T. Boyle - San Miguel

She paused for breath then and no one moved, no one said a word, though the smoke dodged and swirled and the cake blackened and her lungs rattled with the effort of drawing in the breath she so violently needed because she wasn’t finished yet. “And I wish the place had caught fire,” she said, but she was rasping now, all the resonance scoured from her voice by this thing with the claws, by the disease that plucked you up at random, that got inside of you and slowly strangled the life from you. “At least then we could leave this rat’s hole and go back to, to”—she was coughing suddenly, coughing till she felt the sputum dissolve in a hot rush of blood she tried to choke back even as it filled her mouth and broke free to redden her lips and douse the front of her dress in a spatter of bright red droplets—“to civilization. Civilization, Will.”

She held them with a look of fury until Adolph — and Jimmie, Jimmie following his lead — backed out the door and into the rain.

Will said her name once, softly.

“Don’t speak to me,” she said. “Don’t ever speak to me again.”

Four days later, it was Edith’s turn. This time she let Ida do the baking, but she insisted on mixing the batter herself and sitting there in the kitchen till the cake came out of the oven plump and moist and perfectly browned across the top — she was Edith’s mother still, no matter her condition. And every year since Edith had come to her from the orphanage, helpless, impossibly small and vulnerable, this perfect shining infant whose natural mother had tossed her aside like so much refuse, she’d baked a cake on her birthday — and on Christmas too. A cake. The smallest thing. And on this day, the day of Edith’s fifteenth birthday — the twelfth of February, a day she’d marked with a star on the calendar the day they’d arrived — with the rain finally stopped and the sun burning bright in a cored-out sky, she’d risen from her bed with a fierceness of purpose. She didn’t need coffee or tea or any other stimulant, just the cake pan, just the batter, just Edith.

It was a wonder, really, considering how low she’d been these past days. Confined to her bed, weak, bored, feeling useless, she’d lain there staring at the stained canopy and the curtains that hemmed her in, imagining she was already in her grave, a damp place, wet, reeking, the raw earth pressing down on her without mercy or appeal. She was feverish. Her dreams were dense, clotted with images of grasping hands and spectral faces that loomed up out of nothingness and vanished again just as quickly. She’d lost blood, too much blood, and though the hemorrhage hadn’t been nearly as bad as the one she’d suffered in December, for which fact she was grateful, it had left her weak and disoriented all the same.

She’d forced herself to come downstairs that first night — for Ida’s sake, to help her commemorate the occasion and lift the pall that lay over the house — and everyone had been in good spirits, all things considered. The cake was a humiliation, of course, Ida having had to produce another while she herself lay supine on the bed with the smell of it drifting down the hallway and up the stairs to mock her in her weakness and debility, and she hadn’t been able to join in when Edith led a chorus of “Oh! Susanna,” substituting “Ida” for “Anna,” and yet still she felt fortunate to be there — moved, deeply moved — and couldn’t keep from thinking about the following year and the one after that and who would be sitting there in her place. She looked up at Edith, at her face luminous with the pleasure of watching Ida unwrap the gift she’d given her — ribbons, blue satin ribbons Edith had brought with her from the mainland and kept hidden all this time — and she began, very softly, to cry. Will had looked away — she was angry with him still, though at that moment she felt so soft and fragile she would have accepted anything from him — and when she woke in the night, he wasn’t there beside her in the bed.

It had taken her a moment, fumbling with the match and lantern, to understand why. “I don’t want you here,” she’d told him when he came to her at bedtime. He was hateful to her then, clumsy, shabby, the root and cause of all her troubles made flesh, his face hanging like a swollen pale fruit in the doorway. “Go sleep in the storage room, ” she’d said , “ go sleep in the bunkhouse. I don’t care. I don’t want you here. I’m weak. I’m in pain. I—” But he was already gone, the door pulling shut softly behind him.

That was over now, gone, done, past. She didn’t want to think of it or what it meant that he’d made his bed in the monk’s cell across from Ida’s room ever since and that she didn’t care a whit whether he came back to her bed or not, not today. Today the sun was shining, the floorboards were drying out, the lambs growing into their limbs and all the birds in the world singing in unison while the cake, Edith’s cake, sat cooling on the table. That was what mattered, that was all that mattered: the cake. And Edith. Edith’s birthday. She got up and busied herself around the kitchen, thinking of all the things that needed doing — sending Jimmie for abalone, cutting wildflowers for the bouquet, finishing up the trim on the new dress she meant to surprise Edith with — and she was just sitting down at the little table against the window there, stirring a bit of milk into the porridge Ida had made for breakfast, forcing herself to eat, when she happened to glance up and see Edith making her way across the yard.

And who was that with her? Jimmie. Jimmie trailing along behind her like a moonstruck calf, the big straw laundry basket clutched in both arms as if it were filled with rocks, and why wasn’t he at work? Why wasn’t he clearing the road or plowing or sowing the grain — hadn’t Will said they needed to get it in as soon as they had a break in the weather? Edith’s face was perfectly composed, though her hair was disordered beneath her hat and her skirts were muddy, as if she’d been tramping the hills again, and she was saying something over her shoulder to the boy. In the next moment they both pulled up short, right in the middle of the yard, no more than fifty feet from the house, and Jimmie set down the basket, which did seem to be filled with stones — or no, seashells. They’d been at the shore, that was what it was, and she was just trying to sort that out — the two of them, alone and unsupervised, Edith’s walks, her moods, the way the boy watched her at dinner as if her every word and gesture held some secret meaning, and what if it did, what if she’d been blind to what anyone could have seen as plain as day? — when Edith held out her hand and he went down on one knee in the mud to take hold of it. And then, without prompting, without taking his eyes from Edith’s, he brought her hand to his lips.

All her pleasure in the day dissolved in that instant and she couldn’t stop herself from rushing to the door and out into the festering wallow of the yard, her shoes muddied in an instant, her skirts blackened, all the blood left in her wasted body rising to her face and a strange yammering chorus of voices howling in her ears. Shock, that was what it was, ungovernable, unconscionable. She’d never… She couldn’t…

Jimmie sprang to his feet. Edith lifted her eyes, distant eyes, defiant, as if she hadn’t been caught out, as if she weren’t ashamed in the slightest. There were so many things wrong with that tableau Marantha couldn’t begin to list them. She tried to speak, tried to demand an explanation, but the words died in her throat.

The boy’s trousers, filthy as they were, showed a spreading wet stain in the left knee, where he’d gone down in the mud. He put on a look of innocence. “Good morning, ma’am,” he said, but he wouldn’t meet her eye.