by T. Greenwood
Her breasts dried up, the stitches were removed, the pouch of fat at her belly receded. In only a month, other than her weight gain, there was little physical evidence that she had recently carried a child, given birth to a daughter.
A body forgets, but the heart remembers. And no matter how hard Ginny tried to let Lucy go, to surrender the idea of ever holding her child again, she was still with her. Lucy was inside her chest: a beating, pulsing thing. She carried the memory of her just as she had carried her inside her womb.
Ab never spoke of her, of Lucy, never again allowed tears to spill from his eyes. Instead, he disappeared, slipped away into the ether. He blamed work, apologizing that it was demanding so much of his time, but she suspected work was simply a convenient excuse for retreat from this palpable heartache. And on November 5, twenty-nine days after Lucy’s birthday, he had made no mention of a visit to the hospital.
That night, they sat in bed reading, as was their habit since the earlier days of their lives together. When they were first married and living in Cambridge, he used to read to her, reciting poetry, tracing the words across her bare flesh with his finger.
That night Ab was reading a new biography of Bertrand Russell, but Ginny couldn’t seem to focus enough to read anymore. She could have been holding her novel upside down and she wouldn’t have even noticed. She wasn’t sure he would have, either. They were distracted. Both of them.
The book she’d plucked from the nightstand tonight was Valley of the Dolls. Total trash, but something Marsha had sent her in the mail along with a pound of the drugstore chocolates Ginny loved. Marsha somehow always knew exactly what Ginny needed.
“So, we should get an early start tomorrow, I imagine,” she said quietly, without looking up from her book. She’d been gathering the courage to speak this single sentence all day.
“What’s that?” Ab asked, setting that giant tome in his lap.
“To the school,” she said, the word like a tumor in her throat. “Willowridge?”
Ab winced.
She carefully creased the top right corner of the page into a perfect triangle, marking her spot, and put the book on her nightstand. Her heart was beating hard beneath her nightgown.
Ab rubbed his face with his hands, stopped and studied her.
“It’s been thirty days,” she said, feeling anger welling up inside her. Hot. “They said we’re allowed to visit after thirty days.”
Ab reached for her, put his arm around her, pulled her close. She could smell the Listerine on his breath, the sharp scent of detergent from his freshly laundered pajamas. He kissed the top of her head and cradled her face in his hands, peering into her eyes in a way that used to make her feel so loved. Safe. He was searching for something now, though.
She shook her head, and he lowered his hands from her face.
“If we leave after breakfast, we can get there by ten o’clock. I want to bring something for her. Maybe we could swing by the Square and pick up a special stuffed animal?”
“I was thinking,” he started, stroking the back of her hand with the soft pad of his thumb. “I was thinking maybe we should try again.”
She scowled, confused.
“The doctor said that he’s ninety-nine percent sure this won’t happen again. You’re young. We’re young. It was just an accident. A genetic accident. The chances of it happening again are practically nonexistent.”
“You want another baby?” she said in disbelief.
Hopeful, he smiled. “Just imagine,” he said. “By next summer, we could have another son. Or a daughter.”
“We have a daughter,” she said and felt like she might vomit. “Her name is Lucy, and she is four weeks old. Why don’t you say her name, Ab? Why don’t you ever say her name?”
Ginny was trembling; the old house was drafty and winter was coming.
Ab took a deep breath, summoning courage perhaps. But when he spoke, it was his father’s words she heard. “The school discourages visits for the terminal cases. They say it’s detrimental not only to the parents but to the child. It’s too confusing for everyone. How would we even explain this to Peyton? To our friends? It’s better to grieve now.”
Grief? Was this what she’d been feeling since the minute Lucy was taken from her arms? No. Grief was transient, something that eventually subsided. She knew, as Ab did, that grief, like a wound, healed over time, until nothing remained but a faint scar, a reminder of pain. She couldn’t imagine this feeling ever subsiding. True grief came only with death. And Lucy was not dead. And Ginny knew that so long as Lucy was alive, so too would be this excruciating ache.
