Circle of Grace, page 23
“Take her?”
“Adopt her,” Hal said pointedly. “Childless couples in their thirties are often paired with children in the three-to-six range. If they’re open to adopting an older child, that is, rather than an infant.”
Tess willed her mind to wrap around this concept. Every day for the past nine months she had been writing about the pain of the empty womb. Now, jerked suddenly back to reality, she realized that she no longer felt barren at all. Her personal agony had been siphoned off into Rachel, her protagonist, a catharsis that had drained her of her own grief and torment. The tomb had sprung open—not after three days, but after three trimesters. She could almost feel the graveclothes slipping away.
“Tell me about her,” she said, smiling up at Hal.
“Her name is Clarissa. She’s very bright, your father says, short and a little stocky, with curly blonde hair.” He grinned. “She loves to make up stories, and the caseworker thinks she’ll be reading for herself by the time she gets to kindergarten.”
“I still have my book to finish,” Tess hedged.
“I realize that. But the semester is nearly over, and I can beg off teaching during the summer term.” His tone was hopeful, his expression eager.
“I don’t know,” Tess went on, shielding her eyes with her hand and pretending to think. “This raises a lot of questions, but one in particular.”
“Go on.” He looked deflated.
“Well—Clarissa? Hal, really! A mother named Contessa with a daughter named Clarissa?” Tess raised her face and winked at him. “Do you suppose she could make the transition to being called Claire instead?”
His eyes widened. “You mean it?”
“I mean it. It’s time.” She nodded. “Claire Riley-Hopkins. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”
Claire turned five the same month Rachel’s Wilderness was released.
Hal had handled the little girl’s adjustment to her new home and family with amazing grace and finesse. Clearly born to fatherhood, he had taught her to read, to ride a small pink bike with training wheels, to play catch, to fish with a bamboo pole and big red bobber in the river that ran along the edge of the park.
And to give Tess the peace and quiet she needed when she was writing.
Claire adored her daddy, but held her mommy at a respectful, awestruck distance.
Tess couldn’t blame the child, she supposed. The revisions and rewriting of Rachel’s Wilderness had taken far more time and energy than she had anticipated. It was incredibly difficult, trying to be attentive both to the emotional needs of a precocious toddler and to the intellectual and creative demands of completing a novel.
And this wasn’t just any novel. Rachel’s Wilderness was Tess’s debut, the novel that would set the tone and direction for her future career. It had to be perfect.
At last she finished—or abandoned her perfectionism, anyway. Around two hundred pages into the manuscript, she had, with Hal’s help, secured an agent who had sold the unfinished novel to a small but prestigious New York house, and now she sent it off in duplicate to both her agent and her in-house editor. She waited, nervous and anxious and battling the postpartum depression that often follows the completion of such a work, as the book made its way through another nine months of editing and production.
It had taken all Tess’s self-restraint to keep from spilling the beans to Lovey and Liz and Grace in the circle journal. She had written to them about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, about her romance with Hal and their wedding, about her infertility, about adopting Claire. She had tried to explain about her passion for writing, even though nonwriters rarely understood. But as much as she wanted to tell them how she had, finally, fulfilled her life’s dream, she didn’t dare jinx the book’s release by prophesying its success.
Still, she had done it. Rachel’s Wilderness would leave its imprint on the literary world, and the name Tess Riley-Hopkins would be on everyone’s lips.
The novel made its mark, all right, and almost overnight her name did become known in the small subculture of literary fiction.
Riley-Hopkins’s debut novel, Rachel’s Wilderness, leaves the unfortunate reader sucking sand from a desert mirage, searching for water but finding only dust, one critic wrote. The worst sort of maudlin, predictable, pseudo-literary angst.
Feminism may be on the rise, said another reviewer, but Tess Riley-Hopkins clearly lives in the stultifying world of the 1950s, where a woman’s sole fulfillment—indeed, her only salvation—comes through childbearing. Rather than answering the call for edgy, razor-sharp contemporary fiction, Riley-Hopkins subjects the reader to a brutal as sault with a blunt knife.
