“Maybe I’ll go after a priest too,” Lauren said.
“Oh,” Mom interjected, “so not Doug or John or maybe my husband?”
“That phase over?” Martha asked.
“I think I’ll stick to the single ones,” Lauren said. “In fact this new guy I’m dating—”
We all laughed, interrupting her sentence, and, as I slammed my car trunk shut and listened to the women remaining in my life banter with each other, I knew that Louise was right: Lovey and D-daddy were absolutely everywhere.
Lovey
Lies That Matter
February 1960
My momma always said that the snow can bury secrets, but, at some point, the frost thaws, the spring comes, and whatever you were hiding comes to light. But sometimes, the truth comes out while the snow is still falling all around you.
“She died,” Dan said.
Those two simple words made that panic rise to the surface briskly and painfully enough that I completely ignored the fact that my husband was standing at our back door, at our house in Bath, breath blowing in the winter air, with a whimpering, swaddled child, who, from the sound of it, couldn’t have been more than a few hours old. My mind catapulted to my girls, vomit rising in the back of my throat.
But that’s impossible,I thought.You just checked on them.
Feeling my heart come back into my chest from where it had beenracing around the solar system, I stilled my breath and asked, “Who? Who died?”
“Her mother,” Dan said, as though that was supposed to clear up anything at all.
The baby began to wail loudly as he shouted over her noise, “Can we keep her?”
“For God’s sake, Dan, she’s not a kitten.” But it registered that I also sounded like I was referring to a stray pet when I said, “I’m sure we can find her a good home.”
I took the baby from him and turned to go inside. I sat down beside the hearth in the kitchen, feeling the roaring flames return the heat to my body as he said, “She must be starving. I don’t think she’s eaten at all.”
I looked around the kitchen helplessly, knowing we didn’t have any formula or anything else appropriate for a baby to eat. I looked into that beautiful, red, wailing face, and that maternal pull, the tug in your loins that makes mothering feel so right, got the better of me. I knew in the instant I saw that beautiful face, despite what I said, that this little girl belonged to me too, that she would slide seamlessly into the staircase of pigtails that I was raising.
And, without even thinking about it, I did something that was as natural to me as making the beds and boiling the coffee. I opened my shirt and fed this helpless thing that was completely alone in the world save Dan and me.
“Can you do that?” Dan asked.
“Well, I’m still nursing Louise, so, yes, milk is milk, I presume. I don’t know what other option we have in the middle of the night in the middle of a farm.”
Louise was only ten months old then, and I had breastfed her longer than the other girls, confident that she would be my last child,wanting to savor those fleeting seconds of babyhood, that deep connection that sharing your body with another can bring, while I could.
“So, could you please explain why I’m nursing someone else’s child in the middle of the night?”
Dan sat down in a chair beside me, put his head in his hands, and, a moment later, I realized that he was crying. “I was going to lie to you,” he said. “But you have to know the truth. You have to forgive me, Lynn.”
I looked down at the heavy eyelids beside my breast and, more than my curiosity or the sinking feeling that what was coming next was an explanation that I wasn’t going to want to hear, it occurred to me how much things change. When Dan and I had reconnected again and again, our love for each other was like the fire in the hearth. It was intense, passionate, heated. But, over the years, through childbirth and diapers, scrimping and saving, getting promotions and losing jobs, the person beside you in the church pew morphs from the object of your near-addictive love obsession into something more akin to the sterling silver service on the sideboard. You can always count on it being there even though you don’t really use it in the same way you once did. And that burning love you had for another person reshapes itself into the love you have for your family, that united front against the world that you have become with him at the helm.
And so I made a command decision. Where I had had four daughters moments earlier, I now had five. “Get the suitcases and clear as many of the girls’ things as you possibly can into them,” I said, stroking the cheek of the now-sleeping baby in my arms.
He looked up from where his head had been in his hands and asked, “What?”
“Well, we have to move, obviously. There’s no way on earth I can explain this if we’re still living in the same town. We’ll move on,start over, and people will just assume we had these five little girls the whole time.”
Dan kissed me hurriedly and ran toward the door, like a child on his way for ice cream, afraid that Mother would change her mind. “Wait,” he said. “Couldn’t we just say she was adopted?”
“Adopted,” I spat. “She’s your child, for heaven’s sake.”
