She was crossing the bridge now, her tires singing, the Kentucky River meandering far below and the high charged energy of the previous night melting away. She glanced again at the baby. Surely Norah Henry would want to hold this child, even if she couldn't keep her.
Surely this was none of Caroline's affair.
Yet she did not turn around. She turned on the radio again— this time she found a station of classical music—and drove on.
Twenty miles outside of Louisville, Caroline consulted Dr. Henry's directions, written in his sharp close hand, and left the highway. Here, so near the Ohio River, the upper branches of hawthorns and hackberry trees glittered with ice, though the roads were clear and dry. White fences enclosed the snow-dusted fields, and horses moved darkly behind them, their breath making clouds in the air. Caroline turned onto an even smaller road, where the land was rolling, unconfined. Soon, across a mile of pale hills, she glimpsed the building, built of red brick at the turn of the century, with two incongruous low-slung modern wings. It disappeared, now and again, as she followed the curves and dips of the country road, and then was suddenly before her.
She pulled into the circular driveway. Up close, the old house was in a state of mild disrepair. Paint was peeling on the wood trim and on the third floor a window had been boarded up, broken panes backed with plywood. Caroline got out of the car. She was wearing a pair of old flats, thin-soled and scuffed, kept in the closet and flung on hastily in the middle of last night when she couldn't find her boots. Gravel pushed up through the snow and her feet were immediately cold. She slung the bag she had prepared—containing diapers, a thermos bottle of warmed formula—over her shoulder, picked up the box with the baby, and entered the building. Lights of leaded glass, long unpolished, flanked the door on either side. There was an interior door with frosted glass and then a foyer, dark oak. Hot air, redolent with the scents of cooking—carrots and onions and potatoes—rushed and swirled around her. Caroline walked tentatively, floorboards creaking with every step, but no one appeared. A strip of threadbare carpet led across a wide-planked floor and into the back of the house to a waiting room with tall windows and heavy draperies. She sat on the edge of a worn velvet soia, the box close by her side, and waited.
The room was overheated. She unbuttoned her coat. She was still wearing her white nurse's uniform, and when she touched her hair she realized she was still wearing her sharp white cap, too. She had risen at once when Dr. Henry called, dressing quickly and trav?eling out into the snowy night, and she had not stopped since. She unpinned the cap, folded it carefully, and closed her eyes. Distantly, silverware clattered and voices hummed. Above her, footsteps moved and echoed. She half dreamed of her mother, preparing a holiday meal while her father worked in the woodshop. Her child?hood had been solitary, sometimes very lonely, but still she had these memories: a special quilt held close, a rug with roses beneath her feet, the weave of voices that belonged to her alone.
Distantly, a bell rang, twice. I need you here right now, Dr. Henry had called, strain and urgency in his voice. And Caroline had hur?ried, fashioning that awkward bed out of pillows, holding the mask on Mrs. Henry's face as the second twin, this little girl, slid into the world, setting something into motion.
Into motion. Yes, it could not be contained. Even sitting here on this sofa in the stillness of this place, even waiting, Caroline was troubled by the feeling that the world was shimmering, that things would not be still. This? was the refrain in her mind. This now, after all these years?
For Caroline Gill was thirty-one, and she had been waiting a long time for her real life to begin. Not that she had ever put it that way to herself. But she had felt since childhood that her life would not be ordinary. A moment would come—she would know it when she saw it—and everything would change. She'd dreamed of being a great pianist, but the lights of the high school stage were too dif?ferent from the lights at home, and she froze in their glare. Then, in her twenties, as her friends from nursing school began to marry and have their families, Caroline too had found young men to admire, one especially, with dark hair and pale skin and a deep laugh. For a dreamy time she imagined that he—and, when he didn't call, that someone else—would transform her life. When years passed she gradually turned her attention to her work, again without despair. She had faith in herself and her own capabilities. She was not a per?son who ever got halfway to a destination and paused, wondering if she'd left an iron on and if the house was burning down. She kept on working. She waited.
She read, too, Pearl Buck's novels first and then everything she could find about life in China and Burma and Laos. Sometimes she let the books slip from her hands and gazed dreamily out the win?dow of her plain little apartment on the edge of town. She saw her?self moving through another life, an exotic, difficult, satisfying life. Her clinic would be simple, set in a lush jungle, perhaps near the sea. It would have white walls; it would gleam like a pearl. People would line up outside, squatting beneath coconut trees as they waited. She, Caroline, would tend to them all; she would heal them. She would transform their lives and hers.
