“My clothes,” I said.
His face fell.
“And pirate ships?” I teased.
His older brother, maybe eight or nine years old, laughed, but the boy with freckles protested, “Don’t be silly.”
The oldest—a girl with solemn eyes—watched me. It was she I turned my attention to. “Does Blanche Bouchard live here?”
“She’s our mother!” the youngest said. “Is she your friend? I don’t have any friends.” Before I could express my sympathy, he added, “Except for Evan and Martin!”
He jumped off the gate and unlatched it, but he couldn’t budge it because his siblings stayed attached. “Move!”
His older brother actually did what he said, but the oldest continued to watch me suspiciously.
Just then, a woman ran out of the house. I backed up, thinking she didn’t like me talking to the children. But she hardly glanced my way.
“Margrit, we must hurry. Get in the car, get in the car.”
“Is it time?”
“It is, it is. Get in the car,” the woman said, waving her hands. “Something’s not going right.”
“What’s not right? Alice’s crazy mother?” Margrit asked, concerned, taking her mother’s bag from her.
“I want to come,” the younger of the two girls said.
“No, no!” the woman told her. “Watch your brothers.”
“I want to come with you, Mama. Margrit always—”
“Shush, Bridgit. You have to watch your brothers.” It was only then that the woman glanced at me, and all of that excess energy fell away as she stared. Her face turned so white I reached for her, afraid she might faint.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“It’s the lady in the red hat!” the youngest said excitedly.
Margrit tugged on her mother’s hand. “Mama, we have to go.” But her mother kept looking at me, finally giving me a weary smile. “Come, come,” she said to me, “get in the car. We’ll talk on the way.”
“YOU’RE CECILIA?” SHE ASKED AS WE SPED OFF DOWN THE ROAD, DIRT flying.
I nodded at her. “You knew my mother?”
“The resemblance—”
“Yes,” I murmured, interrupting, looking out the window.
“She told you about me?” she asked.
I shook my head, feeling uneasy with her scrutiny, especially considering we were flying down the road in an old car. She was quiet for a while, obviously trying to take it all in.
“How did you know where to find me?”
“A letter from my aunt, before she died.”
She put a hand over her mouth, and her eyes swam. “I didn’t know Laura had died.”
“Yes,” I said softly, “last month. I’m sorry to tell you in such a way.”
Her eyes were back on the road when she spoke. “Is your mother … did Cora … ?” She stopped, not able to finish. Her lips were pressed together.
“She’s not dead.”
I couldn’t see her reaction, really, if there was one. She just kept looking at the road. “Is she still in that place, the asylum?”
“Have you been there?” I asked quickly. “To see her?”
She stopped talking as we pulled up in front of another farmhouse. Margrit grabbed her mother’s bag.
BLANCHE BURST INTO THE HOUSE WITHOUT KNOCKING. TWO MIDDLE-AGED women were at the table, one with a rosary. “Blanche,” one said with weary relief. “It’s not going well.”
A woman’s screams pierced the air.
Blanche raced down a dark hallway, flying through the door at the end. Margrit and I were right behind her. A young woman, who looked barely my age, was on the bed, holding her very pregnant belly. She fell back against the pillows, her face exhausted. Another woman was in the room with her, so similar to the girl in features I knew she must be related.
Blanche was at the girl’s side in a flash. “Why wasn’t I called sooner, Irene?” she snapped.
“Bringing a baby into this world hurts,” the woman said with a shrug. “Alice could never take pain well, even when she was a child.” She wiped the girl’s sweaty red face with a wet rag. “It’ll be all right, my daughter.”
Blanche waved Irene out of the way. “Now, Alice,” Blanche said softly, “I need to see what’s going on, so I can help you.”
Alice’s face was white. Blanche gently guided her, as I stood by her side, mesmerized. I could see the baby was trying to be born.
“Okay, I see why it hurts so much, Alice. Your baby is turned the wrong way. I need you to sit up.”
The girl groaned.
“What?” Irene snapped. “She’s not having her baby that way.”
