“But that’s what I’m telling you!” she shouted. “I didn’t want to help it. I wanted it to be dead.”
“Fine,” Naomi said, feeling sick.
“It was right there.” Heather pointed. Her face was dull. “Right there. By that rock. And I remember thinking, It’s dead just like I thought, because I didn’t hear anything. And I put my hand over its face, just to make sure there was nothing there. I held my hand there till I was sure. There was nothing there. It wasn’t breathing.”
Naomi, who wasn’t breathing either, stared at the ground.
“But I’m not sure I hurt it,” Heather said suddenly. She stared at Naomi. “Didn’t that doctor say he couldn’t prove it had been alive?”
Naomi, numb, nodded. “He said that.”
“So. All right, then.” She looked down. A few feet past them, the little pond gave its dull reflection of the afternoon sun. Naomi could not look at it.
“I don’t think I hurt it,” Heather said suddenly. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “I only wanted to be sure.”
Naomi took a step back. “I have to leave.”
“When you found that other baby, I thought … no, I knew it couldn’t. I didn’t stab my baby like that other person. My baby wasn’t breathing. I made sure it wasn’t breathing before I put it in the water.”
Naomi turned and ran, away up the hill, her breath wet and rough in her ears. She could not leave fast enough. Behind her, Heather was kneeling by the water, reaching out to break the surface with a fingertip.
Chapter 47
The River
SHE HAD TO SPEAK TO JUDITH, BUT JUDITH WAS missing. Naomi called her between bouts of packing and trips to the dump, between bouts of packing and sessions over the mill computer with Sarah. She phoned Judith from Tom and Whit’s, or the mill, or the gas station, spilling pockets full of change onto the top of the pay phone just as she’d done years before, when she’d first moved to Goddard and had no home and no phone of her own. Judith was not answering. Finally, fighting the beginnings of paranoia, she took to driving by Sabbathday Ridge. The cars were gone. Judith wasn’t answering because she wasn’t there.
Naomi had an appointment in the city for the following Monday, a meeting with a woman who knew one of her Cornell friends and had a storefront on Sixty-eighth, near Broadway. The notion of sitting down to discuss Manhattan real estate was at once so thrilling and so bizarre that she could not think of it without shaking her head, but as the day drew close and with it her own departure, Naomi shrank in dread. She had to see Judith, and Judith wasn’t there.
When she was through packing, it surprised her to see how little she was actually bringing with her, and most of that was in the form of Flourish overstocks and other things having to do with the business. The furniture she had bought with Daniel (or which he had fashioned in his imprecise way) stayed where it was—the real estate agent said its presence might make the A-frame marginally easier to sell—and what remained were books she would never read again, clothes inappropriate to the Upper West Side, and a stereo system moaning for replacement, all of which she hauled to the Salvation Army in Peytonville. There was only, in the end, a photograph of Polly taken on the first day of toddler swim class, her bright face wide with delight in the water, in Naomi’s arms, and this, Naomi now understood, was the strongest link she had forged in Goddard—to a child who no longer even recognized her. And to Judith, of course. But Judith wasn’t there.
The day before the day she planned to leave was a Friday, wet with July heat. Naomi drove again to Sabbathday Ridge, sour and pessimistic, thinking to leave, at least, a note wedged under the kitchen door, but as she swung her car around the turn she saw Judith’s car, and Judith herself, unloading bags of groceries from the trunk. Judith straightened and gave Naomi a weary wave, and Naomi was so surprised to see her that her heart raced. Judith wore, despite the heat, a black sweater, a black skirt. “You’re here!” said Naomi delightedly. “I was going to leave a note.”
“I’ve been in Providence,” Judith said. “My nephew died.”
Half out of her car, Naomi froze.
“I just got back an hour ago. I’m sorry.” She looked at Naomi. “Were you trying to reach me?”
“Yes,” Naomi said. “Oh, Judith. How awful.”
“It isn’t, really.” Judith reached for a grocery bag. “I mean, it is. But we’ve been preparing for this for a long time.”
“But Rachel.” She took another bag and followed Judith inside.