Tess couldn’t believe it. They had missed the point entirely. Everything she had written into Rachel’s character was true. The torment was real, authentic.
It was Tess herself.
Consumed by horror and a sickening despair, she read the critiques like a condemned traitor facing a verdict of execution: Self-conscious, contrived, plodding, oppressively unoriginal. An inauspicious beginning that bodes ill for both author and publisher.
And the final scathing analysis, which chilled her blood as if ice had been injected directly into her veins: Has no one ever told this woman that she is more than two ovaries and a womb?
Surrounded by the devastating reviews, Tess slumped across the bed clutching a brand-new copy of Rachel’s Wilderness. She inhaled the scent of crisp paper and fresh ink, watched the cover shimmer past her unfocused eyes, submerged under relentless tears. Her breath came hard, in racking sobs. Again and again she forced herself to read the clippings, as if her numb and bleeding soul were trying to flay itself into atonement with the scourging words.
Somewhere in the distance she heard a soft rustling sound, and turned to see Claire entering the bedroom on tiptoe, her wide blue eyes fixed on Tess’s face. The little girl put a pudgy finger to her lips. “I’ll be quiet,” she whispered.
“It’s OK. Come on.” Tess pushed the clippings aside and scooted over to make room on the bed. Claire scrambled up beside her and snuggled her stout little body close, bumping the book out of her mother’s grasp as she wriggled into the embrace.
“I know why you’re sad, Mommy,” Claire said softly. “Daddy told me. Some bad people didn’t like your book.”
Tess kissed the top of her daughter’s tousled head and felt the child’s warmth seep into her. She smelled like sunshine and fresh grass and toddler sweat, with a faint hint of strawberry jam. “They’re not bad people, honey. They’re just…just critics.”
Claire reached a hand up to stroke Tess’s tear-glazed cheek with her stubby fingers. She leaned close, as if she were about to reveal a grand and glorious secret.
“You know what, Mommy?” she whispered with a fierce, determined intensity. “Next time—” She beamed up at Tess, and her tangled blonde curls bobbed as she gave a vehement nod. “Next time you can write a story about me. And ever’body will love it. Even the crickets.”
-28-
THE BIRTH OF C. J. KENNING
Tess smiled wistfully as the twenty-year-old memory returned. The scent of sun and earth in her daughter’s hair. The light in the child’s eyes, that determined lift of the chin as she prepared to unveil the utter genius of the idea her five-year-old brain had formulated.
Even now, as an adult, Claire still got that look on occasion. And when she did—when her jaw jutted upward and her expression illuminated from some hidden inner source—Tess and Hal both knew that their daughter had tapped into a deep well of the soul, and that whatever vision or decision proceeded from its depths, it was not to be second-guessed or argued with.
Besides, Claire was not often wrong. The girl had a gift. She discerned innately, even at age five, how to connect with another’s heartfelt longings and dreams, how to bring hope out of circumstances that seemed worse than hopeless.
Tess fingered the photograph on her desk, her mind now miles away from her protagonist Kendall Wright and his fictional dilemmas. “Out of the mouths of babes,” she murmured, “come knowledge and insight and understanding.”
Seven years had passed since the birth and untimely death of Rachel’s Wilderness. In all that time, Tess Riley-Hopkins wrote nothing for publication. Not a single word.
Seven long years. Seven lean years. Seven years of drought and famine.
And yet she had rarely felt herself burning with inner thirst or clutching her distended soul in hunger. Her energy and attention had been consumed with a more immediate and infinitely more challenging career direction—learning to become a mother to the little girl she and Hal had adopted.
Tess had missed so much those first few months. Absorbed in the important work of finishing the Great American Novel, she had both physically and emotionally absented herself from her new daughter’s life. But when Rachel’s Wilderness launched and immediately sank before it ever got out into deep water, Tess found her perspectives radically altered—by force, initially, if not by choice.
Aimless and disoriented, she had wandered through the days immediately following Rachel’s demise like a war refugee suffering from traumatic amnesia. What was she, if not a writer? Who was she? And where in God’s name was she supposed to go from here?
