14
BETSY WAS AWAKENED at seven by the sound of the big jets firing up at Mueller Airport half a mile to the east. She had never gotten used to the sound of the engines, a roar that vibrated through the cinder-block walls of the house in Austin where she had lived all her life. On any given morning, she would drift off to sleep again, and the engine noise would become part of her dreams. She was aware that it was raining, too, and in the silences between the jets roaring to life, she could hear the sound of the drops pinging off the aluminum roof over their small front porch and the gurgle of rainwater running in the gutters and downspouts outside the window. Even in the rain, the big black grackles were calling to each other up and down the block. She wondered what day it was, whether it was a school day, and then she recalled that her mother was dead, and suddenly she knew she wouldn’t fall back asleep, even though it was Saturday morning.
She sat up in bed and drew her curtains back, looking out onto the lawn and the big puddle that had formed in the low part beneath the swing under the elm tree. The morning was gray, the curb trees heavy with rainwater, their trunks stained black like the asphalt street. She slipped her hand under her pillow and found the little wooden box that she’d hidden under there last night.
She listened for movement in the hallway outside the door, but there was only silence. Holding the box carefully in her hand, she tipped it toward the daylight through the window and opened the lid, tilting it back on its hinge. Inside lay the glass inkwell, the squat neck of the bottle bent crazily to one side as if the glass had at one time gotten hot and started to melt. The base of the bottle was crisscrossed with dirty surface-deep cracks, and the clarity of the blue-tinted glass walls was obscured by cloudy patches, so that the bottle looked as if it had lain for years in the depths of a furnace. As far as she knew it hadn’t; it had belonged to her grandmother, who had given it to her mother a long time ago. Her mother had told Betsy that it was a family heirloom, and the most precious thing she had: it was a memory, she had said, of Betsy’s grandmother.
The day had come when Betsy had finally understood this, although she didn’t understand the bottle itself at all. It wasn’t just any old inkwell, and it wasn’t just made out of any old glass. Although it was probably her imagination, the shape of the cloudy patches in the walls of the thing seemed to change subtly over time—too slowly for her to observe the changes, slower even than the hour hand on a clock. She stared at those clouds now, and it was easy to believe that she was looking into an almost infinite blue sky, and that the clouds were drifting on a slow wind from somewhere far away.
A flurry of raindrops spattered against the window, and she watched the rivulets of water running on the glass, obscuring the view of the street and the lawn, isolating her from the world. Carefully she spilled the glass trinket out of the shallow wooden box and onto the rumpled bedspread. For a moment she let it lie there, her gaze wandering from the bedspread to the hundreds of books in the bookcases, and back to the window again and the rainy morning. Slowly, without looking at the inkwell, she let her hand drift down along a ridge of bedspread until she knew she was nearly touching the blue glass. It seemed to her that the air was heavier around it, that it resisted her touch, but only in some feeble, almost teasing way. She closed her fingers partway around it, still not quite touching it, then shut her eyes and pressed her hand against the warm, living glass …
… immediately she was dreaming, although even in her dreaming she was wary, ready to drop the inkwell when she had to. She seemed to hover over herself, as if she were floating above the woman lying on the bed below—not her own bed—and at the same time she was the woman who lay on that bed. She was in an old room made of wood, and there was sunlight through open windows and warm air blowing the curtains, as if it were breezy outside. She could smell something on the breeze—flowers, she guessed. She remembered this from last time, and the memory relaxed her, because she knew what was coming, and there wouldn’t be any surprises. An old woman stood at a dresser with a basin of steaming water on top of it, and the bed was covered with sheets. The woman was a midwife, waiting for another contraction, although right now, thank God, she was in-between. The midwife was speaking, her words unintelligible, distant, and slow, like the droning of a fly on a windowpane. She breathed heavily through her mouth, her eyes fixed for the moment on the woman who sat on the chair by the window, asleep after a long night. Outside, clouds drifted in the blue haze of the heavens, and their shapes made her think of the misty clouds in the glass walls of the inkwell that she held in her hand. A wave of confusion passed over her, and for a moment she felt as if she would fall from where she floated above the bed, and the woman below her was a stranger again. She held tight to the inkwell, picturing herself seeping into the woman on the bed like water into sand, and once again the two of them merged, and she lay waiting for another contraction.
She felt a growing pressure and she shut her eyes, breathing more heavily, tensing her body, readying herself for the pain. She could feel the baby moving within her, and the feeling was inexpressibly beautiful, the long-awaited promise of months of anticipation, of carrying within her this tiny living person, flesh of her flesh. And then the joy faded and was replaced by a deep sadness. She pictured the face of the child’s father, felt the hot shame of their not being wed, denied the shame with her intellect just as the contraction hit her and her body lurched sideways with the pain and she heard herself cry out, saw the midwife step toward the bed, saw the woman in the chair awaken with a look of surprised alarm. …
Betsy realized that she had dropped the inkwell. She sat breathing heavily, confused by the sound of the rain and staring with unfocused eyes at a picture on the wall. She looked at the inkwell on the bed cover. It had changed its shape while she had been holding it—just as it had last time: the distortion was lessened, the glass clearer, although even as she watched she could see it changing again, losing its glow, the neck of the bottle very slowly sagging back into its original distorted shape.
This was only the second time that she had actually held the inkwell for more than a second or two. Last time she had dropped the inkwell sooner, at the first faint pain of the coming contraction. There was something compelling about that pain, even though she hadn’t been able to hold on through it, something that fired her curiosity beyond its normal bounds. And the growing clarity of the dream contained in the inkwell made her long to know more, about herself, about the woman on the bed and the woman who sat in the window, as if she were watching rapid brush strokes covering blank canvas, revealing a deeper and deeper mystery that she had only to let herself fall into.
Holding the wooden box open as if it were a clamshell in her hand, she made the box swallow the inkwell, and then fastened the brass hook that held the box tightly shut. There were footsteps in the hall, a soft scuffing that stopped outside the door. She lay still, her eyes shut, still holding the box but with her hand under the pillow to hide it now.
It was Mrs. Darwin outside the door, listening. Betsy knew it was Mrs. Darwin by her shuffling walk, the heels of her broken-down house slippers scraping the floor. She had heard the same shuffling last night, long past midnight, after she had taken the inkwell out of her mother’s room. Mrs. Darwin had gone in there and stayed in there for a long time, opening and shutting dresser drawers. Something told Betsy that Mrs. Darwin wouldn’t be fooled by the ceramic angel, despite the tin box that it lay in. Mrs. Darwin knew just what she was looking for; otherwise she wouldn’t be snooping around in her mother’s bedroom at all, not in the middle of the night.
Betsy gripped the box, wishing it were hidden somewhere besides under her pillow. The door swung open abruptly, and Betsy pretended to be just then waking up. She pushed the pillow back against the wall and sat up, leaning back against it. Whatever she was asked to do, she would stay where she was, keeping the box hidden, until Mrs. Darwin left her room.