by Chloe Garner
“What?” Rhoda asked.
“No,” Sarah said, something dark finding her. “No. You aren’t going to talk about that child that way. She deserves better than that, and if that’s all you have, she deserves better than you.”
She reached out to Rhoda, who handed over the baby without hesitation.
“You cut it,” Rhoda murmured as Sarah worked at keeping the cord slack. “You tie it first and then you cut it.”
Kayla and Jimmy came back and Sarah sat low on the floor, holding the baby against her chest.
“There’s suture thread in there,” Sarah said. “Use that to tie it tight, then get the scissors and wash ‘em with the water over there.”
Rhoda took a minute to get everything together, even with Jimmy helping. It looked like everyone around her was in shock. Finally they did it, and Sarah rubbed the baby’s head with the towel.
“Keep her warm,” she said, handing the baby back to Rhoda and going to work on Lise. The woman was bleeding, but not so much that it worried Sarah. She needed stitches, which Sarah did without comment, and then she covered Lise with a layer of towels.
“Get her a blanket,” Sarah said to Kayla. Kayla nodded quickly and disappeared, and Sarah turned back to Rhoda, putting her arms out.
“Give her to me.”
Rhoda handed the baby over and Sarah stood, rubbing the girl’s chest with the towel, then checking her temperature.
“She’s doing well,” Sarah said, looking up to find Jimmy standing at her elbow.
“She’s very red,” Jimmy observed, and Sarah nodded.
“She is.”
“Is that normal?” Jimmy asked.
“I’ve never seen one before,” Sarah answered.
“Liar,” Lise muttered, distant. “You said you’d done this before.”
“I lied,” Sarah agreed. “But you made it.”
“Leave me alone,” Lise said. Sarah stood by as Kayla draped a heavy blanket across Lise, then she nodded to Kayla.
“You know how to take a pulse?”
Kayla nodded quickly.
“You keep track of her pulse. If it gets slow or weak, you call me. I’m going to go get her something to eat, and then she should rest.”
“Um,” Kayla said. Sarah nodded.
“Check the towels I put over her, under the blanket. If you start seeing blood that seeps across them, call me.”
“Um,” Kayla said again, still looking very pale.
“I’ll stay here,” Rhoda said, going to lay across the couch. “Just for moral support.”
Kayla looked from one to the other of them, but it was apparent to Sarah that Lise no longer cared what was going on. She turned with Jimmy to go to the dining room, where she lay the infant out in the table under the better light.
The baby girl kicked her legs hard at the cold air, and she screamed a tiny, wailing scream. As soon as Sarah was sure that none of the blood on the baby was her own, she wrapped her again.
“I’ll get her a clean towel in a minute,” she said to Jimmy. “Then we need to wash her up.”
“Sarah,” Jimmy said quietly. “You’re holding a baby.”
“No one else was going to,” Sarah said. “She needed someone who was going to claim her.”
She tucked the infant up against her shoulder and looked at Jimmy, defying him to say something humored or clever, but he just gave her a half a smile.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said.
“Birth and death isn’t ever pretty or well-planned,” Sarah answered, glancing back toward Lise. “She might wake up in a different mood tomorrow.”
“We’ll take care of baby Lawson tonight, then,” he said. “Should she eat?”
Sarah blinked.
“I don’t know.”
Rhoda was walking past with a load of soiled towels, headed for the kitchen.
“All that formula you’ve been stockpiling in the pantry?” she said to Jimmy on the way by. “It’ll have instructions printed on it.”
Sarah sat down at the table and looked up at Jimmy.
“I recommend you go read them, then,” she said.
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The night passed sleeplessly. Sarah checked Lise hourly, but she was recovering as well as Sarah would have expected. A cow would have been on her feet within thirty minutes or an hour, but Sarah wasn’t expecting the same from Lise. The woman slept on the floor there in the front room all night, with Kayla and Rhoda watching over her. Sarah and Jimmy tended the baby, and no one saw or heard from Little Peter all night.
