Free Homeland and Other Stories by Barbara Kingsolver Page B

three years of intimacy I had never seen these secret instruments. I thought the case contained some feminine thing that wasn’t my business. Face powder, maybe, or tampons.
    â€œYou could have told me,” I said.
    â€œI’ve lived all my life with this thing,” she said, and I tried to understand this. That some pains are our own. She said, “I didn’t want you constantly worrying about it.”
    I squeezed her hand to bring some strength into mine. I thought of the previous afternoon, of watching her, beautiful and permanent, against the continual loss of the Eel River. The things we will allow ourselves to believe.
    Â 
    In the hospital, Lena’s friend Dr. Cavanaugh warned me that although Lena was out of the woods she was even more visibly swollen than when I had seen her last, and would remain so fora while. It takes the body days, he said, to reabsorb the fluids it releases in such haste.
    Before I pushed open the door to her room I put in my mind the image of Lena swollen, but still I was startled. She didn’t actually look like my wife, but like some moonfaced relative of Lena’s.
    She smiled, turning the moon to a sun.
    â€œDoes that hurt?” I asked, sitting cautiously beside her thigh under the sheet.
    â€œDoes what hurt?”
    â€œI don’t know, your face. It looks…stretched.”
    â€œGee, thanks,” she said, laughing. She took my wrist and laid her fingers lightly across my veins. Her hands were still Lena’s hands, slender and gracefully curved. In bygone days they would have been the fingers of a movie star, curled around a cigarette.
    â€œWhere’s Melinda?” she asked suddenly, almost sitting up but restrained by the sheet that was drawn across her chest and tucked into the bed.
    â€œUrsula has her. They’re getting along like knaves.”
    â€œYou know what I think? Immortality is the wrong reason,” she said, and suddenly there were two streams of tears on her shiny cheeks. “Having a child wouldn’t make you immortal. It would make you twice as mortal. It’s just one more life you could possibly lose, besides your own. Two more eyes to be put out, and ten more toes to get caught under the mower.”
    Lena’s Grandfather Butler had lost some toes under a lawn mower once. And, of course, there was her lost sister.
    â€œYou’re just scared right now. In a few weeks life will seem secure again,” I said.
    â€œMaybe it will. But that won’t change the fact that it isn’t.” She looked at me, and I knew she was right, and I knew that for the first time she felt sure she would not bear children. I felt a mixture of relief and confusion. This was the opposite of thereaction I’d expected—I thought brushes with death made people want children desperately. My younger brother and his wife were involved in a near-disaster on a ski lift in northern Wisconsin, and within forty-eight hours they’d conceived their first son.
    â€œYou’re full of drugs,” I said. “Cortisone and Benadryl and who knows what else. And that stuff I shot into your arm.”
    â€œEpinephrine,” she said. “You did a good job. Did Cavanaugh tell you? That’s what saved me.” She stroked my hand and turned it over, palm down. The wedding band stood out against the white hospital sheets like an advertisement for jewelry and true love and all that is coveted in the world.
    â€œWhat I’m saying is,” I said, “this isn’t the time to be making important decisions. Your head isn’t clear. A lot of things have happened.”
    â€œWhy do people always say that? My head is clear. Because of what’s happened.” She laid her head back on the pillow and looked at the ceiling. The white forelock still bloomed above her forehead, but her beauty had gone underground. Dark depressions hung like hammocks under her eyes. I realized that now I had the