The Well

            Streams of afternoon light were all I could see when I opened the door to our home. But instead of a familiar silence, a musical sound from upstairs met me at the entry. We had found the smooth wooden object at the antiques market and attached it to the high ceiling with an extended cord, the crowning glory to all our hard work in the anticipated newborn’s room. The musical element came from a ball in the center. Sheila said the piece came from 1800s England, and we did not sour of its melody, repeated over and over, which reminded us of the song “The Cow Jumped Over the Moon,” with a twist at the end where the tempo accelerated. We didn’t know whether the mechanism had weathered strangely or whether the ending should have sped up so, but we did not care. Sheila had not gone up to the room for months and I now wondered what had made her, in her advanced condition, venture up the steep and narrow stairs, to wind up the mobile.

The tune continued to greet me as I entered the dining room and passed through it, into the kitchen, I found Sheila lying on the floor. Her right arm was splayed out above her head and wisps of her long black hair fell free from her bun, as if they could no longer be contained. Her smooth face had lines of pain through it, rupturing the unblemished surface, her wide, dark eyes and the eyebrows above them clenched.

Spit formed in the corners of her mouth as she spoke. “Frankie, I couldn’t help it.”

“Did you slip? What happened?” I got down on my knees.

“Something doesn’t feel right in here.” She put her left hand on her belly. “It hurts.”

That was all I needed to hear. It only took seconds to punch out 911 on the phone, and seconds more to give our address, but it seemed to take forever as I crouched there at the kitchen counter, holding Sheila’s hand, the long phone cord stretching from the wall. The call made, I reached up to set the phone on the counter rather than get up and attach it to the wall-mount, and the recorded operator’s voice said, Please hang up if you’d like to make a call, followed by the annoying beeping sound, like a foghorn. I would not leave my wife’s side until they came. She was almost nine months pregnant and her belly had grown as large as a balloon, protruding outwards from her body so far that I could imagine her flying up into the air. She had decided to take off work a couple of months earlier, fortunately not a problem to the magazine since they had enough photo shoots for the month.

Then I noticed that old green English teapot, her favorite, had fallen and broken into a few large pieces, and a pool of yellowish-green liquid made a puddle to one side of Sheila. It looked like a crime scene without the blood. But what was that pinkish stain on the hem of her long shirt? I lifted the material up a little, and there was a blood stain on the inside and some more blood on the outside of her underpants. Had the baby been hurt? Had something burst inside—what had gone wrong?

“I’m sorry,” her voice crackled. I shouldn’t have—The doctor said—”

I put my hand on her face. “It’s okay, they’ll be here soon.” But time slowed and it took forever for them to arrive.

All I could do was run through the possibilities. I knew she had a doctor appointment scheduled earlier that day. Her friend Therese was going to drive her over, and she would take a cab back. Had something happened at the doctor? I felt guilty for leaving that morning, even though she had seemed fine sitting at the kitchen table eating while the morning sun poured onto her, illuminating her as a marble statue. I had gone out to Fort Point to write a local color piece, and the Ranger in charge told me I could find him giving tours between nine and 11. Since I no longer went out of town to write travel pieces, I picked up anything my friend at the San Francisco Chronicle would pass off to me. When Sheila had become pregnant I limited my travel to local sites, and a couple of months ago I curtailed my trips into day-long jaunts, solely working out of our house rather than motels at far destinations.

Sheila and I had met at an Ansel Adams photography show I was covering for a friend when she was 20, 15 years ago. We were an odd couple, physically speaking, with her striking wine-colored skin and wide cheek bones, and my pale, almost translucent skin, graying red hair and beard. We had not discussed much her Catholic upbringing and my Jewish one and how this would affect the baby, but since neither of us practiced our religion it seemed to matter little. I hardly saw my parents as they lived in New York, and she had severed connection with hers before I knew her, aside from her brother Pete. It was the one thing she didn’t want to talk about, past a brief conversation during our courtship, when she told me of her adoption, that her parents hadn’t told her until she was 18 and there had been a fight about trying to find her real mother. The story of her real mother was only revealed during her search.

Buying the Victorian house the year before, we decided to stop wasting our paychecks on rent because San Francisco was never cheap, even though we would probably be paying off the mortgage for half our lives. Sheila collected antiques—large, ornate wooded pieces of furniture, as well as teapots, jewelry, and clothing. I liked the idea of living in a piece of history, since most of my travel writing essentially had to do with history, layers of a town or site unfolding. The rooms were huge, with enough room for a separate bedroom for the child growing inside Sheila, and we spoke to the unborn girl about the lavender wallpaper as we put it up, with its green vines and deep blue flowers. I attached the special mobile after we wallpapered the room and painted the trim around the windows. And I bragged to the child who was not yet born about the crib I built from scratch, quite a feat for me. The house afforded a clear view of Duboce Park, and in spite of the generous pine tree out front, sunlight poured through the southerly-facing windows in the afternoons.

That night in the hospital I sat in the airless waiting room for hours, peering out the one window to the nurses’ station. A man sat across from me but we did not speak, each leafing through magazines. When finally a nurse came around, I startled awake at her patting on my shoulder, a magazine clutched in my sleeping hand. Entering the ICU, we came to Sheila’s bed, a little area surrounded with a gray curtain which was partially drawn. A bunch of tubes entered her body—an IV and something going to her nose, and a couple others. The space around the bed was little more than a few feet in any direction from the bed, and two chairs were crammed in, one on either side. Nearby I could hear someone breathing heavily in a labored sleep, maybe the person in the next bed. Sheila lay quietly, her chest slowly bur regularly moving. The nurse had instructed me sit quietly, so I made no noise. Wound around Sheila’s body from the neck down, the bed sheets made her look like a mummy, as if the bars on either side could not prevent her from rolling off if she awoke. The sheets looked too tight. I could not move nor speak. I didn’t know what to do. Betadine carroted her hands, neck, feet, belly, and probably where I could not see, from when they had scrubbed her and swathed her, her body unattached to a personality yet flaccid.

“Mr. Kalinsky?”

I looked up to see the doctor at the now parted curtain. Twice my age, with salt and pepper hair, he must have seen every type of disaster walk through the emergency room doors, and his face had a permanent grin, probably from trying to seem like everything was okay when it was not.

“Why the tubes, Doc?” I tried to sound calm when my insides felt like someone had taken a cement mixer and swirled them around.

“Just to make sure.”

I thought of all the lawsuits the hospital had to fend off, and the tubes stuck in my wife as the result. My mind went in all sorts of directions, but I tried to stay on track. “She doesn’t look very comfortable. Can you at least unwind the sheets? She looks like a God damned mummy.”

“Look, I understand you’re upset. I’ll have the nurse look in. But look, Mr. Kalinsky, I need to talk to you. Please follow me out to the hall.”

Nurses whisked past us, carrying files and pushing carts, but none of them seemed to care about Sheila.

“First of all, the baby was stillborn when we delivered it. When you checked her in, you told us your wife fell on the kitchen floor. That alone may have caused the miscarriage. She must have been in some pain during the last few months, but a lot of women adjust to the pain and it becomes a low-level annoyance. She might not even have told her regular doctor about it. She lost a lot of blood during the miscarriage—that’s why we’ve got her hooked up now, one of those tubes is the blood. Who knows how long she was lying on the floor like that. We’ll have to do some more tests later today, to make sure she’s out of danger.”