“Help me, Margrit,” Blanche said quickly. “You too, Cecilia.” She pointed to one side of the bed, then the other. “Leave, Irene. We’ll be done soon.”
“I’ll say I’m not. Not while my daughter is having my grandchild.”
My hand slipped on the girl’s sweaty, hot skin when I took her arm, but she was so tired she let us maneuver her. We pulled her up so that she was on her knees. The girl’s body buckled and she screamed again. Her weight pressed against us as Margrit talked gently to her.
“If you’re to stay, Irene,” Blanche said, “then take Margrit’s place.” Without further protest, Irene did as she was told. Margrit hurried out the door with the bag, and I heard her directing the women at the table.
Alice caught my eyes and held them, but I wasn’t sure if she knew she was looking at someone. Her eyes were dark and miserable, until life flickered in them. “My baby,” she whispered to me.
“Your baby is all right,” I told her, as if I knew something.
The two women from the kitchen were in the room with us now, one of them with the rosary still draped over her hand. She hung it on the headboard.
Blanche ordered the women to get on either side of Alice. “Cecilia, climb up on the bed in front to help her and encourage her.”
I scrambled up as Alice let out another piercing scream.
“Push, Alice,” Blanche told her.
I cupped the girl’s face in my hands, holding her head up when the screaming stopped and she drooped.
“This isn’t the way it’s done,” Irene grumbled. “It’s not the way I had my babies.”
Blanche whipped her head over to Irene. “Out!”
The older woman stepped back at the ferocity of Blanche’s order. Margrit bustled back in, carrying instruments in a cloth. Irene left in a huff, loudly shutting the door, as Margrit pulled a small table around to her mother and laid out everything carefully. “They’re sterilized, Momma.”
With Irene gone, the tension in the room eased. The woman who’d had the rosary was singing softly, a beautiful song in French. The light slanted in the window, suddenly shimmering.
Blanche talked quietly to Margrit. “The baby is coming out the wrong way. I need you to take Cecilia’s place and help Alice.”
With Margrit on the bed with Alice now, I stood by the door, trying to stay out of the way. Another spasm of pain hit Alice. Margrit wiped her face with a cool cloth, talking to her quietly, so quietly I couldn’t hear what she was saying. The woman kept singing, the French words familiar to me, even though I didn’t know what they meant.
“Push, Alice,” Blanche directed.
I heard Alice murmur something. Her body hung limply. I wasn’t sure how she’d find the strength to get her baby out. The singing seemed to comfort her. I saw her lips move as if she was saying the words too. Margrit talked quietly to her until Alice did push.
Blanche spoke softly, encouragingly. “You are doing so well, Alice. Your baby girl is almost here.” Her brow was creased with worry, but still Blanche was calm and efficient. Her confidence steadied the mother—all of us, really.
Despite the seriousness, I felt a part of something amazing and beautiful. I began to feel disoriented and the room tilted. Before my eyes was another place, a familiar one. It was my mother’s room at Sanctuary. A baby was b
eing born. I was Amoret watching my own birth. Aimée, she whispered, her hands toward the baby. Whoosh, the vision shifted. It was the same room, but decorated differently. Amoret was now on the bed, an intense, focused look on her sweating face. Her body bent. A man and a girl were with her, helping her as her baby was being born.
Alice’s scream shook me out of my trance, a contraction hitting her hard. Shaking, I pushed away my visions and focused on what was before me. Blanche comforted and reassured the mother. She reached forward as if she was just there to catch the baby more than to birth her. The baby’s head fell out and forward, the little thing bending over at its waist.
“There, now,” Blanche said happily.
Alice collapsed into Margrit while Blanche whisked the baby up. She wrapped her in a cloth quickly, cut the cord, and handed the child to me.
The unexpected warmth and crying gathered in my arms surprised me so much I felt tears rolling down my cheeks. I looked down into the new eyes in wonder.
