The Story of Beautiful Girl (7 page)

The phone rang for the twelfth time, then stopped.

She seized bottles of formula from the icebox, a jacket from its hook. The phone began again as she got into her Buick, set the basket on the floor in the front, threw the map into the back. She turned on the engine and pulled around to the front field.

The driveway to the road was flooded.

“Darn.” The word brought her palm to her lips. It was the worst profanity she ever thought, and she never uttered it. But the word, now out in the air, did not make her feel as coarse as she’d imagined. She set her hands on the steering wheel and steered away from the gravel drive and onto the field itself. Mud flew, her tires found traction, and she began to descend. It was a thrill, moving over the field without a proper surface. Even more thrilling was the last sound she heard as she reached a break in the trees near the bottom. It was the twelfth ring—the second round of efforts to reach her—and then silence.

She emerged from the trees and turned the car onto Old Creamery Road.

On her left stood the lighthouse man, waiting for the mail carrier. Would she tell her students about this event at Christmas? Would she write them letters about it later this week? The baby began to moan; Martha could not think about the future. She rounded the car past fallen branches and headed east.

After a few miles, during which Martha saw no one on the road, the child quieted. Yet Martha herself could not calm down. She was heading toward a student she hoped would provide assistance, though she had always refrained from turning to her students for support. There was, after all, a natural law to the universe. Parents watched over their children. Wives yielded to their husbands. Teachers guided their students. Yet a mother had just entrusted Martha with her child. Martha had already done what her husband would never do. Would it truly be a violation if she turned to a student this one time?

This much she knew: She had begun to change last night. She had climbed to the attic, and sat beside the baby, and thought,
I am all you have now.
And she’d felt an opening in her chest where she hadn’t known anything was closed. She had reached down into the bed of mending, and when her hands touched the baby’s flesh, she remembered that she’d never touched her son. She’d lifted the girl slowly. The baby was light, her tiny eyes closed. Martha held the baby to her chest and felt the little heart beating into hers. It was a heart she’d waited decades to hear; and she thought,
What kind of life awaits you? Will you be reunited with your mother soon? Or will you never know who she is? Will I be a part of your life? Or can I only fulfill her dream for you if I say good-bye?
The openness in her chest pulled her toward the baby, allowing their heartbeats to fall into step. Martha’s heart was bigger, but the baby’s heart beat louder.

Now, hoping to hear something about the desperate flight of the School escapees, Martha turned on the radio. The news was on, though it was talking about last night’s storm, saying many roads were closed. She’d barely been noticing the road, and she refocused. She was just about to pass the one intersection that provided an alternate route, Scheier Pike, a twisting, hilly, two-lane highway. But Scheier Pike went north through the moun
tains for twenty miles before the next bridge. So Martha stayed on Old Creamery Road, the straight shot to Well’s Bottom.

Soon the woods that had hugged the shoulder for the first many miles thinned to pastures and orchards, and Martha saw that low-lying areas were indeed flooded. The sports came on, and then more news. Martha listened until the reporter returned to talking about the storm. How could they say nothing about two people who had disappeared? She turned off the radio.

Ahead was the entrance to a camp for Boy Scouts that was closed for the season. It was the last landmark before the river, and just after she passed it and the road began its long slope down, Martha finally saw another car. It was moving slowly, and she saw through its back window that it was following other cars. As the road tilted toward the river, their speed dropped. Then they all came to a halt.

She waited. The man in front of her stepped onto the road, looking ahead.

She lowered her window. “Can you see what’s happening?”

“I think the bridge got washed out.”

She should have considered this. But the bridge had never been closed before.

“Darn,” she said again, this time without her hand to her lips.

She opened her door, hoping to see this novel sight. People ahead were already walking forward. She was around the final bend from the bridge, so the walk would not be far—yet what if she happened upon a police officer? She closed the door and rolled up her window. Her watch said ten after eight.

They could wait this out, she thought. There was already a truck behind her, so waiting was the most cooperative option. Then she heard a whimper, and as she looked into the basket, the baby opened her mouth and began to cry.

The panic of last night returned, though for new reasons.
What did this cry mean? Was the baby hungry or in need of a diaper? Was she simply unsettled by the cessation of the car’s motion? The baby’s volume rose. Then Martha remembered she wasn’t quite the Martha she’d been yesterday. She knew how to angle a bottle. She knew she could find first steps.

She told herself,
Just do what you need to do—as any mother would.

She made a U-turn and drove away from the river.

This time she felt only anxiety and doubt. She had nothing to provide guidance besides a shrieking baby, the contents of the car, and the road before her.

She moved forward, her thoughts scrambling. Then she saw the entrance to the closed camp. She could turn off the road, that’s what she could do. Quiet the baby here.

The chain closing off the dirt road into camp was on the ground, so she drove over it. She had not been down here for years, though nothing had changed, and soon she entered a campsite with fir trees and wooden bunks. They hugged the western bank of the river, where there were swimming and fishing areas and, farther down, a low-head dam.

She stopped the car in the muddy parking lot and could see the river across the campsite. The water was brown and rushing fast and had swelled far up the banks.

Martha reached into the basket and took the crying baby in her arms. The girl’s face was red and her cries pitiful. At least Martha now had a better sense of how to translate this particular sound; the makeshift diaper was not wet.

With the baby in one arm, Martha opened the back door, maneuvered the suitcase, and removed a bottle of formula. She sat down in the car and, with the experience of last night instructing her, figured out how to hold the baby; the cries, however, persisted, and the baby would not open her mouth to receive the
nipple. After a few moments of terror, Martha did the only thing she could think of. Baby in her arms, bottle in one hand, Martha stood and walked slowly.

