9   The Biddles

Clay’s clothes had been washed except for the corduroy jacket. Dirt had worked into it so deeply it was nearly all one color, an ashy brown. The lining hung from the collar in shreds. He held up a sleeve to his nose. He thought he could smell the streets he had walked on, the ground he had slept on, even the dust-thickened pieces of blanket and canvas he had wrapped himself up in. He bundled up the jacket and held it on his lap, not knowing what to do with it, yet worried at the thought of leaving it in the hospital.

“You look good, Clay,” the nurse, Alicia, said on her way to one of the other beds, where she took the temperature of a child with a broken arm, who explained, “My Christmas skates did it.”

Clay was sitting on the edge of his bed, waiting. There was a big hole in the sole of his right shoe, but a wad of newspaper Buddy had slipped into the shoe was gone.

He hadn’t seen Buddy since Christmas morning. Today was January 2. A new year had begun. He wondered if he would ever see Buddy again. In a paper bag next to him was Robinson Crusoe and the English double-decker bus. It was only a toy. Real buses groaned and rumbled along streets, and the drivers in their high seats looked impatient and stony.

“Hello, Clay,” somebody said.

A tall, broad-shouldered woman was looking intently at him from just inside the door. She was wearing a thick, fuzzy gray coat. Little wisps of brown hair stuck straight out around her ears from under a black wool hat on her head. She was holding a pair of red mittens and a big black pocketbook in one hand. In the other, she gripped a black jacket.

“I’m Edwina Biddle,” the woman said. “I know Mrs. Greg explained to you I’d come to take you home with me today.”

She held out the black jacket.

“This is an old thing someone outgrew. But we’ll get you a proper coat as soon as we can,” she said. “It’s very cold outdoors today.”

“Thank you,” he said. His voice squeaked as though it needed oil.

Alicia smiled at him as she passed the woman on her way to the hall.

“I hope you’re hungry. I made a meat loaf for supper, and there’s tapioca pudding too.”

Clay felt tears spring to his eyes, wash down his cheeks, and touch the edges of his mouth. Edwina Biddle remained near the door. She said nothing but kept a steady gaze on his face. When his tears stopped as quickly as they’d begun, she came to the bed and held out her hands with all the things she was carrying hanging from them. He took hold of them and gave a jump so his shoes smacked the floor.

Later, he was glad she had not rushed over to him and hugged him, or said things like, Don’t cry—everything will be all right. At that moment, he would not have liked to be hugged by someone he didn’t know. He hadn’t, after all, been crying because he felt terribly sad or frightened. His tears had come from the burst of relief he had felt at the word home.

“I hope you’re not married, and I hope you don’t smoke cigars,” Mr. Biddle said that evening when he arrived home from work. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders like his wife. In his dark brown hair, just over his forehead, grew a startling streak of white hair. Clay smiled politely. Mr. Biddle was a joker.

“Have some gum,” he said, holding out the yellow-wrapped stick to Clay. “And call me Henry.”

“Don’t give him that before supper, Henry,” said Mrs. Biddle from the kitchen. “The sugar will take away his appetite.”

“Will it?” Henry asked Clay in a serious voice.

Clay shook his head and took the gum.

“You’re the strong, silent type, are you?” Henry asked.

Clay coughed.

“I see,” Henry Biddle said. He bent over, placed his big hands on Clay’s waist, and lifted him straight up in the air. “You don’t weigh much,” he remarked. “We’ll fix that.” He held Clay close to him for an instant and set him down on his feet. Clay turned away to hide his smile. He felt there was a reason not to show how much he’d liked being lifted up and held, but he couldn’t work out what it was.

“There’s a letter from your sister,” Mrs. Biddle said to her husband as she came to the kitchen door, “and a rug-sale notice from Macy’s, the phone bill, a request to help save the tortoises, seven catalogues, and a mail-o-gram that says you may have won a million dollars. Or was it ten million?”

“You open them and read them,” said Henry, hanging up his green storm jacket on a peg in the hall. “Then collect that million and save the tortoises.”

Mr. Biddle was a postal clerk and worked all day sorting mail at the post office. Clay could understand why he didn’t care to look through mail when he came home.

Mrs. Biddle went back to the kitchen, and Mr. Biddle said, “I’ll take a wash and be ready in a jiff.”

