Maggie watches her mother sweep a pile of dirt into her dustpan and then dump the whole thing out the back door. “Those beasts never stop tracking filth inside this house,” she complains.
She means her children, the three youngest who still live in her house. Maggie has a sip of ice-cold lemonade and moans with pleasure. Her mother’s lemonade is made with fresh lemons, heaps of sugar, and a touch of honey for extra sweetness. The apple cake melts in her mouth, and Maman’s sublime cooking almost makes Maggie forget how miserable it was to live with her. It helps, too, that her mother treats her way better now that she’s married and someone else’s problem.
Maman pours herself a glass of lemonade, slices off an end of cake, and sits down facing Maggie. It’s Sunday afternoon. Roland and her father are in the maid’s quarters, drinking and puffing on cigars.
“How are you feeling?” Maman asks. “Still got the morning sickness? I had it for months. Terrible. Remember?”
Maggie’s been dreading this moment. She looks away. “I lost the baby.”
“Again?”
“Yes,” Maggie admits. “I saw a doctor, though.”
Roland arranged an appointment with a specialist, Dr. Surrey, in Montreal. He gave Maggie a D and C, which he claimed would at least clean her out. “There’s definitely residue in the uterus from one of the previous miscarriages,” he said. “Which would explain the trouble you had with the last pregnancy.”
“So you mean the residue from the first miscarriage might have caused the second?” Roland interjected. “And so on?”
“Absolutely.”
“I knew there was an explanation,” he said, pleased with himself.
“Miscarriages are quite common, Mrs. Larsson. They don’t mean anything is necessarily wrong. However, without a follow-up D and C to clean up all the tissue, there’s a greater chance of another miscarriage.”
Maggie’s uterus is clean now. The first miscarriage—a common, random thing—had likely caused the others. There’s nothing to worry about, Dr. Surrey assured her. All they have to do now is start trying again. Their chances are excellent.
“You’ll probably have a grandchild by next summer,” Maggie tells her mother, sounding more optimistic than she feels. “He gave me a D and C, which he said should fix everything.”
“How’s Roland taking it?”
Roland’s way is to make model trains and compulsively toil over teeny puzzle pieces and mostly to work. He’s started to leave the house a little bit earlier in the mornings and come home later than usual in the evenings. He often misses supper. Maggie has always known he’s uncomfortable being around her when she’s down. Her moods frighten him, make him squeamish. She’s learned this about him over the years: he needs everything in his life to be orderly and pleasant. He wants his wife to be perky and accommodating. She tries, but she’s discovered she’s a terrible actress.
In some ways he tricked her, pretending to love her ambition. Really, he only ever wanted her to have children. He’s very good at pretending, something she’s discovered gradually over the course of their marriage, by way of little crumbs of information he lets slip, usually when he’s had too much to drink. His father was a cold, stern Swede who did not like him. His mother tried to compensate and cover up the father’s disdain, right up until she died, leaving the two of them alone. Roland became a master at cultivating a veneer of cheeriness and normalcy, especially in an atmosphere of tension.
She wishes they could go back to the way they were, before they got so fixated on having a child. Roland is way more determined than she is, and it’s changed him. It’s put a strain on their friendship and affected the quality of their marriage—the very things she treasured most about their life together.
“He’s making you pay,” Maman says, picking at her cake.
“Who?”
“God.”
“Maybe I’m not supposed to have children,” Maggie says. “I wasn’t sure I wanted any at first.”
“No one really wants them,” Maman admits. “But what other choice is there?”
“Didn’t you want us?”
“Who thought about such things?” Maman says. “We just got pregnant. It’s what was done.”
“Why didn’t you keep my baby?” Maggie asks her mother. “You could have raised her as your own. You like babies.”
Maman frowns but doesn’t disagree.
“She could have stayed in our family.”
“Imagine what people would have said? You disappear for nine months and then all of a sudden I’ve got a new baby? The immaculate conception! Everyone would have known.”
“Everyone probably knew anyway.”
“What are you bringing this up for anyway?”
“Maybe she was my only chance at having a child.”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I thought I could forget her,” Maggie says. “I did for a while, until I got pregnant again. And now . . . I don’t know. I think about her a lot lately. If it wasn’t for what happened—”
“Stop it.”
“Where did Daddy take her?”
“There was a foundling home nearby. It was the only place we knew of.”
“No infant was brought there in March.”
“How do you know?” Maman asks, her eyes narrowing.
“I spoke to a nun there.”
“You’ll never find her,” she says. “Trust me. They don’t want you to find her.”
“Who?”
“The church. Your father.” She finishes her cake. “Just have another one,” she says. “The odds are much better.”
After supper, Maggie goes outside by herself. She heads straight down to the cornfield, wanting to get lost in there. As she makes her way through the stalks, she’s able to breathe again. The air has the musky smell of ripe corn, a smell that instantly transplants her back to a time of romance and possibility, when her future felt as limitless as the stalks that seemed to grow right up into the sky.
A voice in the night startles her back to the present.
“Is that you?”
For a split second she thinks she’s dreaming. She hears the corn crunching beneath his boots. His keys jangling. She stands very still, waiting. And then she turns slowly and he’s there, filling the field like some beautiful hallucination. Just like in her fantasies.
“Hello, Maggie,” he says.
“Gabriel?”
He smiles at her as though they’re still teenagers and meeting here in secret. The decade of their separation dissolves and it’s just the two of them and the smell of the corn and the humid air and the tickle of husks and tassels against their ankles.