Heidi called depression turning blue. “What is it like?” Maud once asked. “Good question,” Heidi said, as if she’d never before been pressed to describe it, had not told countless doctors where she was on a scale of one to ten with eating, sleeping, bad thoughts, spending, hiding, et cetera. Heidi was the source of Maud’s respect for precision.
“Close your eyes and press your palms against your eyeballs,” Heidi instructed. “Now cross your legs and lock your ankles over each other. No, don’t stop, keep pressing your eyes. Now make a deep noise in your chest, a very afraid noise.” Maud did all three. “Keep going.” Maud felt trapped. Her ribs vibrated horribly. “Are you feeling anything?” Maud nodded. “What? Don’t say it out loud. Tell yourself.” Maud felt frightened, and as if she were stuck. Pinned down. Alone. She whimpered.
“Now, now, come back. Take your fingers off your eyes. Shake out your arms and legs.”
Maud was crying.
“I’m so sorry, lamb. It was the only way I could think of to explain.”
“I’m not crying for me,” Maud said.
Their last family time together was at Caneel Bay. Her father, Moses, had told her the story several times, but she believed she remembered some of it firsthand. Maud was almost five. Heidi had gone snorkeling the first day and had been hectic at the tea that afternoon, describing all the fish she’d seen to the other guests. Maud had seen them look pleased at first to be approached by such a beautiful young woman, but soon they were trying to sidle away from her. When Moses led her away Maud saw them notice her limp. Maud wanted to tell them the limp went away in the water—that was what Heidi said—but she was too shy.
On the second day Heidi got up before anyone and swam out into the boat channel. She described swimming alongside a barracuda and seeing his ghastly smile and fanatic eyes. “He recognized me,” she said. “He knew me from before.” “Before when?” Maud asked. They had never been to Caneel Bay before. “From the past, when we were relatives.” Moses frowned. He hired one of the workers at the hotel to keep an eye on Heidi so he and Maud could go to the beach. He needn’t have. Heidi was fine for the rest of the vacation, her personality meshing with her pretty face. Maud loved to think of that trip. The temperature and the island colors matched her inner feeling. When they got home, though, Heidi went straight into the hospital. Maud was told she was at a place in the country where she could sleep.
Maud stopped at the threshold of the top-floor room Heidi sometimes went to for naps. “Come on, Clem.” She picked her up again and opened the door slowly. Heidi was on her bed, face up. Maud couldn’t tell whether or not she was asleep. Heidi’s feet were bare, her toenails unpolished. She wore an old broom skirt and a black sweater and the gold bangle she never took off—it had attracted the barracuda. Her hair fanned to the sides across the pillowcase.
“Ma? Are you awake?” Maud leaned over her and arranged her hair. “It’s almost dinnertime. Do you want to come downstairs? It’s really beautiful outside.”
Maud set Clemmie down and sat on the edge of the bed. She rubbed her mother’s arm. Heidi brought a wrist up to her eyes and draped them. She smelled clean, washed and perfumed.
“I just got home from work. Had a lovely walk back, naming the world.” She took Heidi’s hand. “As you taught me.” She looked into the soft brown shadows, and at the wavy pale lines around the blots of shades. “Please, Ma?” She tugged lightly.
Heidi hinged upward via her strong stomach muscles and looked around.
“Hi, Heidi,” Clemmie said.
“Hello, you. Come up here.” Clemmie reached up, and Maud hooked her fingers in the back of her shorts and lifted. Clemmie hurled herself onto Heidi’s lap.
“I had a long nap. I felt a little blue this morning, but I fought it. I took a long bath and did beauty things,” Heidi said.
“I’m so glad. You seem fine now.”
Heidi raised her eyebrows. “Fine might be going too far. But I feel all right. I caught myself in time. This morning I went to a store and stood there staring around, and I thought—uh-oh.”
This was a symptom for Heidi. It was also the kind of thing she couldn’t tell people without their saying, Oh I do that too! No. They didn’t. Not in the same way. Her major spiraling symptom was a repetitive thought. She went around the world picturing bad things happening to children at that very moment, and then bad things happening to animals. When she had those thoughts, if she didn’t get help soon enough, she ended up in the hospital.
“Good, Ma.” Maud was careful not to go overboard. An excess of enthusiasm frightened Heidi. Her detector for false cheer was finely tuned. “Come on, I’m getting hungry.”
She held out her hand and the three of them went down—mother, daughter, granddaughter. Maud led Heidi and Clemmie straight down to the garden and headed back up to the kitchen. She cut up vegetables and put rice in the cooker. A stir-fry. A staple. Maud would watch to see if Heidi ate the green peppers. When she was really getting blue, she didn’t like to chew.
As Maud cooked, she checked out the window every couple of minutes. It appeared Clemence was in charge of whatever game she and Heidi were playing. She pointed here and there, and Heidi skipped across the bricks. Maud smiled—her bossy daughter. Clemence had been a person right from the start, with her own preferences and ways of doing things. She’d had colic, and Maud had spent hours walking her, and more hours with her draped like a tense lion in an acacia tree over her forearm, or in the groove between her pressed-together thighs, the baby turned on her stomach, tiny feet pointing toward Maud’s abdomen, the rumbling stomach hanging free, the bony back rising on each breath. Or in the same position but rolled on her back, so the baby faced her, and Maud could slip her thumbs inside the little fists and make the hands jig back and forth while she made funny faces.
She discovered that if she removed a layer of clothing when Clemmie was wailing she usually stopped. She also found that Clemmie liked to be set down on a blanket on the floor in a pool of sun and left alone. This perplexed Maud. She’d read about Jane Goodall raising her son, Grub, as she’d seen the chimps raise their young, by always having him in someone’s arms and never letting him down or leaving him alone. She’d have tried that if it weren’t for her job—she couldn’t very well ask the day care to replicate the doings of a chimp mother. But Clemmie wouldn’t have wanted that anyway. She had a strong sense of her bodily integrity.
Now Clemmie was nearly three, a solid walker and talker. She’d started talking early and spoke in sentences, and that made her both easier and harder than when she was a baby. Maud hated to leave her to go to work, but she very much wanted to work, beyond the need for money. Her father, Moses Silver, had offered to pay for an abortion, on the theory that having a baby so young and without a husband would ruin Maud’s career, but Maud couldn’t conscience that, not for herself. She’d asked Heidi what she thought, and Heidi had been her usual fey self, saying she’d loved being a young mother, and that she’d put her creativity into that and the house and missed nothing. Moses’s mother also encouraged the abortion on the grounds of her long-term work for abortion rights groups—she’d be proud to have a granddaughter who’d had one. Heidi didn’t have any family for Maud to consult, which she was used to—but in this instance the lack, the absence, reinforced her decision. All those people she’d never know would come alive in the baby. Maud made up her mind to go ahead with the pregnancy, and to never regret it. She was sure Heidi had never regretted her.