Consumed by this vision, she had applied, in a great rush of fer?vor and excitement, to become a medical missionary. One brilliant late-summer weekend, she had taken the bus to St. Louis to be in?terviewed. Her name was put on a waiting list for Korea. But time passed; the mission was postponed, then canceled altogether. Caro?line was put on another list, this time for Burma.
And then, while she was still checking the mail and dreaming of the tropics, Dr. Henry had arrived.
An ordinary day, nothing to indicate otherwise. It was late au?tumn by then, a season of colds, and the room was crowded, full of sneezes, muffled coughs. Caroline herself could feel a dull scratch?ing deep in her throat as she called the next patient, an elderly gentleman whose cold would worsen in the next weeks, turning into the pneumonia that would finally kill him. Rupert Dean. He was sitting in the leather armchair, fighting a nosebleed, and he stood up slowly, stuffing his cloth handkerchief, with its vivid spots of blood, into his pocket. When he reached the desk he handed Caroline a photograph in a dark blue cardboard frame. It was a portrait, black and white, faintly tinted. The woman looking out wore a pale peach sweater. Her hair was gently waved, her eyes a deep shade of blue. Rupert Dean's wife, Emelda, dead now for twenty years. "She was the love of my life," he announced to Caro?line, his voice so loud that people looked up.
The outer door of the office opened, rattling the glass-paneled inner door.
"She's lovely," Caroline said. Her hands were trembling. Because she was moved by his love and his sorrow, and because no one had ever loved her with this same passion. Because she was almost thirty years old, and yet if she died the next day there would be no one to mourn her like Rupert Dean still mourned his wife after more than twenty years. Surely she, Caroline Lorraine Gill, must be as unique and deserving of love as the woman in the old man's photo, and yet she had not found any way to reveal this, not through art or love or even through the fine high calling of her work.
She was still trying to compose herself when the door from the vestibule to the waiting room swung open. A man in a brown tweed overcoat hesitated in the doorway for a moment, his hat in his hand, taking in the yellow textured wallpaper, the fern in the corner, the metal rack of worn magazines. He had brown hair with a reddish tinge and his face was lean, his expression attentive, assess?ing. He was not distinguished, yet there was something in his stance, his manner—some quiet alertness, some quality of listening—that set him apart. Caroline's heart quickened and she felt a tingling on her skin, both pleasurable and irritating, like the unexpected brush of a moth's wing. His eyes caught hers—and she knew. Before he crossed the room to shake her hand, before he opened his mouth to speak his name, David Henry, in a neutral accent that placed him as an outsider. Before all this, Caroline was sure of a single simple fact: the person she'd been waiting for had come.
He had not been married then. Not married, not engaged, and with no attachments that she could ascertain. Caroline had listened carefully, both that day as he toured the clinic and later at the wel?come parties and meetings. She heard what others, absorbed by the flow of polite conversation, distracted by his unfamiliar accent and sudden unexpected bursts of laughter, did not: that aside from mentioning his time in Pittsburgh now and then, a fact already known from his resume and diploma, he never made reference to the past. For Caroline, this reticence gave him an air of mystery, and the mystery increased her sense that she knew him in ways the others did not. For her, their every encounter was charged, as if she were saying to him across the desk, the examination table, the beautiful, imperfect bodies of one patient or another, / %now you; I understand; I see what the others have missed. When she overheard people joking about her crush on the new doctor, she flushed with surprise and embarrassment. But she was secretly pleased, too, for the rumors might reach him in a way that she, with her shyness, could not.
One late evening, after two months of quiet work, she had found him sleeping at his desk. His face was resting on his hands and he breathed with the light, even cadence of deep sleep. Caroline leaned against the doorway, her head tilted, and in that moment the dreams she'd nurtured for years had all coalesced. They would go together, she and Dr. Henry, to some remote place in the world, where they would work all day with sweat rising on their foreheads and instruments growing slippery in their palms, and where of an evening she would play to him on the piano that would be sent across the sea and up some difficult river and across the lush land to where they lived. Caroline was so immersed in this dream that when Dr. Henry opened his eyes she smiled at him, openly and freely, as she had never done before with anyone.