“We have to choose, Gin. Between the past and our future. Because we can’t have both.”
“What are you saying?” she said.
“I’m saying,” he said, “we can either cling to this sinking ship, or we can swim.”
All breath and air were knocked out of her. She was drowning.
“I love you,” he said, his voice breaking, filling with sorrow. “Please, Gin. I’m so sorry. But for Peyton, for us. We have to let her go.”
He said they had to choose, but she knew the choice had already been made.
Three
September 1971
The next day, Marsha arrived just after lunch, as Ginny was sending Peyton out to play. She hoped to keep him confined inside the fenced backyard to avoid contact with Christopher, who she suspected was scheming acts of terror even as they ate their lunch. Peyton hadn’t wanted to go outside at all given the latest harassment, but she’d plied him with fresh-baked cookies and the promise of Gomer Pyle later. “Play on your swing,” she pleaded. “In your fort.”
“It’ll be just like The Swiss Family Robinson!” Ab had said when Peyton was still a baby, not even crawling yet. He had spent every Saturday for a month making trips to the lumberyard, sawing and hammering, and stifling a host of expletives as he attempted to follow the plans in the book. But earnestness did not necessarily translate to mastery, and he’d eventually had to hire someone to come complete the backyard project for him. No matter, the end result was truly magical: a double-decker tree house high up in the branches of a seventy-five-year-old red oak, complete with a tire swing and a pirate’s lookout. It was every little boy’s—including Ab’s—dream. Before his brother Paul died, he and Ab had practically lived in the woods behind their parents’ home, building their own forts out of sticks and bricks.
She’d caught Christopher trying to climb over the fence once (having stacked two or three milk crates on his side of the fence), but his plan was foiled when Arthur, the Richardsons’ Newfoundland, was waiting on the other side. Arthur was harmless, of course, but enormous, and Christopher was afraid of him. This afternoon Arthur had bounded out into the backyard after Peyton, hopefully ensuring a respite from Christopher.
Ginny peered out the window when she heard Marsha pull into the circular driveway out front. She watched as Marsha slammed the car door shut and marched up the steps. She knocked only once before storming into the foyer.
Marsha gave Ginny a terse hug and then held on to her shoulders, studying her face. “You okay?”
“Come into the kitchen,” Ginny said. “Peyton’s in the backyard, and I want to be able to keep an eye on him while we chat.”
Marsha wore a pair of knee-high suede boots, a mustard-colored corduroy miniskirt, and a tight cream-colored sweater, her long curly black hair parted in the middle and nearly to her waist now. Ginny had dressed as she did most days, in a turtleneck and wraparound calico skirt (which she appreciated for its adjustability depending on her fluctuating waistline as well as to hide her dimpled knees). She’d always felt like the homely stepsister next to Marsha, though she never begrudged Marsha her beauty. “Beauty and the Brains” was what their high school classmates had called them.
Marsha followed Ginny down the long, newly carpeted hallway.
“I’m sinking,” Marsha said and stopped, unzipping each soft suede boot and wriggling her toes. �
��There, that’s better.”
“You want some lunch? I made tuna salad,” Ginny offered. She and Peyton had already eaten their lunch before he went out to play.
“No, but I’ll take a cup of that coffee.” Marsha gestured to the percolator bubbling on the gleaming counter and plopped down at the dinette set.
Ginny poured them each a cup of coffee, adding creamer and sweetener to her own, leaving Marsha’s black. She checked on that evening’s pork shoulder, which was slow-roasting in the oven. The kitchen was warm and smelled wonderful. There would be pineapple upside-down cake for dessert.
She thought, for a moment, that this could be like any other visit with Marsha. Gossip about their former classmates. Updates about Marsha’s love life. Talk about books or TV or movies. Nothing of import. Nothing that would rattle the tenuous walls of this world she’d made. But then Marsha pulled the papers from her purse and laid them on the table like a fortune-teller laying down a pack of tarot cards.
Ginny sat down and Marsha pushed the first one toward her.
