Even without the paralysis in her left side, Edith had difficulty keeping pace with Gracie and Abigail as they made their way down Beaucatcher Mountain. They were accustomed to walking; she had the disadvantage of living in an era where people got in their cars and drove a quarter of a mile to retrieve fast-food dinners from a pick-up window.
As dusk closed in, she lost sight of them halfway down Charlotte Street. But there was no danger of Edith getting lost— she had lived in Asheville all her life and was only a few blocks from home. The streetlights came on, shedding dappled light and casting a romantic glow over the sidewalks, lawns, and houses along her way.
When she finally climbed the steps and stood on the wide porch of Quinn House, the front door was shut and there was no sign of either Gracie or Abigail. Cautiously she turned the handle and entered the foyer.
Every light in the house was on. She heard voices and heavy footsteps overhead.
And then a scream.
Edith bolted up the stairway and paused on the landing, flattening herself against the wall as a tall, rangy man flew past her down the stairs. He stopped for just a moment and turned back, and she saw his face—young, clean-shaven, and attractive. Vaguely familiar. And terrified.
“Don’t panic, darling!” he yelled up the stairs. “I’ll be back with the doctor as soon as I can!”
Then he vanished into the gathering night, slamming the door behind him.
Edith heard a car engine sputter to life. She peered out the landing window to see a Model T roadster backing out of the driveway. It rattled off into the darkness, and she climbed the rest of the stairs to the second floor.
Another scream—coming, she thought, from the master bedroom. She hurried forward, apprehension clutching at her throat.
The bedroom door was shut. A small tow-headed child—a boy, dressed in woolen knickers and a blue cotton shirt—stood at the door banging his little fists on the panels. “Mommy! Mommy!” he shouted. When no one came, he sagged against the door, slid to a sitting position in the hallway, and began to sob.
Edith sat down next to him and leaned against the wall. She wished she could take him in her arms, comfort him, tell him everything was going to be all right. But he couldn’t see or hear her. And besides, she couldn’t very well reassure him when she had no idea what was going on.
At last the door opened, and Gracie emerged, looking tired and haggard. She seemed to have aged several years in the past hour—her hair showing more silver, the lines around her eyes and mouth more pronounced. She knelt down and scooped the little boy into her embrace.
“It’s all right, Jay-Jay,” she soothed. “Your mommy’s going to be just fine. Come on. Gramma will take you downstairs and we’ll get some milk and a cookie—how about that?”
Edith stared, disbelieving, at the two of them. Jay-Jay. Her brother, born in 1924. The eldest child of James and Abigail Nelson, who died on D-day, just three days shy of his twentieth birthday. How old was he? Three, maybe? That would make this year 1927, and if the sounds emanating from the bedroom were any indication, someone was in labor.
Edith’s heart palpitated as the truth settled in on her. That someone was Abigail. Her mother. About to deliver her second child . . .
A daughter, who would be given the name Edith Quinn Nelson.
Somehow, on the trip down Beaucatcher Mountain and back home again, Edith had skipped four years. Abigail was married and already the mother of one child. And the frantic man on the stairs was—
Of course. Daddy.
Edith shook her head and tried to clear her mind. She felt as if she had landed in the middle of surrealistic painting—one particular painting, in fact. Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. Time was incomprehensibly skewed, with clocks melting all over her inner landscape. If she were, in fact, dying, teetering on the border between this life and the next, then everything she had experienced so far was simply a preview, and the main feature of her own life was about to begin.
Jay-Jay had been put to bed. James, Abigail’s husband, had been banished to the lower reaches of the house to pace and wait.
The contractions were coming faster now. Exhausted and sweaty, Abigail leaned back against the pillows and gripped Gracie’s hand, taking advantage of a brief moment of respite. The doctor, who had arrived an hour earlier, crouched on an ottoman at the foot of the bed. “We’re close now—very close.”
Edith had been through this experience before—once when she gave birth to Abby and a second time, vicariously, when Neal Grace was born. She understood what her own mother was enduring. But Abby’s birth had taken place in a hospital, and drugs had assuaged much of the pain. With every contraction, every scream, her own body writhed in torment as well. Children never knew what agonies they inflicted on parents, she mused. And birth was only the beginning.
Another contraction hit, and the doctor braced himself. “This is it, Abigail. When the next one comes, push. Push hard!”
Abigail took a deep breath. Edith leaned close, and even though she knew Abigail couldn’t feel it, she laid a hand on her mother’s arm. “I’m sorry, Mother,” she whispered into Abigail’s ear. “Sorry to put you through all this.”
“My child, my darling child,” Abigail breathed. “It will be worth it—worth it all—to have you.”
Stunned, Edith stumbled back away from her mother’s bedside. Was it possible that her mother had heard?
Gracie leaned over Abigail and held on to her hand. “What did you say, honey?”
“Never mind what she said!” the doctor snapped. “Push, Abigail. Now!”
Abigail pushed. A howl of pain tore from her throat as the infant, bloody and wet and wriggling, slid from her body into the waiting hands of the physician. “It’s a girl,” he announced. “A strong, healthy baby girl.”
With an efficiency born of experience, he wiped the baby’s face and straggly limbs, smacked her hard to get her breathing, and placed her gently into her mother’s arms.
Abigail gazed down at the wailing infant. Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. “Look at her, Mama! She’s beautiful.”
