The Body in the Sleigh (10 page)

Looking at the clock in the classroom, Miriam pulled her thoughts from the past to the present and started writing. Gender-motivated infanticide. China was the obvious choice, but she didn't want to be obvious.

She wrote furiously for a while, and then paused. What if her parents had known the sex of the child they were going to have before she'd been born?

She wouldn't be here.

How old was she when she'd first heard her father say to her mother, “You're worthless. Completely worthless. You couldn't even give me a son,” in that flat, cold voice he used before he would start the rest? Not caring that Miriam was in the doorway—was she six? Or seven?—and could see it all. Could hear it all—her mother's cries.

Miriam shook her head to force the thought to the back of her mind with the rest of the things she didn't want to think about. It was getting pretty crowded.

But the image persisted. She had a vague memory of her mother happy. Sewing clothes for Miriam's dolls. Baking pies. The scenes were so out of focus that Miriam wasn't sure they had ever been sharp. Maybe they were from a movie she'd seen, a book she'd read, and wished she'd been in.

She didn't remember when her mother—Rebekah—had stopped getting out of bed. Oddly enough, what she could remember was when Rebekah stopped leaving the house. Miriam had been invited to someone's birthday party and her mother had started through the door to the garage to drive her. She had paused, turned around without a word, and left Miriam sitting in the car. She was nine.

Neither parent ever came to any school functions. Her father was too busy and her mother just didn't. Was it acute depression, agoraphobia, anorexia nervosa? Miriam had been transfixed by the descriptions of these mental illnesses in the psych class she took last semester. She'd jotted her mother's symptoms in the margins of her class notes and it was all she could do to keep from cornering the professor after class to ask more questions. But he wouldn't have had any answers. Not to the big question. Not to the why. The why it started, why it worsened, and finally why she left her little girl alone for so many years. The one thing Miriam did know was that her mother had really died when Miriam was nine. The subsequent years were simply marking time until it was official.

Whatever was wrong mentally with her mother, it began to eat away at her body during those years until at the end she really was physically ill. Was it cancer? Could chemo or radiation, maybe both, have saved her? And what were those pills? The ones she wouldn't let Miriam look at? Where did they come from? Miriam never saw a doctor at the house, and doubted that her mother would have left the house for an appointment.

By the time the ambulance took her away to Maine Medical, Rebekah was so thin she barely raised the covers on the bed. She'd
been refusing food for a long time and, at the end, water. There was no question of treatment. Even had it been possible, Rebekah Carpenter was making it clear that she wanted to leave her life forever.

Which is what she did. She never came home again.

Why had she refused to get help? Or was it Miriam's father who refused to recognize that his wife's illness was real—always had been.

And the drugs. Supplied by…?

Miriam was in ninth grade when her mother died—two short days after being hospitalized. But she died free of pain. Miriam blessed the morphine—the drug that gave her her mother's smiles back, smiles that the pills hadn't produced. That last day, Miriam slipped away from school at lunch. She was holding her mother's hand at the end and didn't shed a tear—not even when one of the nurses pulled her gently away and took her to a room where she sat with her as she waited for her father to come. Miriam had been grateful for the company, couldn't swallow the juice the young woman kept pressing upon her, and when it became apparent that her father wasn't going to come, the nurse had driven her home, walking her to the house. Miriam still had a card with her name and phone number on it. When she'd first discovered she was pregnant she'd thought about calling this Diana Taylor, but she wanted to keep the memory of her separate. Separate and unsullied by what happened afterward to Miriam. There had been that brief moment when she'd been totally cared for and she had often hugged it close in the years since, especially at night, trying to fall asleep. If she'd had a girl, she would have named her Diana. Not Rebekah.

Her father married Brenda a month later—why wait? When Miriam met her and realized who she was, she knew they'd been together for years. All those essential training conferences in Miami and Vegas. All those long weekends in Boston.

Of course her father would marry Brenda, petite, a perfect size four, but really stacked. Even at age thirteen, Miriam had felt like one of Swift's Brobdingnagias whenever they were in the same room, which wasn't often.

Miriam's friends tried to be supportive, but she couldn't stand to be with them. After a while they stopped calling, continuing to greet her in the hall, but leaving her alone. That's what she'd wanted, right?

Just as she had been the spelling champ, Miriam led her class in every other subject. Junior year the guidance counselor called her into her office and asked Miriam where she thought she'd like to go to college.

