Ralph grunted that he would.
Evangeline peered at the bracelet and back at the men. “That’d be so nice.”
Isaac yelled that he could use her outside. She excused herself, thinking she’d dig the bracelet out later, but when she returned, the can had been emptied. She asked George where the trash had gone.
“Dumped it in the back of my pickup. Why? Something else you wanted in there?”
She said no but made an excuse to leave and wandered by the truck. The rubble was a good three feet deep. She’d need to climb in and dig around. If they saw her, she’d have to explain, and she couldn’t even explain it to herself.
How did she feel about Jonah? How had she ever felt? She had recognized him, and he had recognized her. And maybe that was a type of love, finding in someone the same river that flows through you, both of you sharing its banks. But what did it mean when that river boiled as if a million fish leaped against its current? When she imagined Jonah slashing at Daniel—which she had a thousand times—she felt that seething river rushing through his heart, surging up his arm into that swinging blade. Could a passion like that have been love if that’s what it produced?
She looked at the wreckage from the old house, then back at the yard where three men stared at the new hole in the wall. She walked away from the truck, from leaping fish and splattered blood and unanswerable questions, and headed toward Isaac and his friends.
* * *
—
TWO WEEKS LATER, the nursery walls glowed the same creamy lemon as her room and a warm spring breeze ruffled a gauzy curtain over the new window. The three Quaker men assembled a white crib. A fair dose of good-natured grousing accompanied the task, but laughing too filled the room. When they were done, Ralph hammered a nail into the wall and pulled from his daypack a framed picture of a colorful cartoon dog. When he hung it, he had the funniest little smile, as if the picture amused him in some tender, forgotten way.
After a late lunch of chicken salad, the Friends said their shy good-byes. A half hour later, Lorrie and Nells arrived lugging a big wooden trunk painted in bold blocks of fuchsia and teal and canary yellow. Except for the Rufus emergency, Evangeline hadn’t seen either of them at the house since the first week of February.
They set the trunk in a corner of the kitchen. Lorrie clasped Evangeline in a fierce embrace, a little too long and too tight, as if making up for missed time. Evangeline almost cried for its painful relief, but Lorrie let go, turned her head vaguely in the direction of Isaac, and offered him a muted hello.
“I’m glad you could come,” he muttered, not sounding the least bit glad. He kept glancing out the window as if expecting someone else, obviously relieved when Natalia, Sophie, and their mother showed up a few minutes later. They swept into the house loud and laughing, bearing brightly wrapped packages.
Awhile later, Isaac produced a white cake with fluffy meringue frosting, store-bought but delicious all the same. At first he avoided talking to Lorrie, but by the time everyone left in the late afternoon, he’d had the presence of mind to ask her about her schoolwork and laugh when she made a silly joke.
As they were leaving, Lorrie said to Isaac, “Thank you. For inviting us.” This time, it was Isaac who gave a little nod, and though there was caution between them, Evangeline also sensed a remembered affection.
She realized the entire day had been a kind of baby shower and marveled at how Isaac had arranged it. She now understood that Lorrie’s absence in their lives had nothing to do with her. There’d been some painful rift between the adults. And that was the best present of all, because she could see how difficult it was for Lorrie and Isaac to be together, yet they had done it for her.
That evening, after Isaac went to his room, she returned to the nursery. The light from a floor lamp softened the space, and she sat in the overstuffed chair and cried. Not out of joy but because nothing in the world could terrify her the way happiness could.
* * *
—
OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS, this disturbance of happiness was softened by a familiar creep of fear. At night, even in the lucky hours when the baby slept peacefully inside her, Evangeline lay awake, the presence of the completed nursery pressing down on her chest, squeezing out the last air she had. The permanence of what was arriving and the loss of who she was and had been—who she’d never get a second chance to become—could no longer be ignored. Strange how she hadn’t really thought about that before, all the deaths that accompany birth.
Her mother’s absence was magnified a thousandfold by the approaching arrival. She wondered if her mother knew and thought she must, because if she didn’t, if Evangeline could be so truly alone in the world, then it was as if she didn’t exist at all. But if her mother did know and wasn’t there, what did that say about Evangeline?
For weeks, she’d lain awake, pondering this: how would the baby’s parentage sort itself out? No one had mentioned any kind of testing. The baby would be born “early,” unusually heavy for such a “preemie.” But it would look like babies do, soft and unformed, a mewling lump of flesh. It would take a while for features to clarify and likely years, perhaps never, before some telling detail asserted itself. If, after those first weeks, the baby’s eyes turned green or hazel, Isaac and Lorrie could think it was either of the boys’。 Brown eyes would suggest Daniel as the father, but her mother had brown eyes, and besides, Evangeline already sensed the baby would not.
Whatever the baby’s eye color, at some point—and Evangeline realized this with a start—she would confess. She would tell them the truth: neither boy was the father. Isaac would act with graciousness, would insist she remain in the house. His God would demand he provide shelter to the slut and her bastard child, though of course he would never think such words. Not with such harshness. He had a self-image to protect. But swimming beneath any surface kindness would be other feelings, darker and more complex, and this is what she worried about: how what was felt but not spoken, not even allowed to be thought, would weigh between them. Wasn’t it the anger lurking beneath the surface that killed things in the end?
Yet even with all this worry and rightful fear, Evangeline knew that something bigger and more powerful was happening to her. For the first time in her life, she could feel in her chest the hearts of others—both Isaac’s and Lorrie’s—with such consistent clarity that she was willing to pay the awful price of truth. Their pain, their need, now hers.
It was a wonder—a painful, horrible, terrifying wonder—this unexpected understanding of love.
64
Three times, I’d attempted to write a note of invitation to Lorrie for Evangeline’s shower. Three times, I tore it into bits and buried it deep in the trash. I was afraid she wouldn’t come. I was afraid she would. When I managed to leave my fourth effort in her mailbox, a sense of liberation overtook me, as if I’d long been chained to a barren spot and had finally been released.
Later, when I watched her across the kitchen—saw her eyes shining on the girls, saw them laughing together—I struggled to picture the Lorrie I had seen before the fire the past fall. I confess, I worked hard to summon it. Daniel had called me to that spot. His blood was being burned. To let go of that moment would be like letting go of my son himself.