Come morning, Sarah heard Lise stir and she brought the baby back to the front room again.
“Lise,” she said sitting on the floor. “This is your daughter.”
“I don’t want her,” Lise said.
“You were so happy, being pregnant,” Kayla said.
“Just take her out and drown her,” Lise said. “Best thing that could happen to her. Better than being a Lawson.”
“I think you’d find she disagrees,” Sarah said, peeling the towel back away from the baby’s face. The child was sleeping again, purple eyelids against fair, fair skin.
As her skin had lost its redness, Sarah had had the increasing sense that the baby had much more Jimmy’s complexion than Peter’s, but she kept this to herself.
She didn’t want to know. It didn’t change anything.
“She’s so little,” Kayla said.
“Kicks and fights like a Lawson, though,” Sarah said. “Eating well. Don’t know how much she should be eating, but she wakes hungry and she sleeps full.”
Lise wrinkled her nose and turned her face away.
“Take her. Go give her to the nurse.”
“Nurse isn’t her mother,” Sarah said. “This is your daughter. She wants to know her mother.”
“I don’t care what she wants,” Lise said. She looked back over. “You won. Okay? I lost the coin flip. If that… thing had been a boy? How different would it be right now?”
Sarah had seen heifers reject their calves. Just got confused that the creature wanted something from them, and shunned them. You had to hand-raise the calf or leave it to die. There wasn’t any talking the cow into changing her mind. Lise should have had more reason, more ability to rationally understand what she needed to do, but Sarah wondered if the woman wasn’t just as stubborn, just as set.
“It was always just about the power,” Sarah said quietly. “From the first you knew.”
“What else would it be about?” Lise asked. “I don’t want to be a mother. I hate children.”
The woman edged herself up off of the floor.
“I need a shower.”
“Help her up,” Sarah said, standing and making room for Kayla.
“Go give her to the nurse,” Lise said. “I don’t want to see her again. It’s why we got a nurse.”
Sarah watched coolly as Lise went by, checking for signs of fresh blood on the towels and Lise’s gown. It was there, but not more than worried Sarah.
“If she starts bleeding hard, call me,” Sarah said.
“You expect me to go in with her?” Kayla asked.
“I expect someone to be in earshot of her,” Sarah said. “And I expect Little Peter is passed out black.”
“I am never having a baby,” Kayla said, helping Lise toward the stairs. Sarah squatted, stripping the blanket off of the towels and collecting the heap of mess into the towels. Rhoda came to help.
“It could change,” Rhoda said. “Some women don’t bounce back from having a baby as well as others.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m going to let her penalize the baby in the meantime,” Sarah answered, scooting more towels along the carpet with her foot. Rhoda stooped to gather everything up and they walked to the kitchen.
“You should get some sleep,” Sarah said.
“I napped on the couch overnight,” Rhoda said, “on and off. So I’m good. What do you need?”
Sarah shook her head, looking down at the
baby.
“Jimmy has a crib around here, somewhere. I should find that and get her settled in there, to sleep.”
“Where is she going to be?” Rhoda asked.
“Until Lise decides to own her own offspring, she’ll stay with me,” Sarah said. Rhoda paused at the door to the kitchen.
“I thought you… Never mind.”
Sarah shook her head.
“Every infant should have someone looking over them,” Sarah said. “For now, that’s me, and I don’t care what anyone thinks of it.”
“No,” Rhoda said. “It’s just… Okay. I’m surprised.”
Sarah shrugged and went into the kitchen ahead of Rhoda, mixing up a bottle and going to sit at the dining room table with it.
She listened to the house move around her, quiet noises of people doing whatever they were doing, Rhoda talking to one of the women in the kitchen about whether to wash or burn the towels. If it had been her blood and the like, Sarah would have opted to bury it, but she couldn’t quite say why, and it weren’t hers, anyway.
Jimmy came down the stairs and sat down next to her at the table as Rhoda and the woman in the kitchen moved on to the laundry room and became inaudible.
