Bree was calling. Norah went downstairs without bothering to put on lipstick or even brush her hair. Her feet were still bare.
“I look awful,” she announced, defiant, entering the room.
“Oh, no,” Ruth Starling said, patting the sofa by her side, though Norah noted, with a strange satisfaction, the glances being exchanged among the others. She sat down obediently, crossing her legs at the ankles, and folding her hands in her lap like she’d done in school as a little girl.
“Paul’s just gone to sleep,” she said. “I won’t wake him up.” There was anger in her voice, real aggression.
“It’s all right, my dear,” Ruth said. She was nearly seventy, with fine white hair, carefully styled. Her husband of fifty years had passed away the year before. What had it cost her, Norah wondered, what did it cost her now, to maintain her appearance, her cheerful demeanor? “You’ve been through such a lot,” Ruth said.
Norah felt her daughter again, a presence just beyond sight, and quelled a sudden urge to run upstairs and check on Paul. I’m going crazy, she thought, and stared at the floor.
“How about some tea?” Bree asked, with cheery unease. Before anyone could answer, she disappeared into the kitchen.
Norah did her best to concentrate on the conversation: cotton or batiste for the hospital pillows, what people thought about the new pastor, whether or not they should donate blankets to the Salvation Army. Then Sally announced that Kay Marshall’s baby, a girl, had been delivered the night before.
“Seven pounds exactly,” Sally said. “Kay looks wonderful. The baby’s beautiful. They named her Elizabeth, after her grandmother. They say it was an easy labor.”
There was a silence, then, as everyone realized what had happened. Norah felt as if the quiet were expanding from some place in the center of her, rippling through the room. Sally looked up, flushed pink with regret.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, Norah. I’m so sorry.”
Norah wanted to speak and set things in motion again. The right words hovered in her mind, but she could not seem to find her voice. She sat silently, and the silence became a lake, an ocean, where they all might drown.
“Well,” Ruth said briskly, at last. “Bless your heart, Norah. You must be exhausted.” She pulled out a bulky package, brightly wrapped, with a cluster of narrow ribbons in tight curls. “We took up a collection, thinking you probably had all the diaper pins a mother could want.”
The women laughed, relieved. Norah smiled too and opened the box, tearing the paper: a jumper chair, with a metal frame and a cloth seat, similar to one she had once admired at a friend’s house.
“Of course, he won’t be able to use it for a few months,” Sally was saying. “Still, we couldn’t think of anything better, once he’s on the move!”
“And here,” said Flora Marshall, standing up, two soft packages in her hands.
Flora was older than the others in the group, older even than Ruth, but wiry and active. She knitted blankets for every new baby in the church. Suspecting from her size that Norah might have twins, she had knitted two receiving blankets, working on them during their evening sessions and the coffee hour at church, balls of soft bright yarn spilling from her bag. Pastel yellows and greens, soft blues and pinks intermingled—she wasn’t about to lay any bets on whether they would be boys or girls, she joked. But twins, she’d been sure about that. No one had taken her seriously at the time.
Norah took the two packages, pressing back tears. The soft familiar wool cascaded onto her lap when she opened the first, and her lost daughter seemed very near. Norah felt a rush of gratitude to Flora who, with the wisdom of grandmothers, had known just what to do. She tore open the second package, eager for the other blanket, as colorful and soft as the first.
“It’s a little big,” Flora apologized, when the playsuit fell into her lap. “But then, they grow so fast at this age.”
“Where’s the other blanket?” Norah demanded. She heard her voice, harsh, like the cry of a bird, and she felt astonished; all her life she’d been known for her calm, had prided herself on her even temperament, her careful choices. “Where’s the blanket you made for my little girl?”
Flora flushed and glanced around the room for help. Ruth took Norah’s hand and pressed it hard. Norah felt the smooth skin, the surprising pressure of her fingers. David had told her the names of these bones once, but she could not remember them. Worse, she was crying.
“Now, now. You have a beautiful baby boy,” Ruth said.
