Free The Mothers of Voorhisville by Mary Rickert Page B

his pink face. “He got sunburned.” Elli looks down at her knees. She doesn’t want to cry. Theresa leans down to hand Timmy to her. “I know this is hard, but—”
    â€œMom, there’s something I have to tell you.”
    Theresa is not in the mood for teenage confessions. Why is Elli doing this now?
    â€œThere was another one, Mom.”
    â€œWhat do you mean? Another boy? Is that why you won’t say who the father is?”
    â€œNo. Mom, I mean, another baby. I had two. Dad doesn’t want me to say, ’cause, well, he was a freak, and he died. Dad buried him in the cornfield.”
    â€œWhat do you mean he was a freak?”
    â€œPlease don’t tell anyone.”
    â€œSweetie, I—”
    â€œHe had wings, okay?”
    â€œWho had wings?”
    â€œThe other one. The one that died. Do you think it was something I did?”
    Theresa cannot form a logical connection between her daughter’s revelation and her own son’s wings. Several things occur to her, but not even for a second does she consider that she might have shared a lover with her fifteen-year-old daughter. (That notion comes later, with disastrous results.) Instead, she thinks of the paper mill, or some kind of terrorist attack on their well, things like that.
    â€œYou didn’t do anything wrong,” Theresa says, “except have unprotected sex.” (Feeling like a hypocrite for saying it.) “And if every woman who did that was punished with a dead baby, there wouldn’t be anyone living at all.”
    â€œBut it wasn’t just dead, Mom. It had wings .”
    Theresa glances at the house, where she’d left Matthew resting in his crib. “How do we know that wasn’t some kind of miracle? How do we know it was a sign of something bad happening, rather than something good?”
    Elli sighs. “It’s just a feeling I get. Remember ‘We are the stuff that dreams are made on?’”
    â€œWhat about it?” Theresa says, feeling tense at the topic hovering too close to the library, and Jeffrey.
    â€œI don’t know,” Elli says. “It’s just something I think of sometimes.”
    Theresa knows she’s been distracted lately, perhaps not as supportive of Elli as she would have liked. She glances at the house again, trying to decide if Matthew could be flying through the rooms, banging into walls and ceilings. She doesn’t know anything about raising a child with wings, except that it is hard enough to raise one without them.
    â€œTry to think of it as a good thing, okay?”
    Elli shrugs.
    â€œWill you at least try?”
    For three days, Elli tries to convince herself that her first baby was not a freak or a punishment for something she’d done, but a sign of something good. She almost convinces herself of it. But on the third day, while she has Timmy on the changing table, she watches in horror as dark wings sprout from his back.
    That’s when she knows. The stranger she had sex with was the devil. That explains everything. It even explains why she did it with him. She looks into Timmy’s beautiful blue eyes. For once, he isn’t crying. In fact, he is smiling.
    Evil , Elli thinks, can trick you . She works the saliva in her mouth and spits. Timmy’s face goes through a metamorphosis of expressions, as if trying to decide which one to employ—a slight smile, raised eyebrows, trembling lips—all while closely watching Elli. She begins to cry. He opens his mouth wide and joins her, the glop of phlegm dripping down his forehead. Elli wipes it with the blanket. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” she says, picking him up.
    That’s when Theresa walks into the room.
    Elli, still crying, looks over the small dark points of her baby’s wings at her mother, who puts her hand over her mouth and—turning on her heels—spins out of the room.
    Theresa wheels down the hall like a