I want one of these, I thought, and laughed at myself as the baby embraced her first breaths. She was so bright with life it was as if she’d come to us directly from another world, carrying over truths that needed to be heard. I stared more deeply into her blinking eyes, feeling she had something to tell me. But it was Mamie’s haunting words that came to me, words I had forgotten: Cecilia was the one born at Sanctuary, Cora. She is closest to it and to Amoret. You can’t keep her from me forever.
THE ROAD WAS DARK, AND THE HEADLIGHTS MEAGER. MARGRIT WAS CURLED up in the backseat asleep, looking more like a child than a wise old soul. Blanche was exhausted and asked me to drive, and I had to explain that I didn’t know how.
“You’ll keep me awake by talking to me?” she asked. “It isn’t far. But I’m exhausted. I want to lay my head down on this steering wheel.”
“I can do that,” I said, but I was so tired. I was feeling very unsettled by the visions, coming when they had. But I understood why. Seeing a life come into this world was a spiritual event, the air charged with meaning and bonding. That wonder could be seen on the face of each woman in the birthing room tonight. The wave of energy had even stirred Amoret inside of me, carrying me to my own birth and to Aimée’s. It seemed a divine thing. I hadn’t known I was born in the same room as Aimée.
Remembering—hearing?—Mamie’s words had also shaken me. I recalled my mother’s angry look when Mamie said it. As a child, I’d so wanted to please my mother. Any small attentions she gave me were momentous. Her beautiful face had distorted into ugliness when she’d snapped at Mamie. I’d thought Mother had wanted to push me away. She didn’t want me to share in Amoret because she didn’t want me close to her. Maybe that hadn’t been it at all.
“Cecilia?” Blanche was asking.
“I guess I’m not talking.”
“You must be tired. We don’t have to talk.”
“No, I have so much I want to ask you,” I said. “How did you know my mother?”
“You know I live in her house now?”
“No … no,” I stammered.
“The girls are in her old room upstairs. That’s where I’ll put you tonight. You’ll have to sleep in their bed.” She laughed. “You are staying, I assume?”
“If I may.”
“Of course you’re staying.”
“How did you end up with my mother’s house?” I asked, mystified.
“My husband, Earl, and I bought it from your grandmother when she left. We wanted to be close to my parents. I was here so much as a child, it felt like a second home anyway.”
“My mother was raised in a farmhouse,” I said in disbelief.
Blanche laughed again. This no-nonsense, industrious, happy woman had been my mother’s friend. The people my mother attracted to her—Miss Owens, Blanche—were nothing like I’d thought they’d be. Was my mother drawn to them, or they to my mother?
“Cora never liked living on a farm,” Blanche said. “She was desperate for life in New York City with dancing and poets and dreams.”
“Was her childhood unhappy?”
Blanche shrugged. “Fine, I think. Your grandfather was a jovial man, filled with light and laughter. British descent, not Acadian. Mrs. Lancaster, your grandmother,” she said with a nod at me, “was … well, you remember, more serious, a little crazy, perhaps, with all that obsessive talk.”
Inwardly, I cringed at the description, but just nodded in the dark.
“Cora would roll her eyes when Mrs. Lancaster would go on about the Acadians, telling her that was forever ago and it didn’t concern her, and your grandmother’s eyes would flash, and she’d yell at Cora, and Cora would just flip the pages of whatever book she was reading and yawn and stretch like a cat.”
We drove up to the front of the house. Looking back at Margrit, Blanche said, “Isn’t she my angel?”
After she’d jostled Margrit awake, we went inside. I tried to think, This is my mother’s house, where she was raised. But my thoughts were tired and jumbled.
I crawled into the bed with Margrit, her sister between us, in my mother’s childhood room, listening to the breathing of the two sisters. I was reluctant to sleep, fearful of the dark dreams about Amoret that still haunted me at night. And alongside that fear was Eli tormenting me too with an endless, unceasing loneliness and ache. My feelings for him were beyond logic, springing from an unknowable depth within me. I didn’t know how to exorcise him. Finally, I fell asleep.
