Her face worked, but she drank more water and managed to keep talking. “Jenny helped organize the protest at the silo. She had this ambition to make it like the one in England, and we fought over that, like we fought over everything the last year of her life. Oh, the nights I still lie awake tormenting myself with regrets. My darling, darling girl, all I did was fight with you. Why couldn’t I show a little support? I knew you were right about the weapons, even if you were wrong about Matt.”

She hugged herself; the wind was picking up, and she was feeling frail. I took a blanket from a settee and placed it around her shoulders. The only other thing I could offer was platitudes; those I kept to myself.

“She gave birth out there in that field, and those two women, Lucinda Ferring and Doris McKinnon, you’d have thought they birthed her themselves, they were so proud, so solicitous. I could have murdered the two of them, bringing Jenny here to show off little Cady, as if they were the grandmothers and I was some ignorant old-maid aunt. She had a strawberry birthmark on her left shoulder, just like Jenny’s.”

“Cady doesn’t have one?” I asked when she’d again fallen silent.

Her mouth twisted in a painful smile. “Dr. Clayhorn, she was the pediatrician, she said birthmarks sometimes disappear spontaneously, but not usually inside a week. Nathan, Dr. Kiel, was always so solicitous of Cady’s well-being. I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted Cady to be Jenny’s baby. The first year I worried that Matt might show up and claim her, even though Nathan promised that he’d left KU for good.”

50
Where Oh Where Can My Baby Be?

“If Jenny wasn’t Cady’s mother, then who— Oh!” I felt a jolt, as if one of the Fates had stuck out a casual arm and whacked me between the shoulders. “Spirova had a baby at the same time as Jenny.”

“She and Dr. Kiel argued about it; he wanted her to have an abortion, she wanted him to leave Shirley and marry her. She thought a baby would force him to choose her.” Perec’s head was bowed, her voice so soft I had to lean forward to make out the words.

“I presume if you knew, the whole lab did,” I said. “Matt Chastain, too.”

“I don’t think so. I was Dr. Kiel’s secretary. I saw and heard things no one else did, and I wasn’t the kind to be sharing what I heard with every stray dog that barked outside Dr. Kiel’s office.” She gave me a sour look—I was one of those stray dogs, but I’d had the effrontery to barge in uninvited.