Beneath the Apple Leaves(51)
Claire pulled up a chair and stirred her own cup, her eyes hypnotized by the circling spoon.
Drink your damn tea and leave me in peace. A gnawing grated inside, the animosity making her sweat. The kitchen and Frank’s wife trapped and stoked her.
Claire took a reserved sip of her hot drink, then rested the cup on her lap. “Seeing y-y-young ones—” She stopped, pursed her lips as she tried to tame her tongue. She began again, slowly this time. “Seeing young ones dying just isn’t right.” Her eyes flitted back and forth in their sockets as if she were reading a sad story in the newspaper.
The heat pulsed through Eveline’s neck. How dare you. She balled her fists, thought she might overturn the table just to get away from the woman and her empty words of condolence.
“Thank you for your sentiments, but I don’t especially feel like talking, Claire. Been a long day, as you can imagine. Besides, mothers lose their babies every day. It’s God’s will.” There was a jab in the tone, a stab at a God who had done nothing to protect her children. She put the hot tea to her lips gently even as her fingers squeezed the handle so hard, the cup nearly broke into shattered chunks.
Gently, Claire removed the tea from Eveline’s hands and put it down on the table. “You haven’t buried those babies yet.” The voice was nearly mute, but Eveline heard every word.
She wanted to spit at the face, at the eyes that hung with pity. “I just buried them,” she hissed. She wanted her tea back to hold, to keep her hands busy. “You were there.”
“They’re not buried.” Claire winced, shook her head long and low. “Not yet. Not until you’ve grieved for them.”
Things were rising from inside and it made her mad. So mad she wanted to kick over the chair, so mad she wanted to push Claire off her chair. So mad she wanted to bite someone, put her teeth into skin and pull like a rabid dog. The fury burned her face and she wanted to scream loud enough to break the windows. “I don’t need to cry or grieve for those babies,” she sneered. “You know why?” Her body shook in convulsions and she couldn’t think straight, let the words tumble out unconfined. “Because I was glad when they were gone! So, don’t preach to me about grieving over babies I never felt love for from the start.” The sobs broke and she snorted hot air from her nose.
Eveline stormed up, wanted to rip the woman’s hair out by the roots, call her a simpleminded idiot. “I did everything I could to make them drink and be healthy and they wouldn’t do it. They cried all the time. They were so weak and I knew I was losing them! I knew it!” She cried so hard she couldn’t breathe and she gasped for air. “Do you know what it’s like to hold your infants in your arms every waking minute knowing they are fading away? Do you have any idea what that feels like?” she accused roughly.
“Yes.” Claire’s eyes were wide with compassion, glistened with tears. “I do.”
Eveline’s crying slowed and her body dulled. She wrinkled the folds of her dress in her hands. She looked up at the woman’s face and saw it for the first time. And in Claire Morton she saw the mirror of her own grief, and it nearly knocked the wind from her lungs.
“I miss them,” Eveline gasped. Claire nodded, a lone tear dripping down her cheek and under her jaw. “Miss them so much it feels like I don’t have skin, that everything’s just open and raw.”
“I know.”
And the women sat at the table in the tired, creaking house. The tea grew cold in their silence even as a warmth, thick as an embrace, joined them as one.
*
Andrew didn’t turn his lamp on, just sat blanketed in the dark of his room. The house was noiseless, but he could still hear the distant, echoed cries of the babies, as if they lay embedded within the grains of the old clapboard.
He should have known better than to let the cows graze in the forest. The sickness could have killed them all. He thought of Edgar and Will, thought of what would have happened if all the cows had been poisoned; thought of the sure fate of his cousins had they been allowed to drink the same milk as their baby brothers. He pressed his stomach, thought of the little boys who galloped like horses and laughed to tears with his tickles, imagined them buried next to the twins, and he was cold and numb to his feet.
Andrew remembered carrying the twins back to the house the night Eveline had left them in the fields. They had nearly slipped from his arm and yet they did slip. And here he sat, in the dark, a body broken, unable to help anyone, unable to save a life. His father. The twins. In the end, they all slipped away.
A knock tapped softly on his door but didn’t register between the tortured thoughts. Andrew heard the sound as one hears the wind shudder through the panes of a window or a bat flap in the attic crevices.
The door creaked and Lily entered, closed it behind her. His back was turned, but he knew it was she, felt the woman’s presence as water feels the ripples of a dropped stone.
She stepped across the floorboards toward him and the currents grew as if his senses only tuned to that soundless movement. The bed creaked and lowered as Lily sat next to him. Her body was the only substance alive. This woman. Everything else was dead and black and dismal. Yet her form, her form alone, pulsed while every other stagnated—a green leaf in a lifeless and burned forest.
Andrew heard her swallow, but she didn’t speak. But she breathed, and the life was enough—enough to know that one bit of the world was still alive. She turned to him, only a vibration of change. And then her head leaned on his shoulder. He closed his eyes.