The Daughters: A Novel (14 page)

“Hello?” I speak immediately when the line connects.

“Hello?” Echo. Silence. “
Hello?”

Her voice is so familiar, I could cry.

“Mama,” I say. “It’s me.”

8

T
he woods encroached on Greta’s home—through the lumber, through every window and crack. But they also belonged to her, and she to them. Her people were always killed in the manner of forest creatures; they died as they lived—struck by lightning, poisoned by a corrupted stream, lost in a field of identical birches that confounded a wanderer’s sense of direction. People in town said Greta came from nowhere, that she’d been found by a hunter bundled up on the ground and had for the most part raised herself. And for that reason or for some other, she continually slipped back into the woods on rambling walks that led her nowhere.

People also said she pulled trouble behind her wherever she went, but for a long time that was just talk, it wasn’t true. Not until she was a grown woman making choices for herself and asking for the things she wanted. Wishes are dangerous things, you see. Start asking the sky to grant you requests and you better prepare for some fallout, red rain.

When a fifth daughter had bloomed within her and faded, this was when she made the deal. The baby lasted long enough inside her to inspire a new glimmer of hope, and to bring a new type of devastation when it was born early, blue and still. Greta insisted on digging the grave herself, and taking the girl far away from her home. She was worried that the voices of the lost girls were getting too loud, and that no child would ever be able to hear past them. She was insensible to protests—deaf to Saul’s urging to stay in bed, to the midwife’s painstaking explication of the volume of blood she’d lost in labor. Greta took the small raisin of a body and wrapped it in clean blankets with the face left bare. Even close up it was difficult to tell the child wasn’t just sleeping.

Greta strapped this parcel to her chest with a long cotton shawl, leaving her hands free to carry a shovel. She allowed Saul to put an apple in her pocket, a crust of bread, and then she kissed the boys on the tops of their heads and walked into the forest, snapping small twigs beneath her feet.

She walked all day. In truth she had no notion of where she was going, what she was looking for. Occasionally she caught a hint of a song on the wind—naturally, she thought she was imagining it. But with no other guiding light to follow, she turned her ear to the sound and walked towards it. By noon she’d consumed the apple and tossed the skinny core beneath a bush. By nightfall she was curled up beneath a tree guarding the waxen infant with the curve of her body.

When the sun came up, Greta found herself in a small clearing full of light blue flowers. She couldn’t remember seeing them the night before, though of course it had been dark then, black shadows dripping down from the sky. Now she was covered in dew, her clothing wet and her hair hanging in damp strings. She blinked in
the light and spent a moment rubbing color into her cheeks, cricking her back. There was a baby asleep beside her.

“I’m afraid not.”

Greta started at the voice but made an effort to retain her composure. A creature that sneaks up on you in the dead of the woods is usually only as dangerous as you make it. Keeping her body poised, she turned her neck to peer behind her. Some ten feet away, just outside the clearing, a man stood, leaning against a tree. He was bathed in shade, with only one leg peeking out into the full light. When he noticed this, the man pulled the leg back, turning his body monochromatic.

But Greta had seen the color of his suit, gray as the ashes from an old fire. Familiar.

“Do we know each other?” she asked.

“Perhaps.” The man turned so his spine lay against the tree and his weight rested on his heels. “We may have, once.”

He began to whistle, as though he had all the time in the world and this was the most ordinary interaction he could have dreamed up. Almost dull. But the sound sent a thrill through Greta’s body, her lungs constricting, heavy and cold.

“I’ve heard that song before,” she said.

“Well.” The man smiled at her, a half smile. “It’s not uncommon, is it? The kind of song you might hear at a pub.” He whistled another few bars. “Or a dance.”

A cool wind blew across the clearing, bending stalks of vegetation into sway-backed petitioners. Greta let her weight rest on one hand and listened to the familiar music rebound from rocks and trees. She hummed along, just a little. Remembering Saul’s hand in the concave of her back.

The body of her child lay tranquil beside her on its bed of flowers and grass. During the night the child’s skin had taken on
a bluish hue—peaked, freezing—and, unthinking, Greta tried to warm her. Ran a finger over the small forehead, felt the cheeks with her palms. But the child didn’t stir. She just lay there, skin smudging slightly where it was touched.

Greta shivered. When she looked up, the sun had gone behind a cloud and the man was stooping right beside her. His hair was white blond, his eyes slightly lined, as if from squinting.

“Well,” he said again, nodding at the shovel. “Aren’t you going to get on with it?”

What could she do? What else
was
there to do? Accepting the hand the man held out to her—a clean hand, with trimmed nails and pink skin—Greta hauled herself to her feet and picked up the spade.

“I think,” the man said, “that anywhere around here will do.”

Greta’s shoulders heaved each time the shovel sliced the ground, calling forth a cold
chink
from the soil. She wanted a hole deep enough to muffle her own grief, if such a hole could be had. Soon she was standing in a pit up to her ankles, then her knees. The dirt grew cooler the deeper she went, a chill seeping out from the earth and into Greta’s skin. The man just watched, rocking back and forth on his heels.

“Although . . .” Sweat dripped from every inch of her skin, but still, when the stranger spoke, Greta froze. She looked up to see him wearing a thoughtful expression. “It does seem like a shame.”

Greta waited. After a minute she asked, “What does?”

