the flat rocks, but not with an eight-pound weight dragging me down. My legs and arms felt heavy, like I was swimming through molasses. By the time I got to shore and climbed up onto the rocks I was exhausted and I still had to walk five miles to the store.
I was soon sorry I hadn’t brought my shoes. The forest floor, which had been invitingly carpeted with moss and ferns in the summer, was now prickly with pine needles and dead leaves. And I was cold. My wet clothes clung to me like winding shrouds. What had I been thinking? I considered swimming back to the island, but I couldn’t bear the thought of going back into that ice cold water. So I walked, or crawled, mostly, clinging to the rocky shore so I wouldn’t lose my way in the woods. Sometimes I stopped and leaned my cheek against the rough bark of a tree and cried. In one of the fairy tales Luther had read to us in class a tree grows up from a dead mother’s bones and watches over her daughter. But my mother was buried far from here. No one was watching over me.
By the time I got to the general store it was, of course, closed. But there was a light on in the trailer next door. I knocked on the door, my hand so numb I couldn’t feel the aluminum door under my knuckles. I wasn’t fully convinced that I was really there. If the old man who opened the door—grizzled, wearing two flannel shirts and a Red Sox cap—had looked right through me I wouldn’t have been surprised. Instead the shock on his old creased face told me how bad I must have looked.
“Sweet Jesus!” he said, pulling me into the cramped, smoky trailer. He sat me down by a kerosene heater and put a blanket around me, muttering, I knew that city fella was up to no good, gone off and left you, has he? Well, don’t you worry, Samuel’ll have you all fixed up in a trice.
Samuel fed me hot coffee and gave me warm clothes and the privacy to change into them. It was when I was changing that I saw the blood.
“Could you take me to the hospital?” I asked him. “I think my baby is coming.”
It was a forty-minute drive down unlit backcountry roads to the hospital in Skowhegan. The contractions started halfway and I wondered if I’d have to ask Samuel to pull over and deliver the baby on the side of the road. But we made it, Samuel pulling his truck into the emergency bay at an angle and hollering for help as he carried me through the sliding glass doors.
Luther had told me that Western medicine imposed the notion of birth pains on women but Luther was clearly full of shit. The pain wrapped around me like a riptide and carried everything with it—me, the white walls, the glistening, distended IV sacs, the masked faces of doctors and nurses that bobbed over me like channel buoys on a rough sea. We were all underwater, riding the surf that poured out of me. The final push delivered us all to shore: me and the beaming nurse and the wet, blood-soaked creature screaming in her arms. In the bright lights he shone like a pearly mollusk. A bit of flesh that clung stubbornly to life.
And then he was gone. The doctor was telling me that since he was early he had to be taken to the NICU. I needed stitches and rest and something for the pain. My grandfather would be in to see me soon—
I drifted off then. Luther told me later that I lost so much blood I nearly died. I was unconscious for sixteen hours. When I came to, Luther was sitting in a chair beside the bed, holding the baby.
“He has red hair like you” were the first words he said to me, “so I named him Rudy.”
WHY DID YOU go back to him? I hear a voice that sounds like Kevin Bantree’s ask me. I’ve reached the police station. I’m in the parking lot, sitting in my Subaru with its Bluetooth and seat warmers. What will I tell him? How will I explain?
I felt worthless, I’ll say. I felt overwhelmed. What was I going to do with a new baby on my own? And Luther seemed genuinely devoted to our son. He took care of him in those first months like