For Time and All Eternities

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  I somehow managed to get to my feet. It wasn’t a graceful walk, but I made it down the hall, my heart pinched in my chest every step of the way.

  The nursery was recently vacated, it seemed to me as I looked around, the crib bottom still down to its lowest notch, to keep a toddler contained, rather than up to make it easier to reach an immobile newborn.

  I let out a little sob, away from Carolyn’s hearing, and then stuffed my feelings back inside. I grabbed the tiny sleeper, red with white trim, and the pack of diapers that were on the top of the baby dresser.

  Then I heard a long, pained groan in the next room, and rushed out, holding the baby items to my chest.

  “Go ahead and push, Carolyn,” Naomi was saying when I got back. “You’re fully dilated.”

  Urgently, Naomi motioned me back to the bed and I put the things down on the floor next to us.

  “Behind her,” said Naomi. “Help her with pressure to her lower back. She needs someone to help support her with each push. It takes a lot of strength to deliver a baby.”

  Kurt had taken that position behind me during the births of our sons. With Georgia, too. His strong hands and the whisper of his voice in my ear came back to me. I missed him so much.

  “Now, Linda,” said Naomi.

  So I maneuvered myself into position and put my hands on Carolyn’s back. She groaned and pushed.

  “Good. Rest for a moment,” Naomi said when the contraction was over. She brushed back her own hair impatiently.

  The tears began to flow then and I didn’t even try to stop them anymore. There was no hope of that. I wept and I did what Naomi asked. I felt as if I were flickering back and forth between my own past and into Carolyn’s present.

  Kurt behind me, weeping, the smell of his clean sweat as his body was pushed to its limits along with mine. And then the moment when Georgia came into the world, the moment that changed both of us forever. Sometimes I wondered if any problems I had, with Kurt, with the church, were really all related to that one moment when I had become broken, when our whole family had become broken.

  Carolyn was delivered of a stillborn son three minutes later. He was tiny, and the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. It was not a pretty sight.

  I was surprised, somehow, because Georgia had been so beautiful. There had been no real reason for her death in utero, except that the doctor said she had gone too late and the placenta had stopped working. From what he said, it seemed clear to me at the time that my infant daughter had slowly suffocated over a period of hours inside of me, unable to cry out or demand help.

  My tiny daughter had been so perfect at birth; I could almost believe when I held her that she might yet take a breath. Kurt and I had wept over her, until it seemed that everything I drank that day had tasted of salty tears. We had taken a few solemn pictures of her, of us together, though those photos were now in a box in our basement that contained everything of Georgia’s.

  I remembered Kurt holding our dead daughter and ritually blessing her with hands on her head, after he got special permission from our bishop to do so. He had loved her. I knew that from the way that he held her so gently, as if she were still alive and needed that special newborn tenderness. He had touched her tiny fingers and toes, as he had with our sons, counting them to make sure she had all ten. It had been half a day before she had turned so cold that I was certain she was dead, and Kurt was able to convince me that we could leave her in the hospital, for her body to be taken to the mortuary who had promised to pick her up.

  There was very little lifelike about Carolyn’s baby, however. I remembered now counselors coming to warn me, before Georgia was delivered, how gray and gruesome a stillborn baby might look. I had not remembered what they’d said in all these years, because in the end, Georgia had not looked like they’d described.

  I had never thought to thank God that my daughter had died with so little trauma visible. Through my tears, I did so now.

  I wished I could have been stronger for Carolyn, but in that last moment I was unable to help her sit up to deliver the afterbirth. I was sobbing for two lost babies (hers and mine) who might never know each other in any world, mortal or immortal.

  By the time I was capable of moving again, Naomi had already wrapped the baby tightly in a serviceable, white blanket and handed him to Carolyn. At least the blanket covered up much of the damage to his deteriorating head.

  I put a hand on Carolyn’s arm. “It’s not your fault,” I said. “Whatever you think right now, remember that. It’s not your fault.” It was what I wish someone had told me at that time, but I wasn’t sure hearing it from someone else would have helped me—or would help Carolyn. A mother can never see a child dead in her arms and not believe it her fault, surely.

  Carolyn looked up at me. “Thank you,” she whispered, and we shared a moment of utter unity then, the kind that no one ever wants to share, but no one can ever forget.

  Then I wiped at my face and turned to Naomi. “What can I do?” I asked, trying to signify that I was ready to be of use again.

  Naomi’s eyes whipped over me, and I flinched from the disgust in them. She had wanted me to be stronger—had expected it of me, and I had failed her.

  “You can take this and dispose of it,” she said, handing me the mess of the afterbirth. I tried to clear my head, focusing on my task, wondering if there was something special I was supposed to do with it. If Carolyn had been delivered in a hospital, the afterbirth would have been medical waste. But what would it harm going out with the trash? I hoped it wasn’t illegal, but I had no idea what else to do.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, I greeted Esther with a mumble. Then I opened the back door and used the big trash can there. Somehow it surprised me that the big plastic can looked nearly identical to the one I used at my own house. But of course the Carters still needed the city to take the trash. It was so ordinary, and so practical. I found myself sobbing again as I reached for the door to go back inside.

