The Light of Luna Park

by Addison Armstrong

  Unbidden, my thoughts drift back to Charlie. The sunbursts of witch hazel he picked for me to press alongside Mrs. Wallace and her daffodils. Would I be so happy now without him? No. I love his laugh and his eyes and his calm, steady hands; his eagerness and his passion and his recognition of a like mind despite its trappings. I love the time we spend with him, as if we’re a family instead of a complicated mess.

  It’s exactly this that has stopped me from telling Charlie the truth. I saw sense after I almost told him in my moment of hopeful fantasy in November. No matter how many tests I might set up for Charlie, I can’t know how he would react. This current existence can’t last forever; nothing does. But I want it to go on as long as it can, and the fear that Charlie will reject us after learning the truth is too strong to let go. One day, I’ll have to make a choice—but not yet. Not now, when things are too perfect to destroy. We are happy, now; why ruin it?

  I released myself from half-mourning a year after my husband’s alleged death. I once again wear colors and patterns, and I take off my rings unless I am out with Stella among strangers.

  “I didn’t love my husband,” I confess to Charlie after we’ve returned to Mrs. Wallace’s on a bright spring day. The lie feels like a truth; I had no husband, after all, to love. Stella is upstairs, her tiny ears unmarred by my decrial of the man who I claim is her father.

  “I’m sorry,” Charlie murmurs, but I barely hear the words. I stare transfixed at his lips, dark red against fair skin, and those gray eyes. His words are gentle and sympathetic, and he does nothing to belie that anything more lies beneath the surface. Then again, neither do I, my hands folded demurely in my lap. Is it possible that he is as hungry as I? Does he crave so desperately the touch of my hand the way I do his; does he break out in sweat at the very thought of my skin?

  Althea, I demand, control yourself. But I cannot. Charlie has moved to sit beside me at the table, and he caresses my cheek gently. “You have been through so much, Althea.”

  I lower my eyes. I have, perhaps, but not in the ways he thinks. I am not a widow. I am merely a woman who has torn herself from her world to save a girl who isn’t hers, a woman who has suffered by her own hand.

  “Althea.” He lifts my chin and brings his lips to mine. For a brief moment I feel nothing. I am too stunned.

  But then God almighty, there it is. I feel it. I know now why I have lain awake every night, know now what it is my body somehow knew I wanted.

  I kiss Charlie back. Forget about my husband, I try to tell him, forget that I am a widow. I’m twenty-four, after all, and right here is exactly where I should be. “Charlie,” I say aloud instead, whimpering as his hands alight like feathers on my waist.

  He pulls back after a minute, his breath heavy and ragged. I stare back at him and try to calm my own breathing. Neither of us speaks.

  “I’ve been waiting for that,” I finally confess.

  “Me, too.” Charlie’s nostrils flare with honesty. “Me, too.”

  Mrs. Wallace’s voice cuts into the momentary silence. “Althea?” She is upstairs resting, tired from the time outside in the sun and the grass. “Althea?”

  “Oh,” I whisper. “Mrs. Wallace needs me.”

  “Of course.” Charlie dips his chin. “I will see you tomorrow?”

  “Please.” I smile as I lead him to the door.

  He tips his hat and disappears, the outline of his broad shoulders receding amid the car horns and horses. I watch him go and then close the door, wobbly, both giddy with joy and anxious for more. “I’ve been waiting for that,” I’d whispered, and I had. But now I know too that I was waiting for so much more.

  I go upstairs and pass my bedroom, heart rate increasing. Stella sleeps beside my bed, and I allow myself a brief moment of indulgence. What if Charlie and I were married, curled up beside her bassinet? Desire wraps around me, nostalgia for a family I’ve never had.

  I force myself past my own bedroom and into Mrs. Wallace’s. “You called?”

  Her wrinkled face pulls into an apologetic smile. “I just need a glass of water, dear.”

  “Of course.” This is my job, I remind myself. I cannot fault her for needing me. I fetch her a glass of water and then return downstairs alone. Birds chirp outside the window, and I press my forehead to it. Charlie, Stella, Mrs. Wallace, and I ate our midday meal out in Central Park, basking in the fresh air and the sun. Like a proper family. I again let myself picture things as I wish they could be: Charlie leaning over the picnic blanket to kiss me lightly, Mrs. Wallace bouncing Stella on her lap. Stella perched atop Charlie’s shoulders. Wedding bands on his hand and mine.

