1987-2003

In late November, Wade arrived home to find Alison asleep on the sofa, The New Yorker open on her chest.

He lifted the magazine, kissed her eyelids, carried her to bed.

In the morning, he wrapped his arms around her as she poured his coffee. “You’re exhausted,” he said. “You don’t have to do all this.”

“I like making you breakfast,” she said.

“I like it, too.” He took the coffee, sipped. He meant school. He’d already talked her into quitting her part-time job in the gallery on campus. Now, as she flipped another pancake, he was saying that classes and homework and time in the studio were clearly wearing her out. She didn’t have many classes left to get her degree; it would be easier to complete it later. Wasn’t she planning on staying home with the baby, anyway? What was the rush?

She didn’t register for spring classes.

~

The new year rolled in with a crisp, clear chill. Alison stood at the sink, belly round, sipping tea, procrastinating doing the breakfast dishes when the phone rang: Dad, saying Happy New Year, saying he had news, saying he’d been promoted, he’d be moving. California.

One hand tightened on the phone, the other gripped her tea. Mum and Dad had brought her all this way. Mum had gone. And now this. Alison’s throat constricted. She heard herself say Congratulations and You must be thrilled and When will you go? Her attention focused on keeping her voice steady, on not worrying him with her grief, on being the good daughter.

He made the arrangements in typically brisk, Dad fashion. The last day of the month, Alison watched him pull into the driveway of Wade’s house. Hers and Wade’s, she had to remind herself, though only his name was on the mortgage. She didn’t have any credit. She’d only be a liability on the application, he’d said. She held her hands on her belly as Dad made his way up the path, file folder in hand. A kiss on the cheek, the folder handed over.

“Extra copies of your adoption certificate,” he said. “And a few other bits and bobs, in case you need them.” Of course. Typical Dad to have everything filed in triplicate or more. His way of taking care of things, of taking care of her.

“Thanks, Dad,” Alison said, words welling in her throat that she could not say: Don’t leave me, Dad. The old, deep, unspoken hope that if she were good enough, he would stay.

Instead, she accepted his brief hug, stood in the driveway and held the folder and the familiar terror that he would never return as he rounded the bend out of sight.

She imagined him driving west, away from the haze of the South Carolina summer days. Across the flatlands in the middle of the country, the sky opening before him. Away from Agnes and her antics. Away from the pregnant daughter, married in the nick of time. All the close air, prying eyes, shame. She felt like some item not deemed worthy of taking to the next place.

She imagined him feeling lucky to have this promotion, free to take it. The contract he’d signed with the Church of Scotland had been fulfilled: Alison was a married woman now.

She imagined him arriving at his new desk, telling his new secretary that he had a daughter, married, grandchild on the way, beginning his story again, telling only the parts of which he approved.

~

Within a year, he would find a new bride, make the tidy life he’d intended all along.

Alison believed she was doing something similar, creating a revised version of the fairy tale—there had been no Handsome Boy; who knew whether the Girl was Beautiful? Dad had taken on the product of this pairing. No matter how she’d tried to hide her insides, she hadn’t met expectations, yet she’d been given a second chance. She must make sure she did everything right.

She filled her time painting the nursery, refinishing an old chest of drawers, knitting layettes, building a crib mobile of her own design. Once or twice, she met former classmates for coffee, though she felt too different and let those connections fall away. She returned to what had contented her as a child: hawk call, feet crunching leaves, what the earth said.

A warm afternoon, boots on the ground, just past a late Easter, a familiar trail. Hand to belly, a contraction. She’d had these for the past month, a gentle tightening, a false labor. She turned back, as she had before. Each time, the contractions had stopped once she got back to the car, sat, breathed. Each time she was home when Wade returned from golf, dinner prep started, the contractions long gone.

Back to the car, out of the park, windows down, The Waterboys turned up, hair blowing out the window. The tightening growing stronger.

Breathless, into the house. Water straight from the tap. Phone in hand. She called the club, hoping Wade was at the nineteenth hole. She left a message. Beads of perspiration on her forehead. Breathe. The doctor, saying go to the hospital. Shaking, she returned to the car. She drove herself.