What was he saying? How can the baby have gone when I didn’t see it? I tried to picture the little body, coming out like thin syrup, draining into a bucket beside the bed. But really, I didn’t want to know what it looked like. Did people have funerals for babies born like this? Or maybe the Doc was lying and they were storing her somewhere in the depths of the hospital, saving our Mimi for some other couple. Maybe the whole hospital was a trap for pregnant women and a lure for barren couples. Maybe…

“Mr. Kalinsky?”

“Yes.”

“I just wanted to make sure you heard me—that you know where we stand. Your wife has pulled through, but we need to keep an eye on her. She’ll need to stay in the unit for now. Alright?”

Yes.”

“Did you hear me? I said she lost the baby. I’m sorry.” His voice dropped lower.

“Yes, yes, I heard you.” I had to make my mouth move to pronounce the words because it felt numb, like I had just gone to the dentist and had a novicane injection. I had heard him, but I didn’t need to. I knew. I knew it with every muscle in my body. But I didn’t need anyone to say it. Not even him. “I’ll just sit with her.”

“Of course, take your time. I’ll send in one of the nurses for that sheet.” He fumbled with his stethoscope before trodding off down the immaculate hall.

Back in the room, I loosened the sheets around my still motionless wife, trying not to shift her body from its position on the bed. Then I sank into the chair, the cushions sagging under my meager frame, offering no support. Sheila would love to see me now, I thought, bending this chair. She always joked about how she could wrap her arms around me twice.

Where had they taken the baby, if it could be considered a baby? The white sheets gave no indication of Sheila’s struggle for life, and though I had seen her on the kitchen floor, it hadn’t seemed so bad at the time, her face the only indication of what trouble stirred within. I assumed both would pull through because I knew no other way of thinking. I sat alone, staring at her pale complexion. I had made two calls, one to Pete and the other to Therese. I still had to call my family. It was sinking in that had almost lost Sheila, floating in that gray space, but rallying back. Rising and falling, her chest made feeble motions at life. I only wanted to get back to our house, start over and make our lives fuller rather than the paired down mess it had become, the wedding photo on her bureau the only indication of us as a couple.

Then baby was all I could think about, and how we had decided on a name for her after we found out that she was a girl. Sheila wanted to call her Frances after her favorite aunt, but in the end she gave in to my choice. Though I was not a practicing Jew, I had grown up going to temple and I wanted to honor the tradition of naming a child after a grandparent. My mother’s mother, Miriam, or Mimi, had been the source of stories for me when I was little, and the reason why I became a writer, so Mimi seemed the obvious choice. My grandmother, no matter how much I knew what to expect, always startled me. She was either a little modern for her time or I had an incorrect notion of what someone her age should be like. She died when I was fourteen, but I could remember her talking a little too frankly for my parent’s comfort. She would put a “sch” at the beginning of any word, Yiddish-izing it. Even sex. My parents tried to put their hands over my ears or usher me out of the room when she said “sex, schmex,” because it usually meant a juicy story. When Mimi spoke, I found myself in the old country, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the two towns the families lived in, what became Poland and the Ukraine. One of my favorite stories was about when she was a kid, before she came to New York. She got typhoid fever and her mother bathed her in a basin, put the “schmates” on the head, a kind of salve causing all her hair to fall out. It took a few weeks to grow back. She wore a kerchief, even though her parents offered to borrow a “sheitl,” a wig, from their next door neighbor. She wore it all winter long, and then, come springtime, the flowers and the grass came up, and so did her hair. It had never been curly before, but now she had natural curls. It had been lighter—and now it came in all black. I wondered what color hair our little Mimi’s would have been.

I missed the old Mimi and my family, even though I had come out to the West coast to get away from their histrionics and bullying to lead my life as I wished. The irony in my wanting to name our child after Mimi was that she herself would have objected to my marrying a Catholic and disowned me as her grandson. My own mother, being a first-generation American and reformed Jew, did not give me hassles on this end. But she did not hold back on anything else and I rarely spoke to her. When I did, I usually ended up holding the phone away from my ear while she let me know her feelings on some decision I had made, as when I had bought the Duboce house. I knew she was just showing that she cared, but her form of concern gave me an unhealthy dose of anger, something untapped under most circumstances.

I must have fallen asleep because when I awoke, book in my lap, Sheila’s brother Pete sat on the chair on the other side of the bed, slumped forward, hands grasping his head.

Hearing me rustle, he looked up.  “Frank, how ya’ doin? I got your message and came up as soon as I could.” His face was clenched like Sheila’s had been on the kitchen floor.

“Pete, Sheila’s had a hard one, but the baby—I just can’t believe it. And they had me in that room for I don’t know how long—”

“Hey I’m sorry, man, I couldn’t get here sooner.”

Pete came around the bed and I rose unsteadily, almost falling over. He grabbed my arm with one hand, pulling me close, almost crushing me. Pete was the only one Sheila kept in touch with and had come to the house occasionally, but I had not seen him in almost a year. He had the same lustrous black hair as Sheila, like all seven of the Santos kids, and looked younger than me with my receding strands, even though we were the same age. Sheila had commented recently that I complained about feeling old recently, at forty.

“How long have you been here? I fell asleep,” I asked.

“Oh, about ten, an hour ago. My folks said to tell you they would come by in the morning. I don’t know what Sheila will say, but don’t you think it’s about time?”

“I don’t know—maybe they shouldn’t come. You know, we want her to rest. But thanks for calling them—I didn’t know how to do it really.” I knew I wasn’t making much sense. She was their little girl. They wanted to see her. It was she that froze them out. It never made much sense to me, but then again, I didn’t see my parents either.

“I called the other kids too, but I think we don’t want a lot of people around, unless it’s necessary.”

“Let’s see, when she gets home. Maybe she’ll agree for everyone to visit her, a little at a time.”

“I’m sure they can all come then—well, I hope so anyhow.”

Pete had come up from Palo Alto, south of the city. He had his own wife and newborn waiting at home. He silently placed his palm on Sheila’s forehead, leaving it there for a few minutes, as if listening to something I could not hear. I had given up over the last few months, trying to get close to her. She pushed me away, not with words or a look, but with a quiet grunt. She sat on the far end of the long sofa when we watched old movies, maintaining a space of a few inches between us. I hadn’t questioned her, as I had stopped asking how she had been sleeping. She receded into the large window seat of the living room’s bay window, where she arranged boxes of photos into albums, and I moved all my writing things into the renovated round tower. Every morning the dark circles under her eyes revealed another restless night, and I could see she didn’t want to talk. So I stopped. Did it all add up to this, her body flat on the tight little bed with metal supports, Pete and me discussing the family? Why did I let it come to this, instead of somehow inviting her parents over, making her see—The distance between her and her parents had grown to form a circle around her, which excluded me as well.

