Authors: Orson Scott Card
“My age?” asked Hazel. “That’s rich. I may not be fast, but I’m mean. Nothing wrong with these twins that can’t be cured by smacking them around a little.” There was a momentary pause. “That was a joke, you beastly children. I never raised a hand to
you
, Jared. You should have leapt to my defense.”
Now everyone laughed. But Jared was still reluctant. “Will, you should have asked us before you went ahead and sold your house.”
“If you can’t do it, we’ll work something out,” said Will.
“What about Sarah’s family?” asked Jared.
It was Sarah who answered. Firmly, loudly. “No.”
Everyone looked at her.
“You mean your parents really wouldn’t help?” asked Rachel, surprised. “I know they’re all alone in that big old farmhouse, and there’s plenty of land . . .”
“I mean my children aren’t going to have any memories of living
there
,” Sarah said firmly.
“It’s really not an option,” said Will, his face reddening. He was going to back his wife up on this one, clearly, and he also wasn’t going to brook any questions.
“Of course you can stay here,” said Rachel. “Your father was only reluctant because he’s trying to protect me from overwork. But Mother Hazel’s right, she’ll be a great help to me. Between the three of us, Sarah, we womenfolk will have those two monsters outnumbered. Just do us a favor and don’t have another boy. Smart as the twins are, a solo would probably be born running.”
“It’s a girl,” said Sarah.
This was the first they had heard of the sex of the child. “Ultra-sound?” asked Dawn.
Sarah shook her head. “I’ve known all along.”
Another silence.
Will finally spoke up. “Sarah . . . dreams. Sometimes. She knew about the twins before the doctor did.”
Rachel had a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. Why did this
bother her? She had always known that some women had visions, true dreams, intuitions that turned out to be true. It was one of the gifts of the Spirit. And it was certain that Sarah didn’t boast about it, since this was the first they had heard about her being a visionary woman. Still, there was something faintly awkward about the way Will phrased it. He didn’t just say she had a dream about this baby. He said that she dreams “sometimes.” He wasn’t telling about one experience—he was saying that this sort of thing happens a lot. A very different claim. It made Rachel wonder who really had the upper hand in their marriage. If anyone does, she reminded herself quickly. After all, Rachel and Jared had a perfect balance. There
was
no upper hand.
Even reminding herself of how good her own marriage was didn’t make her bad feeling go away. She wondered: Do I feel uncomfortable because I don’t really believe in people who regularly get visions? Or do I feel uncomfortable because my son married a woman who is much more closely in touch with spiritual things than I am?
“Well,” said Hazel, “that’s a
useful
talent, I’d say! Is the baby going to be all right?”
Sarah smiled faintly. “We’re going to love her very much.”
“We don’t talk about this stuff much,” said Will. “It’s . . . sacred, I’m sure you understand. I don’t know why I mentioned it today. I guess if we’re going to live here I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. Just till March, can you handle it?”
“What are you going to name her?” asked Hazel.
“We have some ideas,” said Sarah. “But nothing is set.”
“Just don’t name her Hazel. I’ve always resented my father for giving me that name. It’s even more old-fashioned now. She would be teased mercilessly in school.”
Buck hooted in laughter. “You can say that again! My parents didn’t even have the decency to name me ‘Norman,’ which would have been bad enough. No, every school year the teacher had to read out my name.” He put on an exaggeratedly high teacher’s voice: “ ‘Normal’? Is that right? Is that a name, or an evaluation?”
“I’ve always wondered that myself,” said Will.
Dawn answered. “It’s
not
a description,” she assured him. “At least not an accurate one.”
“What
I’ve
always wondered,” said Jared, “is how you came up with the nickname ‘Buck.’ I mean, are your folks deer hunters or something?”
“Simple enough story,” said Buck. “They call me Buck so they can tell me apart from my little brother.”
“Oh, what’s
his
name?” asked Hazel.
“Buck,” said Buck. Then he took a bite of turkey.