Alone in the room, she breathed as she’d been taught. There she lay, her young-woman-self in labor. Her child-self rose—the one who stood, alone, at the door in the morning, her brother gone, her Mum too disheveled to be helpful. Her Dad at work. Papa in his flat in the city. Her small hand there, wishing for her brother’s return, wishing for a hand to hold, dry-eyed.

There in the hospital, her throat tightened. Vic would have held her hand had she stayed in Scotland. She shook her head, focused on the next wave of contraction. The physical pain brought her back to the present. Was this what it was like for Mary?

She was being wheeled to the delivery room when Wade arrived. “We don’t have time to waste,” the nurse said. He waited outside.

A boy, briefly placed on her belly. “A baby,” she gasped. Silly. As though she’d thought she was growing a geranium.

In the recovery room, she held him. Tiny fingers, toes. Perfect. Hers. The first person in the world she’d seen who was connected to her by blood, by bone. She did not want to release him, even to Wade.

~

The next morning, Mum called, saying she was staying at some hotel, she and Frank. They arrived just before noon, both of them tanned, leathery, smiling. She approached the bed, peered at the baby.

“It looks rumpled.”

“He, Mum. He’s a boy.”

“Yes. A baby. That’s very clever of you.” She’d never seen a baby that new. She hadn’t wanted the mess of birth, the pain, the change to her body. And in having her wish granted, she’d denied herself this power, to make a life.

Five minutes, no more, and they were away.

Stillness in the hospital room: her son, eyes open and staring, a shock of spikey blond hair. Skin of her skin, blood of her blood, bone of her bone. And of her mother’s: the egg that made this child was created in Mary’s womb. Tree and seed and sapling.

A sudden terror—tightness in the belly, clenched throat. Did she deserve this perfect being? How would she know what to do? A rising of tears, an unexpected grief along with the realization that no one knew her when she was a delicate, fresh creature like this one.

He nuzzled her breast, turned his head, rooting, latched easily. Thank God one of them knew what to do. They stared at each other, as mothers and new babies do. Alison felt she was being seen for the first time: wonderful and terrifying.

Isadora interrupted them. Her frosted bangs came around the door before the rest of her. She held out lilies, cut from her garden, white, perfect.

“Let me have a look at this little darlin’.”

Alison pulled the baby closer, unfolded the blanket, offered her baby to Isadora’s scrutiny, tried not to shake.

“Look there, Wade’s little toes, all over again. And those lovely long fingers.”

Part of Alison wanted the baby to be all hers; more of her was glad of the evidence of Wade, the stability of a family that could be traced back and back to the first homestead, the growing of the town, belonging, proven. Legitimate. Good enough.

~

Isadora had been lobbying for names since Wade told her they were expecting, seeking to use one of the names she’d chosen for girls she never had. They’d be named after queens: Elizabeth, Charlotte, Ann, Victoria. Alison thought it pompous and absurd. Wade wanted to please his mother. Alison wanted to please Wade. He chose the name Charles, after his own father, for this child born six months and two weeks after their wedding. Nine pounds and five ounces. Whatever anyone made of this, they held to themselves.

~

They settled into a new routine: Alison dropped into sleepless nights; she woke before Wade and Charles, who would soon become Charlie, ground Wade’s coffee before she made her own tea. Pancakes or waffles, from scratch. She learned his grandmother’s biscuit recipe, his favorite omelet with peppers: only the red or yellow ones—the green ones weren’t sweet enough. She held jalapeños, her favorite, on the side since Wade didn’t like spice. After he left, there was, sometimes, space enough for her to sketch and sip tea on the deck before Charlie woke. Nursing and a walk, and the cleaning of the house. Most of Wade’s friends’ wives had maids as their mothers had had, and theirs before them. It did not occur to Alison that she would need, or deserve, one. Wade did not offer.

Alison felt proud as she tucked Charlie into his car seat at a month old for the short drive to the supermarket. In the driver’s seat, she paused to watch a cardinal flit from tree to tree, lowering the window to hear his song. Without warning, a flood of tears arrived. Heaving sobs drowned the birdsong. She clutched the wheel, gathered herself. How ridiculous.

