DECEMBER 6, 2011
The room spins—blue-green ships, pale lemons.
They bring her down to the house, set her and the baby up in a bed upstairs, but Lena’s not well enough to care for the child. She has a fever, an infection somewhere. Is weak, has lost too much blood. Hazel has done this for years with cows in the barn; brought them warm water and rubbed down their teats. Helped them heal. Hazel takes the baby from Lena. The baby screeches and Hazel fills a bottle with formula, the stuff the doctor delivered, puts it between Bonnie’s lips until she stills.
Lena weeps, rages, in her room at the top of the stairs. “Bring me my child!” she calls out, her voice weak, cracking.
“Shh,” Hazel says to her sister. “You’re not well. What you need is rest.” Hazel brings the baby to Lena every morning but does not let her nurse.
“Let me,” Lena implores, crying, but Hazel pulls the child away. Lena’s breasts swell, engorge, grow hot to the touch.
“Squeeze them with your fingers,” Hazel says. “They’ll dry up.”
The doctor, on the telephone, says best not to nurse. He says: hot water compresses. Aspirin.
Lena’s brow grows beads of sweat. Her fever rises. Her shirts are soaked from spurting milk, her breasts red, rock-hard, burning.
Hazel brings the baby to her crib. Gives her the bottle. Wraps her in thick cotton. Puts her on her stomach and slips out the door.
“I’M SORRY, LENA,” HAZEL WHISPERS, LOOKING AROUND frantically. Reaching her arm out into the room. But no, she’s confused again. This is not Lena, walking toward her.
This is Deb. Handing her a cup of something too sweet. A straw. Placing it between Hazel’s lips.
She closes her eyes. Sucks in.
A disease of the brain. That’s what Deb tells her she has. And now she’s in the living room in a hospital bed, and Deb is here all the time. Sometimes a woman she doesn’t know. Sometimes Vale.
She closes her eyes. It makes the breathing easier and eases the pain, which seems to be from nowhere and yet everywhere. What is the name of the disease they tell her she has? All she remembers is one in a million.
One in a million. She and Lena are girls, picking wild blackberries on a hillside. They are singing. The church songs they knew then. Lena in a pale-blue gingham dress, covered in stains, a hole by her left knee. That knee covered in scabs. Those legs running out ahead: a ball of fire, or sun-stricken light, wild hair in flames, that hair Hazel tried to brush that morning. Lena throws her arms into the air and runs and does not stop running.
“Lena!” Hazel calls out, but it’s no use.
Hazel saw her giving birth. Lex tearing down the path like something was after him, face ghost pale. And then Hazel was running, too. Hazel thought then: dead. My sister will be dead. Just like all those heifers. And then Lena reared up, like a horse, like a lion, and made her hands into fists and raised her neck and bared her teeth, and it was girl-Lena again, that feral child, swearing, spitting, and then the head of a baby. Crowning. The wet, bloody orb of a child’s head, coming into this world.
Hazel wiped the baby down, brought her to Lena, there in the dirt, saying, “Let her drink.”
And she did. Lips to her rising breast. Bare cheek against bare skin. There in the dappled light. Her sister’s fingers on the girl’s crusted skull, and then the next wave of contractions, as she pushed the placenta out: magenta, still half-alive, that pulsing thing in the dirt and leaves.
“Lena,” she calls out now. “Take the baby.”
But it’s Deb leaning closer, brushing her hair back from her face. “Hazel? Are you okay? Do you need anything?”
“Where am I?”
“Your living room. Here. I made some soup. Full of fall vegetables.”
She brings a spoon to Hazel’s lips. Warm soup. Cool hands. It slides down Hazel’s throat and settles in her stomach. Vegetables—tomatoes, potatoes, squash. Just like when she was a girl, a young woman, a wife, a mother. Vegetables from the garden, always.