“Who do you think will take it? One of your sisters?” I said.
Del sat down on her couch. Dust rose from the cushions into the slant of weak sunlight. “Eventually we’ll have to tell them.”
I noted her use of “we” with a feeling close to despair. I could easily pity her, with her soon-to-be-extending midsection full of something that stirred and pressed and made its presence known against her skin. I couldn’t help thinking of the movies with gestating babies destined to wreak evil and havoc on the world. She caught my expression and frowned. “You have to be a good aunt,” she told me. “Who else will it have?”
“All babies have a father,” I said.
Del pulled her sweater sleeves over her hands. “You’re so amusing.” Outside a car horn sounded in the street, and we both startled. “Does it really matter?”
“That sounds like your new phrase,” I said. “Does it matter?”
I told myself that the father might be Randy.
“Weren’t you using birth control?” I said. My anger must have shown on my face. Del folded her arms across her abdomen as if she were protecting the child.
“They tried to make me use an IUD, but I took the pill, and then I ran out,” she said. “Still, I honestly don’t know how this could have happened.”
She laughed again and looked up at me.
“Is it William’s?” I said.
Del looked even more confused. “No!” she cried. I had the feeling, as I had the day I told her William and I were married, that she was faking her exclamation, that her protest was a lie. Then she said something under her breath that I couldn’t hear, and I worried she was talking to herself.
“What?” I said. “What did you say?”
“‘Sun, Moon, and Talia.’ Remember? By the Italian author. It was in that book of tales Grandfather used to read to us.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I said.
Out the window and across the street, I saw a figure by the curb on the corner, watching the house. He lurked slightly behind a tree, almost leaning on it. Then he pushed himself off and moved away slowly down the sidewalk. A glint of sun caught in his copper hair. His shoulders were broad in his coat. He moved away with a distinct limp, a drag in one leg. I didn’t think I could take a breath. My head filled with ringing. Del was asking me something, and I couldn’t make out what she was saying—my head was so full of sound.
“What did you say?” I turned my back on the window.
“What is it? What’s out there?” Del came to the window, but I moved away and she followed me across the room to the door.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“Will you come with me?” she said. “For Easter?”
In the vestibule, William’s father’s hat hung from the coatrack.
“We should get rid of that,” I said.
I went out onto the porch, but the figure, William, had disappeared. Had I experienced enough grief to summon him? Or was it his love for me that brought him around? I clutched the porch railing, faint and confused. His ghost might be undertaking unfinished business, but what use would the portfolio be to him now? This life and its ordeals were erased. The dead clung to a tether of love, drawn back by a loss that tormented them, and I felt my knees weaken with my own desire, and the impossibility of ever being with him again. Del, beside me on the porch, pressed her hand to her stomach. If Del was pregnant with William’s baby, he might have another reason to be watching the house. I felt a fresh surge of anger. And Mary Rae was back beneath the elm.
I’d waited long enough to uncover William’s connection to her death. I owed her the truth. And I was going to live my life. He’d accused me of seeing Charles Wu—as if something that preposterous had been the reason for his misery. I’d give him something to be miserable about.
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