The baby just lay there, head back, beads of blood and foam on its bald head. Jolie blew again, and a miracle happened. The tiny chest heaved; the blue eyes popped sightlessly open. He began to wail. Celia Frode started the applause, and the others joined in . . . except for Elaine, who had retreated to where she was earlier, her arms once again clasping her midsection. The baby’s cries were constant now. Its hands made tiny fists.
“That’s my baby,” Tiffany said, and raised her arms. “My baby is crying. Give him to me.”
Jolie tied off the umbilical cord with a rubber band and wrapped the baby in the first thing that came to hand—a waitress’s apron someone had grabbed from a coathook. She passed the wailing bundle to Tiffany, who looked into his face, laughed, and kissed one gummy cheek.
“Where are those towels?” Erin demanded. “Get them now.”
“They won’t be too warm yet,” Kitty said.
“Get them.”
The towels were brought and Mary lined the Budweiser cooler with them. While she did, Lila saw more blood gushing from between Tiffany’s legs. A lot of blood. Pints, maybe.
“Is that normal?” someone asked.
“Perfectly.” Erin’s voice was firm and sure, confidence personified: absolutely no problem here. That was when Lila began to suspect that Tiffany was probably going to die. “But someone bring me more towels.”
Jolie Suratt moved to take the baby from his mother and put him in the makeshift Budweiser bassinet. Erin shook her head. “Let her hold him a little longer.”
That was when Lila knew for sure.
7
Sundown in what had once been the town of Dooling and was now Our Place.
Lila was sitting on the front stoop of the house on St. George Street with a stapled sheaf of paper in her hands when Janice Coates came up the walk. When Janice sat down next to her, Lila caught a scent of juniper. From a pocket inside her quilted vest, the ex-warden removed the source: a pint bottle of Schenley’s gin. She held it out to Lila. Lila shook her head.
“Retained placenta,” Janice said. “That’s what Erin told me. No way to scrape it out, at least not in time to stop the bleeding. And none of that drug they use.”
“Pitocin,” Lila said. “I had it when Jared was born.”
They sat quiet for awhile, watching the light drain from what had been a very long day. At last Janice said, “I thought you might like some help cleaning out her stuff.”
“Already done. She didn’t have much.”
“None of us do. Which is sort of a relief, don’t you think? We learned a poem in school, something about getting and spending laying waste to all our powers. Keats, maybe.”
Lila, who had learned the same poem, knew it was Wordsworth, but said nothing. Janice returned the bottle to the pocket it had come from and brought out a relatively clean handkerchief. She used it to wipe first one of Lila’s cheeks, then the other, an action that brought back painfully sweet memories of Lila’s mother, who had done the same thing on the many occasions when her daughter, a self-confessed tomboy, had taken a tumble from her bike or her skateboard.
“I found this in the dresser where she was keeping her baby things,” Lila said, handing Janice the thin pile of pages. “It was under some nightshirts and bootees.”
On the front, Tiffany had pasted a picture of a laughing, perfectly permed mommy holding up a laughing baby in a shaft of golden sunlight. Janice was pretty sure it had been clipped from a Gerber baby food ad in an old women’s magazine—maybe Good Housekeeping. Below it, Tiffany had lettered: ANDREW JONES BOOK FOR A GOOD LIFE.
“She knew it was a boy,” Lila said. “I don’t know how she knew, but she did.”
“Magda told her. Some old wives’ tale about carrying high.”
“She must have been working on this for quite awhile, and I never saw her at it.” Lila wondered if Tiffany had been embarrassed. “Look at the first page. That’s what started the waterworks.”
Janice opened the little homemade book. Lila leaned close to her and they read it together.
10 RULES FOR GOOD LIVING
1 Be kind to others & they will be kind to you
2 Do not use drugs for fun EVER
3 If you are wrong, apologize
4 God sees what you do wrong but HE is kind & will forgive
5 Do not tell lies as that becomes a habit
6 Never whip a horse
7 Your body is your tempul so DO NOT SMOKE
8 Do not cheet, give everyone a SQUARE SHAKE
9 Be careful of the friends you choose, I was not
10 Remember your mother will always love you & you will be OKAY!
“It was the last one that really got me,” Lila said. “It still does. Give me that bottle. I guess I need a nip after all.”
Janice handed it over. Lila swallowed, grimaced, and handed it back. “How’s the baby? Okay?”
“Considering he was born six weeks shy of term, and wearing his umbilical cord for a necklace, he’s doing very well,” Janice said. “Thank God we had Erin and Jolie along, or we would have lost them both. He’s with Linda Bayer and Linda’s baby. Linda quit nursing Alex a little while ago, but as soon as she heard Andy crying, her milk came right back in. So she says. Meanwhile, we’ve got another tragedy on our hands.”
As if Tiffany wasn’t enough for one day, Lila thought, and tried to put her game face on. “Tell me.”
“Gerda Holden? Oldest of the four Holden girls? She’s disappeared.”
Which almost certainly meant something mortal had happened to her in that other world. They all accepted this as a fact now.
“How’s Clara taking it?”
“About as you’d expect,” Janice replied. “She’s half out of her mind. She and all the girls have been experiencing that weird vertigo for the last week or so—”
“So someone’s moving them around.”
Janice shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. Whatever it is, Clara’s afraid another of her girls is going to blip out of existence at any moment. Maybe all three of them. I’d be afraid, too.” She began flipping through the Andrew Jones Book for a Good Life. Every page was filled with an expansion of the 10 Rules.
“Should we talk about the Tree?” Lila asked.
Janice considered, then shook her head. “Maybe tomorrow. Tonight I just want to sleep.”
Lila, who wasn’t sure she could sleep, took Janice’s hand and squeezed it.
8
Nana had asked her mother if she could sleep over with Molly at Mrs. Ransom’s house, and Elaine gave her permission after ascertaining that it would be all right with the old lady.
“Of course,” Mrs. Ransom said. “Molly and I love Nana.”
That was good enough for the former Elaine Geary, who was for once glad to have her little girl out of the house. Nana was her dear one, her jewel—a rare point of agreement with her estranged husband, and one that had kept the marriage together longer than it might have survived otherwise—but this evening Elaine had an important errand to run. One that was more for Nana than it was for her. For all the women of Dooling, really. Some of them (Lila Norcross, for instance) might not understand that now, but they would later.