When two weeks passed with no change in her aspect — two weeks he’d spent immersed in his books, mulling options for her cure — he decided something had to be done. Before he went downstairs to open the shop he stopped in to Thea’s room.
“Good morning, Thea.”
She adjusted Odd’s cap.
Hosea thumbed the wee boy’s little toes, spoke his baby gibberish, then stood up and looked down at Thea. In his clumsy Norwegian he said, “Has two weeks of rest given you your strength back?”
Thea did not answer.
He continued in Norwegian, “You’ve hardly spoken at all since the child was born. Are you feeling well? Are you happy?”
She turned her attention back to the child, touched his face gently, then looked back at Hosea. “Very happy,” she said.
Hosea stepped forward and knelt at her bedside. He put his hand on her arm. “Join Rebekah and me at supper tonight.”
Thea nodded, smiled.
“Very good!” Hosea said in English now. “Rebekah will prepare a feast.”
And she did, fish soup and buttermilk biscuits, apple strudel for
dessert. Thea came to the table for supper with Odd in her arms. She appeared sleep-starved and nervous, and when Rebekah asked — as she’d been instructed to — if she could hold the boy, Thea shook her head and held him closer.
“Now, Thea, you can’t hold him forever,” Hosea said in Norwegian, his voice jolly, his line rehearsed. “Rebekah wants a turn with the little one.”
“Sleepy,” Thea said in English. “Odd. Sleepy.”
“Okay, child,” Hosea said, his tone full of sympathy.
By the time Rebekah served the strudel, the boy was indeed asleep. Thea held him close while she nibbled on the baked apples, tending constantly to the blanket wrapped around him, to the knit hat he wore on his head.
“I’ve got something for Odd,” Hosea said, setting his empty coffee cup on the saucer. He stood and wiped his mouth with the napkin off his lap. He went into his bedroom and returned a moment later lugging a birch-wood bassinet. He set it down next to Thea. “A place for the boy to sleep,” he said, rearranging the muslin canopy. There was a scalloped skirt hanging under the ticking.
Thea leaned forward, looked into the bassinet, at the plush bedding. She looked doubtful, seemed to be holding the boy closer.
Hosea did not hold much hope she would put the child to bed properly. “You must get some rest. Your humors are not well.” And with those words Hosea left Thea and the boy at the table, carried the bassinet across the flat.
Rebekah stayed up late that night. She trimmed the apothecary with holly and mistletoe, with candles in all the windows and a ten-foot spruce covered in tinsel and strung cranberries. When she came upstairs after midnight Thea was changing Odd’s diaper. He was fussing, sending up his little howls, punching the air with his balled fists. After Thea finished wrapping his bottom and straightening his layette she lifted him and started to sing.
Her voice was lilting and faint and it put the boy at ease. She went to the rocking chair next to the window and lifted her nightdress. Her full breast shone in the winter moonlight. Odd as much as lunged for it, and in an instant Rebekah could hear him suckling.
Thea began another song, her voice even fainter from across the room.
“What does it mean?” Rebekah asked, her voice upsetting the deep silence enough that Odd pulled off Thea’s breast.
Thea guided his head back to his feast. “A bear sleeping,” she said softly.
“It sounds pretty. You sing nice.” Rebekah could see Thea’s smile in the moonlight, could see her glassy eyes. “It’s a lullaby. A song you sing your baby. It’s called a lullaby.”
“Lullaby,” Thea repeated.
“You’re making me sleepy.”
Again Thea smiled.
Then there was only the sound of Odd suckling, of Odd catching his breath when he was finished. Thea put him over her shoulder and stood and walked around the room as she patted his back. She stopped at the window and stood there with her son, the moon gone higher but still shining through the glass.
Rebekah watched them for what might have been an hour. Long enough that the moon no longer gave them light. When Thea finally returned to her bed with the sleeping boy, she did so still whispering the lullabies. She fluffed her pillows and lay down. She pulled the bedding up over her legs and sang to him more.
And Rebekah might have fallen asleep listening to Thea sing but she was intent on enforcing Hosea’s will. So she struggled to stay awake. When no sound had come from the other bed for some minutes, Rebekah slid from her bedcovers, crossed the room, and stood above Thea and her son. It was the first time she’d seen Thea sleep since the child had been born. Odd lay in her limp arms, wrapped in his blanket, the cap falling off his head, his hair winging out after his bath earlier that night.
Neither Odd nor Thea woke when Rebekah picked up the boy. She held him as she’d seen Thea, setting him in the crook of her arm, holding his head with her free hand. His lips puckered and he reached for his face with his bunched hands and she was sure he’d wake bawling but he only settled deeper into her arms. The floor creaked as she stepped off the carpet, into the whispered light from the window.
Thea slept soundly, her head fallen on her shoulder, her breathing slow and tremulous. There were no dreams there. And there were none in the boy, either. She could see that. All of that sleep absent of dreams saddened Rebekah deeply. She laid the boy in the bassinet and tiptoed to bed, thought she might conjure dreams for all of them. Lord knows she had them.
Rebekah woke to Thea’s screams and the light of morning. Her eyes flashed open and the first thing she saw was Thea thrashing in her bed, kicking and tearing at the bed linens. “Odd! Odd! Odd!” she said, her voice shrill and piercing.
Rebekah threw her covers back and jumped from bed, not remembering her antics in the middle of the night before. They reached the bassinet at the same moment and looked together into its emptiness.
Thea hollered as she ran from room to room in the flat, her panic rising alongside her shouting, Rebekah trailing the desperate mother.
By the time Thea reached the second floor her shouting had given over to sobs. She went down the hallway from door to door, stepping into each room to check for the boy. It was in the fourth room, in the surgery, that she found him, lying on the table, Hosea standing above him with a pair of eight-inch nickel-plated shears in his hand. On a tray next to the boy lay a pile of bloodstained gauze and a long needle and syringe. The boy was naked and wailing.
Rebekah managed to get her arms around Thea before she reached the table. Before she reached her boy. Thea’s cries mixed with Odd’s and Rebekah hugged her tight.
Hosea spoke. “Dear child, there’s nothing amiss.” He set the shears on the table, turned and reached out for Thea, took her hands in his, and tried to pull her to him.
"My boy! “Thea shrieked, fighting to free herself from both Rebekah and Hosea. They held her tight. Her crying had sapped her breath and she went limp in their arms and could only muster a whisper as she said, “Good Lord, my boy."
Hosea ushered her to a chair and urged her to sit. To Rebekah he said, “Apply an ample dose of Vaseline to the boy’s prepuce and wrap him up.” Turning to Thea he said, “Miss Eide, listen to me.”
Thea seemed to have no breath left in her.
“Miss Eide!” Hosea shook her by the shoulders. “Miss Eide, listen to me. Odd is fine. I gave him an examination this morning, I circumcised him. There’s nothing wrong with the boy that a little nap won’t cure. You’ve nothing to worry about. These are things the child must have done. Do you understand me?”