“You’ve been so generous, we don’t need anything more.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Evangeline. “Can’t have too many baby clothes.”
“I’m not sure when I’ll be home,” I said, “and I know Lorrie gets up early.”
Evangeline ignored me, said to Lorrie, “I’m sending him home at eight. Stop by at eight thirty.”
Lorrie raised her brows in question, and I said that’d be fine.
When she’d left, I turned to Evangeline. “Everything okay?”
“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Lorrie said not to worry, that everything would work out.”
“She just meant about the baby. You know, being a mother and all. It’s kind of scary.”
I granted that it was and told her I’d lined up a substitute for my classes, that I’d be there to help her when she got home.
“You don’t need to,” she said. “Lorrie can help.”
It surprised me how this casual rebuff wounded me. I said Lorrie was pretty busy with her job and studies and teenage daughter.
“I suppose,” Evangeline said.
Maybe it was her apparent preference for Lorrie that made me tread into territory I’d avoided, or maybe I simply needed to know. “It seems you were off on your due date.”
She nodded, still focused on the baby.
“I’m just going to ask. Is Daniel the father? Could he be the father?”
She began to speak—a reflex to lie, I suspect. But she stopped herself and said softly, “I thought for a while he might be. But he isn’t. I’m sorry.”
I was heartbroken to have it confirmed, but I think I’d known all along. Perhaps that’s why I managed to feel a certain joy. Evangeline had seen that I needed the truth. She must have believed she was risking everything in refusing to lie. She must have felt as I did when I exposed myself as a fraud to my Friends. I hope, I pray, that in response she too felt only love.
* * *
—
AS PROMISED, Lorrie arrived at eight thirty holding a large cardboard box. I took it from her and invited her in, but she’d already headed back to her car, returning a minute later with a baby swing. “Some moms at work—they brought in a few odds and ends. Stuff their kids had outgrown. Just to get started.”
From the box, I pulled pastel blankets and plush toys, at least a dozen baby outfits, a nursery monitor. Everything about this irritated me, the imposition of unasked-for charity, the assumption I wouldn’t be prepared—but I managed to say, “Thank you and please thank your friends. I’m sure this will all be put to use.”
“You have a car seat, right? They won’t let you drive away without one.”
I reassured her that, yes, the infant seat was already strapped in the back of the car.
“Good,” she said, her eyes noting my tight jaw, my arms folded like bars across my chest. “Isaac, I know it’s difficult for us, but there’s a baby now.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I thought I had forgiven Lorrie, that my spiritual revelations had manifested in a more loving heart. I thought Lorrie’s tender care and burial of Rufus—actions made in love, in hope of redemption—had repaired the damage. But the news, received just hours before, that the child wasn’t Daniel’s, flared the embers of loss and rage still burning in me.
Lorrie dared approach again. “Evangeline’s going to be moving slowly for the next month. Abdominal surgery is tough. I don’t mind helping.”
“We’ll manage,” I snapped. I despised who I was in that moment. Who I’d been all these months. I had never offered Lorrie true kindness, and I was unable to do so now. “Believe me,” I said. “I did my share of baby duty when Daniel was little.” My son’s name was produced with particular venom, as if it were a corrosive I could scar her with.
She studied me, and I wondered if she saw what was trapped inside me, the alien self, huge and monstrous, wanting to burst free, wanting to spew more horrible words into the room.
“Will you sit down? Can we talk about this?” she said.
“I’m tired,” I said. “Maybe some other night.”
Finally her eyes flared in anger. “Tired? Yeah, I know about tired. I’m working full time cleaning up old people’s diarrhea, taking care of my teenage daughter who—maybe you can imagine—has all kinds of struggles, trying to pass my prereqs for nursing school, and spending hours in the hospital with Evangeline. So yeah. I understand tired.” She pulled out a chair, sat down, and leaned forward. “What’s happening here? I thought we’d gotten past this.”
I remained standing, the edge of the counter hard against me, but my arms fell to my sides. When I spoke, my voice shook. “Something is horribly wrong with me.”
She stood as if to come to me, but I stiffened, and she stopped. In a gentle voice, she said, “Of course something’s wrong with you. Your beautiful boy was murdered. Your wife of decades is gone. You lost your closest friend, and you’re about to bring a new baby into this house. Something would be wrong if it weren’t.”
I pressed my lips tight, trying to hold myself together, trying not to ask her, but at the mention of my son, there it was. “My beautiful son? Was he? Beautiful?”
“What?”
“His soul. Could you see his Inner Light?” How small and afraid I sounded. How strange to be asking her this.
She hesitated, and I had my answer. She said, not unkindly, “Daniel was an adolescent boy, Isaac. Jonah too. Their souls were beautiful. But adolescence? A certain violence comes with the territory, don’t you think?”
She braced herself as if expecting anger at the comparison, but it fell on me as truth.
“Jonah, he had that physical reactivity in him. A very jumpy kid. We all saw it. Those nerves of his, they’d fire off without warning. Genetics, trauma, he had cause to be like that. Though I swear to you, Isaac, no one—not me or Nells, not his dad, not Jonah himself—no one had any idea he was capable of what happened. He’d always been a gentle boy.”
“And Daniel?” I said.
“Could I see Daniel’s Light?” She paused, considering. “Yes. I saw that big heart in him, the way he was there for Jonah after Roy’s death. He made room for Jonah in his social group, even though we all knew Jonah didn’t fit. But the adolescent in Daniel? Sometimes that guy could be a little brutal.”
Tears wet my cheeks. She came to me, and even as my arms remained limp at my sides, she wrapped hers around me. That touch—being held after such a long time alone in my body—overwhelmed me. I collapsed against her, shaking, drawing deep, gasping breaths. She led me to Rufus’s old chair and instructed me to sit, then knelt at my side, clasping my hands.
When I could speak without choking, I looked up, a pitiful sight I’m sure. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “This is good.”
She thought I was apologizing to her, or perhaps that I was accepting her kind offer of help.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do this.”