“Did your parents ever take you to a doctor or anything?”
I stopped walking. “Why would they do that? I wasn’t sick. And I’m not crazy.”
“No, I know, but—”
“And what kind of doctor would they have taken me to? What kind of doctor would believe me?”
“All right. I can see how that would’ve been a problem. My apologies. Please?” Truman nodded so that we could resume our walk.
We strolled in silence for a few moments.
“Do you see them right now?” Truman asked.
“Of course.”
“Can you tell me?”
In the distance a tractor snorted. Starlings were chirping in a nearby pepper tree. One of Sam’s workers, Felipe, was singing a tune in Spanish several rows away.
“The sound of that tractor is lines of brown and gold,” I said, “and the birds’ singing is swaths of orange, like strokes of a paintbrush. Felipe’s voice is blue bursts lifting up like a fountain.”
“That’s incredible. And it’s always been this way for you?”
“For as long as I can remember. My mother had a great-aunt who saw the colors. But I never met her. She died before I was born.”
“Wow.” Truman’s voice was laced in salmon-colored fringe and utter amazement. “But you don’t remember telling Wilson any of this?”
I shook my head. “I don’t. But I must have. I stopped telling people when I was in second grade. My parents insisted on it. And you can’t tell anyone, Truman. Okay? No one is supposed to know. I don’t even think I want Wilson to know.”
“But he does know.”
“He just thinks he does.”
We walked on for a few moments in silence.
“I think I understand now why it always seemed to me that your father had expectations of you,” Truman finally said. “He was probably afraid for you.”
“Which is why you can’t tell anyone. Please? You can’t.”
He nodded as we started back for the house.
That nod, I would confidently assume, had been a guarantee—a vow to keep my secret.
A promise not to mention it to anyone.
Including Celine.
11
MAY TO JUNE 1939
As April eases into May, I marvel at how my body is adapting and changing, cocooning the little one that moves inside me now with what seems like great delight. I saw Dr. Melson for a routine checkup in mid-April, and even upon seeing him—he is a dour-faced older man who seems bored with his job—I had no recollection of having met him before.
I am not the only pregnant woman at the institution; there are at least six others that I have seen. Since the maternity appointments all take place on a particular Tuesday, I sat with three of them in the waiting room on the day of my checkup. It was the closest contact I’d had with any of the other expectant mothers. With more than two hundred and fifty women at the institution, I have only seen the others from afar, either in the cafeteria or the dayroom or during our required outdoor time, when we wander around on the back lawn with nothing to do, separated from the men by a metal fence. As I waited for my name to be called, the woman next to me started singing lullabies to her unborn baby as if she were holding it in her arms. She leaned over to me and whispered that her child was the Baby Jesus.
When it was finally my turn to go in, the indifferent Dr. Melson measured my abdomen, weighed me, and listened to the baby’s heartbeat with something he called a fetoscope. He then pronounced me and the baby healthy and told me that unless I had complications, he wouldn’t be seeing me again until the first of July, just a week or so before my due date.
I was glad to leave the second-floor infirmary when he was finished. Having to pass the door to Ward 2 on my way to the stairs brought back the memory of waking up in it as if from a bad dream, only to realize the nightmare was real.
