It feels dumb to talk about childbirth as trauma, but that’s how it felt. I couldn’t use my right leg properly for the next month. They’d struck a nerve with the epidural, they said, and feeling would probably fully return “eventually.”

I keep doing things I think will make me stronger, but it doesn’t work.

I skipped a few pages, as she had, and continued:

I’ve never loved anything more fiercely. This love that is not really like love. It feels markedly close to fear. I’ve never feared for anything more. I keep waking up while he’s sleeping, gripped by panic that he’s going to stop breathing; that it’s going to be my fault. I wish I could put him back.

21

THE SOUTHAMPTON FAMILY HOUSE WAS LONG AND LOW, THE shingled roof rising in several curved pitches from the surrounding beach grass like an extension of the landscape. It had been built in the Gilded Age, they told me, and handed down through Lonnie’s mother’s side of the family. The rooms—like Lonnie’s drawers, the boxes, the closets, and the cupboards—never-ending, filled with so many forgotten unused things.

Horse stables with no horses in them. Servants’ quarters, which no longer housed servants. Maids came and went inconspicuously, when the family wasn’t home. They were not a part of the fabric of the house itself, they merely removed the dust when you weren’t looking. It must have been a fantastic amount of dust. The house was built so that members of the family would never have to see or hear one another unless they desired it.

At the top of the house was the nursery—not just a bedroom, but three of them, designed for the sort of large family that had fallen out of fashion. The bedrooms ended in a vast playroom, filled with half-inflated balls, old squeaky tricycles, a smattering of child-sized chairs, and a stage at one end for spontaneous performances. There was a secret cupboard underneath the stage big enough for two small children to fit comfortably inside, or, less comfortably, a skinny woman and her small charge. Lonnie’s name was carved crookedly, sloppily, in one wall of the cupboard, deep enough to be traceable with a finger, even in the dark.

WE ARRIVED IN THE EVENING, BY CAR. THEY DIDN’T MAKE ME find my own way by train, but let me ride in the back seat, like I was a second child. The air was cooler the farther we got from the city, though still filled with moisture. We rolled the windows down and I felt I could eat mouthfuls of the breeze.

We didn’t say much on the drive. William was subdued by the view out the window, and we all appreciated the silence.

“You know,” Lonnie said at one point. “My hand still hurts. This sort of ache right down the middle.”