New Orleans, Louisiana — August 5, 1918
She had not meant to fall asleep.
She had been sitting up deliberately, the way she had taken to doing on the nights Thomas worked late — not out of fear exactly, or not fear she was willing to name as such, but out of the feeling that sleeping deeply and alone in the house was something she had decided, quietly and without announcing it to anyone, she was not going to do anymore. Not until this was over. Not until the police found something or admitted they weren't going to or the whole thing resolved itself the way these things sometimes did, the killer caught or fled or dead, the city moving on.
So she sat. She had her notes. She had the lamp on the table turned up as high as it would go, the light falling warm and full across the kitchen wall, across the map with its pins and string, across the cards she had been adding to and rearranging for three months now. She had a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago and a book she wasn't reading open on the table in front of her, because having the book open made her feel less like a woman sitting alone in her kitchen in the middle of the night waiting for something to happen and more like a woman who had simply stayed up reading and happened not to have gone to bed yet.
The baby was restless. It had been restless all evening, shifting and turning, pressing outward in ways that were uncomfortable and also, underneath the discomfort, quietly reassuring — the confirmation of a presence, of something in there that had its own agenda and its own movements and its own particular way of making itself known. She had her hand on her stomach and was reading the same paragraph for the fourth time when her eyes closed.
She didn't know they had closed. That was the thing about sleep when you were this far along — it didn't arrive the way it used to, as a gradual dimming you could resist or negotiate with. It arrived all at once, like a door closing, and you were simply on the other side of it before you had time to object.
She slept.
She didn't know what woke her.
There was no sound. That was the first thing she understood, surfacing from sleep into the dark kitchen — the lamp had burned low while she slept, the room half dark now, the wall with its maps and strings reduced to shadow — that whatever had woken her had not been a sound. It was something else. A change in the quality of the air. A density to the silence that the silence hadn't had before.
She was awake in the way you are awake when your body has decided something before your mind has caught up, every part of her suddenly and completely present in a way that had nothing to do with choice.
She turned her head.
He was standing in the kitchen doorway.
She could not have said afterward, with any certainty, what she saw. The lamp was too low and the doorway was shadow and the shape of him was more impression than detail — broad, still, the particular stillness of something that has been standing there for longer than she had known, watching her sleep with her hand on her stomach and her book open on the table. She had a sense of height and width and of a hat, the brim of it low, and below that brim nothing she could name or hold onto or describe to anyone.
And the axe. Hanging at his side. Her axe, from beside the back door, the one Thomas had bought the first winter they lived here for splitting the wood for the stove.
She understood everything in the space of a single breath.
She opened her mouth.
The scream that came out of her was not the kind of sound she had ever made before. It came from somewhere below thought, below intention, from whatever part of a person exists before language and reason, and it was enormous — it filled the kitchen and went through the walls and out into Elmira Street and into the dark and it kept coming, she couldn't have stopped it if she had wanted to, wave after wave of it pouring out of her while she scrambled backward off the chair and the chair went over and she went down with it, one hand on the floor and one hand still on her stomach, still between the world and the baby, even now, even in this—
He moved.
She saw him move, saw the arm come up, and then the axe came down.
It did not land the way it was meant to. She had moved, was still moving, had gotten herself off the chair and partway to the floor, and what hit her was not the full force of the blow he had intended but the edge of it, glancing, the blade catching her across the top of her head as she went down and tearing open her scalp in a line from her crown toward her ear. The pain was enormous and immediate and then almost immediately distant, the way extreme pain sometimes goes — her body's decision, not hers, to put the signal somewhere she could not quite reach it.
She hit the floor.
She heard him above her. Movement, the shift of weight, and she pressed herself against the overturned chair and kept her face down and her hand on her stomach and made herself as small as she could make herself, which was not very small, and did not scream again because she had no air left and could not find any, her breath coming in shallow useless pulls that weren't quite enough.
Then nothing.
She lay on the kitchen floor and listened and there was nothing. No movement. No sound of him. The back door — she heard it, distantly, through the roaring in her ears and the blood that was running down the side of her face and dripping onto the floorboards — the back door opened and closed.
He was gone.
She lay there for a long time. She didn't know how long. She was aware of the blood and aware of the baby, which was moving — fiercely, furiously, as though it too had been frightened and was not done being frightened — and she was aware of the floor against her cheek, the familiar grain of the kitchen floorboards she had looked at so many times, and the lamp on the table still burning, still throwing its low inadequate light across the room.
She thought: Thomas.
She thought: He will come home. He always comes home.
She closed her eyes.
Thomas Clark came through the front door of the house on Elmira Street at twelve minutes past midnight, which was later than usual because the last streetcar had run early and he had walked the final six blocks, and he called his wife's name up the stairs the way he always did and got no answer.
