From multiple World Fantasy Award winner and Nebula, Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, Sturgeon, and British Science Fiction Award nominated author M. Rickert comes a gorgeous and terrifying vision of the Mothers of Voorhisville, who love their babies just as intensely as any mother anywhere. Of course they do! And nothing in this world will change that, even if every single one of those tiny babies was born with an even tinier set of wings.

This novella was acquired and edited for Tor.com by editor Liz Gorinsky.

The things you have heard are true; we are the mothers of monsters. We would, however, like to clarify a few points. For instance, by the time we realized what Jeffrey had been up to, he was gone. At first we thought maybe the paper mill was to blame; it closed down in 1969, but perhaps it had taken that long for the poisonous chemicals to seep into our drinking water. We hid it from one another, of course, the strange shape of our newborns and the identity of the father. Each of us thought we were his secret lover. That was much of the seduction. (Though he was also beautiful, with those blue eyes and that intense way of his.)

It is true that he arrived in that big black car with the curtains across the back windows, as has been reported. But though Voorhisville is a small town, we are not ignorant, toothless, or the spawn of generations of incest. We did recognize the car as a hearse. However, we did not immediately assume the worst of the man who drove it. Perhaps we in Voorhisville are not as sheltered from death as people elsewhere. We, the mothers of Voorhisville, did not look at Jeffrey and immediately think of death. Instead, we looked into those blue eyes of his and thought of sex. You might have to have met him yourself to understand. There is a small but growing contingency of us that believes we were put under a type of spell. Not in regards to our later actions, which we take responsibility for, but in regards to him.

What mother wouldn’t kill to save her babies? The only thing unusual about our story is that our children can fly. (Sometimes, even now, we think we hear wings brushing the air beside us.) We mothers take the blame because we understand, someone has to suffer. So we do. Gladly.

We would gladly do it all again to have one more day with our darlings. Even knowing the damage, we would gladly agree. This is not the apology you might have expected. Think of it more as a manifesto. A map, in case any of them seek to return to us, though our hope of that happening is faint. Why would anyone choosethis ruined world?

Elli

The mothers have asked me to write what I know about what happened, most specifically what happened to me. I am suspicious of their motives. They insist this story must be told to “set the record straight.” What I think is that they are annoyed that I, Elli Ratcher, with my red hair and freckles and barely sixteen years old, shared a lover with them. The mothers like to believe they were driven to the horrible things they did by mother-love. I can tell you, though; they have always been capable of cruelty.

The mothers, who have a way of hovering over me, citing my recent suicide attempt, say I should start at the beginning. That is an easy thing to say. It’s the kind of thing I probably would have said to Timmy, had he not fallen through my arms and crashed to the ground at my feet.

The mothers say if this is too hard, I should give the pen to someone else. “We all have stuff to tell,” Maddy Melvern says. Maddy is, as everyone knows, jealous. She was just seventeen when she did it with Jeffrey and would be getting all the special attention if not for me. The mothers say they really mean it—if I can’t start at the beginning, someone else will. So, all right.

It’s my fifteenth birthday, and Grandma Joyce, who taught high school English for forty-six years, gives me one of her watercolor cards with a poem and five dollars. I know she’s trying to tell me something important with the poem, but the most I can figure out about what it means is that she doesn’t want me to grow up. That’s okay. She’s my grandma. I give her a kiss. She touches my hair. “Where did this come from?” she says, which annoys my mom. I don’t know why. When she says it in front of my dad, he says, “Let it rest, Ma.”

Right now my dad is out in the barn showing Uncle Bobby the beams. The barn beams have been a subject of much concern for my father, and endless conversations—at dinner, or church, or in parent-teacher conferences, the grocery store, or the post office—have been reduced to “the beams.”

I stand on the porch and feel the sun on my skin. I can hear my mom and aunt in the kitchen and the cartoon voices from Shrek 2, which my cousins are watching. When I look at the barn I think I hear my dad saying “beams.” I look out over the front yard to the road that goes by our house. Right then, a long black car comes over the hill, real slow, like the driver is lost. I shade my eyes to watch it pass the cornfield. I wonder if it is some kind of birthday present for me. A ride in a limousine! It slows down even more in front of our house. That’s when I realize it’s a hearse.