“With your grades and test scores, you should be able to get in any place you want, possibly one of the Ivies. True, you're lacking in extracurricular activities, but I think our geographic will make up for that. Not too many students here of your caliber. I'm sure your parents will be taking you to visit places in the spring.”

The counselor was new—fresh from college herself. Miriam told her she'd let her know.

“Work on your essay now. So many students put it off. I'm sure you'll be eloquent.”

She'd beamed at the prospect of having one of her advisees at an elite school, shaken Miriam's hand, and checked her name off a list.

Miriam never went back, and when the counselor cornered her in the hallway, Miriam told her the family was taking care of things themselves.

Or not. Miriam
had
broached the subject with her father, waiting to catch him alone. He had expressed surprise.

“Any responsibility I have for you ends on your eighteenth birthday, which is, I recall, virtually coincidental with your high school graduation date. If you want to go to college, that's your business. Nothing to do with me.”

She should have been angry, but it was what she had expected, and she'd doubted that she would fit in at college any better than high school. Her life would take a different course. Since she was sixteen, she'd been waitressing at various places in nearby Portland. It kept her out of the house, and she'd put all her earnings in a savings account. She liked the atmosphere in the various kitchens and mostly liked serving her customers. Sure, there were the occasional jerks who sent stuff back or stiffed her tip, but mostly they were just people happy to be out eating for a change.

Miriam was first in her class, but she told the principal she didn't want to be valedictorian. What would she say to her fellow classmates? Who was she to give any kind of advice?

Needless to say, her father and Brenda were not at the graduation ceremonies, and when she arrived home afterward, she'd found a note on the floor of the front hall telling her to pack her things and be gone by the time they came back from work. That was all that had been in the envelope. No keys to a new car—the school parking lot had been filled with these traditional graduation gifts for weeks now. No savings bond. No card. She'd packed quickly. She didn't take much. Then she'd added some of Brenda's jewelry, especially the pieces that had belonged to Miriam's mother. Miriam didn't consider herself a thief, but thought of it as making up for a lot of years of gifts like tube socks. And Brenda could get them back. Miriam pawned her stepmother's trinkets after withdrawing her savings from the bank. When she returned to the house to pick up her bag, she put the pawn tickets in Brenda's jewelry box—and left for good.

That summer she waitressed in Bar Harbor, the only recent high school graduate not college-bound. When the restaurant closed at the end of the season, she got a job at an Applebee's in Bangor and rented a room nearby that she'd found on Craigslist, using the library's computer. The room was small, but cheap and clean, and nobody bothered her.

By the middle of the fall, she was bored out of her mind, and with her savings and current earnings, she began to think college might not be out of the question—or a bad idea. The admissions counselor at the University of Maine thought so too. Miriam lied and said that her father was dead as well as her mother—not a stretch, considering. He wouldn't be providing financial aid in any case.

When she'd left home, Miriam had taken her birth certificate, high school transcript, and the one picture she had of her mother. There weren't any of the two of them together. Baby pictures of Miriam, with either or both parents, had been destroyed or never taken. When she was about eleven, she had come across her mother's high school graduation photo in a book of Robert Frost's poetry—a graduation gift? She looked beautiful, self-confident. The kind of girl most likely to succeed.

UMaine didn't need a photo of her mother, treasured though it might be, but they needed everything else and she was accepted. Miriam moved the short distance from Bangor to Orono and her days were soon filled with classes, schoolwork, and two jobs. Going to the party at Bruce's apartment had been a last-minute decision. She'd given in to the entreaties of a girl in her dorm—entreaties, Miriam later realized, fueled by the girl's desire to have someone straight to drive her and her car back to campus and put her to bed.

Professor Patel moved, scraping her chair on the floor. It occurred to Miriam that the professor must like her. She could have had a graduate student proctor the exam, or not have offered the opportunity at all. It made Miriam want to do her best. She glanced at the clock on the wall. There wasn't much time left. For the exam. She had all the time in the world for everything else. No responsibilities now—to anyone.

It had been an easy delivery. She could have done it herself, she realized afterward, but she had been frightened at the thought
of being alone and had gotten a name from a bulletin board at a coffeehouse. The card was a little circumspect—“Looking for someone to talk to about alternatives to hospital birthing?” When Miriam called, the woman said she was a licensed midwife, and maybe she was. They met that same day later in the afternoon at the coffeehouse. Miriam had told the woman about when she thought she'd deliver and also that she couldn't have the baby where she was currently living. The woman hadn't seemed surprised and told her Miriam could come to her place.

