The bright voices flowed towards me like meltwater:
I placed my feet on the floor. Beneath the soles of my feet it felt unusually hard. I myself was the infant, the newborn, whose feet were not yet accustomed to the ground, but instead still shaped for dancing on my toes. That’s how I remembered Edmund’s feet, with a high instep and just as soft and arched underneath as on top. I could stand with them in my hands, just look and feel, as one did with one’s firstborn. I thought that I would become something else for him, be something else for you, something else entirely, than my father had been for me. That’s how I stood with him until Thilda snatched him away from me under the pretext of a feeding or diaper change. The infant feet moved slowly towards the window. Every step hurt. The window grew before me, huge and white.
Then I saw them.
All seven of them. For it wasn’t a choir of strangers from the village. It was my own daughters.
The four tallest in the back, the three shorter ones in the front. Dressed in their dark winter clothes. Wool coats, too tight and too short, or too big and with ever more patches, the threadbare quality disguised behind cheap ribbons and pockets in odd places. Brown, dark blue or black wool bonnets with white lace trim framed narrow, winter-pale faces. The song became frost in the air before them.
How thin they had grown, all of them.
A path showed where they had walked, footsteps through deep snow. They must have waded through it far above the knees and had certainly gotten wet. I could feel the sensation of damp wool stockings against bare skin, and the frost penetrating up from the ground through the thin soles of their shoes—none of them had more than this one pair of boots. I walked closer to the window. I half expected to see others in the garden, an audience for the choir, Thilda, or perhaps some of the neighbors. But the garden was empty. They weren’t singing for anyone. They were singing for me.
All of their gazes were focused intently on my window, but they had not yet discovered me. I stood in the shadows, at the back of the room, and the sun shone on the windowpane. They probably could only see the reflection of the sky and the trees.
I took one step closer.
Fourteen-year-old Charlotte, my eldest daughter, was standing at the far end. Her eyes were on the window, but she was singing with all of her body. Her chest rose and fell in time with the melody. Perhaps it was her idea, all of it. She had always sung, hummed her way through childhood, with her head in her schoolwork or bent over the dishes, a melodious murmuring, as if the soft notes were a part of her movements.
She was the one who discovered me first. A light slid across her face. She nudged Dorothea, the precocious twelve-year-old. She quickly nodded to eleven-year-old Olivia, who turned her wide-open eyes towards her twin sister, Elizabeth. The two did not in any sense resemble each other in appearance, only in temperament. Both gentle and kind, and dumb as posts—they couldn’t understand arithmetic even if you were to nail the numbers onto their foreheads. In front of them a restlessness had begun in the ranks. The young ones were also about to discover me. Nine-year-old Martha squeezed seven-year-old Caroline’s arm. And Caroline, who always sulked because she really wanted to be the youngest, gave little Georgiana, who would have liked to have escaped being the youngest, a hard shove. No great cheer to the heavens above, they didn’t allow themselves that, not yet. Only the slightest irregularity in the singing betrayed that they had seen me. That, and weak smiles, to the extent that their singing, O-shaped mouths would allow.
A childish lump pushed forward in my chest. They did not sing badly. Not at all. Their narrow faces glowed, their eyes shone. They had arranged it all just for me. And now they thought that they had succeeded. That they had pulled it off—they had gotten father out of bed. When the song was over they would release the cheer. They would run jubilantly light-footed through the freshly fallen snow into the house and tell me about their own homespun miracle. We sang him well again, they would crow. We sang father well!
A cacophony of enthusiastic girls’ voices would echo in the hallways, bouncing back at them from the walls: Soon he will return. Soon he will be with us again. We showed him God, Jesus—the born-again. Hark, the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king. What a brilliant, yes, truly dazzling idea it was to sing for him, to remind him of beauty, of the message of Christmas, of everything he had forgotten while bedridden, with the thing we call illness, but which everyone knows is something else entirely, although mother forbids us to speak about it. Poor Father, he is not well, he is as thin as a ghost, we have seen it, through the cracked-open door as we have crept past, yes, like a ghost, just skin and bones, and the beard he has let grow, like the crucified Jesus. He is beyond recognition. But now he will soon be among us once more, soon he will be able to work again. And we will once more have butter on our bread and new winter coats. That is in truth a real Christmas present. Christ is born in Bethlehem! But it was a lie. I couldn’t give them that gift. I did not deserve their cheers. The bed drew me towards it. My legs trembled, my new-born legs were unable to hold me upright any longer. My stomach knotted again. I gritted my teeth, wanted to crush the pressure in my throat. So I slowly pulled away from the window.
And outside the singing subsided. There would be no miracle today.
Chapter 3
GEORGE
Autumn Hill, Ohio, USA, 2007
I picked Tom up at the station in Autumn. He hadn’t been home since last summer. I didn’t know why, hadn’t asked. Maybe I couldn’t bear to hear the answer.
It was a half-hour drive up to the farm. We didn’t say much. His hands just lay in his lap while we drove home. Pale, thin and silent. His bag lay beside his legs. It had gotten dirty. The floor of the pickup hadn’t been clean since I bought it. Dirt from last year, or the year before that, became dust on the floor in the winter. And the moisture from the snow melting on Tom’s boots trickled down and mixed into it.
The bag was new, the material stiff. Definitely bought in the city. And it was heavy. I was startled when I lifted it up from the ground at the bus station. Tom wanted to take it himself but I grabbed it before he had the chance—he didn’t exactly look as if he’d been working out a lot since the last time I’d seen him. You wouldn’t think he’d need anything but clothes. He was only going to be home on vacation for a week. And most of his things were already hanging on a hook in the hallway. His coveralls, boots, the hat with the earflaps. But he had clearly brought a load of books with him. Apparently he thought there would be a lot of time for that kind of thing.
He was standing waiting for me when I came. The bus had been early, or maybe I was late. I had to shovel snow in the yard before leaving.
“It doesn’t matter, George. He has his head in the clouds anyway,” said Emma, who stood and watched me, shivering with her arms hugging her chest.
I didn’t answer. Had to shovel snow. The snow collapsed like an accordion, light and new. I didn’t even break a sweat on my back.
She kept looking at me.
“You’d think it was Bush coming to visit.”