Then my dad and Uncle Bobby come out of the barn. When my dad sees me he says, “Hey! You can’t be fifteen, not my little stinkbottom,” which he’s been saying all day, “stinkbottom” being what he used to call me when I was in diapers. I have to use all my will and power not to roll my eyes, because he hates it when I roll my eyes. I am trying not to make anyone mad, because today is my birthday.

As far as I can figure out, that is the beginning. But is it? Is it the beginning? There are so many of us, and maybe there are just as many beginnings. What does “beginning” mean, anyway? What does anything mean? What is meaning? What is? Is Timmy? Or is he not? Once, I held him in my arms and he smiled and I thought I loved him. But maybe I didn’t. Maybe everything was already me throwing babies out the window; maybe everything was already tiny homemade caskets with flies buzzing around them; maybe everything has always been this place, this time, this sorrowful house and the weeping of the mothers.

The Mothers

We have decided Elli should take a little time to compose herself. Tamara Singh, who, up until Ravi’s birth, worked at the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Saturday, has graciously volunteered. In the course of persuading us that she is, in fact, perfect for the position of chronicler, Tamara—perhaps overcome with enthusiasm—cited the fantastic aspects of her several unpublished novels. This delayed our assent considerably. Tamara said she would not be writing about “elves and unicorns.” She explained that the word fantasy comes from the Latin phantasia, which means “an idea, notion, image, or a making visible.”

“Essentially, it’s making an idea visible. Everyone knows what we did. I thought we were trying to make them see why,” she said.

The mothers have decided to let Tamara tell what she can. We agree that what we have experienced, and heretofore have not adequately explained (or why would we still be here?)—might be best served by “a making visible.”

We can hope, at least. Many of us, though surprised to discover it, still have hope.

Tamara

There is, on late summer days, a certain perfume to Voorhisville. It’s the coppery smell of water, the sweet scent of grass with a touch of corn and lawn mower gas, lemon slices in ice-tea glasses and citronella. Sometimes, if the wind blows just right, it carries the perfume of the angel roses in Sylvia Lansmorth’s garden, a scent so seductive that everyone, from toddlers playing in the sandbox at Fletcher’s Park to senior citizens in rocking chairs at The Celia Wathmore Nursing Home, is made just a little bit drunk.

On just such a morning, Sylvia Lansmorth (whose beauty was not diminished by the recent arrival of gray in her long hair), sat in her garden, in the chair her husband had made for her during that strange year after the cancer diagnosis.

She sat weeping amongst her roses, taking deep gulps of the sweet air, like a woman just surfaced from a near drowning. In truth, Sylvia, who had experienced much despair in the past year, was now feeling an entirely different emotion.

“I want you to get on with things,” he’d told her. “I don’t want you mourning forever. Promise me.”

So she made the sort of unreasonable promise one makes to a dying man, while he looked at her with those bulging eyes, which had taken on a light she once thought characteristic of saints and psychopaths.

She’d come, as she had so many times before, to sit in her garden, and for some reason, who knows why, was overcome by this emotion she never thought she would feel again—this absolute love of life. As soon as she recognized it, she began to weep. Still, it was an improvement, anyone would say, this weeping and gulping of air; a great improvement over weeping and muffling her face against a pillow.

Of all the sweet-smelling places in Voorhisville that morning, the yoga studio was the sweetest. The music was from India, or so they thought. Only Tamara guessed it wasn’t Indian music, but music meant to sound as though it was; just as the teacher, Shreve, despite her unusual name, wasn’t Indian but from somewhere in New Jersey. If you listened carefully, you could hear it in her voice.

Right in the middle of the opening chant there was a ruckus at the back of the room. Somebody was late, and not being particularly quiet about it. Several women peeked, right in the middle of om. Others resisted until Shreve instructed them to stand, at which point they reached for a water bottle, or a towel, or just forgot about subterfuge entirely and simply looked. By the time the class was in its first downward dog, there was not a person there who hadn’t spied on the noisy latecomer. He had the bluest eyes any of them had ever seen, and a halo of light around his body, which most everyone assumed was an optical illusion. It would be a long time before any of them thought that it hadn’t been a glow at all, but a burning.

Shreve noticed (when she walked past him as he lay in corpse position) the strong scent of jasmine, and thought that, in the mysterious ways of the world, a holy man, a yogi, had come into her class.

