Set Me Free (47 page)

“I used the present tense because he’s obviously quite present in your… well, in
you.
You walk around acting like he just beat you up.”

That was when I told her everything I could about Jasper Francoeur.

When I was done talking, it was much, much later. Suzanne had called to inform us everyone was bedded down at her house. Helen
and I had moved inside. We sat side by side on the couch. I lit another cigarette, even though I knew you’d be horrified to
find me smoking in your house.

“So,” Helen said. “He changed your life. I guess you’ll never forgive him for that.” I had to look at her to see whether she
was mocking me or not. She was dead serious.

“No,” I said.

“No, you will? Or no, you won’t?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I stubbed the cigarette out in the dry glass in my hand and held it in the tips of my fingers.

“Okay,” she said,“confession time. Amelia told me about that pep talk you gave her. Your Caliban advice. She was so matter-of-fact.
She made me promise not to tell anyone else. But what you told her about the affair you had in Boston? With the married woman?
That helped her, Cal. It helped her think about her role, sure. But it also helped her think about life.” She was moving toward
me. “I know I shouldn’t be breaking her confidence. But I wanted you to know that story helped me too. I needed to hear it.
I wanted to understand if it was just your stubbornness that drove me crazy, or if you were the kind of man I could fall in
love with.” She reached out her arm and put it on the small of my back. She pulled me in. She said, nearly whispering, into
my ear, “You must understand this about me: I will never be like that woman. I will never believe that you come from nothing.
I will never believe that you are nothing.” And then she held me. She let me close my eyes and press them against the heartbeat
thrumming in her neck. She let me lean.

* * *

Y
OU CAN SEE
that there is plenty of guilt and grief and joy and forgiveness to go around in the old Bugle House on Antler Hill; there
is a particular way for each of us to feel bad and to feel fabulous, like the wretched and essentially good people we are.
Seeing that, getting that in our brains, has been the first stage in our recovery. The second stage has been finding a way
out. That began when Suzanne Cinqchevaux drove up with old Mrs. Littlefoot and two other old women and three men, and the
ceremonies of eating and sleeping, praying and dancing, began. The vigil began. You lived on, refusing to go, as Mrs. Littlefoot
put it, until we did things right.

Her requirements were simple. The first thing we needed to do was find out about that baby. Yes,
that
baby. The one the kids, Victor and Amelia, had found at Wiggler’s Creek all those years ago. To be honest, I was ready to
tell the old woman to give it a rest, but it was Lydia who hushed me for good.

She’d found the baby. Of course she had. That’s Lydia for you. She’d begun nosing around right after Amelia slammed her way
out of her car, and had come up with a nine-year-old girl, Lucy Randall, baby sister of Lucas Randall, who was now married
to Doris, one of Lydia’s cousins.

The story was simple, kind of romantic. Two kids in love. One Indian girl, one white boy. The boy’s a big brother who’s told
to care for his baby sister for the day. He thinks that means he can woo his girlfriend, he can take her out on the land and
lie down with her. The trouble is, she’s shy, doesn’t want to lie down in front of the baby. So the boy makes it right, takes
the baby off a little span, flags the site, assures his girlfriend the baby is fine.

That’s when those kids show up. One of them’s that white girl, daughter of the schoolteacher. When the little boy runs off
and the little girl hides herself away to pee, the big brother, wily and silent, slips right in and scoops up his baby sister
before the adults come back and whip him for good. Doris and Luke fall even more in love after this, and the story is one
they begin to tell on themselves
in front of family about six years into their marriage. Up until the moment Lydia asks to hear it, everyone else has believed
it to be one of those lies people tell about the time they fell in love.

When Lydia finishes her rendition, Mrs. Littlefoot is nodding like crazy, rocking back and forth in her chair, even though
it’s an ordinary kitchen chair and not a rocker.

Amelia, who sits with Willa on one side, Victor on the other, pipes right up, “I don’t get it. I mean, I don’t think I believe
in all the magic stuff”—she blushed—“but I thought I was the one who made the baby appear. You said I had.” She looked straight
at Mrs. Littlefoot.

