Nola Wren was nine weeks old the day Molly stepped out of the house while the baby slept. She walked along the boundary of the property along a decrepit fence rail. Asters and Queen Anne’s Lace bloomed wild in the field behind the barn. Honeybees with pollen-dipped legs moved heavily at her feet. How long would it take to die if she were to lie down here, to sink into the soil and wait for weeds to sprout through the knobs of her spine, storm her gated ribs, eat through her broken heart? She willed her feet to keep moving. The baby would wake soon and need to be fed.
Back in the house, Molly could hear crying upstairs. She wiped the yellow field from her shoes and climbed the stairs to the howling baby and her beet-red face. She unbuttoned her shirt, picked up Nola Wren, and cradled her gently, shushing, shushing. She’d left a half glass of water on the table next to the rocker. She took a drink as she sat down and sighed so deeply she wasn’t sure she wanted to take another breath. Her mouth hung open as the baby tugged on her nipple, on her spirit,on what rooted her to her own life. She could almost see it, slender as steam, wisping out of her mouth into thin air around her.
“I can’t do this,” she said to no one. She released Nola Wren gently. Her nipple, cork-like and scarlet, throbbed in the open air. She put the baby on her shoulder and stood. She became aware that she was bare-breasted, standing in the room she’d occupied when she was a child, before ... She could imagine that little girl staring at her, baffled by the person she was seeing now.Go downstairs, wait for Mom.That was the plan. She needed a break, that was all. She was overwhelmed. She would go for a drive, to the beach, to the lake. Anywhere. Get her head straight. At the top of the stairs, she hesitated, held in place by shackling hands coming up from the floor. Over and over, O’Kane went through the rails. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, something worse happened, something horrible.
She pictured it like she intended to go through with it, her sweet girl sailing over, tiny arms backstroking, eyes in that dream place of wonder, asking, “How could you?”
Molly’s feet unstuck, and she ducked back into her room, Nola Wren safely on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she said, over and over, tears drenching the soft spot on the top of her child’s head that throbbed with heart and blood and real life. She had fought, and she had lost.
Over the next month, Molly declared herself done with breastfeeding. She pumped enough to relieve the engorgement but bought baby bottles and fed Nola Wren formula instead. She would not subject her daughter to whatever poison was bottled up inside her. She let her parents feed Nola Wren, liberating herself, distancing herself. She took Nola Wren to Maeve’s house, watched how sweet Dylan and Opal were with her, how Wendy and Maeve doted on her. Molly was in awe at the way her sister deftly moved between mothering an adolescent girl and a pubescent boy and a newbornbaby that wasn’t her own. “I really admire you,” she told Maeve. “I mean it. I wish I had what you have.” What she couldn’t bring herself to tell Maeve was that she missed her. She missed everything about being a little girl and being Maeve’s little sister. Maeve hugged her the way she once had, enveloping her from behind. “You have no idea how much that means to me.”
She told Maeve and Wendy she was invited to spend Labor Day weekend in Portland with an old college friend. Just until Monday. Would they, could they, watch the baby?
“Go. Go!” they said.
When the bus arrived in Portland, Molly thought about getting off, spending the weekend there, making a friend, then going home. But she’d bought the ticket to go through, knowing she would. In Boston, she switched to a westbound bus, afraid that if she continued toward New York that she might get off in New Haven. She needed time and distance and nothingness. The bus hummed beneath her, racing through a tunnel of trees like water in a garden hose.
A boy in his early teens boarded the bus in Syracuse and took the seat next to her. He wore a John Deere hat over hair so short Molly couldn’t see the color of it. Pink and pimpled, he grinned widely at her as the bus pulled out of the station.
“Ridin’ the dog,” he said wisely, an old soul.
“I’m sorry?”
“You know, riding the dog. The Greyhound. I’m heading back to Rochester. Go back and forth all the time, riding the dog. How about you?”
“Oh, right,” Molly said. “The dog. Yeah, west I guess. I’m not sure.”
“An adventure, then,” the boy said. “I’ve got an extra bologna sandwich if you’re hungry. My grandma makes me a whole bag every time I come.She don’t think my dad feeds me right even though I tell her I’m naturally skinny, is all.”
Molly hadn’t eaten since she bought an ice cream bar at a stop back in Massachusetts. Bologna sounded good. “Sure,” she said. “Thanks.”
The boy handed her the sandwich and a bag of barbecue potato chips. “They’re good smashed right between the bread. Mixes with the mustard and mayonnaise. That’s the way I like it. My mom likes it that way, too, but she can’t really eat right no more on account of the stroke. I visit her with my grandparents in the nursing home. My name’s Brandon, by the way. We don’t got to be friends or anything but good to know who you’re sitting with.”
“I’m sorry,” Molly said, and the boy shrugged. She crushed her chips on top of the bologna, squished the whole thing back together. “My grandpa did that, too, with his potato chips. Molly,” she said, before taking a bite.
“Anyway,” Brandon said. “Nice to be riding the dog with you. Usually it’s me and a bunch of losers.”
“How do you know I’m not a loser?”
“You been on the dog as often as I have, you can spot a loser easy.”
She wanted to ask Brandon what he saw in her but thought better of it. The boy didn’t need her bullshit.
When she finished her sandwich, she balled up the plastic wrap and stuck it in the seat crack. Brandon was turned around now, chatting up someone she couldn’t see over the head rest. She pulled out her aging Walkman, put her headphones on, and pressed play. Leo’s mixtape. She’d almost left it behind in her old cigar box. But she’d grabbed it at the last minute, in case she actually went through with her plan.
At the cove house, she had held Nola Wren close, searing an impression of the baby into her before handing her off to Maeve.This is me fighting for you, I swear.
“Have fun,” Wendy said, hugging Molly in her hugger way, as if everyone welcomed intimacy.See me and stop me from doing this,Molly wanted to yell, returning Wendy’s hug uncharacteristically. WhenWendy pulled away, she took a gift bag off the table and handed it to Molly. “I know it’s been hard, and I don’t want to overstep. But it might help to write about your feelings. Even a single word or phrase can be empowering. Give it a try while you’re away.”
Molly opened the floral notebook, flipped to the first page, blank as her mind. She didn’t know what she was chasing or running from. Didn’t know how or why she’d done what she’d done except for what she told herself.You are saving a life.She was not a poet, not religious, not a deep thinker or even a caring person, for that matter.I am ..., I am ...She wrote down how she filled in the blank.Riding the Dog.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
1995: Mid-Coast Maine
Faye kept two pieces of lined paper taped on the wall next to the telephone. The first was a long list of typed numbers that included the fire station, the police, Sam’s business phone number, the number for the cove house, which hadn’t changed since her father lived there. She had Maeve’s number at the law office, Wendy’s number at the OB-GYN office where she worked now, the numbers for Dylan’s junior high school and Opal’s elementary school. In blue ink off to the side, William had handwritten the number of his estate-sale buddy Noel Delaney who owned an antiques shop in town. He’d also jotted down the number for the pizza place that would deliver.
It took all of them to care for Nola Wren. Faye and William babysat on the days Maeve and Wendy’s work overlapped. Dylan and Opal came through in a pinch too. Even Sam helped when he was with his kids. The pediatrician’s number was there above the family doctor.