“He had a sister,” Norah whispered, determined, looking around at all the faces. They had come here out of kindness. They were sad, yes, and she was making them sadder by the second. What was happening to her? All her life she had tried so hard to do the right thing. “Her name was Phoebe. I want somebody to say her name. Do you hear me?” She stood up. “I want someone to remember her name.”
There was a cool cloth on her forehead then, and hands helping her lie down on the couch. They told her to close her eyes, and she did. Tears still slipped beneath her eyelids, a spring welling up, she couldn’t seem to stop. People were speaking again, voices swirling like snow in the wind, talking about what to do. It wasn’t uncommon, someone said. Even in the best of circumstances, it wasn’t strange at all to have this sudden low a few days after birth. They ought to call David, another voice suggested, but then Bree was there, calm and gracious, ushering them all to the door. When they had gone Norah opened her eyes to find Bree wearing one of her aprons, the waistband with its rickrack trim tied loosely around her slender waist.
Flora Marshall’s blanket was on the floor amid the wrapping paper, and she picked it up, weaving her fingers into the soft yarn. Norah wiped her eyes and spoke.
“David said her hair was dark. Like his.”
Bree looked at her intently. “You said you were going to have a memorial service, Norah. Why wait? Why not do it now? Maybe it would bring you some peace.”
Norah shook her head. “What David says, what everyone says, it makes sense. I should focus on the baby I have.”
Bree shrugged. “Except you’re not doing that. The more you try not to think about her, the more you do. David’s only a doctor,” she added. “He doesn’t know everything. He’s not God.”
“Of course he’s not,” Norah said. “I know that.”
“Sometimes I’m not sure you do.”
Norah didn’t answer. Patterns played on the polished wood floors, the shadows of leaves digging holes in the light. The clock on the mantel ticked softly. She felt she should be angry, but she was not. The idea of a memorial service seemed to have stopped the draining of energy and will that had begun on the steps of the clinic and had not ceased until this moment.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe. Something very small. Something quiet.”
Bree handed her the telephone. “Here. Just start asking questions.”
Norah took a deep breath and began. She called the new pastor first and found herself explaining that she wanted to have a service, yes, and outside, in the courtyard. Yes, rain or shine. For Phoebe, my daughter, who died at birth. Over the next two hours, she repeated the words again and again: to the florist, to the woman in classifieds at The Leader, to her sewing friends, who agreed to do the flowers. Each time, Norah felt the calm within her swell and grow, something akin to the release of having Paul latch on and drink, connecting her back to the world.
Bree left for class, and Norah walked through the silent house, taking in the chaos. In the bedroom, afternoon light slanted through the glass, showing every inattention. She had seen this disorder every day without caring, but now, for the first time since the birth, she felt energy rather than inertia. She pulled the sheets taut on the beds, opened the windows, dusted. Off came the denim maternity jumper. She searched her closet until she found a skirt that would fit and a blouse that didn’t strain against her breasts. She frowned at her image in the mirror, still so plump, so bulky, but she felt better.
She took time to do her hair too, a hundred strokes. Her brush was full when she finished, a thick nest of gold down, all the luxuriance of pregnancy falling away as her hormone levels readjusted. She had known it would happen. Still, the loss made her want to weep.
That’s enough, she said sternly to herself, applying lipstick, blinking away the tears. That’s enough, Norah Asher Henry.
She pulled on a sweater before she went downstairs and found her flat beige shoes. Her feet, at least, were slim again.
She checked on Paul—still sleeping, his breath soft but real against her fingertips—put one of the frozen casseroles into the oven, set the table, and opened a bottle of wine. She was discarding the wilted flowers, their stems cool and pulpy in her hands, when the front door opened. Her heart quickened at David’s footsteps, and then he stood in the doorway, his dark suit loose on his thin frame, his face flushed from his walk. He was tired, and she saw him register with relief the clean house, her familiar clothes, the scent of cooking food. He held another bunch of daffodils, gathered from the garden. When she kissed him, his lips were cool against her own.