By then, Clay had seen everything in the apartment, which was on the sixth floor of a seven-storied yellow-brick building on the west side of the city near the river.

The letters were in a pile next to the telephone on a small table in a narrow hallway. Down a few steps and to the right was a living room with a plump sofa and two armchairs, and a round table covered with magazines and a pot of roses. Clay discovered the petals were made of cloth. On one wall hung photographs in silvery-looking frames of children of various ages. A small television set on a metal stand occupied the space between the two windows. On the wall behind the sofa was a large painting of a ship, an old-fashioned kind of ship with four masts and dozens of sails, sitting on a puddinglike blue sea furrowed with neat white-caps, behind it all a red sun sinking on the horizon. The floor throughout the apartment was covered with peach-colored carpeting. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom. One of the bedrooms was his. A wall shelf held games and toys, some of which he could tell had been broken and then repaired. On another shelf sat about twenty books, all of which appeared to have been handled and read by many people.

Mrs. Greg had explained to Clay that the Biddles were a foster-parent family. They didn’t have children of their own, but they took in other people’s children, boys and girls who had no place to live because their parents had died or had gotten too sick to take care of them or, as in his case, had disappeared. Mrs. Greg mentioned that there were other circumstances in which children needed temporary homes, but she didn’t go into them. As far as Clay was concerned, she didn’t have to. He remembered Tony, his thin, bony, small self huddled up against the hotel wall, his bruised face.

The questions he most wanted to ask but dared not ask yet were about time. Did children stay with the Biddles until they were grown-up? How long would he stay? Would he at some point be sent to another foster family? Would he, one morning, be put out on the sidewalk? He knew this last question was what Calvin would have called wild foolishness. He was connected now, through Mrs. Greg, to Social Services. The net was under him. Still, anything could happen.

They ate supper at a Formica table in the kitchen, where the walls were covered with small framed pictures, a shepherdess watering a sunflower, a rooster crowing on the roof of a barn, two birds holding a wreath in their beaks over the head of a little girl whose chubby hands were crossed in her lap on top of a flounced pink skirt. On several pieces of varnished tree bark were sayings written in such curly letters it was hard to decipher them. Home Is Where the Heart Is, Clay spelled out after staring at one while he ate warm meat loaf, peas, and a boiled potato.

He began to feel less strange sitting there. It was as if this real food filling him up so pleasantly was making his first meal with these two large friendly people ordinary as well as unusual. When a green glass bowl filled with tapioca was placed before him, he didn’t make a face and growl the way he had when his mother used to urge it on him. Mrs. Biddle handed him a can of evaporated milk with a V-shaped opening and said the tapioca was twice as good with a bit of cream. The food in the hospital had been pale, as if all of it had been boiled for days.

Eating had taken up most of his attention, so he only half listened to the Biddles’ conversation. It was mostly about Mr. Biddle’s day in the post office, about people who tried to sneak ahead in the line to buy stamps, about his friend, a Mr. Nakashima, who’d found an open envelope addressed to a person and a street that didn’t exist, and out of which had dropped an enormous dead spider.

When Clay finished everything, he glanced at the Biddles. They were both smiling at him.

“Good?” asked Mrs. Biddle.

Clay nodded.

“Nice to have you here, Clay,” said Henry.

He wanted to smile back at them, but a thought got in the way. Was his old life now blotted out? That was what he’d felt when he’d discovered new people living in the hotel room.

“Thank you,” he said.

The next morning, Mrs. Biddle told Clay she would wash the corduroy jacket and reline it. She could see that Clay had long outgrown it.

Clay imagined a boy somewhere in the city at the very moment of being lost, and set on a path that would lead him through hard days and nights to Edwina Biddle’s apartment, where Clay’s old jacket, spruced up, would be waiting for him in a closet.

They went to shop on Broadway. Mrs. Biddle bought him two pairs of shoes, sneakers and brown oxfords, blue jeans and two pairs of corduroy pants, a sweater, three shirts, socks and underwear, a navy blue down jacket and a wool hat, a toothbrush, and a canvas bag for schoolbooks.

“That’s a nice belt for you,” she said, pointing to one curled on a counter, a silver eagle emblazoned on its buckle. He ran a finger over the eagle, feeling its taut wings stretched in flight.

“Would you like it?”

“Thank you. Yes, Mrs. Biddle.”

