The Fate of Mice (20 page)

The last line is: “Tomorrow I begin again.”

God, that last line! No wonder I’d liked that poem—it sounded like what coming home from work had been every day I could remember, every single shitty day. I remembered the kid and thought, hey, hey, are you still there? I couldn’t feel her cowering anymore, just myself feeling sick and swollen and horrible, like when I’m about to get my period except it really was too late, at that point. And I realized that I wanted to be pregnant, that I wanted to get the kid out of me, send her into the world so she could find people who’d know how to love her—even if she wasn’t real, even if she was just something I’d invented out of goddamned paper towels and coffee grounds.

I switched OB/Gyns, because after I’d said being pregnant was impossible the first one wouldn’t have believed my new story, which was that I wanted to be a single mother and had paid a stranger to get me pregnant.

I invited Joni into the city one weekend, and didn’t even have to tell her because she knew when she looked at me, God knows how because I wasn’t showing at that point. But she knew, Joni who’d been my best friend since first grade and had always known everything.

She knew better than to believe the story I told, though. “You want to have a baby?” she asked gently, shaking her head. “Cara? You never said anything about it. You’ve never even liked kids—”

“I changed my mind,” I told her. It hurt to swallow. I’d never consciously lied to Joni about anything, but if I told her the truth I’d lose her, too—Joni who was the only person I’d ever completely trusted.

“You
paid
someone? How do you find someone for that?”

“Ad in the
Voice.”

“Jesus, Cara, that’s got to be illegal—do you have a lawyer?”

“No.”

“Who’s the father?”

“We didn’t use real names. That was part of it. We met at a hotel.”

“Oh, my God.” Joni rubbed her eyes, shook her head again, said, “Why didn’t you tell me about this? Why didn’t you say anything?” And a moment later, with morbid curiosity, “How much did you pay him?”

I made up a figure. I couldn’t tell Joni that I was planning to give the baby up for adoption, because that would blow the
Voice
story to hell. But I could tell she still didn’t believe me; she sounded worried all the time, and when I was ten weeks along she finally said, “Cara, are you sure about this? There’s still time to change your mind… it’s not easy to make a good home for a kid, even when you’re married and everything.”

“I’m sure,” I said. After I’d had the baby I’d tell her I’d changed my mind, that I’d thought about it and she was right, I couldn’t give it a good enough home. How could I tell Joni I was having a child precisely because I couldn’t give it a home at all, couldn’t give anything or anyone a home, couldn’t make a home for myself?

She appointed herself my surrogate partner. She enrolled me in exercise and natural childbirth classes, nagged me about nutrition, made me swear by anything I’d ever believed in not to drink, not to smoke, not to take even the most innocent drugs. She went with me for my check-ups, for the sonogram and the amniocentesis and the monitors which picked up a steady, thriving fetal heartbeat. I don’t know how she afforded the time away from Dave and Joshua then, how she can afford it now; but I went along with all of it, because I owed the beaten child at least that much.

When the results from the amniocentesis came back, the doctor asked me if I wanted to know the sex of my baby. “It’s a girl,” I told him.

He laughed. “Bingo. You had a fifty-fifty chance of being right.”

Even with the heartbeat and all the tests, every night before I went to sleep I became convinced that I was playing a huge hoax, that the symptoms were fake and there was no baby at all—even though I felt it kicking, even though my belly was growing like that of any pregnant woman.

And I found myself, to my horror, beginning to want the child. The charade of setting up a nursery pleased me as nothing has done in years. I began noticing children everywhere I went—infants in strollers, toddlers in playgrounds, women with babies in stores. When I talked to Joni on the phone I’d listen to hear what Joshua was doing in the background. I started reading baby books and worrying about chicken pox.

I love this unseen baby more than I’ve ever loved anything, and I don’t know what to do with that, I who have always been so afraid to love. I’m afraid that at the last minute I’ll waver and keep the child instead of giving it up—for all the wrong reasons, for the attention it will bring me—and that sooner or later I’ll subject it to the very torment from which I’m trying to free it, just because I don’t know any other way to act. I don’t know if the promise I made, that night in front of the television, is one I can keep.

