The Baby Who Looked Like Hers

“And then,” she said, and she reached out, finally, with one shaking hand, and she touched the top of Nell’s head, just rested her fingers there in the dark hair, “and then you walked in and handed me my Faye back, forty two years later, with that same hair and those same eyes and that little moon behind her ear, and I could not. I could not. I had spent my whole life holding that lid down, and you came in and knocked it clean off, and I did not know how to be in a room with it. I thought I would scare you. I thought I would say something crazy. I thought if I held her I would never be able to put her down, and then what, what kind of grandmother is that, grabbing at a baby and crying over a dead child. So I stayed away. And I know what it looked like. Wade told me what it looked like. I know you thought I hated her.” Her voice cracked all the way through. “I have never loved anything so much in my life that I was so afraid of.”

I was on the floor by then. I do not remember getting down on the floor but that is where I was, on my knees by that chair with my arms around that hard, cold woman who was not hard and was not cold, who had only ever been a mother carrying a weight nobody had let her set down, and we both cried over my daughter’s car seat until Nell got fussy about the noise and we had to laugh through it, the way you do.

Here is what I have learned about how things actually heal, because it is not the way I thought. I thought the crying on the floor was the healing. It was not. It was the start. The healing came after, and it came through people, slow, one hand at a time, the way a barn gets raised.

It came through Earl first. When Loretta and I had put ourselves back together enough to drive out to the barn, and she told him, in front of me, that she had told me about Faye, I watched that quiet man set down the wrench he was holding and stand very still. And then he said the first thing, I would learn, that he had said about his daughter out loud in four decades. He said, “She had a laugh like a drain unstopping.” And Loretta made a sound that was half a sob and half the first real laugh I ever heard out of her, and she said, “She did. Lord, she did,” and the two of them stood there in the barn and started, for the first time in forty two years, to say their daughter’s name back and forth to each other, and I took Nell and stepped outside and left them to it, because some things are not for a daughter in law to watch.