“Call me Edwina,” she said. “I’d love that.”

After supper, Henry cut his hair. When Clay went to look in the bathroom mirror, he didn’t look familiar to himself. Of course, he was taller. It was odd to think he’d been growing all the time he’d lived with Buddy and Calvin in the park. His face was very thin. His brown eyes stared into their own reflection. Did he really look like his father, as his mother had often remarked? What did his father look like?

The school he was to attend was a ten-minute walk from the Biddle apartment. After he took reading and arithmetic tests, he was placed in one of the four sixth-grade classes. His homeroom teacher, Miss Moffa, called him Charles for several days. In the end, she got his name right but didn’t pay much attention to him. He could see she had her hands full keeping the class quiet enough to give out assignments.

He was the thirty-third student in his class. His desk was next to a girl who, as soon as he sat down, gathered up her pen and pencils and a blue comb and moved them all away as though she knew he meant to grab them.

He had been worried the first day he’d entered the old gray stone building with its great dirty windows. A man in uniform had passed a device like a ray gun over him and the other children to make sure no one was carrying a concealed weapon.

But nobody bothered him much. During class changes, the corridors were packed. Some of the bigger boys and girls punched anyone they could reach with their jabbing fists. There was one who cursed and screeched with laughter whenever he landed a blow. His face was bone white, and bristles of hair stood up on his scalp like porcupine quills. Clay named him Son of Stump People.

In a week, he had made a friend. His name was Earl Thickens. His smile reminded Clay of Buddy’s. They ate lunch at the same table in the school cafeteria. Whenever there was a free period, they sat together. Neither Earl nor he asked each other about their families.

“Don’t let anyone see your belt with that eagle on it,” Earl advised him. “Somebody will take it off you.”

In the afternoons especially, the school was a crazy house of noise. There was fighting in the corridor, bells clanged, teachers shouted to try and bring about order. Clay set himself against it all. He discovered he wanted to read anything he could get his hands on, to learn everything.

When he couldn’t hear the teachers’ voices through the din, he watched their lips. In time, he got pretty good at guessing what they were saying. He wrote it all down and did his homework regularly. Sometimes he could escape into the library, which smelled of paste and dust and books, and where it was quiet like a cove you could row your boat into to get out of the gale wind.

In the long-ago days when he’d lived with his father and mother, a teacher had written on his home report that he daydreamed too much.

He didn’t daydream anymore. He remembered.

One bitter afternoon in late January when the wind blew fiercely through the streets and rattled signs and doors, he went downtown with Earl to a store that sold old comic books. While Earl went through stacks of Spider Man comics, Clay stared through the store window at the street. It had begun to look familiar. His gaze fell upon the entrance to an alley that ran alongside a big apartment house.

It was where he and Buddy had found a hoard of bottles and cans to redeem. He realized with a shock that made his knees quake that he couldn’t be more than a few minutes’ walk from the park.

Earl shook his arm. “Hey! You going into a trance?”

“I was thinking about something.”

“Think on this,” Earl said, holding an open comic book in front of Clay’s face. With one finger, he pointed to a vampire that seemed to have been drawn with black shoe polish except for her gruesome white fangs.

“Doesn’t she remind you of Miss Moffa?” Earl asked. “Especially when it’s teacher vampire hour at three P.M.?”

“She’s prettier,” Clay said. Earl laughed.

Monkey Island, Clay was hearing, where the monkeys live. In his mind’s eye, he could see those bawling faces, those bodies hauling themselves along, coming toward the park, set on damage and hurting, worse than any shoe polish vampire or irritable teacher.

Earl was paying the clerk for the comic book. He made a little money on weekends putting fliers in mailboxes for a Chinese take-out restaurant. Edwina often asked Clay if he needed a dollar or two. But he didn’t care much for comic books, and he couldn’t think of what else he wanted. He did like the newspaper Henry brought home every evening. He read it all through, sometimes even the apartment ads.

“You want to do something?” Earl asked when they were out on the sidewalk. “Like go down to the river and those old warehouses? Or we could go to where they’re putting up that new office building and look through the holes in the fence.”

“It’s too cold for the river,” Clay said.

“Well—what do you want to do?” Earl asked a little crankily. “You’re all wrapped up like a package today.”

“There’s a place near here … if you want to come with me,” Clay said, not sure he really wanted Earl along.

