Chapter Twenty-Five
Faye took Molly’s sheets from the dryer, held them to her nose, breathed them in like fresh air.
Cotton as whipped as the color white, as scorched as sunlight on the bluest day.
She remembered being a girl, pulling sheets off the line from the house by the cove, Maeve’s house now, Maeve’s chaotic household now.
Back then, the sheets might have been out for days, through rain and mist, dry enough to bring in when the sun got around to doing its job.
Back then, Faye would shroud her whole body in her bedsheets, suck in the taste of sea and grass and brine through her open mouth, her tongue licking the threads.
She would imagine herself mummified, the sheet a layer of protection between her dead body and what would readily consume it—fire, maggots, shrapnel, tire rubber, tank tread—though it was these morbid thoughts that she longed to escape the most. The time that Thomas found her like that, cocooned head to toe on a bare mattress, was the only time he or Jean ever laid an angry hand on her.
He’d dumped her out like a potato from a bag.
When she recovered her footing, he swatted her firmly.
“Never do that again,” he’d said, then pulled her to him, enfolding her a surely as the cotton sheet had done.
That may have been the day Faye knew for certain that Thomas loved her.
She flattened the top sheet against her body, folded and smoothed, right over left, until it was a neat package to be delivered to the upstairs bedroom, the yellow one, Molly’s.
She folded the bottom sheet next, making a clever tuck of the elastic corner that she’d learned from Jean.
Perhaps she had learned from Jean how to tuck away worry too.
When the girls were little and helped with the laundry, she had tried to teach them to fold their sheets instead of impatiently wadding them around their forearms like they were winding an electric cord.
She never told them about wrapping herself in sheets.
It was not that she didn’t want to imagine them doing the same, wondering what it would be like to be dead.
It was more that she didn’t want them to know that’s what she had been like as a girl.
She hoped her girls would be happy, that their lives would be uncomplicated, clean and dry, carried on a gentle breeze.
Maybe she had hoped that the worst thing that would ever happen to them was that they’d be bad at doing chores.
“You two are hopeless,” she would say, snatching the sheets back to fold them properly. “You’ll make terrible wives.”
“Oh, no. Not that,” Maeve replied, flipping her hand to her forehead. “Whatever shall we do with ourselves, dear sister?”
Faye remembered the laughter, when Molly collapsed on the floor, a curtain on a stage gone dark. “We are doomed!”
Faye breathed in the sheets once more before they cooled and the scent was gone.
She shouldn’t have said that, the thing about them making terrible wives.
In her head now, it sounded like a curse.
She pulled the string to turn off the overhead light and carried the sheets and a few towels up the stairs.
The door was open, so Faye went in without knocking.
She set the towels on the dresser and paused to stare out the window, holding the sheets to her chest. Her mind wandered as her eyes followed the line of the barn to the silver maple.
William’s son would be in his mid-forties if he had lived.
And where would Faye be now if he had? She was fifty-seven, and it was true what people said.
She looked young for her age. She celebrated Fiadh’s birthday, after all, not her own.
Maybe she was really fifty-six, or fifty-five even.
Could she have been a stepmother if Sterling had lived?
When she was pregnant with Maeve, she’d secretly wondered whether William would save her or the baby she carried if something went wrong during childbirth.
She kept her question to herself, though she imagined telling William to choose the baby over her, secretly hoping he would choose her anyway.
What kind of woman was she, to have such a terrible thought!
And then there were pregnancies she wasn’t able to carry to term.
She’d feared it was punishment for her selfishness.
Her life, her family, might have been so different if she’d chosen different paths.
But it had not gone a different way. Only this one.
The maple was beginning to leaf out. New life, like Molly, ready to burst. There must be a phrase for when a woman is near birth, like a leaf bud waiting for spring.
Faye pulled the fitted sheet over Molly’s bare mattress.
Maybe clean sheets would help. That morning, Molly had been so uncomfortable, the baby kicking at her relentlessly.
She had no sense of modesty, that girl, pulling up her shirt, leaning into the sofa cushions to rub her exposed belly with nut cream Wendy had given her.