  Stella lets out a cry, and the image dissolves. “Coming, darling!” I call to her. I run up the stairs to quiet her before she wakes Mrs. Wallace. “Here, sweet girl.” I cradle her and nudge her bottle gently between her lips. When she’s done, I carry her down to the kitchen. She glances around the room quizzically, fuzzy eyebrows furrowed. She wriggles until I place her on the ground, and then she rocks in an attempt to crawl toward the door. I laugh lightly. “He’s not here anymore, baby girl. But don’t worry.” I smile. “He’ll be back.”

  * * *

  —

  Indeed, Charlie calls on our household the next morning. I am aiding Mrs. Wallace with her knitting when he knocks on the door, and I nearly trip over Stella in my haste to answer it. “Good morning!” I greet Charlie warmly, taking in the irresistible dusting of stubble along his chin. “Come on in.”

  He stoops to pick up Stella as he enters and swings her around. “How’s our little birthday girl today?”

  My eyes widen. “Charlie, you’re right! She’s nine months old today!”

  He doesn’t hear me. Stella is giggling with delight. Her choppy chuckle makes me laugh too, and Mrs. Wallace peeks her head around the doorframe to see what all the ruckus is about. She too smiles to see Stella’s joy, and the four of us return to the sitting room to visit.

  “I can’t believe she’ll be a year old soon.” I shake my head as I gaze upon my daughter. Nine months. Seventy-five percent there. “And to think she’d be just over half a year had she been born full-term!”

  Charlie whistles. “A miracle.” I smile. Charlie’s frankness is one of my favorite aspects of his demeanor. He doesn’t dilute his thoughts or beliefs for the sake of propriety or comfort. He is passionate and intense, and he never falters. He continues now. “Do you have any plans for her real birthday in July?”

  I grin. “Perhaps we’ll simply tell her the fireworks the night before are hers.”

  “Nonsense!” Mrs. Wallace drops a stitch. “You must give her a proper party. I’ll have my son and daughter-in-law come into town, and of course the good doctor.” She points at Charlie with a knitting needle, and he shrinks back slightly. “Althea, you ought to bake her a cake.”

  “Mm.” I close my eyes and breathe in. “I have a lovely recipe for the Ritz lemon pound cake. Or perhaps I ought to make the butterscotch penuche. Lemon may be too sour for our little star.” I sweep her into my arms.

  “I suppose she’s too young for one of Nathan’s famous hot dogs,” Charlie jokes. “But a trip out to Coney Island would be fitting.”

  Stella squeals as I grip her upper arm tightly.

  “Sorry, darling.” I lower her to the floor so she can play and then look up at Charlie. “I’m not sure . . .” I cough. “It might bring up traumatic memories for her.” A weak excuse, as there’s no chance of Stella remembering the first few weeks of life. But the best I can invent. “The incubators, the pneumonia . . .”

  “Of course. I’m sorry if I was being insensitive.”

  “No!” Guilt forces the corners of my lips into a stiff smile. “It’s a wonderful idea. I’m just a paranoid mother.” I attempt a breezy laugh that comes out as a bark. Well. I’m not one for breeziness even at my best.

  I must steer the con
versation from Luna Park. Absurdly, all I can think of beyond Stella’s birthday is Charlie’s crimson mouth. The winter of his face: snow-gray eyes, berry-red lips, the dark shadow of his scruff.

  I swallow. Now is not the time. Not with Mrs. Wallace’s knitting needles clacking beside me and my daughter skirting under the table in an imagined game of peek-a-boo. Charlie takes pity on her and covers his eyes. “Where’s Stella?” he coos. “Stella, Stella, Stella Star? Where are you?” He draws the words out so she laughs. “Aha! I hear her!” he cries, ducking his head underneath the table to meet her eyes. “I found her!” He pulls her up and tickles her belly.

  My thoughts darken with envy. My father never played with me so, wrapped up as he was in grief and anger. But perhaps Stella’s life can be different, I think as I look at Charlie. What a lovely father he would make. Never would any daughter of his fear speaking up or speaking out. She would have his authenticity.

