Impossible

by Nancy Werlin

  If they failed—if she failed—it would burden him to know that truth.

  A pause. Then Zach nodded. "All right. I'll load up the goats' horns, the wheelbarrow, and the sand and corn dust in the car, and then we'll be off."

  Lucy was practically vibrating with relief. "I adore you. Okay, I already checked the tide tables and right here"—she pointed to a specific place on the map of the Bay of Fundy—"it'll be low tide at just after ten tomorrow morning. We'd have to wait a whole day for the next low tide at daylight."

  "That's true," said Zach. "Let me just call your parents. I assume you want them to come?"

  "Oh, yeah." Lucy put a hand to her stomach. "Especially Soledad."

  Zach froze. "But you told me the doctor said—"

  "Calm down. I still have three weeks. We'll be there and back before I go into labor, I'm sure. I just thought Soledad should be nearby anyway, just in case."

  "Sounds good to me," said Zach. But when he got off the phone, he was frowning. "She says Leo has a gig tonight that he's already left for and she's not sure exactly where it is. He always turns his phone off when he plays, and he won't be home until one or two in the morning. And a night's sleep would do us all good, she says, and can we leave first thing tomorrow? I told her that was fine. I know you'd like to go now, but it's a good idea to wait, Lucy. It won't be long."

  There was a lengthy pause. Lucy looked as if she wanted to speak; indeed, she moved her lips as if she were forming words. But she didn't. Then, slowly, carefully, she said, "I want to make tomorrow morning's tide. It feels important to me—actually, it feels urgent." She took a deep breath, and turned away. She massaged her throat as if it were stiff.

  Zach hesitated. It made all the sense in the world to get some sleep tonight and go in the morning with Soledad and Leo.

  He said, "Okay. You and I will go right now. I'll tell your parents to follow us up tomorrow morning, as soon as they can. They'll only be a few hours behind us. It's no biggie. They'll meet us there."

  Lucy's face illuminated. "Can we really?"

  "Yeah," said Zach. "Let's go."

  CHAPTER 51

  They reached New Brunswick just after sunrise and had breakfast at a truck stop on the Trans-Canada Highway. Lucy forced herself to eat a big omelet with two slices of toast. She sipped orange juice while poring over the map. "We take an exit toward Memramcook. Then through Dorchester and on to Shepody Bay." Shepody Bay was an inlet of the Bay of Fundy with long stretches of pristine shoreline. "The tide won't be fully out until ten, but it doesn't matter if we get there early." She peered out the window at the gray sky. "I just hope the sun comes out." She was finding it difficult, but possible, to contain her anxiety and urgency.

  What she had not found it possible to do was to talk to Zach about the Elfin Knight. If it turned out all right—if she succeeded—then she could tell him afterward. Otherwise, it was best that he not know. He would suffer less. Leo and Soledad would suffer less. And their knowing or not knowing would affect nothing as far as the baby was concerned.

  "Weather.com said it would be clear today," said Zach. "Cold, but clear. Which I guess is as good as it gets in February."

  Lucy nodded.

  They got back in the car. But as they drove farther east toward what should have been the rising sun, the sky grew darker. The wind picked up force and whipped against the car. Then a heavy, wet mixture of sleet and snow started to fall, making it difficult for Zach to see. He noticed Lucy watching the speedometer anxiously. Every time he had to slow down, she would clasp her hands tightly.

  There was something new in Lucy now, he noticed. A new level of anxiety? Maybe it was because they were getting so close. But when he asked if she wanted to talk, she smiled and said no, she needed to focus her mind on the task ahead.

  There was nothing else he could do.

  More than an hour later than they had originally estimated, they reached the correct exit. "Should be only forty or fifty minutes to the bay now," Zach said. He debated asking Lucy to get him a couple of aspirins from her purse. He had a headache that was getting worse, but on the other hand, he didn't want her to know about it. She had enough to worry about. Maybe he could take the pills on the sneak at some point.