It had turned out all right. Miriam called the woman's cell when her contractions started and went to her house soon after. By the time she got there, the contractions were so close together that Miriam never had a chance to feel afraid. The woman knew what she was doing and even insisted on keeping Miriam overnight after the delivery, bringing her cups of strong green tea. During labor, she kept lighting fragrant candles and playing that waterfall kind of New Age music that Miriam's yoga teacher in high school had liked so much. It was something they were trying that year, letting students take yoga instead of field hockey or soccer. There were only three kids in the class. Three kids who didn't have to worry about peer pressure, because they didn't have any peers.

The pain hadn't been too bad. Not what Miriam had expected after eavesdropping on women talking about childbirth while she'd waited on their tables. “With your pelvis, you were born to have babies,” the midwife had said admiringly.

Then she gave Miriam a beautiful handmade baby blanket and Miriam gave her one thousand dollars.

Time was almost up. She scribbled the last few sentences and put her pen down.

December 26. The day after Christmas. The English called it “Boxing Day.” She'd have to look up why. A box, a Pandora's box.
That was what her life had been like. Except for him. Except for Christopher.

In the end she'd had to act fast—with Bruce and Tammy in Canada and far away from the apartment, she'd hoped to have more time with her child—but, in the end, the only thing that mattered was that he was safe, in a place no one would ever find him.

Pulling up to Mary's house was a relief. Instead of all the speculating Faith had been doing, there would be something concrete in front of her.

Yesterday she had asked Mary if she thought she could construct a list of possible mothers from memory. Knowing Mary's trusting ways—the mayonnaise-jar honor system for cheese and the bouquets of flowers she also put out in the summer—Faith had not imagined Mary would have something as businesslike as a guest register. Her B and B was only marked by a small sign at the turnoff from Route 17; advertising was by word of mouth and an index card pinned to the bulletin board in the Granville Market, where it often got buried under flyers for septic systems, yard sales, crab pickers, and all kinds of boats from skiffs to schooners.

Faith knocked at the back door and went into the kitchen. Christopher was asleep in his makeshift crib; he looked so darling it was all she could do to keep herself from stroking his soft hair. “Never wake a sleeping baby.” That and “Don't eat cucumbers with milk” were the only two pieces of advice she had ever received from her mother-in-law. The cucumber lore dated back
to an unpleasant gastric episode in Marian's childhood; the baby wisdom had come later. With Ben's arrival, Faith understood what Marian, the mother of four, had been driving at. Sleep was a precious commodity, especially during the never-to-be-forgotten weeks of colic.

“I only started asking for a name, address, and phone last summer,” Mary told her. “Before, I'd left something people could sign if they wanted to—I introduce myself when they arrive and they tell me who they are and usually where they're from. Nobody's ever left without paying, but my cousin Elizabeth told me I should be keeping a better record and sent me this book—I'd just put out a pad, nothing fancy. She said that you never knew—and she was right, as usual. See? Hers has a place for all sorts of information we can use.”

“Elizabeth? This is the one who lives out West? And gave you her goats when she moved?” It was easy to keep track of Mary's relatives, since she had so few. Faith had heard about only this cousin and Mary's older sister, Martha, who had flown the coop as soon as possible many years ago. She'd settled in New Hampshire, not far away in terms of miles, but light-years away in terms of contact.

“That's Elizabeth. She grew up in the north—potato country—and moved out West to Arizona when I was about twenty. My sister was long gone and I was here alone with my parents. Elizabeth thought her two nannies would be company for me. Where she was going wasn't goat country.”

Mary shook her head, apparently in astonishment that such places existed.

“I'll never forget the day they arrived. She found someone with a truck who was coming this way. All goats have personality, but these two were loaded with it. I know I sound crazy, but I swear they were smiling at me when I took them off the truck. Goats do smile, you know. Or at least that's what I call it. The larger doe
was Dora the First; the Dora I have now is Dora the Second. The other Dora lived to be twenty, but I lost the other one, Cora, when she was only twelve.”

Filing away the interesting notion of two Nubian goats as a substitute for human contact for further thought, Faith mentally thanked Elizabeth for the easier-to-grasp idea of a guest register and sat down to work after refusing Mary's offer of some rose-hip tea. Jill's cups were small but the coffee strong, and after two Faith didn't want any more liquid refreshment, however therapeutic.

