here working, there are no hints of that work left behind. I take off my coat and sit on the bed in the corner and lean forward, my head in my hands. I may not believe in God, but I don’t move through the world with my eyes closed. I know what sacraments are and stripped of all the trappings and history and performance of church—Lev and the man, the water, the trees around them—made it all seem more real somehow. I think of Lev out there, in the water, perfectly still and untouched by the cold and it makes me wonder if that’s what faith shields you from, if that’s only one of the things that faith might make possible, and I’m suddenly, painfully aware of my own teeth chattering, my numb and aching joints, the shivers moving across my skin.
2014
The baby, a girl, comes too soon.
There’s supposed to be more calendar pictures to go.
The birth happens so quickly, Bea can’t even recall it in any specific detail. Her body is traumatized. She tore. She’s stitched up and sore. The blurred sights and sounds of the delivery room could not take form over the roar of blood rushing in Bea’s ears as it happened. Then that sudden, pronounced absence in her body and the flood of euphoria at what it signified: that she had brought something into being. Bea doesn’t know if she’ll ever feel so powerfully complete in her life again. She knew better than to wait for that first moment of skin-to-skin contact, but she waited for it anyway. All she wanted was her daughter pressed against her chest, to share heartbeats. She’s still waiting.
She remembers Mom and Dad telling her the NICU was a special place when Lo was born; It’s because she couldn’t wait to get here and see you. But it’s not a special place. It’s a special kind of hell where the waxen, devastated faces of new parents stand over incubators to witness firsthand the fragility and unfairness of life. (She can’t stand to think of the ones luckier than her.) To see a baby made more helpless by the universe than the universe has already made it is so profoundly wrong. The memories of Lo’s birth drive home to Bea how far away her family truly is. No one in the waiting room shares her blood or her name. She thinks of her mother, thinks of herself tucked against her mother’s breasts, her mother’s arms around her, and she craves it so badly she has to find a bathroom to cry in. She wants her mother. She is a mother. Her milk hasn’t come in.
* * *
Lev commands Foster to the hospital to help navigate the doctors and the nurses, the language they speak. Once Foster has talked to them, he privately pulls Bea aside and gives her his own diagnosis: the baby has to be his. No child of Lev Warren’s would arrive in this world with so many complications. No child of Lev Warren’s would enter life on the brink of death. What they did was poison, and it has poisoned the child. The baby needs to be cleansed of their sins or they will lose her forever.
Now that Bea has a daughter, she can’t bear the thought of a world without her.
We have to tell him, Foster says.
But Bea can’t bear the thought of that either.
* * *
What are you calling her? the nurse asks because no one should die without a name.
* * *
While Foster confesses to Lev, Bea goes to the hospital chapel where no one is, the journey comprised of one halting step in front of the other until it comes to an abrupt end. She collapses in front of the altar and the cross, pulled down by the weight of her grief, and she weeps. The last time she made an appeal to God, she was a child and now she is a mother. It’s a mother’s job to be strong for her child.
God, she begs with all the strength in her heart.
And then He appears.
When Bea raises her face, Lev’s is in shadows. Her betrayal radiates off of him and it breaks her heart because she loves him, there is no man she loves more than him, and what she did with Foster was out of love for and devotion to him but she knows beyond any doubt that Lev will never see it that way.
And she knows now, that she would do it