“But she can. She’s doing fine.”
“Who nurses anyway? The stuff they make in tins is better for the baby. Everyone says so. And this will ruin you.” He flipped a hand toward the blanket. “But if you’re going to nurse, nurse Kit. Nothing wrong with him.”
“She’s the one who needs me more.” Kay pulled the blanket away and helped her baby to begin again. “And I have enough milk for both of them. Plenty. He’ll get his share.”
But before she had finished nursing Holly, Chad had sent a nurse for a bottle of warm formula, settled himself in a rocking chair by the window, and was teasing his son’s lips with drops of milk.
Watching them from her bed, Kay was struck by a familiar onslaught of panic, heightened by the discomforts of her recent ordeal. Where had this man come from? How was it that they had children now? When had all of this happened? She wondered, suddenly, if there was any sort of honorable retreat, or if she was bound to these people for her lifetime. And then she looked at her husband again, and she realized that he was hers and she his and the children, now, theirs. She breathed out a long breath, felt her womb contract, and said, “I think we’re very lucky.”
“I suppose we are,” he said, his eyes on his son. It was three days before he held his daughter for the first time.
Kit was six years old when his mother went sailing one evening and died in a storm. By the time he was ten he remembered very little about her except that she smelled like oranges.
Holly also remembered her dead mother. But she remembered more. She remembered her mother coming into her room each morning, gathering her up into soft arms, and carrying her down to the warm kitchen. It was where Holly spent her waking moments, watching her mother halve a dozen fragrant, heavy oranges, squeeze their frothy juice into a tall, iced glass, and place it on the table for her husband. It did not seem to bother Kay when Chad failed to comment on her thoughtfulness or even scolded her under the solemn gaze of their cook. “Just look at your hands,” he’d say, not touching them. “You look like a grocer.”
As long as her mother was alive, Holly knew she was much loved. She was not old enough to understand or fret about her disfigurement. When she looked in the mirror, she smiled and babbled and made faces like other children. When her mother tucked her into bed at night, Holly offered her cheek, usually the damaged one, for a kiss just like any other child. And when other children asked her how she’d come to have such a face, she was as unabashed as her brother was when asked how he’d purpled his thumbnail.
“It happened before I was born,” she always said, then went on to more important things.
It was Holly’s mother who taught her to love her crooked face, her smallness, her weakness, her vulnerability. Her mother even managed to make Holly’s frequent illnesses enviable. She’d prepare elaborate picnics and carry them up to Holly’s bedroom, read her dozens of books, sing her hundreds of songs, lie next to her in bed and tell her about the hours before she and Kit had been born.
“There was lightning but no rain,” Kay remembered, “and at one point a full moon. And in the morning there was fog.”
Holly did not speak to anyone except Kit for weeks after her mother was killed. She was only six, but she suspected that her father didn’t like her very much. And although she had always adored her brother and thought that he loved her just as much (for he had always been a willing playmate, always been where she could find him, always called her “jolly Holly”), the weeks following their mother’s death had changed him, reordered him into a smaller version of their father, so that she felt she had lost her brother, too.
What Holly didn’t know about was the cruelty of strangers. Grade school taught her that. Had Kit been with her, things might have been different. But shortly after her mother died, her father sent her off to a boarding school for girls while Kit stayed home with his father and the people who were paid to tend them.
His mother and sister gone, Kit was lonely for the first time in his life. The huge house seemed to have become ugly, and the toys he had played with for years suddenly had the feel of dead things. But then his father took him to the Orient, Africa, the capitals of Europe, to islands of luxury bordered as much by starvation as by the sea. From his father, Kit learned that the world would never be the same for him as it was for most of its other billions. They would die far earlier than he would. They would be hungry, sick, unhappy, afraid. He would be fed, tended, indulged. “That doesn’t seem fair,” he said one day, shortly after he’d turned nine.
“Fair?” replied his father. “Who said anything about fair?”
When Kit was ten years old, he, too, was sent away to boarding school, where a hundred other boys all wore the same blinders with which he had been fitted and where the lessons his father had taught him were reflected in every eye.
It was here that Kit learned boredom, impatience, disrespect. Over the years, he learned how to threaten, how to charm, how, on rare occasions, to retreat. And when, home for his sixteenth birthday, Kit opened the door to his new forty-thousand-dollar sports car to find a five-hundred-dollar prostitute inside, he learned yet another lesson about privilege and power: that there is little in this world that cannot be purchased.
By nearly any definition, Kit was a spoiled boy. But his attitudes were studied. They were something he practiced constantly and displayed openly, but they