At the beginning of her pregnancy, I flattered myself when we went out together to dinner or a show, as Sheila, soft in her expanding knit dresses, received compliments. But we had stopped going out. She decided. One night, she sat at her dressing table in our bedroom, staring at the mirror of an inlaid wood piece we got at one of the Castro Street antique shops. She had put on a light green shift and looked like a gauzy insect, a moth about to fly. She applied makeup around her eyes, and tinkered with other implements on the table. We were dressing up to go to the Presentation Theater out on Balboa street to see “The Mikado,” her favorite Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. The lining on my vintage jacket had separated from the top of the sleeves, and I had to put my arm through gingerly. Sheila had fished out this one out from a whole wardrobe of jackets at the huge, annual vintage swap, touting its subtle blue stripes.

“We need to get going, hon, if we’re gonna make it.”

I looked up and saw her freeze, and she continued to sit motionless for a minute.

“Hon, what’s wrong?” I stopped fussing with the jacket and walked across the room to her. I put my hands on her shoulders. She let me. Reflected in the mirror, we looked quite a pair, suddenly worn out and older than when we started this whole baby thing. “We don’t have to go,” I assured her. I rubbed her back gently.

She looked up at me, in the mirror, then down onto the table, where she had out all her magic implements of transformation, her brushes and combs and reminders of the past. One brush set had been my gift to her on her 35^th birthday, the previous year, while we went antique trolling to outfit our house in suitable style. The green set was from the 1940s and was made from what she called Bakelite, supposedly highly sought after now. I could appreciate the brush, which she had swooned over, with a pattern that fanned out, making the back of the brush look like a butterfly. A picture of her family took up more space than any of the other objects on the table, with its shiny wood frame. Taken on her father’s 70^th birthday in her parents’ backyard, the huge family squished together tightly to fit into the wide-angle lens. The event took place a few years before I met her, before they had told her about her real mother.

She had lived with them at the ranch-style house in Palo Alto, devoted to them completely. But when she turned 18, her parents told her that they were not her birth family, that she had been taken by the county after she survived a near-death experience. Her real father had left the family a few times before finally disappearing for good. The mother, drugging the three toddlers on sleeping pills, locked the car doors and rolled the windows up. Then drove her station wagon into the local lake. The youngest and smallest, Sheila slipped out through a partially rolled-down back window. When a couple of fisherman found her by the side of the lake, her breathing shallow, they took her to the hospital. The hospital in turn gave her to the county and placed her when she had sufficiently recovered. Sheila knew from an early age she had been adopted, but her new parents only told her the entire story when she turned 18, after Sheila began relentlessly searching for her real mother. They wanted her to stop wasting her energy, but they didn’t think about the results. The shock was too much. She hadn’t seen much of them since, and only her brother Pete managed to stay close.

Our wedding picture sat right next to the one of her family, smaller and more humble, in a curly silver frame. We had decided to have the event in a friend’s house to save money for a leisurely European honeymoon, and our families crammed into the place. Sheila had consented to her family’s participation, and I had asked mine to come as well, a rare event. A college friend of mine who had a minister’s license performed a non-denominational ceremony with only a brief reference to God. Grandma Mimi would not have come to the non-Jewish wedding. A friend of Sheila’s from the magazine took wedding photo, posing us in front of a bay window with a carpeted window seat, much like one in the house we ended up buying. Sheila scoured the city for the right dress, a Victorian ivory lace number which came to her ankles and flowed past her wrists, and framed her face, as lace sprouted around her neck. For me, she found a gray-green suit with wide lapels and a cream tie. We looked great in that picture. But in the mirror, looking back at me, she didn’t look great at all. She looked run down.

“Should we just can the whole thing, if you aren’t up to it?”

She stood up, the outer light green sheet layer of her dress swishing over the darker underneath one. “I’m tired, Frankie. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ve seen it before and they’ll do it again. Besides, we have the next one coming up in a few months, ‘Princess Aida,’ right?”

Her eyes were moist. “I’ll be out of commission by then.” She put her hand on her belly.

“We can get a sitter—one of our friends who has a kid.”

“Even when it’s that young?”

“You mean she.”

“She, it—what does it matter anyhow. We’re never going to be able to do anything.”

Sheila wasn’t making sense to me. She had never expressed hesitation before, had always seemed so sure of herself. It was as if this was a different woman standing in front of me. But I dismissed it.

I took off the jacket and went into the living room to settle in with a book. She appeared shortly in her old plaid robe from college, brown and blue and frayed at the edges, the sash tied above her belly.

“I thought you had gotten rid of that old thing,” I said.

“No, I love it. I would never get rid of it. It was just in the back of the closet.” She had clutched the robe around herself tightly, even though I had turned on the radiators.

Anyone coming in to our living room just then would have seen a warm domestic scene, but I knew the robe perpetuated the distance between us—an act of defiance against something I could not control because I didn’t know what filled that distance.

Pete slouched in the chair, irregular breaths coming from his open mouth. He had probably been up since dawn, as I knew he dropped his wife Mary off at work for her shift at the hospital and the baby at his parent’s place before going off to whichever construction site he was currently checking out, as an OSHA inspector.

Beads of moisture hovered on Sheila’s eyelashes. I stood up and kissed her. Her lips were warm pads, but they offered no resistance, like the chocolate cake I had over-baked the previous week for her birthday, hard and dry.

Light streamed in through the thin curtains, morning rays. I heard Pete rustling, and looked over at him.

His voice cracked as he spoke. “Do you wanna get a cuppa coffee or anything? I mean, I hate to go, but I—”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m alright,” I reassured him.

“You sure?”

“Yeh.”

He engulfed me again in a hug before his leather jacket swung out the door.

The next moment, or what seemed like it, the doctor stood over me.

“Mr. Kalinsky?”

“Yes?”

“No, don’t get up, we can talk here. I just wanted to let you know that she’ll be fine. Earlier—you must have been asleep—the nurse checked her o-levels. They’re good and she has color in her face. You can take her home in a few days I expect, but let’s see how her tests go later this afternoon.”

Light peered around the closed blinds.

He put his arm on my shoulder. “Go home. Get some rest.”

I figured he probably told all the husbands that. When a nurse appeared—an older woman whose pale complexion mirrored her pants outfit—to re-adjust some of the tubes, and finally the sheet, I decided to take a small break. But I would not go any further than the cafeteria.

I returned with a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate and a greasy grilled cheese sandwich on white bread, and the nurse left.

Sheila’s eyes blinked. I could tell by her yellow eyes when she opened them that she knew what had happened to Mimi. Then she spoke.

“Drowned—” The “o” in the word “drowned” cried out from some place deep inside her, the vowels wide open like the inside of a whale.

I set the tray down and took her hand. “It’s okay,” I said. The new Sheila had no control over her own body, confused from her fall in the kitchen.

“People with dentures have better teeth than babies,” she spurted out, saliva shooting over her smock.

I laughed quietly, unable to help myself. “Let me call the nurse. You’re not supposed to be making jokes.” I pressed the buzzer on the wall, then put my hand on her chest. Her breathing had become deeper with her waking.

Her blood shot eyes and the skin around them had dried and coarsened like sandpaper. Her delicate, long eyelashes hung down. She opened her mouth and the crust that had formed in the corners cracked into pieces, some of it trailing down the front of her gown.

“Oh, sweetie,” I said, kissing her crusty mouth, her wrinkled forehead. “The Doc said you’re going to be alright.”

“How is she then? Let me see.” A different nurse, a young woman with an afro wearing a light green pants outfit, took her spot at the other side of the bed and took Sheila’s temperature, her pulse, and looked at the tubes. “What’s this?”

