The Custodian of Paradise (10 page)

Miss Long sat by the bed even when I wasn’t in it, reading her Bible, wetting her finger when she wished to turn one of the tissue-thin, translucent pages. Reading at an impossibly slow, ponderous pace, not so much seeking edification or instruction, it seemed, as teaching herself to read, the achievement of literacy by a perusal of the Bible being the single, never-to-be-completed pastime of her life. Her lips not quite silently mouthed the words so that there issued from them constantly a kind of sibilant murmur that so irritated me I offered to read the book out loud. Miss Long, by her silence, declined the offer.

Each evening, as Miss Long locked the doors of my suite from the outside, I called her “Florence Nightinjail.” “Good night, Florence Nightinjail.” How I would have loved to see a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Or anyone’s.

Each morning she would look at the risen mound of my belly and shake her head, unable to believe how inexorable and protracted was
the course of this affliction. Did she expect that, what with all the Bible reading that was done in its proximity, she would come in one morning to find that the swelling of this girl’s body had reversed itself, that the illness for whose alleviation she had prayed so long had run its course?

“Men from all over the world make port in St. John’s, you know,” I said. “Your employers are going to get quite a surprise when the baby’s born. I mean, for all they know, his father might be Portuguese or Spanish. Or West Indian. He might be from Hong Kong. Wouldn’t that be a hard one to explain to their friends, how Dr. Breen and my mother managed between them to conceive a baby who was half-Chinese? It might start some rumours about my mother, don’t you think? Or send Stepdoctor Breen’s relatives clawing through the branches of their family tree. I really don’t know what complexion the little bundle of joy will be. But I can see the announcement in the papers. ‘Dr. and Mrs. Breen are pleased to announce the addition to their household of a bouncing black baby boy.’”

The old woman slammed shut her Bible and, instead of turning away as usual, leaned towards me without touching the bed and, though we were alone in the room, whispered, “Dr. Breen heard two heartbeats. Do you understand? He heard two heartbeats.”

These were the first words she had ever addressed to me.

She all but hissed the last two words, as if in them lay the essence of my wickedness.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Two heartbeats,” Miss Long hissed again.

“Mine and the baby’s,” I said.

The old woman shook her head. “Two heartbeats,” she said. “The beating of two hearts.” She pointed at my belly. “In there.”

I felt that the old woman, in pointing at my belly, had punched the breath from my body. I heard myself groan and I clenched my insides in anticipation of another blow.

“That wasn’t one of your smart remarks now, was it,” she said.

Twins. Suddenly, another life to be relinquished, another life that, with the one to whose renunciation I was reconciled, would come
tumbling out. All along, beside the guilt I had felt for my one child, waiting to take on form and substance, had been the ghost of this second guilt. A child that, even in the womb, was unknown and unacknowledged by its mother. And
he
had known. It had been for that reason that he had all but pressed his ear against my belly, the better to hear those heartbeats, dissynchronous, distinct.

After the old woman had gone, I lay there on the bed, my hands on the belly whose shape they had grown used to but now seemed unfamiliar to me. I felt as if my own body had betrayed me, withheld the truth from me as surely as my three attendants had. My body, which had given up its secret to Dr. Breen, had kept it from me. The other baby had been there all along, beneath my hands that cradled the drum-tight egg of my belly as I walked about my rooms. The other, hidden baby that did not so much as insinuate itself into my dreams, that had been lying low as if it had its reasons for not wanting me to know of its existence. How could my attendants know of this second child while I, the host in whose body it was growing, by which it was nourished and protected, did not know? No doubt this secret knowledge had helped them endure my behaviour, my “smart” remarks.

I thought of my mother, lying awake at night, imagining her twice-blessed future, my mother knowing that in her daughter’s womb lay a child that her daughter did not know was there. A child that when it issued with its double from her daughter’s body would be hers.

“Stepdoctor Breen,” I said, hoping my voice and pallor did not betray me. “Miss Long tells me that you have some news. News that you have had for some time now.”

“She told me of your conversation.”

“I suppose it was her idea of a conversation.”

“You’re having twins.”

“You mean you and my mother are
getting
twins.”

“God willing.”

“When were you going to tell me? When God said it was time to?”

“Please do not add blasphemy to your list of vices.”

“I can think of one vice you should be glad is on my list.”

“If that is how you choose to see it.”

“It is.”

“I discovered the second heartbeat only weeks ago.”

“I discovered it only hours ago.”

“I was worried that it might upset you—”

“Or make me change my mind?”

“It never occurred to me that you might, as you put it, change your mind. You’ve been sensible so far. I had no reason to think that that would change.”

Sensible. He meant me to take it for the euphemism it was. Too “sensible” to go back to Newfoundland, to step off the ship with twin infants in her arms.

“You chose what was best for your child and yourself,” he said, as if he had just cautioned himself that he must not provoke me. “I didn’t want you to fret. I thought you might think that giving birth to twins was twice as hard. That you might be even more apprehensive than you were already. I was thinking of your health. And the babies’ health. Miss Long should not have spoken to you as she did. I have told her so and she has asked me to apologize on her behalf.” Like my mother, he said things he did not even wish to be believed.

“I did what any sensible young girl would do.”

“Yes. You did.”

“Two heartbeats.”

“Yes.”

“Two heartbeats. One heartbeat one day, two the next.”

“It can sometimes be difficult to—”

“Two children,” I said and pressed my fingernails into the palms of my hands to keep from crying.