“YOU LOOK JUST LIKE HER. BEING IN THIS KITCHEN, WITH YOU LOOKING like Cora, it’s shaking me up.”
We were at the breakfast table, the kids wild and silly with their talking and their walking around the table, biscuits in their mouths. I thought of Eli’s stories about his brothers and sisters and wondered if this was what his home was like. The thought of him hurt and pinched my heart. I turned my mind elsewhere.
Bridgit was helping her mother in the kitchen while Margrit still slept after our long night. Blanche explained her husband, Earl, was in New Brunswick to see his mother, who was ill.
“You were close to my mother?”
“Tight.”
“I still can’t believe she was raised in this house … on a farm,” I added, lest she think I was criticizing.
She laughed. “She desperately wanted to leave it behind.”
“She did leave it behind.”
“Not her family, though. Your grandmother found her in New York. I’m ashamed to say my part in that. I gave her letters Cora had written me.”
“Do you still have the letters?” I asked quickly, then blushed when I realized I was asking to read her private mail.
She shook her head.
I nodded, disappointed. “So my mother didn’t want to be found?”
“Cora wanted another life, one that didn’t have anything to do with family obligation. But your grandmother had raised her on family obligation, with every meal and prayer.”
I fiddled with the tablecloth. “Why?”
“Your grandmother had plans for your mother. Cora often told me she thought your grandmother was crazy.”
I shivered. There was that word again. “Do you know what Mamie’s plans were?”
For a second, I caught her eyes gazing into some memory or thought, but she didn’t share it with me. She looked uncomfortable.
I was about to ask something else, trying to nudge it out of her, when she said, “Come with me.”
Behind her bed, lovingly placed on a high shelf, were six books. A small painting hung over the shelves, one of a woman with a bright red hat. One elegant hand with long fingers pulled down the wide brim of the hat, so only one of her eyes was visible, still conveying a coquettish gaze.
I put a hand out but didn’t touch it. My hand dropped.
“She sent me that as an apology of sorts,” Blanche said. “It didn’t come with a note. Just the painting sent from Lady Cliffs. How like your mother to apologize by sending a picture of herself.” She laughed again.
I went closer t
o study it.
“Probably why I knew you,” Blanche said. “It looks so like you. I’m not sure who the artist was.”
My father, I thought. “Why an apology?”
“She had a hard time forgiving me for those letters. She didn’t want to be found.”
“She looks contented.”
“She loved your father,” she said with a wistful smile. “So much. I think it made up for her having to fall into line with her mother.”
“Blanche, you have to tell me. What was it that Mamie wanted my mother to do?”
Still, Blanche hesitated.
“You think it will make her sound mad. That’s why you don’t want to tell me.”
Her eyes showed me I was right. Finally, she said with a sigh, “It’s all about a young Acadian woman who lived a long time ago.”
“You know about Amoret Winship?” I asked quickly.
Her eyes lit up in surprise. “When Cora and I were growing up, I paid more attention than she did to Mrs. Lancaster’s long stories. So I heard how you’re all descended from Amoret—”
“What?”
“Surely you knew that, Cecilia. You did know that.”
“But … but Amoret … then … the baby …”
“Yes, the baby, who was your great-great-something-grandmother, little Aimée, taken from Winship Island and brought back to Acadie by a servant.”
“Oh, no,” I said, my stomach lurching.
“What is it?” Blanche asked, putting a comforting hand on my arm.
I was descended from Captain Winship too. But then something else occurred to me. Was I related to Uncle? I shuddered.
“What?” Blanche asked again.
“My uncle’s ancestor is Winship. Is he descended from Aimée too?”
“Laura’s husband? No, no. Most definitely not. Laura told me there was another child back in England. She inherited the estate and her descendants settled there.”
Still, I thought. He is my distant cousin, as well as my aunt’s.
And we were all of Winship’s line. I shivered.
WITH THAT NEWS, I TRIED TO PUT AMORET AND CAPTAIN WINSHIP AND Sanctuary out of my mind. Uncle’s vileness was wrapped up in all of it. I didn’t want to think of it.
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