I walked around to see the nurse wiping a corner of Sheila’s mouth, removing a coin of clotted blood, which fell to the floor. When I slid away I smashed it with my foot.

“Here, let me wipe that off.” The nurse held out a tissue and I took it and lifted my shoe up, to wipe it clean.

“Some people get real disgusted when they see blood, like the scene of a murder.” She smiled. She was used to this.

I was a child that needed holding, the cards in my chest collapsing in a pile.

“Oh, there, there. Don’t worry, she’s just waking up, it’s normal. The blood comes from the surgery—it finally made its way out, and you’ll see, tomorrow they’ll remove the red and blue tubes. Just you see, she’ll clutch that bar above her in a few days and raise from her bed.” She patted my back before leaving.

I parked myself back in the chair, tissue in my hand.

Sheila’s arms might not remember the small tucked hospital bed once they left, each body part suffering its own individual memory from the operation, eyebrows memorizing an occasion, fixed in position. But would she remember her footsteps across the kitchen floor? With the nurse gone, she closed her eyes and her expression melted, the lines leaving her forehead altogether. The corners of her mouth released their grip and she went into a gentle sleep.

What had she meant by “drowned,” in her half-awake state? I thought of the pool of tea on the kitchen floor, and of the baby inside her, drowning in the liquid of the womb. And I thought of the “water birth” method that Sheila had decided on, which would take place at home, with the midwife, a cheerful woman with a lot of bumper stickers on her car who had been trained in Hawaii. We had set the special wide, shallow tub in the far corner of the large downstairs bathroom, just off the kitchen. The old white porcelain of our own tub had yellowed and would have needed to be scrubbed thoroughly. The midwife had told us that giving birth to a baby under water relieved the pain, but I had dreams of the baby drowning. And when I tried to talk to Sheila about it, wondering also if it were not an odd choice for someone with her tragic childhood past, she only showed me the pamphlet, which said that a baby born into water has a diving reflex that helps prevents the inhalation of water into its lungs. She did not speak of the station wagon, submerged, and her mother, lost. She only spoke of “the baby,” exposed to air, and the receptors in its face triggering breathing.

            A few days after her admission to the emergency room they moved Sheila into a regular hospital room and a week later I brought her home. The first week I set her up in our bed with as many pillows as I could find. We had lived separate lives before the accident and we continued to do so. She appeared with her plaid robe every morning at the breakfast table just as I finished up, to eat the eggs I scrambled and toast and tea. Somehow she heard me vacate that spot all the way from the bedroom, or some force within her had to occupy the space I had vacated, and I wondered if she was trying to keep herself separate from everything. Or, if in spite of her efforts, our occupying the same space at different times could make us whole.

            After a week, Therese offered to drive us down to the cemetery in South San Francisco to bury the deceased. She hadn’t made it to the hospital because she was out of town. Sheila hadn’t seen her since the day of the accident. I wasn’t sure Sheila was ready for the excursion, let alone reliving the loss, yet she agreed with a nod.

San Francisco had buried its dead south of the city since every bit of room filled up within the city limits. As we passed one cemetery after another, I forgot which was ours—”Rolling Hills,” or “Seraph’s Chambers,” they all resonated with a sense of forced remembrance. As I turned my head my neck felt fuzzy and numb, like I could bend sharply and feel no ill effects. We were there by choice. We needn’t have accepted the body nor have a ceremony, but had I insisted so we would have a place to return to. I was able to think ahead enough for that. And while Sheila didn’t complain, she accepted the idea with sullen lips pursed together.

We finally reached the grave-site after following the directions given to us at the office, through winding yards and then miles of elaborate bouquets propped up on tall stones or laid down in reverence on stones in the shapes of miniature tombs. I thought of the pyramid at Giza, which I had explored to write a piece on Egypt’s cities of the dead. The photographer and I had followed the guide to a place deep inside the structure, so that we felt like we were buried in the earth ourselves.

No flowers were laid out in the Jewish section because in the land of the dead none of the pretenses of life were perpetuated. The only sign of visitors were smooth round stones piled on top of flat plaques or standing tombstones. The older section boasted taller stones with large-chipped surfaces, edges sharp, with front and back surfaces smooth and cold looking. Their gray color had browned over time, leaving a dullness that matched the clouding sky. “Rosenbaum,” “Stein,” “Weiss,” and all the Jews of San Francisco that I had no acquaintance with filled the prescribed area. I had visited my family’s plot in Queens when I was a child, the only introduction I had to some of my aunts and uncles who lived not long enough for my appearance in Brooklyn, whose neighborhoods held the upwardly-mobile Jewish classes.

With Terese’s use of the map we found the burial site. The unadorned wooden box sat beside an open square in the plush grass, a mound of dirt beside it.

            “The box is so plain,” Sheila complained. Her voice sounded rough but quiet. It was the first time she had spoken that day.

“I know we haven’t talked about it much. The Jewish tradition calls for a plain wooden box. No decoration.”

“What do you mean? How do you know she’s Jewish? She was barely—”

“You weren’t interested, so I made the arrangements. But if you want to say your own prayers—I know Catholics have theirs. Anyhow, it’s all the same, isn’t it? I mean, we are—”

“Do you really believe that it’s all the same? All those years going to church, they told us that Jesus died for our sins…”

I had never heard her talk about her faith. My father used to joke that Jews had a direct line to God and didn’t need anyone translating the words. We could read them ourselves. While I had distanced myself from my boyhood years of Torah study, I had never realized the force behind the words. Sheila and I had never had this talk and it seemed strange to have it now, that in all the months preceding the accident or in all the years we were together we never addressed the faith of our daughter. I had assumed it would all work out somehow. We had left our families and they were not a part of us, and only now did it seem they were still there, had paralleled out life in absentia.

I had brought a stone with me from home, something I had collected on a hike at Mt. Lassen with a former girlfriend, before I met Sheila. The rock’s surface had little sulfurous holes peering out like a potato with the eyes removed. My hands were stiff from the crisp weather, but I ran my fingers over it before slipping it back in my pocket. I would put the stone near the grave when we were done.

In front of the small square hole in the earth, we perched—Sheila, Therese, and I—in the three metal folding chairs provided, Therese on Sheila’s right side and me on her left. I reached out for Sheila’s hand and took it, not waiting for an answer. It felt clammy, so I took off my jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. She glanced over at me with large eyes before looking back down at her hands. She was studying them, gloved in dark green to match her wool car coat. Therese took Sheila’s other hand, and between the three of us we must have looked like a kind of alliance. The land sloped downwards a little ways off, putting us at the top of a hill, with a vista of the coastal mountains, blue and green from oak and buckeye, rays of light emerging from the clouded sky.

A man appeared, walking from out of nowhere, it seemed, with two large men in overalls following him. His frazzled curly white hair circled his face like a lion’s mane, a contrast to his formal attire of dark blue suit and shiny shoes, as if he had just thrown them on for the moment. He had a strange smile, with the edges of his mouth turned down, as if modified for the occasion.

“I’m Ben Simon.” He looked down at the hand-sized pad of paper. “You are Mr. and Mrs. Kolinsky, yes?”

I nodded.

