Cora smiles, a little sheepishly. “I’m amazed I still remember that,” she says. “See how well your father taught me? Anyway, understand that we were just joking around back then. We’d all be laughing the whole time—even Addie. Back then.”
“Right,” Scarlet says. “That was the difference, wasn’t it?”
Eventually Addie didn’t find it funny anymore. Scarlet too can remember her mother’s raging against what she called k-selected humans acting like r-selected beasts, squandering resources, sending their young off to die in wars. Tom had always hated it when she’d used scientific theory like that. Turning science into sociology, he called it.
“Tom has always said that scientists are far more optimistic than artists,” she says, remembering her parents’ endless debates. “He’s certainly more of an optimist than Addie was, which I guess isn’t saying that much. More optimistic than I am too—as he’s always reminding me. ‘Poets, painters, musicians, all of them—artists are horrible cynics beneath that pretty facade,’ he says.”
“And what do you say when he says things like that?” Cora asks. She is staring pointedly at Scarlet.
“Oh, I usually just agree with him.” Scarlet feels tired of this conversation suddenly, unnerved by Cora’s curiosity. Actually, I think I may be more of a cynic than even Addie was, she considers saying, but doesn’t. And that frightens me, now.
“You know,” she says instead, maybe just to change the subject, maybe because of all the questions she herself has now, “all those conversations and jokes about k-selected species always kind of puzzled me. Maybe this was just a kid’s egotism, but it always seemed like those remarks were somehow about me. About the fact that Addie and Tom didn’t have more children, about how everyone assumed I was dying for a brother or sister. And I didn’t really see why. Or was I missing something?”
Cora looks puzzled. Understandably, Scarlet thinks; she knows she’s being vague. She takes a breath and tries again. “I guess I’m asking if there was more going on there. More than Addie’s personal quest to save the planet, I mean—you know, doing her part to stem the tide of overpopulation.” She pauses again, but still there is no response from Cora.
“Okay. Here’s what I’m asking. Did Addie want another child, maybe? Or, maybe I’m asking this: Did having me make her decide she really didn’t want more children? Was it all too much somehow? Was there some kind of secret I never got to hear about?” Scarlet stares at Cora now, forcing herself to stop, to hold back from revealing more than she’s ready to reveal. She tries to decipher the look on Cora’s face. Is it changing subtly? Is there some hint of realization there behind her furrowed brow?
After a moment Cora shakes her head slowly. “No, no,” she says. “No secrets that I know of.” She continues to stare at Scarlet, her eyes full of other unasked questions. “You know, everyone just always thought you were supposed to have at least two, so I suppose we always talked about it because we were just curious or something. And Addie had her blue days, just like all of us did—home all day with a cranky baby, no adult conversations for weeks at a time, that kind of thing. But she never showed any signs of regret, Scarlet.” Her voice is tender now, and Scarlet feels, suddenly, embarrassed by her questions, by the silly self-involvement Cora must be hearing there.
“No, no. I didn’t really mean regret,” she says. “I’m not exactly sure what I mean. It’s just, well, all that k-selected species stuff, all the ‘singleton’ jokes and whatnot. I just was curious about it, I guess. I know I’m not being clear. . . .”
“Well, who is right now, right? What’s being clear got to do with Addie’s dying? Was she being clear, giving up on treatment like that and—” Cora stops herself, takes a sip of coffee and looks out the window for a moment. She turns back to Scarlet and tries to smile. “Anyway, you didn’t seem to suffer for being an only child. There was your friend Peter, and then our boys . . .”
Her voice catches, and suddenly Scarlet wonders why she’s doing this to Cora, insisting on this topic of mothers and children. “Yes, right,” she says, then tries to steer things to safer ground. “Just thinking about the only-child thing to avoid other thoughts, I suppose. Or, well, I don’t know why. It’s funny what these last days with Addie have brought up. Apart from all the big stuff, I mean.”
“Yes, it is funny. It’s funny what we found ourselves talking about. I mean really, under normal conditions when do we ever wonder about what female dogs think about their own reproduction, or lack of it?” Cora looks down at Lucy, trailing her fingers along the dog’s soft white belly. “But that’s what you talk about. Things like that, things that seem so silly and irrelevant—and then you realize they really aren’t.” She folds her paper then and starts to tidy the table, a brisk habit Scarlet recognizes. She braces herself for what will come next.
“Addie worried, you know, that she might have somehow turned you away from marrying, or from having children,” Cora says when she’s wiped away a tiny trail of milk. “She ended up in tears that night we talked—well, of course we all did. Lou kind of fell apart . . . you know how she feels about her girls now, so convinced they blame her for everything.”
How, Scarlet is wondering, does Cora always know what she’s really thinking? She has done this for years now, greeting Scarlet at the breakfast table, after those long drives and a few hours’ sleep, with a fresh pot of coffee and, before long, a seemingly innocent and indirect observation that was meant really as a pointed question.
But Addie has been dead for only seven hours, and Scarlet has slept for maybe three. Though she was sidling up to the topic herself only moments before, she’s just not ready, she thinks now, to launch into things like Addie’s fears for her. Or what Addie’s life might have taught her about love or marriage or having a child. She can’t ask the questions she needs to ask, and she can’t answer Cora’s questions either. Not now.
So instead she asks Cora something else, though here too she’s afraid of where her answer could take them. “And what did you cry about, Cora, that night with Lou and Addie?”
Cora looks at Scarlet intently for another long moment. Then she waves her hand in front of her face and shifts her gaze to the window. “Not what you’d think, Scarlet,” she says. “I cried because beautiful young girls grow up, and grow old. Isn’t that silly? I look at my granddaughters now, and they take my breath away. Bobby’s girls are eight and five now. Can you believe that?”
Scarlet raises her eyebrows, feigning surprise, though in fact she’s well aware of Cora’s granddaughters’ ages.
“They remind me of you,” Cora goes on. “Of course they’re younger than you were when you started coming here with Addie and Tom, but already Lindsey, at least, makes me think of you. She’s long and lean like you were, with that same wild, long hair. I love just watching her walk, just like I used to love watching you. Young girls are like colts really. Silent and watchful, and restless, under that calm on the surface. Restless and ready to break free.
“And that night I thought, for the first time—can you believe this?—I thought, My Lord, we were like that too, and it seems like it was just yesterday, and now Addie is here in my house, on this huge hospital bed in the middle of my studio, and she’s dying. And I thought, How can this be? We were so young, so happy, tramping through the woods and riding horses and kissing our boyfriends in the moonlight. And then suddenly Addie seemed to leap ahead of us—well, I mean she was always so passionate and intense, but then boom, she was doing this very, very grown-up thing, falling in love with Tom and moving in with him. And then before we knew it we were all doing it—getting married, having families, buying homes, all of it—buried in work, and debt, and caring for children. . . .”
Her voice breaks ever so slightly, and she pauses. Scarlet reaches for her hand, but Cora only lets her hold it for a moment before she pulls