Cut Away

4. Asa

78 Asa I don’t like coming in here. It is full of secrets my daughter whispered into the ceramic ears of her kitten, the white rabbit, or the spaniel she called Lady. Moonlight slaps the low, single bed, the wooden chair, and the dresser where the animals cast long, strange shadows. Surfaces jump up out of the darkness in white, clean light. They shudder as if pulling free. It is dazzling. Like pooled electric current. For a moment, I think I see her standing by the window, and then she is gone. She was my teacher’s daughter. Just like my own baby would have been if my blood hadn’t crested and flushed it away. The teacher’s wife already had twins and a house and a husband. What did I have besides Olivia? I knew enough to expect that people won’t always see things how they really are. Most are as scared as I was back then: a teenage girl, baby clamped to her chest, running toward dark. Can’t see what’s right in front of them. I should leave her things alone. I found the doctor’s card in jeans scrunched up at the back of her dresser drawer. Even if I put it back in the pocket and ram the jeans in again, I can’t help thinking she’ll know when she comes back. I don’t stop looking, though. Even when it leads nowhere. Catherine Kirkwood / 79 The card came from the place in Santa Monica. The clinic. I’ve been cleaning nights there for a couple years. Olivia used to come with me sometimes to read the magazines . Mostly I work in ugly places—cramped, stuffy offices in cement buildings with sour-smelling carpet. But this one is nice. They do face lifts, boob jobs, that sort of thing. Why would she have their card? I remember black ice, a pink knitted hat with a bobble on top, the feeling of being whole again and scared because of it. It’s hard to know how cold it was that night. In my mind, it’s the coldest ever in Victor, South Dakota. The ground was frozen and the air was too bitter to even think about when spring might come. I had lost my baby. Months too soon. Never moved or breathed or nothing. I would dream about her being found, all tiny and perfect like when I put her in the ground, but still alive. During the day, I felt like I was buried with her, stiff and permanent. When I heard the teacher, father of my own baby, had a newborn, I couldn’t help going to see. He lived in the part of town with split levels and shag carpets and wives like pumice, all pale and airy. His wife was pretty, too, and when I saw her I wondered why he ever bothered with me. I was pimply and gangly, barely female. I knew he’d hired that fat girl from home economics to help out at the house, and I’d just seen her headed across town. She was on her way home, hunched up like she had cramps real bad. So I showed up at his door, like he’d called me up and sent me over. I asked the wife, “Didn’t you get a call from him yet?” She let me in right away. No questions. No call to check or anything. I spent all afternoon in his house, with the wife, the two toddlers, and the baby. The wife carried the baby on her long, slim hip, always moving like she had somewhere else she wanted to be. I ran after the kids to make the wife think 80 / Cut Away I knew what I was doing. But mostly, I watched the baby and wondered what it would be like to hold her. On the phone, the wife chatted, sighing and laughing: “What can you do?” “Every one is a blessing.” “Even more so when it’s not expected, I suppose.” “The Lord only gives what He knows one can bear.” I thought about my baby, tiny blue fingers curled in tight fists, pup-sized body balled up in a pillowcase. I wondered about that big, grown-up world I had not gotten into yet, whether the things that must be borne kept getting heavier and how anyone could...