“Should you want—I was sent from the office, to read the prayer?” He nodded his head towards me. He spoke with a New York accent, and the reverse words handed down from the Yiddish ordering, back to front, made me feel more at home, like I could do this. And to Sheila, he then nodded. “Mrs., the mourner’s Kaddish,” as if he expected her to follow along.

But I nodded my head. “No, wait.”

Sheila looked over, her eyes raised from her lap.

“Isn’t there another prayer. Kaddish is said by children for parents, but not by parents for children. We cannot say it.”

Ben Simon scratched his head a moment. “You’re right, absolutely. It’s not often we put to rest such a young soul.” His little squinty eyes searched side to side. “But we can say it if you wish. Some do.”

I told him, “My father used to say that only the adults get to be eaten by worms.” I laughed too loudly, but the release felt good. I took a deep breath. It was true. I could hear my father saying it. “He said, as soon as the body is laid in the grave and covered over, the angel wakes it up. And so long as the soul is in purgatory, so long does the body remain alive in the grave and feel the gnawing …” Then I couldn’t remember the rest.

Simon picked up the thread. “You mean the period being long or short according to the sins committed.”

“Yes. He used to scare me with that when I was a kid. But now…”

I saw that Sheila’s head was down.

To Simon I said, “Anyhow, we really should have a minyan, but the three of us will have to do.” My father would argue that we needed a group of ten men, to say the prayer, that it wasn’t enough for one man, or two.

He said, “Including me, that’s four.” Then he started with the prayer. “Baruch ato adonai…

I uttered it along with him. “Yeetgadal v’ yeetkadash sh’mey rabbah. B’almah dee v’rah kheer’utey…” The words pin-pricked me, with their reverence of God, but they also bathed me in familiarity.

After reciting the Hebrew, the man repeated it in English. “May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified. In the world that He created as He willed…”

The words repulsed me in their wish to revere the God of my people, but I knew they meant more. The teachings from Sunday school came back to me in waves. Simon was asking for peace between nations, between individuals, and peace of mind, from God. I used to play hangman with my best friend Sam in the last row of benches every Sunday while the Rabbi looked down at his book. At Friday night services at the synagogue, I would knock my knees together, my stiff blue suit rustling until my father’s hand reached over to silence my legs. The day of an aunt’s funeral, my uncles, grandma Mimi, and the rest stopped with my parents before open earth. Prayer’s for the dead. My father in his gray pin-striped trousers reciting along with a group of men, his head bobbing and his curly hair waving about in all directions. He had seemed senseless. It was the same when he led Passover around our dining room table, bobbing until all of us, as many as sixteen including aunts, uncles, and cousins—spoke the passages in the prayer book in near unison.

“Amen.”

“Amen,” I repeated, and heard the two women echo.

“Possibly would you like to hear something more, on this occasion?” Ben Simon asked, his voice raised in anticipation.

If I moved at all, said anything, I would break down and be unable to support Sheila, so I just nodded my head up and down. I needed something more.

He turned a page and read from the note pad. “A soul is comparable to an object which was given to us—to each individual, to his or her parents and loved ones, to guard and watch over for a while. When the object must be returned to its rightful owner, should we not be willing to return it? Let us therefore consider the matter as ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord took back, may the Name of the Lord be Blessed!’”

I heard a low mumbling from my right and heard Sheila uttering what I realized was her own prayer in Latin, melodically spoken. She was remembering Mimi in her own way, and I thought that the words had touched her too, reached her own prayers. I did not turn my head as not to make her self-conscious, but I also heard Therese join her. Their families had gone to church together.

The man looked up at us all and waited until the women finished. Then he took the shovel and offered it to me, so I could ladle some dirt onto the box before the men lowered it down and we could view it no longer. I rose, leaving Sheila’s hand empty, and slipped my hand into the fresh dirt beside the grave and sifting it over the clean, simple box, square and without markings.

            “Do the ladies wish to—” he asked, motioning to them, but realizing they did not, he raised his hand to signal the two men to lower the box.

            I stood there watching them in their jeans and T-shirts as they used the leverage of the wide ribbons to gently lay the box to rest. Then they bowed and left. They would fill it in later. Ben Simon said his goodbyes and Therese led Sheila back to the car. As we placed her in the front seat she looked like a puddle, her shoulders slanting into her chest, her knees together and feet apart. She stared ahead at the dashboard. The light had dimmed and by the time we got back to the city it would be dark.

            That night, after Therese heated up the casserole she had brought over earlier, I left the two of them talking in the living room. I went upstairs and unlocked the baby’s room, which we hadn’t spoken about yet—what we would do with the room, the furniture, all our hard work come to nothing. I sat down on a little stool, its legs too small for me; we had painted it the same color as the trim on the wainscoting, a pale blue. I felt like a giant in the child’s chair, for I had thought of her not only as an infant who we would lay down in the crib, but as a child who would get up and walk and play with her toys. The stool creaked as I got up to pull on the string above the crib. But I stopped myself. I did not want to hear the tune again. I slumped back down on the tiny stool, the room spinning in the growing dark, the purple-blue of the walls fading like a flower closing at night. Finally, I went out of the room, past the now dark kitchen to the bedroom, where Sheila was breathing the loud breaths of deep sleep. I lay down on top of the covers next to her.

In the weeks after our visit to the cemetery, I began cooking like I had never done before, for I had never really cooked on my own, eating from boxes, cans, and defrosting prepared meals. So I called my mother back East to learned the recipes she had made when I was a child—matzo ball soup and potato pancakes, beef stew and kasha varnishkas, Her answer was “You, cook?” She always knew how to be supportive. But she gave me the recipes just the same, and too much extra information until I asked her to just read the information off the cards. I could picture her smiling in a self-satisfied way and could hear the conversations between her and her friends. They would always speak of their sons as children.

One night Therese stopped by. Sheila hadn’t wanted anyone to visit her, but I had told Therese she should come anyhow and deal with the consequences. We talked before she went into the bedroom, where Sheila was resting.

“I don’t know what to do. She just won’t come around. We’re like two separate pods,” I told her.

“Well, she needs a lot of sleep doesn’t she? I wouldn’t expect too much out of her right now. I can help with the shopping, whatever you need.”

“Thanks, but I think I’m okay there. But what I mean is she seems out of it.”

“Frank, haven’t you ever heard of post-partum depression? She probably needs to talk about it—maybe we should make an appointment with a therapist.”

“Yes, I’ve done it already. There’s too much silence. And I thought she’d be angry at me, but she’s agreed. The doctor said she’s up to going to that one extra appointment. But you know, I think it’s more than about the baby.”

“M-hmm, you mean her mother. When I think of what she’s been through, it’s amazing she survived. All those years when we were kids and she knew nothing of it—she was better off, you know. This is going take some working through. I’m impressed that you thought of getting her an appointment. And I hope you don’t mind my saying this…”

“What?”

“Well, I think you should have her folks over—I can call them. I know, I know, you don’t need to tell me, but I saw them last week when I went down to visit my mom and dad, and they asked me how she was doing. I think they’re ready. No, I think they’re more than ready.”

I had never said much to Therese before. She and Sheila had grown up together, living all sorts of adventures from selling frogs at a flea market and starting a girl’s club on their block to well as roller skating and riding their first bikes together. Sheila had told me about her best friend when we first started seeing each other because they had both moved to the city about the same time. She was Sheila’s only friend it seemed, although her co-workers had left messages and sent flowers to the hospital. People cared about her even as she did not include them.

