The Grace Year(104)

Tonight, when I open my eyes, the girl is lying beside me. I haven’t dreamt of her in so long, it startles me. She looks different … worried.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” I tell her, but when I reach out to touch her face, my hand goes right through her.

A jolt of pain shoots through me, making me crunch up in a tight ball. It starts in my lower abdomen, radiating throughout my limbs. It’s so intense, so sudden, that I let out a sharp scream.

“What is it?” Michael bolts up in bed. “Another nightmare? I’m here. You’re safe. You’re home.”

I try to stand, but the next wave of pain hits me like a runaway colt. “Whoa,” I manage to exhale.

“What can I do?” he asks.

I lean forward, trying to ease the pressure, when I notice tiny specks floating outside the window.

“Snow,” I whisper as I peer through the gap in the heavy damask curtains.

“Do you want me to open the window for you?” he asks, easing his warm hand over my lower back.

I nod.

As he opens it, the blast of freezing air brings me right back to the encampment—facing Ryker on the frozen lake. A fresh wave of pain comes over me, but it’s not physical this time. I try to get up so I can see the snow more clearly, but when I rise from the bed, Michael stammers, “Tierney … you’re bleeding.”

Without taking my eyes off the falling snow, I say, “I know.”

As he bolts out of the room, yelling at the maids to fetch the midwife, I can’t help wondering if this is a sign. A late snow sent by Eve. But what is she trying to tell me?

Another surge of pain comes, making my knees buckle.

Michael bursts into the room, dragging the midwife with him. She still looks half asleep, but once she sees the state I’m in, she snaps to.

“Dear child,” she says, pressing her hand to my forehead. I’m sticky with sweat and burning up with fever, but I try to smile. Another wave of pain hits, and I let out a deep groan.

As she helps me to the bed to examine me, I watch my stomach roiling in the lamplight. Tiny elbows and knees, struggling to get out.

“I need towels, hot water, ice, and iodine,” she barks at Michael. “Now.”

“What’s wrong?” I pant. “Is there something wrong with the baby?”

As he rushes out of the room, hollering at the staff, I’m asking a million questions, but she just ignores me, removing the tools from her satchel. It reminds me of Ryker, the tools from his kill kit.

There’s a commotion downstairs. The midwife props up my body with the pillows. Even this small amount of jostling is excruciating. I have to bite down on a rag to stop myself from screaming out.

People are racing up the stairs; my mother and two older sisters barge into the room. Clara and Penny aren’t allowed, not until they’ve bled.

As they hover around me, I hear my father outside the room, trying to calm Michael down. “It’s going to be okay. Tierney is as strong as they come. She can do this.”

My mother presses a cool cloth to my head.

“I’m scared,” I whisper.

She pauses, her face ravaged with worry. “Frykt ikke for min kj?rlighet er evig.”

“Fear not, for my love is everlasting,” I whisper back. It brings fresh tears to my eyes. It reminds me of a time when I was small, curled up next to my mother in her room after Penny’s birth, the smell of blood and freesia hanging all around us. She was burning up with fever, and I knew by the look on my father’s face that it might be the last time I’d see her. As I clung to her soft warm flesh, burrowing my face in the musky linens, she told me to be strong. She pressed my hand over her heart. “There’s a place inside us where they can’t reach us, they can’t see. What burns in you burns in all of us.”

I ran to the woods that night, hiding in the tall grass. Hiding from all my fears.

The fear of growing older, the shame of not bearing sons. The wounds the women held so close that they had to clamp their mouths shut for fear of it slipping out. I saw the hurt and the anger seeping from their pores, making them lash out at the women around them. Jealous of their daughters. Jealous of the wind that could move over the cliffs without a care in the world. I thought if they cut us open they’d find an endless maze of locks and bolts, dams and bricked-over dead ends. A heart with walls so tall that it slowly suffocates, choking on its own secrets. But here, in this room, my mother and my sisters gathered around me, I understand there’s so much more to us … a world hidden in the tiny gestures that I could never see before. They were there all along.

As my mother pulls away to help the midwife, June and Ivy step in to comfort me. “We’re here,” June says, taking my hand.

“It’s okay to scream,” Ivy says, taking my other hand. “I screamed my head off with little Agnes. It’s the one time we’re allowed, might as well make the most of it.”

“Ivy,” June hisses, but she can’t stop the small smile taking over the corner of her mouth. “We can scream together … if you’d like,” June adds.

I nod, a hazy smile coming over me as I squeeze their hands.

As the midwife presses down on my belly, she shakes her head.

“What is it?” my mother asks.

“The baby’s in a bad position. I’m going to have to reach in and turn it.”