She was unlacing her boots by the warmth of the woodstove. She looked up at him. “My boots are full of snow.”
“I guess winter decided to come after all.” He set the bell by the door, took off his coat, and crossed the fish house. From its hook on the wall he took down the lantern and lit it. He set the pictures on the ledge above his bunk and looked at them for a moment before he turned.
She was crying.
He walked quickly to her, knelt, and said, “Hey, hey, now. What is it?”
“I have to show you something, Odd. Another picture. I have to show you this and then I have to tell you something. You have to listen and I don’t want you to say anything. Do you understand?”
Odd nodded. He pulled his three-legged stool from beneath the boat, which sat in its bracings.
She reached into the pocket of her skirt and withdrew a postcard that she kept palmed in her hand. He could tell she was steadying herself. Steeling herself. Though for what reason he could not fathom.
“I’m showing you this because I want you to know everything. Because what I have to tell you will change a whole lot, and you need to know this in order for that to happen.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“Shh,” she snapped. “I said I want you to listen. I don’t want you to say anything until I’m finished.”
Now she stood and put the postcard to her lips. Then, as though pushed, she reached between them and handed him the postcard and turned away. She did this in one motion and stood with her back to him, her hands at her mouth.
“Don’t say anything. Do you understand? Do not say anything. Let me figure this out.”
Odd looked up from the postcard and waited for her to turn around. He waited three full minutes, his mind clamoring for a clear thought.
“Hosea rescued me, in a way. And he was always — always — perfectly honest with me. Before we left Chicago he told me exactly what would be expected of me.” Now she turned to face Odd. “That,” she said, pointing at the postcard, “is the price I have had to pay. A small price compared to the one I might have. The price I would have.”
She walked back over to Odd. “I know he can be a brute. And I wish he wasn’t. But if I’d stayed in Chicago it would have been much worse for me. Sometimes Hosea is as kind as a preacher. Others, well, he’s got his ways.” She paused, looked down at him. “I guess you know all about him.”
She shook her head and closed her eyes. “Dear God, how am I supposed to tell you this?”
“Tell me what?”
She reached down, took the postcard from his hand, and walked to the woodstove. She opened the door and put the postcard in the flames, closed the door, and walked back to him. She knelt before him and took his hands. “I’m pregnant, Odd.”
Rather than some emotion rising in him, Odd saw instantly his own bunched face in the photograph with his mother. He saw his eyes, just slits then, the old-man lines coming off his baby’s eyes. He would have given anything to know how he’d felt when that picture had been taken, in his mother’s arms. Maybe that was what it was, the feeling that had been plaguing him since he’d left Grimm’s. He reached up and felt the lines coming off his eyes, he closed them, regained the moment, and looked at her. At her waiting face. He saw only his love for her in what looked back.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said, her voice hardly audible.
“Rebekah,” he whispered. “Baby.” And he reached down and picked her up and held her on his lap.
“I’m too old to have a baby,” she said into his shoulder. “I’m nearly twice as old as you.”
“I guess this is the first moment that ever mattered.”
“It matters because I’m pregnant.”
“I can’t tell you whether or not you’re too old to have a baby. But it seems to me if you’re young enough to get that way, you’re young enough to see it through.”
“We were like a brother and sister, Odd.”
“We sure were, right up till that day at the farm. Right up till that day up in the flat.”
She took a deep breath. “What have I done?”
“I guess we did it together.”
She ran her hand through his hair. “Hosea will be so upset if he finds out.”
“This ain’t Hosea’s business, it’s ours.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Odd. But I live with him. That’s my life over there at the apothecary.”
“Not anymore,” Odd protested. “Now it’s you and me. And our baby.”
She sat up, looked at him. “What? We’re to live in a fish house? On what you make fishing? We’ll be disgraced. No one in town will so much as glance our way. For that matter, who will deliver the baby? Hosea?”
“We’ll get out of here, then,” he said. He could hear desperation in his voice.
“And go where?” she asked. “And live how?”
“We can go wherever the hell we please,” he said. “We can live however we want.”
She looked at him now and smiled, though her face was full of sadness. “There’s not a way I don’t love you, but I don’t think I can have this baby.”
“What are you talking about, not have the baby?” He set her down, stood up, paced a few steps. “You think I didn’t know about the postcards?” Now he felt helpless. “Why’d you show me the postcard, anyway? If you’re going to get rid of the baby, why’d you feel the need to put that under my nose?” He pulled his tobacco and papers from his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette over the counter. The snow was spitting against the window.
“How did you know about the postcards, Odd?”
He turned to face her. “You think I just sat on my hands all those years? While you and Hosea were downstairs tending to the shop, I was supposed to practice my grammar lessons up in that house of secrets? Honestly?” He ran his hands through his hair, took a long drag on his cigarette, looked out the window onto the darkness of night, the lightness of falling snow. “You have me pegged a fool, don’t you?”
Now her voice rose. “You’ve known all this time and never said anything?”
“What in the world was I supposed to say?”
There was no answer to that question, and they both knew it. He stood at the window trying to think this whole thing straight. But he couldn’t. Something was nagging him. “He’s still taking pictures?”
“Oh, Odd. He hasn’t taken a picture of me in years.” She stood up, walked over to him. “I’m forty-one years old. Too old for just about anything. Too old to have a baby.”
He turned to face her, there were tears streaming down his cheeks but his voice was perfectly calm. “Don’t you see? Your whole life you’ve been his captive. He ain’t got rights. You’ve paid your dues.”
“He was as much a father as I ever had, Odd. He gave me a place to live. He bought me nice clothes. He taught me how to read.”
Odd swung around. “I’ve got to think,” he said. “Give me a minute to think.”
And so he did, as he marched around his boat, into the dark reaches of the fish house and back into the lamp and lantern light. Rebekah sat with her head in her hands, unable to face the young man she had loved from the first moment of his life. This man she had loved in ways she hadn’t known were possible.
He must have made ten laps around the boat. After five minutes he stopped and rolled another cigarette and lit it and took a coffee can from under the fish counter before he resumed the stool in front of Rebekah. “When will the baby be born?”
“I suppose the baby would come sometime next summer.”
“Okay. All right.” He flicked the cigarette ash. “I ain’t gonna beg you. I ain’t gonna tell you the hundred reasons Hosea ought to be shot for the way he keeps you under his thumb. But I will tell you what we’re gonna do.”