The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(41)

“At church, you always sound so assured when you answer questions. I think the Sunday School teacher quakes in his boots, hoping you don’t correct him. He thinks you have the whole Bible memorized.”

“Well, I don’t,” I said, astonished. I had always thought that I was just on the border of heresy, and she seemed to think I was some sort of icon of Mormon womanhood.

“I thought you would quote Bruce R. McConkie at me and expect me to accept death with grace and courage. As a relief and a triumph.”

Bruce R. McConkie, author of multiple volumes of the once-beloved Mormon Doctrine, had spoken at General Conference just days before his death from cancer in the 1980s. He had looked pale and gaunt, and his voice was one of those harsh whispers that made you stop and listen. He had stood on the pulpit and before the audience of millions of Mormons had declared that he knew Christ lived, and that even when he was dead, he would not know any better then than he knew now that Christ was real. No one who had heard the speech live would forget it.

I said, thinking of that certainty in the face of death, “It’s nice to have grace and courage after the fact. But I’m afraid most of us are all too mortal and only find grace and courage in special moments. The rest of the time we’re alternately angry or fiercely afraid.”

“You—afraid?” said Anna.

There was a long moment when I didn’t know if I could be honest enough to tell her the truth. My mouth opened, but the words wouldn’t be pressed out. They were too big to fit through the sieve.

“I lost a daughter,” I got out finally, the words hardly audible.

“What? I thought you had five sons.”

“And one daughter,” I said.

“But—what happened?” she asked.

I took a deep breath, and then another. We hadn’t lived here then, so no one in the ward knew. We moved here two years later, after Kenneth was born. Samuel and Zachary were the only children born in our Draper house.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what happened and sometimes that is harder than anything else.” This had nothing to do with Tobias and Anna. This wouldn’t help her deal with her own difficulties. I told myself to be quiet, that she didn’t need to hear the details. But it had been so long since I had spoken about it. I wasn’t sure I ever really had. And so I kept talking.

“I was scheduled to be induced the next day. She was overdue and the doctor was tired of waiting, I think. He never saw any problems in the ultrasound. She was losing weight, though. He said that babies sometimes did that at the end. He said it was nothing to worry about.”

I wanted to take the wet dishcloth from her and use it. I wanted to do something with my hands while I spoke, but instead, I just stared down at them.

“That night, I went to bed and slept well for the first time in months. When I woke up in the morning, I realized it was because she hadn’t moved all night. Kurt came over to touch my belly because he said it looked different. And somehow, that moment, he knew. He started crying. I called the doctor and asked for an appointment. I went down and ate some breakfast. And read one of those pregnancy books, which reassured me that the baby might just be uncomfortable or asleep. I was so sure that the doctor would say everything was fine, and that Kurt was a crybaby for nothing.” I smiled a little at that. Kurt was often more emotional than I was.

“But he was right. There was no heartbeat. They rushed me to the hospital and induced me right away. Even then, I kept thinking that if I delivered quickly enough, maybe they would be able to revive her.” The sounds of my own breathing were so loud that they embarrassed me.

“I’m sorry. I never knew,” said Anna.

I shook my head. I could feel tears falling, but they were cold by the time they landed on my cheeks. It was all so long ago. People talk about how you recover from tragedy. But it’s more like scar tissue. It’s always there; you just find a way to work around it.

Anna was staring at me.

I felt suddenly self-conscious. I’d spilled my soul, and now I felt exposed. “I’m sorry. I came here for you, to talk about your problems, not mine. Please forgive me. I must be very tired.”

“No, don’t apologize. Thank you. Thank you for telling me the truth.”

Did she realize that she was the only person I’d opened up to about this? My face felt sticky from the tears. A part of me wished I hadn’t said anything about my daughter, maybe a bit like someone who has a hangover and wishes she hadn’t had anything to drink. The aftereffects are brutal, but at the moment, I couldn’t have held back.

“I think I understand you a little better now. I never had a daughter. I never had sons, actually.” Anna put her hand over mine on the countertop, and I realized she did know how rare this truth of mine was, and she was honoring it with her own painful truth. “Only Tobias’s sons, but they were never fully mine, no matter how much I loved them. There was always a barrier with them. We decided not to have our own children because I needed to focus on Tomas and Liam, make sure they felt my complete love.” Her voice was strained. “But there is a certain pain in not being a mother in your body. I have put that away for a long time, but it is still there.” Her hand let go of mine and brushed against her stomach.

Yes. She understood. It was strange that a pain that was so different could be so much the same. We had both faced the loss of what we had expected, deserved, and dreamed about. A loss of the imagination, which was worse in some ways from any other loss.