There were four papers, with four separate articles. Each one took up nearly the entire front page before directing the reader to turn to a page later in the paper. The reporter who wrote the exposé had visited every corner of the facility. He’d spoken to the students, the attendants, the staff. He’d photographed the rooms: the bathroom without stalls. The sleeping quarters’ walls smeared with human waste. The kitchen with its cockroaches. As she read about the vats of slop meant to pass as sustenance, as food, her stomach turned. The rich scent of the roast in the oven filled her eyes with tears. Broken elevators filled with dirty laundry. Sewage spills. And the children, God, the children huddled into corners. Alone.
“It says a child nearly died last year,” Marsha said, her voice hushed.
Ginny sucked in her breath, the current buzzing and hissing in her veins again.
“He wandered off but nobody noticed. They found him three days later. He’d crawled into one of the washing machines in the laundry. He’s lucky he didn’t suffocate.”
“Oh, my God,” Ginny said. She felt oddly numb, her skin almost prickly, the way a limb feels when it falls asleep. She was gripping the newspaper so tightly her knuckles ached.
“You okay?” Marsha said, reaching for her. “Let me get you some water.” She stood and started to make her way to the sink, but Ginny felt acid burning her throat and rose quickly from the table, trembling, and rushed back down the hall to the powder room where she vomited the tuna salad she’d had for lunch. When she looked at her face in the mirror, she barely recognized herself. Her blond hair was still perfectly coiffed: freshly trimmed bangs and ends flipped hopefully upward. Her makeup was still clean and bright, but her eyes looked haunted. She splashed cold water on her face, swished her mouth with water, but nothing could take away that look in her eyes or the red splotches, like a disease, that bloomed across her pale chest, climbing up her neck.
Marsha knocked gently on the bathroom door before pushing it open. “You okay, hon?” Ginny shook her head.
Back in the kitchen, Marsha lit a cigarette, the paper crackling and hissing as it ignited.
“Well, I can’t imagine they’ll be able to keep running after this,” Marsha said. “The state will have to shut the facility down. You and Ab really need to talk to the parents who’ve filed the lawsuit. Find out what they plan to do about their children. There must be other schools, better schools.”
“I need to go talk to Ab, to show him these,” Ginny said. The newspaper was one that she and Ab did not get in Dover, and one her mother had stopped subscribing to years ago. Shirley, like Ginny, lived with her head firmly embedded in the sand. If not for Marsha’s call, Ginny realized, she might never have found out. She was sure Ab had no idea, either. “Can you drop me off at the train station in Needham and then stay here with Peyton until I get back?”
“Of course,” Marsha said and reached for Ginny’s hand.
“Ab can fix this,” Ginny said, though she wasn’t sure whom she was trying to convince.
Ginny brought the newspapers with her, folded neatly in her purse. She couldn’t bear to look at them again, but Ab needed to see. If he had any idea what was going on at the school, he’d have to do something. Still, it was the rage of betrayal that informed every muscle in her body as the train hurled along the tracks. She felt like an angry lover preparing to confront her cheating husband, his mistress’s love letters in hand, as she marched into the building and ascended the elevator to Ab and the elder Richardson’s firm’s offices.
It was just a forty-minute train ride to Boston, but she rarely left Dover. She’d been to the firm only a handful of times in the last five years of his employment: once when he first started working there, and later only for the annual Christmas parties. As the elevator doors opened, she felt overwhelmed by all that she did not know about her husband’s life. Day after day, he took the train into the city, rose into the sky on this elevator, and exited these same doors to a world so far beyond her own, it might as well have been the moon.
No one recognized her as she walked toward the gleaming reception desk. She was a stranger, an alien having landed on a new planet. She half expected when the receptionist opened her mouth that some peculiar language would come out.
“Good afternoon,” the receptionist said, and Ginny sighed in relief. The girl was pretty, though she wore heavy makeup, including a spiderlike pair of false eyelashes. Her hair was short, in a pixie cut, like a boy’s, but she wore large hoop earrings. If she were to stand up, Ginny was sure her skirt would be a good eight inches above her dimple-free knees.