“Sleeping?” Jimmy asked.
“Still,” Sarah answered. He nodded.
“She’ll want to eat soon.”
He had an earnestness to him that made her uncomfortable, just the way he sat forward, over his knees, looking down at the baby, the way his eyes didn’t seem to have their normal stony visor.
Sarah touched the bottle with the back of a finger, but otherwise didn’t shift.
“Do you need to sleep?” he asked.
“Two days without sleep isn’t going to hurt me,” Sarah said. “I can do another night, tonight, if we need to.”
Jimmy nodded.
“I’ll stay with you.”
Sarah glanced over at him.
“I assume it’s occurred to you that we ain’t this baby’s parents, and that they ought to be involved in this.”
He pressed his mouth.
“Kayla told me that Lise is rejecting her.”
“Kayla’s supposed to be in earshot in case Lise needs help,” Sarah answered.
“She was standing in the doorway to the room,” Jimmy said. “She didn’t want to go in. I don’t blame her. Petey has a history of shooting strangers in his room when he wakes up from a blackout.”
“Does he?” Sarah asked, not surprised. Jimmy leaned forward an inch further.
“Is she rejecting her?”
“Hasn’t yet touched her,” Sarah said.
“What are you going to do about it?” Jimmy asked.
“It’s her baby,” Sarah said. “I’m not going to let her just leave her with a nanny and walk away. She deserves better than that.”
“She needs a name,” Jimmy said.
Sarah shook her head.
“Lise hasn’t gotten to that, yet. Does Little Peter know what he wants to do?”
“Judging by how much he drank last night, I’m going to go out on a limb and say he hasn’t thought it through even this far,” Jimmy said. He looked up at Sarah’s face through his eyelashes. “You were the only one ready for what happened last night.”
“You had a whole shelf of formula,” Sarah said. “And a crib, I hear tell.”
He nodded.
“Are you going to put her down?”
“Not until I’m sure she can keep herself warm,” Sarah said. “Hairless. Don’t know how she’s expected to stay warm, like that. And without a big momma body to bed down next to.”
“I think you should call her Babe,” Jimmy said. She looked up at him, sharp, but he was unwavering.
“This is not my child, Lawson,” she said. “I’m not going to be the one givin’ her a name, and even if I were, it wouldn’t be Babe.”
“For your ma,” he said, and she nodded.
“The woman with nothing to say for herself but that she married a drunk, got kidded up, and had a friend who stepped in when she was too weak to go on.”
“Is that really what you think of your mother?” he asked. Sarah pursed her lips, then looked down at the baby.
“If we were to name her for someone, it’d be Elaine, not my ma.”
“Then so it is,” Jimmy said. Sarah shook her head, big.
“No, Jimmy. She ain’t mine and she ain’t you…” She cut herself off, pulling her mouth in tight as the child squirmed against her chest.
“You see it,” Jimmy said quietly. “Just as well as I do.”
“It doesn’t mean anything and it doesn’t prove anything,” Sarah said. “You’re brothers.”
“Denial doesn’t change it,” Jimmy said.
“Nor does wishful thinking,” Sarah retorted, settling the bottle against the baby’s chest as she wiggled and opened her eyes, lips forming a tiny ‘o’.
She fed the girl, then cleaned her diaper. Homesteaders didn’t have any place to put that volume of refuse, so they used cloth diapers, but Jimmy had disposable ones from the coast, and she used them for now. She had no idea what the house staff did with trash.
Jimmy watched her as she worked, and she felt his eyes with almost a physical pain.
“May as well say what you’re thinking,” she said.
“You’re good with her,” Jimmy said.
“No different than any other newborn,” Sarah said. “Gotta keep ‘em clean, fed, and safe.”
She straightened, re-wrapping the baby and tucking her against her chest, giving Jimmy Lawson a defiant look.
He shrugged, doing his damnedest not to look amused.
“You should sleep tonight,” he said. “I’ll look after her.”