“I didn’t sleep at all,” she complained.
“Please baby, please baby, please baby!”
“It’s bad?” Faye asked.
Molly rolled her head, stretching her neck and jaw. “She’s right there. If I could—” She paused and her teeth clenched—“stick my fingers in, I could touch her and take care of her and make whatever is bothering her better.” She held her belly with both hands like a medicine ball, shushing the baby.
Faye had carefully twisted a lock of Molly’s hair around her finger before letting it spring back.
Oh, if only a mother’s touch could solve all a child’s problems!
“If it’s any consolation at all, you look good.
You’re almost there.” She hesitated but brought up the sore subject anyway.
Molly had been clear. She would do this on her own.
The father was out of the picture. “We can still call Leo . . .”
Molly yanked her shirt down. “Will you please—I’m begging you, Mom. You and Maeve and Daddy. Wendy! All of you. Please, drop it.”
“I’m sorry. I am. It’s just—”
“No, it’s not just anything! God, I can’t believe I’m here.
” Molly had stuck it out as long as possible in DC, but those people she’d been living with—“the hippies,” Molly called them—had told her she couldn’t live there with a baby because a baby couldn’t follow the quiet hour rules, of all things.
And finding a new place that she could afford when she was seven months pregnant had proved impossible.
Her petulance, while understandable, was hard to take.
“We’re not so bad . . .”
“I don’t know what I’m doing, Mom. I’m not you. Maeve was right. I don’t even like kids. I hardly like anyone.”
“Oh, Pix. That’s the hormones talking. You’re being too hard on yourself.”
“Am I? What if I’m terrible at it? That’s why you all want me to call Leo. You think I’ll fail at this.”
She fell into Faye’s arms then, her little girl, suddenly so at odds with the world.
Was it sudden? Molly had been fighting for so long.
Maybe motherhood would be the thing that would correct Molly’s course, though it was true that Faye had her doubts.
“You’ll be happy to have her,” Faye said, rubbing Molly’s shoulders.
“Like I was happy to have you girls. We both were.”
Molly cinched herself in. “I’m going to find Dad.”
Faye smoothed the flat sheet, then whipped the quilt into place.
From the window, she could make out Molly’s splayed legs now, stretched into the sun that flooded through the white-and-black barn.
Only William could keep her from blowing her top these days.
He had stripped the crib that Maeve used for both Dylan and Opal, giving it a fresh coat of white paint for the little girl Molly would have any day.
He’d walked her through every detail of his process, lulling her like a hypnotist. Since his heart attack he’d honed that gift, her husband.
The gift of keeping his cool. It seemed nothing could rattle him anymore.
“She doesn’t want advice,” he said, when she’d come home bearing news that she was not going back to college after all. Instead, she was having a baby. “Not from you and definitely not from Maeve. Her little wheels are spinning up there.”
The revelations had happened right on top of each other—boom, boom, boom—the thing with Maeve and Wendy, then Molly calling to say she was done with being a nanny, that she found another job and was staying in DC.
Faye had doubted both of her daughters. But Maeve had proven her wrong—so wrong.
She had been steady through the breakup with Sam, both of them so patient with Dylan and Opal.
And the transition of Wendy into their lives had been .
. . well, it had been fine. More than fine.
Faye was charmed by Wendy, her ease, her air of assumption that she could be herself and that everyone could come around at their own pace.
She was as fresh as those clean sheets. Now, if only Molly could surprise her too.
Faye sat for a moment, pressed Molly’s pillow to her face.
She couldn’t hear a single sound except the gentle buzzing in her own ears.
Soon enough there would be baby noises and baby smells again in the house.
Oh. And laughter! God how she missed Molly’s laugh!
She never wanted to admit to herself that maybe she and William had let Molly down, that maybe they shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss her sullenness.
It was so long ago, when her laughter faded.
She straightened a bobby pin that had come loose behind her ear, fighting the urge to flop down and swaddle herself in the freshly laundered bedding. “Pshhh,” she said, flipping her hand. No time for nonsense. No time to dwell in the past. Molly needed her.