Part 4
In the morning Lydia brought the cup.
She always did it the same way: poured an inch or so of warm water, took the dark bottle from her robe pocket, shook it, and counted the drops with her lips moving silently. Then she handed Julia the cup and stayed until she drank.
Julia held it in both hands. She stared at the water, thinking that in another moment she would look up and ask everything.
What is this? Let me see the bottle. Let me read what it says.
She asked nothing.
A thought came to her, cold and clear as springwater. If she asked, she would never find out. The bottle would disappear. Another would take its place, holding something else. They would keep giving her the drops, only more carefully.
“Drink it before it gets cold.”
Julia raised the cup and took the liquid into her mouth. She did not swallow.
She held it inside her cheek, put down the cup, and reached for the towel she always kept across her lap. As she wiped her lips, she spat into it.
It was simple. So simple it made her shake.
“Why are you trembling?”
“I’m cold. The window was open all night.”
Lydia took the cup and left.
Julia’s second life began that morning. Three times each day she took the bitter water into her mouth without swallowing. In the evenings, when Derek carried the cup in, she did the same while he watched the television. She rinsed the towel herself in a basin.
Later she found a better place. A geranium stood beside her bed on the windowsill, planted in an old condensed-milk can. It was already struggling, its lower leaves dry. She began spitting into the soil.
Nine days later it collapsed all at once, as if someone had pulled it from its roots. The stem at soil level had turned dark and wet.
Julia wheeled herself into the yard, emptied the can beside the fence, and put it back on the sill.
“What happened to the geranium?” Lydia asked that evening.
“Dried up. I kept forgetting to water it.”
“That’s you all over. Anything you’re given, you let it go to waste.”
The first days without the drops frightened Julia in a way she had not expected. She had expected to feel better. She felt worse.
On the second night she began to shake, a fine vibration from somewhere deep inside, like an idling engine. The sheet beneath her back was wet. Her heartbeat stumbled, leaving little gaps, and nausea rose after each one.
On the third day, ringing filled her ears until evening. Something kept flickering across her vision, as though a black thread were being drawn in front of her face. She wanted to cry for no reason. She wanted to scream. She clenched her teeth and pretended to read.
On the fourth night she did not sleep at all. Toward morning she seemed to see her grandmother standing silently in the corner.
Julia knew it was not Martha. She knew exhaustion was doing this. Still, she whispered, “Wait, Grandma. I’m not done yet.”
“What are you muttering?” Lydia asked in the morning.
“Praying.”
“You?”
“Grandma taught me.”
Lydia studied her a little too closely.
“You look terrible. I’ll add another drop.”
“All right.”
She did. Julia spat out more that morning, and the smell alone made her sick for the rest of the day.
The worst part was having no one she could tell. Anna came every other day with bread and the mail. A hundred times Julia opened her mouth to say, Anna, listen. I think they’re poisoning me.
A hundred times she closed it again.
If she said it aloud, she would hear how it sounded. A young woman had been unable to walk for years; the doctors could not explain why. Now she was accusing her mother-in-law because an old woman from beyond the river had told her something in the yard.
People in Cedar Fork already whispered that Julia Bennett had lost her mind from being bedridden. At the church picnic the previous spring, Lydia had complained in front of everyone that her daughter-in-law had grown mean and was talking nonsense. The women had nodded and sighed.
If Julia spoke, Lydia would hear about it that same day.
On the seventh day, the ringing stopped.
On the eighth, Julia woke before sunrise and lay trying to understand what had changed. The house was quiet. A neighbor’s rooster crowed outside. The air smelled of hay and smoke.
Her head did not hurt.
The muffled, rustling haze she had lived inside for three years was gone. The world held still, its edges sharp. She could see every gap between the ceiling boards.
She remembered that she needed to ask Sam about his school planner, and the thought stayed, waiting for her to come back to it.
She cried soundlessly into her pillow so that no one would hear. This was proof.
Her legs came back slowly, and not entirely.
First came pain. On the eleventh or twelfth night, burning in her feet woke her. It felt like the pins and needles after a leg falls asleep, a hundred times worse, and it kept spreading, up to her ankles, into her calves.
She bit the corner of the blanket. She could have howled and laughed at the same time. For years those feet had felt nothing.
By morning the pain eased, leaving a fine, living prickling, as if ants were moving under her skin.
On the fourteenth day she moved the big toe of her right foot. She lay watching it obey, slowly and unwillingly.
She tried the left. Nothing happened. She tried all day, sweating with the effort. Toward evening, that toe moved too.
After that, things came faster. She learned to bend a knee, then pull a leg toward her, the same movement she had managed the previous May and called a miracle.
One night, while the house slept, she lowered her feet to the floor, braced her palms on the mattress, counted to three, and stood.
The floor was cold beneath her feet, rough, and utterly real. She swayed so badly she had to catch the windowsill. Her legs felt like someone else’s stilts, like the thin ribs of an umbrella. Her knees shook.
She stood for half a minute. Then she sat on the bed, pressing her hand over her mouth as she had beneath the apple tree.
In the morning she let them put her in the wheelchair. She went limp as she always had.
From that day on, she acted.
It was harder than the pain, harder than the sleeplessness. By day she sat and let herself be pushed, lifted, covered. She dropped a spoon and waited for someone to pick it up. She watched Lydia pass and felt herself drawn tight inside.
At night she stood and took three steps beside the bed, holding the wall. Then five. Then she made it to the door and back.
A week later, she knew she could not do this alone.
On Thursday she wrote a note. She had no paper of her own, so she tore the last sheet from Sam’s math notebook.
Pearl, you were right. Don’t tell anyone. Come to the window by the apple tree after dark. J.
“Sam, do you know the place beyond the ford where Miss Pearl lives?”
“The one with the mean dog?”
“That’s it. Take this on your bike. Don’t let Grandma see, and don’t let anyone along the way see it either.”
He took the note and gave her a steady look that did not belong to a child.
“Is this because of what she said in the yard?”
Julia hesitated.
“Yes.”
“I won’t tell,” he said. “I haven’t told anybody anything.”
Then he flushed and blurted out something he had plainly been holding for months.
“I heard Grandma tell Mr. Rob on the phone you wouldn’t last much longer. Back in the fall. She was out in the yard, and I was behind the woodpile.”
Julia’s hands went cold on the wheels.
“Which Mr. Rob?”
“The one who came in the white car. He was looking at the land. He went behind the garden and took pictures with his phone…”
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