His cheeks moved rhythmically as he drank. Around them the universe hummed, exquisite and demanding.
Norah’s heart surged with love, with vast unwieldy happiness and sorrow.
She had not cried about their daughter right away, though David had. A blue baby, he had told her, tears catching in the stubble of his one-day beard. A little girl who never took a breath. Paul was in her lap and Norah had studied him: the tiny face, so serene and wrinkled, the little striped knit cap, the infant fingers, so pink and delicate and curved. Tiny, tiny fingernails, still soft, translucent as the daylight moon. What David was saying—Norah could not take it in, not really. Her memories of the night before were distinct, then blurry: there was the snow, and the long ride to the clinic through the empty streets, and David stopping at every light while she fought against the rippling urge, seismic and intense, to push. After that she remembered only scattered things, strange things: the unfamiliar quietness of the clinic, the soft worn feel of a blue cloth across her knees. The coldness of the examination table slapping her bare back. Caroline Gill’s gold watch glinting every time she reached to give Norah the gas. Then she was waking up and Paul was in her arms and David was beside her, weeping. She glanced up, watching him with concern and an interested detachment. It was the drugs, the aftermath of the birth, a hormonal high. Another baby, a blue one—how could that be? She remembered the second urge to push, and tension beneath David’s voice like rocks in white water. But the infant in her arms was perfect, beautiful, more than enough. It’s all right, she had told David, stroking his arm, it’s all right.
It was not until they left the office, stepping tentatively into the chill, damp air of the next afternoon, that the loss had finally penetrated. It was nearly dusk, the air full of melting snow and raw earth. The sky was overcast, white and grainy behind the stark bare branches of the sycamores. She carried Paul—he was as light as a cat—thinking how strange this was, to take an entirely new person to their home. She’d decorated the room so carefully, choosing the pretty maple crib and dresser, pressing the paper, scattered with bears, onto the wall, making the curtains, stitching the quilt by hand. Everything was in order, everything was prepared, her son was in her arms. Yet at the building entrance, she stopped between the two tapering concrete pillars, unable to take another step.
“David,” she said. He turned, pale and dark-haired, like a tree against the sky.
“What?” he asked. “What is it?”
“I want to see her,” she said, her voice a whisper, yet somehow forceful in the quiet of the parking lot. “Just once. Before we go. I have to see her.”
David shoved his hands in his pockets and studied the pavement. All day, icicles had crashed from the zigzag roof; here they lay shattered near the steps.
“Oh, Norah,” he said softly. “Please, just come home. We have a beautiful son.”
“I know,” she said, because it was 1964 and he was her husband and she had always deferred to him completely. Yet she could not seem to move, not feeling as she did, that she was leaving behind some essential part of herself. “Oh! Just for a moment, David. Why not?”
Their eyes met, and the anguish in his made her own fill with tears.
“She isn’t here.” David’s voice was raw. “That’s why. There’s a cemetery on Bentley’s family farm. In Woodford County. I asked him to take her. We can go there, later in the spring. Oh, Norah, please. You are breaking my heart.”
Norah closed her eyes then, feeling something drain out of her at the thought of an infant, her daughter, being lowered into the cold March earth. Her arms, holding Paul, were stiff and steady, but the rest of her felt liquid, as if she too might flow away into the ditches and disappear with the snow. David was right, she thought, she didn’t want to know this. When he climbed the steps and put his arm around her shoulders, she nodded, and they walked together across the empty parking lot, into the fading light. He secured the car seat; he drove them carefully, methodically, home; they carried Paul across the front porch and through the door; and they put him, sleeping, in his room. It had brought her a measure of comfort, the way David had taken care of everything, the way he’d taken care of her, and she had not argued with him again about her wish to see their daughter.
But now she dreamed every night of lost things.
Paul had fallen asleep. Beyond the window, dogwood branches, cluttered with new buds, moved against the paling indigo sky. Norah turned, shifted Paul to her other breast, and closed her eyes again, drifting. She woke suddenly to dampness, crying, sunlight full in the room. Her breasts were already filling again; it had been three hours. She sat, feeling heavy, weighted, the flesh of her stomach so loose it pooled whenever she lay down, her breasts stiff and swollen with milk, her joints still aching from the birth. In the hall, the floorboards creaked beneath her.
On the changing table Paul cried louder, turning an angry mottled red. She stripped off his damp clothes, his soaked cotton diaper. His skin was so delicate, his legs as scrawny and reddened as plucked chicken wings. At the edge of her mind her lost daughter hovered, watchful, silent. She swabbed Paul’s umbilical cord with alcohol, threw the diaper in the pail to soak, then dressed him again.
“Sweet baby,” she murmured, lifting him. “Little love,” she said, and carried him downstairs.
In the living room the blinds were still closed, the curtains drawn. Norah made her way to the comfortable leather chair in the corner, opening her robe. Her milk rose up again with its own irresistible tidal rhythms, a force so powerful it seemed to wash away everything she had been before. I wake to sleep, she thought, settling back, troubled because she could not remember who had written this.
