Caleb nodded. He felt completely overwhelmed.
“Attaboy,” she said.
He watched her head down the beach and returned to the shelter. Pim was jotting in her notebook. It was one he hadn’t seen before, handsomely bound with leather. A bottle of ink sat on the sand beside her, as well as a pile of books from Hollis’s stash. Pim looked up, closing the diary with a muffled clap as Caleb sat on the sand.
She told you.
Yes.
Pim, too, was grinning at him in a manner that verged on laughter. He felt like he’d wandered into the wrong room at a party, one in which everybody knew everybody else and he knew exactly no one.
Relax, she signed. It’s no big deal.
How do you know?
Because women know. She drew a sharp breath, her face scrunching with pain. Caleb saw it in her eyes: her lighthearted attitude was a cover. His wife was steeling herself for what would come. Hour by hour, she would go further away from him, into the place where all her strength came from.
Pim? Okay?
A few seconds went by; her face relaxed as she expelled a long breath. She tipped her head at the pile of books. Read to me?
He lifted the first volume from the pile. Caleb had never been much of a reader; he found it tedious, no matter how much his father-in-law had attempted to persuade him otherwise. At least the title made sense to him: War and Peace. Perhaps, contrary to all his expectations, it would actually be interesting. The book itself was enormous; it felt like it weighed ten pounds. He opened the cover and turned to the first page, which was covered in dispiritingly minuscule print, like a wall of ink.
You’re sure about this? he signed.
Pim’s eyes were bright, her hands folded together over her belly. Yes, please. It’s one of my father’s favorites. I’ve been meaning to read it for ages.
Full of dread, yet anxious to please her, Caleb sat on the sand, balanced the book on his lap, and began to sign:
“ ‘Well, prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family. No, I warn you, that if you do not tell me we are at war, if you again allow yourself to palliate all the infamies and atrocities of this Antichrist (upon my word, I believe he is), I don’t know you in future, you are no longer my friend, no longer my faithful slave, as you say.’ ”
And so on. Caleb was totally baffled; nothing seemed to be happening, just obscure conversations that went nowhere, full of references to places and characters he couldn’t keep track of, even a little. The signing was laborious; many words he did not know and had to spell out. Yet Pim seemed to be enjoying herself. At unforeseen moments, she would issue small sighs of pleasure, or her eyes would widen with anticipation, or she would smile at what Caleb supposed was the book’s equivalent of a joke. It wasn’t long before his hands were exhausted. Pim’s contractions continued, the gaps between them shortening over time while their durations increased. When this happened, Caleb would pause in his reading, waiting for the pain to end; Pim would nod to tell him it was over, and he would begin reading again.
The hours moved by. Sara visited at regular intervals, taking Pim’s pulse, touching her belly here and there, reporting that all was well, things were moving normally. Of War and Peace, she only remarked, eyebrows raised, “Good luck.”
Others came by: Lore and Rand, Jenny and Hannah, as well as several people Pim had befriended on the ship. In midafternoon, Hollis brought Theo and the girls. The boy could have cared less, sitting on the ground beside his mother and attempting to fill his mouth with sand, but for the girls, the birth of a cousin was a long-anticipated excitement, like a present waiting to be unwrapped. During their weeks on the ship with little to amuse them, Elle’s signing had improved. No longer was she limited to the most elementary phrases. With Pim she chattered away, oblivious to the woman’s discomfort, though Pim didn’t seem to mind or, if she did, managed not show it.
“All right,” Hollis said finally, clapping his hands together, “your aunt needs her rest. Let’s go look for shells, shall we?”
The girls complained, but off they went, Theo riding his grandfather’s hip. Pim’s eyes followed them. She looks so much like Kate, she signed.
Which one?
She paused. Both of them.
The afternoon faded. Caleb had become aware of a certain energy being directed at the tent from multiple directions. Word had gone around: a baby was being born. Eventually Pim told him to stop reading. Let’s save the rest for later, she said, by which she meant: nothing besides having a baby is going to happen for a while. The contractions intensified, long and deep. Caleb called for Sara. A quick exam, then she looked at him pointedly.