by Lily King
Helen Gunther lived across town at the end of a cul-de-sac. Her house was part of a semicircle of new identical houses, each a different pale shade, each with a brick walkway and a small porch. On Helen Gunther’s porch, beside the door, was a basket of strawberries and a note that read: Picked these this morning out by Wilder’s place. Thanks for everything! Love, Cammie.
When she came to the door, my sister handed her the basket, and even though she read the card, she seemed unable to separate us from her appreciation. “I can’t think of a better gift than strawberries. I really can’t. And there was no need for a gift at all. Please come this way. My office is in the back.”
Despite the heat, my sister and I had dressed up for the meeting, but Helen Gunther wore a faded denim shift. She was a large woman, over fifty, though from the looks of the kitchen and playroom we passed through, she seemed to have several young children. In the hallway, the walls were covered with drawings. On some there was writing. One said I love you Ma and another Happy Mothas Day. My sister lingered, touching the curled corners tenderly.
We sat at the far end of Helen’s office, away from her desk, in comfortable armchairs around a coffee table layered with magazines and newsletters about adoption and single parenting and family planning.
“So,” she began, eyeing the bulge that pushed apart my blazer, “Rosie’s pregnant.”
We nodded.
“And Sarah is going to raise the child.”
We nodded again.
“Why?”
After a while, after I realized my sister was not going to answer, I said, “Because she can’t have children.”
“Lots of women can’t bear children. I can’t. Are you going to give your next one to me?”
“Rosie’s off to college in the fall. It was an accident. The time isn’t right for her to”—Sarah groped for words—“keep it.”
“Forgive me. I’m going to play devil’s advocate here.” Helen turned back to me. “Women with babies go to college. Women with babies work, and go to the movies, and go on to lead challenging but pretty normal lives.”
She didn’t understand. “I don’t want a baby, Mrs. Gunther. My sister does. I have never thought of it as mine.”
“But that baby is yours, Rosie. No matter what you decide to do—”
“I have decided.”
“No matter what you decide, that baby is yours and the whole process is going to be a lot harder for you if you don’t accept that now.” She turned to Sarah, who looked like a thin doll in her chair between Helen and me. “By law, Rosie has seventy-two hours after delivery to decide what she wants to do. It’s crucial that you give her this time. Can you agree to that?”
My sister nodded, unable to trust her voice. She kept her eyes focused through the open office door to the hallway of pictures.
“Have you thought about what you will tell the child?” Mrs. Gunther asked her.
“The truth?” Sarah said, more as a question than a conviction. It occurred to me then that neither of us had imagined this child as any older than a few days.
“And what’s the truth, as you see it?”
I’d never seen my sister so unnerved. “That Rosie … that she got pregnant too young, and I agreed to raise her child.”
“Temporarily, until she’s older? Or for the long haul?”
Sarah looked at me, bewildered.
“For the long haul,” I said.
When the session was over, my sister left the room abruptly. To compensate, I stayed to get a closer look at the large black-and-white photograph on the wall of an alabaster statue. It was a figure of a young woman holding flowers, precariously set on the stone wall of a bridge.
“Has she fooled you too?” Helen asked.
I didn’t know what she meant.
“It’s a real woman. She’s covered herself in some sort of plaster. And she stays perfectly still for hours.”
“Why?”
“See that jar by her feet? People put money in it.”
“Where is this? New York?”
“Paris. The Pont Neuf. Have you ever been there?”
“No. I took French, but I never thought of it as a real place.”
“It’s very real. One of the best cities on earth.”
I heard Sarah open the screen door on the other side of the house.
“Rosie,” Helen Gunther said. “It’s not your fault your sister’s infertile.”
I acknowledged her without moving, taking my first lesson from the alabaster woman.
“Come back next week, even if Sarah won’t. Relinquishing a baby is not easy, Rosie, not once you’ve given birth.”
Sarah held him first. I’ll never forgive her for that. Eight hours of labor and I didn’t even get to hold my baby first. The doctor handed him to her. Later that night, when I accused her, she said she passed him to me. “I didn’t hold him. I carried him to you. You held him.” But I remember how it was. She held him first.
When we came home from the hospital, I held him in the car but she carried him in, Hank cooing beside her, doubts and statistics forgotten. I went upstairs, unable to block out their voices as they introduced him to the dog, then the two cats. In my absence, Hank had stacked milk crates outside my room. I was enrolled at the University of New Hampshire and freshman orientation began in three days. I dragged in the crates and began to empty my drawers into them. I could hear the baby begin to cry downstairs, and it soaked my bra. I shut my door but I could still hear him. I turned the radio on loud, and still I could hear him. I knew even in my dorm room in Durham I would hear him still.
She knocked. I shut the music off and let her in.
“He’s sleeping now,” she said. “He was just tired.”
“You don’t have to tell me every detail.”
“Okay.”
Nothing in my body felt right. It seemed to be ringing with pain but there was no part of me that I could point to and tell her, Here, here’s where it hurts. I only knew that her presence made it worse. Helen Gunther had said that these would be the most challenging days for us, and that we should be honest but careful of each other’s feelings. I saw now that it would be impossible to do both.