In the middle of the next night, in the middle of nursing, they arrived again. She didn’t want to wake Wade. Instead, she thought of Vic. She or her mum would know what to do. The need was almost strong enough to make her face whatever Vic’s mum might say about her treatment of Vic. By the time she finished nursing and settled the baby back in his crib, the tears had stopped, and it seemed an absurd notion.

The next day, they arrived while she cooked dinner. Wade found her, standing over steaming vegetables, red-eyed and wet-faced.

“Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know.”

He put his arms around her. She sank into them, rested there, safe. The flow stopped.

Six-week checkup: mother and baby doing nicely. She said nothing of the tears.

Wade arrived home to grilled steak, sautéed vegetables, a weeping wife, again.

“Sorry, Wade.”

“We gotta get this stopped,” he said. “I can’t stand to see you like this.”

He arrived home the next day with one of those huge strollers with the big wheels for her to run behind.

“It’ll make you feel better,” he said. “Endorphins.”

Isadora left a voice message two days later, saying she’d signed Alison up at the Sheffield Center, the gym she went to; Alison’s card was waiting at the front desk. She’d told someone to be on the lookout.

~

Some women spent half the time in the shower or fixing their hair. They seemed to have access to faster metabolisms or less appetite than Alison. Another ten miles on the bike, another set of sit-ups, all the calories written in the training journal Wade gave her.

She had the sense that she was a lumbering goat while the other women were gazelles. Her running attire was whatever was clean. Theirs seemed to fall under the category of ensemble. She stuck with the jogger, wept her way around the neighborhood day after day. Her hips narrowed. Her belly flattened. Eventually, the tears stopped. Wade had been right. She returned to the gym, felt a sense of community with the women who worked in the nursery. There, at least, she could get advice.

~

There are piles of photograph albums from that first year, but few clear memories. One though, just after Charlie’s first birthday. Alison had been clearing drawers while he napped, and found a folder Dad had given her. Inside, beneath seven copies of her adoption certificate and umpteen prints of her early school photos lay a letter from someone at the Church of Scotland—Mrs., with no surname signed. Before she could read it, Charlie woke; she carried him outside, watched him dig his bare toes into the sand in the sandbox. Alison fingered the letter, which she assumed was about her.

It was dated 17th April. Spring. Like her. The days lengthening, the earth unfurling. The year was wrong, though. Dad must not have noticed; Alison had been four when this letter was written. The ‘Baby’ the letter referred to was Andrew.

Watching Charlie, the tears began to rise again. These, at least, made sense. Lost brother. The rumble of the train. The beaker of milk. The shadow. All real. All true. This little piece of paper, validating her truth, her sense of the shape of them all. She lifted Charlie. No one could take him. She was safe, now, wasn’t she? She hoped Andrew was, too, on the brink of being a golden-haired man. She imagined him strong and happy with his Beautiful Girl.

~

In the middle of the sweltering summer of 1989, she found herself once again awaiting the silent pronouncement of a pregnancy test. She’d tried the pill, endured most of the known side effects and a few her body invented all on its own. She couldn’t take it. Now here she was again. At least this time she was married.

Wade was thrilled.

When she called Dad to tell him, he did not congratulate her, instead sending money for her to finish her degree. Wade said she should give it back; it was unnecessary. Dad insisted. She felt caught between the two of them, relaying their comments to each other, both of them insistent that they knew what was right for her. She did want to go back to school. She also wanted to be a good wife. She was pregnant and had a toddler. She did not want to argue. She was going to say that to Dad when he phoned again, but before she could say anything, Dad asked for Wade. She handed over the phone, watched Wade’s neck redden. A vein on his forehead pulsed but he nodded, said “Yes, sir,” and then handed the phone to Alison.

So it was that, on the mornings that Charlie attended Mother’s Morning Out, from nine to two, fall semester and spring, while other mothers went for coffee or to scrapbooking club or home for a nap, Alison went to class and wedged in studio time and homework.

She labored over a series of tiny birds with clipped wings and golden irises, gathered into refurbished baby mobiles. She could not explain where the ideas came from, only that they seemed to come through her, rather than from her. Dr. Mindon had encouraged them from the start. Alison was nearly as proud of making them as she was of Charlie. Her anxiety rose, though, as the date for them to be revealed to the world, at her senior exhibit, approached. Wade assured her that all would be well, that he would be there with her, but then, at the last minute, couldn’t leave work.