Mary was explaining the list she'd made.

“I went through the book last night when he was asleep—he's a good little sleeper. Are all babies this way or is he special?”

“Definitely special,” Faith said.

“I have a lot of repeat customers. The Bradys come every year for two weeks in August. He grew up on a farm in New York State and likes to do the milking. They're great birders and go up to Grand Manaan to see the puffins, or the gulls at Schoodic, which is closer, but they still throw their tent in the car in case they decide to stay overnight. I don't like to charge them when they're gone, but they insist and I guess since they leave their things, it's fair. But I take something off for the breakfasts.”

Faith didn't want to push Mary. It was rare to hear her this loquacious—the goat soliloquy had been very touching—but there were a lot of names in the book and if every one evoked a lengthy reminiscence or Capricornian tangents, they'd be lucky to locate Christopher's mother by the time he was old enough to drive.

Mary seemed to arrive at the same conclusion.

“But you don't need to hear this. Right off the bat I eliminated the women who are over a certain age. He's a miracle all right, but we have to be realistic.”

Faith nodded in agreement. In the Bible, Sarah had been ninety years old when she brought forth Isaac—Abraham was one hundred, not much of an age difference when you get up to that point
in life. As for their son, there would have had to have been yet another miracle if they were going to make it to Isaac's high school graduation—or even his bar mitzvah.

“I wasn't going to include the people who have been here before. These are people I know pretty well and I can't imagine any of them abandoning a baby, but then I remembered what you said—that the mother had to have known my routine. So, I decided it made sense to look at them first. Here's that column. Three names.”

“What can you tell me about them?” Faith asked.

“The first two come with their families and I've watched the children grow up. Both women are in their thirties, I'd say, and judging from the kind of attention they pay these children, I think it's unlikely they'd drop a new addition off here.”

“Unless it was an extremely unwanted addition,” Faith said, imagining scenarios ranging from the result of an illicit affair to an overwhelmed mother teetering on the brink of despair. But still, Mary was right; it seemed unlikely. For one thing, the woman's husband, if not the other children, would certainly have noticed the change in her appearance. “I think we can skip them for now. Who else?” she asked.

“Elaine Reynolds fills the bill—right age, unmarried—at least, no ring and she never mentioned a husband but did talk about a boyfriend this summer. Seemed real happy about the whole thing and said she was going to bring him next year. Maybe the boyfriend wasn't ready for fatherhood.”

Faith circled the name.

“Only problem is, Elaine lives out in California. North of San Francisco where they make the wine.”

“Napa?”

“That's it.”

“So, she'd have to either have taken a newborn on the plane across country, probably to Portland or Bangor, then rented a car
and driven up here, or she delivered someplace nearby. Did she have family in Maine? How did she find Sanpere?”

The influx of summer people doubled the island's population from roughly June through August and there were always day-trippers coming to Granville to visit a working fishing village—a dying phenomenon—but Sanpere was not a well-known tourist destination. Someone from so far away would most likely have had some kind of connection.

“She went to Bowdoin, and a bunch of students used to come here with one of the professors to gather specimens for a marine biology class. She fell in love with the island and her dream is to move here for good someday. I know she doesn't know anybody, because she specifically said it would be hard to leave friends and family in California to come to a place where she would be a complete stranger, but she didn't care. Sanpere was where she was ‘meant to be.'”

Faith reluctantly erased the circle around Elaine's name. The logistics of the cross-country trip ruled her out—and with friends and family, surely there would have been someone closer to Napa with whom she could have left the baby. Plus the lack of current connections in Maine made that scenario a dimly lit one. Could the young woman have been so taken with Mary that she went to extraordinary lengths to have the baby here? Faith looked at her, bent over her list, her faced screwed up in determination to do the right thing. Mary was special, but would this Elaine have developed such a strong affection for her after a few brief summer stays? It sounded as if what the woman was most attached to was Sanpere itself. And wanted her child raised here? And Mary was the person she trusted to do it well?

Faith drew the circle around Elaine's name again.

“Now here,” Mary said with the air of a magician pulling a rabbit from a silk hat, “we have the column with the names of women I knew were pregnant for sure. There were two of them.”

“Great!” Finally, they were getting someplace, Faith thought.