  Lucy reached for the cell phone, which was something she'd done periodically all morning. Then she snapped it shut and sighed.

  "No signal?"

  "No signal."

  "Well, worst case, your parents will meet us tonight at that hotel Soledad mentioned. I'm sure they're on the way by now." Zach kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel. He'd had to slow down yet again. "How are you feeling?" he asked. "You must be uncomfortable. All this sitting in the car. Do you need me to stop at the next rest area?"

  "I'm all right," said Lucy.

  It was a lie, but a necessary one. She was uncomfortable, but that was only to be expected. The real problem was that ten minutes before, she had experienced a muscle contraction. It wasn't much, though. And, luckily, Zach's eyes had been fixed on the car windshield and the wipers that were doing an extremely bad job of keeping it clear, so he hadn't seen her surprise.

  There was this thing called Braxton-Hicks contractions, which was the uterine muscle getting ready for labor. She and Zach had learned about it in the birthing class they had taken. Braxton-Hicks contractions were not real labor. What Lucy had just experienced was, she promised herself, Braxton-Hicks. After all, she had to plow a field today. And then sow it. She had to, and she planned to, and she was going to.

  So you stay right where you are, she thought to the baby. Listen to your mother!

  The sleet and snow continued. Zach stopped talking as he concentrated on the road, which wound mile after mile along the beautiful, nearly deserted shoreline. He noted, with private relief, the location of a hospital. They passed boarded-up summer cottages. Then he lost his way once before, finally, just after ten o'clock in the morning, they found an area where more than an acre of ocean floor lay exposed between rocks, the shore, and a finger of marshland.

  Zach pulled the car off to the side of the unpaved road. He turned off the motor.

  They had missed low tide, but only just. Lucy would have to work fast, but she'd planned to do that anyway. Even at their most optimistic, when they had hoped for better conditions, neither of them had thought she could endure twelve hours out there. And it was obviously best to try to finish while there was still daylight.

  "I can do it in seven hours," Lucy had said yesterday.

  Zach turned to face Lucy. With the engine off, they could hear the wind and the sleet beating against the car.

  He thought she looked pale and scared.

  She thought he looked tired and worried.

  He wet his lips but didn't speak. He held out one hand. She put hers into it. They watched their fingers interlace. They sat there together for the space of three breaths. It was all the time they could afford.

  Then Zach helped Lucy struggle into her down parka. He tied her scarf over her hat on her head. Lucy took out fingerless gloves that Soledad had knitted, but Zach snatched them from her and made her hold out her hands so that he could put them on for her, one at a time.

  They got out of the car. The sleet beat down.

  From the trunk, Zach removed the goat's horn plow he had made out of the little wheelbarrow. He handed Lucy the spare horns, to swap in if the original one broke.

  The wind howled.

  Zach took the heavy bag of sand out of the trunk. Over two weeks before, Lucy had ground a single kernel of corn to a fine dust in a coffee grinder. She had sifted the corn dust into the sand. Now she took the bag from Zach and heaved it into the wheelbarrow. She gripped the wheelbarrow with both hands and lifted it experimentally, aware of her stomach, round as a watermelon, before her.

  "You practiced in the backyard," Zach reminded Lucy. She knew he was mainly speaking to reassure himself. "You know how to do this."

  "Yes," Lucy said. "I do."

  T
hey had calculated the plow rows, the speed, and the time. They had examined the tide tables. Intellectually, they knew exactly how hard this was going to be. They had long known.

  Zach could not read the expression on Lucy's face as she stood before him. He wanted to tell her that he'd stay exposed to the weather too, because it was all he could do to share her task with her. He wanted to tell her that he was wearing the seamless shirt and that he believed in her. But everything that needed saying had already been said.

