Evangeline held Emma high before her. After a second, the baby’s eyes half closed, her mother having disappeared into the blur of distance. “Baby,” Evangeline whispered.
Emma’s eyes widened and tried to focus, so Evangeline drew her closer, and closer again, until Emma’s gaze hooked into hers with surprise, as if her mother had appeared out of nowhere.
“Lorrie is coming,” she said. “We should give her a name, shouldn’t we? Nana? Mimi? Got any ideas?”
The baby blinked, and Evangeline nestled her against her chest, breathed in her sweet baby smell, as intoxicating as sun-dried cotton. “We’ll come up with something. We’ll ask Lorrie what she’d like, okay?”
A floor nurse came in, the one who seemed in charge of aggravating patients. She began setting up an infusion of antibiotics. “This little one’s going home, right? I saw Isaac leave ten minutes ago.”
“Emma’s going home with Lorrie tonight. She’ll be here any minute.”
The nurse stopped her bustling, placed a gentle palm against the baby’s back, and said, “You have a lot of people who love you, don’t you, little girl?”
Evangeline didn’t mind the nurse so much after that.
SHE HADN’T PLANNED TO SEND ISAAC AWAY WITHOUT THE BABY. But she had trusted him to tell Lorrie she was here. Things had gotten serious. She had almost died. Yes, she’d told Isaac she wasn’t going to, but that was because he was a mess and she needed him to calm down for Emma’s sake.
In truth, when she woke in a sea of sweat with a fever of over a hundred and three and her skin turned gray, she knew her body was under a fierce assault. And the doctor told her after the surgery how terribly sick she’d been. So when Isaac hadn’t called Lorrie, hadn’t so much as let her know where Evangeline was, she was filled with a kind of fury she’d never known, a fury not for herself but for her baby.
She wasn’t going to let Isaac keep Emma from someone who would love her, would care for her, because Emma, with an abandoned sixteen-year-old girl as her mother and no father around, hadn’t exactly been dealt a great hand, had she? Evangeline would tear apart anyone who attempted to interfere with love from any source.
Sure, she was scared. What did she know of being a mother? All the more reason she wasn’t going to let Isaac drive away the only woman who’d acted as one to her this past year. Evangeline had been watching Lorrie with Nells for months, saw when Lorrie reached out or held back, when she pulled up firm or softened, how she held the reins of distance between herself and her daughter. At first, Evangeline thought it was a formula she might learn. But it didn’t take long to understand that there was no recipe or equation. Parenting was a river of moment-by-moment decisions, intuitions, a balancing of one’s own needs, which did factor in somehow, with those of the child. But mostly it was being there, truly there, with all your senses. Trusting the heart knowledge that arises with full attention. Lorrie had that. She had a gift for attention of the heart.
As for Isaac, Evangeline trusted he wouldn’t leave her. She believed this despite knowing the anger he had to battle. Lorrie had told her about burning Jonah’s clothes, about Isaac seeing. She’d told her not to burden her but so Evangeline would know “who to blame” for Lorrie’s prolonged absence in her life. “I can’t live with any more secrets,” she’d said.
Evangeline didn’t blame her. Or Isaac. Even in these first days with Emma, the love that rose up nearly choked her with its abundance, and she knew anything would be possible in defense of her child. With a love like that, she might have done what Lorrie did. And if she were Isaac, she might not forgive. She saw the impossibility of the four of them together, her and Isaac, Lorrie and Nells. Which is what she wanted. Yet she refused to believe it so. The baby had lit her on fire with love, and how could that not make the impossible possible?
Emma was sleeping now, her lips making soft burbling sounds. Evangeline whispered to her, “I don’t know shit, you know that, right? But I’m trying to arrange things the best I can.”
She didn’t say she’d be the mother she had wanted for herself, because she wasn’t sure she could manage that. She only knew she would try.
The nurse returned with a bottle of warm formula. Evangeline unwrapped the baby, stroked each perfect limb and the soles of her feet. The baby cried and made rooting motions with her head. Evangeline laid her against her bare belly and breast, tickled her nose with the bottle’s nipple until Emma latched on. And though it wasn’t her own breast, though it’d be another five days of throwing her milk away, Evangeline felt each tug of the baby’s mouth and her milk let down again, though she had pumped only a half hour before.
She heard Lorrie and Nells coming up the hall toward her room. She stroked the baby’s downy head, this child that was her and not-her and everyone else all at once, and a ferocity of love flashed through her like lightning.
Emma. This sudden bright meaning of her life. This life. This life she was holding now.