by Abi Maxwell
Because the next morning, when Henrietta woke, Alicia was already up, cooking. She’d been up for hours. She had doughnuts frying in the Dutch oven on the cookstove. When she saw Henrietta, she looked out the window and said, “Isn’t it just the thing, doughnuts on the ocean? I got back up last night to make the dough. If I lived here, I would make them every single day.” Also, “Look at that view, if I lived here I’d have to pinch myself all day.” And “So many rooms. If I lived here, I wouldn’t be able to stand all the empty space.”
Still, it was at least another month of Henrietta alone. In that time, she met most of the men at the wharf and the people on the little main road less than a mile from her house. The job was emboldening her. She found she liked the people who lived up on this forsaken spit of land. Her kind of people, she felt. Not the sort to judge, not the sort to go thinking they were any better than she was. She told everyone her name, her real name, knowing it wouldn’t matter anyway. No one was looking for her; no one ever had and no one ever would.
And she might have gone home if they had looked, she thought sometimes. But so what.
Also in that remaining time alone, after rereading all the library books about birth and babies, Henrietta went back to the books the house had—this time, instead of cookbooks, she read the gardening ones, and then as soon as the ground thawed she set right to it. First she weeded all the perennials around the place and heaped compost from the pile into the wheelbarrow and spread it out thick in all the spots she could think to spread it. It reminded her of that old foundation in her woods, of the remnants of plants that surrounded it. Her father had pointed them out: ferns, violets, day lilies, bleeding hearts. He’d said Henrietta and Jane ought to care for them, pour some compost on them and make them flourish. Now, in her new home, Henrietta cleared out the old vegetable beds and turned the soil over and stirred compost into that, too, and she felt so capable. Despite her big belly, it felt so good to move around and use her body in this way. She bought seeds and some starts at the hardware store, and in no time at all she had a garden ready to grow. She met a neighbor who sold sheep meat, so she bought some of that and taught herself to make and hang sausage. She even bought salt from a couple nearby who harvested it right from the ocean. She ate seaweed, she drank the raw milk from the farmer down the road, she taught herself to make a quick, simple cheese. And she grew and grew and grew, and imagined, sometimes, that the baby inside of her would be the strongest being on the whole entire planet.
* * *
—
Henrietta was at work when Alicia called the restaurant to say she’d lost her job. Summer was almost here; there were three tables waiting and the cook was snapping his fingers at her. Her baby was due in just over one month.
“Move in with me,” she said quickly, and by the time she got home that night, Alicia had. She’d just let herself right in.
Even by then, they’d never asked each other about the fathers of their babies. The only words they’d ever spoken on the subject had come from Alicia, and those had only been: “I don’t need someone trying to steal my baby.” Those words exactly. It was as if she had planted them.
* * *
—
Alicia had brought an old black camp trunk with her and that was it. When Henrietta showed her which room she should take, Alicia tipped backward onto the bed and spread her arms out on the quilt and proclaimed that it was so beautiful, that she would rise each morning and make the bed, that she would keep the place so, so perfect. And, in a way, she was telling the truth. She swept the floors, she dusted, she washed the dishes, and all of it while she sang. She was bubbling over with energy and happiness. So much so that one day not a week after she’d moved in she went down to the wharf and invited a man right up for dinner.
“Alicia,” Henrietta scolded.
“I’m not going to sleep with him, for Christ’s sake. Who fucks a pregnant girl? And anyway, how?”
“From behind, I suppose,” Henrietta had said while laughing.
His name was Brian. He worked on his father’s lobster boat, and he’d lived exactly one mile from the wharf for the entirety of his life—twenty-four years, so far. Henrietta had seen him around, had even been introduced to him, but she’d never really spoken with him. They heard his truck approach long before they could see it. He walked in carrying a case of beer, and he tipped his hat and said, “I know this house,” and right away he told them the story. The woman, the one Henrietta was caretaking for, she had been a mistress, her lover a sailor. It was he who had bought the house for her. Supposedly he’d chosen this particular spot because it was the closest they could come to a 360-degree view of the ocean, by which she could watch for her lover’s return.
“So, what happened?” Henrietta asked. “Did he ever leave his wife?”
“Of course he didn’t,” Alicia said, and she was right. Brian pointed west, said the old sailor and the wife still lived right there on the next peninsula.
Brian got a little drunk that night, but he was nice enough, and he was fun to have around. He’d brought a mound of picked clams with him, and they fried them right up. It took some time, but it was worth the wait, they were that delicious.
“What are you two, lesbos?” he asked as they ate. And then, “Did the same man get you pregnant?”
Alicia feigned incredulousness, but Henrietta just sat there, pregnant and full with two strangers in this huge, empty house. She couldn’t think of a thing to say. Soon she would have a baby here with her. She felt it—him, her—kick all the time now. Not so much throughout the day, but around two a.m., religiously, it would do cartwheels in there. Now she put her hands to that growing form that had made her leave her home, and she stared blankly ahead.
