The-Hummingbird-s-Cage(52)

I swallowed hard. “Nine in June.”

The boy nodded. “I write my own stories, too.”

“Best grades in his class,” Simon said. “Davey, can you go water Pegasus?”

The boy bolted off, eager to please Simon. And no doubt just as eager to escape the crazy woman with the Medusa stare. When he was gone, I turned to Simon: “Tell me about his family.”

He hesitated. “They have a little place on the other side of the Mountain.”

“I remember,” I snapped. “From the barbecue—ranch folk, respectable people. And he’s their only child?”

“They have a couple more. Older boys.”

“But he’s . . . their natural child?”

Simon didn’t answer, but watched Davey refill the water bucket, Pegasus at his side. Olin joined them and was running his hand over the horse’s bowing back, then down each reedy leg.

When Simon spoke again, I could see what a careful, neutral mask his face had become.

“Davey was a foundling,” he said. “They took him in as a baby. His natural parents—they’ve never been part of his life.”

“They found him? On their doorstep?”

“I’m not sure what you want to know, Joanna.”

I wasn’t sure, either. How do you say, without sounding like a lunatic, that a boy you just met looks like a child version of your husband, but with your eyes? Like he could be your natural-born son?

A son that, in point of fact, had never actually been born.

I’d been about ten weeks along when Jim gave me that punch to the stomach. The fetus had barely been an inch long—it hadn’t even registered a heartbeat. But I knew from pregnancy books that all its organs were in place. That it had ears and eyelids and a nose . . . a tiny body cabled with muscles and nerves. That it was distinct down to its fingerprints and hair follicles.

I’d never had an ultrasound and could never have asked the doctor, but I knew—in my heart I knew—he’d been a boy.

And for years I’d been imagining him: his features, his temperament. I’d been dreaming him up out of whole cloth, like Laurel with her rain boots. A boy who wouldn’t inherit the malice of his father, but a finer, sweeter spirit.

And every year he grew older—a presence that only I felt. Only I missed.

If I’d carried him to term, he would have turned nine this past June.

And the name I’d chosen for him all those years ago—but never told a soul—was David.





Tea and Empathy





Back from Simon’s cabin I withdrew again, hunkering down until it was almost like the bad old days under Jim’s boot. I couldn’t buck the feeling I’d stumbled onto something I shouldn’t have—a glimpse of the baby I couldn’t save . . . the boy he might have become if I had. I couldn’t stop picturing his face—every line, every curve, every inch of it. I was floundering in grief and guilt.

Olin had said Morro could be a Place of Truth for me, but that nugget of wisdom should have come with a warning label. Truth wasn’t just something that could set you free—it could kick you in the gut ten times over. In its way, truth could be as brutal a bastard as Jim ever could.

I kept to my room, just like the early days when we’d first arrived. Jessie brought me meals on a tray again and didn’t ask what was wrong or where it hurt. At night, Laurel climbed up on my bed and slipped under the covers.

This was new territory. With Jim, it was constant survival mode—every morning armoring up for one more round. I could never have surrendered like this around him, or he would’ve eaten me alive.

But here . . . here, I could shut down. I could lie in bed—neither asleep nor awake—and just drift. Aimless and mindless as a dandelion seed. And know with utter surety that if I only let go, let go for good and all, I could rise and rise . . . a sweet, numbing nothingness sluicing over me, through me, warm and solacing . . . until I dissipated at last, like the cloud that day in the vegetable garden.

Courage is a kind of salvation.

It was Olin’s voice.

Olin’s words in my ear, so close he might have been drifting on the wind beside me. I could smell the tang of cured tobacco . . .

My eyes flew open, and instead of a blank, open sky above me there was only the bedroom ceiling. I concentrated until the light fixture slid into focus.

Courage? Forget it—wouldn’t know it if I tripped over it.