I carried my bucket of tools and my gloves up the slope and climbed over the stone wall. I sang softly as I pulled the new weeds from around the headstones and the crosses. I picked up the small branches storms always culled from the trees and left behind where they fell. The empty graves . . . For my father’s grave, I left the stone Grand had created. My mother’s name was on it, for one thing. For another, though he’d committed murder . . . still, my mother had loved him, at least for a time. I could believe only that mental illness had caused their tragic downfall.
I touched the cross and hoped he’d found peace. There was some kind of symmetry in seeing his marker, even knowing he wasn’t here, but instead washed in the sea and absorbed back into the earth. The other empty grave—the one for the man who’d never existed—I removed that marker and set it aside for disposal. That fiction was over and done with.
Grand and Gran, Grand’s parents, my mother, plus there were unmarked graves. The one I couldn’t deal with was the tiniest.
My Ellen. The first Ellen. My sweet baby. I wrapped my arms around my knees and put my face against them. That pain, the old excruciating pain, came back, cramping in my belly and in my heart, and I understood that while the arrival of the second Ellen had given me another chance, it didn’t resolve the first loss. Nothing could.
All the darkness came back, sweeping over me as if it had abated but had never gone away. The tide was now coming back in and with a vengeance.
At some point, I’d stopped singing, and my vocalizations wanted to become a high-pitched wail. I struggled to keep the sound inside. I leaned forward, almost convulsed with the effort. The ground was against my forehead. I bent farther and felt the dirt and sticks against my cheek and my lips. Earth’s leavings. Nature’s gleanings. Birth and death. Birth and rebirth. But my baby was still gone, and I wanted to scream at God and beat my fists at the earth.
“Is that where she’s buried? The first Ellen?” a familiar voice said, my daughter’s voice, but she sounded hard.
I knew I could rise, if I tried hard enough. I could stand, perhaps blush a little at my extreme emotionalism. I could ask my daughter how she was. I’d tell her I was glad she’d come to speak with me. Except I couldn’t because I was huddled, kneeling on the ground with my arms over my head, and I knew tears and dirt covered my face and made it impossible for one Hannah to hide the other, the one who could not be consoled.
Did it matter? Ellen had her father now. She was strong enough. I’d heard it in her voice. Strong enough to move on without me.
I dug my fingers like claws into the earth on either side of her small grave.
“Hannah.” A man spoke with a warning note in his voice. Liam.
My daughter spoke again, saying, “Stay back.”
She came over the wall. I heard the sound of her clothing moving against the stone. A stick cracked where she touched ground, and then she was near me. I felt her hand on my back.
“Mom.” Her voice was low at first, but then she spoke more loudly. “Mom.”
I eased my grip on the earth. I pushed against it and rose a few inches. I was being forced to return to the present, not by Gran’s need but by my daughter, who was speaking to me and calling me Mom. She put her hands on my shoulders and pulled me gently upright.
This young woman, Ellen, knelt beside me, then reached past me to touch the concrete block covering the first Ellen’s grave. Her fingers played over the quartz and mica fragments arranged along the edges.
She asked, her tone soft now, “This is her grave?”
A ragged breath, a sniffle—it was the best I could do before my shoulders moved inward again.
“I always knew it must be an infant’s grave, but I never suspected . . . Why, Mom?”
I blinked.
“Why?” she asked again.
I brushed at my lips. They felt numb, and bits of dirt fell from them. “We lost her—”
Ellen interrupted me. “You didn’t lose anyone. She wasn’t an umbrella or a book. She was a baby, and she died.”
“She died.” I echoed her words. “My baby died.” I gasped. I’d never said those words together before. As if they belonged to one another, in a sentence together. It hurt with such exquisite sharpness, I could hardly bear it. “She’s dead.” The pain burst from me in a high moan. My hands rushed up to cover my face. My fingers dug into my cheeks and forehead.
Ellen grasped my hands and pulled them away. “I know. What I’m asking is, why are you still so upset about it?”
Startled, I looked up. She was staring at me, examining my face.
“I thought it was me you were upset about,” she said. “About my finding out what you’d done, about me being hurt and angry.”
I nodded. “I was. I am.”
“I believe you, in part, but I don’t think that’s what upset you the most.”
“I’m sorry. Truly. I should’ve done it better, made better decisions. I wanted to protect you.”
“Who were you really protecting?”
Her voice was so harsh, so angry, I was desperate to stop it.
“You. Gran.”
“No, Mom. You were mostly protecting yourself.”
“I wanted only to keep you safe. I’ve never cared what the world thought of me.”
She stared into my eyes and repeated, “You were protecting yourself. You were desperate to avoid acknowledging her death.” She shook her head. “As long as you protected me from the truth, you could protect yourself from having to face your own truth.”
“For me, the truth is that finding you on the porch made all the difference to us. You and Gran were my truth.”
“No, Mom. The truth is that Ellen died.”
“She died,” I said again, hearing the words more than saying them, feeling the pain, still there but diminished. I looked away from Ellen and brushed my hand against the stone slab. “I put her here.”
“You have to let her go.”
“I thought I had . . . when I found you.” I closed my eyes for a few long seconds, then opened them again. “There’s something I need you to understand. I’m not making excuses. Just hear me?”
She touched my cheek again, brushing at something clinging to it. Not leaves. Her hands came away wet. She nodded. “I’m listening.”
“Gran thought you were her. Our baby. Our Ellen. When she saw you on the porch, she thought you’d come home to us. I let her have her fantasy while I tried to figure out what to do. And then . . . and then it was too late. Too late for both of us. For all of us.”
Ellen shook her head. “What you did was wrong. But my father told me about his life at the time, about my mother and her problems. I don’t know what my life would’ve been like if you’d told the authorities, whether I would’ve been stuck in foster homes. I’ll never know. In a way, you stole that from me, too, but I think you also rescued me, even if it was done with lies.” She put her hand to her forehead. “What you did wasn’t right. I’ll never say it was. I think it was dumb luck that it worked out.”
Or destiny, I thought. Maybe it happened just as it was supposed to.
“I understand,” I said. “I don’t blame you for being hurt and angry. I’m glad you have your father after all these years, and I’m glad he has you. I know it will be a good thing for both of you, and I’ll always be here for you. Please believe how sorry I am.”
Suddenly I saw myself through her eyes and knew I was covered in dirt. Muddy tears were smeared across my hands. I could feel them tightening and drying on my face.