Mercy Train (25 page)

*   *   *

“Well, you sound pretty normal,” Melanie said. “From what Sarah told me I thought a madwoman had come and picked up Ella.”

“Sorry. It was a big day for me, you know.”

“I know. I don't really get it, but I know. God, it's frigid in here. Hold on. I'm turning the heat up to seventy-eight.”

“Let me guess, Doug'll secretly turn it down and you'll turn it back up again.”

“Bingo. But he'll give up first. I can't believe it's cold again. Just the thought of my neighbors' rosy-cheeked cheer while they shovel their cars out of two feet of snow is enough for me to break out the vodka.”

“Thanks for today.”

“Really, it's nothing. I'm selfish, remember? I'm just waiting for the right moment to order new place settings from you. So, should I tell Sarah she'll have Ella during the week or what? Sarah loved her. She said she could handle both kids, no problem.”

Sam bit her cheek. “I need to think about it. Maybe one morning a week?”

Melanie laughed. “Don't go too crazy, Samantha.”

“Baby steps.” In the background Sam could hear Rosalee saying
Mama, Mama, Mama
. “So what can we bring to dinner?” Sam asked.

“When do they start taking care of themselves?” Melanie said. “Nothing. I'm getting food from Harvest. You didn't think I'd actually cook, did you? Okay, must go tend to child.”

“See you soon,” Sam said.

*   *   *

Sam imagined a vessel for her mother's ashes. Something simple, subtle. At first she felt the creak of effort, thinking of a familiar form, an old design. But then her synapses revved up, pushing into new territory. A small lidded jar, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, full and round like the body of a bird. The lid, sunken and flush with a round knob handle. She would carve vertical lines through the layer of dark slip from the opening of the jar to its base, exposing the white porcelain underneath, giving the piece depth and texture. An allover stony matte glaze. She sketched and sketched until she saw on paper what she had envisioned in her head.

*   *   *

She slid in under the covers next to Jack, who was reading the
New Yorker
.

“I'm sorry about the gift for Franklin,” she said.

He finished the paragraph he was reading before he turned to her, and she wondered if he had always done this or if it was just that now she noticed.

“It's okay. I don't think it'll bring down my academic career.” He smiled and smoothed her hair off her face.

“My mom was on my mind so much today.”

“Grief doesn't run in a straight line,” he said, laying the magazine on his chest and lacing his fingers. “It can loop around. Come and go.”

“I want to go to Minnesota,” she said. “To where she grew up. Where my grandparents lived. Can we go there sometime?”

“I would like that. Our first family trip. In the spring?”

“In the spring.”

She picked up her mother's library copy of
To the Lighthouse
, which had been on her bedside table for a year, and opened it to the first page.

*   *   *

Sam couldn't sleep as Jack snored beside her. She got up and went into the bathroom for her robe; the floor, buckling and losing tiles and no longer charmingly antique, was cold against her bare feet. It was fall, after all, and despite the pumping furnace, the heat quickly seeped out from the ill-fitting windows and poorly insulated walls and gapped floorboards of the old house.

The studio floor was unyieldingly cold, like the marble floors of a cathedral in winter. She flipped on the light and winced from the flash of brightness, blinking until her eyes adjusted. She went to her bulletin board and tacked up her sketch. It wasn't bad, she thought, tracing her finger along the line of the body, but going from idea to actuality seemed monumental.

She took a breath and worked open the knotted bag of clay, the smell pungent, earthy, and familiar. The gray-white porcelain had little give, but she plunged her fingers into its surface, wet with condensation. It was smooth and malleable, the possibility of its forms infinite. The feeling of the clay began to jog the memory in her hands, stirring the desire to create—that elusive fire—and she knew she would be back in her studio again soon. She pulled her hand out and tied the bag closed.