Alison arrived that night, a week away from delivery, with Charlie on her hip; he garnered more attention than her sculptures. She didn’t mind hiding behind him; it saved her from watching people respond to her work.

~

If Wade and Alison did anything well together, it was to bring boys into the world. William, weighing eight pounds, eight ounces, arrived two years after Charlie.

The tears came, again, lasting longer. They felt as though her baby-self had held all her tears, wishing to be in her Beautiful Girl’s arms all this time, and now surfaced as Alison held her own children. At length, she managed to push them back down, forgot them, agreed to do it all again.

When she called Mum, in late 1991 to tell her she was pregnant again, Mum said, “Christ it’s as though you’re a brood mare.” Michael arrived in August, 1992.

~

As the boys grew and changed, Alison also transformed, driven to shed the bedraggled girl she’d thought she was when she’d stood in the dressing room being fitted for her bridal gown. She made herself over into a respectable mother and wife, volunteering on the PTA, offering the scant number of sculptures she made as donations to silent auctions, turning the bulk of her creative energy to making quilts in which to wrap her children, Harry Potter scarves for the houses each of them liked, sweaters for Wade. She baked bread from scratch, the scent of it in the oven sometimes returning her to Papa’s kitchen or Vic’s house. When this memory rose, she pushed it away.

She packed the boys’ lunches in old-fashioned paper bags, on which she drew their names in varying scripts, adding a different picture each day—hawks or owls most commonly, their favorites. This last, sending her children into their day with homemade nourishment and her art, simple though it was, she would be willing to do again and again until the end of time.

As the children grew, so did the volunteer requests. Yes and yes and yes. Always yes.

She did not question why she was driven to this; she was not consciously aware that living with Mum had taught her how to gauge a room or a person, how to please and appease. She didn’t even think about it. It was as much a part of her as her hair or eyes. In addition, Wade gave her pointers, told her what she could do better. Though she told herself he was helping her, she felt the familiar pang of not being enough, of being pushed down. Each time, she fought her way to the surface, worked harder.

~

The night before Halloween, ten years after the birth of her first child, and a week before her fourth child’s due date, her waters broke. After a rush to the hospital and a labor that lasted just under an hour, Alison held in her arms a tiny girl with a shock of black hair and wide, dark eyes, perfectly healthy. They hadn’t settled on a name yet; despite the ultrasounds, they hadn’t been sure of the sex.

“A girl,” Alison said.

“I didn’t think that was even possible for me,” Wade said. “She’s got your hair, for sure. And eyes.”

Alison stared into those eyes. She wasn’t sure she’d even know what to do with a girl. It stirred something within her that the boys hadn’t. A heightened awareness, a frisson of fear. And something more than the deep connection she’d felt at once for the boys. A delight that she’d felt with only one other person in her life.

“Victoria,” she said. She thought to retract the name. Almost gasped at its sound after all this time.

“Mama will love it,” Wade said.

Alison did not disagree.

~

Tori seemed to awaken parts of Alison that had been asleep for the past eleven years. Sometimes, that meant moments were brighter, simpler, clearer, like an August morning in 2000.

“Mum,” Tori called. “Mum, Mum, Mum.” She stood in the sandbox, pointing up. Together, they looked skyward.

Accipitridae. Red-tailed hawk. Drifting, circular on a smooth sky. The humid summer air closed in around them, making it hard to breathe fully. Alison felt it, this sense of being stifled, more and more each day. She blamed it on the latitude, the season. As she and Tori turned their heads towards the expanse of sky, the slow swirl of the bird, wings outstretched, Alison opened her arms wide. Tori copied, still on podgy legs. They turned, then, slowly, imitating the hawk, a pair of tiny, turning dolls there on the earth, the lid of their music box briefly open.

~

In July, 2002, the whole family spent a week at the club with Isadora and Charles. The boys took golf lessons. Charles and Wade golfed. Alison took Tori to the man-made beach while Isadora played tennis.

