She took off her boots in the hallway and hung her sweater on a hook by the door. It was still chilly in the house, from months of freezing weather. Lila could hear voices in the parlor and, standing in the hallway, she was reminded of the first time Richard had brought her here. Then it had been Helen Grey’s voice she had heard, and the sound of it had made her frightened to go in. She’d had a strong sense of interrupting something, of stepping inside a place where she didn’t belong.
“Don’t worry,” Richard had whispered to her, and he had taken her arm to give her courage. “They’re going to be crazy about you.”
Janet Ross was sitting on the couch, still wearing her coat, when Lila walked into the room. Jason had just put out a cigarette and was coughing. His cough, Lila couldn’t help noticing, was getting worse.
“I guess you lied to me,” Lila said, right away, not willing to give Janet Ross an inch.
“I’ll bet you ladies are thirsty,” Jason Grey said. He had been sitting in the old chair that faced the couch, and now he stood. “What if I offered you both some bourbon and water?”
Lila and Janet Ross were staring at each other.
“None for me,” Lila said to her father-in-law.
“None for me,” Janet echoed.
“You’ll excuse me if I get some for myself,” Jason Grey said, and he left the room. They could hear him in the kitchen, but then the back door slammed, and Lila knew that what he’d wanted wasn’t a drink but an excuse to leave them alone.
“I guess your father-in-law lives here by himself,” Janet Ross said. “You can always tell just by looking at a room.”
Lila sat down in the armchair. She could still hear the birds outside, even through the closed windows.
“You can tell from a room when something’s gone wrong,” Janet said.
She looked at Lila then.
“As soon as I saw you I knew you were Susan’s birth mother,” she said.
The name cut right through Lila. That was definitely not her daughter’s name, not Susan. All during her pregnancy, and even after the baby was born, Lila had not once thought of a name for her daughter. It was only lately that she felt her daughter had to have a name, and she certainly wasn’t about to let someone like Janet Ross choose it.
“Not her birth mother,” Lila said. “Her real mother.”
Janet Ross looked toward the doorway of the parlor after Jason Grey. “Maybe I will have that bourbon,” she said.
“I don’t think there is any,” Lila told her. “He just wanted to get out of the room.”
“Well, I don’t blame him,” Janet said. She unbuttoned her coat, but she was so nervous that she couldn’t get all the buttons undone. “It certainly was a different kind of January back then,” she said. “It was so cold that when you stepped out for a second to get the mail your eyelashes froze together and you couldn’t see a thing.”
“I know what it was like,” Lila said.
“When the phone call came I thought I was dreaming,” Janet said. “I was half asleep, and my husband had worked late the day before so he was exhausted—he didn’t even hear it ring.”
“Look,” Lila said, “I don’t care about you or your husband. I don’t care about anything you have to say. I just want to know where she is.”
“I know that’s what you want,” Janet said. “That’s why I’m telling you this. Because I remember everything about it. I remember thinking, This is going to be the best day of my life. Even before it happens to me, I know it can never be any better.”
They were in Dr. Marshall’s office when he brought her in to them. At first Janet was afraid to touch her; she had wanted her so much that now if she reached out a little too quickly the baby might dissolve into smoke. Of course, once she did hold the baby she refused to let go. She held her all the way back to East China and refused to speak. Even when her husband asked her a direct question, she just couldn’t answer. It was all too perfect to talk about. From the window of the train they could see that the sound had frozen solid, each wave had turned into green ice.
That first night Janet sat in the rocking chair in the nursery, fed the baby a bottle, and sang her to sleep. Lewis had wanted to call the baby Deborah, after his grandmother, but the name Susan came to Janet the moment Dr. Marshall put the baby in her arms, and she insisted upon it.
After that first quiet night Susan couldn’t seem to sleep, and Janet had to rock with her for hours. The baby slept peacefully during the day, but as soon as it grew dark she was restless. All the books assured Janet that this sort of fretting was normal, but sometimes, after Susan had finally fallen asleep and her mouth was still puckered from crying, Janet wondered if it was something more, if Susan simply couldn’t bear the dark. After a while, they settled into a routine, but Janet still felt drawn to the nursery at night. She stood in the doorway, and even from a distance she could see that Susan’s skin was luminous. She nearly shimmered beneath her woolen blanket, and even on moonless nights the nursery seemed brighter than the rest of the house, as if the baby had managed to chase away the night.
Janet’s husband, Lewis, may not have been a model husband—he worked overtime too much, and he sometimes didn’t listen to a word she said—but he was a good father to Susan. He brought home dresses and toys, and when the baby came down with a cold in February he took turns rocking her back to sleep. Susan’s cold lingered for more than a month. It seemed to wrap her in a cocoon, and Janet had the feeling that the baby was far away, even when she was holding her. Janet had Lewis hook up an intercom to connect their bedroom with the nursery, and whenever she heard a hiccup or a cough in the middle of the night she sat up in bed, eyes riveted to the intercom until it was quiet again. She was overanxious, but what had she expected? She had been afraid of losing this baby even before she had her, and now she couldn’t escape the uneasy feeling that Susan was somehow on loan to her, and that sooner or later she’d have to give her up.