After Therese left, I called Pete and asked him to bring his family the next week for a potluck dinner. And when I called Sheila’s parents and asked them to come too, her mother’s first question was did Sheila want chicken or beef tamales. I asked her to bring both, knowing she would indulge her long-lost baby.

On the day of the event our house had never seen so many people and the smells coming from the kitchen wafting through the whole house. Her mother, Joanne, heated up the tamales, and lifted the huge pot of thick vegetable soup onto the largest burner on the stove. The eldest daughter was left to attend to the rest of the preparation, fending her father off as he offered to cut tomatoes and wash out a few things. In the meantime, Joanne disappeared into the bedroom to fetch Sheila. I didn’t stop her. I wanted something to happen.

When they appeared, Joanne was holding her daughter’s arm in hers, leading her over to the couch, where a few of the siblings sprawled, their long legs duplicates of each other, as they talked loudly of the details of their daily lives: work, babies, a broken faucet. Joanne just plunked Sheila down in the midst of the pile, as if she were five years old again. I could see that Sheila held no resistance to her mother’s will. Perhaps she had reconciled, knowing they were coming, or perhaps she had simply given up her fight the moment she saw the familiar figure enter the bedroom.

By comparison to her siblings, Sheila’s flesh paled, the color gone. But the group sounded now like a more mellow crew with her there. They doted on her with their eyes and words. While Sheila was preoccupied, Joanne sought me out.

“Admit it—you were worried!” Her big smile erased any idea I had of difficulty between the family. Her thick hair, cut short around her face in curls, framed a weathered but content face.

“What can I say—I’m pleasantly surprised. And what, if you don’t mind my asking, did you say to her?”

“Well, she’s still angry at me, believe it or not. She said I never should have told her, something about how the uninformed are happier. But what does that have to do with now? We wouldn’t have taken her if we didn’t want her.” Joanne shook her hair around as she talked, and gesticulated with her pinky fingers.

“I don’t think it’s about you anymore, if it ever was. From what she told me, your family was the best place.” I wanted her to know Sheila really did have a happy childhood. Joanne was the one who had lost, it seemed to me.

She enfolded me in her arms in the same way that Pete did. “There, there, it’s okay. We’ve got our baby back now.”

She seemed so sure, but I wondered if it was true. The house had come alive that evening, and one of the brothers had even brought his guitar. He sat off to the side, playing for one sister a song he had just learned. After every verse he explained it to her. Maybe she was a musician too. I knew little of what they had done since Sheila’s childhood.

            Sheila continued to sit on the sofa between her siblings until we assembled for dinner, and the whole time she remained reserved and quiet, in another place. But when they left she seemed relaxed once more as I read her a story before bed.

After her parent’s visit, Sheila’s interest became piqued too, serving as a glue which cemented us together during those sessions. Every night I told her not only my grandmother’s stories, but fairy tales or anything else from our large collection of books, as she leaned against me. And when I received the brochure about the National Storytelling Festival, in “Historic Jonesborough, Tennessee,” I left it on the bedside table, waiting for her to comment on it. When I went back in later that day to help her out to the living room, she waved her hands around animatedly, like her mother had. Our going to Jonesborough made sense, she said, not only because of my travel writing, but because I had always been interested in storytelling. And I didn’t realize that Sheila had already been thinking about it, in a sense.

“I’ve always wanted to go to one of these. There was one in Oakland recently, but we’ve missed it. And I haven’t been anywhere in so long.”

“But is it okay for you to travel?”

“Soon, I think. Well, I’ll ask the doctor.”

When we talked about going away it felt as if it were years ago, when we first met, the excitement of the future something to talk about because it was still going to happen. We had no doubt then.

I helped her out to the living room, where the couch waited with a folded plaid blanket. We sat down, thigh to thigh. I had put a Billy Holiday record on the turntable, and she sang “I dreaming of the man I love.” Lester Young’s smooth tenor solo carried the mood, and Sheila moved away a little, but then leaned into me, her head on my shoulder, closing her eyes. She turned her face, nuzzling into my chest.

            We agreed—in six months, barring the doctor’s ban, we would find ourselves at the famous storytelling festival. Sheila would bring her camera and I my mini tape recorder. Our storytelling radars were set and I felt like I hadn’t for years, thinking about again traveling, and this time with my wife.

Early October should have been the prettiest time of year, with clear evenings, but red and yellow leaves were half hidden under the early snow, packed up on the curb. In the waning daylight Sheila and I could see a slender white church tower at the end of a street of historic brick buildings. Beyond, the Storytelling Center loomed, looking as crisp and new as in the brochure, its square wooden bell tower shining with a series of lights strung top to bottom. The Southern-style second story porch offered a white railing all the way around and the steps leading up had been cleared of snow. We had planned to start at the Storyteller’s Wall inside the visitor center, where according to the brochure, photos of Tellers in residence and visitors were plastered, in addition to information about the Story Telling town, Jonesborough Tennessee, and its thirty-year-old festival. Our room in the B&B had a cozy view of a side street, and the place was decorated with Victorian wallpaper and fresh flowers arranged on coffee tables and in the breakfast room, where we filled up on fried eggs, blueberry muffins, and fruit salad, and a pot of tea, to brace ourselves for the outdoors.

A few Christmas decorations from the previous year resting along the tops of lamp posts. Otherwise everything pointed to the convention. People dressed up as European storybook tinkers and tailors, princes and dwarves. Gypsies and musicians strolled. Sheila pulled out her camera and started taking pictures.

Pointing to a man dressed as a crane, dark hair smoothed back and wide jaw, I told Sheila “He looks like your brother, without the muscles.”

Sheila giggled. It had been more than a year since I had heard her laugh, let alone smile. I put my arm around her shoulder as we walked along.

“Story, story,” one man hawked, as if selling something tangible like a newspaper or pretzels.

“I’ll lead you to a place where you can find—” a woman with a round body sang. She wore a dress that made her look like a sack, loose and unshaped.

We walked a little quicker.

“Frankie, let’s stop here.”

A crowd gathered around what sounded like a Celtic harp player, underneath the bright red awning of a tall building with curved windows on the upper story. But we couldn’t see the performer over the heads in front, so moved on to the next block, to a tall bearded man singing about catfish, possums, dandelions, and wild snakes, alternating with the harmonica. His white vest flapped over his red shirt as he stomped his feet and clapped his hands.

But then the corner across the way begged, for we could hear a man switch from voice to voice, human to animal, and as we neared, we could see that he mimed stories of Latin America in English. At the next corner I could barely make out a black-robed man with a large Japanese fan, making large, sweeping motions. Across the street, a woman in a rocking chair spoke with a thick Southern accent, with only a few listeners hanging on to the long drawl. White-haired, with a black and white wide-striped sweater which made her look like an ocelot, she seemed at home out on the street corner, snow banked up near her little red shoes. She wore around her neck a silver pendant in the shape of a ghost and had a donkey puppet on one hand. The disappearing light shadowed her and she rubbed one arm with the other. She slipped a finger puppet over her index finger, a gray donkey. She told a children’s’ story, but it reminded me more of something by Tennessee Williams than a story suitable for children, with people meeting at night and a jungle. So we moved on.

