Blessings (26 page)

There were two ways to get out of the rest area, one that led to the highway running west, to Nebraska or Kansas, and one that led east, back the way he’d just come. He went east. It was a kind of circular thing: to be the kind of person who would have taken Faith in, he had to be the kind of person who would take her back. He drove with a buzzing sound in his head, careful to keep
just a little above the speed limit. There were two dead deer along the shoulder, and an RV having a tire changed by a man who didn’t look like he knew what he was doing while a clutch of heavyset women circled him like disconcerted pigeons. There was the playground where he’d stopped, filled now with day-care kids with name tags on colored paper hung around their necks with cord. There was a Best Western where he could check in and play with the baby on the bed for another hour or two while the sheriff put his license-plate number out over the state police radio. He kept on driving. Faith was asleep.

He drove past the exit you took to the Boatwright place and saw a heavy woman in red shorts hanging laundry on a droopy line. It seemed like there was a raccoon in a cage on the front porch, sitting on top of the washing machine. He drove past the exit for McGuire’s and could see the parking lot half full even though it wasn’t even lunchtime. Someone had painted the side of the garage next to McGuire’s with the words “Real Men Love Jesus.” Off the other side of the highway he could see the peak of Foster’s auto body behind a stand of elms. The Wal-Mart loomed off the highway, and then the trees closed in, and he was getting off on Rolling Hills Road, his shoulders stiff from holding on to the wheel so tightly. The fields were striped yellow, brown, and faint purple with high grasses, and a pair of hawks rose through thin clear air. He turned in and reflexively thought that the grass needed to be cut at Blessings. The cat had left a dead squirrel splayed in the doorway to the basement, and he wondered who was making the coffee now that he was gone.

There were three cars in the driveway, the sheriff’s car between the big sedan that belonged to Lester Patton, Mrs. Blessing’s lawyer, and a blue Toyota he had never seen before. The Toyota had a bumper sticker that said
WE BRAKE FOR ANIMALS
and an infant car seat in the back. He wondered what they thought he was going to do with his. From the back of the house he could see Nadine peering through the window, wiping her hands on a striped dish towel, and even though it had been only a week he felt that he was
coming back here after a long time away, the way he felt whenever he drove by the elementary school, as though a ghost of himself lived there still even though he was long gone.

Nadine stood at the back door and he was waiting, just waiting for her to say something. He could hear her voice, crowing, “Big trouble for you.” But she just stood there with her arms crossed, her head to one side. Faith was still asleep, a dead weight against his shoulder, her red lower lip thrust out as though she were annoyed at her own dreams. When he moved past Nadine she looked down and her eyebrows came up and she said, “Pretty baby,” but without rancor.

The living room was full. Mrs. Blessing was in the wing chair. She struggled to her feet, said “Charles,” half questioning, but he would not look at her, remembering the crowded darkness of the room the last time they were there together, the accusation in her eyes. Her lawyer was on the sofa with its back to the room; the sheriff stood in the corner with big circles of perspiration on his khaki shirt. On the brocade sofa, shadows cast on their faces by the awning outside the window, were the other three, a woman with soft brown hair and glasses and dangling silver earrings, a man in a green polo shirt with the words “Lucky Dog” over his heart and a hairline with pale points over both his temples, and between them the girl. Skip knew she was nineteen and that her name was Paula Benichek. What he needed to know he could see in an instant, the light brown hair that had surely once been blond, the small pointed chin with a kind of soft knob at the end, the narrow upper and full lower lip. She looked as much like Faith as an adult can look like a small child, and so, while the girl’s mother raised her hands to him, her fingers splayed and trembling, while the daughter sat with her arms crossed and her face truculent, it was into the lap of the younger woman that he placed the baby, angling her so that the young woman’s lap made a natural cradle. Faith blinked, closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and made the shouting sound she’d made to the boys in the playground.