Ella's cry was faint from this distance. Sam felt adrenaline speed up her heart before her ears registered the sound. She wiped her hands on a towel and padded up the stairs to the nursery, where she found Ella sitting up, holding on to the crib. Sam lifted her out without a word, silently moving to the glider chair. It must be around one thirty, she thought, one of Ella's regular intervals of waking to be nursed back to sleep. It was a choreography of need and soothing, expectation and fulfillment, one that Sam had come to rely on for a certain satisfaction. She closed her eyes and counted to sixty in time with the rock of the chair, then switched breasts and started again. She inserted a pacifier into the sleepy mouth, carried Ella back to the crib, and laid her down. She went back to the rocker and covered herself with a blanket, a cream-and-rose-checked afghan knit by her grandmother.

In a span of months she had been present for birth and for death, the wondrous first breath and the horrible last. But wasn't it an honor to be there at the end of a life as well as the beginning? To mark the extraordinariness of a lifetime, to bear witness to its completion? Could she ever convince herself of that?

The last time she and Jack had gone to Paris, over dinner at the lively Chez Janou tucked behind the place des Vosges, they had agreed it was time to have a baby. Sam had felt the bubbly aftereffects of that giddy decision. She smiled, and he smiled back. They drank more wine.

“What's
cuisses de grenouille
?” he asked, pronouncing it badly and pointing.

“Frog legs,” she said. “Or, I guess, more precisely, frog thighs.
Ribbit ribbit
.”

He stuck out his bottom lip and shook his head in disgust. “Don't say they taste like chicken.”

She laughed, feeling light and lucky. “Hey, what's it called when a word is used that's related to the thing to represent the thing.” She lowered her voice. “Like calling the French
frogs
.”

“Isn't that an epithet?”

“No. I mean, I guess it's derogatory. But like they eat frogs so they're called frogs.”

“Metonymy?”

“Yeah, metonymy.”

“Like
the crown
for royalty.”

“Or
suits
for executives,” she countered.

“Madison Avenue.”

“The White House.”

“Mother tongue.”

“Wall Street.”

“Houston, we have a problem.”

“Whoa. That's advanced,” she said.

They drank more and ordered, he the seven-hour lamb, she the confit de canard. They held hands across the table.

“Roof,” she said, which took him a moment to realize she was back at it. “As in
a roof over our head
.”

“If you want to get technical,” he said, “I think that's synecdoche. The same idea, but when you use a part of something to represent the whole.”

“Okay, smarty pants.
Ivories
for piano,” she said.

“
Threads
for clothes.”

“Mouths to feed.”

“All hands on deck,” he said.

“White-collar criminals.”

Jack spun his wine and bit his cheek, not ready to lose a language game.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” He raised his hands in triumph.

“No. Really?
Merde
. I'm out.”

The
escargots bourguignonnes
arrived, shiny with butter in their delicate spiral shells.

“It's weird you'll eat snails but not frogs,” she said.

“I guess there's no accounting for taste.” He had popped his tiny fork into the rubbery meat.

“I like the name Charlie,” she said. “If we have a boy let's name him Charlie.”

The memory felt like fireplace warmth to her now. It didn't make her long for what had been lost. The first baby, her mother, a blithe marriage, a steadfast desire to create, a life before Ella when her fears were containable—she had fingered those worry beads enough for one day. Instead it was synecdoche that stuck with her, how a part might stand for a whole, how it might, in fact, let you tap into something larger. How a day could represent a lifetime, a snapshot of humanity that wouldn't exist without all that came before it. It comforted her to think this way. Sam dozed in the chair, awash in the humidifier's lulling hum. But then she thought, Enough of this, and forced herself to get up.

She slipped back into the cold sheets beside her sleeping husband and tried to hold on to her newfound clarity. She scooted her body next to Jack's, molding to his familiar curve.

“Jack,” she said, shaking his shoulder. “Wake up.”

 

VIOLET

“I'll do it,” Violet said to Frank. “We'll hop out at the next stop.”

Frank looked terrified. “Do you think they'll come after us?”