Edith drew forward, marveling. The puckered little face, beet-red. The thrashing hands and legs, so tiny, so perfectly formed, even down to the minuscule fingernails and toenails. A new life, with her future spread out before her like an unpainted canvas. Infinite possibilities in that tiny soul. And even though Edith knew firsthand what that infant’s future held—its joys and pains, its struggles and victories, its mixture of darkness and light—she couldn’t stop herself from thinking that this moment was nothing short of a miracle.
She leaned in for a closer look. The baby’s eyes opened and locked onto Edith’s gaze. Impossible, Edith knew. And yet it happened. Those enormous blue eyes—wise eyes, old eyes—looked at her and peered straight into her soul.
Once the child arrived, Gracie’s exhaustion immediately transformed itself into energy. She changed the linens, dressed Abigail in a fresh gown, brought a new, hand-embroidered blanket to wrap the baby in. When all was in order to her satisfaction, she opened the door and called down the stairs.
“James! Come up and see your baby girl!”
Edith heard her father take the steps two at a time with a bouncing, eager gait. He burst into the room and went straight to Abigail’s side. “Are you all right, darling?”
“I’m fine,” she murmured. “Just tired.” She pulled the blanket away from the tiny, wrinkled face. “Meet your new daughter.”
James Nelson gently reached out to stroke his daughter’s downy head. The baby’s hand flailed out, grabbed his forefinger, and held on. A light came on in his face—an expression of complete enchantment and utter tenderness. “Well,” he whispered, “how’s my little beauty?”
Tears sprang to Edith’s eyes. She couldn’t hold them back. She had always idolized her father, but when she was a girl, he invariably spent more time with her brothers—taking them to ball games, working in the wood shop, fixing things. And after Jay’s death at Normandy, all the life seemed to drain out of him. She never doubted that he cared for her, but at this moment, for the first time, she understood how deep his love went.
He leaned down and kissed Abigail. “I’ll go get our son. He should meet his new baby sister.”
In a minute or two he returned with Jay-Jay, half-asleep and a little grumpy, dragging his teddy bear by the ear. The boy rubbed his eyes and squinted at the squirming bundle in his mother’s arms.
“Here’s our new baby,” James said.
“Where’d it come from?” Jay-Jay demanded.
James and Abigail exchanged a wry glance. James chuckled. “From our love, Son—just the way you did.”
“What’s his name?”
“It’s not a he. It’s a she. A girl. A sister for you. Her name is Edith Quinn Nelson.”
Jay-Jay threw his bear on the floor and twisted his face into a grimace. “A girl? A sister? Don’t want a sister. Can we send it back and get a brother?”
James laughed. “No, Son, we can’t send her back. But you’ll like her. She’s pretty small right now, but she’ll grow up and be lots of fun.”
“Can I touch her?”
“Yes, but very gently.” James lifted the lad and settled him on the bed next to his mother.
The boy extended one finger, gingerly touched the baby’s hand, then pulled back as if he’d been burned.
“It’s all right,” his dad assured him.
He reached out again. This time, the infant grabbed his finger, just as she had done with James a few minutes before. “Whoa!” Jay-Jay breathed, awe-struck. “She’s real!”
“Yes, honey,” said Abigail, stroking his hair with her free hand. “She’s very real.”
“OK.” He scrambled off the bed and retrieved his bear. “I guess we can keep her. If I go back to bed now, will she be big enough to play with when I wake up?”
“Not quite,” his dad said. “But soon. Before you know it, she’ll be nearly as big as you.”
Jay-Jay, ambling to the doorway, turned back and cast his father a look of utter disdain. “No girl will ever be as big as me,” he said. Then he shuffled off down the hall, yawning as he went.
When Jay-Jay was safely tucked in again, Gracie returned to the master bedroom and stood admiring her granddaughter. Edith had seen that look before, that expression of love—had seen it every time her grandmother looked at her, right up until the day she died. Her grandfather, Kenzie, leaner than before, his hair now peppered with gray, stood beside Gracie with an arm around her waist. On the other side of the bed, James sat next to his wife, embracing both her and the baby. He couldn’t take his eyes off the infant’s face.
“We need to let Abigail and the baby rest,” Gracie said. “But before we go, let me hold my granddaughter for a moment.”
Abigail nodded and handed the baby over to her mother. Gracie cuddled the sleeping child to her breast and looked down into her face. Silence enveloped the room, a silence so profound and deep that Edith could almost hear the infant’s heart beating in time with her own.
“Darling Edith, you are one of God’s good gifts,” Gracie said quietly. “Live fully and love freely. May you grow into a wise and compassionate woman, and develop a pure heart and a faithful soul. And when life becomes difficult and her way dark—” She glanced over at her daughter, who was smiling through her tears.
“May you look for the love, and not for the answers,” Abigail finished.
Gracie nodded. “Be strong in the grace of God, secure in God’s love, and in the love of this family. Amen.”
Gracie returned Edith to her mothers arms, then she and Kenzie drifted off to sleep in another room. James stretched out in the chaise lounge beside the bed and pulled an afghan over his legs. “I love you, darling,” he said. “Both of you.”
“We love you, too,” Abigail responded sleepily.
Then he turned out the light.
In the darkness Edith groped her way out into the hall and sat down with her back against the door. But she did not sleep. She had too much to think about, and a watch to keep.
A vigil for her own infant self, who slumbered peacefully in her mother’s arms.