“Rachel is surprisingly all right. It’s Hannah who’s a mess. She understood ‘dying,’ but ‘dead’ is different.” Judith set down her bag on the counter. “It’s so hot.” She looked around the kitchen. “Let’s go down to the river. Maybe it’s cooler there. We can put our feet in, anyway.”
“All right.”
Judith poured them tall glasses of seltzer, and they walked out back and down the slope. The river was sluggish in the heat, but far cooler than the air. Naomi took off her sandals and moved her toes in the current. “That feels good,” Judith said. She sighed. “I didn’t think it would get this hot in New Hampshire. I remember last year, I was so surprised by the heat. I told Joel I thought we’d need air conditioners. But then the fall came, and I forgot all about it until now.” She smiled suddenly. “Like labor, I guess. They say you forget how bad it is, till the next time.”
Naomi frowned. “I didn’t know you were here last summer. I thought you came in the fall.”
“Well”—she shrugged—“I was here. I wasn’t going out much.” She drank her seltzer, then pressed the glass against her forehead. “So. You’re off, then.”
“Tomorrow. Yes.”
“End of an era,” said Judith. There was an edge to her voice. “What will you do when you get there?”
Naomi looked off downriver. There was a straight view from here, down a good half mile to where the river curved out of sight. Just beyond was the site of the “Sabbathday incident,” that streak through the night woods when she caught Daniel howling in fear to the God he denied. And past that place, the Drumlins, the sharp rocks under the surface. And past that place, the eddy where she had found a doll face down in the water, which had turned out not to be a doll at all. For some reason, she had not realized till now how close Judith’s house was to the place.
“Naomi?” Judith kicked her feet under the surface, making the water swirl.
“Oh, I don’t know. I thought maybe I could do what I did here. Maybe there are old ladies in Brooklyn making quilts and things. I can start a collective to sell the results.”
Judith sighed. “Come on, Naomi.”
Taken aback, she frowned. “What?”
“It’s time now. This isn’t for you.”
“What are you talking about? It worked the first time.”
“But that’s my point,” Judith said. “It worked, but not by itself. You made it work. First of all, you took a bunch of women who’d never earned a wage and you gave them an income. That’s one thing. But you did something else, even harder. You not only found a niche in the marketplace, you found a whole marketplace where there wasn’t one before. People can’t be taught what you know. Don’t denigrate your talents.”
“Oh, there’s no talent.” Naomi shook her head. “I just followed the protocol. This is what they told us to do at VISTA. I mean, it wasn’t an original idea.”
“Jesus.” Judith shook her head. “How can you be so obtuse about yourself? There is no VISTA anymore. All that’s finished. We tried, we gave it our best shot, and now it’s time for the next thing. You’re not part of a trend, Naomi. What you did showed initiative!”
“No,” Naomi said fervently. “I did what I was supposed to do.”
“Listen to me, Naomi.” Judith leaned forward. “I admire you. You have enormous capabilities. But you are laboring under a serious misperception. You seem to feel that you’re a civil rights worker. But you’re an entrepreneur.”
&nbs
p; “Oh,” Naomi said, horrified. “I’m not.”
“Jesus Christ, Naomi! I saw you fire a woman because she didn’t agree with you!” Judith rolled her eyes. “Be glad for what you can do, but be clear about what it is.”
“No.” Naomi shook her head. “You’re wrong.”
“Fine,” Judith said harshly. A first breath of estrangement rose between them. Naomi remembered why she had come.
“I saw Heather,” she told Judith. “I went to say goodbye. Judith”—Naomi’s voice began to shake—“you were right. You were right that she killed her baby.”
Nonchalant, Judith sighed. “I tried to tell you that.”
“She put her hand over the baby’s mouth. She said so. She said she hated the baby.”
“I don’t need to think about Heather anymore, thanks.”
“Don’t you care?” Naomi said wildly. “Shouldn’t you do something?”
“Shouldn’t I do something?” shouted Judith. “I already did something! I got her off. I got the attorney general to say on television that he’d never try any part of the case again. I think I’ve done enough.”
“But she really killed her baby!” said Naomi.
Judith put up her hands.
“Don’t you care about the babies?” Naomi said hotly.
