Chapter 12

Calder

Two years has a way of settling into a house so gradual you almost miss the shape of the change until you stop, some ordinary morning, and look around at a life that bears only a passing resemblance to the one you started with.

Hannah Mei Vance came into the world a little past midnight in the coldest week of that second winter, squalling loud enough to wake half the county, or so I told LilLi after, which earned me a look sharp enough to cut leather even from a woman still flat on her back and worn clean through from the labor of bringing our daughter into the world. She’d come easy, as these things go, though no birth is rightly easy, and I’d spent the whole of that night pacing a groove into the porch boards while the midwife worked, same useless nervous circuit I imagined most men wore into their own porches at times like that, until finally the cry came through the walls and near buckled my knees with the relief of it.

Hannah favored her mother from the first, near enough a copy of LilLi that folks who saw them together for the first time sometimes did a double take before they caught themselves, the same dark almond eyes, the same steady, watchful way of taking in a room before deciding what she made of it. It was only her hair that broke the pattern — dark brown rather than black, some quiet inheritance from my own side of the family finding its way through despite how thoroughly she otherwise favored LilLi in every other way. LilLi liked to run her fingers through it some evenings, marveling at the color same as she’d marvel at anything that reminded her the girl was truly half mine as well as half hers, a small daily proof of the two of us woven together in a way neither Emmie’s adoption papers nor my own name on a birth certificate could quite match for plainness.

I remembered, holding Hannah for the first time that cold winter night, thinking of the letter that had started all of this, the registered mail that had arrived on a Tuesday and turned my whole life over inside a week. I hadn’t been able to see past the desperation of that letter back then, hadn’t been able to imagine anything beyond the immediate crisis of a judge’s ruling and a court’s timeline. Standing there with my daughter in my arms, LilLi exhausted but smiling up at me from the bed, Emmie hovering close at my elbow trying to get her first look at her new sister, I understood that whatever fear had driven me to LilLi’s door that desperate afternoon had been, in the end, the finest piece of luck I’d ever stumbled into, dressed up as the worst trouble of my life.

Emmie had been the first of us to hold Hannah properly, LilLi insisting on it despite my own nervousness about handing so small a thing to a girl not yet nine, and I’d watched Emmie’s face that evening with something close to wonder, the fierce, careful tenderness settling over her features as she looked down at her new sister for the first time. She’d looked up at me after a long moment and said, solemn as any oath, that she meant to teach Hannah everything she knew, the alphabet and the multiplication tables and how to fix a crooked braid, and I’d told her that sounded like a fine plan, and watched her take to the task with a seriousness that hadn’t wavered once in the two years since.

I thought sometimes, watching the two of them together, of the wary, silent girl who’d stood on our porch that first afternoon, a rag doll clutched tight, refusing to run into a stranger’s arms no matter how kindly that stranger’s voice had been. There was nothing left of that wariness in her now. She’d grown into exactly the kind of steady, generous soul I’d hoped LilLi’s presence might coax out of her, back when I’d stood in a dry-goods store weighing one woman’s suitability against another’s, though I understood now that no amount of hoping on my part could have guaranteed the outcome. That had been LilLi’s doing, patient and unhurried, one small offering at a time, until a broken little girl had grown whole enough to offer that same patient love back out into the world herself.