Earl shrugged and thrust the comic book into a pocket. “Let’s go,” he said.

There were a number of streets to choose from. Clay made several false starts until suddenly his memory shaped itself into an arrow. He headed down a broad avenue.

“Bird-dogging,” remarked Earl. “What’s the mystery?”

Clay was unable to speak. Not much more than fifteen minutes from the comic-book store, the avenue split in two to fork around the triangular park.

For a second, Clay felt so dizzy he thought he would pitch forward to the street. He grabbed Earl’s arm. There were no newspapers along the paths, no black plastic sacks. The cement drinking fountain had been removed. One bench, most of its slats broken, stood on its three remaining legs under a tree.

The park was only a pause in the streets, a small place surrounded by rusty iron rails where trees had trouble staying alive.

“What are we looking at?” asked Earl.

“I lived there for five weeks,” Clay said, letting go of Earl’s arm. “In that park, over in that far corner, in a kind of crate house.”

He stared at the corner, seeing himself in the big sweater Buddy had found for him, sitting at the entrance to the crate, looking up to see what Buddy was going to take out of a pocket or a paper bag for them to eat.

“You were on the street,” Earl stated.

“Yes.”

Earl blew on his fingers, looking over them at Clay.

“My cousin, Lawrence, is on the street,” he said. “He sleeps over to the Port Authority except when the cops chase him away. We haven’t got room for him. My mother takes him food when she can.”

Earl went far out of his way to walk Clay almost to the Biddle apartment. It was still hard for Clay to think of it as home, but on this dark, cold afternoon, after seeing the park, it wasn’t possible at all.

He was silent at supper that night. He knew he was making the Biddles uncomfortable. Henry told jokes. Edwina piled food on his plate. He couldn’t do what they wanted, laugh at Henry’s stories or tell them about school, or about what Earl and he had done that day. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt their disappointment.

He did the chores he was asked to do, made his bed, dried dishes, helped to clean the apartment on Saturday mornings, put his soiled clothes in the hamper for Edwina to take to the Laundromat down the block. But they wanted more from him, even though Edwina told him he was the easiest boy she had ever taken care of. As she spoke, there was a questioning note in her voice as if she hoped he would contradict her.

It flashed into his mind that she might be relieved if he acted up a little, balked at a chore for once, sulked and slammed shut his bedroom door.

This sense, this knowledge, of what grown-ups were feeling was new in Clay. He thought it had come to him because he had lived like a grown-up himself all those weeks.

It wasn’t that Buddy and Calvin hadn’t known he was a child. But in some deep way, he’d been on his own. He’d been one of them.

It filled him with a somewhat spooky hilarity to realize that he had real thoughts of his own. From the time you learned to talk, he thought, people were always saying, Think about what you’re doing! Don’t be thoughtless!

One of his thoughts was that people only saw you when you were standing in front of them. By now, the nurse, Alicia, would have had many more patients. Mrs. Greg would have seen and tried to help many more children in trouble. And if he suddenly disappeared, the Biddles would take in a new boy or girl. Henry would make jokes to get them to smile. Edwina, in her kindly way, would see that their socks were clean and that they had warm sweaters. But Clay did make an effort now and then to talk to them more than he felt like talking.

He felt his mind had become a clean, bare room with a hard, clear light shining in the center of it.

He did pretty well in school. He kept away from the really rough kids. There was nothing he wanted from them. He knew most of the places where drugs were dealt and used, and he avoided them. He and Earl learned a large part of the city like a lesson in a book.

The truth was simple. He was alone. His father had left. His mother had left. In time, he’d grow up and find a job and have a small apartment of his own and take care of himself. Nothing lasted forever.

But there was one shadowed corner in the bare, clean room of his mind. In that shadow, he glimpsed Buddy standing motionless, looking at him gravely, and he felt an enormous longing to see him, and an uncertainty about all these new thoughts that had come to him with his trouble.

In early March, there was a blizzard, and school shut down for two days. The whole city seemed to have shut down. There was hardly any traffic. Only a few people moved about the streets, thickly muffled in clothing, their heads down.

Clay kept to his new routine. In the afternoon, he went to the park. It took him just under forty-five minutes to reach it. When he got there, he walked all around the railing before going up the path to the corner. He’d been doing this on the afternoons he didn’t spend with Earl, even on weekends when he’d finished whatever he had to do at the Biddles’.