The house was quiet. The furnace clicked off; leaves rustled on the trees outside. Distantly, the bathroom door opened and shut, and water ran faintly. Bree, her sister, came lightly down the stairs, wearing an old shirt whose sleeves hung down to her fingertips. Her legs were white, her narrow feet bare against the wood floors.
“Don’t turn on the light,” Norah said.
“Okay.” Bree came over and touched her fingers lightly to Paul’s scalp.
“How’s my little nephew?” she said. “How’s sweet Paul?”
Norah looked at her son’s tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. He had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wristband, something that might easily slip off and disappear. She had read about people—where? she could not remember this either— who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to be not yet of the earth, suspended still between two worlds.
“Paul.” She said it out loud, solid and definite, warm as a stone in sunlight. An anchor.
Silently, to herself, she added, Phoebe.
“He’s hungry,” Norah added. “He’s always so hungry.”
“Ah. He takes after his aunt, then. I’m going to get some toast and coffee. You want anything?”
“Maybe some water,” she said, watching Bree, long-limbed and graceful, leave the room. How strange it was that her sister, who had always been her opposite, her nemesis, should be the one she wanted here, but it was so.
Bree was only twenty, but headstrong and so sure of herself that she seemed to Norah, often, the elder. Three years ago, as a junior in high school, Bree had run away with the pharmacist who lived across the street, a bachelor twice her age. People blamed the pharmacist, old enough to know better. They blamed Bree’s wildness on losing her father so suddenly when she was
in her early teens, a vulnerable age, everyone agreed. They predicted that the marriage would end soon and badly, and it had.
But if people imagined that Bree’s failed marriage would subdue her, they were wrong. Something had begun to change in the world since Norah was a girl, and Bree had not come home as expected, chastened and embarrassed. Instead, she’d enrolled at the university, changing her name from Brigitte to Bree because she liked the way it sounded: breezy, she said, and free.
Their mother, mortified by the scandalous marriage and more scandalous divorce, had married a pilot for TWA and moved to St. Louis, leaving her daughters to themselves. Well, at least one of my daughters knows how to behave, she had said, looking up from the box of china she was packing. It was autumn, the air crisp, full of golden raining leaves. Her white-blond hair was spun in an airy cloud, and her delicate features were softened with sudden emotion. Oh, Norah, I’m so thankful to have one proper girl, you can’t imagine. Even if you never marry, darling, you’ll always be a lady. Norah, sliding a framed portrait of her father into a carton, had flushed dark with annoyance and frustration. She too had been shocked by Bree’s nerve, her daring, and she was angry that the rules seemed to have shifted, that Bree had more or less gotten away with it—the marriage, the divorce, the scandal.
She hated what Bree had done to them all.
She wished desperately that she’d done it first.
But it would never have occurred to her. She’d always been good; that was her job. She had been close to their father, an affable, disorganized man, an expert in sheep, who had spent his days in the closed-up room at the top of the stairs, reading journals, or out at the research station, standing amid the sheep with their strange and slanting yellow eyes. She’d loved him, and all her life she had felt a compulsion to make up, somehow: for his inattention to his family; and for her mother’s disappointment in having married a man so alien, finally, to herself. When he died, this compulsion to make things right again, to fix the world, had only intensified. So she went on, studying quietly and doing what was expected of her. After graduation she had worked for six months at the telephone company, a job she’d not enjoyed and had given up quite happily when she married David. Their meeting in the lingerie department of Wolf Wile’s department store, their whirlwind private wedding, had been the closest she’d come to wild herself.
Norah’s life, Bree was fond of saying, was just like a TV sitcom. It’s fine for you, she’d say, tossing back her long hair, wide silver bracelets halfway to her elbow. For me, I couldn’t take it. I’d go nuts in about a week. A day!
Norah smoldered, disdained and envied Bree, bit her tongue; Bree took classes on Virginia Woolf, moved in with the manager of a health-food restaurant in Louisville, and stopped coming by. Yet strangely, when Norah became pregnant, everything changed. Bree started showing up again, bringing lacy booties and tiny silver ankle bracelets imported from India; these, she’d found in a shop in San Francisco. She brought mimeographed sheets with advice on breast-feeding, too, once she heard that Norah planned to forgo bottles. Norah, by then, was glad to see her. Glad for the sweet, impractical gifts, glad for her support; in 1964 breast-feeding was radical, and she’d had a hard time finding information. Their mother refused to discuss the idea; the women in her sewing circle had told her they would put chairs in their bathrooms to ensure her privacy. At this, to her relief, Bree had scoffed out loud. What a bunch of prudes! she insisted. Pay no attention.
Still, while Norah was grateful for Bree’s support, she was, at times, also secretly uneasy. In Bree’s world, which seemed mostly to exist elsewhere, in California, or Paris, or New York City, young women walked around their houses topless, took pictures of themselves with babies at their enormous breasts, wrote columns advocating the nutritional benefits of human milk. It’s completely natural; it’s in our nature as mammals, Bree explained, but the very thought of herself as a mammal, driven by instincts, described by words like suckling (so close to rutting, she thought, reducing something beautiful to the level of a barn), had made Norah blush and want to leave the room.
