Chapter 12: Late Bloomer

April 2011

Spring came to the pass the way it always did — not all at once, but in a slow loosening. The snow at the valley floor went gray and granular and pulled back from the south-facing rocks, and meltwater ran in thin bright threads down toward the stream, and the light came earlier and stayed later until the days were longer than the nights again. The trails were still treacherous in the high places, still half-buried, but they were no longer impossible. The world was opening back up — which was a joy and a dread both, and nobody in the house said the second part aloud.

Inside, the household had two big-bellied women now, and the work still fell mostly on Dina.

She didn’t mind the work. She’d never minded work. What had crept into her over the weeks was the other thing — the being-the-last, the odd-one-out, the only body in a house full of growing ones that stubbornly stayed her own. She’d told herself for years not to want what she couldn’t have, and she’d gotten so good at it that she’d never once, in twenty-one years, troubled to learn the rhythms of her own body. Why count days toward a thing that was never going to come? Why track a cycle when the whole established fact of Dina was that she was the one nothing good happened to?

But Yasmin had turned up pregnant.

That was the thing that cracked it open. Gentle, broken Yasmin, who’d been told she was barren, who’d believed it for six years — Yasmin’s body had answered after all. And if the door wasn’t shut for Yasmin, then maybe — maybe — it wasn’t shut for Dina either. The thought frightened her more than any amount of hauling water in the cold ever had, because it meant letting herself want, and wanting was the one thing she’d guarded against her whole life.

She started counting.

She didn’t tell anyone she was doing it. She just began, quietly, to mark the days — to pay her own body the kind of attention she’d never once paid it, half-ashamed of the hope behind it, doing the arithmetic in private the way she did everything that mattered. And the days went by, and the count came round, and the bleeding she’d half-braced to see, the bleeding that would prove the old voice right one more time —

— didn’t come.

She told herself it was nothing. She’d never tracked before; maybe she was just irregular, maybe she’d counted wrong. She waited two more days, hauling wood and breaking ice with her heart going strangely in her chest, and still nothing, and then on the third morning she woke before the others and lay in the dark with her hand flat on her own stomach and let herself, for the first time in her life, believe.

And Dina — who turned away to hide her face, who covered every soft thing with a dry remark — pressed both hands over her mouth in the dark so no one would hear, and shook.

She held it close for three days, and the holding taught her something about herself she hadn’t known.

She’d expected to want to tell it the way Yasmin had — to have it spill out of her, uncontainable. But that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that she found she wanted to keep it, just for a little while, the way you cup your hands around a flame in the wind. And the reason surprised her, when she finally understood it: for three days she had a secret that was nothing but good. No catch in it. No price coming due. In twenty-one years she had never once held a thing that was purely, simply hers and purely, simply happy, and she wanted to learn the shape of it in private before she had to share it or perform it or brace for someone to take it back.