“A first child for each. The Warrens live in Bolton, Vermont—not that close, but still a doable drive, especially because the weather was good Christmas Eve. The Tuttles were from Saco—south of Portland. Even though I know both women are possibilities, I can't see either of them giving their child up. They were so happy to be pregnant. Normally I don't chat that much with new guests, but these two told me they were having a baby just about the moment they walked in. Both couples were looking forward to coming back next summer and every summer after that to watch little whoever play with the goats. The nannies are very sweet playmates, you know.”

Faith did know. And now she also knew they smiled. Once again, she thought that someone looking for strong maternal instincts would only have had to watch Mary with her herd and listen to her talk about them to conclude she was a natural-born nurturer. Granted, her charges were ruminants, but if you were looking for Mother of the Year, Mary was a contender.

Not only did Mary keep her goat house clean and dry—it looked like something from Carl Larsson's
The Farm
—but she also religiously tended to the nannies' every need from physical to psychological. All her goats had had their horn buds removed and Mary gently but firmly discouraged butting from the moment they were born. She greeted each one by name starting with the queen, stroking and petting them several times a day. After the stress of breeding—and delivering—she read to them and even sang to them, as Faith discovered one day, hearing a stirring rendition of “Seventy-six Trombones” with accompanying bleats issuing from the barn. Their play yard was just that, with several cable spools courtesy of Bangor Hydro for the nannies to climb on. The pasture had a high electric fence and Faith was pretty sure the Nubians were better fed than Mary, who seemed to exist on whey sweetened with honey (bartered for cheese), rose-hips in
various forms, and whatever vegetables, fresh or put up, the garden yielded. Maybe it wasn't such a bad diet; rather, it was the thought of it that repelled Faith. Yes, she knew people—including some near and dear—thought she was a food snob, but it came with the territory and she considered the label a badge of honor.

“Okay, so those are definites. What about women of childbearing age, either part of a couple or single, who hadn't been here before? First-timers?”

Mary beamed. “That's this third column. In June I had a young woman from Norway for three nights who was ‘seeing America' for the summer, starting up here and working her way to San Diego. She had some sort of bus pass and rented cars when she wanted to go someplace out of the way. She said my cheese wasn't like the real goat cheese from Norway.
Gjetost.
She was correct about that! I've tried it. The Bradys brought me some. I think you can even get it at Hannaford. Brown. Kind of sticks to the roof of your mouth and sweet. The Norwegians must have very different taste buds.”

Faith had tried the cheese also. Once. She didn't think it was a taste bud problem, though. Think of gravlax—that heavenly dill-cured salmon served with mustard sauce. She thought
gjetost
was one of those cultural things. Like the Swiss and muesli or all those countries where the sheep's eyeballs were the pièce de résistance of the meal. Of course the Norwegians, and Swedes, ate lutefisk, cod soaked in lye for something like several years, and the smell alone could clear out the sinuses of a small country. Maybe it
was
the taste buds.

“How about if she didn't go back to Norway?” Faith said. “How about if she met a sailor in San Diego, they fell in love, but since the baby obviously couldn't be his, when she began to look pregnant, she came back to Maine, remembering the goats and thinking it was like home. Dropping Christopher off on a cold winter's night would be nothing for a Viking.”

“She had graduated from the university in Oslo shortly before her trip,” Mary said. “And was looking forward to the job waiting for her, plus she had just purchased an apartment with her boyfriend. She was traveling light, but one section of her backpack was reserved for those plastic snow globes with the names of the states she'd visited. I gather they were to be a surprise for him,” Mary said.

“This doesn't sound like someone who would get swept off her feet and change her plans. Do Norwegians get swept off their feet?” Faith's friend and neighbor Pix Miller had spent time in Norway and had familiarized Faith with the Nordic temperament. Faith recalled Pix also mentioned the high out-of-wedlock birthrate and lack of any stigma. It would probably have been of little concern to this girl to add to the statistic.

“Besides,” Faith continued, “it would have been complicated staying here past the time she'd declared to the immigration official upon entering—and then there were all those ties back home,” Faith said. “Especially those snow globes to give her honey—interesting focal point for the apartment's décor. I think we can eliminate our Norwegian, but not entirely.”

Mary moved to the next name on the list. “Around the Fourth, a cousin of the Harveys they didn't have room for stayed for a week, but I never saw her but once briefly. She took all her meals, even breakfast, over there, came in at night and went straight to the room. She was alone, so either she was here without her husband or not married. I doubt she'd leave her baby this close to kin if she wanted the whole thing to be a secret.”