“Hi,” he said. “Looks like you had a good day here.”
“Yes. It was good.” She nearly told him what she’d done, but instead she made him a drink: whiskey, neat, like he liked it. He leaned against the counter while she washed the lettuce. “How about you?” she asked, turning off the water.
“Not so bad,” he said. “Busy. Sorry about last night. A patient with a heart attack. Not fatal, thankfully.”
“Were bones involved?” she asked.
“Oh. Yes, he fell down the stairs. Broke his tibia. The baby’s asleep?”
Norah glanced at the clock and sighed. “I should probably get him up,” she said. “If I’m ever going to get him on a schedule.”
“I’ll do it,” David said, carrying the flowers upstairs. She heard him moving above, and she imagined him leaning down to touch Paul’s forehead lightly, to hold his small hand. But in a few minutes David came back downstairs alone, wearing jeans and a sweater. “He looked so peaceful,” David said. “Let’s let him sleep.”
They went into the living room and sat together on the sofa. For a moment it was like before, just the two of them, and the world around them was an understandable place, full of promise. Norah had planned to tell David about her plans over dinner, but now, suddenly, she found herself explaining the simple service she had organized, the announcement she had placed. As she talked she was aware of David’s gaze growing more intent, somehow deeply vulnerable. His expression made her hesitate; it was as if he’d been unmasked, and she was talking now to a stranger whose reactions she couldn’t anticipate. His eyes were darker than she’d ever seen them, and she could not tell what was going on in his mind.
“You don’t like the idea,” she said.
“It’s not that.”
Again she saw the grief in his eyes; she heard it in his voice. Out of a desire to assuage it, she nearly took everything back, but she felt her earlier inertia, pushed aside with such great effort, lurking in the room.
“It helped me to do this,” she said. “That isn’t wrong.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t wrong.”
He seemed about to say more, but then he stopped himself and stood up instead, walking to the window and staring out into the darkness at the little park across the street. “But damn it, Norah,” he said, his voice low and harsh, a tone he had never used before. It frightened her, the anger underlying his words. “Why do you have to be so stubborn? Why, at least, didn’t you tell me before you called the papers?”
“She died,” Norah said, angry now herself. “There’s no shame in it. No reason to keep it a secret.”
David, stiff-shouldered, didn’t turn. A stranger, holding a coral-colored robe over his arm in Wolf Wile’s department store, he had seemed strangely familiar, like someone she had once known well and hadn’t seen for years. Yet now, after a year of marriage, she hardly knew him at all.
“David,” she said, “what is happening to us?”
He did not turn. Scents of meat and potatoes filled the room; she remembered the dinner, warming in the oven, and her stomach churned with a hunger she had denied all day. Upstairs, Paul began to cry, but she stayed where she was, waiting for his answer.
“Nothing’s happening to us,” he said at last. When he turned, the grief was still vivid in his eyes and something else—a kind of resolution—that she did not understand. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill, Norah,” he said. “Which, I suppose, is understandable.”
Cold. Dismissive. Patronizing. Paul was crying harder. The force of Norah’s anger wheeled her around and she stormed upstairs, where she lifted the baby and changed him, gently, gently, all the time trembling with rage. Then the rocking chair, buttons, the blissful release. She closed her eyes. Downstairs, David moved through the rooms. He, at least, had touched their daughter, seen her face.
She would have the service, no matter what. She would do it for herself.
Slowly, slowly, as Paul nursed, as the light faded, she grew calm, became again that wide tranquil river, accepting the world and carrying it easily on its currents. Outside, the grass was growing slowly and silently; the egg sacs of spiders were bursting open; the wings of birds were pulsing in flight. This is sacred, she found herself thinking, connected through the child in her arms and the child in the earth to everything that lived and ever had. It was a long time before she opened her eyes, and then she was startled by both the darkness and the beauty all around: a small oblong of light, reflected off the glass doorknob, quivering on the wall. Paul’s new blanket, lovingly knit, cascading like waves from the crib. And on the dresser David’s daffodils, delicate as skin and almost luminous, collecting the light from the hall.