Shreve, like Sylvia, was a widow. Sort of. There was no word for what she was, actually. She felt betrayed by language, amongst other things. Her fiancé had been murdered. Even the nature of his death had robbed her of something primary, as if how he died was more important than that he had. She’d given up trying to explain it. Nobody in Voorhisville knew. She’d moved here with her new yoga teacher certificate after the second anniversary of the event and opened up this studio with the savings she’d set aside for the wedding. His parents paid for the funeral, so she still had quite a bit left, which was good, because though the studio was a success by Voorhisville’s standards, she was running out of money. It was enough to make her cranky sometimes. She tried to forgive herself for it. Shreve wasn’t sure she had enough love to forgive the world, but she thought—maybe—she could forgive herself.

With her hands in prayer position, Shreve closed her eyes and sang “shanti” three times. It meant “peace,” and on that morning Shreve felt like peace had finally arrived.

Later, when the stranger showed up for the writers’ workshop at Jan Morris’s house, she could not determine how he’d found out about the elitist group, known to have rejected at least one local writer on the basis of the fact she wrote fantasy. Jan asked him how he’d found them, but Sylvia interrupted before he could answer. Certainly it never occurred to her to think he was up to anything diabolical. Also, it became clear that Sylvia knew him from a yoga class she attended. By the time he had passed out the twelve copies of his poem—his presence made them a group of thirteen, but they were intellectuals, not a superstitious bunch—well, it just didn’t matter how he found them.

Afterwards, as the writers left, Jan stood at the door with the stranger beside her, waving goodbye until she observed two things: first, that the last car remaining in the driveway was a hearse, and second, that the stranger smelled, quite pleasantly, of lemons.

Jan preferred to call him “the stranger.” Never mind Camus; it had a nice ring to it all on its own. Eventually, when the mothers pieced things together, it seemed the most accurate moniker. They didn’t know him at all. None of them did. Not really.

One night in early June, after events began to unfold as they did, Jan looked for her copy of the stranger’s poem, which she remembered folding inside a book, like a pressed flower. But though she tore apart the bookshelf, making so much noise she woke the baby, she never found it. She called the others and asked each of them, trying to sound casual (“Remember that poet, who came to the workshop just that once? And that poem he wrote?”), but none of them could locate their copy either.

Sylvia remembered that night well; waving goodbye to Jan and Jeffrey, who were standing in the doorway together, haloed by the light of all those overwhelming lemon-scented candles. Jeffrey was a good deal taller than Jan. Sylvia realized she could look right into his blue eyes without even seeing the top of the other woman’s head.

When Jan called in June, Sylvia pretended to have only a minor memory of Jeffrey and the poem, but as soon as she hung up she began searching for it, moving ponderously, weighed down by her pregnancy and the heat. How could she have misplaced it? She had intended to give it to the child some day, a way to say, “Here, you have a father and he is a genius.” But also, Sylvia felt, it was proof that what she had done had been the only reasonable response. The poem revealed not just his intelligence, but also his heart, which was good. Sylvia had to believe this, though he left her. Her husband had left her, too . . . and yes, all right, he had died, but Jeffrey made no promises. He’d come and gone, which Sylvia considered fortunate. She didn’t need, or want, the complication of his presence. But she did want that poem.

That night, when Sylvia’s water broke, she was surprised at how it felt: “As though there had been an iceberg inside of me, which suddenly melted,” she told Holly.

Holly, the midwife and a keeper of many secrets, had a house in Ridgehaven, but that May, she rented a small room from the Melverns, who were thrilled to have her in such close proximity to their pregnant seventeen-year-old daughter. Holly had told no one what she had seen: all those pregnant women in Voorhisville who didn’t appear to have a man in their lives. While this was certainly not scandalous, she did find the number significant. When the babies began arriving that last week in May, it became clear to Holly that something had happened to the women of Voorhisville. Something indescribable.

For Jeffrey’s appeal—though he was a good-looking man—went beyond description. Though there weren’t many, there were other attractive men in Voorhisville who the women had not fucked; receiving nothing in exchange but a single night, or afternoon, or morning (after yoga class, in the studio, the air sweet with jasmine). When the women tried to define just what was so compelling about the stranger, they could not come to a consensus.

Lara Bravemeen, for instance, remembered his hands, with their long narrow fingers and their slender wrists. She said he had the hands of a painter.

Cathy Vecker remembered the way he moved. “Like a man who never hurried . . . but not lazy, you see. Self-contained, that’s what I mean.”

Tamara mentioned his eyes, which everyone else thought so obvious there was no need to comment on.

