Joel had recently taken in several homeless people from Northampton to work and live on the farm, and now they were calling to each other in joyful voices even though it was drudgery to comb through the orchard for fruit. Ivy had seen them on the night they arrived, after they’d been brought to the dining hall. Joel had been the one to bring them their dinners, and then he had sat down with the new people as if he had known them all their lives. He had been so kind to them that Ivy’s heart had swelled up with an abiding devotion. Most people were intimidated by him, but he opened himself to these people who had nothing and welcomed them to the Community. He’d lifted his eyes to her, and when he did everyone else in the room had fallen away.
Ivy was four months along and showing now. It was a chilly morning, and she was out gathering fruit in a wicker basket. She knew her family had something to do with apples, and they had never been a favorite fruit of hers. She wore a scarf and gloves and a man’s peacoat. When she turned, Joel was standing there watching. She’d heard other women say it would be unwise to betray him or anger him; you had to earn his trust, and if you dared to break it, there was a price to pay. She had seen men and women wearing badges when they had gone against the rules. She was told they had lied or stolen, that they had been vain or disrespectful. Joel was an honest man and expected honesty in return. That’s what Evangeline always said.
“Wherever I look, I always see you,” Joel told her when they encountered one another in the orchard. “I see true beauty.”
Ivy felt so unattractive, her face was puffy, her body heavier than it had ever been, that she couldn’t help being flattered. “You must be seeing apple trees, not me.” Ivy laughed, flushed with embarrassment, but also with something more.
“You’re far more beautiful.” His eyes were so dark, almost black. “Some things are meant to be,” he told her.
“Like apples.” Ivy gave him a fleeting look. She felt out of her depth here. The basket was heavy in her hands, and she set it down in the grass, aware that he was watching her. For some reason her breath was shallow in her chest.
“Like us,” Joel responded. “I’d wondered if I could ever love someone again.”
When Joel came toward her, she didn’t step away. Ivy couldn’t imagine that he’d want someone like her, an insecure girl who hadn’t even finished high school, who didn’t know how to drive a car and was pregnant and didn’t know the first thing about being a mother. She couldn’t imagine that her life could be set right. He kissed her in a way she had never been kissed before. No wonder people did as he said and believed in him. He was stronger than most men; for one thing, he knew what he wanted, even though Ivy wondered how he could be so kind to someone who had arrived on a bus, owning nothing, with nothing to offer. When she told him so, he smiled and shook his head.
“You have everything I want,” he told her. “You are the apple, you are the tree, you are the orchard.”
He didn’t wait for what he wanted. Ivy was impressed by that after being with a college boy who expected everything to be handed to him. Two days after they’d met in the orchard, Joel went on his bended knee before her; it was old-fashioned, and another woman might have laughed at how serious he was, but as soon as he did, Ivy was his. Just like that, on an October day. She was a tree in the forest, she was the love of his life, she was so young she was unable to see the future, and on that day, she went forward, hoping for the best. All she knew was that she was the woman who walked through an orchard knowing that she was valued and loved, something she had unfortunately never felt before.
* * *
THAT WAS THE WINTER when the snow fell for days and storms became blizzards, when the Lost River froze and turned blue, it was the winter of love when they walked through the drifts to an abandoned cabin at the edge of the woods so they could be alone. Ivy’s belly was huge; she was due that March. All the same, Joel swore that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and she nearly believed him. They were inside a snow globe, after all. They were in a world of their own. “What do you want more than anything?” Joel asked her.
“A daughter,” she said. “Your daughter,” she added when she saw that he looked crestfallen. She knew that she said things to please him, that in some corner of her soul there was a hidden self she never allowed to be seen. Nothing was perfect, but this was close. Nothing lasted forever, although Joel swore what was between them was for all eternity. The snow was deeper all the time, and the world Ivy had known was so far away. She might have been anywhere, but she was here, in his arms, only six miles from the nearest town, but so far away she might as well have been west of the moon.
* * *
ON THE DAY MIA was born, there was a false spring. The lilacs bloomed all at once and the bees emerged from their hives, only to freeze when the cold, blue night fell. Petals turned black. Bees were found on window ledges, having frozen as they tried their best to reach the warm rooms inside. The Tree of Life planted by Johnny Appleseed did not have a single leaf that year. Ivy knew nothing about childbirth, and she’d thought she might die during the worst of her labor. She asked the midwife to put her out of her misery, but they didn’t use drugs of any sort. “I can’t do this,” Ivy had cried, but then Joel had leaned close to whisper in her ear. He didn’t leave her for a minute. “You have to walk through hell to get to heaven,” Joel told her. She listened to him and calmed down. In this way she was bound to him, no matter who she had been before. “Breathe,” he had said and that was what she did. Have faith in yourself, she thought. Have faith in him.
When they handed Ivy her daughter, the heart of her heart, the true love of her life, all of the pain she’d experienced was immediately forgotten.
“Our girl,” Joel said, and Ivy was grateful that the child would have a father, even though here at the Community, children were raised in the children’s house, the babies cared for by the women who worked in the nursery. She called the baby Mia, for she’d read that the name meant mine, and no matter the rules, this child belonged to her. Ivy had seven days alone with her daughter before she had to bring her to the nursery. Seven days of love and patience and solitude and sweetness. A wash of love came over her whenever she held her daughter, but the time spun by, and then it was over. Ivy’s heart broke when Evangeline took Mia from her arms. Ivy was still scheduled to feed her, and those were the most precious hours of her day. There was a rocking chair by the window in the nursery with a lovely view, but Ivy never looked outside. She held the world in her arms, and when her visit with Mia was over, Ivy stood outside the children’s house crying.
Some women saw her and reported her, and she was summoned to Joel’s office.
“You have to be an example,” he told her. “You can’t break the rules.”
Children belong to everyone.
Another woman would have been punished, isolated, and kept from her baby, or, if she continued to break the rules, taken into the fields to be beaten, but Joel had Ivy come sit on his lap and he gently made her promise to accept that her child belonged to the Community. He reminded her that love was everywhere, and if Ivy ever felt like crying again when she left the children’s house, she stopped herself, worried that someone might see her. It wasn’t so hard not to show what you really felt if you practiced, if you closed your eyes and imagined that your daughter was with you even when she was somewhere else, if you let the wind rise all around you, if you only heard the songs of the sparrows in the forest, a place so dark it was easy to get lost even in broad daylight, even if your eyes were open.