Likely, Hazel had been afraid, for maybe she had known friends, cousins, acquaintances who had died as they pushed a baby into this world, whose lives had been a threshold of a different sort.
“I’m afraid,” Opal said. She hadn’t used that word before—afraid—but she was saying it now, and she couldn’t unsay it. It was out there, like a ball she’d kicked into the sky, and now she was waiting for it to fall.
He began to dress, pulling one trouser leg on at a time. Now his back was to her, and she felt silly for saying anything, silly for thinking this man could help. They were playacting. She hadn’t convinced him yet. He could not love apart from Hazel—for that would be like asking a fish to swim with no water. The water contains the fish, but gives it freedom, too. That’s the irony of the bond.
She thought again about what life might be like in France. About the Spirit Machine, about totality—how, to look at the sun during an eclipse, you had to first obscure it completely.
“We could go somewhere,” Opal said. Soon, the baby would make it impossible to travel. “Before the baby comes—before it’s too late. Like last time.”
The Colonel stood. “What do you know about last time?” he asked. Now all his movements slowed: the tucking of his shirt, the buttoning of his trousers.
“You lost the most precious thing in the world to you,” she said. She pulled her dress from the floor and covered her chest, suddenly aware of her nakedness. “We could go to Europe. They have the best doctors there. In France, they understand people like us.”
“Likeus?” the Colonel asked, and she knew she’d pushed too far.
“There’s a machine. A Spirit Machine. I know someone who can make a spirit incarnate. It can give you answers. That’s what you’ve been searching for, isn’t it? That’s what you want.”
The Colonel glanced up at the portrait of his wife. He finished tying his boots. He put on his hat. “I’ll have my driver take you home,” he said, and she knew she had lost him.
NOW SHE MADE HER WAYthrough the beer caves in the dark, using her fingertips on the rough edges of the wall to guide her.
Inside, she lumbered up the stairs of the factory. Her legs felt heavy with her own weight, and she stood breathless on the foreman’s platform overlooking the empty floor. A metal cart by the entry contained trays of perfect yellow rectangles. The door to one of the boilers had been left ajar. Nobody had bothered to sweep beneath the cutting machine, and soap shavings gathered there like dust. From outside came the chanting of protesters, the sounds of sirens in the distance.
To say she always wanted a baby would be untrue. The reality of it startled her: wailing, soiled diapers, a body that clung to hers, wanting for her milk like she was a farm beast.
She’d been doubted so much in her life; she doubted herself. She considered the freedom she’d have without a baby. How could she hope to make it to France, pregnant and alone, when she could barely manage the weight of her own body up the stairs of the factory?
Inside the laboratory, she lit a lamp. The formulary was cracked open, beakers still half full of water, powder in the mixer, tins labeled, empty capsules, cracked.
She lifted the notebook and scanned her finger down the page where she’d written out the formula for her Comet Pills. She’d only wanted to help, to do something more meaningful than washing laundry or wrapping soap. She had only one life, and she was tired of waiting for it to begin. So often she’d almost gotten what she wanted, but onlyalmost. She wished she could be someone else. Somewhere else. Not just France, but a different time altogether. A distant future where a woman like her had more choices.
At the bottom of the page she hadn’t initialed her name in tiny letters, like Jagr had done. Now she picked up an ink pen, and she signed it roughly, crossing thetwith such force she nearly ripped the page. Her signature felt like a confession. There, now everyone would know what she’d done.
She flipped the pages of the notebook, and then she found it, the formula that had cured so many women of their shame, like she hadbeen cured of hers all those years ago. She hadn’t been given a choice back then, about the baby or her shame. She’d been told what to do, and she did it. Jagr assured her she could never again conceive.
Save her, that voice had said. Instructed. Ordered. She was sick of being told what to do. Wouldn’t this baby shrink her world again, its insistence on her milk, its cries to be held? Maybe Jagr had been right: She was unwell, unfit to be a mother. Now she only wanted to save herself, and what was wrong with that? She took off her necklace and tucked it inside the formulary, with the letters from Madame de Fleur she’d kept there.A woman must never apologize for what she wants or for what she must do to protect herself.
Until she’d met the woman, she hadn’t considered what she wanted. There in the grass by the river, time had condensed, but space had, too. She existed in another dimension where she’d collapsed into herself. Or maybe she’d expanded. If this was the Other Side, how she longed for it. Was she touching herself or the woman or Oren? Whose hands had reached for whose hips, whose mouth had covered whose lips? Her whole body had arched, like she might very well levitate.
But it wasn’t just their bodies.
Now her thoughts were foggy. Exhaustion settled in her ankles, which felt fat and swollen. It’s a curse of the living to tote around a body. How freeing it would be to live apart from one.
She gathered the bowls and the Bunsen burners. From her apron pocket she withdrew the herbs she’d brought from home, left over from when she’d formulated this very same cure for Amanda Mahooney. She lit a match, but as she set it to the igniter, the match extinguished. She lit another and another and another still, but each flame shrank until it was nothing but a hiss of smoke, as though invisible lips had extinguished it. The baby kicked inside her, and Opal felt a pang not dissimilar to hunger except stronger and deeper. It didn’t hurt so much as compel her to move, to stretch her back and take a deep breath. But she couldn’t manage to take in much air; her girl was suffocating her.
1986
Soap is a weapon of war as well as a tool of peace… Use it wisely and use it well.
—PROCTER & GAMBLE
The Mercantile Library was a private membership library, and the Tuttles were donors, and when I had once told Charlie how the library felt like a place out of time, how I loved the iron and mahogany and slant-topped desks, he bought me a membership I’d never used, not even once, until that day in early February I decided I needed to read firsthand about the fire that claimed those Earthshine women.
Why did I go to that library? I wish I could say it was my quest for truth. I wish I could say I was high-minded enough to have already realized that we all lived in the same world, all of us, and what happens to one of us happens to everyone. I want to say I already believed in sisterhood and feminism and righteous rage. But we can only first see through the lens of our own lives. Ever since I opened Halley’s safe-deposit box, my whole life upended, my body wrecked, my career destroyed, my marriage imploded. By this point, things had gotten a little personal.
Bertie Tuttle once gave a keynote lecture at the library, and Charlie brought me as his plus one because he never seemed to date anyone—aconfirmed bachelor, some said. After her talk we sipped wine and ate finger foods brought to us on trays, things like speared mushrooms and cantaloupe wrapped in translucent meat. A pianist had been hired to play old swing standards, and the room brimmed with people who’d paid $300 a ticket to admire Bertie up close, to tell their friends they’d met her in the flesh, this juggernaut.
Now, I took an elevator up to the eleventh floor. The library was bathed in natural light. A small placard boasted the names of the individuals who’d lectured there: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville and William Thackeray. The air was tinged with formality, similar to a church. I thought that’s what I felt when I stood in the reading room: the sanctity of the library. Of knowledge. Of institutions. Of history. The lights flickered. I sensed something strange, a presence, someone watching me from a distance.
