The mask was placed abruptly over her mouth, this time for longer.
Then she slept.
• • •
“It’s a girl, Mrs. Van Laar,” said the doctor.
She opened her eyes. Closed them. The light overhead was too bright. Bear, she thought, and she sat up as well as she could, but still he was gone.
“My son,” she said—but the words came out in a croak.
“Your daughter,” said the doctor, bringing the baby to her. She was wrapped in a blanket. He held her out to Alice expectantly, but her arms were heavy at her sides.
“Mrs. Van Laar,” said the doctor. He was young, despite his hairline, and he sounded frightened. “Are you all right?”
There was a window in the room and it faced a courtyard. Through the glass, Alice could see a very green tree waving its branches. Beyond the tree was another building, and then sky.
“Mrs. Van Laar?”
• • •
A nurse came and grasped her arm.
“This will clear your milk up,” said the nurse. And she gave her a shot before Alice could respond. She had not nursed Bear. She had a half-formed thought that she would have liked to try it, once, with this child.
In the hallway, murmuring. Peter’s voice: he’d arrived from work.
After a moment he came into the room, holding the new baby in his arms. He sat down on the bed with her. Two nurses hovered behind him and he turned to them, speaking sharply.
“A little privacy, please,” he said, and they scattered.
Then he turned back to Alice.
“Peter,” said Alice, urgently. “I saw Bear. He was right there.” She pointed to the corner. She could picture him: tall for his age and handsome, in need of a haircut, wearing his favorite blue shirt. His fingernails with dirt beneath them from love of the woods. One baby tooth missing.
“We have to find him,” she said. “He’s alive, Peter. He was here.”
But Peter was shaking his head. “It was the gas they gave you.”
“It wasn’t,” said Alice. Her voice rose, and she knew she would cry. “I saw him.”
Peter was shaking his head.
“I think it was a sign,” said Alice. “Even if he wasn’t here. I think it was a sign that he’s alive.”
She lowered her face into her hands, hiding. Peter hated crying.
Inside the dark of her hands she heard him sigh. Next would come shouting.
But instead she felt his hand on the side of her face. She grasped it.
“Look at me,” said Peter, with surprising gentleness. “Look at me. He’s gone.”
“You don’t know that,” said Alice.
Peter paused. “We have to live our lives as if he is, Alice.” He looked down at the baby in his arms, who stretched a tiny hand suddenly upward and then let it down.
“Barbara,” said Peter. He pronounced it in three syllables. Bar-ba-rah. “I’d like to name her Barbara.”
Alice was caught off guard. Twice, in the past month, she had tried to broach the subject of names with him. She liked Darien for a boy—she had known a boy with that name in her youth, and had always found it beautiful—and Charlotte for a girl. But each time she asked, Peter had brushed her off, saying he was busy.
Now here he was, next to her, suggesting a name she had never considered at all. Barbara. She knew several people with the name—all of them Peter’s age. It was a name she associated more with his generation than the baby’s.
“If that’s all right with you,” added Peter, finally.
“Why Barbara?” asked Alice.
“It’s just a name I’ve always liked,” said Peter. “I think it has a nice ring to it. Bar-ba-rah Van Laar.”
And he gazed down at his daughter with such sudden tenderness that Alice said she liked it too. It was important, she had heard, to let one’s husband feel invested in the children. Any interest he expressed should be rewarded.
• • •
It was only later, when they were back in the Albany house after a week in the hospital, that Alice found the book of names she had bought from a bookstore. This was when she was expecting with Bear—whose Christian name, too, had been chosen without her input.
She turned to the section on girls’ names, and then to the page on Barbara.
From the Greek word “barbaros,” said the book, meaning “foreign,” “wild,” or “strange.”