I pulled some clothes out of the closet.
“Don’t do this now, Rosie. Rest. I’ll help you tomorrow.” She sat on my bed and patted the space beside her.
It felt strange to sit and have my body fold so easily now. I put the length of the bed between us. I didn’t want her to touch me.
“He looks so much like you.”
She wanted reassurance. She wanted to hear that this was still what I wanted.
I looked at the stuffed milk crates, and at the freshman face book on my desk. I stood up and began throwing the last of my things into a black suitcase. “I want to get this done,” I said.
“Don’t shut down.” Her voice broke despite her efforts. “Please don’t shut down on me.” She cried like I did, as if she’d been doing it for years, her face all wrenched and soundless.
I hated watching it. I hated her honesty and her innocence of my schemes. I hated all her newly surfaced emotions and her sentimentality. I couldn’t understand how we’d ever been close, how I’d come to live in her house, how I’d let myself be manipulated by her. I hated her. I hated myself. The only thing I loved was the touch and the smell of that little boy who was no longer mine. “You have no rights to me anymore.”
That night, Hank tried to give me an envelope. I threw it back at him. “You can’t pay me. You can’t pay me for this. This isn’t about money.”
“You’re going to need some cash when you get to school. Financial aid won’t cover everything. You’re going to want to go out and do things, like get a pizza at the Tin Palace or—”
“You don’t know anything about what I’m going to want.”
I watched him wrestle with his anger at me, weighing it carefully against the gratitude he should feel, knowing there were still twenty-four hours to go before I could sign
the papers his lawyer had drawn up. “We’ll talk about this later,” he said, placing the envelope on the mantel.
My sister must have contacted Helen Gunther, because she called the next day.
“How are you holding up, Rosie?”
“Fine.”
“Yeah?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Are you really fine?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to come by and talk?”
“No, thanks.”
“You had a boy?”
“Yes.”
“What does he look like?”
She wanted me to crack. “Winston Churchill.”
There was a long silence.
I hung up the phone gently, and she didn’t call back. But I was glad I talked to her. She’d reminded me of the photograph of the statue, and of the city in the background. I headed toward the back porch, to apologize and to explain where I was going. But when I reached the doorway and saw the three of them in the wicker seat, I understood how little need there was for good-byes. I found the papers on Hank’s desk. I signed them, dating each signature one day in advance. They didn’t hear me as I dragged down my black suitcase, took the money off the mantel, and slipped out of their house.
II
I knew they weren’t my children, but it was my job to care for them, to tend to them. I clipped fingernails, buttoned the backs of dresses, made snacks at homework hour. They were all I had in Paris, and even when I wasn’t with them, I was watching them.
They told me their stories, but they underestimated my ability to understand them. They mistook the flatness of my gaze for lack of imagination, when all the while I was watching their worlds from the inside.
Guillaume
HE STOLE QUIETLY INTO HIS MOTHER’S ROOM TO TAKE A LONG PURPLE SCARF, WHICH he draped over the shoulders of the white bathrobe he wore. On the coffee table in the living room he spread a lace tablecloth and placed two candlesticks, a wineglass with a gold rim, and a cigarette box in the center. He lit the wicks with a match from the silver box, then closed all the shutters, so that the room, save for the two blades of yellow light and their twitching reflections, was quite dark for midmorning. He left, then reentered the room slowly, head down, one hand cradled in the other. He stood behind the table, raised his eyes, and spread out his arms to the empty room. His speech was inaudible except for an occasional t or hard c. After several minutes of this he darted out of the room and returned with a large book, which he placed open on the table and proceeded to read from, glancing up now and then at different parts of the room imploringly. When he was finished he closed the book gently and made a few more short speeches. From an imaginary decanter in his right hand he poured a few drops of air into the wineglass. He then raised the glass above his head, spoke, and brought it to his lips. From the box he gingerly extracted a pretend wafer and, with the same slow gestures, raised and lowered it into his mouth. He stepped to the side and, with the open cigarette box in one hand, continued to remove weightless, invisible disks, which he poised and dropped at precise intervals while his lips moved in the same configuration of shapes each time. When this was finished, he moved the glass to the left side of the table, placed the cigarette box beside it, lifted his terry-cloth arms again, and mouthed a few final words. He stood motionless as the room emptied out.
He liked to do this with real people, with Lola or his friend Arnaud, but he was more focused when practicing alone, he thought, returning the wineglass to its cabinet behind his father’s seat in the dining room. And Lola was becoming less and less serious. He could feel how she didn’t really pray, not even in church. He was worried about her; he prayed for her. He feared she had stopped believing in her own miracle.
Lola had saved his life with her faith.