IV
ONCE HER VOICE DWINDLED TO NOTHING IN THE EMPTY parking lot, Caroline slammed the car door and started picking her way through the slush. After a few steps, she stopped and went back for the baby. Phoebe’s thin wails rose in the darkness, propelling Caroline across the asphalt and past the wide blank squares of light, to the automatic doors of the grocery store. Locked. Caroline shouted and knocked, her voice weaving with Phoebe’s cries. Inside, the brightly lit aisles were empty. A discarded mop bucket stood nearby; cans gleamed in the silence. For several minutes Caroline stood silently herself, listening to Phoebe’s cries and the distant rush of the wind through the trees. Then she pulled herself together and made her way to the back of the store. The rolling metal door off the loading platform was closed, but she walked up to it anyway, aware of the scent of rotting produce on the cold, greasy concrete where the snow had melted. She kicked hard at the door, so satisfied by its booming echo that she kicked it several more times, until she was breathless.
“If they’re still in there, honey, which I kinda doubt, they aren’t going to be opening up anytime soon.”
A man’s voice. Caroline turned and saw him standing below her, on the ramplike decline that allowed tractor trailers to back into the loading area. Even at this distance she could tell he was a large person. He wore a bulky coat and a wool knit hat. His hands were shoved into his pockets.
“My baby’s crying,” she said, unnecessarily. “My car battery is dead. There’s a phone right inside the front door, but I can’t get to it.”
“How old’s your baby?” the man asked.
“A newborn,” Caroline told him, hardly thinking, the edge of tears and panic in her voice. Ridiculous, an idea she had always loathed, and yet here she was—a damsel in distress.
“It’s Saturday night,” the man observed, his voice traveling over the snowy space between them. Beyond the parking lot, the street was still. “Any garage in town is likely to be closed.”
Caroline didn’t answer.
“Look here, ma’am,” he began slowly, the steadiness of his voice some kind of anchor. Caroline realized he was being deliberately calm, deliberately soothing; he might even think sh
e was crazy. “I left my jumper cables with another trucker last week by mistake, so I can’t help you that way. But it’s cold out here, like you say. I’m thinking, Why don’t you come sit with me in the rig? It’s warm. I delivered a load of milk here a couple of hours ago, and I was waiting to see about the weather. I’m saying that you’re welcome, ma’am. To sit in the truck with me. Might give you some time to think this through.” When Caroline didn’t immediately respond, he added, “I’m considering that baby.”
She looked across the parking lot then, to its very edge, where a tractor trailer with a dark gleaming cab sat idling. She had seen it earlier, but she had not taken it in, the long dull silver box of it, its presence like a building at the edge of the world. In her arms Phoebe gasped, caught her breath, and resumed her crying.
“All right,” Caroline decided. “For the moment, anyway.” She stepped carefully around some broken onions. When she reached the edge of the ramp he was there, holding up a hand to help her down. She took it, annoyed but also grateful, for she felt the layer of ice beneath the rotting vegetables and snow. She looked up to see his face, thickly bearded, a cap pulled down to his eyebrows and, beneath it, dark eyes: kind eyes. Ridiculous, she told herself, as they walked together across the parking lot. Crazy. Stupid, too. He could be an ax murderer. But the truth was, she was almost too tired to care.
He helped her collect some things from the car and get settled in the cab, holding Phoebe while Caroline climbed into the high seat, then handing her up through the air. Caroline poured more formula from the thermos into the bottle. Phoebe was so worked up that it took her a few moments to realize that food had come, and even then she struggled to suck. Caroline stroked her cheek gently, and at last she clamped down on the nipple and started drinking.
“Kinda strange, isn’t it,” the man said, once she had quieted. He had climbed into the driver’s seat. The engine hummed in the darkness, comforting, like some great cat, and the world stretched away to the dark horizon. “This kind of snow in Kentucky, I mean.”