Nearly two feet of snow had fallen. The traffic light clicked, but no cars passed. His were the only tracks in the drifts that had piled up along the paths. On the sidewalk, in front of the big building on the far side, a man with a long scarf wrapped around his head and face trudged through the snow as lights went on above him in several windows. It was so silent, as silent as it might have been in a forest of great trees.

What had happened to Mrs. Crary? To Dimp Laughlin and his dog? To the boy with the earrings? Calvin was probably dead. But Buddy couldn’t be dead.

What am I doing here? Clay asked himself, and answered, I’m looking for Buddy.

He let himself into the apartment with his key. He heard voices from the living room, Edwina’s and someone else’s that was vaguely familiar. After he’d hung up his jacket, he looked into the room and saw Mrs. Greg sitting in an armchair, taking a sip from a cup of tea. She smiled at Clay.

“Here he is!” she cried.

Edwina said, “Oh, Clay! I was getting worried. Did you and Earl go off somewhere? It’s already dark.”

“I walked in the snow,” Clay replied, staring at Mrs. Greg.

“Mrs. Greg has something grand to tell you,” Edwina said, and her voice trembled very faintly.

“Clay,” Mrs. Greg began. He held his breath. “We’ve found your mother and your tiny new sister.”

“Lucy?” he said so quickly he didn’t think either of them heard him gasp.

“Her name is Sophie, actually,” said Mrs. Greg. “She looks quite a bit like you, Clay. Your mother is living in a shelter with other women and their children. She’ll be moving into a place of her own very shortly. And then you’ll be with her. She was so happy to know you were safe and being taken care of. Yes. We made the connection—it’s truly wonderful how it all came out—just patient work,” and at this point, Mrs. Greg appeared to ponder on how wonderful it all was.

Wonderful didn’t fit Clay’s feeling at that moment, unless it could mean dazed, unless it meant the faint hollowness he had often felt when he woke up bundled in rags and canvas, hearing old Calvin snoring a foot away, or else Buddy breathing lightly as though he were never fully asleep.

He felt a strange embarrassment too, as though he was waiting for a huge sensation of surprise that was somehow passing him by.

Then he thought—I have a sister, Sophie, and he was able to smile at Mrs. Greg.

“Well! I should say!” she exclaimed, smiling back at him. “Tomorrow I’ll come and get you after school, and I’ll take you to her. I know how eager you must be.…”

He nodded energetically, hoping the two women would not notice his silence.

Edwina said, “Clay, I’m so glad for you.”

That night at supper, Henry didn’t make a joke. He said what a miracle it was that people could find each other even in this vast city, that things can turn out fine. Looking at Clay and touching his arm, he said, “We’re going to miss you when you move in with your mom. But you’ll come and visit us sometime? Many of the children do, for a while.”

“Yes,” Clay croaked. It was hard to talk. Whenever he meant to agree with Henry, to say how glad he was his mother had been found, an opposite feeling would push up behind his words. But it wasn’t that he was not glad. It was rather that he couldn’t understand at all why the small explosions of joy that rose up in him became muted at once as if they couldn’t make their way through a dense cloud of bewilderment and discontent.

The women’s shelter was an old brick house on the Upper West Side of the city. When Clay looked up at it and caught sight of a woman passing in front of a bay window, carrying a child, he pulled away from Mrs. Greg.

“Clay, what is it?” she asked.

He shut his mouth tightly so nothing could come out of it that would surprise them both. The big glass doors opened. He found himself in a large, disordered room full of worn furniture, toys, and children’s clothes folded and piled up on chairs as though just taken from a dryer. Unframed pictures of babies were taped to the walls. A young woman with long black hair was sitting on a couch, nursing an infant. Clay looked quickly away. Mrs. Greg was speaking with a thin, tall woman wearing steel-rimmed eyeglasses who glanced at Clay from time to time. She beckoned to him, and when he went to stand beside her, she looked at him gravely as she stroked his hair.

“Your mother is in her room,” she said. “We’ll go up. She’s been expecting you all day.”

“I was in school,” he said.

“Oh, she knew that.”

They walked up a broad, curving, uncarpeted staircase. The banister was shaky. He heard babies crying, a child shouting, “Waffles, Mama!” and the rise and fall, like wavelets, of women’s voices. The lady with the glasses pushed open a door that was already ajar.

