Free What Is Visible: A Novel by Kimberly Elkins Page B

swirl of blue and black and white like Doctor says the sky can be on a stormy night. Didn’t you think that would be better than nothing, Mama, better than these tiny, wrinkled caves of bone? She tries to calm me as Addison holds me down, and I sign into the air: “Did you throw the mess outside?”
    I cry myself into stillness as they both lean above me. I reach for my mother’s face, trace one finger down her cheek. All my heartbreak, all my terror, all those terrible questions, and still my mother has not shed a tear. What’s wrong, Mama, are you afraid you’ll cry your eyes out?
      
    Asa comes for me the next day, and I tell him I’m sorry they wouldn’t let him stay. “Mama mean,” I write, his crusted palm so wide that it holds both words easily.
    “We play,” he writes.
    Papa is not rich, Doctor says, but he does have over a hundred acres here in the Connecticut River Valley. We can walk in any direction and it’s still Bridgman land. Hand in hand, we walk to the creek, and Asa helps me find the roundest, smoothest stones for skipping. I can’t enjoy the splash when they hit the water, but it gives me great pleasure to fling them into the air just so, just the way he has taught me. This creek was one of my favorite spots when I was little, and now I take off my boots and socks and dip my toes into the icy water. It is a tingle like no other, and then the squish of the mud between my toes, the jagged edges of the rocks that thrill me even as I know they can hurt me. I’ve cut my feet on them more times than I can remember, Mama getting so mad with Asa when he’d carry me back with a bloodied foot, me happy as a bird.
    Slowly―it is always so slow with him―I tell him that Mama didn’t cry about my eyes. He brings my hand to his face and shakes his head no over and over. He draws my fingers to his cheeks and slides them up and down, up and down, until I understand that he means Mama wept. He places my palm against his heart, and back to his eyes, and I realize how much my dear friend mourned also. After a moment, he writes, “2 babies die,” and then, “before you.” I rock back on my heels away from him, sit down hard on a slick rock. Mama had two babies who died before me?
    “Fever?” I ask Asa. Yes. I have no memory of any babies dying, but then again, I was only two when the fever struck me.
    “Boy and girl,” he writes. No one has ever told me. Why? Did they think it would add to my burden? Or that I just didn’t need to know, as they doubtless think that half the things of this world I don’t need to know, information that even the slowest-witted possess, simply by virtue of seeing and hearing, by witnessing .
    He taps on my hand again: “And your mam’s mother too.” My heart wells for her: the fever also took Mama’s own mother from her; how does she walk upright with the weight of all this sorrow?
    I wait a few days until Mama and I are alone shucking corn. I take the shock from her hands and brush away the stray kernels. “2 babies die?” I ask, though I already know the answer. Her hand squeezes mine so hard that it hurts, but in a good way. We sit at the table, holding hands amid the piles of corncobs, and I understand: she had no more tears left for me, and that is all right. I know she still loves me.
    When the carriage pulls up to the front porch to take me back to Boston, everyone hugs and kisses me good-bye, and Addison writes one last message from Papa: “Don’t come back till you can speak. Even the half-wit can speak.”

Chapter 7
Letters, 1845
    April 1845, Julia to Louisa
    I have been too tired to write to you. Measure forgiveness by the heaping cup, I beg you, like we did when Cook let us help with the cake baking.
    I am reduced to something less than human, while I remain married to one who believes himself divine.
    May 1845, Laura to Julia
    Here at Perkins, we all speak of nothing but baby Julia Romana. You have picked the most beautiful and perfect name. I