  I was angry by then, angry at a Heavenly Father who would do this to a woman already grieving the loss of her husband—however complicated their relationship—and who had only wanted to love and care for this child she had spent months sacrificing her own health and comfort for.

  I was angry that Naomi had pretended things would be fine and that I had followed her lead.

  I was angry at Kurt for not being here when I needed him.

  I was angry at Kenneth for getting me mixed up in this whole thing.

  I was angry at Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and every Mormon who had ever thought that polygamy was a sacred practice.

  And I was angry at myself, for not getting out of this while I could.

  After I’d kicked the side of the house hard enough to turn the anger into pain, which then faded, I went back inside and heard the sounds of a child’s inquisitive voice, answered by the older Esther in the kitchen. I checked the time and saw it was now past 6:00 a.m.

  Back upstairs, Carolyn was now weeping openly, her labor pain giving way to grief. I held her from behind and resisted the impulse to repeat the stupid things people had said to me, that she would see her son again in the next life, that she would raise him there, that she was sealed to him in the eternities. Those things might be true, but none of them changed the reality that right now, her baby son was gone.

  Naomi worked at cleaning up the bloodied bedding and remaking the bed without asking Carolyn to move more than a few inches this way and that. Then she disappeared, presumably to put the sheets in the washing machine.

  “You know what this is like,” Carolyn said softly to me, twisting her head so that she could look into my eyes. “Don’t you?”

  I nodded. “My daughter was stillborn more than twenty years ago,” I admitted.

  “Did your husband know it would happen?”.

  That I hadn’t expected. “What? No. Of course
not.” Why would she ask such a thing?

  “Do you believe it was a punishment? That your daughter was born dead?” Carolyn pressed. Her face was bruised and there were huge dark circles under her eyes, but her eyes were fever-bright.

  “No,” I said. And then added, “Not anymore.”

  We could hear the sounds of children laughing downstairs, and of footsteps. They were playing some sort of chasing game. I wished they weren’t, because it felt wrong that anyone anywhere could be laughing at a time like this.

  But of course Esther was just trying to take care of the younger children as she had been asked. And there were people all over the world who were laughing, perhaps celebrating the best achievements of their lives. Right now. While we wept.

  That was what life was, this grandest of contradictions, joy and sorrow combined in one. There was no separating it, not really. The more we loved life, the more we suffered. The less we loved, the less we laughed.

  “Stephen told me this would happen. Months ago,” Carolyn whispered, her voice hoarse with laboring. “He told me that I was to be punished. He said that this child would be a boy and that he would never take a breath.”

  I felt my stomach clench. What a thing to say to a vulnerable, pregnant woman! For a moment, I wished Stephen was alive again so I could stab him myself with that kitchen knife.

  “What was he punishing you for?” I asked, and then wondered if it was only curiosity that was making me ask.

  Carolyn bit her lower lip, hesitating. Did she think I would judge her as harshly as Stephen had? “I told him that I didn’t want any more children after this one. I wanted an operation. Or at least some kind of medicine to prevent it. There are so many children here, and I’m not—I’m not as patient with them as I should be.”

  Stephen probably thought he was the only person who should be in charge of the number of children that came out of Carolyn’s body.

  “He couldn’t have possibly known what would happen,” I said, pressing a comforting hand into Carolyn’s. “It’s just a coincidence. A terrible coincidence.”

  Had Stephen planned to kill the child if it hadn’t been stillborn to prove that he had been right about the future? Or would he have pardoned Carolyn sometime later and removed the curse from the unborn child? The more I learned about the man, the more of a monster he seemed to be. Not complex at all, but just an expert at hiding and manipulating the truth.

  Or—it occurred to me to wonder if Joanna had predicted Carolyn’s stillbirth, which Stephen had simply taken credit for. Was this proof her spiritual gift was real? I would have to ask her myself.

  “You don’t think he is up in heaven, now, watching to see that his prophecy came true?” Carolyn said.

  “No. No.” I had to force my hands to unclench, because I was about to tear the clean bedsheets. “Carolyn, Stephen never had that kind of power and he certainly doesn’t now.”

  I stayed with Carolyn, my mind whirling with thoughts of Stephen’s murder, of Joanna’s gift, money and power, and my own sins, until Carolyn blessedly fell asleep.

  When Naomi returned, she beckoned to me to head out with her. Moving slowly, I extricated myself from the awkward position I’d been in, trying to circle Carolyn with some sense of love and comfort. I felt completely drained of energy and my head buzzed with hunger as if I’d been fasting for a full day.

  “We have to decide what to do with the baby’s body,” Naomi said.

  We wouldn’t have to report this child’s death, either, I supposed. But in this case, no one needed a death certificate for a stillborn child. Georgia didn’t have one, either, and she had been born properly in a hospital.

  “Bury him in the graveyard with the others?” I said tentatively, wondering about how our relationship would work now that she had seen me at my worst, and I secretly knew too much about her reliance on her father’s wealth.

