AT FIRST, there was no point in pretending that the baby wasn’t mine. Fleurette’s bassinet stayed in my bedroom for the first year so that I could nurse her and get up with her in the middle of the night. But during the day, Mother took her from me.
“She has to learn to come to me,” she said.
I knew she was right. I knew that, years later, Fleurette couldn’t have an inexplicable bond with one sister that she didn’t have with the other. The girl needed to grow up with one mother, and it had already been decided who that mother would be. So my mother was the one who held her and fussed over her and decided how to dress her and when to bathe her.
She only handed the baby to me when it was feeding time. I would take her into the pantry and crouch down on a little stool we’d put there for that purpose. It was just the two of us in the dark, surrounded by tins of baking soda and breakfast tea. Fleurette would look up at me through enormous black, uncomprehending eyes as she fed. She was looking at her mother, as any baby would when it nursed. With her eyes open but her mind unformed, she was witnessing the great secret of her life, one that she was supposed to forget, and would forget.
In those moments I felt like I’d stolen her. If she fell asleep I would sit and hold her, matching my breath to hers there among the preserves and pickled beans, counting the minutes until my mother’s footsteps would come across the floor and the door would open.
“You know better,” she would say, and take her from me.
Norma wasn’t particularly interested in the baby. She was a teenager, still finishing school in Ridgewood, and happily occupied with farm chores in her spare time. She and Francis bought a pair of goats, they built a chicken coop and figured out how to raise a flock, and they put up a fence to keep the deer away from the vegetable garden. The two of them kept so busy that no one even noticed that they’d built a pigeon loft as well. It wasn’t until an incubator appeared in the kitchen that we realized what Norma had in mind.
Baby pigeons were far more interesting to her than baby humans, but she took her turns with Fleurette anyway, sitting with her on the kitchen floor and watching the gray fledglings hop around in their crate of wood and straw. Sometimes Norma would take one of the baby birds firmly in her hand and hold it out to Fleurette, its legs splayed and its wings pinned behind it. Fleurette would reach one finger out to the bird’s downy undercarriage and laugh uproariously.
Everything made Fleurette laugh. She was at the very center of a world created just for her, and she knew it.