“What burden?” Ivy said. She had felt a chill along the back of her neck.
“What do you think?” Kayla patted her stomach. “I can’t have it, and I’m not allowed to get rid of it, so where does that leave me?”
There was a clinic outside Blackwell, where pregnancies could be terminated, but Joel believed such procedures to be crimes against nature; he believed that a woman’s body belonged not to her but to the Community. One of the men from the farm was stationed outside the clinic in a pickup truck, but even if any of the Community women had dared to enter, they had no medical insurance and no personal savings, and they knew what would happen to them if they were caught.
Kayla had disappeared one night when the snow was coming down hard. She hadn’t been found even though a group of men had gone off searching for her. The weather was too bad, and people were told she likely took the bus back to Boston. But when the ice melted in February, a body was discovered in the woods. It had never been identified, even after an autopsy. In town, people said there had been multiple organ failures when a woman tried to terminate a pregnancy by ingesting poisonous herbs, including henbane and rue.
Joel had told the Sunday gathering that Kayla didn’t have the strength it took to build a new society. A woman who is weak is not a woman worth helping, he told them. Not like you, not like your daughters. You are all beautiful, inside and out. You are queens who have no need of a crown. He went up to each of the women and bowed down before her, and when he came to Ivy there were tears in his eyes. “You know you’re the only one,” he told her, as if he had read her mind, and was aware that she had doubts, even though she knew she should not.
She never told anyone that on the night Kayla disappeared, there had been a faint knocking at the door of the house Ivy shared with Joel.
“Joel?” Kayla had called. Her tone, which was usually indignant, was soft and earnest now. She stood there as the snow fell down. “If you don’t let me do it, I’ll do it myself.” Joel was at a meeting with the men on the construction team and so Ivy was alone. She had pressed herself against the wall and remained quiet, and eventually Kayla had stopping knocking.
For all she knew Kayla was a liar. She lied about being too sick to show up for work, and about needing to have her own room because she was a light sleeper. Still, Ivy reproached herself for not opening the door to her friend. She told herself she didn’t do it because the Community had taken such good care of Ivy when she arrived, and Joel hadn’t left her side during her three-day labor when she brought Mia into the world. But when she searched her soul, she knew that the real reason was that she was afraid to hear what Kayla had to say.
On the day they heard a body had been found in the woods, Joel had brought Ivy a special present, a pair of red boots she had admired at the General Store.
“Wouldn’t this be vanity?” she had asked him.
“Try them on,” Joel had told her, and when she had he’d smiled broadly. “It’s not a vanity to please your husband,” he insisted.
He’d wanted forgiveness, she could tell, or maybe what he’d really been asking for was forgetfulness; either way, Ivy had given it to him, and she had never mentioned Kayla again. Nevertheless, she thought of her every day, every time she slipped on her red boots, she wondered what would have happened that night if she’d opened the door and listened to Kayla. She wondered what might have happened if they had gone to the nursery and taken Mia and run away together.
Ivy had begun to think that life was made up of a series of accidents and drastic errors. The unexpected became the expected, you made the right turn or the wrong turn, and all of it added up to the path you were on. Happiness was there and then gone, impossible to hold on to. And here she was, in Western Massachusetts, the wife of a man who said she was his world. But sometimes she heard knocking at their door. He would be fast asleep, and she would get out of their bed and go to open the door, but no one was ever there. There was only the dark night and the sound of crickets, and it was as if Kayla had never existed at all.
Whenever it was Ivy’s turn to work at the stand that the Community set up at the farmers’ market on the town green on Saturdays, she found herself drawn to the library. It was an old brick building with a mossy slate roof and a turret with windows fashioned of old, wavy glass. Occasionally, Ivy said she was going to the public restroom at town hall, but instead she sneaked over to gaze through the library windows, and she stood there crying. There were lilacs all around, she could say she’d come to pick a few blooms for the dining hall. She looked inside, longing for the books on the shelves, but she didn’t dare go in. These were the rules she lived by now, and the vows members of the Community made were taken seriously. She wasn’t dealing with selfish, spoiled boys like Noah Brinley or uncaring men like her father. If either of them cared about her, wouldn’t they have looked for her? Not Noah, she had no expectations of him anymore, but her father, who had called her a princess, her father, who had slapped her in the hallway of their house, who had planned to send her away, who had never once listened to what she wanted, who must have heard her crying at night when he walked past her room but had merely continued down the hall.
But now it was her wedding day, and the time when she might have returned home was over, and she forced herself not to think about the life she once had. She would never see her room again, or the books on her bookshelf. She would never sit in the Athenaeum reading on a rainy day, full of hope for the future. She was a married woman with responsibilities now. Her heart belonged to her husband, and her life belonged to him as well.
At the end of the day, when the sky was turning pink, everyone finally sat down at the rough-hewn tables for the wedding feast. New marriages here had to be approved by Joel, and because they were rare, it was all the more reason to celebrate. The women had been cooking all day, and there were fresh loaves of bread and vegetable stews. Cake was a luxury, and usually forbidden, but some of the women had made a three-tiered vanilla cake, sweetened with the honey from the farm’s hives. No alcohol was allowed, except for the hard cider made from their own apples, Look-No-Furthers, which had a kick that could get a person drunk in no time at all; this was the alcoholic beverage that was said to be favored by Johnny Appleseed himself.
Children were at last let loose, galloping into the fields to catch fireflies, directed not to disrespect their elders with unruly shouts of joy. Ivy went to find Evangeline. She had been overcome with the notion that her child had been stolen, as they often were in fairy tales, and that she’d never see her again, but there was Mia dozing in Evangeline’s arms.
“I can take her,” Ivy blurted. She was constantly caught off guard by how fiercely she could love someone. She knew that the children belonged to everyone here in the Community, but as far as Ivy was concerned, Mia was hers and hers alone. Her darling child, with red hair and dark eyes, quiet, yet full of life, an endearing changeling born in a forest.
Evangeline kept hold of the baby. “You’re the bride. Go enjoy yourself.”
Joel had noticed that Ivy was missing, and he waved his arms when he spied her, gesturing for her to come back to him. The cake was about to be served and he wanted to feed it to her. The shadows of the yew hedges behind him were so darkly green the leaves appeared black. Ivy couldn’t tell whether or not he was smiling as he signaled to her.