My mind trained on Madame Doucet, on her pregnancy. She’d gone into labor, that night of the fire. Bertie was with her. But Bertie had gone into labor that night, too—that’s what I’d read inThe Juggernaut. That’s what Bertie told me herself.
What I’m about to tell you is the truth, all of it: As I thought about Opal Doucet, there at that table, my legs weakened. My ankles felt swollen and fat with water. My body was heavy. My forehead felt tight. I thought I felt a kick inside me, then a cramp worse than any I’d ever experienced. I felt like I was in labor, like all the pressures of gravity, the forces that keep us tied to the earth, had come to focus in my core. My entire body seized. The pain terrified me, sitting there in that library. I thought I might be dying.
But I didn’t die.
I opened my eyes—mine, Nona’s—and the sensation was gone.
Some things are unexplainable, and this was one of them. I can’t tell you how I knew, only that I knew. For a moment, I wasn’t reading about Opal Doucet or thinking about Opal Doucet. IwasOpal Doucet.
My therapist once told me it didn’t really matter if an experience is real or not real. Real or not real is the wrong question to ask. One can get stuck because there is no answer. We live in multiple realities. Instead ask: Knowing this, how do I proceed? How can I keep moving forward?
I steadied my breath. I was okay, I told myself. I was tired. Over-stressed. My eyes darted around the room. The librarian click-clacked on her typewriter. Newspapers spread out before me; I could smell them. The man in the wingback chair was now asleep.
Maybe Halley had been right—maybe the factory was haunted by those women. But Opal Doucet didn’t haunt the factory; she hauntedme. She’d gone into labor the night of the fire, not Bertie Tuttle. I touched my abdomen, the flatness of it. The emptiness. I’d never have a child of my own—but for a moment too brief to be counted, I felt it, that baby alive inside me, that baby heading for the light.
What happened to the baby?
Outside, dusk was falling. I’d read enough to make the connections. Bertie knew Opal Doucet. She’d been with her the night of the fire. It was Opal Doucet who’d gone into labor that night. It was Opal Doucet who’d given birth.
You don’t know Bertie Tuttle.
I admit it—I didn’t.
We always do this, don’t we? We berate our younger selves for not knowing what we should have known, for not seeing things with the same clarity as our future selves. How could we have been so foolish? If only we’d done somethingdifferent. We look back and regret decisions we didn’t make, actions we didn’t take, a life that could have been lived. But by the time we realize this, it’s too late. A midlife crisis. A midlife chasm. A division of selves.
In that moment, I felt cheated. Used. The anger came easily. The hard part was grief. Mourning theideaof something but not the thing itself. Would I have been happier, then, in a life without Bertie Tuttle? Would I have become someone else?
Real or not real?
There are no answers.
Rage thumped at my fingertips. I had the sudden urge to move my body, like I might spontaneously combust if I didn’t.
Halley had been right: I didn’t know Bertie Tuttle.
But now I blamed her for what happened to me—for what happened to all of us. I was angry and full of grief, yes, but I was something else: I was willing to act.
There’s nothing more dangerous than a woman with nothing to lose.
1910
The Tuttle estate smelled of oranges and floor wax. Opal’s boots squeaked as she walked. Charles Tuttle had been called away to Pittsburgh for a meeting with Reginald Goodman, who’d come back to the table, according to theInquisitor. Since Betsy’s death, the strike had failed to gain momentum. Some girls were urging Maria to accept Tuttle’s new terms and end the strike completely. Despite Bertie Tuttle’s sensational appearance at the picket line, even the papers were beginning to lose interest in the story.
From the foyer, Opal could see into the drawing room: a conversation settee, a piano, a metal stand that held a potted plant with tendrils long enough to reach the floor. A portrait of a young woman hung on the wall: Tuttle’s first wife.
The house girl offered to take Opal’s coat, but she refused. The two of them had ridden over together, in the back of Bertie’s Franklin, the girl insisting that Bertie needed to speak with her, but she wouldn’t say why.
The house girl pointed her up the stairwell. Inside Bertie’s bedroom, the shades were drawn. The radiators hummed. The fireplace burned to embers. Atop her bed rested Bertie at a peculiar angle, a rag to her forehead. Even in the dark, she looked pale.
Opal approached the bedside and realized why Bertie lay strangely.A bedpan was beneath her; her back was twisted in pain. Opal understood now why Bertie had called for her.
“No magic pill for this?” Bertie said. She inhaled deeply and let out a rush of breath. When she moved, Opal could see dark spots on the rags under her.
Opal sat next to her. She didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry” seemed hardly enough. She understood. She thought of when she’d lost her own baby those dozen years ago. The spark inside her extinguished; a living thing was now dead. Some might suspect she grieved after that, but she did not. Inside her grew something else in place of what she had lost. “How long has this gone on?” Opal asked.
“Long enough.”
“You should call a doctor,” Opal said.