Yesterday I asked Joni if she remembered our phone conversation about the child inside us who expects to be liked. “You can’t separate yourself from it?” I asked her. “You can’t send it away?”

“Never,” she said with a smile, and I closed my eyes because I knew she was trying to be reassuring, and I had no way of making her understand that she was being just the opposite.

The contractions are closer together now and I’ve been moved into the delivery room, Joni by my side telling me how to breathe, when to push, all the doctors and nurses looking down at me with cheer and encouragement. Their faces are shining. I can only imagine what mine looks like. I’m so afraid.

Soon it will all be over, and I don’t know how it will end, what will happen to me and what I’ve created. When the baby comes out I wonder if she’ll look like me; I wonder if she’ll be covered with bruises and will never be able to trust anyone. I’m afraid to let her go, to dismiss the only part of me which has ever been good, and I’m afraid that if I don’t give her away I’ll destroy her and myself.

And there’s the other possibility, although all the facts argue against it, although Joni and the nurses are urging me to push one last time, because the doctor just announced that he can see the baby’s head: that when she comes out she’ll collapse like paper, a myth torn apart, and tomorrow I’ll have to begin again.

“Velvet,” she says, pushing back her sleep-tousled hair. “I want green velvet this time, with lace around the neck and wrists. Cream lace—not white—and sea-green velvet. Can you do that?”

“Of course.” She’s getting vain, this one; vain and a little bossy. The wonder has worn off. All for the best. Soon now, very soon, I’ll have to tell her the truth.

She bends, here in the dark kitchen, to peer at the back of her mother’s prized copper kettle. It’s just after dusk, and by the light of the lantern I’m holding a vague reflection flickers and dances on the metal. She scowls. “Can’t you get me a real mirror? That ought to be simple enough.”

I remember when the light I brought filled her with awe. Wasting good fuel, just to see yourself by! “No mirrors. I clothe you only in seeming, not in fact. You know that.”

“Ah.” She waves a hand, airily. She’s proud of her hands: delicate and pale and long-fingered, a noblewoman’s hands; all the years before I came she protected them against the harsh work of her mother’s kitchen. “Yes, the prince. I have to marry a prince, so I can have his jewels for my own. Will it be this time, do you think?”

“There will be no princes at this dance, Caitlin. You are practicing for princes.”

“Hah! And when I’m good enough at last, will you let me wear glass slippers?”

“Nonsense. You might break them during a gavotte, and cut yourself.”

She knew the story before I found her; they always do. It enters their blood as soon as they can follow speech, and lodges in their hearts like the promise of spring. All poor mothers tell their daughters this story, as they sit together in dark kitchens, scrubbing pots and trying to save their hands for the day when the tale becomes real. I often wonder if that first young woman was one of ours, but the facts don’t matter. Like all good stories, this one is true.

“Princess Caitlin,” she says dreamily. “That will be very fine. Oh, how they will envy me! It’s begun already, in just the little time since you’ve made me beautiful. Ugly old Lady Alison—did you see her giving me the evil eye, at the last ball? Just because my skin is smooth and hers wrinkled, and I a newcomer?”

“Yes,” I tell her. I am wary of Lady Alison, who looks too hard and says too little. Lady Alison is dangerous.

“Jealousy,” Caitlin says complacently. “I’d be jealous, if I looked like she does.”

“You are very lovely,” I say, and it is true. With her blue eyes and raven hair, and those hands, she could have caught the eye of many princes on her own. Except, of course, that without me they never would have seen her.

Laughing, she sits to let me plait her hair. “So serious! You never smile at me. Do magic folk never smile? Aren’t you proud of me?”

“Very proud,” I say, parting the thick cascade and beginning to braid it. She smells like smoke and the thin, sour stew which simmers on the hearth, but at the dance tonight she will be scented with all the flowers of summer.

“Will you smile and laugh when I have my jewels and land? I shall give you riches, then.”

So soon, I think, and my breath catches. So soon she offers me gifts, and forgets the woman who bore her, who now lies snoring in the other room. All for the best; and yet I am visited by something very like pity. “No wife has riches but from her lord, Caitlin. Not in this kingdom.”

