Such instant bonding with another creature is something I can’t quite imagine. A mother is supposed to feel that way about her child, but what if she doesn’t? What if she looks at her child and does not recognize it? What if the screaming infant bursts forth into the world and instead of seeing love, she sees only a bleating incoherent alien? A parasitic creature that makes her wonder how it lived inside her so long, her gorge rising at the very thought? This is not mine, she thinks. This is not mine.

I hurry the cart forward on its squeaking wheels so as not to think about it. Damn my sister for making me think these kinds of thoughts.

On the drive home she says wistfully, “Things will be so different from how I imagined, without him. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I just wanted everything to be right. Is that so much to ask?” She composes herself in the mirror.

I am thinking now not of her child but of mine, the one that never was. I was young and didn’t know how to say no to my date, who was also young and stupid and thought I was on birth control. So much for Elizabeth thinking I never got any. I never told her. Even though I was only eighteen, I knew immediately that I didn’t want it, would never want it—him or the baby. Without ever showing him the pregnancy test or returning his calls, I quietly found a clinic and took a taxi there. They tell you that when you leave the clinic you will feel guilty, depressed, empty. Perhaps you will feel like a murderer. Perhaps you will feel unwomaned. The exact horror Elizabeth imagined when her husband told her to get rid of it. I expected to feel ill and ashamed, but all I felt as I walked out into the sun-brightened parking lot still glazed with fresh morning rain was relief. Relief and a lightness, as if I was finally myself for the first time in weeks, as if my treacherous body belonged to me again.

Elizabeth places both hands reverently on her belly. “We’re going to name him Julian.”

2

I have never slept well. Tonight is no exception.

Rather than lying in bed while sleep recedes from me like a boat pulled away by the tide, I get up and wander on restless feet. I don’t even need to turn on the television or grab a book; the house will entertain me.

For all that has ever been, the house remembers.

It is a house haunted by memory; it digests us, all of us, and spits us out again at random. I have seen my younger self from the corner of my eye, just a flash stealing through a doorway and then gone. But I have also seen those who lived in the house before us, the Wakefields of yesteryear.

As I creep past the Rose Room, I glance in to see a familiar ghost: Frances Wakefield, bedridden and gaunt with tuberculosis.