Up on a stage stood a couple, who had the attention of a growing audience. To the side of the almost seven foot tall man, who lurched above everyone in his long-legged overalls, stood his sign: To be with the people, I can feel it in my soul; more spirit there than I have ever felt in any church: Ray Hicks. Next to him stood a diminutive, dark-haired woman with a red dress and ribbons in her hair, playing a banjo. They sang, “I’m riding’ on that new river train… oh, my darling you can’t love but one.” The banjo made the song sound like they were about to jump aboard a moving train, the way she ran her thumb along the strings, back and forth in a steady motion. But then she stopped playing and the audience grew quiet. Then he began.

That wind, where they stayed at, that northwest wind...gah, hit would come through and just burn the house, like I’ve had it here, just burn the house. So Jack said, “Mama, I’m gonna go git you a bunch of wood and I’m gonna go ‘till I find that hole and put my cap in it and stop the northwest wind from blowing.”

Hicks seemed to grow taller as his voice rose from a whisper to a roar, with the wind.

So Jack got up and took off. Walked and walked, and finally came to a log cabin where a man was outside a-cutting wood with a poleaxe.

“Hello, son,” the man said. “Why be on your way?”

Jack said, “Man, that northwest wind has blowed so at home till I’ve decided to go hunt the hole where the wind’s a-coming out at. Gonna put my hat in it”

“Gosh, son,” said the man.

And Jack said, “Me’n my mom ain’t got nothing to eat much - no vittles, and we’s about to starve, and hit so cold.”

“Well,” said the man. “Don’t go stop up the hole. Just go back home. I’ll give you a tablecloth that all you have to do is spread it out and say, ‘Spread, spread, vittles, spread tablecloth full of vittles.’”

And so Jack went on there, and he was a-feeling so big because he knew how to make the magic tablecloth work.

“Thank you folks!” He bowed and stepped forward off the stage into the audience.

We overheard a woman standing next to us, talking to her companion. “He knows the mountainside like the back of his hand—every herb, weed, and tree that ever grew—a real productive farmer. And he dabbles in other things.”

Her companion said “He was in a movie once, I think.”

The storyteller must have overheard them, because he came over. “Yep, people always called me a jack-of-all-trades, but I like to tell of me growin’ up. They’d just show me a little of how somethin’ was done, and I’d citch on real quick. They hain’t much I can’t do.”

Sheila whispered in my ear. “It’s like visiting inside a person.”

“Yeh,” I said, “he’s talking about his life, not just a story. We should grab him for a minute.”

“You’re right. ‘Scuse me, Sir—” Sheila called out.

But he disappeared through the crowd before we she could get his attention. We carefully backed out of the crowd, which had swelled during the performance. On other corners, as far as the eye could see, smaller groups gathered around storytellers—all the way to the white church tower, only visible now because of the lights strung from its height. Darkness had descended, with fires lit in tall metal cans on every block glowing in the faces of those who warmed their hands. The scene made me think of the homeless, who had no other warmth, but we were not homeless, none of us were. We had all booked into hotels and the homes of locals, and made our way around the main street. We were all there to find a story.

The clock tower chimed eight o’clock. I had read in the brochure that something called “ghost story concerts” began at eight, and that they might be too vivid for kids under six.

Sheila yawned. “Frankie, I’ve had it—do you mind?”

I wanted to look after her, but we had come all this way. “Well, since we’re already out here… how about one more? We could listen to a ghost story?”

We came to a sign that said Crones and Gnomes and Creepy Things. A woman stood in a small lit gazebo, waiting as a crowd gathered around her. Torches flickered in the autumn darkness.

But just then, the sound of a fiddle pierced through the traffic of sound. The alleyway to our left was darkened, unlike the bright main street, with no lamps in the winter afternoon. Yet a soft glow came from the direction of the music.

“It’s the song from the mobile,” Sheila said.

She placed it immediately, and then I heard it too, but with difficulty, through the hubbub of the Main Street performers.

“Maybe you’re right, we should call it a night,” I said.

“No, listen.” Sheila led me towards the tune.

A hush pervaded the street, but less by the snow than by the low and constant murmur of voices, storytelling voices. When we entered the alley, the murmurs receded, and the air seemed crisper. The late afternoon rays could not reach their arms inside, and Sheila rubbed her hands together before stuffing them deep in the pockets of her dark red winter coat.

We approached the sinuous strings cautiously. I called out towards the fiddler, “What stories do you have?”

A clear voice, a voice much lower than my average one, came from the soft glow. “Preacher. Call me Preacher. And you’ve got to put that camera down, Ma’am.”

Sheila put her camera carefully back in its case. As we approached, his eyes shone blue against his shiny dark brown skin. Yet he looked younger than the lines of his face, his full head of hair popping out from the front of his cap.

As he put down his fiddle , his dark suit, tailored with wide lapels of the 1940s, like my jacket at home, gave off a musty cigarette smell.

The Preacher said, addressing Sheila, “You need someone to tell you what to do.”

He looked at Sheila’s wrinkled forehead. She had stopped using her expensive face cream and seemed always to have a worried look, and I didn’t know whether the face cream’s magic had proved itself in absence. I expected a sermon from the man, as he spoke in a cadence like a minister in a Baptist church I had once heard.

He continued, “But I can only tell you where you been and where you goin’. I ain’t got answers, only the song.”

He took up his fiddle again, to deliver the same tune. I could hear it more clearly now. We had wound up the mobile so many times to play its tune, and it had awaited Mimi’s arrival. But the preacher did not step up the tempo at the end like the mobile did—he slowed to a calm beat, and then finally, to a one-note drone, before fading out.

The Preacher stopped playing, put down his fiddle, and put out his hand. “Miss. Miss.”

Sheila, in a daze, looked up at him.

“Miss, put yer hand there. Please.”

Sheila didn’t look at me this time, but simply placed her hand in the Preacher’s. My stomach felt hollow, but maybe it was because we hadn’t eaten since breakfast, captivated by the storytellers. The man began to sing, with a note so low it sounded like a volcano’s warning. But then the pitch rose. He did not sing a tune, but a series of notes at strange intervals, unpredictable, and even though he did not direct his gaze in my direction, I began to feel dizzy. The voice sounded like a harp, strings fluttering upwards.

When he stopped singing I could see that Sheila had frozen in position, her hand in his, her mouth slightly ajar, her warm breath making puffs through the crack. Her eyes faced towards the man, straight ahead, so she could not see me. I wasn’t completely under the spell, and maybe I had simply suffered the secondary effects of it, but Sheila had transformed. The lines on her forehead remained but her brow had relaxed. Her eyelids quivered and a natural blush returned to her cheeks.

The Preacher had begun talking, and somehow I had missed the beginning of the story.

“…All around ‘em apple trees blossomed, and they couldn’t believe their eyes, because just the day before it was winter. The grass came up to their knees—it couldn’t stop growing. The man walked behind the woman, following her, more afraid. They had come out to orchard because of a low, hollow noise, a deep echo they couldn’t ignore, sitting inside eating supper. They walked slowly, their hands captured falling blossoms, all the way to the well, and when they got there, they bent down to look inside.”

I took Sheila’s hand. It felt warm.