He remembered fragments. He remembered the part of her hair as she prayed on her knees by his bed. She wore braids then, and her hair was separated perfectly from forehead to nape. He remembered that strip of scalp and how he’d long to scratch it, but by then they’d wrapped his hands. He couldn’t understand why she didn’t itch. When his exema spread and became infected, his fever was very high and he lost the sense of the parameters of his own body; he often felt the walls and mattress were in the same kind of pain, which wasn’t pain exactly but a longing to be rubbed and clawed until the new scabs were between his fingernails and the wound was fresh and bloody again. In the hospital, Lola made an altar by the one window, on which she placed her largest piece of blue sea glass, his ivory elephant, and her locket with the cross on the outside and his picture inside. Once she sprinkled rose petals over it, though it couldn’t have been Corpus Christi at the time. Once he woke up in the late afternoon and the window was open and a breeze grazed the skirt of his sister, who kneeled rigidly at her altar. Her legs were bare, and he longed to score bright red lines down them with the sharp unwrapped fingernails he no longer had.
Papa never prayed at his bedside, not once, and Odile and Maman were more discreet, closing their eyes in their chairs beside his bed only when they thought he was asleep. But Lola was fervent. There was always the rustle of onion-skin pages and the click of rosary beads. He could rely on the perpetual scurrying whisper of her Ave Marias. He knew he had lived solely because of her faith. Had she used it all up on him?
He heard the rattle of the back of his father’s swivel chair from behind the closed door of his study. Soon he would be in the hallway. Guillaume hurried to blow out the candles, replace the cigarette box, and fold up the tablecloth. The scarf would have to wait until the path to the master bedroom was clear. It was Saturday morning, and they were the only two in the house. The study door opened and a wedge of light fell on the carpet. His father’s shadow stepped into it. Guillaume stuffed the scarf into his pocket.
Papa was not a violent man. He wasn’t angry all the time like Arnaud’s father. He didn’t insult or belittle very often. Still, Guillaume’s heart raced as he fled down the other hallway to his room. Papa did not believe in God.
“Guillaume!”
“Yeah?” He didn’t stop moving.
“What’re you up to?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you still in your robe?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you close all these shutters?”
“Yeah.”
A pause. He was noticing something, the smell of wax or fingerprints on the cigarette box. Then, “How about some breakfast?”
“All right.”
“Get dressed first.”
“I’m going to.”
It was Maman who understood his vocation. She said he was blessed. He was her only son, and she often told him that the day he was born, she knew he was more than just an ordinary gift. She promised that someday this fall they’d go visit an old friend of hers, Père Lafond, whom he could speak to about becoming a priest.
His exema had never returned, but sometimes when his mother came in at night and he felt her weight on the bed and listened to her voice above him in the dark, he felt in his heart an ache similar to the itching that once covered his body.
Papa sliced and grilled the bread left over from last night, or maybe even two nights ago. It was tough and chewy. Guillaume spread more marmalade on the second piece. Papa watched him eat with the same discouragement he wore when he watched Guillaume do anything.
Dear Christ our Savior, please help us to understand each other.
On the stove, white foam rose and sizzled down the side of the pan.
“I almost forgot. Hot chocolate?”
“Please.”
Papa put a square of chocolate at the bottom of two breakfast bowls, then poured the milk over them. He brought them over, a spoon in each, and they sat stirring up chocolate swirls from the bottom until the milk was a deep brown.
“Mmmmm,” Guillaume said.
“Mmm,” Papa replied.
“Is today the twenty-fourth?” He knew it was.
“Yes.”
; He had hoped to make his father laugh, for when he first learned about days and dates, he used to ask about them incessantly. But Papa’s yes was straight-faced and unremembering. Then, after a sip of hot chocolate, Papa said, “Of November. Saturday.” He looked up at the clock. “Ten-thirteen and a quarter.”
It wasn’t funny. It came too late. But Guillaume laughed anyway.
Please, please, as you understand me.
They sipped. Guillaume suspected he was drinking his too fast and put it down. Papa put his bowl down too. It was empty. He looked at all Guillaume had left.
“Don’t you like it?”
“Yes, I’m just trying to drink it in moderation.”
Papa laughed, not the kind of laugh Guillaume had tried to solicit before but the kind that involves an invisible shaking of the head. Sometimes he said, “You’re your mother’s son,” but this time he didn’t. A silence stretched between them instead, and Guillaume struggled for something to say.
Lola came bounding down the stairs.
“Ai-ya!” Lola said, crashing through the door, tennis racquet raised like a sword.
Papa’s face bloomed. “Ai-ya!” he said back, and thrust out a butter knife. Guillaume felt the room relent, felt the walls ease back, the chairs sink, the window expand its view of the wrinkled water. They staged a duel with their weapons, lost in each other. There would be no understanding between him and Papa today.
Lola caught the butter knife between the strings of her racquet and twisted it out of her father’s hand. Guillaume reached for the knife, which had fallen beneath his seat, and took it to the sink.
“You’re not going to finish this?” Lola said, sitting down at his place.
“No, I am.” But she was already swallowing, chugging the chocolate. It was gone.
“Lola!” His voice was louder than he had intended. “I was saving that! Papa made that for me!” He heard himself from some remote place. He was screeching. They were laughing. Papa said his head might pop off if he didn’t calm down. Lola laughed harder.