“I don’t think I could stand it,” she said.
“Hush.”
“If I ever lost him.”
“Hush now. You’ll wear yourself out. Why, that boy will be good and strong, running so fast you’ll never keep up.”
Adaline dropped her blouse but kept my hand well inside her own, so fierce a hold I felt the blood drain from my skin. Her face looked like her father’s did when he was thinking, her eyes quiet, readying herself. She pressed my knuckles under her own so she might always keep them, no matter how far she went. At last she tapped her thumb against mine and let me go, shrugging with that smile of hers. I suppose your mother might not remember so much. But for my part, I never will forget the heat of her fingers and the fear in them. That quickening under her skin, it’s the closest to you I’ve ever come.
XVI
Mary
(Winter 1950)
“Kyle’s heading home, Eddie,” I had told her. “It will be soon now. You just have to hold on.” But she never even tried. I walked down our road and saw a scrub of white in the distance, tripping, falling, going off—Enidina, she seemed like a wild animal, her hair white and loose around her shoulders and her housedress faded and worn through the back. She caught her foot on a stone and crouched to rub away the pain, dropping to her knees, but quickly enough she was off. When I called out to her, she turned and looked back, and in that look I saw a light in her eyes and that old terrible strength—her size, her very stubbornness that made her everything at once. Her mouth hung open as if she might speak, her cheeks shivering. “You,” the look said, and she shook herself with a sudden rage and was off. “Eddie,” I called out again, but she was going so hard and fast now I had no hope of chasing her down. She could walk for miles if she went on like that, the sun rising in a haze and her figure dark against the brightness, such a sight I could imagine her forty years younger, that fiery hair on her head a signal for all the world—she was going. She was finished with this place. That neighbor of mine, she was done.
Where I sit now in her bed, I wait for any of them to return. The house is plain, ugly even, but I no longer care—the mattress feels so old it cradles me as if I have been here all along. I have the place to myself now, and I pull Eddie’s blanket over my chest to keep from getting cold. I have a bite to eat in the kitchen and the old outhouse out back should the water stop. I have Kyle’s picture on the bureau and my Bible at my side. But it is that notebook of hers I open, that wiry thing she kept to herself. Scribbles it seems and impossible to read, full of lies no doubt—not an address anywhere, though I can make out my name on nearly every line. Enidina has some nerve to leave me here like this, without so much as a word, without a thank you for all my visits—but I have faith I will not be alone for long. Already I can imagine Kyle walking down that road, Jack’s hat on his head. I can hear him on the porch out front, scraping his shoes on the mat. He will come in with that boyish look on his face and reach out his hands, promise he is home for good. Now that I am alone, he would never run off again. God himself would not abandon me, not like the rest—as if I deserved it—as if I had never done a good thing for anyone in my life.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank early mentors of this book, including John Edgar Wideman, Noy Holland, and Ursula Hegi, as well as my UMass “fiction chicks” group—Bess Fairfield Stokes, Kate Southwood, Michelle Valois, Patti Horvath, Jane Rosenberg, Jeanie Tietjen, and Deb McCutchen. I would also like to thank my Boston fiction group—Karen Halil, Kande Culver, Stan Yarbo, Roy Ahn, and Sumita Mukherji—and other Boston readers and friends—Daphne Kalotay, Lara Wilson, Margot Livesey, Kim Shuckra Gomez, Maria Gapotchenko, and Laura Harrison. Thanks also for the support of Megan Thomas Paulson and Mary Wright, longtime friends.
Thanks to my agent, Esmond Harmsworth, for sticking with me, and my publisher, Other Press, for offering such a professional, supportive, and rewarding publishing experience. Many thanks to my editor, Corinna Barsan; my tireless publisher, Judith Gurewich; my publicist, Terrie Akers; and their marketing guru, Paul Kozlowski, as well as to the entire Other Press staff. Thanks also to the Random House sales team for their energy and commitment.
The following organizations offered time and support for writing this book: the UMass-Amherst MFA program, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, Bucknell University and Philip Roth for the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residency program, PEN New England, Grub Street, and Boston University.
Finally, I’d like to thank my family for their continued support and love; my mother, Lorene Hoover, my sister Lisa Carstens and the Carstens family, my brother David Hoover, and the Marshall family, in particular my uncle Lowell Marshall, who endured ceaseless questions about farm life and practices. Thanks to my late aunt, Irene Israel, for her love, and especially to my late father, Lee Hoover, whom I miss.
Copyright © 2010 Michelle Hoover
Parts of this novel appeared, in an earlier form, in The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Confrontation, and Best New American Voices 2004.
Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Hoover, Michelle.
The quickening / Michelle Hoover.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59051-360-6
1. Neighbors—Fiction. 2. Farm life–Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.O6253Q53 2010
813′.6—dc22
2010005199
PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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