* * *
—
Though she’d always slept downstairs, when the weather began to warm Henrietta decided to move into a second-floor bedroom. The baby would be here soon and it just felt homier up there, despite the heat that she knew would come in August. There were two bedrooms on that floor, one just off the top of the stairs and the other at the end of a long hall. There was also a little bathroom with a curious internal window that overlooked the staircase. Once, Henrietta had asked Brian—who was now their friend, and who came over often—about the purpose of that window, and he’d said, “Spying, I suppose.”
A painting hung in that stairwell—Andrew Wyeth’s most famous. It was the very same one that had hung in Henrietta’s own childhood living room, just above the couch. Though Henrietta’s mother had been distant, she had taught Henrietta a few things, so she happened to know that that woman’s name was Anna Christina, and that they shared the last name Olson. As a child, this had made her sister love that painting. Jane used to stand on the couch and stare hard at it, willing herself to leave her own world for that eternal, fictional one.
“You know you’ll just get there and have polio,” Henrietta had snapped at Jane one time.
“No,” Jane had said. “No, I don’t know that.” There was something about the way she’d said it that had always stuck with Henrietta. Her sister hadn’t meant that she didn’t know about the painting’s subject. No, Henrietta was sure that Jane had meant it was foolish to place such limits on an imagined transcendence. Still, back then Henrietta had just laughed her sister off. Now, though, she found herself staring into that painting each time she mounted the stairs, willing herself to drop out of this life and into the unknown, boundless one that her sister had surely envisioned.
The painting wasn’t the only thing that compelled this kind of thought that she’d always cast off as Jane’s sort. Once, Henrietta woke in the night and sat up drenched in sweat, sure that she was surrounded by a pack of wild, hungry, desperate babies. A dream, she decided, but still the sounds would not quit. Finally she mustered the courage to stand up and walk across the hall, to the bathroom. The floor creaked with each step she took
. Once there, rather than turning the light on, she found herself striking a match and lighting the candle that sat in a little iron holder. With it in her hands she tiptoed down the stairs and out the front door. Those sounds were still around her, but by the time she got outside and the candle flickered out she realized it was the ocean pounding on the rocks that she had heard and somehow transformed in her mind. Now, standing out there, the night sky seemed to curve around her so that only she and that house and that sweep of ocean remained, the lone contents of a snow globe. After that first time, she began to escape nightly, soundlessly, so that Alicia never knew. Out there she would stand on the edge of the cliff, the ocean roaring below her, and she would close her eyes and watch, every time, this encapsulated version of herself patting the inside of the glass like a mime, unsure of whether she wanted to emerge or not.
* * *
—
Alicia’s baby was born first. Henrietta drove her to The Birth Room and it all happened so fast, took only two hours. A girl. Alicia wanted to name her Destiny, but Henrietta talked her right out of that. Instead she chose Robin. Henrietta said, “Thank god your favorite bird’s not a killdeer.”
Henrietta, when the time came, had Alicia drive her to the hospital, which turned out to be the right choice because the baby wouldn’t come out. She lasted for twenty hours before they told her she would have to have surgery.
“No,” Henrietta said.
“Who cares?” Alicia said. “You’ll have a baby at the end.”
“But I never wanted a baby,” Henrietta said, delirious but sure.
“Well, then,” Alicia said, “too bad for you.”
They wheeled her away. When they put a drug into her spine, she was sure she was experiencing the best feeling in the entire world. Time passed in some instantaneous but slow-moving block and suddenly a blue baby popped up over the sheet they’d used to guard her view from her own splayed-open, bloody body. The baby was rushed to the metal table. Doctors crowded around, and through a heavy fog Henrietta began to yell after her baby, wanting to know if it was okay, if it was alive. Only then did she realize that Alicia was still at her side, dressed in scrubs. She was holding her hand and repeating, “Your baby’s here, your baby’s here.”
Henrietta named him Charley, for her father, and she spent most of the next two months in a half-sleep with him at her breast.
But despite the exhaustion they had a good summer. Just a month after he was born, Henrietta went to the restaurant a few nights a week, while Alicia watched both babies. She was good at it, ridiculously good. She kept those little beings happy and calm. Sometimes Alicia and Henrietta would go down to the water and sit in the surf in their bikinis, nursing and shading their babies and talking away. During her pregnancy, as a safeguard against stretch marks, Alicia had doused her belly in pure cocoa butter—her most expensive possession—and she continued to smear it on, even after her daughter was born. It made her skin glow and the water bead right up, and one day as they sat there together like two beached whales with their babies on them Henrietta made a little joke about it. She said they could probably see her shiny belly from space.
“Good,” Alicia had said. “Maybe that way someone will finally find me.”
Henrietta couldn’t even bear to ask what she meant.
