Two
It had been a day and a half since the baby was born, and still she did not have a name. Diane stared down at her, a dim yellow light illuminating the hospital room. A tiny fist escaped the swaddling blankets, and Diane gently spread it open with her thumb as if she were unfurling the frond of a fern. Looking at the wrinkled palm, at the translucent crescents of fingernails, she brought the little hand to her face and inhaled the child in, inhaled her newness, her purity. She was worth it, of course; she was worth everything that had been and would be sacrificed. “Sweet girl,” Diane whispered.
The maternity ward was without sound that night, and Diane felt as though they were sheltered in the belly of a boat as it drifted across a still black sea. Mary stood at the hospital room’s single window, her forehead resting against the cool glass, her eyebrows tensed as she peered into the night. Even at fourteen, Mary’s beauty had a ferocity to it, an elegant savagery. Diane let her head loll against the blue vinyl chair as she stared at her daughter’s back, at her reflection in the window.
“How ya doin’, Mary, honey?” she asked.
But Mary was silent.
Diane looked back down at the baby, feeling the warmth of her in her arms. She hadn’t wanted her, had mourned her coming birth. When she learned with certainty that there was, in fact, a baby, she cried for two days, pacing around the motel and muttering about how stupid she was. How she, of all people, should have known better. How this was going to ruin their lives. But that was all incomprehensible now. Their family was now three: she, Mary, and the baby.
She and Mary had left Sandy Bank, New Jersey, and their home at the Water’s Edge Motel in September. It was usually only the summer people who left then. Even though the motel closed soon after Labor Day, Mary and her mother always stayed through those months of churning gray seas and empty streets with the rest of the locals. Mary hadn’t wanted to go. There was a boy, of course. Someone Mary would have to leave, though she wouldn’t say who. And so she subjected Diane to terrifying acts of rebellion intermixed with frigid weeks of silence before their departure, but Diane insisted that this baby had to be born elsewhere. That she had to be born in a place without winters. So Diane pulled Mary out of school and they drove south, migrating slowly through small towns where people spoke with languid words until they reached their destination.
Bardavista, Florida, was a small city on the Gulf of Mexico whose business was shrimp and the United States Navy. And during that winter, Diane and Mary stayed on the barrier island of Bardavista Beach, which then had only a smattering of motels and beach cottages. Together they walked in silence over sugar-white sand from their cottage up to Ft. Rillieux. The fort was an enormous structure occupying one end of the narrow semibarren island. When they first visited, Diane found Mary reading a placard about Geronimo, who had been held there for a year of his life.
Diane read over her daughter’s shoulder. “Geronimo,” she said. “Isn’t that something?”
Mary was quiet for a moment. “One of his wives died here.”
“In Bardavista?”
“She’s buried in the big cemetery. Over the bridge.”
Diane and Mary kept to themselves in Bardavista and people let them. At thirty-four, Diane was still young. She liked to think that people assumed she and Mary were sisters. Maybe even two young naval wives walking together on the sand while their husbands donned uniforms and defended the nation.
Diane worried about Mary during those months. Worried that she was supplanting the needs of one child for another. Worried that something essential was being drained from her wild, lovely daughter. Mary used to sit alone on that beach that winter, a sheet of paper resting atop the phone book in her lap. She’d draw creatures rising up out of the sea, pelagic dragons, their massive bellies turned skyward as they breached the white crests of waves. Mary had always been an exceptional artist.
Diane had been twenty when Mary was born. It was she and her father at the Water’s Edge then. Vietnam was about to become the event horizon for a generation of young men, and so, perhaps sensing the inevitability of that conflict, boys began crisscrossing the country like creatures at once pursued and in pursuit. They would show up every so often at the Water’s Edge with an undirected hunger in their eyes, searching for something for which to long. And one day a boy with thick dark hair and a tall broad body parked his motorcycle in the lot of the motel and came in, addressing Mr. Chase as “sir” and asking for a room.
Mr. Chase looked down through his glasses as he took the boy’s name and where he was from.