Elli Ratcher stopped chewing on a hangnail long enough to say, “When he held me I felt like I was being held by an angel. I felt like I would always be safe. I felt holy.”

At which point the women sighed and looked down at their shoes, or into their laps. Because to look at Elli was to remember she had been just fifteen. Though no one could be sure about Jeffrey’s age, he was certainly a man. What he’d done to all of them was wrong, but what he’d done to Elli (and Maddy, they hastened to add) went beyond wrong into the territory of evil.

Maddy

My name is Maddy Melvern—well, Matilda, which just goes to show how grownups like to make up the world they live in; my parents naming me like I was living in a fairy tale instead of Voorhisville. Let’s just set the record straight, I don’t remember no sweet-smelling day here or none of that shit. Voorhisville is a dump. The houses, almost all of them, except the Veckers’, are all peeling paint and crooked porches. Voorhisville is the kind of town where if a window gets broke it’s gonna stay broke, but someone will try to cover it up with cardboard or duct tape. Duct tape holds Voorhisville together. Roddy Tyler’s got his shoes duct-taped, and there’s duct tape in the post office holding the American flag up, and there’s duct tape on the back of the third pew in St. Andrew’s balcony. I don’t know why. There just is. I was born here and I ain’t old enough to do nothing about it. I can’t explain why anyone else would stay. I know the mothers like to say there are sweet-smelling days in Voorhisville, but there ain’t.

I agree with Elli. Jeffrey was a angel. And just to be clear, my baby was a angel too. All our babies were. No matter what anyone says. I don’t care if he stayed. What was he going to do? Work at the canning factory? Maybe you can picture him doing that and then coming home to, like, have barbecues and shit, but I sure can’t. He didn’t fall for it, you know, that way of doing things right. What I say is that if everybody in Voorhisville’s so concerned with doing things right, then just as soon as we get out of here I’m going to live my life doing things wrong.

It was the first day of school and me, Leanne, Sasha, and some of the guys was walking to Sasha’s house when we see this hearse parked in front of St. Andrew’s. Mark dares me to go into the church. I’m like, what’s the big shit about that? So when the door shuts behind me they all take off, laughing like a bunch of retards.

I kind of liked it. It was peaceful, all right? And it did smell good in there. And everything was clean. So I’m looking at this big statue they got of Jesus on the cross? He’s got the crown with the thorns on his head, and he’s bleeding, and I don’t know why, but whenever I see statues and pictures of Jesus and shit like that, I sort of hate him. I know that’s insulting to many people, but he annoys me, with that crown piercing his skull and those nails in his feet and hands and shit. I never understand why he didn’t do nothing about it, if he was so powerful and all? “You belong in Voorhisville,” is what I thought, and I guess I said it out loud ’cause that’s when a voice behind me goes, “Excuse me?”

So, I turned and there he was. At first I thought he was the priest, but he set me straight. We talked for a long time and then after a while he said we had to go somewhere safe. I kind of laughed, because ain’t churches supposed to be super safe, but he took my hand, and we went up to the balcony. I don’t know why, we just did, okay? That’s where it happened. I know me and Elli ain’t been getting along so much here, but she’s right: it ain’t bad, what we did. I know, doing it in the church makes it seem bad, but it was good, okay? Like how they said it would be, not like . . . not . . . Okay, I’ve been with boys my own age, and I’ve had bad, and this was not like that. And I ain’t just talking about his dick. I’m talking about the feeling. What’d she call it? Holy.

But that don’t mean that Voorhisville ain’t all stinky and shit. We don’t gotta lie about that. We should tell it right because what this shows everyone is that something like this could happen anywhere. If it happened in Voorhisville, it could happen in any town, and I don’t see that as being a bad thing.

Tamara

The third anniversary of Shreve’s fiancé’s death fell on a Saturday when yoga class was scheduled, but she decided to teach anyway, and was glad she did. She started class with a short meditation. She didn’t tell the women what to think or feel. They just sat there, breathing in and out. Shreve thought about her plans. After class, she would go home and change into something comfortable (but not her pajamas, as she’d done for years one and two), make herself a nice pot of tea, light a candle, and look at photographs.

