What went unspoken was that I was the one who hadn’t been watching that morning.
A light rain was falling, dropping through the nearby trees like quiet music. Somewhere beneath the fallen leaves, a lone, late-in-the-season cricket chirruped for a mate. There was nothing odd or frightening about the farmhouse. No local legends of ghosts. No unexplained deaths. Even though I was used to Bliss House, I was comfortable here, which was probably why I felt relaxed enough to tell Rachel about seeing Olivia the day of Eva’s funeral. I had to tell someone, and I couldn’t tell Nonie. She would’ve made me lie down until the notion passed.
“You poor baby. How frightening.” Rachel touched my hand after I’d told her everything. If she noticed that it was trembling slightly, she didn’t say. Behind us in the kitchen, I could hear her new housekeeper, Sarah, readying the tea tray.
“You told Press, didn’t you? What did he say?”
“Of course I didn’t tell him. He’d think I was insane. Rachel, you know I wouldn’t make something like that up, don’t you? You can’t tell him I told you, either.”
Rachel shook her head.
“I’ve said a hundred times that house is haunted, silly. And how like Olivia to keep hanging around. The old. . . .” She caught herself and gave me a wicked little smirk. “What are you going to do?” Then her face changed and she put her hand to her belly. “The beast is kicking again. Such a little stinker already. Jack’s sure it’s a girl, but I told him I heard that intelligent men father girls. So, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be a boy, right?” She laughed, amused by her own joke. “Want to feel?”
That was Rachel. Impulsive. Playfully cruel. Maybe she was being genuine, but I was still sensitive because of Eva. I didn’t know what I would do if she gave birth to a baby girl just weeks after Eva’s death. The thought sickened me.
“No. I—”
Before I could finish, she grabbed my hand and laid it on the swell of her stomach. She watched my face expectantly as though waiting for me to comment on a fabulous new hat or pair of shoes she’d just purchased.
Beneath the fabric of her blouse, I felt the rolling pressure of a shoulder or knee of the baby as it squirmed in her womb. She was due within weeks, and the baby was stunningly active, given how large it was inside her. At the same point in both of my pregnancies, my children had been still for such long periods that I’d lain awake at night, alert for any kind of movement and fearful that they had died. Press had humored me, putting his face against my naked belly, listening. Telling me he felt and heard things that I suspected he really hadn’t.
I nodded and tried a smile. Rachel was satisfied.
“Do you want me to come over and scare Olivia away? Or we could do an exorcism. You’ve got Father Aaron. Don’t priests do that sort of thing?”
“Please don’t be mean. I shouldn’t have told you. You must think I’m an idiot.”
“You know how Olivia was about me. She thought all Jews stole babies and ate them or something.”
I objected, even though I knew she wasn’t far from wrong. I hadn’t known Olivia before World War II, but the inhuman treatment of the German and Polish Jews in the war obviously hadn’t made any kind of impression on her. Sensible about so many things, she was shamelessly anti-Semitic.
“She was old-fashioned. But I never heard her say one unpleasant thing about you.”
Rachel made a scoffing sound. Then she turned in her chair to call into the house.
“Sarah. Where’s that tea? And bring out some of those ladyfingers you baked this morning.”
Sarah was new because Rachel didn’t keep housekeepers long. I assumed she wore them out with her demands. It never occurred to me then that some of them might not want to work for her because of her Jewish background. Jack wasn’t Jewish, or any other faith that I knew of. I wondered how they would raise the baby, but I didn’t ask.
“Maybe I don’t want Olivia to go away. Maybe she’s trying to tell me something.”
Rachel leaned forward as best she could. “That does sound a little crazy, honey. Are you sure you’re all right?” Her dark eyes were serious. “Press told me he didn’t think you were doing very well.”
I looked down at my hands in my lap, noticing how bitten and ragged several of the nails on my left hand were. I didn’t remember biting them. It was an old, old habit, one that Nonie had broken me of when I was seven or eight.
“I don’t think about her every minute, the way I have been.”