It took a moment for everyone to realize that he was joking. Dawn jabbed him with her elbow. “You didn’t have to pull that old joke on my family!”
He shied away from her. “Don’t touch me when I’m eating unless you’re giving me the Heimlich maneuver.”
She started tickling him. “I don’t use Heimlich, I just tickle.”
“Tickle and
jab
!” Buck cried, holding her hands away from him.
“Children,” said Jared sternly. “Try to behave at least as well as the twins.”
Well, thought Rachel, that was that. Somehow they had agreed to let Will and Sarah and the twins move into their basement. And Hazel, somehow, was going to help with them. The house was going to be full again. It was just bad luck that it happened to be Rachel’s least-favorite grandchildren who were going to be tearing her house apart. Actually, it was bound to be a good thing. When Rachel had a chance to know them better, no doubt she’d find and appreciate the twins’ better qualities. The same might even happen with Sarah. Sarah who took the name of the Lord in vain. Sarah whose parents kept dead cars on the lawn. Sarah who had visions.
Strange and mysterious are the ways of God.
The twins weren’t as much of a problem as Rachel had feared, in large measure because Sarah went over the house with them, her expert eye spotting everything that the twins might be able to break. For a while, Rachel feared that there’d be nothing left, but as she boxed up every bit of ceramic and her entire clock collection, she reminded herself that it would only be a few months. Apparently Sarah spotted everything. The twins quickly learned that there was nothing to destroy inside the house and so they went outside and worked over the garden. Well, that was all right. A few passes with the rototiller in the spring and there’d be no trace of their massive construction projects in the dirt. The only
drawback was bundling them up for the cold weather. But having them out of the house for hours on end was worth the work. Thank heaven the weather was staying dry.
And when the twins were inside the house, Hazel
was
a help. She had infinite patience as a performer, apparently, telling stories to the twins whenever they wanted, which was often. And always with different voices for all the characters and a lot of silliness and wit so the boys were laughing all the time. They actually preferred Hazel to the television. But after a few stories, Rachel could tell that Hazel was exhausted and so she’d bundle the twins into their jackets and herd them outside. In the meantime, Sarah would lie miserably on the couch in the family room and call out, “I can take them in here! Please don’t wear yourselves out!” They cheerfully ignored her, except when Hazel went in and plumped up her pillow and gave her hot chocolate or lemonade or milk or whatever Sarah could finally be bullied into expressing a preference for that day. “You are the most
un
demanding,
un
particular pregnant woman I’ve ever known,” Hazel told the girl. “I swear if the baby said, ‘Well, Mom, shall I come on my due date?’ you’d answer, ‘Oh, you just come when you want. This month. Next month. Whatever.’ ”
“I just don’t
have
that much in the way of a preference,” said Sarah.
Whereupon Hazel would turn to Rachel. “I swear if Sarah’s head was on fire, she’d just say, ‘Now, if you’re going into the kitchen anyway, and it’s not too much trouble, would you mind bringing me back a glass of water to put this pesky fire out? But only if you’re already going to the kitchen, don’t make a special trip on my account!’ ” Rachel noticed that Sarah laughed at these jokes, but at the same time she could see that the girl had some kind of pain behind her eyes.
Sarah’s due date came and went. December 8th. December 9th. December 10th. “I’m going to start jumping off the bottom step,” Sarah told them miserably. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll try the second step.”
“No such thing,” said Hazel. “If that baby needs a few extra days to get ripe, don’t worry. Besides, the doctors never really know when the true due date is. For all you know, this little girl was conceived late in the cycle.”
On the 11th, there was a little false alarm—a sharp pain that Sarah was
sure
wasn’t a contraction but she still had to go check. Hazel bravely
stayed with the boys while Rachel took Sarah to the doctor’s office for an unscheduled checkup. All the way there, Rachel kept assuring Sarah that the doctor would probably make them go right to the hospital and call Will from there. Sarah said little, and her tacit disagreement turned out to be correct. The doctor was as frustrated, it seemed, as Sarah was. “You’re not dilated at
all
,” he said. “I really don’t want to induce until there’s some sign that your body is in birth mode.”
