Charis wished there were a layer of straw under her own house. She tacked some old blankets over the walls, she stuffed some obvious cracks with wadded newspapers. Luckily they had enough wood: Charis had managed to acquire some, cheap, from a person who had given up and gone back to the mainland. It wasn’t split, and Billy split most of it, working outside with the axe, on warmer days: he liked chopping. But the house was still cold, except when Charis built the fire up to danger level. At those times the air inside got muggy and smelled like heated mouse nest. There were real mice living under the floor, driven in by the cold; they came out at night to clean up crumbs and leave their droppings on the table. Zenia brushed the droppings off onto the floor, wrinkling her nose.
Nothing more was being said about her leaving. Every morning she gave Charis a bulletin on her health: better, worse. One day she felt up to a walk, the next day she told Charis that her hair was falling out. She no longer expressed any hope, she no longer seemed to be participating in her own body. She took the things Charis offered her—the carrot juice, the herb teas—passively and without much interest; she was humouring Charis, but she didn’t really think they would do any good. She had periods of depression, when she would lie on the livingroom couch, wrapped in a blanket, or slump at the table. “I’m a terrible person,” she would tell Charis, her voice tremulous. “I’m not worth all this trouble:”
“Oh, don’t say that,” Charis would say. “We all have those feelings. They’re from the shadow side. Think of the best things about yourself.” Zenia would reward her with a little wavering smile. “What if there isn’t anything?” she would say weakly.
Zenia and Billy kept their distance from each other. Each still complained to Charis; they seemed to enjoy this, chewing each other over. Each liked the querulous taste of the other’s name, the flavour of accusation, the bad taste. Charis would have liked to warn Billy not to be so harsh to Zenia: he could drive her to snitch on him, about the bombing. But Charis couldn’t tell Billy this without admitting that she’d betrayed his confidence, that Zenia knew. Then he would be furious with her.
Charis didn’t want fury. She wanted only happy emotions, because any other emotions would smudge her baby. She tried to spend time only with the things that gave her peace: the whiteness just after it snowed, before the soot of the city had a chance to fall; the gleam of icicles, the week they had the ice storm that took the telephone lines down. She walked around the Island by herself, being careful not to slip on the frozen paths. Her stomach was growing harder and rounder now, her breasts were swelling. She knew that most of her white-light energy was being directed into the baby now, not into Zenia or even Billy. The baby was responding, she could sense it; inside her it was listening, it was attentive, it was absorbing the light like a flower.
She hoped the other two didn’t feel neglected, but there was nothing much she could do about it. She only had so much energy, and increasingly there was none to spare. She was becoming a more ruthless person, a harder one; she could feel her grandmother’s ferociousness in her hands more strongly now. The baby inside her was Karen again, unborn, and with Charis watching over her she would have a better chance. She would be born to the right mother, this time.
In her head she spent time decorating the small room, the> baby’s room. She would paint it white, later, when she had the money, when Zenia was gone. In the summer, when it was hot, Billy could build a sauna in the backyard, beside the henhouse. Then next winter they could sit inside it and get heated through, and go outside and roll around in the snow. That would be a good way of using the snow; better than sitting inside and complaining about it, the way Zenia did. And Billy too.
In April, when the snow had melted and the shoots of Charis’s three daffodil bulbs were poking up through the brown earth, and the chickens were outside again, scratching up the dirt, she told Billy and Zenia about the baby: She had to. Soon it would be obvious; also, soon there would have to be some changes. She wouldn’t be able to carry on with the yoga classes, so the money would have to come from elsewhere. Billy would have to get a job of some sort. He didn’t have the right papers but there were jobs to be had anyway, because some of his draftdodging friends had them. Billy would have to get off his butt. Charis wouldn’t have thought like this, before the baby, but now she did.
And Zenia would finally have to go. Charis had been a teacher to her, but if Zenia failed to take advantage of what Charis had given her, that was her own concern.
Enough is enough, said her grandmother’s voice within her head. First things first. Blood is thicker than water.
She tells them one at a time, Zenia first. They’re having dinner—baked beans from a can, frozen peas. Charis has not been so meticulous about organic lately; somehow she lacks the time. Billy’s in the city, again.
“I’m going to have a baby,” Charis blurts out over the canned peaches.
Zenia is not hurt, not the way Charis has feared she would be. Nor does she offer any wistful congratulations or woman-towoman hugs or pats on the hand. Instead she’s contemptuous. “Well,” she says, “you’ve certainly screwed up!”
“What do you mean?” says Charis.
“What makes you think Billy wants a kid?” says Zenia. This takes Charis’s breath away. She recognizes that she’s been going on a certain assumption: that everyone else will welcome this baby as much as she does. She also recognizes that she hasn’t been taking Billy into account. She did make one attempt to imagine what it would be like to be a man, to be
Billy, having a baby, but she just couldn’t do it. After that she made no effort to divine his reaction.
“Well of course he does,” she says, trying for conviction. “You haven’t told him yet, have you,” says Zenia. It’s not a question.
“How do you know?” says Charis. How does she know? Why are they fighting?
“Wait’ll he finds out,” says Zenia grimly. “This house is going to be one whole hell of a lot smaller with a screaming brat in it. You could’ve waited till I was dead.”
Charis is amazed by her brutality and selfishness; amazed; and angry. But what comes out of her is close to appeasement. “There’s nothing I can do about it now,” she says.
“Sure there is,” says Zenia, patronizingly. “You can get an abortion.”
Charis stands up. “I don’t want one,” she says. She is close to tears, and when she goes upstairs—which she does right away, without for once doing the dishes—she does cry. She cries into their sleeping bag, wounded and confused. Something is going wrong and she isn’t even sure what it is.
When Billy gets home she is still lying on the sleeping bag, with the light out and her clothes still on.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” he says. “What’s happening?” He kisses her face.
Charis heaves herself up, then throws her arms around him. “Haven’t you noticed?” she says tearfully.
“Noticed what?” says Billy.
“I’m pregnant!” says Charis. “We’re going to have a baby!” She’s making it sound like a reproach; this isn’t what she means. She wants him to celebrate with her.
“Oh shit, “ says Billy. He goes slack in her arms. “Oh Jesus Christ. When?”
“In August,” says Charis, waiting for him to be glad. But he isn’t glad. Instead he’s treating this like a big catastrophe; like a death; not a birth. “Oh shit,” he says again. “What’re we gonna do?”