  He had thought he understood. But now, in the wind and the cold and the sleet, the reality of what lay ahead was driven home to him in a new way, and along with it, so was this: While Lucy had hours ahead of backbreaking physical labor, in the freezing cold, with the eventual dark as well as the tide threatening, his part in it was also terrible.

  He must stand there and watch.

  Zach reached out one last time to touch Lucy's cheek. Lucy turned her face so that her lips could press the center of his palm.

  Then she stepped back. She walked away, steadily, awkwardly, pushing the wheelbarrow plow with its bag of sand and corn dust, down toward the edge of the Bay of Fundy.

  CHAPTER 52

  Lucy stepped onto the exposed ocean floor and walked out, intending to work her way back into the shore. Pushing the wheelbarrow carefully so that the horn suspended next to the front wheel would rake at the ocean bed with its tip, digging a long, narrow furrow across the sand and rocks. At first she went slowly, afraid of breaking the tip of the horn. But the floor of the ocean was wet and soft, so the plowing went far more easily than it would have done had the earth been hard.

  When Lucy finished the first row, she used a plastic measuring cup with a lip to sprinkle the corn dust along it. It took just over two minutes to plow and seed the first row, which was faster than the three minutes per row they had estimated back home. Lucy felt like cheering as she looked at her watch. If she could keep up this pace, she'd be done in five hours with the approximately one hundred and fifty rows needed. That was much better than the seven and a half hours she'd expected, using the original three minutes per row calculation. And she might go faster too, as she got used to the task.

  But what if she'd been trying to do this while bent over, holding the goat's horn with her hand? It didn't bear thinking of. Thank God Zach had thought of rigging the wheelbarrow.

  About two feet away from the first row, Lucy began another in parallel. She could do this. She could. She could complete the plowing and sowing and beat the tide. She'd keep her speed steady.

  A doubting voice whispered in her ear, however. When she had practiced with the wheelbarrow at home, she had done so for only fifteen minutes. Could she last five hours? In the sleet and wind?

  But she knew she could allow no doubt or defeatist ideas. Just work.

  After several rows, she started to feel the rhythm of it. She began to sing, not aloud, but in her mind. Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme …

  She hated the song, but it goaded her on. The vision of the hateful Elfin Knight goaded her on too. She began to make even slightly better time. Her rows were clean and even.

  Tell her to make me a magical shirt…

  Tell her to find me an acre of land

  Between the salt water and the sea strand …

  Tell her to plow it with just a goat's horn

  And sow it all over with one grain of corn …

  But as Lucy began the tenth row—half an hour into the work—she had another contraction. This one was stronger than the one she'd had in the car. It broke harshly into the song, the spell, in her mind.

  And it hurt.

  Instinctively, Lucy grabbed the handle of the wheelbarrow. It helped to have something to hold as the pain rippled through her. She didn't want Zach to see her bend over.

  Actually, she thought, as the pain passed, she had just been surprised. The pain hadn't been too bad.

  Not yet, anyway, the voice in the back of her head whispered.

  Lucy lifted her wheelbarrow again, but then stopped. During the contraction, she had inadvertently pressed down too hard on the plow handle. The tip of the goat's horn had broken against a rock on the ocean floor.

  No problem, she told herself. She went around to the front of the wheelbarrow and released the metal clasp that held the broken horn in place. She pulled it out and swapped in another. It took a few precious minutes to get the new horn in place.

  She did not look up to see if Zach had noticed what had happened. There was no point. He had to stay where he was, and she had to stay where she was, and go on plowing.

  She furrowed another long row. Then another.

  And another.

  Tell her to make me a magical shirt…

  Tell her to find me an acre of land

  Between the salt water and the sea strand …

  Tell her to plow it with just a goat's horn,

  And sow it all over with one grain of corn …

  Lucy lost all sense of time and space. Despite the cold and the snow, she was sweating. She had already pulled off her scarf and hat, abandoning them as she worked. Sometimes she paused to clean accumulated earth from the goat's horn so that it would plow better. Row upon row upon row. One hour passed, and then two. It was hard work, breaking the ground with the goat's horn. Once, she looked up to compare the area that she had finished to the area yet to do, and her heart fell. After that, she did not look again. She kept her head down. She plowed.