“I’m here to see Mr. Richardson,” Ginny said.
“Junior or Senior?” the woman asked, picking up the phone next to her.
“Junior,” she said. Ab would hate that. Ginny wondered if he knew this was how he was referred to here.
The woman smiled a white-lipstick smile and tapped at the numbers on the phone. “May I tell him who’s calling, please?”
“Tell him it’s Ginny,” she said.
The woman cocked her head expectantly.
“His wife?” Ginny had no idea why she said it like this, as if there were any uncertainty about her relationship to him. She was Ginny Richardson, Abbott Richardson Jr.’s wife.
“Oh!” the receptionist said, clearly surprised, though Ginny wasn’t sure if it was because she was the wife or that he had one at all. Neither option left her feeling very well. “So nice to meet you, Mrs. Richardson. My apologies. I’ve only been here a few months. I’m Sissy.” With that, she extended her hand out across the reception desk, and Ginny noted a flawless manicure, her nails the same color pink as her flushed cheeks.
“Is this an emergency?” Sissy whispered, covering the mouthpiece with her hand.
Ginny shook her head, No, even as her heart reverberated in her chest.
“She says no,” Sissy offered into the phone, and then as she hung up, “He said to give him five minutes. He’s with a client. You can have a seat if you like. There’s coffee over there as well.” She gestured to a small console table in a waiting area. A large silver urn like the one her mother-in-law put out when she had her bridge parties. “There’s some Sweet’N Low if you need it. Or I can bring you a Tab?”
The suggestion that Ginny might need an artificial sweetener, that she might be “watching her figure,” stung. Though truth be told, she’d ballooned up fifty pounds when she was pregnant with Lucy and, even two years later, had yet to fully deflate. She was watching her weight. She was always watching her weight.
The sofa was sleek and uncomfortable, the glass coffee table before it covered with careful stacks of magazines. She sat down, straightened her skirt, and let her eyes wander across their covers: Life, Look, and Time. She reached for the Time magazine, on the cover the crew of the Apollo 15. She recalled the night of the moon landing a couple of years before, when she was pregnant with Lucy. Ab had been at work late, working on a case around t
he clock. Peyton was asleep, despite her efforts to keep him up to witness the moon landing, and she had sat alone in the living room, riveted by the jumpy images on the TV. But once the Eagle had landed, for some reason, she’d felt consumed by an unexpected emotion. While the rest of the country rejoiced, Ginny felt overwhelmed by the arrogance of it all, the audacity, and found herself weeping as these men staked their claim of the luminous moon.
She startled when the receptionist, Sissy, said, “Mrs. Richardson? You may go in now.”
Ginny set the magazine down and watched as a man in a heavy overcoat walked past her and out the lobby door. Ab’s client, she imagined.
Clutching her purse, she made her way down the hallway to where Ab was standing in the last doorway, hand on the jamb, eyes wide and expectant. His dimpled smile betrayed his obvious confusion as to why she would be here, in his office, late on a Thursday afternoon.
“Hey, Gin,” he said, his dark eyebrows furrowing in concern when she did not return his smile. “Come in.”
Her throat ached as he kissed her cheek and he ushered her into his office. She’d been in this room exactly once, when he first started working at his father’s firm right after he graduated from Harvard. The framed photo of them on their wedding day remained where he had first placed it on his desk, next to a photo of Peyton smiling wide, showing off the dimples he’d inherited from his dad.
“Where’s Pey?” Ab asked, gesturing for her to sit down in the chair across from his desk, as if she were a client.
“Marsha’s with him at the house,” she said, still standing.
His eyes narrowed. “Are you okay? Sissy said it wasn’t an emergency. Is something wrong? Your mom’s okay?”
But when he reached for her, she grew rigid.
“Hey,” he said, holding onto her stony shoulders and looking at her quizzically. “What’s going on?”
Her stomach tightened as she reached into her pocketbook and pulled out the newspapers. Wordlessly, she handed them to him.