The old woman looked right back. “You
did
make that baby appear. You needed to see that baby. Now the real baby you missed has come: your sister. Now you let that
other baby, the one you found that day, have her own realness.”

Then she looked at me. “Time’s come,” she said, “for you to pick up the work your daddy made for you.” She chuckled when she
saw my face. “You don’t like me saying that. ‘Course I don’t mean the lawyering. I mean the work where you do what you was
put here to do. I’m looking around me, Calbert. If someone doesn’t begin to tell this family’s story, doesn’t close this story
down, there’ll be no end to it.

“You know what I’m talking about. Your old maw Daisy Lesmures knew as good as me. Unless you tell a person his story, how’s
he gonna know it’s over? How’s he gonna know it’s all right for him to go now?” She shrugged. “That’s the job your daddy saved
you for. Can’t flee it.”

W
E ARE GATHERED
here around your bedside: Helen, Amelia, Willa, Nat, and I. We sit around you, a circle of the family you have made. I know
you feel us here. There is one more story to tell.

This time I don’t have any of the facts. You are silent and Astrid, or Caroline, is dead. But it is the story that we need.
It is the story the girls need to hear in order to put some meaning into what kept
them apart for seventeen years. It is the story Nat needs in order to understand why the woman he loved left him for you.
It is the story Helen needs in order to understand the man she married. It is the story I need because I need it.

All the falling in love around me makes me wonder: were you and Astrid in love? In the beginning? When Helen found you together
in her marriage bed, was what she saw really love? I wonder this because I’ve done my research, and I know now that nine months
and twenty-two days after you made those girls, your wife walked out of her apartment with one of them tied to her chest,
hidden under her coat. It was Wednesday, March 5, 1980. Astrid Lux Barrow—the name she’d made up, because her name was really
Caroline—walked twenty-eight blocks downtown and struck up a conversation with a young, handsome man. She asked him for directions.
When he offered to help her, they walked together until they passed an alley. In the alley waited her friends, her comrades,
who put a pillowcase over the head of this young, handsome man named Jason Simpson, who also happened to be the son of the
president of one of wealthiest banks in the world. Astrid got in that van with the newborn Willa tied to her chest and left
her life behind her.

I don’t know what made her do it. I don’t know why she brought her baby along with her. I do know that what she and her comrades
did to that young man was an act of terrorism denounced in newspapers all over this country. I know that a few days later,
Caroline appeared at Nat’s door to drop Willa off with a man she knew she could trust. I know that this same woman’s life
ended at a split-level in New Jersey a week later, when the safe house where she was staying exploded. She had gone to that
safe house after leaving Willa in Nat’s care.

All these stories depend on one great, strange truth that none of us fully understands. Why did you and Astrid keep the twins
a secret? That is the question that gnaws at us. It keeps us restless in the night. It infuses the girls’ sleep with nightmares.
It keeps you from having your peace.

I wish I could speak the truth for you. I wish I could tell this family of yours why you did such a strange thing. But I can’t.
I wasn’t there. What I can do, what I
do,
is tell stories. So I can guess. And that’s why we’re gathered here today. So that I can tell you all the story of how Willa
and Amelia first came into the world. Together.

I
T WAS A
cold February night, and Astrid was not due for another week. But her water broke early in the evening, and her contractions
came on fierce and rapid. Elliot called the midwife, and she, of the patchouli-scented everything, arrived at the door in
a swirl of wool and linen and declaration. “Your son will be an Aquarius!” she announced, as if Elliot didn’t know that already.
For you see, the midwife was sure the baby was a boy, and even she believed there would be only one baby.

That could still happen in those days. Before ultrasounds. It was just a doctor in a clinic with five minutes and a stethoscope,
who could mistake one back, one head, and one set of legs as all belonging to one baby. Who, in his rush, listened for only
one heartbeat and, hence, heard only one.