  And how lucky his wife would be, too. I feel my face flood with heat, and I lecture myself sternly. Adenylyl cyclase, I remind myself. Vasodilation of the blood vessels in the face. That is all. I repeat the steady, unchanging science to myself until my blush fades.

  But what of the rest of my body, flushed and eager? I shake my shoulders slightly to remind myself where I am. The formal sitting room of my aged employer and with my infant daughter.

  I smile as that very daughter’s face shines with glee. Perhaps we are an odd group, arranged here around the sofa with the knitting and the milk and the medicine. But my daughter is happy. My daughter is happy, and so am I.

  As long as I can forget how Hattie must feel today, how she must feel on the fifth of every month. She’s spent nine months grieving while I’ve been gifted Stella’s first smiles and laughs and watched her learn to roll over and learn to crawl. Hattie has spent nine months sleeping beside a dangerous man while I have spent nine months curled beside their precious baby girl.

  Almighty God, I pray silently. Watch over Hattie. And forgive me, dear Lord, for all my sins.

  Stella laughs loudly, and my gaze jumps to where she rocks on her knees in front of Charlie. He’s tickling her belly and she’s wrapped up in that deep, gurgling laugh I am so in love with. The sound is pure joy, and I take a deep breath.

  Stella is happy. I have done nothing that needs forgiving.

  * * *

  —

  I am eager to see Charlie alone again, as we haven’t had a moment without Stella and Mrs. Wallace since our kiss. But when he bounds through the door in the early morning two days later—early enough that I am the only one awake—he is so excited I nearly forget what’s happened between us. His eyes appear translucent in the morning light, and his lashes sparkle as with dew. Stella will be delighted to see him when she awakes.

  “Althea,” Charlie crows, “I’ve done it.”

  “Done what?” I laugh, too surprised to even help him with his coat. “What have you done?” I imagine mornings like this one in our future, set alight by his passion and fire.

  “You know I’ve been meeting with doctors from hospitals across the city. Interviews, tours, just preliminary things. But now I’ve partnered with Julius Hess, Althea, the pioneering neonatologist.” The excitement in his voice sounds like a child’s, and I wonder what Stella’s passions will be as she turns two and five and ten. “Hess and I are going to study, improve, and then publicize Couney’s incubators, Althea, and we aren’t going to stop until every hospital in this city has an incubator ward for its babies, Althea. Every last one.”

  I am filled with a cocktail of elation and hopelessness more potent than any drink banned by law. “So you’ll work,” I clarify, “with Couney?”

  “Yes.” Charlie grabs my hand eagerly. “And you started it all.”

  But I no longer hear him. His hand on mine sends electricity rocketing through my body, even as my heart plummets.

  I cannot be part of his life anymore. Not if he’s going to exist in my old world, the world in which I am a nurse but not a mother. He would find out. He would find out, and Stella would be taken from me.

  His next words confirm my fears. “I asked the doctor if he remembered you! He definitely knew the name, and he said surely the nurses would be able to recall—”

  I pull him suddenly tighter, desperate to feel his skin on mine for the last time. Desperate too to stop the words he spews with such passion.

  I crush my lips against his and grasp his face between my hands; he is as hungry as I, the weight of his desire sending me stumbling backward. Pressed against the wall, I pull Charlie closer. Every inch of his body is touching mine, so why, why, why does it feel as if we are still not close enough? His right hand reaches into my hair, his left down toward my waist.

  This is the last time he will ever touch me. My only chance. I feel his heartbeat as strong as my own and pull open his shirt to reach it. My only chance. I moan when my fingers land on his chest. I have seen the skin of many men in my work, but the physicality of the body fades in the harsh light of duty. The body in the hospital is the body in an anatomy textbook: mere muscle, skin, and bone. But Charlie’s body against mine pulses, summoning from somewhere within mine the tears I’ve buried for decades. He wipes them oh so gently from my face as they flow and then returns his hands with sudden violence to my hips, his hands fighting fabric in their search for skin. I’m in an ankle-length skirt over my shirtwaist, and Charlie is able to slide his hands beneath the waistband so his thumbs layer over my hip bones. I am warm as if I have stepped naked into a creek under the hot summer sun. The water rises to my thighs, flows between them, and I draw my nails across Charlie’s sweat-soaked skin. I want to go upstairs, and the clarity of the thought shocks me. I want to pull Charlie into bed with me and tumble into sin. But Stella is up there.