“Or a
waste
, really.” The man began strolling around the hole, his hands folded neatly behind his back. “A beautiful girl. A terrible tragedy.”

“I don’t know.” Greta looked at the small, still child and wanted with every fiber to be able to breathe her own life into that body. But what she said was “It happens all the time.”

The man wasn’t listening.

“And of course sons are nice, lovely really, but they’re not the same for a woman. I can see you holding a little girl in your arms. I can picture it.” The man sighed. “Oh, clearly. Very clearly.”

He walked over to the baby, lying in a bed of grass where Greta had left her. The blanket was wrapped tightly around the child, folds tucked cleverly under folds so that the whole package was as smooth as a pillowcase. Crouching on his heels, the stranger picked up the baby and cradled her in his elbow. Greta sucked in a breath. But what could he do that hadn’t already been done?

“Yes,” the man said. “I wonder if we don’t have something to offer one another, you and I.” He rose back up, still holding the bundle. “After all, I hate to see you so lonely.”

He stood at the lip of Greta’s hole and looked down at her. Her shoulders tightened.

“Because you are lonely, aren’t you?” he asked. “You have a little family. All those little men. But how happy can you be? With this?”

The man tilted his chin to the cold form of the baby.

“I can offer you the child you really want,” he continued. “The child you dream of. You
do
still dream of her, don’t you?” He smiled his thin smile again and nodded. “Often. Yes. It would be a good trade.”

In her half-dug grave, Greta’s ankles were freezing cold. She tried to call up an image of Andrzej’s face, then Fil’s, then Konrad’s. But she couldn’t.

“What do you mean, a trade?”

The man looked up into the distance as if calculating a very large number.

“I really dislike waste, you know. Can’t stand it. Everything has a
use
if you look for it. But most people don’t look, do they?”

Greta scowled. “You’re talking in riddles.”

“I am, aren’t I?” The stranger scratched his ear. “Please forgive me. It’s just that I get caught up in my own ideas and I forget what I have and haven’t said out loud. What I mean is very simple. You want a daughter, and you should have one. And she”—he looked now into Greta’s eyes with a frankness that seemed to fix her in place—“she should really have a daughter too. And her. And her.”

He moved the baby so that she lay with her face against his shoulder.

“I’m not sure I understand you,” said Greta. But the man was no longer paying any attention to her, caught up as he was in the details of his idea. He seemed to forget that he’d begged her forgiveness for this very sin not a moment ago.

“And the beauty of it is,” he continued, “you don’t even have to say yes. All you have to do is not tell me no. For a little while, you might think you’ve dreamed this. Oh, you’ll try to convince yourself. Or you’ll think I was a madman in the woods. You’ll think, sometimes, that you’ve caught a glimpse of me—in a window or on a busy street. But you don’t have to worry. I won’t be checking up on you.” He tugged his earlobe. “No need.”

Greta’s fingers tightened around the shovel. The day, she realized, had grown dark, and the sky now seemed to be threatening rain.

“What are you going to do?”

“I told you. Or did I?” The man frowned. “It’s just a simple trade. I take a few things that you don’t need—a few things I’d like to have—and you get something in return. Something you want very much. Doesn’t that seem fair?”

A drop fell from the sky onto Greta’s cheek. The stranger looked up at the clouds.

“You’d better hurry,” he said. “There isn’t much time to decide.”

“All right,” said Greta. Before she knew what she was doing.

“Really?” The man scraped a nail along the edge of his bottom lip. “You’re sure?”

Greta nodded. Another few raindrops fell on her shoulders, a few on the top of her head and her hands.

“Well, good then.” The man turned and walked towards the woods, then looked back at Greta. “I won’t see you again, you know.” When she didn’t reply, he stepped into the trees, picking his way through the underbrush until he was gone.

A moment passed and the rain began to drum against the ground in earnest. Then Greta’s heart wrenched. The baby. He’d taken the baby with him.

“Wait!” Greta tried to pull herself out of the hole, but the dirt was turning into mud and she slipped and scrambled against it. “Wait!” she cried.

But her voice echoed into nothingness. When she finally managed to get out of the grave, the clearing was empty. There was no one in sight, no matter which direction she turned. Just trees, which looked spindlier and more identical as they receded. Her shawl lay empty on the earth.

Greta sat down and sobbed into her hands. Her whole body was covered in mud, and it slurred into her eyes, so everything looked brown and dead. She waited. Time passed and nothing changed, except that she blinked out the mud and wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

The man was gone. And he wasn’t coming back.

Little knowing what else to do, Greta filled in the hole she’d dug. And as strange as it was, with every shovelful she threw down, she felt her fury recede. As if she weren’t lifting dirt from
a mound but from her own shoulders. A weight from her mind. When she was done, she marked the place with a cross of stones and paused to appreciate it. No one would ever know the difference.
Maybe
, she thought,
I’ll forget too.

But she never did.

9

“L
ulu.”

Over the phone I can hear my mother light a cigarette, take a drag. Pause and spit a flake of tobacco off her tongue. She doesn’t say anything but my name, and that’s enough. As always, her voice sounds like it’s kept on packed ice. Winter breathing off the water, ice crystallizing on your eyelashes as you stroll the last block home. A Billie Holiday voice, scratchy muslin that touches your skin even before it reaches your ears.