In early April the weather turned warmer and Susan’s lingering cold disappeared. Janet began to take her everywhere, first to the market, and then for drives in the car. They went to towns where Janet had never been before, to restaurants and diners where Susan sat in her infant seat, propped up on the table quietly drinking her bottle without any fuss at all. For the first time in her life Janet began to talk to strangers, and when she did, she lied. She pretended that she was Susan’s natural mother; she described her labor to waitresses, she discussed her nursing problems with women at the next table. And all the while she felt Susan watching her, studying her carefully with her wide eyes.
At three months, Susan had smiled for the first time. A few weeks later she actually turned over and both her parents were so overcome they had tears in their eyes. Susan watched everything now, and she looked so knowing that Janet sometimes felt uncomfortable. She had gotten into the habit of talking to Susan all day long, calling out each ingredient as she added to the batter of a chocolate cake, reading aloud from the morning newspaper. Sometimes Janet marveled at her own nerve. How had she ever dared to think she could take care of this child? How could she have pretended to be someone’s mother?
Janet felt proud whenever Susan did anything new, as if she had something to do with the child’s brilliance. She could sit for hours, rapt, as Susan studied the mobile above her crib, or carefully examined her toes. They were a closed circle, the two of them, and even Lewis sometimes felt like an intruder. It may have been because of those colds Susan continued to have; though none was bad enough for a trip to the doctor, Janet was so protective that even she began to be amazed at how fierce her love had become. There was something about sitting up late at night with Susan that made Janet totally surrender to the child. Each time her daughter reached up and put her arms around her neck the world outside the nursery evaporated, the nightlight on the wall became far brighter than the moon.
There had been a two-month visit to the pediatrician, and there would be another at six months. But even if someone had s
uggested that something was wrong, Janet Ross wouldn’t have believed it. She didn’t even notice how small Susan was until the child was five months old. It was June; the mimosa trees were in flower and the air was silky. Janet took Susan down to the playground near the harbor for the first time in her new stroller. That day Susan was dressed in white cotton tights and a yellow dress, and Janet felt she had never seen a more beautiful child. At the park she sat on a green wooden bench with the other mothers. She took Susan out of her stroller and held her on her lap; together they watched two ten-year-old boys on the swings who were making themselves dizzy with height. Across from them, on another green bench, were two other mothers whose children were in strollers identical to Susan’s. They waved to Janet and she waved back gaily, and she didn’t even have the urge to lie to anyone about her labor and delivery. That’s how right she felt sitting there with the other mothers. That’s how perfect the day was.
When it was time to go home, Janet put Susan back into the stroller and walked past the mothers on the bench across from theirs.
“Look,” one of the women said to her child, “a brand-new baby!”
The children in the other strollers stared gravely at Susan.
“Not all that new,” Janet smiled.
“God, I can barely remember when Jessie was that small,” the woman said.
“I don’t think Paul was ever that small,” her friend said. “He was ten pounds two ounces at birth.”
Janet bent down to the stroller and smiled. “Hear that?” she said to Susan. “But just you wait till you’re as old as these babies are now. I won’t even be able to lift you up.”
Susan looked so beautiful in her stroller that Janet could hardly bear it. She had the urge to pick her up again; instead she smoothed down Susan’s skirt.
“How old is she?” the first mother asked Janet. “About six weeks?”
“Six weeks!” Janet laughed. “She was just five months. She’s already wearing size six months clothes.”
The two mothers on the bench looked at each other; both knew that a newborn child could fit into that size.
“She was only five pounds six ounces when she was born,” Janet said, flustered.
Susan had untied her hat and the two mothers were studying her.
“How old are yours?” Janet said stiffly.
“I love that hat of hers,” one of the mothers said. “I never saw anything so cute.”
Janet looked closely at the two other children in their strollers; both were twice Susan’s size and Janet guessed they were somewhere between a year and eighteen months old.
“I’d really like to know,” Janet said now. “How old are they?”
“Jessie is four months this week, but Paul is already six months,” one of the mothers said quietly.
“My daughter is very petite,” Janet said quickly. She felt as though she’d been slapped.
“That’s right.” The other mother was just as quick to agree. “Five foot two, eyes of blue. She’ll have all the boys chasing after her.”
Janet walked home then. Susan fell asleep on the way, and Janet left her out on the porch in her stroller. She went inside and sat down on the couch, but after a while she went and got her baby. It just didn’t seem right to leave her out there, asleep and defenseless, because it now seemed that the air was a little too silky, and the sky was almost threatening, it was too bright and too blue.
That night Janet asked her husband to measure Susan. They held her down on the couch and lined up a tape measure. Janet looked up the growth chart in the back of one of the baby books and she found that Susan’s length was that of a six- or eight-week-old baby. She had just stopped growing, and they hadn’t even noticed. She had been getting four bottles of formula a day and she’d never cried out or complained that she was hungry, but when they weighed her now, sitting her down on the bathroom scale, she was only ten pounds.
