Leaving Lucy Pear(41)

But before she could leave, Jack stuffed something into his nose and began to weep. The object was quickly determined by Adeline to be one of Vera’s collectibles: specifically, a finger-sized silver dolphin whose splayed tail had gone up the unfortunate boy’s nostril while its bottlenose hung down like a tusk.

It was none of Bea’s business, really. So she had had a moment with Jack earlier that day. He probably didn’t remember it—or if he did, the memory terrified him. She terrified him. Bea watched Adeline tug reasonably at the dolphin, wiggling it this way and that, Adeline who had grown up on a farm: among this family her knowledge of basic repair made her the equivalent of an engineer. Surely she was capable of removing a trinket from her son’s nose without any assistance. Yet Bea, an auntish confidence surging through her, went and crouched down next to the mother and son. “Is it stuck?” she asked in what she understood to be a chummy, cheery voice, but as with the squeeze of the calf, her judgment was off. Her voice was shrill. And the question itself turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to ask because upon hearing it Jack fell to the floor, where he began to thrash and yowl: “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!”

There were moments that seemed to conspire to undo you, as if time and space knew your precise dimensions, knew how to surround, squeeze, mock, and scold you in the most effective, soul-crushing way. Bea leaped into a frenzy of action. She ran for mineral oil, and when that didn’t work, tweezers, and when this didn’t work, she found a magnet in a kitchen drawer. Back into the great room she ran, waving the magnet absurdly, conscious of her unfashionably long skirt, her hair loosening and wild, her childlessness. She dropped to the floor. The boy rolled. The magnet landed in his ear. A trail of mineral oil ran snotlike across his cheek. He shouted, “Get away from me!”

Bea fought the urge to slap him. It had come on suddenly, bearing down like a train, scattering her intentions. She took the boy by the shoulders, tried to make him still. “I’m trying to help you,” she said. “You can’t just go sticking things inside you!”

His eyes were his mother’s: blue and plain, their odd opacity suggesting self-sufficiency. He had stopped writhing and looked at Bea not with gratitude, as she must have fantasized, or terror, as she feared, but worse, with what appeared to be forgiveness: he seemed to know, in a child’s crude way of knowing, that Bea had no idea what she was doing, and that she was ashamed.

Bea was pulled back by Adeline, who growled softly in her ear, “Let him be.” She tried not to look anywhere but the rug: its mute, whorling repetition. She felt the neat dents Adeline’s fingers had left in her arm, like little egg cups. Jack had quieted as soon as his mother took Bea’s place. The piano was quiet, too.

Slowly, willing herself insect small, Bea made her way back to the love seat. She could recover, she told herself. Her cousins would pretend they had seen nothing of what happened, just as they had always pretended. She hated the idea of any of them pitying her. And she couldn’t leave the party now, in defeat. She didn’t want to leave. All that waited for her up in her room was the listless, half-finished speech she’d been writing for Josiah Story and the latest issue of the Radcliffe Quarterly, which Lillian had brought on her last visit. Why did the Quarterly still come to her parents’ house? Bea threw it out every time Lillian gave it to her, but then, always, she wound up creeping up on the trash bin, fishing it out, and reading it all in one sitting, a forbidden, painful sweet, all those cheerful mothers and acceptably brave career women with their polite little boasts, their references to jokes Bea had not been in on.

She smoothed her skirt and briefly closed her eyes, thinking this might be the moment for her to give Brigitte the locket she had found upstairs on the hallway floor a few days ago. The locket was engraved BH and held a tiny photograph of Julian in one side, while the other, empty, presumably waited for a picture of the baby. Bea could return it to Brigitte now, a public demonstration of just how fine she was: untroubled by the thing with the boy, not even jealous of Brigitte. Here she was, returning her locket! Bea opened her eyes, feeling almost calm, only to see Brigitte’s hand in its slow caress, her huge, hard stomach resting in her lap. Bea had not touched her stomach when she was pregnant. It had not seemed like hers to touch. It was like a moon that had attached itself to her, unreachable even in its closeness. She tried to ignore it, but even then it changed everything, reduced her world to black and white, then and now, now and after, later, when? Toward the end, when it was as big as Brigitte’s, she could see, even through her dress—she never looked at it bare—the baby’s parts jumping and jabbing. Despite her determination not to, she felt the baby wriggling. Once she felt what must have been hiccups. Bea hadn’t told even Vera what that felt like, those gentle astonishing taps: Hello. Hello! She went for a walk so as not to notice, but all she could do was notice; she was shrunk to sensation, as if her eyes, her ears, her breath itself, had been replaced by a baby’s hiccups. Now she watched Brigitte’s stomach for signs of movement. The glow that had followed Bea, then entered her, had grown painfully bright. She felt herself drifting toward its other face: not what was still possible but all she had lost.

Jack was crying again. He had his mother by the hands, blocking her efforts to free the dolphin. Adeline sang to him calmly but her dress was dark at the armpits, her face purple with strain. Oakes said something about baseball. Julian started to play again, “Frère Jacques” now, for the child. “Ow!” shouted Jack. Adeline, straddling him, had managed to pin his hands down with her knees and was doubled over, her face next to his. Her plan was unclear. Would she yank the dolphin out with her teeth?