It was a rare confluence—sunny day, Saturday, and Halloween. Shops and vendors set up booths and tables, and kids in costumes ran screaming through the closed streets lined with pumpkins and cornstalks and bales of hay. Normally, Molly didn’t work Saturdays, but it was an all-hands event with ghost-shaped vegan cookies, vats of hot apple cider, and pumpkin-spiced everything else. She still had hours to go in her shift, but she was already exhausted.
Her back was turned to the table, but she recognized his voice. Unmistakable. She balled up her hands for courage, cursed that she was wearing stained overalls, as if that were the problem. Yarrowwas right. She wasn’t very perceptive. She’d finally taken a test. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t figure this out? Twice, she’d called the phone number that Leo had given her, but she couldn’t bear the thought of him telling her to get rid of the pregnancy. Whatever she decided, she would do it on her own. But she was running out of time. And this? This was the last thing she needed. She caught her reflection in the bakery window, could see him behind her now. She gritted her teeth, conjured a hard smile, and turned.
“Hi, Charlie.”
Charlie checked over his shoulder like a witch was tapping it, which made Molly look too. She scanned the crowd for Sideny, who would be easy to pick out among the dowdier people. But it was almost election day. No chance she’d be strolling around Takoma Park. Then Molly spotted the boys across the street. They were dressed as burglars in matching costumes, holding hands with a sturdy girl who looked a little older than Molly. She approached with the boys, who seemed entirely uninterested in Molly.
“That the new nanny? Doesn’t look like your type. Unless of course your type is young and vulnerable. Then, yeah, she’s your type.”
“Maybe my type is conniving little thief,” Charlie hissed. “She saw the bracelet. She’d been looking for it everywhere. I had to buy a new one exactly like it and hide it so she could find it. You’re welcome. She was planning to call the agency. Or the cops.”
“Stick it.” Molly wiped her hands on her apron, took off the scarf over her curls, and let them drop to her shoulders. “You’re hardly the one to hand out morality lessons.”
Charlie fumbled his bag of apples, and they rolled into the gutter next to the curb. The boys ran to grab them, and the girl with them stood back. “I think they’ve got it,” Molly said. “I’m Molly. I was their nanny before.”
“Boys,” Charlie said, setting the reassembled bag onto the table between them. “You remember Molly.”
The boys didn’t react.
“Guess you didn’t leave much of an impression,” Charlie said. “This is Helen.”
The girl’s face turned crimson. Up close, it was clear she was quite young. Young and frantic. She was petrified. That asshole. Molly felt physically sick, thinking about what might be happening to the girl. She swallowed hard, tried to keep her legs from buckling. The boys stared off at the cotton candy machine, no longer paying attention to the adults.
Molly walked around the table and put both hands on Charlie’s chest. “How’s this for an impression?” she said, and shoved him hard. She pictured him sailing through the air. Instead, Charlie stumbled into Helen.
Molly looked at her hands like they weren’t her own.
She could have told Sideny right away. She could have refused Charlie’s advances. She could have quit and gone back to Maine, and she’d considered it. But the thought of that house, that ghost. No. She swelled with regret. She should have hidden a warning for the next girl in the basement. She shouldn’t have accepted Charlie’s hush money. Keeping quiet had never done her any good. She spiraled around thoughts of protecting herself, protecting other people. She’d even thought she was protecting Maeve when she pushed Conor O’Kane. And look where that got her.
She pointed at Charlie. “Leave her alone. Or I swear ...” She said it evenly, like a killer.
She retreated coolly into the bakery, through the swinging gate, into the kitchen, to the staff bathroom. She closed the door, pressed against it, and hung her head. The checkered floor tiles shifted in a slick of tears. She boiled at the unruliness of her life. It came at her, blunt and thudding, tomatoes thrown at a bad actor.What a colossal fuckup I am.
She grimaced into the scratched mirror, wished she had ever bothered to ask Maeve what it was like to have a baby, what it was like to besomeone’s mother. What had it been like to be her mother? That busted-up girl staring back at her was clueless and dumb and irresponsible. “What do you even have?” she asked. “You don’t have anything.”
But she did have something. If only she could figure out how to fight for it.