Now Bree came back in carrying a tray with coffee, fresh bread, butter. Her long hair fell over her shoulder as she bent to put a tall glass of ice water on the table next to Norah. She slid the tray on the coffee table and settled onto the couch, tucking her long white legs beneath her.
“David’s gone?”
Norah nodded. “I didn’t even hear him getting up.”
“You think it’s good for him to be working so much?”
“Yes,” Norah said firmly. “I do.” Dr. Bentley had talked to the other doctors in the practice, and they had offered David time off, but David had refused. “I think it’s good for him to be busy right now.”
“Really? And what about you?” Bree asked, biting into her bread.
“Me? Honestly, I’m fine.”
Bree waved her free hand. “Don’t you think—” she began, but before she could criticize David again, Norah interrupted.
“It’s so good you’re here,” she said. “No one else will talk to me.”
“That’s crazy. The house has been full of people wanting to talk to you.”
“I had twins, Bree,” Norah said quietly, conscious of her dream, the empty, frozen landscape, her frantic searching. “No one else will say a word about her. They act like since I have Paul, I ought to be satisfied. Like lives are interchangeable. But I had twins. I had a daughter too—”
She stopped, interrupted by the sudden tightness in her throat.
“Everyone is sad,” Bree said softly. “So happy and so sad, all at once. They don’t know what to say, that’s all.”
Norah lifted Paul, now asleep, to her shoulder. His breath was warm on her neck; she rubbed his back, not much bigger than her palm.
“I know,” she said. “I know. But still.”
“David shouldn’t have gone back to work so soon,” Bree said. “It’s only been three days.”
“He finds work a comfort,” Norah said. “If I had a job, I’d go.”
“No,” Bree said, shaking her head. “No, you wouldn’t, Norah. You know, I hate to say this, but David’s just shutting himself away, locking up every feeling. And you’re still trying to fill the emptiness. To fix things. And you can’t.”
Norah, studying her sister, wondered what feelings the pharmacist had kept at bay; for all her openness, Bree had never spoken of her own brief marriage. And even though Norah was inclined to agree with her now, she felt obligated to defend David, who through his own sadness had taken care of everything: the quiet unattended burial, the explanations to friends, the swift tidying up of the ragged ends of grief.
“He has to do it his own way,” she said, reaching to open the blinds. The sky had turned bright blue, and it seemed the buds had swollen on the branches even in these few hours. “I just wish I’d seen her, Bree. People think that’s macabre, but I do wish it. I wish I had touched her, just once.”
“It’s not macabre,” Bree said softly. “It sounds completely reasonable to me.”
A silence followed, and then Bree broke it awkwardly, tentatively, by offering Norah the last piece of buttered bread.
“I’m not hungry,” Norah lied.
“You have to eat,” Bree said. “The weight will disappear anyway. That’s one of the great unsung benefits of breast-feeding.”
“Not unsung,” Norah said. “You’re always singing.”
Bree laughed. “I guess I am.”
“Honestly,” Norah said, reaching for the glass of water. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Hey,” Bree said, a little embarrassed. “Where else would I be?”
Paul’s head was a warm weight, his fine thick hair soft against her neck. Did he miss his twin, Norah wondered, that vanished presence, his short life’s close companion? Would he always feel a sense of loss? She stroked his head, looking out the window. Beyond the trees, faint against the sky, she glimpsed the faraway and fading sphere of the m
oon.
• • •
Later, while Paul slept, Norah took a shower. She tried on and discarded three different outfits, skirts that bound her waist, pants that strained across the hips. She had always been petite, slender and well-proportioned, and the ungainliness of her body amazed and depressed her. Finally, in despair, she ended up in her old denim maternity jumper, gratifyingly loose, which she had sworn she’d never wear again. Dressed but barefoot, she wandered through the house, room to room. Like her body, the rooms were spilling over, wild, chaotic, out of control. Soft dust had gathered everywhere, clothes were scattered on every surface, and covers spilled from the unmade beds. There was a clean trail in the dust on the dresser, where David had placed a vase of daffodils, brown already at the edges; the windows were cloudy too. In another day Bree would leave and their mother would arrive. At the thought of this, Norah sat helplessly on the edge of the bed, a tie of David’s hanging limply in her hands. The disorder of the house pressed on her like a weight, as if the very sunlight had taken on substance, gravity. She didn’t have the energy to fight it. What was more, and more distressing, she didn’t seem to care.
The doorbell rang. Bree’s sharp footsteps moved through the rooms, echoing.
Norah recognized the voices right away. For a moment longer she stayed where she was, feeling drained of energy, wondering how she could get Bree to send them away. But the voices came closer, near the stairwell, fading again as they entered the living room; it was the night circle from her church, bearing gifts, eager for a glimpse of the new baby. Two sets of friends had already come, one from her sewing circle and another from her china-painting club, filling the refrigerator with food, passing Paul from hand to hand like a trophy. Norah had done these same things for new mothers time and again, and now she was shocked to find she felt resentment rather than appreciation: the interruptions, the burden of thank-you notes, and she didn’t care about the food; she didn’t even want it.