It was inside and outside of Flannery, both. The illumination. The point was, the source must have been Willa, and yet it was not as though that tiny baby, just emerged, was emitting bright beams of gratitude that she had escaped her dim cave and gotten her life rolling. (What she primarily emitted were the loud cat cries of any newborn’s arrival.) It seemed rather, to Flannery’s drugged mind – they had tanked her up with painkillers and then anesthetic, when it eventually transpired that the doctors had to slice Flannery open to get Willa out safely – as though on Willa’s joining everyone else in the room, all the darkness went out of the place, out of every corner, leaving only this light.
She could not speak this. She could not say anything at all. Flannery was simply mute and smiling and bewildered. She took in the sequence of events: Charles joking with the nurses, though his eyes blinked with tears; the extreme contrast between his hefty self and the scarcely substantial creature he was cradling, like an image from some cartoon, a bear with a diminutive kitten in its paws; the swaddling of Willa and some helpful nurse’s holding the child before the mother’s eyes. Look at her! Isn’t she beautiful? The images lodged deep within Flannery’s memory, concealed under other immediate realities, and they would stay there always. Her daughter’s arrival.
She had Willa now, and Willa had her, and Flannery’s heart was ripped open into a new, great, terrifying capacity for love. (And, simultaneously, grief, because for some old, indelible reason Flannery felt the fear right alongside the joy – they were inextricable.) She had never known she would be capable of this love, and the feeling left her absolutely exposed to the world and its elements, like driving down the freeway at a hundred miles an hour with the top down and the windows open. Anything could get in.
What shape her fears had, what could happen once you became a mother – all of that would come later. For that day, that timeless hour, Flannery simply allowed herself to bathe in Willa’s light.
18
Once, a long time before, Flannery had felt vulnerable in this way. She had loved deeply and she had lost, and though the experience broke and rearranged her (like a shattered and reset limb), it did not really surprise her. Woven deeply into this calm and melancholy woman was the conviction that all love ended in loss, that abandonment was the norm, that ecstasy was fleeting. It was the order of things.
A self-protective reflex came naturally to Flannery, and after Anne she always simply, somewhere in her, held back. It just made sense. Flannery could be, and was, kind and funny and attentive and hardworking and patient with those she loved; but she never offered that most private self to another person again. It was not worth the risk. She had learned that once, right at the start of adulthood.
If you asked her, Flannery would never have said she was scarred by her relationship with Anne. On the contrary. She had grown, learned, thrived, reveled. She had been touched and moved, and she had touched and moved Anne, too. It was Flannery’s early life’s greatest, if mostly interior, adventure, and next to it the colorful, wild, extraordinary year in Mexico with Adele seemed a movie set, an epic, as opposed to the sharp, true lyric that had been Anne. Though at acute points of self-reflection, Flannery understood that her determination to find her father was triggered by the way loving Anne had opened and changed her.
Now, she was with Charles. Flannery loved her husband, relished him, yes, but she would not say (if anyone asked her; luckily, no one did) that she had fallen headlong for the complicated man. Her passion was not on that order. Americans tended to shake their heads over countries with traditions of arranged marriages but Flannery wondered, once inside one herself and trying to adjust to the odd, boxy shape of it, how different their Western ritual was, really. Weren’t all marriages arrangements? It was like trying to fit your body into a rectangular wooden drawer, as Flannery was told by one of her mother’s friends she could do with her newborn infant if she didn’t want to ‘throw away good money on bassinets and such’.
Flannery managed it – marriage, that is, not cost-cutting measures for Willa, who slept happily in her raised, padded bassinet for the first six weeks of her life – with a combination of effort and determination. At points, she liked to hope, with grace. Flannery cooked dinners and prepared breakfasts, she attended to laundry and wrote holiday cards to their friends and buyers, she sought and gave back rubs in front of the TV; she organized cans in the pantry and towels in the cupboard and baby bottles, sanitized in boiling water, on the counter. She was competent with the new range of tasks, and kept a cheerful face toward it all, animated as she was by the shock of new life. Of new love.
In the gray flavorless hospital room where she recovered for the first few days, Charles reading or dozing in the corner chair, flowers and treats left by visitors bringing color to the place, Flannery held this warm, small life, wrapped in a nurse-folded blanket or pressed nakedly against her skin and nursing, her new eyes closed and her sweet hungry mouth learning how to feed – and she toppled helplessly into love with her. Willa, Flannery murmured to their girl, in the hospital; back at home, in the small bedroom upstairs where Flannery slept for the first months, near the bassinet, so she could rise at any hour to tend to the beloved creature. Willa, Willa. The name itself was a lullaby, easy to sing.
This tiny treasured child stirred something within Flannery that she had not known to expect. How blind, again, not to have foreseen this! What had she imagined about motherhood? Love, of course, exhaustion, responsibility – and joy, and pride. She had read of all that. Flannery had not suspected, though, that this altering passion for another person would have all the same symptoms as the other kind. Everything you saw reminded you of her; you thought about her all the time; the world’s other shades faded next to the implacable brightness of the one you loved. Her name was always on your tongue, the sound of her breath and her noises were tunes that played on a loop in your inner ear, her scents and textures were so familiar to your senses they were the fundamental atmosphere. You held her in your arms, even when you didn’t.
Now it was Willa. Once, it had been Anne.
19
Flannery, siblingless, counted her friends as her family and her mother as her only actual parent. Lenny, though at least a person she knew existed, remained most vivid on the pages of Flannery’s book. She received periodic emails from him, generally with links to animal videos or occasional rambling political reflections. A week after she had sent out a brief general email about Willa’s birth, she received a one-line note back from Len: YOWZAH!!!!
Most who could expressed their congratulations in person. People trooped through the house on Ashbury Street after Willa was born, offering their advice and admiration, their snacks and their blankets. Flannery didn’t know this ritual. Few of her friends had had children yet, she hadn’t grown up in a community with many babies in it, and she felt as though she were visiting a country whose religion she had only read of, a place more vibrant and lively than she had expected.
Flannery’s cousin Rachel came to the door with her ringletted three-year-old Claudia, who stiff-armed a soft cotton-candy-pink bunny in Flannery’s direction though it looked from her pout as though she would rather have kept it herself. In Rachel’s cashmere arms was an aluminum dish of lasagna, and though Flannery had never been much of a lasagna eater before, she found now that she was an everything eater and accepted the dish gratefully, along with Rachel’s lengthy tips on getting the baby to sleep through the night. Charles’s nice architect and pianist friends, whose children were teenagers (an unimaginable age, and dimension), brought pumpkin scones and a soft gray cap with mouse ears; Susan Kim had bags of fragrant Korean barbecued beef and a teething ring in the design of a shark. ‘Other people can do the teddy bears,’ she announced. A colleague of Flannery’s from the art school brought wine for the parents and rusks for the baby, saying, with a little chuck under Willa’s chin, ‘This is how it goes, kid: the grown-ups get all the good stuff. You might as well know that now.’
By the time Flannery’s college friend Nick showed up