“Vincent Drake,” he said. “From Bardavista, Florida.”
Mr. Chase gave a murmur of recognition. “I hear it’s beautiful down there.”
And as Mr. Chase filled out the paperwork in his slow, careful script, Vincent Drake looked out the window behind the front desk at the pretty girl who was shooing away seagulls from the Dumpster as she heaved in another overstuffed trash bag.
After shutting the lid, Diane came back into the office, eyes and mind elsewhere as she started to say, “Daddy, the . . .” Then she noticed Vincent Drake and her words slowed a bit. “Dumpster is full.” And the boy found something for which to long.
Diane didn’t have the opportunity to tell Vincent Drake that she was pregnant. Her father spent months calling town clerks’ offices, but they never did find a young man with that name near Bardavista. And though mother and daughter walked those beaches together for weeks, Diane never told Mary why she had chosen there, of all places, to wait out the arrival of another child. Diane wasn’t even sure if she herself knew.
Sometimes during that winter, Diane would look at her daughter as if remembering the man who said his name was Vincent. Mary resembled him physically, but where his presence was most apparent was in Mary’s boldness. In her opportunistic charm. In the way she could tell wild, outrageous lies with a steady-eyed calm.
Mary had a similar expression on her face now as she stared out of the window of the hospital room. Diane shifted, feeling the fatigue in her body reach down to her bones.
“Mary, honey,” Diane said. “Can you hold the baby for a minute?”
Mary didn’t move. Diane shifted slightly in her seat, suddenly feeling the enormity of raising another child on her own. She was going to need Mary, she knew. She was going to need her girl.
“Mary,” she said, her tone sapped of patience, her words lingering and long. “I need you to hold your sister.”
Mary’s eyes found her mother’s in the window’s black glass, all that was unspoken passing in a look.
“Why?” asked Mary.
Diane held her daughter’s gaze. “Because I have to go to the bathroom, Mary.”
Mary turned slowly and looked at the baby, her arms at her sides. Diane struggled up, cradling the infant in one arm while pushing herself up with the other. “Mare . . . ,” she said, keeping her awkward hold. “Can you?” She felt herself slip slightly, fall back against the chair, and the baby let out a mewling cry.
And to Diane it looked like reflex, like some primal need to protect the being with whom she shared blood—a tribal sense of duty. But Mary darted forward, sliding her arms beneath the baby and pulling her into her chest. Diane watched them for a moment, watched as Mary started to sway, calming the child.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, but Mary was still looking at the baby, some internal battle silently being waged.
In the bathroom, Diane turned on the water and sat on the toilet, letting it run and run, letting it drown out everything else. She wasn’t sure how long she stayed in there. It could have been five minutes. It could have been twenty. And when she opened the door, Mary was sitting in the blue vinyl chair, the baby still in her arms. Diane watched them for a moment.
“So,” Diane said. And Mary started slightly, as if she hadn’t heard her leave the bathroom. “What are we going to name her?”
“Name her whatever you want,” Mary replied, though she couldn’t quite look away from the baby’s small face.
“She’s going to need you, Mary,” said Diane. It was something Diane knew without understanding how. “Do you know that?”
Diane walked over and sat on the edge of the hospital bed facing her daughter. Diane waited, knowing that Mary was a girl whose loyalty was fierce and rare and absolute. Knowing that Mary was deciding, right at this moment, whether or not to love this child, whether or not to give herself to her entirely. The baby squirmed in Mary’s arms and the expression on Mary’s face slackened and at that moment Diane knew it was done. Raising her chin, Mary looked at her mother, and said simply, “Let’s call her Hannah.” And with those words, it was as if Mary had slashed the palm of her hand and offered her blood as oath.
Soon the three of them would return to Sandy Bank, and the whispers and gossip would rise like a tide and then eventually recede. The father of Diane’s second baby, it was said, had swept in and out of her life in much the same way as the father of her first. Another Vincent Drake had come to the Water’s Edge, laid Diane down on a sand dune, and given her a child but nothing more.