Jane rushed out into the hall. To the right, at the far end by Franklin’s offices, members of the staff were collecting, asking what the noise could have been. When they saw Jane none of them called to her or came to her aid. They were as frightened of her as of whatever had been smashing around in the basement.
The door to Bennie’s room was ajar.
Jane crossed the hall to it. It seemed to take an hour or more. The incalculable length of a dream.
Behind her, she heard Maggie and Kate run past, both of them wailing. The hallway’s width and height a perfect magnifier of their distress, sending their voices backward and forward and reaching down the stairwell as they made the turn.
When Jane got to the bedroom door she was exhausted. Her arm was too heavy to raise to the knob, so she just kept walking into the wood, nudging it wider with the toes of her shoes.
Everything was as she had left it when she last came in. Yet something had just been there. Something still was.
There were the tin soldiers lined up against the baseboards. The paint-chipped crib. Her boy’s little bed with the marigold headboard, the lace-fringed pillow, the sheets so tightly tucked in she could see the mattress’s lumps of stuffing push against the cotton.
“Bennie?”
She hoped he would come running to her from out of the walls, out of the air, the same as Sir had appeared. The boy would hear his mother’s voice, the depths of her love, the lengths she had gone to and the risks taken to provide him a way, and he would complete the last part of the crossing himself.
Nothing stirred. The thunderous knockings from below had stopped. Even the presence that had manifested in her bedroom—the thing that had made Kate Fox whisper Splitfoot—wasn’t there anymore, if it had been the same force to open the door.
“I’m here,” Jane said.
She stood there long enough that she discovered she was not trying to hear anything but detect the source of an almost imperceptible change in the room’s temperature. A new warmth. One that she remembered from other rooms in her life, spaces that were similarly chilled and, when she entered, would push against the cold through her own breathing and the beating of her heart.
The crib.
There was a reshaping of the blankets behind the narrow wooden bars she hadn’t noticed when she first entered. She wondered if an animal could have done it. A mouse or rat. But vermin don’t change the smell of a room like this by their breaths alone. Only a child does that. Only a baby.
She went to the crib and bent over it, drawing back the quilt with gentle tugs of her fingernails.
A boy. Maybe two months old. A baby she didn’t recognize, though it was like her own boys in many respects: square-featured, blue-eyed, a general resemblance to their father, which was to say good-looking without any particular beauty marks or aberrancies or exoticism.
“Who are you?” she said, already slipping her hands under its back and lifting it up to her face. “Do you have a name?”
As Jane looked into its eyes the baby’s eyes looked into her. A communion that altered the infant’s appearance in minuscule ways. The baby transformed into Bennie in the moments she held it as if drawing from her memories, the motherly times of being in the nursery, cold and tired but happy, seeing the child in her arms as forever hers.
The baby’s face soured. It didn’t change its features the way babies normally did—there was a mechanical aspect to it, an expert fakery, as if an enchanted doll—and Jane saw it. She didn’t mind. She told herself precisely: Don’t pay any mind to that. The baby may not be fully Bennie, not yet. But she was on a journey and this was the beginning. In any case, wasn’t she a mother? Wasn’t a moment like this when she felt the most secure, strong on her feet, her sicknesses held at bay? Didn’t she always see the nursery as the place where the doubts and hauntings of the everyday couldn’t touch her?
The baby cried.
Its eyes remained placid. The cheeks uncolored. Its body still in her hands. It sounded like a hungry infant. But in every other respect, it was the same doll-like surrogate to an actual blotchy-faced, blinking baby that it was a moment ago.
“There now,” Jane said, and it hushed by a degree.
She carried it over to the feeding chair. It took only a minute to pull down her dress with the infant waiting on her lap and then lift it to her breast. Its mouth found her nipple easily and suckled in even draws.
“There, there,” she whispered, and felt herself emptying.
13
“Jeannie?”
Franklin’s hand was on her shoulder, gently rocking her awake.
“I fell asleep,” she said, and discovered she was still in the feeding chair.
“Are you all right?”
She remembered the Fox girls. The younger one urging her to open a door within her. The true presence that Sir’s skin had always hidden coming into the house. The baby in her arms.
“Is he here?”
“Is who here, my love?”
Jane looked around the room. The infant was neither on her nor in its crib, though the blankets remained tousled just as they were after she lifted it. Her dress had been pulled up. Had Franklin done that when he found her and was choosing to discreetly not mention it? If not him, she stiffened to think of Sir being the one to slip the buttons into their eyelets at the back of her neck.
“Oh, Franklin,” she said, answering nothing.
“You weren’t in your room. I looked up and down. And found you here.”
“You don’t like this place.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” he lied. “I just don’t know what it is.”
“These are Bennie’s things.”
“I can see that.”
“This is Bennie’s room.”
Franklin had expressed varying degrees of worry over her for as long as they had been married. But Jane saw a different type of concern on his face now. It was as if she were dying. Or worse. As if she were dead and had come back a different creature altogether.
“It’s late,” he said. “Can I help you to bed?”
“Perhaps you can help me to yours?”
There was no promise in it. It was a request for assistance and nothing else.
Franklin offered his arm, and she held fast to it.
They closed the door to Bennie’s room behind them and started down the long hall to Franklin’s quarters. She tried to find the anger she’d held for her husband, but whether it was the disorienting events of the evening or a new resolution of her own making, she couldn’t find any.
As they walked, he tried to turn the moment toward the normal by talking about his dinner and its tedious guests, the husbandly sharing of the day pouring out of him after so long on his own, and Jane half listened to him. The other half heard the creak of a handle turning behind her and Bennie’s door pulling open an inch.
Franklin didn’t hear it. Just as he didn’t notice her touch a finger to the top of her chest where she felt a dampness.
She drew the finger away. Sticky and wet. The yellowish white of milk.
14
When they were first courting, Franklin fantasized about saving enough money to buy Jane a piano of her own. She loved to play, and could read sheet music but preferred her own compositions. Melodies that sounded at first like one heard before, a hymn or nursery song that lay just beyond memory, before shifting into a murkier key. Some called them “original,” while others said they gave them goosepimples, or brought on bad dreams.