“That’s all right,” Sarah said miserably.
On the ride home, Rachel finally let her curiosity get the better of her manners. “Can I ask you something personal, Sarah?”
“I would hope so,” said Sarah. “And I’d also hope that if I don’t want to answer, I won’t have to.”
“Of course,” said Rachel. “And it’s rude of me even to ask, but the curiosity is killing me. How did Will come to start calling you ‘Streak’?”
Sarah laughed sharply and looked out the window for a long time. Just as Rachel was about to say never mind, she spoke. “I’m very shy about my body,” she explained. “The first time we went swimming, he dived under the water and snapped my swimsuit. I was mortified, but he assured me that I’d run from the poolhouse into the water so fast that he wasn’t sure I was
wearing
a suit. Actually, it was when he did that and I found that I could forgive him for touching me like that, well, that was when I realized that maybe I
could
marry somebody.” Sarah laughed nervously. She had said more than she planned to, but less, it seemed, than she wanted to.
Immediately Rachel remembered how, at Thanksgiving, Sarah had been so adamant about her children never having memories of the house she grew up in. “You were molested as a child, weren’t you?” Rachel asked.
Sarah nodded. “I knew you guessed when I reacted like I did to living in my parents’ house. It wasn’t my father, though, I don’t want you ever to think that. My father’s youngest brother lived with them for a while because of some trouble he was in out in Star Valley, Wyoming. He stayed for a year. I turned eleven that year. He made me do things.”
“You don’t have to tell me more than that, Sarah, if you don’t want to,” said Rachel.
“I have some pretty bad memories of that time. Because I felt for the
longest time that I was partly at fault. I mean, at first it was almost exciting. I was curious.”
“You were a child.”
“I know that as a Primary president you have all sorts of training in dealing with this.”
“Less than I should,” said Rachel. “And more than I was ever required to have.”
“Well, they
say
that the child is never at fault. But I was over eight years old and I wasn’t stupid. I know that it was mostly him, even though he really was a child himself, only fifteen. But it was partly me, and I couldn’t feel right about anything until I was seventeen and I decided that maybe other people could do what the therapist said, but
I
had to repent. Like Enos, you know? I prayed for two days. In the summer. My mother understood a little and she refused to let anyone go searching for me. Out in the far corner of the orchard. It works, you know. I was forgiven.”
Rachel had tears in her eyes, but when she glanced over at Sarah she could see that the girl was dry-eyed.
“I don’t get emotional about it now,” said Sarah. “It’s at the very center of my life. Not the molesting, but the forgiveness. That was when I first had a, you know, dream. I don’t have a lot of them, if that’s what worries you. It’s more like going to a movie with a friend who’s seen it before, and right before the scary parts she says, ‘Don’t worry about this, it turns out all right.’ ”
“But you still can’t go home.”
“Bad memories.”
Rachel had a sudden insight and had to blurt it out. “Did your parents know what kind of trouble this uncle of yours had been in back in Wyoming?”
“They knew it was trouble with a girl. Father told me that it never crossed his mind that it was somebody as young as me, that his brother was messing with
children
. Afterward, Father wanted to get his brother put in jail for what he did to me, but I refused to let him. I knew that Ammaw and Old Man—my grandparents—I knew they’d blame me the way they blamed that evil girl back in Star Valley.
She
was
twelve
. So the way they saw things, I must be even more wicked. It was really ugly. I love my parents,
but they come visit us, I don’t go visit them. If I was a better Saint I’d forgive them, and I have, in my head. It’s just my heart that doesn’t know it, when I go home.”
“You poor thing,” said Rachel.
“Oh, I’m fine. I just wanted you to understand that it’s not because my parents wouldn’t help me. And I’m not really insane or hateful. I’m still going to be a good mother to your grandchildren.”