On a narrow bed sat Clay’s mother. Next to her on a white flannel cloth was a sleeping infant.

She and Clay looked at each other. He glanced behind him. Mrs. Greg and the woman with the glasses had withdrawn into the hall and were speaking together softly.

His mother held out her arms.

He took two steps. Her hair was short, cropped like a little cap around her head. She was thin. When he had imagined her all these weeks, she had been heavy, carrying the baby that now lay outside of her on the bed.

“Clay,” she whispered.

He went up to her, felt her arms around his shoulders, and was startled when she let fall the whole weight of her head against his neck.

He was speechless. She kissed his cheeks and his forehead. He looked at the baby. Her face was as quiet as a small pond. She frowned slightly; a faint tremulous smile twitched her lips. For an instant, her hands moved like birds fluttering.

“Clay,” said his mother again, pushing the hair from his brow. “You’re parting your hair. You look so grown-up. You have grown. Oh, Clay. I’ve missed you so.”

“You went away,” he managed to say. It was not what he’d meant to say, although what that was, he wasn’t sure.

His mother bowed her head and stared at the baby. He could hear everyone breathing, his mother, the baby, himself. Then she looked directly at him and began to speak quickly as though she’d said the words she was now saying many times before to herself.

“I think I was out of my mind,” she said. “I couldn’t go back to that place. I’d left the money for you under the doughnuts—did you find it?—so I must have known I wasn’t coming back. I wandered the streets. I was frightened of what I was doing—leaving you like that. But I couldn’t go back there. And I thought—God knows if I thought at all—that somehow you’d be taken better care of if I wasn’t there.”

She paused. Her face was close to his and it was flushed all the way to her forehead. He saw she felt shame. Some of it poured out of her and touched him and so he felt it too, for both of them, for what had happened to them.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” she went on. “All I could think about was getting away. It’s more than you should have to take in, but that’s the truth of it. I fell apart. The night I left, I slept in a doorway. I panicked in the morning, thinking about the baby, thinking I’d lose it, that I had to do something. I tried to talk to a woman on the street. I couldn’t speak. It was as if language had been taken from me. Then another woman at Pennsylvania Station took hold of me, actually grabbed my arms and led me to this place. I couldn’t speak, Clay. I couldn’t write down words on paper for people to read. I was locked in. Then the baby came just over three weeks ago. I heard her first crying. And I was able to talk then. Our social worker, the one who tries to help us here, took down everything about you and where we’d been, everything. And they found you. And that’s what happened.”

The baby awoke. Her eyes were blue.

“Their eyes are always blue in the beginning,” his mother said. “Sophie,” she murmured, and picked up the baby and cradled her in her arms.

“I’m all right now, Clay. In a few weeks or a month, there’ll be an apartment ready for us, all of us,” she said.

“Daddy?” he asked quickly.

“No,” she answered somberly. “But I know he’s alive. If he wasn’t, I’d have heard. We can hope he’ll come back. I think now that maybe the same thing happened to him that happened to me. But we can manage. In a few months, I’ll put the baby in day-care. I’ll get a job, only this time it will be a day job.”

He touched the baby’s cheek. She had fallen asleep again. He touched her ear.

“Clay, I know you can’t forgive me. Did Mrs. Larkin help you? I thought she might. She knows her way around all these agencies.”

“She gave me soup,” he said.

His mother groaned. “It all happened,” she said as though she couldn’t believe it. She put Sophie back on the white flannel cloth and looked down at her. Clay hoped the baby would wake. He wanted to hear her voice.

“You suffered,” his mother said in so low a voice, he had to lean forward to hear her. “I know you did. I thought about it all the time, and about Daddy going away. If saying sorry was enough, there’d be no hard feelings in the world. I am sorry, but what can you do with that? They told me how you lived—like a stray animal, and then sick and alone in the hospital. Sorry can’t erase all that. There must be a way for people to go on caring for each other that’s a long way beyond sorry.” She looked up at him and smiled hesitantly.

He looked away from her smile. He had listened to what she’d said, but he couldn’t think about it yet. She hadn’t been there at all; now there was almost too much of her.

“You don’t have to forgive me,” she said. “I can bear that. But you’ll have to get to a place beyond forgiveness.…”

The baby woke then with a small but piercing cry.