Judith glared at her. “I care. I care far more than Heather did, I can tell you that. I care that a healthy child was suffocated and buried underwater. And the other one. Of course I care.” A single tear appeared in one eye; then symmetrically, a tear in the other eye.
“I don’t expect you to understand this, Naomi, but I’m going to try to explain it anyway. When my nephew was born, he was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen. He laughed and smiled. He reached out to us. I don’t know if you’ve spent any time around infants, but there’s this sense, the first couple of months, that the person inside is just waking up and noticing the world. It’s like they climb up out of a hole in the ground and see the world, and Simon did. He saw the world. But then he started to go back down into the ground. He didn’t want to, but he had to. It took three months to crawl up to the world and then two and a half years to crawl all the way back down into the ground. And we had to watch. Every inch, we watched him go back into the ground.” She wiped at her face. “He’s in the ground now.”
Naomi, perplexed but disinclined to interrupt, moved her feet in the water and watched her friend cry.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Judith said suddenly. “Do you understand?”
Naomi frowned.
“If I had a child, and the child had what Simon had, I wouldn’t do what my sister had to do. I wouldn’t watch it die like that. Do you understand?”
“But you can’t know,” Naomi said. “I mean, you can’t tell in advance, can you?”
Judith looked out across the river, her face streaked. “You can, actually. There’s something you can test for, in the blood. Even the blood from the umbilical cord. There’s an elevated level of a certain hormone, and you can tell. If you happened to be looking. If you had a reason to look. Like, a relative who had it. You could tell. You just need a lab, and you need to know what to look for.” She looked back at Naomi. “It’s so pathetically rare. No one would think to look for it unless they had a reason. Not at birth. Not in an autopsy. Do you see?”
Naomi, who began to, stared back.
“I need to make this clear to you, Naomi. A baby who has this disease is already dead. There isn’t any cure. They can’t do a damn thing, not even to slow it down. There’s nothing but watching your baby go back into the ground. I wouldn’t do that! Rachel didn’t have a choice. Simon was nearly four months when they found out, so she didn’t have a choice. But I wouldn’t!”
“All right,” Naomi said, but she didn’t know what she was saying.
“I wouldn’t watch a child of mine die the way Simon did. Not in that long, horrible way. Joel wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t.”
Numb, Naomi watched her own hand move. It placed her glass on the level surface of a boulder. Then she looked at Judith. “So if they’re going to die they’d better do it and decrease the surplus population, is that what you’re telling me? I mean, is that it?”
Judith was staring at her, white-faced and speechless. A long moment passed before she found her words. “No. That is not it. We’re talking,” Judith said, her voice ragged with grief, “about a loved child. We’re talking about a mourned child. Please”—she wept—“at least tell me you understand that.”
Why that, Naomi thought dully, when I understand nothing else?
“You hate me, don’t you?” Judith said.
And Naomi was bereft to find that she did not. In fact, there was nothing inside her at all, only a numb place where the hate ought to have been, and the horror. And while she was aware, vaguely, that she was supposed to tell someone, that justice required her to tell, to report what she knew to whatever “authorities” remained, Naomi also knew that she would never do that. As surely Judith must have known.
“You do hate me,” Judith said. “I see that. But you don’t understand.”
So Naomi nodded, because her ignorance, at least, was something they could agree on. But Judith doesn’t look like a murderer, she was thinking, though if there was the smallest solace in that, it passed quickly enough, because maybe this was what a murderer looked like, after all. Her friend: who was so strong, whose eyes were so wild with sadness. A murderer.
“I hate what you did,” she said aloud, thinking this might represent some kind of middle ground, but she found, to her great dismay, that she could not bring herself to hate even that. And how terrible a person she must be, not to hate even that!
“What I did”—Judith moved her feet in the water—“I did to spare us all. Her suffering. Because she would have suffered. Later on, I mean. And as it was, she didn’t. It was fast, Naomi. Joel made sure.” She shook her head, as if to dislodge the memory. “That’s all I cared about, really. For Joel it was a little bit more complicated, of course.”
Naomi, cautious, waited. She kept her eyes on Judith’s ghost feet, white underwater, as they made the current swirl into a circle.
