Miranda
“Is she hungry?” she asked.
Winnie cleared her throat. “I left bottles with formula in the basket, though it’s possible she won’t take it until I’ve gone.”
“So?” Winnie said.
“Are you really serious?”
“I am really serious. Like I told you before, I haven’t even named her yet.”
Miranda looked down at the baby, who was sucking vigorously on her finger, then back up at her sister.
“I’m sure there are other things for you to figure out, and I trust you with all of it. I just…I have to go. I won’t be able to see her for a while.”
“Winnie, I…” Miranda’s heart felt broken. She loved this child already. But she’d loved her sister for thirty years, and this felt an awful lot like goodbye for a long time.
Winnie kissed her sister on the cheek, and said, “You are going to be an amazing mother. I’ll be in touch. You can write to me with anything I really need to know at Bernard’s address, okay? But…for now at least, I don’t want to hear about her. It’ll hurt too much.”
Miranda swallowed. This was happening so fast, and everything about the past few weeks had moved at a snail’s pace, so she wasn’t prepared for anything, let alone this. Surely so many things would occur to her the moment her sister walked out the door.
Which was happening right now. Winnie kissed their mother on the cheek as well, and when she got to the door, she opened it and said to both of them, “Thank you.”
And that was it.
She was gone.
Miranda felt a surge of love inside her more fierce and powerful than anything she’d felt before. It was for this baby. And for Winnie.
The baby detached from Miranda’s finger and began to wail. Miranda felt her nipples harden. Apparently her body knew this child belonged to her.
Joan said, “The formula is almost ready.”
With the baby’s impossibly small and delicate body against her chest, Miranda instinctively bounce-bounce-bounced, but it had no effect. The little thing must know her mother, and the milk, had gone.
Miranda experienced her first moment of panicked insecurity. Would a bottle and her total devotion be enough to replace the mother that had just walked out the door?
Miranda offered the child her finger again, but she pressed her lips closed and actually shook her head as if she was saying no. In the nick of time, Joan came over with a bottle full of a frothy butter-colored liquid, and Miranda held it close to the baby’s lips. Still she kept her mouth shut.
“Try shaking a few drops onto her lips,” Joan suggested, and Miranda did as she was told.
Initially, the baby kept her lips closed, but she must have decided she was hungry enough because she took the nib into her mouth and started sucking greedily.
The room was suddenly silent except for the sound of the baby’s glugs, though her cries still rang in Miranda’s ears.
She sat in one of the kitchen chairs and awkwardly held the baby in the crook of her left arm while holding the bottle with her right.
Then she made astonished eye contact with her mother.
“Coffee,” said Joan.
Just as the infant drained the last of the formula, Joan set a steaming cup of café au lait in front of Miranda. Unfortunately, the smell of the coffee couldn’t obliterate the alien but obvious scent of newborn poop coming from the child’s diaper. And her cries had started again.
“She needs a change, but first a burp,” said Joan, gently taking the baby into her arms and expertly laying her against a shoulder where she’d already laid a dishtowel. Joan patted her tiny back until a remarkably loud burp escaped her body.
Miranda and her mother couldn’t help laughing, and it felt good.
Then Miranda grabbed one of the diapers from the basket along with the baggie of wipes and shut herself into the downstairs powder room.
There was nowhere to do this work except the floor, so she took the hand towel from the ring and laid it on the little rug in front of the sink, then put the wriggling, wailing baby down on the towel.
Holding her breath to protect herself from the noxious odor, Miranda faced the pulpy yellow contents of the diaper, which had smeared absolutely everywhere.
How many times a day would this happen? she wondered.
She used practically all the damp wipes in the baggie, and felt that she should immediately drive to Safeway for more—of those and everything else. But she didn’t think there would be enough wipes in the entire world for the work before her.
Somehow, though, she didn’t mind.
Once the baby was clean and fed, she piped down to a gurgly fussing that was kind of funny and made Miranda smile.
Holding the baby against her chest on her way back to the kitchen, Miranda breathed in the vaguely lavender scent of her velvety head, which reminded her of Winnie and her concoctions of essential oils.
She could imagine her sister coating the child in garden-fresh scents after a bath, or adding them to the laundry.
Back at the table, she sipped the coffee her mother had made for her. It was still warm, and delicious. The baby had already conked out on her chest, snoring milkily.
“How is it possible that I love her already?” Miranda asked her mother.
Joan was silent for a minute. “A mother’s love is chemical. Alchemical.”
A mother. She was a mother. Improbably.
If she’d been enduring one main emotion just an hour ago—a bottomless vacuum of grief—now she felt a riot of feelings zipping around inside of her: love, gratitude, fear, disbelief, terror.
