Bea paused. Emma watched her blankly, hands neatly folded in her lap. The only sign of her tipsiness was one pinkie, on her left hand, which kept jumping up, then lying back down. “And?”
“And.” Where had Bea been going? She had been talking to talk, to keep Emma from leaving. She hadn’t told this story to anyone. It wasn’t a story, really, just a fantasy she’d had as a kid. It had nothing to do with her nerves, or her balled-up feet. Yet talking about it she felt at ease, much as she had felt answering the doctors’ questions at Fainwright, telling them what she knew they wanted to hear. It was like talking about a subject that was at once her and not her at all—as if, the more she talked, the further the subject grew from her, making it easier to talk. “I was scared. But also tempted. I started waking up every night just to stand at the bathroom door and be scared. I waited for something to happen. I didn’t know if I was supposed to make it happen, by opening the door, or if the people were supposed to come for me—if the door might just disappear and I would be in the forest. I had this idea that my grandparents might be there, too, my mother’s parents, who were dead. I waited like that every night for a week, maybe longer, and then I wouldn’t be able to sleep afterward because I was too excited and still hadn’t relieved myself.”
“And then you went in?”
“No. I never went in.”
Emma was quiet for a while. “Most children imagine things,” she said finally.
Bea looked out at the rain. She felt accused, but of what? Emma was already up again, making the trip to the saucer, but this time, when she returned, instead of dumping her cup out the window, she set it on the table, picked up the Pinkham’s, and drank from the bottle’s spout so delicately that when she set it down, Bea wondered if what she’d seen had really happened. Emma looked at Bea. “So your nerves,” she said gently. “They’re the reason you don’t have a child?”
Bea cringed at the tenderness in Emma’s voice. A moment ago, she had wanted Emma to believe her. She had even wanted to tell her something more, maybe something truer, but now Bea sensed a kind of greed in her, this fecund mother of nine, a ravenousness for any and all information. Bea had already said too much. She had exposed herself as Lillian had warned her never to do to the help. If Emma chose, she could make sure the whole North Shore knew by sunset that Beatrice Haven Cohn had a nervous disorder and regretted being childless.
Bea finished her Pinkham’s and set down her cup. She sat very straight. Just above the ground the rain was frenzied—it was impossible to tell which drops were going up and which down. She waited until she felt the vertebrae in her neck pop, then she said, in a calm, syrupy voice, “Thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity to give back in other ways. I’ve helped women and children less fortunate than myself and for that I’m grateful.” She smiled a smile she despised—her mother’s don’t-pretend-you-don’t-understand-me smile. “We all make compromises, as I’m sure you know.”
Emma didn’t smile back.
“I meant to ask,” Bea went on, “what you’ve done with the pillowcases. What kind of method you’ve devised. I find one of each pair, but not the match. It’s as if they’re off doing who knows what with the other missing ones. I can’t understand it.”
Emma’s pinkie jumped. “I’ll see what I can do, Mrs. Cohn.”
“Also, my spectacles. I don’t need them, which means I can see perfectly well that they’re not where I left them.” How she hated herself! “And there’s a bookend you must have dusted, a lion. Wherever you’ve taken it, I hope you’ll put it back with its mate.”
They were silent for a minute. Bea felt very lonely.
“That leak is getting worse, Mrs. Cohn.”
“I can hear.”
“Do you think . . .” Emma looked stricken.
“What?”
“Isn’t your uncle’s bathroom in that corner, upstairs?”
It took Bea a moment to understand. Then they ran together toward the stairs, their legs, weak with Pinkham’s, struggling to catch up.
Eleven