Stalwart little Claire, with the immeasurable wisdom of a child, held all the answers. Tess was Mommy, and she was supposed to go to the park and play.
And so Tess played. She mastered the seesaw and the jungle gym and the vertigo-inducing curved slide on the far edge of the playground. Tucked her daughter in for afternoon naps. Created wild, floury messes in the kitchen, trying to figure out her grandmother’s recipe for homemade brownies. Read Horton Hears a Who and Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden.
Children, fortunately, tend to be resilient, and this particular child was extraordinarily forgiving. As soon as Tess made the first tentative move toward her, Claire flung herself into her mommy’s arms and reached out to haul her daddy into the family hug. The little girl’s compelling love drew them all together and held them there, and Tess felt a trickle down her spine, a shiver of understanding. Her icebound pain had begun, at last, to melt.
The humiliating agony of Rachel’s Wilderness, of course, was no sidewalk scrape that could be healed with a kiss and a cookie. The experience stayed with her, a pulsing, tender scar. Periodically, without warning or premonition, questions bolted abruptly into her mind like forked lightning from a cloudless sky. Had the gift been recalled as retribution for her failure? Was it lying dormant, awaiting the day she would reclaim it? Had the muse deserted her forever, or merely withdrawn for a time?
And the ultimate question, the savage, clawing doubt that invaded her dreams and awakened her shuddering in a cold sweat: Would she—could she—ever write again?
But Tess could find no answers, and after a while the questions themselves came less frequently and eventually faded into irrelevance. Gradually the pain subsided and the wound scabbed over, mended partly by time, but mostly by the restorative balm of her husband’s steady devotion and her daughter’s exuberant affection, easy laughter, and curious mind.
And Tess had recorded it all. On an upper bookshelf in her office—now used primarily as her daughter’s “quiet room,” where Claire did homework and puzzles, read and thought and spent time alone—stood a series of three-ring notebooks, journals that spanned the past seven years. Filled with funny and tender and loving and heartrending moments, the pages chronicled Tess’s life with Hal and Claire, capturing images that might otherwise have been lost to the inexorable passing of time.
On those inevitable random, rainy days when Hal was teaching and Claire was off at school, Tess would spend an hour or two sitting at the window, reading back over the memories the way others might flip through a favorite family album. The words generated recollections far more vivid than any photograph.
And then, one cloudy afternoon in the seventh year after the Rachel catastrophe, Tess pulled down the very first journal and opened it at the beginning.
At a time when I thought nothing could comfort me, she had written, my little girl, just barely five and far too precocious for her own good, gave me a bit of advice about my writing career. “Next time you can write a story about me,” she said. “And everybody will love it. Even the crickets.”
Write a story about me, Claire had said.
Something stirred deep in Tess’s soul—a longing, a welling-up of desire so powerful, it threatened to overwhelm her. Images rose to her mind—the Secret Garden behind its high stone wall, overgrown with vines and yet burgeoning with unassailable life. A hidden door. A rusted key. A lily blooming beneath the thorns. The indomitable strength of love and faith, collective virtue and common hope.
The muse had returned, infused with fire and trailing clouds of glory as it came. A vision, a concept so unpremeditated as to seem ludicrous upon first glance.
Tess sat stunned, her eyes unfocused, gazing past the raindrops that had begun to cluster and slide in rivulets down the windowpane. The floor beneath her angled and pitched—the tilting outward of a womb, the shift of heaven’s dome when formless clouds transfigure into shapes upon the bright blue sky. A silent film unreeled against the back wall of her mind, and she watched in awe as earth heaved itself up into mountains, down into pastures and valleys. Water pooled to fashion lakes and oceans, rivers running endless toward the sea. From the arc of a wave, a fish leaped toward the sunlight, scattering drops like diamonds from its scales. Wind rose in the trees, and birds exploded into flight on untried wings. Hidden creatures moved through tall new grass—sleek, slithering things and furry, bustling things, predators on silent paws and prey scuttling to safety.