Chapter Twenty-Five
1993: Mid-Coast Maine
Faye took Molly’s sheets from the dryer, held them to her nose, breathed them in like fresh air. Cotton as whipped as the color white, as scorched as sunlight on the bluest day. She remembered being a girl, pulling sheets off the line from the house by the cove, Maeve’s house now, Maeve’s chaotic household now. Back then, the sheets might have been out for days, through rain and mist, dry enough to bring in when the sun got around to doing its job. Back then, Faye would shroud her whole body in her bedsheets, suck in the taste of sea and grass and brine through her open mouth, her tongue licking the threads. She would imagine herself mummified, the sheet a layer of protection between her dead body and what would readily consume it—fire, maggots, shrapnel, tire rubber, tank tread—though it was these morbid thoughts that she longed to escape the most. The time that Thomas found her like that, cocooned head to toe on a bare mattress, was the only time he or Jean ever laid an angry hand on her. He’d dumped her out like a potato from a bag. When she recovered her footing, he swatted her firmly. “Never do that again,” he’d said, then pulled her to him, enfolding her a surely as the cotton sheet had done. That may have been the day Faye knew for certain that Thomas loved her.
She flattened the top sheet against her body, folded and smoothed, right over left, until it was a neat package to be delivered to the upstairs bedroom, the yellow one, Molly’s. She folded the bottom sheet next, making a clever tuck of the elastic corner that she’d learned from Jean. Perhaps she had learned from Jean how to tuck away worry too.
When the girls were little and helped with the laundry, she had tried to teach them to fold their sheets instead of impatiently wadding them around their forearms like they were winding an electric cord. She never told them about wrapping herself in sheets. It was not that she didn’t want to imagine them doing the same, wondering what it would be like to be dead. It was more that she didn’t want them to know that’s what she had been like as a girl. She hoped her girls would be happy, that their lives would be uncomplicated, clean and dry, carried on a gentle breeze. Maybe she had hoped that the worst thing that would ever happen to them was that they’d be bad at doing chores.
“You two are hopeless,” she would say, snatching the sheets back to fold them properly. “You’ll make terrible wives.”
“Oh, no. Not that,” Maeve replied, flipping her hand to her forehead. “Whatever shall we do with ourselves, dear sister?”
Faye remembered the laughter, when Molly collapsed on the floor, a curtain on a stage gone dark. “We are doomed!”
Faye breathed in the sheets once more before they cooled and the scent was gone. She shouldn’t have said that, the thing about them making terrible wives. In her head now, it sounded like a curse. She pulled the string to turn off the overhead light and carried the sheets and a few towels up the stairs.
The door was open, so Faye went in without knocking. She set the towels on the dresser and paused to stare out the window, holding the sheets to her chest. Her mind wandered as her eyes followed the line of the barn to the silver maple. William’s son would be in his mid-forties if he had lived. And where would Faye be now if he had? She was fifty-seven, and it was true what people said. She looked young for her age. She celebrated Fiadh’s birthday, after all, not her own. Maybe she was really fifty-six, or fifty-fiveeven. Could she have been a stepmother if Sterling had lived? When she was pregnant with Maeve, she’d secretly wondered whether William would save her or the baby she carried if something went wrong during childbirth. She kept her question to herself, though she imagined telling William to choose the baby over her, secretly hoping he would choose her anyway. What kind of woman was she, to have such a terrible thought! And then there were pregnancies she wasn’t able to carry to term. She’d feared it was punishment for her selfishness. Her life, her family, might have been so different if she’d chosen different paths. But it had not gone a different way. Only this one. The maple was beginning to leaf out. New life, like Molly, ready to burst. There must be a phrase for when a woman is near birth, like a leaf bud waiting for spring.
Faye pulled the fitted sheet over Molly’s bare mattress. Maybe clean sheets would help. That morning, Molly had been so uncomfortable, the baby kicking at her relentlessly. She had no sense of modesty, that girl, pulling up her shirt, leaning into the sofa cushions to rub her exposed belly with nut cream Wendy had given her. “I didn’t sleep at all,” she complained. “Please baby, please baby, please baby!”