“The couple left their little one back in the house. But when they looked down into the well, deep, deep down, to toss the blossoms in and make a wish, they heard the sound of a baby, crying, from the well. They couldn’t see the child, but the woman knew.”

Sheila’s hand had turned ice cold in mine.

“You have to stop. This is too much!” The ghost story had gone too far, and after our recent experience, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I wrapped Sheila’s arm in mine.

“Wait, I want to stay,” she said, keeping her feet planted and yanking me back. She had regained awareness, as had I.

The Preacher grinned, rubbing his together hands like a clown. “Yip, you see Missus, you see now, doncha.”

I wanted to run, but Sheila wasn’t disturbed, as she gazed at the man.

“What have you done—look here.” I was ready to punch this guy out, though I had never done anything of the kind.

“Take yer time, Mista,” he called to me, his voice rhythmic, lulling. He pushed his arm out towards me, as if to stop me.

She covered her face with her hand. “Yes, I see, I see.” Then she reached out and grabbed the Preacher’s hand.

By this time, darkness had completely worn over us and we stood only in the single light of the Preacher’s candle, which had appeared somehow. His eyes had softened, the corners raised in excitement from their lowered position.

I grabbed Sheila’s other hand and pulled her away, along the alleyway towards the light of Main Street. The alley seemed longer now and filled with trash cans, and cardboard boxes, which we stumbled over. I had to pull hard, because Sheila obviously didn’t want to leave, something I could not comprehend.

Finally out on the main drag, I let go of her hand and she rubbed it with the other one.

“Well, that was completely unnecessary, to drag me out of there!”

“I was trying to help. I didn’t like what was going on. Besides, look.” I pointed.

And we looked back, searching the inner recesses of the alley, only to see that the light had gone, leaving no shadows or anything resembling a human figure.

Sheila began crying quietly.

“What did you want from him? I just thought that—”

But Sheila broke in. “Sh—she’s—she’s not here—she’s gone on—” She looked down. “She—” But then she broke off again, sobbing.

Most everyone had cleared the street. A few fires still burned and some stragglers, who sounded like they had had too much to drink, walked arm-in-arm and singing loudly. A couple quickly worked their way around the group, wanting to avoid them. It was only when the group passed that I saw her. But Sheila must have seen her before I did, because she had broken away and started running across the street, to the corner where the ghost storyteller had set up earlier in her gazebo.

The young woman played a guitar and her long ebony hair hung from her delicate rosy-cheeked face, against a white velvet dress. She strummed out what sounded like a folk song, with a few major chords, pleasant enough, and quite a change from the foreboding the Preacher. She played to no one, and I wondered why she remained at all. True, there were musicians earlier who were not storytellers; yet, somehow she didn’t belong.

By the time I caught up with Sheila, I could see she was mesmerized by the girl, and had a serene expression on her face—it looked restful. And I realized that the last time she looked that way was in the ICU, when I had arrived at her bedside. Her forehead had looked tight, lined with what she had gone through alone, in our house, slipping on the floor, however long before I arrived to call for help. When she had woken up in that bed and spoken senselessly,  talking in riddles. And then, she had fallen asleep with an expression of true calm. She had that expression now.

But Sheila turned to me. “Frankie—” Her voice crackled.

“What, hon?”

“You see, it’s true, what the Preacher was saying. You didn’t want to hear it, I know that, but you’ve got to hear it.”

“I just wanted to get out of there.”

“I know, but you’ve got to listen. Please. What he meant about the baby down there in the well, the crying. They had lost her, they weren’t ready—no, I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want her. Do you hear? I really didn’t want her.”

“What do you mean—of course we—wanted her. What about the crib, all that wallpapering, the mobile? What about all the clothes from your parents, the baby shower? I know Therese insisted on that one, but you gave in. What am I supposed to think?”

“No, listen,” she said. “My career. I spent years of my life as a photographer, for what. You know, you go around writing about your travels, but what about me? What about my art? I wasn’t ready for a kid, I didn’t have any time. You’re older than me, but I’m not that young myself. When you talked to her, you welcomed her, Mimi I mean. You put together the crib, which was great.

“Yeh, thanks.”

“Yes, you were great—you were terrific. We wallpapered together, but I didn’t feel like I was really there. I know, we did it together, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I had convinced myself, since I had gotten pregnant, that I would do it. But that day you came home and found me on the floor, that day in the kitchen—before you arrived, I told her I wanted my life back. The doctor said with my high blood pressure I would have to rest in bed—not just for a few hours in the afternoon, but twenty-four hours a day for two months. I told her I couldn’t stand it—” She put her hands over her eyes.

It was still there, as much as I had hoped what was hard and immovable between us had melted during her recovery at home, as we looked forward to the festival. But I still didn’t understand what she meant about the baby.

“There I was in the hospital with you, all those hours, days, waiting for you, listening to you talk about things that were only in your head. I couldn’t reach you. And at the cemetery too.”

“I know.” She stopped crying, and looked up. “And not only then, but years really, you couldn’t reach me.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have traveled so much,” I offered.

“Maybe I should have talked to my parents earlier.”

“I don’t think I could have stopped them from coming over. I mean, you almost didn’t make it.”

“What do you mean? Really?”

“Yes, you didn’t know?

“You never really said, and you know the doctors—they say they’re telling you everything, but you can’t trust them.”

“I know, but you have to trust me,” I said.

Sheila put her hand over my mouth. She paused, then spoke softly. “You see, when I fell, it wasn’t my hormones, it wasn’t exhaustion. After I told her I didn’t want her, I slipped and fell. Just like that.”

She meant Mimi. She didn’t want Mimi. It finally sunk in. I couldn’t deny her words nor try to convince her otherwise. She had survived her own child, but it was more than that. I saw that it was more than about the baby, that she had never really survived her own childhood, her mother’s legacy. I knew about it. Therese and I had talked about it. But I didn’t see it.

Sheila continued, in a measured way. “What the preacher was trying to say, was that she’s in the past, but she’s also in the future.”

I couldn’t say anything more, I just wanted it to lay there. Whatever she need to say, she would tell me now. I didn’t feel the cold of the night anymore. So I let her continue.

“I mean, I have to go on and look for her.”

I saw, but it was hard to accept. That Sheila would let Mimi go, that she could let her go, or even wanted…” All I could see was the dirty snow on the curb.

“Frankie, look at her. I can’t believe it’s her.” She turned back to face the girl, who was strumming away on her guitar, looking one way and then the other, as if a crowd stood before her. “When I was in the hospital I saw her.” She nodded towards the girl, who didn’t seem to notice. “I dreamt her. She was in a white gown, a little baby, but the same girl. I know it doesn’t make sense, but listen. I held her to me, and nursed her in my bed. The nurse came in and propped my back up with pillows and I sat there with her—Mimi—” She broke off now, staring at the girl with moist eyes.

I stared at the girl myself, and then back at Sheila. “But the Preacher?”

“The Preacher. He only meant that she’ll come back into our lives. But that we first have to let her go. Both of us.”

The girl emanated a light. Whether it came from her white velvet dress, bright in the night, or from the snow behind her, she seemed to glow. And it reached out to Sheila and encompassed her in its path, warming her face, her cheeks glowing as I’d never seen them before. Sheila looked over at me again and I saw that the glow now encompassed where I stood. Sheila took my hand in hers. I was included in that light.