And then a shadowy figure, insubstantial as smoke, knelt and leaned down as if to kiss the earth….
The notebook dropped from Tess’s lap and landed with a dull thud on the carpet at her feet. She gulped a breath, felt oxygen flow into her lungs, and heard the words inside her head:
It is good.
Her soul broke open, paused, and poised itself for birth. It was time. Time to listen to a five-year-old’s advice. Time to set aside her fear and embrace a new and unfamiliar courage.
Time to take the risk to write again.
“C. J. Kenning?” Hal gazed at her, his expression a mixture of admiration and bemusement. “The C. J. I understand—it’s the Kenning that puzzles me.”
“Kenning was Mom’s grandmother’s maiden name,” said Claire, as if this should be perfectly obvious to anyone with half a brain.
Tess moved the remains of dinner to one side and propped her elbows on the table. “And where on earth did you come by that bit of family trivia, my darling daughter?”
Claire shrugged. “You told me once. And last Christmas Aunt Duck showed me the family tree she had needlepointed for Grandma.”
Tess slanted a glance at Hal, and he grinned broadly, as if to say, Too smart for her own good, isn’t she?
“Well, you’re absolutely right,” Hal said, leaning across the table toward Claire. “I’d forgotten that Kenning was your great-grandmother’s name. But it has another meaning, too. In literature a kenning is a specific type of metaphor, a combined, hyphenated form used in place of a name.”
“Such as referring to God as Heart-Mender or Soul-Maker,” Tess added. “Kennings often appear in Anglo-Saxon and early medieval literature.”
“Like Beowulf,” said Claire.
“What do you know about Beowulf?”
Claire heaved a sigh and raised one eyebrow. “I’m nearly thirteen, Mother, and have been literate for a year or two now. There’s a copy in the school library—not a translation, really, but a kids’ edition. Obviously dumbed-down a lot, but it’s still a great story. And whoever did it kept in some of those words. God is the Heaven-Ruler, the World-Shaper. Grendel’s mother is the sea-wolf, the monster-wife who drags Beowulf, the sword-wielder, down under the whale-road—the sea—into her mere-house.” She rolled her eyes. “Apparently this guy thought seventh-graders needed a footnote to tell them that mere means ocean. Like we never heard of mermaids. I hate it when grown-ups talk down to kids like that. Anyway, when Grendel’s mom dies, the battle-blade melts into icicles, and Beowulf is released from his water-bonds. But it’s not done just in epic poetry. I read some stuff by this guy named Hopkins, and he—”
“I see you’ve grasped the general concept of the kenning,” Hal said dryly.
“Cool images,” Claire went on. “Very cool. Let’s see, my science teacher would be the Bunsen-Dweeb, and Mrs. Vole, the librarian, would be the Hiss-Whisperer, and—”
“We get the point. Can we amble on back to your mother’s discussion now?” He turned toward Tess again. “Do you want to tell us more about this idea of yours, or do you need to keep it to yourself for a while?”
Tess, appreciative of his sensitivity around the issue of her writing, sent him a grateful glance and blew a kiss across the table. “It was Claire’s idea, really.”
“Mine?”
“Yes, yours. Something you said a very long time ago. I wrote about it in my journal, and then stumbled upon it again today. After—” She paused and pinched her lower lip. “After the disaster with that first novel, you told me I should write a story about you, and that everyone would love it.”
Claire stifled a gasp. “How old was I, Mom? Four, maybe five? A little egomaniac, from the sound of it. A miniature drama queen.” She shook her head. “Mother, please tell me you are not going to write about me and embarrass me in front of the entire world.”
“Would I do that?”
Claire groaned. “Yes, you would.” She flung her head back and screwed her eyes shut. “Help me, Jesus.”
“There’s no need to be sacrilegious,” Hal said.
“I’m not being sacrilegious, Daddy. I’m praying.” She fixed him with a scathing look.
“Well, you can quit storming the gates of heaven,” Tess said. “I have no intention of writing specifically about you. What I’m considering is a series of novels about adopted children.”
