“What happened to her?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” He gulped. “I found her like this in the bathroom. She’s bleeding from…from down there…”
“Vaginally?”
He nodded. He tried to see what the doctors were doing, but there were so many of them, and they moved around her, blocking his view.
“What’s your daughter’s name?” the nurse asked.
When she was little, and couldn’t pronounce her name, she called herself Lil Bit. That stuck for the longest time. As she grew up, he had dropped the second half of that term of endearment. But he was the only one to call her Lil; everyone else used a different nickname.
“Elizabeth Goddard,” George said. “She goes by Beth.”
—
LAST NIGHT,BEX HAD DREAMEDof a piece of art that was still inside her mind. It was a pixilated fetus curled on its side. In the white space, though, carved out by the absence of arms and legs and umbilicus, you would see the optical illusion of a profile. And if you looked closely, you’d know it was hers.
She was not surprised that today, of all days, she would find inspiration. Just yesterday she had finished her last commission. It was time to start fresh.
She had already called Hugh to wish him a happy birthday and she had finished a cup of tea. Her body was humming with anticipation, like a child waiting for the sun to rise on Christmas. She was going to savor every second of this morning, pluck it like a violin string, let it sing through her.
In the closet of her studio where she kept her paints and her turpentine and her brushes there was a tiny panel that, with the press of a finger, would bounce free to reveal a hiding spot. It had come with the house. She had no idea what it had been used for by the previous owners—a safe, maybe, or hidden love letters. Bex kept a shoe box inside, one that she pulled out now and set on her workbench.
Inside was an impossibly small blue cotton hat, and a hospital bracelet:BABY BOY MCELROY. And then, best of all, the photograph—fading now, into rusts and yellows and greens that she associated with the seventies. It was 1978, and there was Bex in the hospital bed, fourteen years old and holding a newborn Hugh.
Bex could have gotten an abortion—it was legal—but her mother, a devout Catholic, talked her out of it. She came up instead with the solution that became a secret. From the moment Bex left the hospital, she was no longer Hugh’s mother, but his sister. Her father got a job in a different state and they moved there, plastering over the subterfuge until sometimes Bex even forgot the reality. There had been a point when her mother died that Bex had considered telling Hugh, but she was afraid he might be so angry that he’d hate her. This she couldn’t risk.
Bex still got to watch Hugh grow up, have a baby of his own. So did the labels really matter?
It had taken her forty years of careful practice, but she allowed herself regrets only one day a year—this one, Hugh’s birthday. She took out this shoe box, and she pictured the parallel universes of her life. In one, she was Hugh’s mother, Wren’s grandmother. In another, she had fallen in love again, married, and had a child she could gather into her arms any time she wished. In a third, she went to art school and moved to Florence and became a sculptor, instead of staying in Mississippi to watch over Hugh after her father had died and her mom became an alcoholic.
Bex, who hadnotterminated her pregnancy, had still lost a potential life that day—her own. But when she started to grieve for what she had missed, she redirected her attention to the lives that had been saved, literally, by her son—the battered wives, the suicide jumpers. The teenager Hugh had pulled from the freezing river last year. Wren.
No. She would not have changed a thing. Or this is what she told herself, anyway, when she let the question rise high in her throat, when she felt like she was choking.
Bex carefully put the photo in the bottom of the shoe box and placed the bracelet and the hat inside. She carried it back to the closet and slipped it into its hiding place. Then she pulled the trapdoor into place again, sealing the crypt of this memory.
Occasionally she wondered if, after she died, someone would find the shoe box. Maybe whoever bought her house. She wondered if they would create a mythology around the artifacts, if it would be a tragedy or a love story. It could, Bex knew, be both at once.
She shut the closet and then opened the curtains in her studio. Sunshine spilled onto the wooden floor, like golden grain from a silo. The sky was clear, as blue as her son’s eyes. It was why she had named him as she did—her only hint. Even at fourteen, Bex had already pictured the world as an artist did, cast in shadows and light. Even then, what mattered most was hue.
Hugh.
Bex smiled, reaching for the stretcher bars and unprimed canvas.Today,she thought,is a good day to be born.
Epilogue
Six p.m.
NONE OF US CHOOSE OUR PARENTS.BUT SOME OF US GET LUCKY.
One minute Wren felt her father’s arm close around her. She could smell him—bay rum aftershave and starch. “It’s okay,” he whispered, his breath moving the hair at her temple. “Everything is okay now.”
She believed him. She always had. She believed him when he swore to her that there was no reason to be afraid of the dark, and taught her how to read the stars, so she would never feel lost in it. She believed him when he printed out articles about Internet predators and catfishing and left them taped to her bathroom mirror. She believed him when he ate a spider to prove that it wasn’t so scary after all.
He gently pushed her back, his eyes catching on their clasped hands. “Wren, go on now,” he said.
She couldn’t make herself step away. Wren, who had gotten herself into this mess because she couldn’t wait to grow up, wanted nothing more than for her father to rock her on his lap and never let her go.
