The Baby Who Looked Like Hers

I had Nell on a cold morning in November, in the county hospital forty minutes up the highway, after a night so long I lost track of which day it was. She came out with a full head of dark hair and a cry like a cat in a sack and she was, to me, the single most perfect thing that had ever happened in the history of the world. Wade cried. My mother cried. Earl drove up and held her in his big diesel hands and his chin shook and he said she was a Hollis through and through, and I thought my heart would come apart with how full it was.

Loretta came up that afternoon. Earl had gone home to do the milking and it was just me and Wade and the baby when she came in. I remember I had just gotten Nell latched and settled and I had her up on my shoulder and I was so proud, I wanted so badly for Loretta to see her and love her, I had decided that this was the day it would all turn around between us.

She came in with her good coat on and her purse over her arm. She said hello to Wade. She came to the side of the bed. I turned so she could see the baby’s face, and I said, “This is Nell. Nell Sue.”

And my mother in law looked at my daughter and all the blood went out of her face.

I have tried many times to describe what happened to Loretta’s face in that moment, and I have never gotten it right, because it was not any one thing. It was like watching a house have its lights turned off room by room. Her mouth came open a little. Her hand went up toward her chest and stopped halfway, like she had forgotten what she meant to do with it. She made a sound, not a word, just a small sound, like the air had been stepped on. And she stared at Nell, not with love, not with that melting look that even hard people get around a newborn, but with something that looked, to me, lying there, like horror.

Then she set her purse down on the chair, and she said, “I have to,” and she did not finish it, and she walked out.

Wade went after her. I heard his voice low in the hall and I heard her say something short and I heard her shoes going away fast on that hard floor. He came back in with his jaw set and his eyes somewhere else and he said his mother was not feeling well, that the drive had been a lot, that she would come back around. I held my daughter against my chest and I felt something go hard and cold inside me, and I said, “She couldn’t even look at her, Wade.”