From his pocket Skip took a letter and laid it next to the young
woman, who was staring at Faith with a broken terrified expression in her eyes. He’d written the letter the night before on some lined yellow paper, not thinking, just doing, the way he always did when he had to get a dead thing off the drive or clear the septic lines. “6 a.m.,” it started out, “4 ounces formula Isomil no iron (constipates her). Back to sleep two hours. 9:30 a.m. 4 ounces. Up until 12.” He wasn’t willing to give too much, but for Faith’s sake he wanted them to know her schedule, and that she’d had her first set of shots. The other stuff they’d have to find out themselves: how she kept her fist next to her one cheek when she slept, how she blinked so hard in the sunlight and then sneezed and sneezed and smiled as though she loved sneezing, how she raised her feet to the ceiling and tried to grab on to them with a little furrow in her forehead.

“Son, we’d like to thank you,” the girl’s father said, standing and putting out his hand, but Skip could only put his palms up as though he were pushing him away.

“Sir, I appreciate that, but there’s nothing you could say right now that I want to hear. I just think you should know that she’s—that she’s—” But he couldn’t push any more words past the harsh twist in his throat, and he just put his head down and shook it over and over. The door slammed in the kitchen.

“Don’t let them do this!” Jennifer Foster cried from the doorway. “Don’t let them do this to her!”

“Not your business,” Nadine said.

“This is the way it is, Jennifer,” Skip said. “This is the way things go.”

“Bull. This is wrong. You know this is wrong. You’ve done everything for her and now that the hard part’s done, they show up and want to take her back?”

All faces were turned to him, even Nadine’s, peeking furtively around the corner from the kitchen. “There wasn’t a hard part,” he said wearily, taking the diaper bag off his shoulder and putting it down on the floor. “It was all good.” He turned and walked back through the kitchen without a word, drove down the drive in his
car and turned toward McGuire’s. He lowered the windows on Rolling Hills Road so he could get the smell of talcum powder out of the car, but it was still there when he went into the bar, bought a six-pack, drove up on a back mountain road, and drank it all down. Sitting behind the wheel, he fell into the deep unsatisfying sleep of the thoroughly drunk. When he woke up there were drifts of leaves in yellow and orange on his windshield, and it was morning.

A
gain the sound came, and again, and she turned slowly in bed, stiff and bone weary but not at all sleepy, reaching for the book on her bedside table. There was a small brass light clipped to the headboard that Meredith had given her for Christmas two years before. “It’s the one I have so I can read in bed without keeping Eric up,” she’d said as Lydia had turned it over in her hands in the way she had of looking at gifts before she was certain that she really liked them.

“I don’t know why you two don’t have your own rooms. A lot of marriages have been saved by a little privacy,” she’d said, frowning at the fixture.

“She’s not going anywhere,” Eric had said, putting his hand over his wife’s, and Lydia had felt a throb of what she believed to be strong disapproval but was really envy.

She had read this Agatha Christie perhaps a dozen times in her lifetime. She had it in hardcover, an edition published during the war. She was certain because on the back jacket it said in big red letters “Buy War Bonds. Be a true soldier of democracy.” Her books, her photographs, and her winter clothes: those were the first things her mother had had the maids pack up and send out to Blessings once she was there, the necessary provisions for the extended exile of a young lady of a certain class.

She liked to reread the Christie books and the other mysteries that filled the pickled pine shelves in the old den because they had a certain fine inevitable immutable order. The lovers had a misunderstanding;
the wrong person was suspected, and an innocent killed to cover up the crime. But in the end Poirot or Miss Marple, that silly old woman, would have the brainstorm that Mrs. Blessing herself had had twenty pages before, and all would end as it should, the lovers reunited, the guilty party brought to justice, Miss Marple’s knitting complete and Poirot’s mustaches waxed. They were foolish books signifying nothing, but they had the appeal of scales played on the piano or multiplication tables recited aloud, a perfect predictability that she had learned unconsciously to love.

Her life had once been in tumult, and that was how she had shoehorned it back into a manageable shape, by the imposition of rigid order. And then Charles had come, and the baby, and then the baby was gone, and Sunny’s wallet found, and all the order had gone, so that in the mornings she now woke in the silver-gray hours on the leading edge of dawn to nothing more than the faintly sweet odor of autumn air and the occasional sharp reminder that a skunk had been frightened by something in the far fields. There was no odor of coffee in her house until hours after she awoke, when the shape of her day and her mind had already gone awry because of its absence. One day she had crept down in her gown and robe to try to do it herself and discovered that she did not even know how to use the grinder. Pulling herself along the balustrade to retire, defeated, to bed to wait for the sound of Nadine playing her discordant matins on pot and pan, she saw in the mist that hung over the valley a blue heron poised at the end of her pond, thin and pale and still as she was. His beak flashed and shattered the reflection of the trees upon the mirrored surface and he came up with a rainbow trout speared and struggling.

