“I felt possessed, like I might be stuck inside that moment forever, but somehow, she was born, and although you might have thought I’d never be able to sleep again, after that day, the nightmare of it all, I was exhausted, and passed out with my baby in my arms.
“When I woke, I thought I’d dreamed it all, until I glanced at her tiny face in the crook of my elbow and everything came back in a rush. I couldn’t hold it in my head all at once, the utter joy and thesickening horror that had preceded it, and so I focused on her, on that delicate sleeping face, the minuscule movements of her lips, the softness of her velvet skin, her impossibly small, perfect fingers. She was remarkable. She was mine. She was everything I’d ever wanted and dreamed of. So pretty and peaceful. One of the policemen commented on how quiet she was when they came to check on me that day. ‘You’ve had your baby,’ he said, when I opened the door.
“‘Last night,’ I heard myself reply. My voice was strange to my ears, as if it belonged to someone else.
“‘You’ll have to call her Noël.’
“‘Or Joy.’ This was the other officer, the younger one.
“‘Her name is Polly,’ I told them.
“‘Well, whatever the name, that’s a good one you’ve got there. Couldn’t get any of my three to sleep like that. Sleeping like a baby, that’s what people say, isn’t it? Not any of the babies in my house.’
“They were right. She was so sleepy, so quiet and still. I wasn’t worried, not at first. I’d never had a baby before. I didn’t know any differently. And when Mrs. Summers came to check on me and help around the house, she said that they were all unique, and she’d arrived at a difficult time. Babies could be sensitive like that.
“But as the days went on, my concern grew. I couldn’t get her to feed. She would cry when I tried, meek and soft, as if she were already weary with the world. I couldn’t understand. I knew she needed milk, but I couldn’t bring her comfort. My body ached; I felt as if a clamp were squeezing shut inside my belly, my chest, my head. I wished more than anything for Isabel to be there. She was supposed to be there, helping me.
“My baby would cry in my arms and then finally fall asleep, and I would cradle her like that for as long as I could, only placing her in the crib when I needed both hands for something else. It was after one such period that I went to check on her. I’d fallen asleep myself—I was so tired; more tired than I’d been before or since. Butwhen I woke, I saw that the light had changed and knew she’d been sleeping for hours and hours.
“She was lying in her crib, a blanket covering the small mound of her body, her face turned to the side, little eyes sealed shut; she was so very still. As perfect as a porcelain doll. I’ve never been able to get that picture from my mind. I stood at the doorway, admiring her for a time, and then something twigged and I pounced forward, planting my hand on her back, desperate to feel the rise and fall of breath, to startle her awake.
“But there was nothing. Nothing. I picked her up; I thought maybe if I rocked her, or walked her, or fed her, everything would be all right. But it wasn’t. She wasn’t. It wasn’t all right at all.”
The tape continued to play, but the voices had disappeared. There was only the ambience of the long-ago room, a claustrophobic airy sound. Jess chanced a brief look at Polly, but her mother was staring at her hands, her thoughts impossible to read. Jess turned up the volume, focused on the hissing and popping. Just as she was beginning to think the recording might have ended, Nora’s voice returned. It was different again, recognizably Nora, and yet Jess couldn’t think that she’d ever heard her grandmother sound so... vulnerable.
“It’s hard to remember how much time passed. I held her to me as if maybe, just maybe, I might that way give life back to her. I wouldn’t put her down. I couldn’t let her go—while I held her, there was hope. I was still cradling her the next day when Meg arrived, and later, when the policemen came to take me to the town meeting.”
Jess remembered Daniel Miller’s account of Nora at the community meeting, a model of dignity, grieving for her family while caring for her newborn child. To know the truth behind that picture was disturbing, the unfathomable depth of her new loss, devastating. Jess willed Miller to prompt for more, even as she knew he was right to let the story come out at Nora’s pace.