By the time she opened her eyes, those hard minutes had passed. On that day (though not everyone remembers) Voorhisville smelled like chocolate. Emily Carr woke up at 4:30 and began baking. By 6:30, when Stecker’s opened, she was waiting there with a long list of ingredients. She baked chocolate bread, and a chocolate cake (layered with a raspberry filling), a chocolate torte, and good old-fashioned (why mess with perfection?) chocolate chip cookies. Though the day was warm, she also mixed up some Mexican hot chocolate, which she poured into a large thermos. She made a batch of chocolate muffins and six dozen dark chocolate cherry cookies. Then Emily filled several baskets with cookies, muffins, and slices of cake, torte, and bread, and began delivering her treats to the neighbors.

“But why?” they asked, to which she just shrugged. Until, when she got to Shreve’s house, she said, “Let me know what you think. I’m going to open a bakery and I’m trying to find out what people like.”

At that point, Emily began to cry. Shreve invited her inside. Wiping her eyes as she stepped into the warm living room, Emily said, “I’m happy. That’s why I’m crying. I’m so happy.” Then she noticed the photographs spread across the floor, the wedding dress on the couch, the stricken look on Shreve’s face.

“My fiancé died,” Shreve said, “three years ago today.”

Emily, who had forgotten the date entirely until Bobby Stewart said, “What is this? Some kind of September eleventh thing?” resisted the impulse to ask Shreve if he’d been one of the thousands. Instead, she said, “There’s a thermos of hot chocolate.”

Shreve looked from the basket to the photographs, the wedding dress, the box of tiny bells. “I don’t know what to do.”

“We could go to the park.”

That’s what they did. On that mild September evening the women sat beneath the oak tree in Fletcher’s Park, ate too much chocolate, and became friends.

The following Saturday, after Emily’s first yoga class, the women went garage sale-ing together. Both women appreciated a bargain, and both women had appreciated Jeffrey, though they wouldn’t know this until October, when they confided their fears to each other and—like high school girls, giggling, nervous, and unsure—went to the drugstore for pregnancy tests, which, oddly, were all sold out. They drove all the way to Centerville to purchase them, during which time they told their stories of the stranger with blue eyes and thus discovered that they had shared a lover.

“Did you notice how he smelled?” Shreve asked.

“Chocolate,” Emily said. “Do you ever get mad at him? The way he just left?”

“Actually, I sort of prefer it this way. I’m not looking for anything else. You?”

Emily shook her head. “It’s the weirdest thing, because normally I would. I mean, I think so, at least. I’ve never done anything like that with a stranger. But for some reason, I’m not angry.”

Were the women of Voorhisville enchanted? Bewitched? Had a great evil befallen them? It was hard to imagine that anything bad happened that autumn, when everyone glowed.

Later, they had to agree it was more than strange that they all got pregnant, even those using birth control, and none of them suffered morning sickness. It was also odd that, given the obvious promiscuity involved, no one got an STD. But that fall, all anyone cared about was that the women of Voorhisville were beautiful.

Lara no longer stood at the small window in the upstairs hallway spying on her neighbor. Yes, Sylvia was beautiful. She had always been beautiful, even at her husband’s funeral, her face wracked with grief. But there were many beautiful women in Voorhisville. Why hadn’t Lara noticed before?

One morning, shortly after September eleventh (she later recalled the date because she’d eaten Emily’s chocolate cake for breakfast), Lara stood naked in front of the bedroom mirror. Why had she spent all that time studying Sylvia? Lara turned, twisting her neck to get a sideways look.

She decided to begin painting again. She would paint her own strong legs, the sag of flesh at her stomach, her tired eyes. She had to paint all this to try to express the feeling she had, of no longer being a sum of parts. Her parts would be there, but that’s not what the painting would be about. It would be a self-portrait, Lara decided, and it would be huge.

When Lara realized she was late she phoned the pharmacy. “I’m not coming in today,” she said. She didn’t offer an explanation. Even as she said it, she wasn’t sure she would ever return to work. She knew how this would sit with Ed. He wouldn’t like it, but it wasn’t as though she expected him to support her; she had her own savings.

As Lara dressed, she thought about Jeffrey. She’d taken a huge risk; he could have been a psycho. He could have stalked her. Or told Ed! Instead, he disappeared. For weeks, Lara looked for the hearse, but she never saw it again. He was gone as mysteriously as he’d arrived. She’d been lucky, Lara thought—guilty, yes, but lucky.

It didn’t even occur to her she might be pregnant.

Theresa Ratcher knew she was. She would say, later, that she knew immediately.

