Chapter 16
Olivia found the bag on the twentieth, behind the child's door, while she was changing the bed.
She nearly missed it. It was tucked into the corner where the door swung, and the door hid it. She had the sheets in her arms and was turning to go out when her foot touched leather. She looked down.
The carpetbag was packed.
She knew it before she knelt. It sat square and full, with its brass corners shining.
It had sat like that by the bed every night in December, before she stopped looking.
The mouth was closed. On top, folded once, was the notebook the doctor had given the child at Christmas, with the ribbon marking the place.
Olivia set the sheets down on the floor.
She opened the bag. She had no right to, and she did it anyway. The brown dress, folded as neatly as a shop parcel. The nightgown. Stockings, rolled. Everything the child owned in the world, which was not much, laid in with a care that made her throat close.
The notebook was on top because the child was still using it. When it was not needed, it would go in with the rest, and the bag would be shut.
And then the child would sit on her stool and wait to be sent.
Olivia was still on her knees when Antonia came in.
The child stopped in the doorway. Her eyes went to the open bag, then to Olivia. Her face did not change at all, and that was the worst of it. She was not frightened or ashamed. Hers was the look of a person who has been found doing a sensible task.
"It's best to be ready," she said, "before they tell you."
"Antonia."
"On the train they told you at the platform. You had to have your bag." The child came in and closed the door behind her, so that the bag was hidden again. "The first of April is circled. I saw it. That's when Mr. Croft comes back. I'll have the book in by then. I'm just using it now."
Olivia got up off her knees.
She did not know what she was going to do until she had done it. She crossed the room, took the child in her arms, and held her. Not gently. Hard, the way she had wanted to on the porch in December and had not dared. The child was stiff as a board. Then, after a moment, she was not.
"No train," Olivia said, into the red hair. "No train is taking you anywhere. Do you hear me? Not in April. Not ever. I won't have it."
She heard the promise come out of her mouth, whole and certain.
Then she heard it crack. There was a paper in the doctor's desk that said until spring.
The Society held the child's papers, and the doctor had signed them.
And ten days ago the man she was married to had told the reverend, through a door, that he had wanted a mother for the girl and nothing more.
In all the weeks since September, he had never once said a word about what came after the thaw.
Nor had she asked him.
She was holding a child and promising her a home she had no power to give. She knew it. And the child, she thought, knew it too. The small, stiff body in her arms did not soften any further. After a moment, Antonia stepped back. She looked up at Olivia, and said nothing at all.
* * *
Olivia went down to the surgery with the bag in her hand.
There was no knock. That door had been knocked on for two months, and she was done with it. She opened it and went in. Charles looked up from his desk. She set the carpetbag down on the table where he laid out his instruments.
"Open it."
His eyes went to the bag, then to her. Then, slowly, he undid the clasp and looked inside.
She watched him see it. His face understood the folded dress, the rolled stockings, the ribbon. She had wanted him to feel exactly what she had felt on her knees on the bedroom floor. It was worse than she had wanted, and she did not care.
"She's packed since the fourteenth," Olivia said. "She's been sitting on that stool for six days with her bag behind the door, waiting for someone to come and get her. The way she waited on the train. She saw the calendar, Charles. She saw your circle."
He said nothing.
"So I'm asking. Does she go back in April? When the agent comes with the thaw, does she go down that hill to the depot with her bag? Does she get on his train to Denver, to the Society, to another line of families pulling their skirts? Is that what happens?"
"Olivia..."
"Because I should like to know. I was hired to mother her.
That was the advertisement. A woman's hand for a motherless girl.
I have given it. I have not asked for anything that was not in writing, as you told the reverend.
" She saw him flinch, and went on. "So tell me, as a matter of business, whether the mother is to be consulted.
Or whether she simply keeps the house, minds the child, and hands her over at the platform when the paper says. "
He was on his feet. She had not seen him stand.
"The Society holds her papers." His voice was rough.
"You know that. I signed a board-and-keep agreement in September, until the thaw.
It was the only paper the agent had, and the only one I could sign.
The child is placed by the Children's Aid Society of New York, and the placement is theirs to end.
The law is not mine to bend. I cannot keep her by wanting to. "
"Have you tried?"
"Tried what?"
"Wanting to."
The word lay on the table between them, beside the bag.
For a moment she thought he was going to speak. His mouth opened. Then it shut. His eyes went to the surgery door, the way they always did, and she saw him reach for it. Not with his hand. With the whole of himself.
"You hide behind the law," she said, "the way you hide behind that door.
You've a paper that says until spring, so you needn't think past it.
You've a bell that rings, so you needn't stay in a room.
You've a name for me, and it's the child's mother, so you needn't ask what else I am.
" She took a breath. "She's eight years old, Charles.
She packed her bag. What do you mean to do? "
No answer came.
She waited. Ten years had taught her to wait for a great deal. A man finding his tongue in a surgery was not the hardest of them.
Nothing came. She saw him try. She saw the words come up as far as his throat and stop there, the way the child's had stopped for fifty-eight days. For a moment she was sorry for him. Then she thought of the folded dress, and was not.
Olivia picked up the carpetbag. She turned, went out, and closed the door behind her. Quietly. She did not slam it. She had never slammed a door in her life, and she was not going to give him the satisfaction of a sound.
* * *
The photograph was on the desk. It had always been on the desk.
Charles sat down in front of it after the house was asleep. It was a long time since he had sat in front of it. A thousand times he had passed it, going to the drawer, to the bottles, to the door. He had stopped seeing it, the way a man stops seeing the pattern on his own wallpaper. Now he looked.
Maggie, at twenty-four, in the dress she had been married in. Dark-haired, half smiling, with her chin up because the photographer had told her to hold still and she had thought that was funny. Three years. Three years and ten days. He had buried her in ground so hard the men had needed picks.
She had not sent for him. That was what he had never said aloud.
She had been dying in his bed for four days, and she had not sent for him, because the camp needed him more.
And he had let the camp need him more. He had let it need him more every day since.
So that he would never again have to be in a room where someone he loved was dying, and he could do nothing.
That was the door. The reverend had never said so in those words, but that was the door. He had been on the wrong side of it for three years, and called it duty.
On the other side of the desk was the notebook.
Antonia had left it. She had come down after Olivia had gone up.
Without a word, she had set it on the corner of his desk, and gone away again.
It was open. He had not touched it. He looked now, from where he sat.
His own inscription was on the front page in his own small hand.
Under it, in hers, were the sections she had made. Remedies. Observations.
The observations he left unread. He found he could not.
Two silences in the house.
Upstairs, a door that had been locked for ten nights.
Behind it, a woman who had walked into his surgery through a wagonload of broken men and told him she was not Maggie.
Who had scrubbed his table, and taken his arm on a hill.
Who had asked him tonight, with a packed bag between them, whether he had tried wanting.
Down the hall, a child on a stool with her boots on. Waiting to be sent, the way the men in the bunkhouse had waited. He had seen it in October and known what it was. Then he had gone out to the next call.
The next call. There was always a next call. A whole life he had built out of the next call. It had kept him warm for three years. Tonight, for the first time, it did not.
He sat between the photograph and the notebook until the lamp burned down.
He could not have said, when it went out, which of the two silences frightened him more.