“Yes. God willing,” he said.

“It is wonderful how the will of God corresponds so perfectly with yours.” I swallowed down a great gulp of grief that hurt so much I thought my throat would burst. I felt it rising back and swallowed again. I couldn’t catch my breath. Two children unaware that I was their mother. The sorrow of relinquishing one child did not lend itself to measurement. But somehow, with an effort that had numbed and exhausted me, I had forced it down below the threshold of my soul. Perhaps, in time, the sorrow would have erupted anyway. But now it would not be contained. I had nothing left to hold it back. Sorrow
seemed to pour through a massive perforation, flooding the empty, bone-dry chambers of my heart, my soul some inner organ I thought I had but until now had never felt. I lost all sense of my body, had no idea what it was doing, could not see or hear or feel it. I wondered if the end of all this might be death.

“You fainted,” he was saying.

I was lying on the floor beside the bed. His hands were on my shoulders, preventing me from climbing to my feet.

“Sheilagh,” he said, “we know that you are scared. It’s normal. But we’ll take good care of you. And the children.”
The
children. Not mine, not his. They would be no one’s until after I was gone.

“They’ll be like me, you know,” I said. “Have you thought about that? Twenty years of me times two. That’s what you have to look forward to. Twenty years of their father times two. You’ve never met their father. If you had, you would never have agreed to take these children. But now it’s too late, isn’t it? You’ve told the whole world that your wife is expecting. Your order has gone through and it’s too late to cancel it. They’ll be just like him and me. You’ll never have a moment’s peace. You’ll end up like my father. She’ll end up like—”

I heard my own voice as if it were shouting from another room. He’d pulled me up, was holding me by the wrists and at the same time pressing me down into the bed, all because some girl in the other room was shouting. Miss Long and my mother were there on either side of the bed as if, by attending to me, they could make that other girl stop yelling.

Seconds, minutes, hours later? The room was dark and there was someone in a chair beside the bed. My mother? I might have been dreaming, might have dreamt I heard my mother whisper, “You will never know how hard it was for me to leave you. I would not have left you were it not for him.”

I asked Dr. Breen no questions about what the event itself would be like. I didn’t want to know what someone who had never given birth
imagined it felt like. I wanted only to be freed from these two rooms. I read incessantly to populate my mind with other people, other lives. All I had to fear was sleep, which I fought by walking round the suite, trying to pace so softly that no one in the house would hear, though invariably Miss Long or my mother came to my room and told me that Dr. Breen had
ordered
me to sleep because the babies and I would soon need all the sleep that I was missing.

And so every night, in spite of telling myself that I could lie wide-eyed on this bed for the balance of my life, I gave in to fitful, dream-heavy sleep. The children I would never know did not figure in these dreams, nor did my mother or father or Dr. Breen or Miss Long. They were dreams almost as devoid of content, almost as empty as my womb was soon to be. Almost entirely tactile, gravid dreams in which a featureless weight seemed to make its way into my core and pull me down and make me feel as though my very spirit was in slow descent, waning, falling, as though my soul was seeping from me, and my no-longer-buoyant being would soon have sunk to such a depth that it would never float back up. It took all my will to bring my self back to the surface, to the darkness of my room, or to the light of the day I prayed would be the last of my confinement.

The labour and delivery I passed in a delirium of laudanum. First I drank down what Dr. Breen called “a dram of something that will calm your nerves.” From behind the sheet that divided one-half of my body from the other and by which my arms were trussed to my sides and my torso to the bed, I heard Dr. Breen and Miss Long conferring in whispers.

Miss Long assisted Dr. Breen. I wondered where my mother was. Because of the sheet, I could not see what they were doing. Nor could I even feel very much or identify what I was feeling. As parts of me were touched that had never been touched before, it seemed that they had never been there before, had just now come into being, created by his hands. What the babies felt I could not feel and this surprised me. I had imagined that it would be like losing a limb or having an organ
extracted. I felt only the impressions that their bodies made on mine. I felt the babies, first one and then the other, leave my body as though I were expelling them without assistance. Miss Long, before Dr. Breen drew back the sheet, removed them from the room. High-pitched squeals that took on a kind of seesawing rhythm as though the babies were answering each other’s cries. A door opening and closing. And then silence.

“A boy and a girl,” Dr. Breen said in reply to my question.

“Which was born first?”

“The girl.”

“Will you ever tell the children I am their mother?” I asked my mother.

“No.”

“Not even when they are grown and old enough to be trusted with a secret?”

“I cannot see what good it would do anyone, including you.”

“So you will let them take this misapprehension to their graves.”

“You make it all sound so sinister.”

“I’m left-handed.”

“We cannot, of course, control what you will do. Especially after we are gone. But it would be selfish, don’t you think, to disrupt their lives, throw them into confusion, just to satisfy some ill-conceived notion of yours?”

“An ill-conceived notion for ill-conceived children.”

“Believe me, it is often the kindest thing to withhold the truth. Why would you be here if you did not think so yourself?”

“We are all liars.”

“In service of a greater good. I can think of thousands of examples.”

“Yes. So can I. Will you send me photographs?”

“It might be best for you if we did not.”

“Perhaps I know best what’s best for me.”

“You are far too young for such self-knowledge. It would be best, Sheilagh, best for everyone, if you did not communicate with us once
you leave this house. You have your own life to look forward to. And you will be better able to live it if you leave us to ours. It will take courage. No one knows that better than I do. I was not much older than you are now when I left you.”