“We’ve got time,” Sarah said. “We’ll see if she’s ready to sleep without someone to hold her.”
He raised an eyebrow and she turned away, going out the front door and standing on the front porch, watching the sea of red much flow past.
Lawrence would recover.
Would rebuild, where it needed to.
Women had babies, raised children.
Survived the tragedy that went along with life in Lawrence.
Sarah looked down at the baby on her arm, then out at the water again.
She’d always known she would die here. Violently, almost unavoidably.
But she’d never been afraid before.
--------
Peter finally surfaced two days later, stinking of alcohol and looking for a fight. Lise hadn’t been down since the delivery, and she only let Kayla in to see her. The rest of the family was at the table eating lunch.
Peter threw himself into a chair and tipped his head back to look at the ceiling.
“Well, damn,” he said to no one in particular.
Without being cued, Kayla passed the unnamed baby over to Sarah, then hid her hands under her seat.
Sarah gave Peter a very hard look, which he didn’t notice.
“Peter,” Jimmy said. Peter didn’t move.
Sarah blinked, once, slowly.
After a moment, Peter began snoring. Rhoda looked at him with wide eyes, and Kayla might have giggled.
Sarah stood, slowly, feeling the decision happen as it happened, completely unprepared for it.
“Peter Lawson,” she said, her voice even. He snorted and slurped, sitting straight, blinking bloodshot eyes at her.
“If you think yer gonna…” he started.
“Peter Lawson, this is not your child,” Sarah said. “It’s Jimmy’s. And I have no intention of leaving it with either you or Lise. Is that in any way unclear?”
Rhoda put her fork down. Other than that, everyone went very still, watching Peter.
He blinked hard, then shook his head to clear his mind.
“What’d’you mean, Jimmy’s?”
Sarah was unmoved.
“I assume you don’t need me to explain the physics.”
He looked blearily at Jimmy.
“You…” He blinked aga
in and looked at Sarah. “I thought you just liked calling her a whore.”
Sarah raised her eyebrows.
“No. It’s because she really is. She decided that you weren’t the access to power that she wanted, and she went after the real power in the family.”
Peter held out his fingers and started a shaky attempt at counting.
“Oh, it was after you were here,” Sarah said. “In this very house.”
She shot a sideways look at Jimmy, who was watching her with a perfect, still face. It could go either way, from there.
Peter nodded.
It might have just been a loss of control of his head.
Hard to tell.
“I’m’a kill her.”
“Sit,” Sarah said, sharp, cool.
He blinked at her as his body obeyed reflexively.
“She is the mother of a Lawson baby, so she is a part of this family, if one I’d rather not have to see every day. You will not lay a finger on her.”
“Ever again,” a voice said as Lise rounded the bottom of the stairs. She walked gingerly, but that she was up and on her own was encouraging to Sarah.
“Lise,” Kayla said, out of her chair and coming around the table. “Let me help you.”
“Do not treat me like an invalid,” Lise said, coming to the table on her own and easing herself into a chair.
She looked at Jimmy.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “On the next train out of Lawrence. I hate this place, and I don’t want to stay anymore.”
“I won’t prevent it,” Jimmy said.
“What about…?” Kayla asked, coming back to her seat.
“I’m in no condition to wrestle Sarah Todd over that… thing,” Lise said. “I don’t care what you do with her.”
Sarah wasn’t sure how to take that, so she looked back at Peter, impassive.
“I have work for you on the coast,” Jimmy said. “You are still a Lawson.”
“Oh, I have terms,” Lise said. “I am damn well still a Lawson, and you are going to pay for it.”
“I’m listening,” Jimmy said.
“The house in Intec,” Lise said. “You’re going to sign it over to me. By myself. You’re going to give me an allowance to live up to my standards in Intec. I will be your liaison to the power players on the coast, and you will empower me as your agent.”
The words had meaning. Sarah even knew what some of those meanings were. She was reading Jimmy, though, for what his reaction would be.