When she thought of Winnie, who’d been so overcome by her own emotions she’d had to flee the house, Miranda’s heart broke.
“What about Tom?” Joan asked.
Tom.
How was it possible she hadn’t even thought about him until now?
He’d come every day to sit with her, sometimes in the silent dark of her room, to tell her how much he loved her and wanted to begin their life together whenever she was ready.
Would he accept this child as his own?
Suddenly her mind was full of horrible, and what seemed to her likely, events from the future: telling Tom the full story of her family at last and watching the revulsion color his face as he saw, fully, what the Hartley family had long kept hidden.
What she had kept hidden from him. Even if he accepted those lies, would he ever be able to stomach lying to the town about who this child really belonged to?
Maybe it would be better—kinder—to let him go now. To save him from the Hartley family curses of debilitating depression and protective deceit.
And, to save herself. She didn’t think she could survive him leaving her—it would just have been too much on top of the other abandonments in her life—especially because of this perfect little person in her arms, whom she already felt prepared to fight and die for.
She still hadn’t answered her mother’s question, though. “I’m not sure,” she replied.
“There is also the matter of everyone else. For it to be convincing the child is yours, you’ll have to go away for a while.”
“Do you think people will believe it?”
Joan shrugged. “As long as the people who know better about your pregnancy say nothing to the contrary. For now, those are only us, Emilio, Tom, and your doctor. The OB, I think, can be persuaded to keep quiet.”
“And Rachel. But she’ll keep any secret for me.”
Joan nodded.
“Where would I go?”
“I suppose that depends on whether Tom goes with you.”
“I need time to think. I’ll call him and tell him I’m sick so he doesn’t come over today.”
“And I’ll do some shopping, all the way in Santa Rosa,” said Joan. “Can’t have you out and about with her. And there is so much we need.”
“I guess you’re right.”
Miranda thought of the mostly finished nursery at Tom’s place.
But she couldn’t use any of that. This wasn’t a child swap. This child was different. This child felt like a gift.
A gift to her.
The enormity of it all was beginning to sink in.
Joan set off for a big grocery store and a department store far enough away that no one they knew would see her buying all the baby necessities.
Once she was out the door, Miranda called Tom’s office and mercifully got his secretary, whom she told she had the flu, and he shouldn’t come to the house today.
The rest of the day consisted of an unsequenced rotation of diaper changes, feedings, and incredibly short snatches of sleep.
After a few times, the baby’s cries didn’t send Miranda into a blind panic, especially as she learned that if the baby ate and had a clean diaper, she would be quiet soon enough.
She even kicked her legs adorably in the air when Miranda laid her on a clean sheet over the soft carpet in the living room.
Her mother returned in the early evening with a carload full of bags and boxes: a whole kit of bottles and nibs and cans of formula, soft cotton tunics and jumpsuits, a few adorable little pink and white sweaters and hats, a plastic rattle, stacks of flannel blankets with sheep and hobbyhorses for swaddling, a lightweight blue plastic basin Joan claimed would make bathing easier, and a portable bassinet with a handle that looked for all the world like a picnic basket.
“She’ll outgrow this soon, but it’s the perfect temporary solution.
” Joan had also picked out a small stuffed elephant that was quite possibly the softest thing Miranda had ever felt against her skin.
Miranda set to work laundering everything while the newly swaddled baby slept in the bassinet with the elephant at her feet, and Joan made a simple dinner of soup with leftover chicken, carrots, and potatoes from her garden, and fresh parsley for garnish.
It tasted clean and hearty, and between the two of them, they ate the whole pot.
Lying in bed that night, the adrenaline of the day mostly chased away by exhaustion, Miranda wondered where Winnie was and how she might be feeling. Bereft. Despondent. Hopeless. All the things Miranda herself had been feeling that very morning.
Was it possible her sister might also be feeling relieved? She hoped so much that her sister—who’d given her the most remarkable gift—felt just the tiniest bit lighter today.
That thought sent her to sleep.
Barely two hours later the remarkable gift woke up again.
And so began five hours of unsuccessful attempts to get her to settle down.
By five in the morning, Miranda cried with the baby.
Good lord, she had to figure out a name soon, so she could stop referring to this child so impersonally.
The names she and Tom had picked out felt off-limits, and she was too out of sorts from lack of sleep to think of anything else.
Finally—finally, sometime between six and seven in the morning—with the baby’s head against her left shoulder, Miranda bounced and walked to soothe her and she finally fell deeply asleep.
She didn’t even stir when Miranda set her in the bassinet.
As Miranda drifted off to sleep herself, she looked out the windows of her bedroom as the sun began to rise orange and yellow through the eucalyptus and redwood trees.
Dawn.
Everything was going to be alright.