Elliot would have liked to get Astrid better prenatal care. He had the money, for God’s sake. But pregnancy had made Astrid
more political and angry than she’d ever been. She was fiercely independent. She insisted on riding the subway alone, even
though her belly swelled to epic proportions. She told him that if women in Harlem were doing fine with the prenatal care
up there, so could she. She had been sullen on their wedding day, but he’d chalked it up to cold feet, to the strange circumstance
of an unplanned pregnancy. Instead of lifting, the sullenness had spread, turned bitter. She asked him, six months in,“Why
did you make me marry you?” This was when he knew his marriage had crumbled. This was when he began to wonder who it was he’d
married. Because in pregnancy, Astrid was no longer the giggling girl who’d taken him to bed. She was fierce and determined.
Not at all like other pregnant
women he’d seen. He insisted they move to their own apartment and out of the commune. It would be better this way, he assured
her. But more often than not, when he came home from work, she was not there. He would call the commune, and someone would
vouch for her safety, then hang up the phone. The commune was angry at him for insisting on keeping his family unit separate.

As Astrid got closer and closer to her due date, and it became harder and harder for her to get around, she and Elliot began
to argue. He had agreed to a home birth with the midwife of her choice. He thought this was more than a little reasonable.
She wasn’t satisfied. She told him she felt like now that she was full of a baby, she could no longer be full of dreams. She
wept, but she would not let him hold her.

He would have been willing to do anything to see her smile.

On the night when Willa and Amelia were born, the midwife and Elliot held Astrid’s arms and spoke in soft tones. Astrid had
decided she wanted to have the baby swim into the world; they were lucky to have a bathtub in their small apartment. The midwife
advised her that it would be difficult to climb in and out, but Astrid was stubborn like an ox. She could make decisions even
when her body was not hers. She asked for more ice chips and assured them that she was having this baby in the bathtub.

Amelia Barrow was born at 4:03
A.M.
She swam out into the world, all fists and sputter and wild eyes. In planning for the birth, Elliot and Astrid had talked
about this moment as though there were still a partnership between them: Astrid would pick the baby up out of the water, pull
her onto her breasts, and nurse her straightaway. But in the minute after Amelia was born, Astrid could only moan and cry.
Contractions were still coming hard, and the midwife’s uncertainty was nearly more than Elliot could bear. So he reached down
into the lukewarm water himself and pulled out the baby girl, clutching her in a towel. She looked up at him with wise eyes,
and he was washed in happiness. He waited to cut her cord.

“The placenta’s coming,” the midwife said by way of explanation. Four minutes later, it was not a placenta that emerged from
Astrid’s womb, but another baby girl. A baby girl none of them had known would come. This girl was smaller and more serious.
Already so serious that in the seconds after her birth, she looked up through the water and caught her mother’s eyes, and
her mother felt for the first time in her life that she was known.

After that, one thing led to another. It was daytime when the midwife left, and before she did, she and Astrid spent a long
time alone in the bedroom, talking. Elliot didn’t want to disturb them, but when he let the midwife out, she winked at him.
“Our little secret,” she said.

He asked Astrid what the midwife meant. Astrid was exhausted by the birth and the sheer hard work of the girls’ constant demands
for her breasts. She kept saying it was too much. “Look,” she said, “fuck the government. They want us to fill out a slip
of paper saying how many future taxpayers we’re providing them with. Well, fuck that. Let’s tell them we just had Amelia and
leave it at that.”

“You’ve named her?”

“Amelia. After my grandmother.”

“And her?” He held the tiny hand of his second daughter.

“Her name’s Willa. I was going to name our boy William, if we’d had a boy. But Willa’s a good name too.”

Elliot looked at his wife, just a girl, really, and decided the sadness rushing through him could be chocked up to sheer surprise
and exhaustion. They were all going to feel euphoric tomorrow. He would talk sense into her then.

“We have to fill out birth certificates,” he said the next day as he spooned soup into Astrid’s mouth. He’d told her to invite
her friends over, that he’d make a vegetarian stew. But she said she wanted to be alone with the babies. She didn’t mention
him.

“Technically, we only have to fill out one birth certificate,” she said.