Page 29 - 2017 WTP Special Edition

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Agnes sits down beside them at the picnic table in
“That’s because her first mommy didn’t want her,” Tulia says.
the postage stamp-sized garden.
“She’s already told you ten times, Tulip-head,” Zach says, stabbing at his French toast.
“Mary-Katherine didn’t say that, did she?” Agnes asks.
“Mom said not to call me that,” Tulia shouts.
Tulia doesn’t answer, just fiddles with Agnes’s napkin.
“Please, Zach,” Agnes says, more tired now than she was at the end of the pregnancy. “I could use a little help here.”
“Mary-Katherine’s parents love her a lot,” Agnes says, wrapping her arms around her niece, “just like your mommy loves you.”
Zach rolls his eyes. “Fine.”
Agnes meets Tulia’s earnest gaze, feels the tug at her breasts and remembers what she felt after Joshua latched on and sucked and sucked, the tiny eyes with their butterfly lashes closed or opened just momentarily to gaze into hers—he seemed not quite of this world. In that time, the dreamiest peace washed over her, a cocooned calm radically unlike anything she had ever known. Now there are two damp spots on her t-shirt, a sign she will have to shower, press out the milk destined for a child that was never hers to begin with.
“Thank you,” Agnes says, and returns to her meal, aware that Tulia’s big blue eyes are still fixed on her. “Like I said, Tul, the baby is with his mommy and daddy.”
“But he grew in your tummy,” Tulia insists. “You let me feel his kicks, his little ‘hellos.’”
“Oh Bumblebee, I told you that he was going to live with his parents.”
“The real parents needed Aunt Aggie’s body, Tul,” Zach explains. “She isn’t the real mommy.”
“Listen, Tul, I gave birth to him,” Agnes says even- tually, “but the people who waited for him, the Goldmans, they’re his parents.”
“Zach’s right,” Agnes says, amazed that this is the same boy who put gum in Tulia’s hair an hour ago. “I just gave the baby a place to grow because his real mommy couldn’t.”
To her surprise, Tulia nods and goes back to her chair. Soon she is asking Agnes to play Candyland with her after dinner, and can she have marsh- mallows in her hot chocolate, her worries about the baby and Mary-Katherine and perhaps even herself forgotten, for now anyway.
Tulia crinkles her brow, bites her lower lip. “Mom- mies give birth to babies. I waited and waited to meet him. I set up a tea party in my room. Ella Funt and Brown Bear are waiting.”
Agnes smiles, trusting it will all sort itself out, though it’s astonishing that Tulia, who knows all about her father’s new family, just can’t wrap her head around the idea of baby Joshua, as Agnes calls him, going to live with someone else. “It’s
Agnes clears the dishes and thinks about her tired, unhappy sister who, at thirty-six, seems more disillusioned than almost anyone she knows, her own husband having left nearly two years ago now. And oddly enough, she thinks about another pair of lines from The Winter’s Tale, which she reread after coming home from the hospital. What’s gone and what’s past help/ Should be past grief.
a little like Mary-Katherine,” Agnes finally says, thinking of the eight-year-old tomboy who lives next door, as she gathers Tulia up into her lap. “Mary-Katherine’s parents brought her home from the hospital, but someone else gave birth to her.”
“I married an asshole, Aggie,” Beth told her when
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