* * *
—
At a certain point, Brian came over to say he’d had a fight with his father, that he couldn’t live with the man one more day, that he wouldn’t be his dad’s stern man on the boat anymore, and that he was now going to dig clams for work. He’d found a little place to rent, and he wanted Alicia and Henrietta and the babies to come see it.
“No,” Alicia said, the moment they set foot in the place. “No. Live with us.”
And why not? Henrietta agreed that the place he planned to rent was not livable. Dirt for a floor, duct tape and plastic over one front window. Besides, it would be good to have someone as handy as Brian around. The kitchen sink had been clogging, Alicia’s car wouldn’t start, plus a million other small things.
* * *
—
Sometimes Henrietta wondered about the old woman who owned the house, wondered if maybe she shouldn’t call her up to say that her beautiful old place was now a flophouse for young misfits. But what difference would that make? Brian moved in as quickly as Alicia had, but Henrietta liked him. He cooked them food, he did the dishes, he made them laugh, and he always picked up after himself. He was good with Charley, too, bouncing him around, singing, putting on giant, silly expressions to make him smile. Alicia and her baby had taken to long naps in the afternoons, but in the daytime Charley would only ever sleep soundly in his car seat, so during this time Henrietta and Brian began to take leisurely drives along the coast while the baby slept in the backseat. Sometimes they’d drive up into the blueberry barrens, where the land stretched on endlessly in every direction and they had to use a compass to find their way across. They’d go to diners and carry the sleeping baby right in in his car seat and people would mistake them for a happy little family. And how far off was that, Henrietta began to think. Why not, she thought.
* * *
—
Despite the fact that she was the one with a briefcase full of money, Henrietta, during this time, was also the only one who continued to work after the babies were born. Brian still hadn’t gotten his clamming license and Alicia never had looked for another job after the gas station ended. Henrietta thought momentarily of quitting, too, but her job was only three nights a week and she liked doing it. She had a little breast pump from the hospital, and Alicia was happy to babysit, and anyway, she liked earning a little, not spending from that briefcase meant to last a lifetime. Plus, she had a good time with the cook. He was a bit lewd, but so what? One day, she told him she had a crush on Brian.
“Not the only one,” the cook said.
“What do you mean?”
“Alicia, duh.”
“They’re friends. We’re all friends.”
“Sure,” he said.
“What?”
“Two lovebirds at home alone while you earn a living is what.”
* * *
—
It wasn’t like she would ever believe the cook about anything. Still, in spite of herself, that night Henrietta was anxious for her customers to leave, anxious to get home and—and what? She drove home quickly. She found them sitting right up close to each other on the couch, watching the television that Brian had brought with him when he’d moved in. She racked her brain to remember if they had always sat so closely like that.
No good, she couldn’t remember. In fact, just at that moment, she couldn’t even remember what month it was. Alicia seemed fine, but since Charley’s birth Henrietta hadn’t gotten more than even one full hour of uninterrupted sleep, and it was doing insidious things to her mind. She often imagined backtracking, getting far enough back in her own existence to erase her son’s entirely. It was a dream both terrifying and oddly addicting. Also, this: that high spot of cliff out above the ocean, on the far side of the field, just past the blighted apple tree, the one she would go to at night when she’d been pregnant. She could just step off it. That quickly, she could enter into the heaven of an eternal sleep.
* * *
—
When a local man was giving chickens away, Brian suggested they clean up the barn and move them in. This would have been October—nearly one whole year since she’d run away. Charley was four months old now, as sleepless as ever, but she’d lasted the summer at the restaurant and still, oddly, there was business.
“Leaf peepers,” the cook had said. This year more than he’d ever seen. He wouldn’t stop talking about them. He wanted them to go home. He wanted to shut the restaurant down and go back to his cabin and play his guitar in peace. But even he had to admit that the trees were incredible this year, even up here in t
his land of pines. The tamaracks had suddenly transformed to gold, the pale aspens shimmered, and the blueberry bushes that lined the ground had turned a fiery red. It had all begun to glow, so much so that sometimes, Henrietta would look out the kitchen window of her home while she washed dishes and she would let her eyes rest and suddenly she would see that great big old barn bursting up into flames. Over and over again she would see this, yet she would do nothing to stop the vision. She would just keep on watching as a sailor moored out in the cove, rowed his dinghy in, and walked across the field. On his way his slacks would catch on the thorns of the rosebushes and tear; he would lean over to pick a late flower and get stung by bees; and yet still he would press on until he’d arrived at the front door.
“Go away,” Henrietta would say. And then this odd phrase, which was like a prayer of hers in this scene that had begun to replay itself in her mind: “No good will come of you here.”
“What?” Alicia said once, because Henrietta had said it aloud. But she just shook her head, gave no answer.
* * *
—
One night, Brian went to Henrietta. It was past midnight. He slipped into the room so quietly that it could have been a dream. By this time, Charley was sleeping in a crib on the other side of the room. Still waking up at two-hour intervals for milk, but at least sleeping on his own in between.