“I shall have riches of my own, when I am married,” she says grandly; and then, her face clouding as if she regrets having forgotten, “My mother will be rich too, then. She’ll like you, when we’re rich. Godmother, why doesn’t she like you now?”

“Because I am stealing you away from her. She has never been invited to a ball. And because I am beautiful, and she isn’t anymore.”

What I have said is true enough, as always; and, as always, I find myself wondering if there is more than that. No matter. If Caitlin’s mother suspects, she says nothing. I am the only chance she and her daughter have to approach nobility, and for the sake of that dream she has tolerated my presence, and Caitlin’s odd new moods, and the schedule which keeps the girl away from work to keep her fresh for dances.

Caitlin bends her head, and the shining braids slip through my fingers like water. “She’ll come to the castle whenever she wants to, when I’m married to a prince. We’ll make her beautiful too, then. I’ll buy her clothing and paint for her face.”

“There are years of toil on her, Caitlin. Lady Alison is your mother’s age, and all her riches can’t make her lovely again.”

“Oh, but Lady Alison’s mean. That makes you ugly.” Caitlin dismisses her enemy with the ignorance of youth. Lady Alison is no meaner than anyone, but she has borne illnesses and childlessness and the unfaithfulness of her rich lord. Her young nephew will fall in love with Caitlin tonight—a match Lord Gregory suggested, I suspect, precisely because Alison will oppose it.

Caitlin’s hair is done, piled in coiled, lustrous plaits. “Do you have the invitation? Where did I put it?”

“On the table, next to the onions.”

She nods, crosses the room, snatches up the thick piece of paper and fans herself with it. I remember her first invitation, only six dances ago, her eagerness and innocence and purity, the wide eyes and wonder.
I? I have been invited to the ball?
She refused to let go of the invitation then; afraid it might vanish as suddenly as it had come, she carried it with her for hours. They are always at their most beautiful that first time, when they believe most fully in the story and are most awe-stricken at having been chosen to play the heroine. No glamour we give them can ever match that first glow.

“Clothe me,” Caitlin commands now, standing with her eyes closed in the middle of the kitchen, and I put the glamour on her and her grubby kitchen-gown is transformed by desire and shadow into sea-green velvet and cream lace. She smiles. She opens her eyes, which gleam with joy and the giddiness of transformation. She has taken easily to that rush; she craves it. Already she has forsaken dreams of love for dreams of power.

“I’m hungry,” she says. “I want to eat before the dance. What was that soup you gave me last night? You must have put wine in it, because it made me drunk. I want some of that.”

“No food before you dance,” I tell her. “You don’t want to look fat, do you?”

No chance of that, for this girl who has starved in a meager kitchen all her life; but at the thought of dancing she forgets her hunger and takes a few light steps in anticipation of the music. “Let me stay longer this time—please. Just an hour or two. I never get tired anymore.”

“Midnight,” I tell her flatly. It won’t do to change that part of the story until she knows everything.

So we go to the dance, in a battered carriage made resplendent not by any glamour of mine but by Caitlin’s belief in her own beauty. This, too, she has learned easily; already the spells are more hers than mine, although she doesn’t yet realize it.

At the gates, Caitlin hands the invitation to the footman. She has grown to relish this moment, the thrill of bending him to her will with a piece of paper, of forcing him to admit someone he suspects—quite rightly—doesn’t belong here. It is very important that she learn to play this game. Later she will learn to win her own invitations, to cajole the powerful into admitting her where, without their permission, she cannot go at all.

Only tonight it is less simple. The footman glances at the envelope, frowns, says, “I’m sorry, but I can’t admit you.”

“Can’t admit us?” Caitlin summons the proper frosty indignation, and so I let her keep talking. She needs to learn this, too. “Can’t admit us, with a handwritten note from Lord Gregory?”

“Just so, mistress. Lady Alison has instructed—”

“Lady Alison didn’t issue the invitation.”

The footman coughs, shuffles his feet. “Just so. I have the very strictest instructions—”

“What does Lord Gregory instruct?”

“Lord Gregory has not—”

“Lord Gregory wrote the invitation. Lord Gregory wants us here. If Lord Gregory learned we were denied it would go badly for you, footman.”