Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“Beautiful morning,” Mrs. Johnson says, poking her head in the door. She has been the director of Plymouth Brewster all the years Elizabeth has been here. A gentle redheaded woman who sits with Elizabeth and discusses the books she is reading. “Don’t forget you’ve got a visitor this afternoon.”

Elizabeth smiles and Mrs. Johnson passes on and Elizabeth gazes again over the harbor. She sees people, tiny at this distance, heading out along the breakwater, leaning into the wind as they go. Yachts bob in the marina, their chrome masts ticking back and forth like the arms of metronomes.

Sun glistens on the water. The scene is alive with motion.

Nearly four hundred years since our family arrived on this shore, Hester begins, her voice cleaner and more vibrant this morning.

“Here we go,” Elizabeth says, taking a seat in her chair, “sing your little song.” It’s better when she’s able to affect nonchalance. Signs of care are like flesh exposed to her companion’s arrows. And what a beautiful season of suffering it has been. What principled wars. What tidy profit.

And the machines, they are enough to take your breath away. And all the limbs and eyes and organs of the children bled and severed for progress. And the raped slaves and the heads of boy soldiers crushed like eggs. Why, the minister might even allow us a dance. Perhaps to celebrate you, Elizabeth, a flower grown from the seed of all this. What have you done to correct it? Do you suppose the divines would have liked your country club, Daddy coming down the back nine, dark hands fixing Mommy a cocktail? Jitterbug.

“Lousy historian,” Elizabeth mutters, trying to maintain the dismissive upper hand. “You’re confusing all sorts of things.”

It’s been years since she’s had to argue like this. She has the energy, for now.

I’d forgotten, Hester says. You always believed books and their facts could save you. Haven’t done so well by them, have you?

Elizabeth laughs. “If I’d only known what a harsh woman you were.”

What? You would have refused my help?

“Is that what you gave me?”

And then the memory is there, the morning her contractions began: second day of the blizzard, 1978, the roads covered in ice and buried, the police saying no one was to drive, the hospital telling them they weren’t sure when they could send an ambulance. She lay upstairs in her grandparents’ old room, in the front of the house.

For hours she did her breathing as best she could, laboring there on the high bed, clutching Will’s hand. When the contractions got worse, her mother tended her, told her she had to be brave. Elizabeth begged for the doctor or drugs—something to blunt the vicious pain in her abdomen. In the moments of reprieve, she’d open her eyes and from the walls of the bedroom see the dead generations staring down at her: daguerreotypes of gaunt women and simian-faced men, stiff as iron in Sunday black, posed as if to meet their maker. As children visiting their grandparents, Elizabeth and her brother scared each other telling stories of the people who’d died in these rooms. The pictures seemed alive now, the ancestors’ rectitude offended by her abjection. She bit her pillow and sweated. Hours passed and still no doctor.

She heard Will land her parents whispering in the other room, saying, how could they move her now that she was so far along and the roads so dangerous? At six the power went out, leaving the house in darkness. For a few minutes, all that remained of the world was the seizing pain and the rush of the wind lashing the trees in the front yard. Her father lit candles, put batteries in the radio. It kept snowing. From downstairs, she could hear the news saying hundreds of people were stranded in cars on the highway and then the voice of the announcer telling citizens to remain in their homes.

Her mother gave her water and wiped down her face and chest. The pictures flickered in the shadows. Past one in the morning, in the fifteenth hour, long after she’d started to push, her mother left for a moment to find more towels.

Elizabeth lay on the soaked mattress alone, Will in the kitchen boiling water on the gas stove, her father yelling on the phone to the hospital, snow pressing against the glass, the flesh between her legs ripping. She felt blood leaking onto her thighs. Something started hammering at her temples. Her heart kicked. She thought she would die.

It was then she looked up in the candlelight and for the first time saw Hester standing in the far corner of that ancient, crooked, low-ceilinged room. She stood silent in her black dress and hooded cape, a woman of thirty with a face of fifty, plain featured, eyes of mild gray. Naive about nothing. A woman who had lain in this room on a winter night some centuries ago, Elizabeth understood, her husband at a trading post on the Connecticut River, her sister there to tend her, three younger children instructed not to cry, crying in the other room, twenty hours before she expired. A woman Elizabeth need give no explanation, her life reduced to a line in a letter written from one man to another. A line Elizabeth had always remembered from a summer past when her grandfather read them papers their ancestors had left in the house: Sad past words to report Hester has died giving me a boy. Elizabeth stared at the dark figure in the corner and would have cried out were it not for her worry that Will and her parents would think her crazy. Slowly and without a word, Hester walked to the bed. She placed a cold hand on Elizabeth’s brow. Elizabeth closed her eyes. She sensed Hester’s hands between her legs, holding the baby’s head.

She gave a final push. When she opened her eyes and strained upright, she saw the blue child. The umbilical cord had wrapped itself twice around his neck in her womb, pulling against his tiny throat, strangling him as he was born.

Will was the first to enter. In the instant before reason or compassion or duty retrieved him from the doubt of her sanity he must always have harbored, he stared at her as if at a murderer. In a rush, she explained how it happened, because what choice did she have then? How a woman had come and delivered the child, how the cord must have been coiled like that for weeks, and her parents wept and Will held his head in his hands. In the early morning, a nurse arrived and cut the boy loose.

“It’s not help you gave me,” Elizabeth says aloud from her chair by the window. “It’s not help you gave.”

She is thankful that for now there is no reply. Thankful too that the colors in her room beat once again with the pulse of life, the air and the blue ocean quickening to a new birth.

Sedation’s cloud is lifted. And Ted, Ted will be here soon.

THAT AFTERNOONS HE hears his voice coming up the stairwell from the front desk. Judith, the nurse, has bought her the Pepperidge Farm cookies she asked for and she’s saved juice from lunch along with two glasses.

Soon, he knocks on the open door. “Hey there, Mrs. Maynard.”

For years Mrs. Johnson has sent along the facility’s information to the high school volunteer program, inviting students to sign up for regular visits with an appropriate resident. Every autumn one or two come, but Elizabeth has never been lucky enough to have someone assigned to her.

Until now. He’s wearing a blue ski jacket she hasn’t seen on him before. His curly brown hair hangs down over the jacket’s high, puffy collar. The centers of his cheeks are red from the cold.

“You’re beautiful,” she says.

He glances back along the corridor, then down at the floor.

“That’s cool,” he mutters.

“I got us come cookies. Would you like one?”

He steps into the room, shrugging off his knapsack. She holds the plate up and he takes three Milanos.