“For Joel it would have been a question of faith, do you see? Of saying, to God”—she spat the word—“that he accepted this. God did it, but Joel accepted it. Like, he said, when Abraham did what God asked him to do. Or when Miriam put Moses in the river, she was telling God she trusted Him to do the right thing. Even if the right thing was to send him over a waterfall, then it was all right. She would accept it. We had to be the same way, he said.” She shook her head. “He actually believes that, you know.”
Naomi, who by now did know, nodded in silence.
“I mean, he has to. He’ll do anything for a little hope. A little hope is so fucking narcotic.” She laughed, darkly, her eyes were wide and flowing like the river’s surface. “Maybe he thought there was going to be some Pharaoh’s daughter out there for us, to save her. But we got you instead.”
I’m sorry, Naomi nearly said. For not being a Pharaoh’s daughter. For not letting that poor cold baby float away in the first place. Because I was wrong about everything. From the very first moment to this moment, from the eddy in mid-river to this one by the riverbank, at Judith’s feet, Naomi had done everything wrong.
“Did you get the hope at least?” she said, thinking aloud.
Judith surprised her by shrugging. “Well, I guess so. I’m pregnant,” she said, and the extra word, the word she didn’t say, hung for a moment on the stagnant air between them, then was lifted by a small, stray breeze and taken off down the Sabbathday. Naomi, watching it go, thought how alike they were, in the end, Judith and Heather, though they each would have shunned the comparison. How Heather had given back her baby in wild hope for what she had lost, and Judith for what she had not had in the first place. Perhaps it would work better for Judith than it had for Heather, Naomi thought, though she herself would not wait to see if it did. She would not know what happened
to the baby Judith carried, since she would not know Judith after today. Grieving for a dozen things at once, she got unsteadily to her feet and reached down for her sandals. She did not look at her friend. “I have to go.”
“You’re going now? Right now?” Judith spoke harshly, her face streaky and tight. “Right this second?”
And that was when it occurred to Naomi that she could go. And yes, right this second. She could leave right away, after all—not tomorrow, as she’d planned, but now. Since she had already packed what little she was saving, her vital places filled with vital things, and there was nothing to keep her. She could get in her car and floor the gas, and drive and drive until she would have to close her eyes to see the people she had left behind. But only see—because they had passed by now beyond her reach, even if she were still inclined to reach for them.
Lines from “Spilt Milk” by Sarah Maguire (from Spilt Milk, Seeker & Warburg, 1991) and “Sheol” by Craig Raine (from Clay, Whereabouts Unknown, Penguin, 1996) are quoted with the permission of the authors.
Lines from “The Language Issue” by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, translated by Paul Muldoon (from Pharaoh’s Daughter, Wake Forest University Press, 1990), “If Luck Were Corn” by Peter Fallon (from News of the World, Wake Forest University Press, 1993), and “Terezin” by Michael Longley (from Gorse Fires, Wake Forest University Press, 1991) are quoted with the permission of the authors and Wake Forest University Press.
I thank these friends and relations for having generously allowed me to quote from their poetry.
Lyrics from “Glad to Be a Woman” are quoted with the permission of Betsy Rose. Copyright © 1975 by Betsy Rose. All rights reserved.
Also by Jean Hanff Korelitz
A Jury of Her Peers
The Properties of Breath
Author’s Note
Canavan disease is a rare neurodegenerative disorder caused by a deficiency in an enzyme called aspartoacyclase, which in turn causes progressive spongy degeneration of the brain. In the most common form of the disease, onset occurs in the first few months of life and death by three or four years of age. The enzyme was identified in the mid-1980s, but prenatal diagnosis by amniocentesis was extremely difficult and unreliable due to very low enzyme expression in amniotic fluid cells. In 1994 the gene for aspartoacyclase was mapped to the short arm of chromosome number 17. The most common mutation was identified at nucleotide 854, with suggested carrier frequencies ranging from 1 in 36 to 1 in 59 in the Ashkenazi Jewish population (similar to the frequency of the Tay-Sachs gene), though the disease also occurs in other ethnic groups. Since 1994, DNA testing has allowed parents to undergo carrier testing and accurate prenatal diagnosis to determine if they are carrying an affected fetus. There is no cure for Canavan disease and the only available treatments are supportive and palliative.
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