*
Dear Julie.
I wonder about choices. How we resent them, and how we regret them—even as we watch them grow.
*
The contractions started early. A shooting pain, in the cold husk of dawn. Lavender begged: No barn. Let’s just do it here.
Johnny rolled out a blanket next to the rocking chair. He and Ansel stood over Lavender while she shrieked and bled and pushed. It was different this time—like she was not inside her own body, like the pain had consumed her and she was only there to spectate. Halfway through, Ansel flung himself over Lavender, his sticky palm pressed to her forehead with worry, and Lavender felt a primal bursting that brought her briefly back into herself: a swell of love so powerful and doomed, she was not sure she’d live through it.
After, there was calm.
Lavender wished the floor would open beneath her, pull her into a different life. She was certain that her soul had exited her body along with the baby’s head, fingers, toenails. As Johnny passed the bundle to Ansel and tried to rouse her from the floor, it occurred to Lavender that reincarnation was in fact a last resort: there were other lives, in this very world. California. She turned the word over in her mind, a sweet sucking candy that disintegrated on her tongue.
She could not look at either of her sick, sniffling children. Ansel, with his strange monster face. The new baby, a bundle of warm skin that she couldn’t bear to touch without feeling like she’d catch some disease. What disease, she didn’t know. But it would trap her here.
Lavender sank into the hardwood. She wished to be a speck of dust on the ceiling.
*
Weeks passed, and the new baby did not have a name. One month melted into two. Baby Packer, Ansel would coo, as he played with the bundle on the floor by the fireplace. A little song he’d made up, tuneless and lilting. Baby Packer eat, Baby Packer sleep. Brother loves you, Baby Packer. Brother loves you.
*
Johnny made the occasional show of tenderness, a halfhearted attempt to bring her back to life. He rubbed Lavender’s feet, crouched at the end of the mattress. He cleaned her wounds with a sponge, ran a hairbrush through her tangles. She stayed nestled in bed while Johnny brought the baby in to nurse—the rest of the time, Baby Packer squirmed under Ansel’s watchful four-year-old eye.
For the few minutes a day that Lavender held the baby, she wondered how he had gotten here, whether it was possible that this sweet suckling thing even belonged to her. With Ansel, she’d felt the same way, but her love had been so new and fierce. Now, she feared she had used it all up.
“Take him,” she monotoned, once the baby finished feeding. “I don’t want him here.”
Johnny’s frustration was hardening. Lavender could feel it, building up in his chest like molten lava. The horror only made her sicker. Numb. She had been subsisting on a single can of corn or beans per day, the hunger pangs like background static. More when you start contributing again, Johnny promised idly, his voice turned sour with disgust and frustration, repeating the words that had become a fixation. You have to learn to earn your keep.
So by the time Johnny stood over the bed, brimming with indignation, Lavender was so weak and brainless, she could not bring herself to care. Lavender looked up at the mass of him, seething, enraged, and tried to conjure the Johnny in the field with the raspberries. It wasn’t that he’d been replaced by this grizzly stranger, more that he’d evolved. Grown into his own shadow.
“Get up,” Johnny said.
“I can’t,” Lavender told him.
“Get the fuck up, Lavender.” His voice itched, curdled. “You have to get up right now.”
“I can’t,” she said again.
Lavender felt like she’d willingly asked for what came next. Like the plot had already been written out for her, and all she had to do was live it. She realized she had been waiting months for this. The locked food, the little bruises—warnings she had registered but not heeded.
Before Johnny lunged, she expected some nightmare version of him, a person she’d never seen. But no. In the milliseconds before the blow, Lavender looked at the same rugged man she had always known, and she thought, with a clarity that bordered on sympathy: You could have been anything, Johnny. You could have been anything but this.
*
A fistful of hair, yanked from the scalp. A scream, pleading, as Lavender’s aching bones slammed against the floor. The wound between her legs, open now, searing. Johnny’s steel-toed boot, rearing back like a horse, landing square in her stomach. The shock, a glittered red.