Silken sky overhead. Flat of the lake in front of them. They crouched, digging near the edge of the water. A passing boat made small waves. Tori reached her hand towards them. Alison returned to her child-self, there by the sea with Papa, after Andrew had come and gone, wondering where the waters went.

Mum, on the kitchen floor. Mum, in her room. Mum, throwing the doll at Dad.

Close the eyes. Concentrate: wet grit against palm. Shush of the wave. Cicada buzz. High lilt of Tori’s voice, so quiet the words were indiscernible, instead forming a melody. Rhythmic thruck-thruck-thruck of her small hands making a moat for a castle.

Her girl. Her flesh. Her blood. Safe. Here. Now.

On the last day, Wade announced that he’d stay for a round of golf, some member-member event to which she was never invited. She didn’t care. She was happy to pack herself back into the minivan.

She lifted Tori from her nap, let the boys pile into the car, wound down the roads home. When they arrived, brown leaves littered the drive. The boys hurried into the house, heading straight for the fridge. Alison lifted Tori out of the car.

“Why is it fall?” Tori asked.

“It isn’t.”

“Why are there leaves then? On the ground.” Her voice a little like Wade’s, sounding so sure she was right.

Ahead, the shagbark hickory at the foot of the drive loomed over 100 feet. Could it possibly have lived its 200-year lifespan? Every spring, they plucked its seeds from the ground. Wade’s father wanted it cut down—a danger to the house, he said. Alison won that argument mostly because Wade didn’t want to spend the money. Its limbs were almost bare, as though it had given up in their brief absence.

Alison and Tori stood at the foot of the tree, necks tilted.

“Our tree has died,” Alison said.

Tori considered this for a moment. “Where will it go now?”

“I’ll call the tree people. They’ll cut it down and we’ll use it for firewood when it gets cold.”

“No, Mum.”

Alison thought she didn’t want the tree down, told her they had to, so it didn’t fall on the house.

“No, Mummy, not that. Not where does its body go, where does its self go?”

Still, hand in hand. The usual humid air. Silence, and then bird call.

“Have you been talking about this in kindergarten?”

“No. But where do things go when they die?”

“People have lots of different beliefs about what happens when we die.” Alison began to tell her, in what she hoped were four-year-old terms, about afterlife, trying to dance around notions like Hell and judgment, in which she didn’t believe, and which might scare Tori. She recalled Papa trying to explain tides to her. Tori listened to Alison ramble for a minute or two.

“But where do you think the tree will go, Mum?”

She recalled Vic, on one of her rants, talking about her mum and the old ways and Druids—the original tree huggers—transmigration of souls, the transformation of the body, the remaking of the energy. Vic. Where are you now?

“Nowhere,” Alison said. “It will still be here. It just has to find a way to take a different shape. We could leave some of it in the ground. It can help the next trees grow. And make a home for a little chipmunk or other animal.”

“Okay,” she said. “Can I have some juice?”

~

On the porch, wine in hand, the children in bed, Alison thought of the transformative power of nature, and then of Papa, of that day on the shore when he told her that the sea flies, and that it always comes back. She felt like a tide pulled so far away it could no longer find its way back to its home shore, yet lacking some key quality necessary to roll safely to another. She sipped her wine, turned her wedding band. On the outside, she seemed the perfect wife and mother, yet she never felt as though she belonged. The few times Wade had taken her to the club, he’d wave at people he knew, but never take her over and introduce her. It didn’t occur to her that he wanted her all to himself. He noted other men’s approving glances at her body. He wasn’t about to let them get close to her. She was his.

Added to that, his ‘helpful’ comments had come to feel corrosive. No matter how hard she tried, she did not feel good enough. No matter how hard she tried, that old self would not rest.

A place between her shoulder blades began to burn. She set down the wine, stood to stretch, to try to open the space. Wade’s headlights turned into the drive. Would he even notice that the leaves were out of season, or just that she’d been home for seven hours and the drive hadn’t been swept? A defiance rose.

And then he stepped out of the car, bronzed legs, taut under the night sky, another golf trophy catching the streetlight. Down the garden path and up the steps. His lips on hers. This life. These children. She would have none of it without him. It was good, wasn’t it? The defiance fell away.