It can only be Lev’s, was her answer and he’d accepted it.
He is the first to pass.
* * *
The next time she’s at an appointment, she asks the doctor what the odd feeling she sometimes gets in her stomach is, tiny frantic wings. She doesn’t think it’s nerves, though she’s nervous all the time. The doctor stares at her with some amusement and tells her that’s the baby. It’s fluttering. Bea is so struck by this, by these unexpected first movements—she had envisioned something much more obvious and at the hands and feet stage—she asks to hear the heartbeat again, and this time, alone and without Lev, Casey in the waiting room, she cries. She thinks of what her mother told her all those years ago when Lo was born. She thinks that if being a sister is a promise you make, then being a mother must be a promise that you are. And for the first time since Bea found out she was pregnant, it’s a promise she wants to be.
* * *
She wakes up to a damp bed.
Her body warms with embarrassment as she tries to figure out how she’ll explain this to Lev, the first real indignity of her impending motherhood. She pushes the sheets back and is shocked when she sees all the red. She doesn’t understand it at first and then, horrifyingly, she does: blood. It’s blood.
She’s aware of other things; the dull ache in her abdomen.
She slips out of bed carefully without disturbing Lev and tiptoes, covered in her own blood, to the shower. She strips out of her clothes. She can’t look at her body in the mirror. She turns the water on as hot as it will go. Lev finds her there, curled up under the spray, sobbing. He steps inside with his clothes on to turn the water off and then wraps her in a towel. He helps her to dress because she is so overcome with grief, everything else feels too abstract to understand, let alone execute: the simple act of dressing. The simple act of walking out of the house. He leaves a note for Casey on the desk, the bloody sheets still on their bed, and drives Bea to the hospital. She watches him from the passenger’s side. His face is pale and his jaw is set. She’s still bleeding, can feel herself bleeding. She hates that she can feel it, this failure of her body, which up until this point did exactly what it was supposed to do.
God will keep this soul, Lev promises her.
This will be cold, the doctor warns her, smoothing the gel across her womb ahead of the ultrasound. She squeezes her eyes shut and wishes she could disappear.
But there’s a heartbeat.
Lev holds her hand the whole ride home.
She can still feel herself bleeding. She’s on pelvic rest. She should not lift heavy things. She presses her hand to her stomach and she thinks about the ultrasound. The small perfect shape of her baby, its heartbeat, and just there next to it—a stain.
FEBRUARY 2018
At the first hint of sunrise, I head to Chapman House.
I give them no warning, fumbling through the process of leaving the Poughkeepsie station on my own and then paying a stupid amount of money for the taxi that delivers me from civilization. The driver asks, doubtfully, if I’m allowed to be where I say I want to go. She lets me off at the road up, and I walk the rest of the way. The house seems even bigger, more impressive, meeting it on foot. When I reach the front door, I stand there, a dull whine in my head, wondering what will happen when Lev finds me on the other side. He may have told me to leave but he didn’t tell me I couldn’t come back.
I knock on the door.
No one meets me.
This possibility didn’t occur to me. So many people live here, Casey works here—I thought there’d be someone. I round the house to the windows at the back and peer inside. The Great Room is empty, the lights off. Footsteps have been crushed through the freshly fallen snow leading from the door, interrupting the pristine landscape.
They ghost the path to the lake.
I decide to follow them.
The pines creak, rocking slowly in the wind, and the farther down the path I walk, the more I think about what Casey said about being alone with God out here, and I wonder if that means she experiences a deeper silence—or a richer one.
When the trees begin to thin, I hear voices ahead.
I slow my pace.
The lake comes into view, and I stay just inside the trees, cloaked in the cover they offer. There are two people near the water’s edge and I don’t know what to make of what I’m looking at, not at first. Lev. He’s wearing a Henley, jeans, no coat. If I’m cold—and I am—he has to be freezing, but I’m too far from him to tell. There’s another person next to him, a man, similarly underdressed. I spot Foster standing guard nearby. I inch forward, biting my lip. Lev and the man face the water with a certain kind of resolve, just enough to allow me to guess what might be about to happen.
And then it does.
My body seizes as they walk into the freezing lake. I flinch when the man yells as his body makes contact. I swear to God I can feel it, the awful, sickening burn of the water against my skin. Lev makes no sound. My pulse thrums in my ears at the sheer impossibility of that, of Lev’s utter calm as he’s enveloped by the lake, holding the man upright as he slowly collapses.
How does he not feel it?
Lev begins to speak. I can’t make out the words from here but his voice is as steady as a single sustained note of a song before falling away and making space for the man to echo the note back to him, a pale, more fractured imitation.
And then Lev eases him bodily into the water.
I stop breathing as soon as the man goes under and I resolve not to take a breath until he resurfaces. My heart pounds in my chest, and then my head. Black dots pattern in front of my eyes. I exhale; I have to breathe. The man stays under. Fear presses down on me and I feel my hand slowly reach for my pocket, my phone.
What if this isn’t a baptism?
And then Lev lets him up. It’s violent, the sound of the man’s choking coughs filling the air, but once he settles, he goes still beside Lev in the way Lev is still, as though he doesn’t feel the cold now either. Maybe he’s so shocked, he can’t.
The man falls into Lev’s arms and after a long moment of only holding him, the two make their way back to the shore, to Foster. When they reach Foster, they share the burden, supporting the man carefully between them as they continue forward.
The man sobs.
Their return to the house will put them directly in my path and I know I shouldn’t be found. I assess my surroundings. I can’t take the obvious route to Lev’s cabin, but if I cut through the trees, keeping left, I should eventually come across it. I move as quietly as I can over the snow, have only just made it past the point of discovery when I hear Foster, Lev and the man in the space I just stood. The man is saying thank you over and over again.
I resist looking back, though all I want to do is look back, and continue pushing ahead until I’m finally rewarded with Lev’s cabin.
Its front door opens for me. I let myself inside and take off my boots. It’s halfway between warm and cool in here; Lev must have been in not so long ago with the fire lit. If he was in here working, there are no hints of that work left behind. I take off my coat and sit on the bed in the corner and lean forward, my head in my hands. I may not believe in God, but I don’t move through the world with my eyes closed. I know what sacraments are and stripped of all the trappings and history and performance of church—Lev and the man, the water, the trees around them—made it all seem more real somehow. I think of Lev out there, in the water, perfectly still and untouched by the cold and it makes me wonder if that’s what faith shields you from, if that’s only one of the things that faith might make possible, and I’m suddenly, painfully aware of my own teeth chattering, my numb and aching joints, the shivers moving across my skin.