But what about the other times, a part of me fought against the natural conclusion to this line of thought. Would you want the child to miss them? The times of exquisite happiness, like on the first warm day after a long winter, when you feel your heart rise. There were those times too. But so fleeting, and first you had to endure the winter, I answered the fading light of myself. Still there were times…the light said back, its voice getting dimmer and all the harder to hear, when you thought it was enough, enough to make it worthwhile.
And then I answered aloud, “I don’t think so anymore.”
There was a woman who lived in the woods, not far from the whorehouse, which, looking back, must have been real convenient. Jewel used to mysteriously recite sometimes, “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn’t know what to do… So she went to see the woman in the woods.” I didn’t know the woman, had never laid eyes on her, because like other Galen outcasts, she was only whispered about. I knew only that Jewel hated her “because of how she makes her living,” and for the longest time, I couldn’t imagine what the woman could possibly be doing in her cottage in the woods to make Jewel, who thought nothing of befriending prostitutes and thieves, hate her so. It was the only time I could remember Jewel seeming to harbor malice, and it gave the woman a deep fascination for me, until in my later years, I found out just what it was she did.
It was after midnight when I made my way into the woods. Snow had fallen earlier, and when I finally found the cottage, I saw that it was covered in white, as were the trees around it, a scene out of a fairy tale.
I knocked and waited, hoping she would not be angry with me for coming so late. Probably she was used to women coming at all hours. Desperation probably never observed any schedule.
When the door was opened cautiously by a white-haired woman, she didn’t ask me why I’d come. There was only one reason anyone would.
“Have you brought money?” she wanted to know.
I nodded.
“Let me see it.”
I showed her and she told me to get undressed.
“How many months?”
“Almost five.”
“Fine. Lay down and we’ll start.”
“Is five too far gone?” I asked, starting to undress.
She shrugged. “Makes no difference to me. I’ve done ’em gone longer.”
The whole thing didn’t take very long, and would have gone even more quickly if I hadn’t started crying. It wasn’t because she hurt me. I was too numb from the cold and brandy to feel much of anything. But some place in the pit of my brain had resisted the numbness and was already aching.
After it was done, I wanted to rest a minute, but the woman had someone else coming and she told me I would have to leave. And then she said the cruelest thing anyone had ever said to me in my whole life. She said, “It was a boy.”
The snow had stopped by the time I left, and the moon shone blue on the clearing. I walked slowly, with great effort. I’d never felt this light before, like the wind might blow me away, and so weary, tired enough to lay down in the snow and go to sleep. I looked down at the new-fallen snow, thinking to find a place to rest, and as I did, I saw the reason for this unrelenting fatigue. I was beginning to bleed to death. I saw it with each step, as a new circle of red formed against the frozen white ground, and opening my coat, I felt my skirt saturated with a warm wetness. I was dying and leaving my daughter alone in a word that I knew from long experience did not care about her, without a father, without anyone, and it was this knowledge that propelled me forward and changed my direction.
I collapsed on the road leading up to the doctor’s house, the same doctor who’d sewn Aaron up after I’d cut him with the sickle. In the end, I owed my life to his wife’s insomnia and her love of new-fallen snow. She’d been up looking out her window admiring it when she’d spotted me lying in the midst of it as she sipped warm milk in her kitchen.
Morning came unwelcome and found me alive, though I took no pleasure in the fact, and with it came sobriety, not from drink, but from the drunkenness of despair that had a hold of me the night before. I was not despairing now. That had abated, and in its place was left a resignation to existence. I could not live without Luca. That, I had found out soon after they’d taken him from me. But I could exist without him. That much I could do. I owed it to Rennie.
Dr. Lynch came into the bedroom where he’d put me and said, “I should take you to the sheriff and tell him what you did.” I hung my head. I half agreed with him. “And I’d do it too…but for your little daughter. Don’t worry. She’s downstairs in the kitchen. My wife went and fetched her last night.”
“I’m grateful.”
“I don’t want your gratitude. You got to pull yourself together, girl. You got your man in prison and things are hard for you. Well, too bad. Things is hard for everybody nowadays. That’s