He had learned, in six years of marriage, to calibrate Amy's silences. There was the silence of deep sleep, which was complete and untroubled and meant he should take his boots off on the mat and come upstairs quietly. There was the silence of her being awake at the kitchen table and not wanting to call back because she was in the middle of a thought. There was the silence of her being annoyed with him about something, which had its own particular texture.
This silence was none of those.
He went to the kitchen.
The overturned chair was the first thing. Then the lamp, burned nearly to nothing, and in the failing light the shape on the floor that it took him two full seconds to understand was his wife, and then he was across the kitchen and on his knees beside her and she was alive — breathing, he could feel it, her chest moving under his hands — but there was blood, so much blood, dark and wet on the floor and soaked into her hair and on the side of her face and on her hands, her hands that were both pressed flat against her stomach even now, even unconscious, both hands still there.
He did not remember going to the neighbours. He did not remember what he said or who came or in what order. He remembered Amy's face when they turned her over, the gash across her scalp that went from her crown to just above her ear, the strange terrible stillness of her face against all the blood. He remembered the neighbour's wife taking his arm and saying something he couldn't hear. He remembered sitting on the floor of the kitchen beside his wife with his back against the cabinet and his hand in her hand and not letting go while they waited for the doctor, and looking up at the kitchen wall with all its papers and strings and the map with its two red pins, and the axe — her axe, the one he had bought the first winter — lying on the kitchen floor where it had fallen.
The back door was standing open.
The panel on the lower left side of the frame — the one he had repaired, the one he had fixed with new wood and proper joinery, sitting solid and flush just three weeks ago — had been removed and was leaning neatly against the wall.
The doctor came. Then the police, who arrived after the doctor and left before he did, which told Thomas everything he needed to know about the relative priorities at work. They took a statement from him, looked at the back door, looked at the axe, looked at the wall of notes and maps with an expression he did not have the capacity to interpret at that particular moment. They said they would be in touch. They left.
Amy did not regain consciousness that night. She lay in the bedroom where Thomas had carried her — the doctor directing, Thomas doing the carrying, unwilling to let anyone else — with her head bandaged and her breathing slow and the baby moving visibly beneath the sheet, its own steady rhythm, its own insistence on itself.
Thomas sat beside her and held her hand and watched her breathe.
She remembered nothing, afterward. That was what she told him when she woke, late the following morning, her head bandaged and the light through the bedroom window too bright and wrong — she remembered sitting at the table. She remembered the lamp. She remembered the book she hadn't been reading.
She did not remember him.
She remembered waking up on the floor with her hands on her stomach and Thomas's voice saying her name from very far away, but between the table and the floor there was nothing. A gap. A cut in the film where something had been removed.
The police, when they came back, asked her to describe what she had seen. She told them about the doorway and the stillness and the hat brim and the axe. She told them she had screamed and that he had swung and that she had moved. She told them she had not seen his face.
They wrote it down. They thanked her. They told her to rest.
She looked at Thomas from the bed, her head bandaged, her face the colour of old paper, and said, "The axe. Did they take it?"
Thomas looked at her.
"For evidence," she said. "Did they take it for evidence or is it still in the kitchen."
"Amy—"
"Because if they left it there I need to know. I need to know whether they took it or whether it's just—"
"They took it," he said. "They took it. It's gone."
She looked at the ceiling. She looked at it for a long time.
"He stood in the doorway," she said. "He was just standing there. When I woke up he was already there. Which means he had been there for—" she stopped. "He was watching me sleep."
Thomas said nothing.
"He stood there and watched me sleep," she said, "and then when I woke up he—" She stopped again. Her hand went to her stomach, the automatic gesture, the same one she had made on the kitchen floor. "He had time to leave. Before I woke up. He could have been gone. He chose not to be."
The room was quiet. Outside Elmira Street went about its morning, the ordinary sounds of it coming through the window, indifferent and continuous.
"He wanted me to see him," Amy said.
She said it the way people say things they are certain of. Not a question. Not a theory. A thing she had woken up knowing, the one piece of that missing hour that had come back to her not as memory but as understanding, as a fact her body had recorded even when her mind hadn't.
Thomas took her hand.
Two days later, at six in the morning, Amy Clark delivered a healthy baby girl in the bedroom of the house on Elmira Street. The midwife said she had never seen anyone do it with so little fuss. Amy said nothing, only held the baby against her chest and looked at the ceiling and breathed.
She named her Judith.
She was back at the kitchen table by the end of the week. The wall was still there. The map was still there. Thomas had straightened some of the cards that had fallen in the commotion and had, she noticed, removed the overturned chair from the floor and replaced it with the one from the sitting room, which was slightly more comfortable.
She looked at the wall for a long time. Then she got a new index card and wrote on it: He watched me sleep. He wanted me to see him. She pinned it in the centre of everything, where she could not look at the wall without seeing it.
Then she picked up her pencil and got back to work.