  Every so often, but she did not know how often, she would have another contraction. When it was going to happen, she had just enough time to put down the wheelbarrow so that the pressure on the goat's horn was relieved and it would not break.

  And then she had finished over half the acre, but this did not cheer her, for the remaining portion suddenly looked huge. She had never been so tired in all her life. And the contractions were hurting badly now. They were coming about every fifteen minutes. And a glance out at sea told her that the tide was coming in. She could see it now. It was still many, many yards away. But this was the Bay of Fundy. The tide would move in fast. She could beat it, though. She could, she would. The contractions were only Braxton-Hicks. They had to be. She'd finish the plowing before the tide got to her.

  That was what she thought, before she had the vision.

  CHAPTER 53

  It was a pair of feet that Lucy saw first. The feet were small and slender, and they were tightly encased in shoes—slippers, really. The slippers had delicate toes and arched insteps, and looked to be entirely woven of fragile silken thread, in colors not unlike the red and gold of a glorious autumn, but not quite like that either. Seeing the slippers, you understood that you had never truly seen red and gold before, and that a real shoe was meant to tread a hairsbreadth above the earth, and to showcase a lady's foot in just the same exquisite way that these slippers did.

  The slippers made Lucy burn with desire. In fact, if she had not had such a tight grip on her makeshift wheelbarrow plow, she might have sunk to her knees.

  She knew vaguely that it could not really be about the slippers; it was Sarah who was shoe-mad, not Lucy. She thought, hoped, that she was hallucinating. And it would be no wonder. She'd been working so hard for so long. She was tired. And also—she faced it—the contractions were no longer likely to be Braxton-Hicks. She was in labor. The baby was coming soon.

  If Lucy had been home, if life had been normal, this would have been the time to get into the car and head for the hospital.

  But nothing was normal.

  Lucy raised her gaze to see the rest of the vision. The feet were of course connected to legs, and the legs to a woman. She was a slender, dark-haired woman wearing a gossamer dress of red and brown and green and gold.

  Then Lucy saw her face, and gasped. The woman's face wasn't the single face of a single woman, but a constantly shifting rotation of faces. Lucy knew, even before she caught a glimpse of the one she recognized—that of Miranda—that the
faces were those of her ancestors. Even as her stomach heaved and she struggled to keep control of her revulsion, she wondered which one belonged to Fenella, the first Scarborough girl.

  She hoped what she saw was an illusion, and not real. It had to be, didn't it? Didn't it?

  But she was allowed to focus on the merged women's faces, horrifically trapped on a single body, for only one instant. Then her gaze was seized and commanded by the Elfin Knight, he who had called himself Padraig Seeley. He had a silk-clad arm around the waist of the strangely beautiful being that stood by his side. His black boots dwarfed her exquisite slippers.

  Lucy gripped her plow. She tried a quick breathing exercise. She reminded herself fiercely of her baby, and of Zach, who she knew was somewhere near. Who she knew was watching. But that did not matter; he might as well have been on the moon, for she knew instinctively that he would see nothing of what she saw.

  Her own world had narrowed so that all she saw was the Elfin Knight, as he stood before her in some magical space that was separate from the howling wind and the raging sleet that assaulted Lucy. The Elfin Knight and the merged women she was destined to join. Part of the Elfin Knight's collection.

  And her daughters forever possessions of mine.

  When would this happen, Lucy wondered. Along with the madness? Or upon death? She prayed she would never know. But she feared she would.

  Without taking his gaze from Lucy, the Elfin Knight reached out gently with one hand to caress the shoulder of the woman-creature he held. The woman-creature stood quite still. She kept the gaze of her myriad eyes only on Lucy. That gaze was blank, and Lucy longed not to look.