Finally, her grandmother continued: “It was just before dawn thenext morning, or perhaps the one after that, when I went outside for a walk. I used to do that quite often, to move my legs, to clear my head. I hadn’t since my Polly was born, but that morning, I did. I stepped outside, and almost at once I heard it. Like a small animal crying. I went over to where the roses are, the bed nearest the house, and the noise got louder. That’s when I saw her. I thought I’d gone mad. Babies don’t just appear. But there she was, in the middle of the roses.”
“Thea,” said Daniel Miller.
“I snatched her up and took her inside with me—what else could I have done? The blanket was muddy and torn, but inside it she was perfect. There wasn’t a mark on her. Initially, she wouldn’t settle. She was hungry, of course—God knows how long it had been since she’d eaten, poor little lamb. I fed her from my own breast, and it was the most natural thing in the world. She was so eager.
“I didn’t mean to keep her, not then. But there was no one for me to tell, no way to tell them. The telephone lines were still down after the storm on Christmas Eve, and I was all alone. I wasn’t up to walking into the town. We were alone, the two of us, for days. Amid so much loss, we were the sole survivors. It was a miracle.
“It was some days later that one of the policemen gave me the idea. They came to the house, and she was sleeping peacefully in her pram beside me. She cried and I nursed her, and the policeman said, ‘She’s doing well. Getting bigger quickly, isn’t she?’
“I wondered for a moment what he meant, and then I realized his mistake. ‘She’s a very hungry baby,’ I said. Which was true. And it was all so normal, so right.”
Nora’s tone had shifted into defensive mode, sounding more and more like the grandmother Jess knew well. Confident and beyond reproach, justified. But what she was saying was shocking. Jess glanced at Polly, wondering how on earth she was taking this news, but her mother’s face was impassive, revealing nothing.
“There were times,” Nora continued, “when I forgot what I’d done. She was my baby, my Polly. Other times, I reasoned, what better option was there for this little person who had done nothing wrong? Would I have been doing her a favor to tell the police? To have word spread as to who she really was? To make her live with the ignominy of what Isabel had done?
“No. I was her mother, and I would be the best mother to her, to that perfect little girl. A baby should always be with her family. Who else would have loved her as I did? What harm could it cause to anyone?”
Jess thought of Percy Summers, who had lived the decades wondering what had happened, and then believing himself responsible for the baby girl’s death. Nora wasn’t to have known, of course, though she must have wondered how the baby arrived in the rose garden. Had she really believed that wild dogs had taken the child from the picnic and then delivered her, unscathed, to Isabel’s rose garden near the house? Perhaps it was possible to believe anything if one wanted to badly enough.
Daniel Miller had evidently been considering Nora’s rhetorical question as to who might have been harmed. “What about your brother? It was his child, too.”
“What would he have done with a tiny baby?” she scoffed. “He didn’t have time for the family he had! No, she and I belonged together. We had survived together.”
“Did he ever recognize her?”
“He never saw her. He abandoned us both—started fresh in London and never returned to Australia, and of course I never took her to see him. I went home to Sydney a month after their deaths, taking my baby girl, my Polly, with me. I was spared from answering questions. People don’t know how to behave around tragedy. They don’t know what to say, and they don’t want to say the wrong thing, so they make sure they’re not in a position to say anything. I didn’t see a soul, except Mrs. Robinson. I didn’t mind. I couldn’t have been happier than to spend time with my little baby, just the two of us.
“When enough time had passed, and people finally came to visit,they didn’t talk about Isabel and what she’d done. Oh, I’m sure they gossiped avidly among themselves, but they knew better than to engage me. They focused on the baby instead, my baby. Everyone knew how much I’d wanted her, and certainly no one suspected that she wasn’t mine. Why would they? I had gone to South Australia, heavy with pregnancy, sick, intending to stay with my sister-in-law until I had my baby. That Isabel had committed that awful crime was dreadful timing, but there was no reason for anyone to see anything in my return with a baby other than what they had expected to see.”