The effect was swift. By the first patch of bunks, the baby had hushed. By the second, she’d begun taking the bottle.

Martha decided not to turn back until the child was finished. Besides, it felt good to be under the sky, even if it was obscured by trees. It felt good to take in fresh air. The scent of sap and fir and wet soil, the sound of the baby sucking, helped Martha’s heart beat more evenly.

Soon she came near a swimming dock. Built out from higher ground, it remained barely above the water. Perhaps as she enjoyed this respite from her worries, she might take a step onto it to see the swirling water below. The baby swallowed, making noises of contentment, and as Martha neared the dock, something atop a post at the far end caught her eye. She tested the planks with her feet and moved out over the water. As she and the baby neared, she saw that it was a hat. No, a cap, just like the one her husband used to wear.

Just like the one she’d given to Number Forty-two.

She stopped. She could see it clearly. The brown wool. The moth-eaten hole.

She looked behind her. The bunks responded with silence. She almost called out, then remembered he couldn’t hear.

She went to the edge of the dock and retrieved the cap with her free hand. She held it up to her face. It smelled like Earl, and she closed her eyes and felt him beside her on the bed, felt herself longing to reach over and rest her hands on his chest and look into his eyes with such love that he would see through his haze of sadness and find her again, right in front of him. Then he would touch her face, and forgive the universe its chaos, and forgive her their broken child.

She opened her eyes.
Where was the man?

Maybe he’d slept on one of the shores or climbed one of the trees to avoid the water. She scanned the river. The streaming water was the color of earth. She saw nothing but far more water than the banks ahead could hold, rushing toward the net that marked the swimming boundaries of the camp, then onto the edge of the low-head dam. She hadn’t noticed the roar from the dam but heard it now. Surely Old Creamery Bridge would be closed all day. Everyone on this side of the river would have to remain here.

She turned and looked upstream. The view was similar, though a huge branch was in the water, racing toward the campsite. The currents were so swift, the branch passed beneath the dock within seconds, then sped on.
It will get caught in the net,
she thought. When it didn’t, she realized the net had torn. She watched the branch tumble over the edge of the dam.

She fingered the hat, looking to both shores for traces of the man. Still feeding the baby, she left the dock and picked her way down the western bank. She saw nothing except debris streaming along in the river: past the final float for swimmers, past the torn net, past the signs that read,
NO BOATING BEYOND THIS POINT
. She walked until she reached the vertical face of the dam. As she’d expected, in the churning water beneath, the branch and debris bobbed on the surface, got sucked under, then returned to the surface, over and over, stuck in the cycling water. Then something captured her gaze. Rising to the surface was a piece of dark clothing. Her husband’s jacket—which she’d given the man. It went under, and her husband’s shirt rose.

She went cold. Number Forty-two must have come to the dock in the rain, hoping to swim across the river to make his way back to Lynnie. He must have taken off the cap and set it on the dock. He must have dived into the water in the night. But he’d been swept downstream and over the dam. The backwash had caught him and sucked his clothes from his body.

The net had been put up because canoeists had been lost. Some had never been found.

Martha’s heart pounded as she drove the only way she could: west on Old Creamery Road. It was impossible—the man could not have drowned. She had only just met him. She had watched him look at this baby with a care that could conquer all the trouble he and Lynnie must have endured to reach the farm. Yet his strength had been no match for the current and the spinning water.

She touched the cap, which lay on the seat beside her, in that way touching both Earl and the man. Then she raised her hand to her lips and breathed in the scent of the two men who were no more.

Thank goodness the baby was asleep again. Thank goodness she might never know what happened to this man. Yet Number Forty-two had helped this baby escape into the world; and could there be a tale more worthy of remembrance? Maybe Martha should write it down when they reached wherever they were going tonight. Maybe she should place this sad story inside the hat and make every effort to ensure that whatever happened, both remained with the baby.

Martha turned the radio back on. Surely she would hear about a body found in the river. Though the authorities would probably keep it quiet until they knew the man’s identity—and since he’d be wearing nothing except her husband’s trousers, if even that, they would not be able to identify him. He would just be a man who, if found at all, would be buried as John Doe.

Martha kept looking at the baby, then pulling her gaze back to the road. Everything was going wrong. Lynnie had been apprehended. Number Forty-two had drowned. Martha herself was driving in the opposite direction from Well’s Bottom. It was already nine o’clock.

She should return to the farm.

She had a barn, a springhouse. She could hide the baby in one of them. She was heading that way anyhow, unless she took Scheier Pike—which would only deposit her at the distant bridge. What if that was out, too?

She could not think. She could barely see. She felt like an egg dropped from up high, shattered into pieces that skittered to faraway corners.

The intersection was near. She thought of Robert Frost, coming upon two roads diverging in the woods. One wanted wear, and although he longed to take the other, he took the one less traveled by, and that made all the difference.

She was not a poet. She was not an adventurer. She was not even a mother. She was only someone who had given her word to a request she had not understood. For the first time, she wondered: What would happen if the baby was found?

But how could Martha take that chance?

There it was, up ahead: two small signs. One pointed the way home, west on Old Creamery Road. The other pointed north, Scheier Pike, the way she never needed to go. How she ached to return to her house, with everything she knew, with walls so unbroken by windows that they’d protect her—though not the baby. And now, fingering the brim of the hat, she felt more obliged than ever to do as Lynnie had asked.