  “I don’t think we should do a funeral. It wasn’t ever really alive,” Naomi said.

  “Don’t you say that!” I snapped at her, surprised at the surge of anger I felt. “To Carolyn, he was alive. She felt that little boy move within her for seven months or more. He was her son as much as any child could be!” Of course Naomi couldn’t understand, never having had or lost a child herself, but couldn’t she try a little harder?

  Naomi put up her hands wearily. “All right. If you say so.”

  I felt bad for the ferocity of my reaction then, but I didn’t have the strength to explain it to her. I would have to tell her about Georgia later.

  “Let Carolyn hold the baby for as long as she wants today,” I said, sure of myself. In this, I had far more experience than Naomi did.

  “The body is pretty far gone,” Naomi said.

  Why did she have to talk about it as a “body” and not as a child? Was that what they taught you in medical school? My doctor had acted like that, too. As if it was just a procedure to him, just so much human flesh to be disposed of. I hadn’t remembered that until now, either.

  Maybe it was a coping mechanism for a professional who would see many deaths in the course of their career, but it wasn’t one I admired.

  “Give her time to let go,” I said as calmly as I could manage. “When she’s ready, then you can bury him and ask her for a name to put on a stone. But first make sure you ask her if she wants any pictures taken to remember him by.”

  “Pictures?” asked Naomi, disbelieving. “Of that?”

  “Yes, of him,” I said coldly. “And make sure they dig a new grave. That boy shouldn’t have to share his grave with Stephen.” Though it would be easier to simply dig up the soil over his grave because it was already soft. The little boy whose death had been predicted by a vengeful father deserved better than that and I was going to make sure he had everything I could give him, however small it was.

  Chapter 27

  I was still shaking with emotion as I walked away from Carolyn’s house. I wanted to go home to my normal life, to a husband who didn’t need to be in control of my every action and thought, and who genuinely cared for and grieved with me. Whatever my disagreements with Kurt about the policy, he was a good husband and father. He loved Samuel and Kenneth and he was going to figure out a way to stretch his faith around them both. Maybe he was taking a different path than I was, but I had to respect that.

  I had promised to solve Stephen’s murder before I left, and now I desperately wanted to go home. So I pushed myself to focus. I’d been asking everyone about the changes to the will except the one person I should have: Jennifer. She was the investment broker. She was far more likely to have known about Stephen’s financial situation than anyone else. So I headed toward her house. It occurred to me that maybe I had been avoiding talking to her just because I disliked her so much.

  Jennifer was standing on the porch, staring at the rising rose of sun in the eastern mountains.

  “How is Carolyn?” was the first thing she said to me.

  They say news flies in a small town. In a compound like this, it must get around so fast it was practically time travel. “The baby was stillborn,” I said.

  Jennifer nodded. “Yes, I’d heard.”

  “It must be particularly painful to you when one of the other wives loses a child,” I said, watching her carefully. “Especially when you couldn’t have children of your own.” I was needling her—I could tell she clearly disliked children and probably never wanted any.

  She frowned and then recovered. “It just wasn’t to be, I suppose. Stephen always said that we had to look to God for answers to such difficult questions.”

  I was curious about why she had married Stephen when he, from what I had heard, must have expected her to give him more children. What had Jennifer really wanted from this marriage, this lifestyle? And had Stephen at some point discovered he had been duped when she gave him no children to be his in heaven?

  “It bo
thered Stephen, though, didn’t it?” I pressed. The wooden floor of the porch, I noticed, looked like it had been replaced recently. Stephen didn’t stint Jennifer for anything, though Joanna’s house was still unfinished.

  “Of course it bothered him. Being a god means having posterity for eternity. Filling the universe with your offspring.” Her voice sounded distant and she had a hand on the door to the house.

  I couldn’t make her stay and talk to me, but I was hoping she wouldn’t escape into the house too soon. I spoke bluntly. “You disappointed him as a wife, then. Not giving him children.” This would have been cruel if Jennifer were the woman that Stephen had thought she was, but she showed no reaction at all.

  “I’m sure I disappointed Stephen in more than just that one way,” Jennifer said, smiling as if it were a joke.

  There was something very strange about their relationship, about the fact that she had been the first woman to agree to enter into a polygamous marriage with Stephen and Rebecca. She just wasn’t the same type as the others who had joined. She wasn’t needy at all, nor did she seem to be cowed by Stephen.

  “You made sure you didn’t have children?” I guessed.

  “That was the simplest part. A little pill each morning,” said Jennifer with a faint smile. “Stephen never found out, at least not until a few weeks ago. And by then, what did it matter? I’m too old to have children now.”

  A few weeks ago? Was this what had precipitated the murder? “Then why did you marry him in the first place?”

  Jennifer was quiet for a long moment. “Why do you think?” she asked.

  “Money,” I guessed out loud.

  “Well, if that was so, it wasn’t as if he had anything to complain about in the deal,” she said, grimacing. Was she another wife who had denied Stephen her bed eventually?

  “But surely you could have made money on your own,” I said.