When Lara drove past the Ratcher farm on her way to Centerville for art supplies, Theresa Ratcher was standing in the driveway, shading her eyes, as though expecting a visitor. The women waved at each other. Lara sighed. Even Theresa Ratcher was beautiful in her old housewifey dress, her clunky shoes, her corn-colored hair in a messy ponytail.

Theresa watched the car arc over the hill with one hand on her tummy, which had not been flat since Elli was born fifteen years ago. Pete would never suspect a thing. Why would he? Why would anyone? She closed her eyes and tilted her face towards the sun. “What are you doing?” Pete said. Theresa opened her eyes, wide, as though caught. Her husband’s face had hardened with time, and he smelled of manure, but she loved him. She placed her hand on his crotch. After a moment, she turned and walked away. He followed, surprised when she didn’t go into the house but walked behind the barn, where she lay down on the grass and lifted up her dress, revealing her freckled thighs, the white crotch of her panties. This was very much like how it had happened, when, still teenagers, they’d made Ellie.

Here’s your dad, Theresa thought.

What all (or most) of the women of Voorhisville would have said was that beautiful was everywhere that fall: it was in the light and shadows and the muted green leaves that eventually burned into a blaze of color, it was in the duct-taped houses, in the bats that flew out of St. Andrew’s belfry each night, and the logey bees buzzing amongst the pumpkins and squash.

Beautiful was in the women, the way they talked, walked, the things they did: the stretch of limbs in yoga, the scent of chocolate from Emily’s kitchen. Jan Morris had never written so proficiently—or, she felt (and the writers in the workshop agreed) more beautifully. Lara Bravemeen began painting again, which caused an argument with her husband, a fight Lara could only think of as beautiful in its passion.

Strange things were happening to the women of Voorhisville. Anyone could see that.

“Like bones, and skin, and blood,” Elli Ratcher later said. “What could be more beautiful than that? What could be more strange?”

The Mothers

We, the mothers, understand the enormity of the task involved in relaying the events that preceded the seminal one. We appreciate the impossibility of incorporating each personal account into this narrative, and, after much discussion and several votes, made the decision to tell this story through the voices of a representative few. It is an imperfect solution, we know, but then again, we are in an imperfect situation. However, we would like to stress that we reject the penis-glorifying tone that’s been taken, as though we, the women of Voorhisville, were only completed through penetration. We would like to make it clear that we believe the women of Voorhisville were always beautiful, always interesting, always evolving, always capable of greatness.

Tamara

The Veckers own the big white house on the hill. They pay people to do their gardening, mow the lawn, trim the bushes. Several Voorhisville residents think it’s unjust that the Veckers win the Gardeners’ Association’s blue ribbon each year, as well as the grand prize for their Christmas decorations; that big house outlined with thousands of little white lights, all those windows and doors bordered too, so that it looks like some strip mall.

Nobody is exactly sure how the Veckers got to be so rich. Even Cathy Vecker, twenty-five years old and recently returned from Los Angeles, looking a good deal older than her age, has no idea where the family money came from. The topic never held much interest for her. Cathy knew everyone was not as fortunate as she was; but what could she do about it? Whenever she thought about all the poor people—Roddy Tyler with his duct-taped shoes, for instance—it just made her weary.

Because what could they do? The Veckers were rich, but they weren’t that rich; they were no Bill Gates, that’s for sure. Even Cathy, who had never been good at math, knew the numbers didn’t work out. The world had more people than dollars in the various Vecker accounts. If the Veckers gave away every cent they owned, nobody would be rich, and the Veckers would join the masses of those without enough. For a while, Cathy had worried that she was becoming a socialist, but once she worked through the logic, she was relieved to discover that she was just a regular rich American.

Being a rich American meant Cathy could follow her dreams. She moved to Los Angeles to pursue modeling and acting. Cathy Vecker was pretty. She was not as beautiful as Sylvia Lansmorth, but everyone knew that Sylvia was exceptional—though overly attached to her roses. Sylvia’s husband was gorgeous too, or had been, before he died. He was a carpenter. Cathy’s mother and grandmother hired him from time to time for special projects.

Cathy had never been happier for the Vecker money than she was upon returning from Los Angeles. She was thrilled she didn’t have to come up with an immediate solution to the challenging question of what she would do with her life. It wasn’t that she meant to shrug the question off—she had every intention of addressing it eventually—but it was a relief not to have to rush to a conclusion, get a job waitressing or something.