  Stella.

  Stella.

  Stella. The reason I can never kiss this man again, the reason it is so wrong to give him this impression. The reason Charlie can never see my naked body and the reason that now I can never see him again at all. Oh, Charlie, I think with a jolt, what have I done? I stumble sideways to stand apart from him, though the need for his body still rages in my own.

  “Oh, no.” He shakes his head, his own breath ragged. “I’m so sorry, Althea, I—”

  “No. Please don’t.” I don’t want the last memory of the man I love to be an apology for the same. Love. Dear God, I love him.

  “No, but—” He scrabbles through the pockets of his coat where it hangs near the door. “I wasn’t trying to take advantage”—he shakes his head—“I . . .” He pulls out a glittering silver ring. It is small and delicate; it would not slide loosely on my fingers like the gold ones I bought myself at the pawnshop. It would fit.

  This is everything I’ve wanted. Everything I want for myself. Everything I want for Stella.

  Except that now, marrying Charlie would plunge us all into danger. I imagine my daughter with the Perkinses. The violence of a father, the rejection of a mother. And the disappearance of the woman who’d raised her. Welfare Island and its desperate souls materialize in my mind for the first time in months. I swallow as Charlie thrusts the sparkling ring toward me. “Althea, I want to marry you.”

  Shoulders down, back straight. Chin up, eyes down. A nurse is composed even in the face of agony and death. “Mrs. Wallace will be waking soon,” I say evenly. “I ought to go attend to her. I trust you can see yourself out.”

  * * *

  —

  I fall into bed and cry. It seems Charlie has unlocked my tears, and Stella peers confusedly between the slats of her crib. The blanket at Mrs. Wallace’s house felt so luxurious when I first moved in—so much softer than the standard-issue one I’d had at the dormitory. Now, I can hardly bear to be underneath its stifling heat. I itch where the fabric rubs against bare skin.

  I’m trapped enough in my life. My complicated, convoluted life
. My life of lies. My life of denial.

  I tuck my thumbs into my palms and wrap my fingers around them till the joints pop. Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. My toes twitch with each iteration of his name.

  Charlie. I love him. I want him. I want to slide my stiff, exhausted body into bed beside his warm one each night. I want him to be there when I wake in the dark to feed Stella. I want him there when we wake up in the morning, and then I want to spend the day with him: coffee and conversation at the breakfast table, picnics at the park with Stella. I want to work beside him, laugh with him, even fight with him.

  I love Charlie.

  But I love Stella more.

  For her, I am of course filled to the very brim with gratitude; joy, even. If Couney’s incubators can be introduced into Bellevue, St. John’s, hospitals across Brooklyn and Manhattan—well, millions of lives can be saved. I don’t doubt that Couney himself has already saved thousands. How much more can be done in hospitals?

  But must Charlie, my Charlie, be the one to do it?

  He is not your Charlie, I remind myself sharply. And indeed, he is certainly not my Charlie now. He cannot be. Not if he is going to be part of the circles I must forever avoid: those at Bellevue, at Coney, those who know that I am a nurse rather than a mother.

  A true mother is not so selfish, I think. I should be overwhelmed with joy that other babies like my own will be saved.

  But I feel so alone.

  No. I gaze at my daughter’s round face in her crib. Giving up Charlie guarantees one thing: I will always have Stella.

  * * *

  —

  I wake the next morning before my daughter does. I do not forget even for a moment the events of yesterday, instead peeling through them again. I am desperate enough to hope my reaction was overly dramatic; I pray that I overstated the effects of Charlie’s decision. There must be an alternative to leaving him. But no. Perhaps if I’d confessed earlier, told him the truth—but I can no longer risk it. Not when he is working with the very nurses I deceived, the very hospital from which I was let go. Now, telling Charlie would mean more than losing our blissful days together. It might mean losing Stella, too. And even Charlie would be in danger. Asking him to keep my secret would mean asking him to lie to his colleagues and his bosses; if we were ever caught, he’d end up in jail just as I would.