“What do they care? Two less to worry about.” She relaced her boots and shoved her Bible under the seat.

Mrs. Comstock dozed at the front of the car, her head cocked against her shoulder.

“We got to get lost from the rest. Go up to a different car.”

“You mean now?” Frank asked.

“I'll go. You follow in a minute.” Violet jumped up.

Patrick grabbed her arm as she passed. “Where you off to, huh?”

She jutted her chin toward the front of the car.

He laughed. “Well, ain't you the adventurer.” But he didn't offer to come along, resignation having deflated his bravado.

She slipped by Mrs. Comstock, and all of a sudden she was outside in the deafening space between cars, a new quickness in her feet. She pushed through the door into the next car, sparsely filled with riders who didn't turn to look at her as she made her way up the aisle, running her hand along the backs of the seats. Frank finally appeared, nervous and shifty, hunched over, with his hands hiding in his pockets.

“Wait up,” he said.

“Beloit!” a porter called. “Next stop, Beloit!”

“What're we going to do for food?” Frank asked. “I'm hungry.”

“I don't know. Swipe something from the station. Or a store in town. Every place has a store, don't it?”

He followed her to the top of the car, and they stood at the door watching the world slow down. Frank didn't offer her much, but being with him was better than being alone. She would keep running until she got back to New York. She could find Nino again, she could even find her mother. Lilibeth would have to take her back, wouldn't she?

The train groaned to a stop. She jumped down the steps.

“Now!” she called to Frank, who hung back in the doorway. “Come on!”

But he wouldn't move.

“You go on,” he said, tugging his cap down low. He took a step back into the shadow of the vestibule, like he was worried she would try to pull him off.

Violet looked at the people milling about on the platform, and through the windows of the station she could see the waiting wagons and carriages. Did freights even come through here? A man with a thin mustache and dark close-set eyes leaned against the depot wall and watched her. He ran his hand over his mouth and stared. She didn't know what to do next, and she felt frightened by her smallness in this strange wide-open place. The whistle shrieked.

She heaved herself up the ladder and shoved Frank out of the way. She was back on the train.

*   *   *

The conductor came through and punched their tickets, alerting Mrs. Comstock to their approaching destination. She sat up and shook her head to clear it.

“Children,” she said. “Wake up now. We are almost at Stoughton.”

Violet retrieved her Bible from underneath the seat where she'd left it.

They were herded down Main Street, through the small town of brick-and-stone buildings, and crossed over the Yahara River, its water green and placid.

“What a lovely little place,” Mrs. Comstock said to the attendant rolling the trunk and bags.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, through a thick Norwegian accent. “The church is just up ahead.”

“Look at the ducks,” she said to Frank. “You ever see ducks before?”

He leaned over the railing for a better look.

“Wouldn't you like to live in a place where ducks swim about, no one bothering them?”

He smiled a little. He wouldn't look at Violet, who'd been scowling at him since Beloit. The group walked on.

She wondered if this river went south and met up with a bigger river, which might connect to the Ohio, which might snake all the way to the Kentucky border, back to where she had started. Her boots pinched her toes. Her dress was no longer white, its hem ruffle was torn, and she smelled of coal ash and sweat.

They were greeted by a somber group of women with weathered country faces who served them fried fish, boiled potatoes, and cabbage on the lawn in back of the church alongside the cemetery.

“Grace, children,” Mrs. Comstock said, eyeing Nettie, who'd already picked up the fish with her fingers.
“O Lord, we pray thy blessings, upon this food and upon our souls. Guide us through life and save us through Christ. Amen.”

“Amen,” the kids mumbled.

“They're setting up a platform out in front,” one of the women said to Mrs. Comstock. “Bring them around when you finish eating.”

Soon Violet could hear wagons and carriages, horse hooves against the gravel, as the curious and the interested arrived. Amidst the chittering of birds and the rustling of the heavy-leafed towering oak came the low murmur of voices.