“Go!” she had hissed from the landing window. “Go away. Scat!” The enormous bird turned his head slowly, almost mechanically toward the sound, and in measured movements gulped down the fish.

Now it was too dark for her to see anything, but the faint strips of silver coming and going beneath the scudding clouds showed
her where the center of the pond lay. Perhaps it was the heron that made the sound that repeated itself over and over again. It did not sound like a birdsong, but, then, she had never heard a heron make a sound; she thought of them as ghostly mute birds that dropped down and ate and disappeared like smoke. She imagined that one of them was there now, plundering the pond, and she wished she could throw the lights around its rim and catch him out, as though that would satisfy something in her that was itching inside. But someone had turned the pond lights out, and she was ashamed to say that over the years she had forgotten where the switch was.

“What do we do if he doesn’t show up?” that fidgety man in the golf shirt had said as he sat in her living room.

“He’ll show up,” the sheriff said.

“He’s very late,” the woman said, looking yet again at her watch.

“So are all of you,” Mrs. Blessing had said fiercely, and all heads in the room had turned toward her, and the girl had started to sniffle and wheeze and finally sob harshly. Her mother had patted her back but the girl had pushed her away with a sharp roll of her shoulder and buried her face in her hands. “She has asthma,” the mother had said, burrowing in her purse. It occurred to Mrs. Blessing that the noise she kept hearing from outside was like the noise that girl had made, a kind of ragged and breathless crying.

She had not offered them refreshment, not tea or a cold drink, though the parents certainly acted as if they could use one. She had hated having them in her house. “People I have never met in my life,” she had said to Lester Patton. “You had some pretty dicey characters here when you were younger, Lydia,” he’d replied, sipping halfheartedly at Nadine’s dreadful coffee. “People we knew,” she said. “That’s completely different.”

But they both knew that that was not what she had objected to. They had destroyed that sense of order that she found inside these old books and these four walls. They destroyed it because she should have thought their presence perfectly proper, because if someone had said to her in springtime, just seven months ago, when the shoots of the daffodils were shafts from the soil around
the back door, Now, Lydia, suppose a young man, unmarried, inexperienced with children, was to discover an infant lying by his back door, and was to keep that infant and try to raise her as his own, and suppose the mother was to come forward and claim her, what ought to be done? She knew what she would have answered.

And yet today she knew it should not be so. She had called Lester Patton off the golf course, where he was playing a creditable nine holes for the first time in a month, and astonished him by saying, as she seemed destined to say these days, “I have made a terrible mistake.” And she had asked him to find a way for Charles to keep the baby, asked him to offer the girl money, have her charged with abandonment, have an action for custody brought under her own name. “She still thinks the name Blessing opens any door,” he’d told the other men in his foursome as he cleaned his cleats and changed his clothes. But Lester Patton, wisely, had begun by talking to Skip, and when he arrived at Blessings from Foster’s garage he took a gin and tonic, the glass slick in his hands, and told her that Skip thought the child should be returned. “He thinks the baby belongs with her mother.”

“The baby belongs to the person who loves her most,” Mrs. Blessing replied.

“The law assumes that that person is the one who gave birth to the baby.”

“Then the law is an ass.”

She lay in bed and turned a page and found that she could not attend to what the vicar had found when he paid an unexpected call on the lady from London renting a cottage. There was another cry from the back edge of the pond, like a tormented wild thing calling, like her own voice crying so many years ago, “My brother has had an accident.” On the bedside table was one of the old albums, so old that the pictures were held in place with black brackets and the photos themselves were black-and-white, now faded to gray and yellow. And in so many of them it was as though a tissue scrim were lifted, the same sort of tissue that covered all the invitations to parties, debuts, weddings. She could see clearly now: the
way Sunny’s shoulder touched Benny’s in the foyer of the Carton house. The way they looked at Lydia in her dance dress, fond brothers both. The way they looked at each other over Lydia’s bent head. The emotional code hidden beneath the social one.