Janet could feel something inside her snapping, but after she put Susan to sleep and Lewis wanted to talk about it, she couldn’t.
“There’s nothing wrong with her,” Janet insisted.
But she lay in bed awake all night, and she could tell Lewis was awake, too.
“I’ve thought it over,” he told her in the morning. “There probably is nothing wrong with her, but maybe she has a hormone deficiency or something. I just want to take her in and get her examined. I want to be sure.”
He was right, and Janet nodded her head, but she just couldn’t stand it. Lewis took the day off from work and they drove to see the pediatrician. When the doctor saw Susan something in his eyes changed. It passed in a moment, and he calmly examined Susan, but Janet knew then that something was wrong. He never accused them of anything, although now all Janet could think of was why hadn’t they thought to weigh her, why hadn’t they brought her in one of those times she was coughing and feverish? By the end of the exam the doctor had made an appointment for a chest X-ray that afternoon at Central Suffolk Hospital.
“That’s impossible,” Janet found herself saying. “Susan takes a nap in the afternoon.”
“Janet!” her husband said.
“I don’t think you understand,” the doctor said gently. “There may be a problem with her heart, and that’s what may have affected her growth.”
But Janet understood perfectly. They were about to take Susan away from her. When she was taken into the X-ray department Janet had to look away. The technicians had fitted Susan into a sort of glass tube to keep her from moving, and inside the glass Susan looked tinier than ever and so beautiful it nearly broke Janet’s heart. She tried to think of a reason why she would be punished this way, and she knew it could only be that she hadn’t been a good enough mother. Not a real mother. She had resented the crying in the night sometimes, she had been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of dirty laundry one baby could generate. And now she was being punished, and what’s more, she deserved it.
They discovered a congenital heart lesion. It had stopped Susan’s growth and made her delicate enough to catch so many colds. The valves of her heart were beyond repair. Janet and Lewis took her to Mount Sinai for a second opinion, but the second opinion was the same as the first. Susan would not last through her first year. The strange thing was that, if anything, Susan became more beautiful, and when Janet took her for walks in her stroller people turned and stared and some of them couldn’t stop themselves from coming right up to tell Janet what a lovely daughter she had. Janet herself looked much older. Lewis told her to take it easy, not to work so hard, to sleep more. But Janet just didn’t feel she had the time to waste on things like sleeping and eating. She only wanted to be with Susan. She spent all day playing with her, and didn’t bother with supper for Lewis or vacuuming the rugs. She taught Susan to eat cereal off a tiny demitasse spoon, to clap her hands together, to wave goodbye. One afternoon, when they were sitting together on the floor, Susan stopped playing with the soft rattle she held, looked up at Janet and said “ma.” Janet felt her heart break in half, and all that night Susan ran her new sound together, “amamamamam,” and even after she had closed her eyes, when Janet went into the nursery to check on her, Susan turned in her sleep and called out to her.
In July Susan had a cold, and then a stomach virus; she just didn’t have the defenses to fight it off. And then, when it seemed that the virus had subsided, it suddenly got worse, and it happened so fast there was no time to think. One moment Susan was well enough to take solid foods, and the next she’d begun vomiting and her eyes had rolled upward so that all you could see was a milky white line beneath each lid. When they rushed her to the emergency ward she was absolutely limp, like a small doll who occasionally took a deep breath, and Janet thought to herself, This is a test. This is to get me ready for all I have to bear. Only a few hours after she was hooked up to an IV Susan revived, and as they took her home Janet realized that she hadn’t once allowed herself to cry. Even Lewis could do that, she had heard him in the bathroom, with the water in the sink runnin
g to mask the sound. But somehow, crying was an admission of what was happening to them, and Janet would never be ready for that.
She died on the second Sunday in August, when the sky was cloudless and the temperature eighty-two degrees. Janet woke up at five in the morning and, lying next to her husband in bed, she knew. The light that morning was pearl-colored and soft. It was the sort of morning when summer is everywhere, in all the rooms of the house and in every backyard. Janet slipped out of bed, leaving her husband asleep. When he got up at seven, he found Janet in the nursery, rocking back and forth in the chair, holding the dead child. There were always blackbirds in East China, but this morning they called so loudly in the trees that they set all the neighborhood cats howling. Lewis sat down on the carpeted floor of the nursery and put his head in his wife’s lap, and because there was no longer any reason not to, Janet finally let herself cry.
They couldn’t find a coffin small enough, so they had one specially made. By the following morning all signs that a child had been in the house were gone: the crib and all the boxes of clothes were taken up to the attic; the photograph albums and toys were stored in the cellar behind an old metal sink. But all that first night Janet swore she heard a baby crying for its mother.
The day that Lila had appeared at the front door Janet was suspicious, and as soon as Lila began to question her about her children, she was a hundred percent sure. It wasn’t unexpected—why shouldn’t Susan’s birth mother come back after all these years? Why shouldn’t she accuse her of murder? But Janet wasn’t about to admit anything, and when Lila finally left the house Janet double-locked the front door, and she didn’t dare take another breath until she heard Lila drive away.