His clear surprise brought her to herself. She stood up straight and touched her hair, murmured some apology, blushed deep red. She disappeared, mortified but also faintly thrilled. For now he must know, now he would see her at last as she saw him. For a few days her anticipation of what might happen next was so great that she found it difficult to be in the same room with him. And yet when the days passed and nothing happened she was not disap?pointed. She relaxed and made excuses for the delay and went on waiting, unperturbed.
Three weeks later, Caroline had opened the newspaper to find the wedding photo on the society page: Norah Asher, now Mrs. David Henry, caught with her head turned, her neck elegant, her eyelids faintly curved, like shells…
Caroline started, sweating in her coat. The room was over?heated; she had almost drifted off. Beside her, the baby still slept. She stood and walked to the windows, the floorboards shifting and creaking beneath the worn carpet. Velvet drapes brushed the floor, remnants from the far-flung time when this place had been an ele?gant estate. She touched the edge of the sheer curtains beneath; yel?low, brittle, they billowed dust. Outside, half a dozen cows stood in the snowy field, nosing for grass. A man wearing a red plaid jacket and dark gloves broke a path to the barn, buckets swinging from his hands.
This dust, this snow. It was not fair, not fair at all, that Norah Henry should have so much, should have her seamless happy life. Shocked at this thought, at the depth of her bitterness, Caroline let the curtains fall and walked out of the room, moving toward the sound of human voices.
She entered a hallway, fluorescent lights humming against the high ceiling. The air was thick with cleaning fluid, steamed vegeta?bles, the faint yellow scent of urine. Carts rattled; voices called and murmured. She turned one corner, then another, descending a sin?gle step to enter a more modern wing with pale turquoise walls. Here the linoleum floor gave loosely against the plywood below. She passed several doors, glimpsing moments of people's lives, the images suspended like photographs: a man staring out a window, his face cast in shadows, his age indeterminate. Two nurses making a bed, their arms lifted high and the pale sheet floating for an in?stant near the ceiling. Two empty rooms, tarps spread, paint cans stacked in the corner. A closed door, and then the last one, open, where a young woman wearing a white cotton slip sat on the edge of a bed, her hands folded lightly in her lap, her head bent. Another woman, a nurse, stood behind her, silver scissors flashing. Hair cas?caded darkly onto the white sheets, revealing the woman's bare neck: narrow, graceful, pale. Caroline paused in the doorway.
"She's cold," she heard herself saying, causing both women to look up. The woman on the bed had large eyes, darkly luminous in her face. Her hair, once quite long, now jutted raggedly at the level of her chin.
"Yes," the nurse said, and reached to brush some hair off the woman's shoulder; it drifted through the dull light and settled on the sheets, the speckled gray linoleum. "But it had to be done." Her eyes narrowed then as she studied Caroline's wrinkled uniform, her capless head. "Are you new here or something?" she asked.
Caroline nodded. "New," she said. "That's right."
Later, when she remembered this moment, one woman with a pair of scissors and the other sitting in a cotton slip amid the ruins of her hair, she would think of it in black and white and the image would fill her with a wild emptiness and yearning. For what, she was not certain. The hair was scattered, irretrievable, and the cold light fell through the window. She felt tears in her eyes. Voices echoed in another hall, and Caroline remembered the baby, left sleeping in a box on the overstuffed velvet sofa of the waiting room. She turned and hurried back.
Everything was just as she had left it. The box with its cheerful red cherubs was still on the sofa; the baby, her hands curled into small fists by her chin, was still sleeping. Phoebe, Norah Henry had said, just before she went under from the gas. For a girl, Phoebe.
Phoebe. Caroline unfolded the blankets gently and lifted her. She was so tiny, five and a half pounds, smaller than her brother though with the same rich dark hair. Caroline checked her diaper-—tarry meconium stained the damp cloth—changed her, and wrapped her back up. She had not woken, and Caroline held her for a moment, feeling how light she was, how small, how warm. Her face was so small, so volatile. Even in her sleep, expressions moved like clouds across her features. Caroline glimpsed Norah Henry's frown in one, David Henry's concentrated listening in another.