Los Angeles had been an experiment, and she’d failed miserably. All the women in Los Angeles were gorgeous. It was kind of weird, actually. Also, Cathy discovered, she couldn’t really act. It wasn’t until she saw a recording of her audition that she recognized that. Why hadn’t anyone told her? Why hadn’t someone just said it?

By the end of August, Cathy had narrowed her choices to going to college—though she hadn’t applied, she felt certain her family connections could get her into St. Mary’s or the university—or opening a small business. She was bogged down in the details. What would she major in? What kind of business would she start?

Then she became distracted. She thought she was falling in love, or at least that explained the powerful attraction, the chemistry, the reason she did it in the back of a hearse, like somebody who couldn’t afford a room somewhere. Later, Cathy had to admit there was something about it that felt dangerous and exciting. She thought she’d gotten that sort of thing out of her system in Los Angeles, but apparently not.

He didn’t ask for her phone number, but she didn’t worry. She was a Vecker. Everyone knew how to get in touch with the Veckers. By September, she realized he wasn’t going to call. By the end of that month, despite the Pill—which Cathy had been taking since she was fifteen, when she had her first affair with Stephen Lang, who (she didn’t know it was a cliché at the time) cleaned their pool—Cathy guessed she was pregnant. A quick trip to the drugstore and a home pregnancy test confirmed it. Cathy knew she should be upset, but honestly, she wasn’t. She placed her hand on her flat stomach and said, “I’ll do this.”

She decided she’d start a community theatre, right there in Voorhisville. A Christmas play in December, maybe a musical; possibly Our Town in the spring; something modern in-between. It wouldn’t have to make money. The Veckers could do this. They couldn’t support the world, or America, but they could do this. Cathy could run it, even while she raised her child, and she could live off one of the Vecker accounts, and she could do something good for Voorhisville.

The senior Mrs. Vecker received the news—first of the pregnancy, then of the community theatre—with the traditional Vecker attitude. Cathy was worried her grandmother would be upset, but it turned out there had not been an exact alignment between Grandma Vecker’s own wedding and Cathy Vecker’s mother’s birth; a matter covered up, at the time, by an extended European honeymoon. “Didn’t you know that?” Mrs. Vecker asked.

Whereas Grandma Vecker said, “It’s quite clever of you to start without the man hanging around. Everything you need from him, you’ve already got.”

After her husband died, Sylvia Lansmorth found herself in the unusual position of being rich. Well, not rich, exactly, not like the Veckers, but she no longer had to work at the canning factory, a job she’d held since she was fifteen. Who would have guessed that Rick Lansmorth—who was, after all, just a carpenter—had the foresight to take out sizable life insurance policies for both of them? But he had.

All these months later, Sylvia was still finding the wooden figurines Rick had been working on during his chemo; tiny creatures that fit in the palm of her hand: a swan tucked in his toolbox (she’d been looking for the hammer); what appeared to be the beginnings of a wolf (the shape formed, a few lines cut for fur but no eyes or mouth) on the kitchen windowsill; a tiny mouse with a broken tail in the garden. Rick used to sit outside wrapped in blankets, even when the sun was hot, and Sylvia guessed he’d thrown it in frustration. Not the sort of thing he would normally do, but dying had been hard.

Sylvia was not living the life she’d imagined when she was a high school girl who thought her job at the canning factory was temporary. She used to look at the women working there and wonder why they stayed. Now, Sylvia knew. It just happened.

She and Rick had planned to leave Voorhisville. First, he tried building up a clientele in Centerville, but he was just another guy with a toolbox there. People in Voorhisville knew and trusted him, and while there wasn’t much work, what work there was, he got. Then he moved to Alaska. The plan was that he would get established before Sylvia joined him. They missed each other, of course, but it was a sacrifice they were willing to make. They thought they had time. Instead, he came back to Voorhisville with cancer and stories of moose.

After Sylvia quit her job, she spent a great deal of time in the garden; so much so that, as fall approached, she realized that her main occupation had been dying, and she didn’t have anything to replace it with. She would have denied that she had wished for it, or expected it; she would have resisted calling it a miracle; but just when the garden started to look barren, she discovered she was pregnant, the result of one single sexual encounter with a stranger she had no desire to see again. Sylvia had gotten quite good at crying over the past year. Why couldn’t it be Rick’s child? Why couldn’t he still be alive? What could possibly come of conception in a hearse? How Freudian was that?

Sylvia considered an abortion. Then she got in her car, drove to Centerville, and went to the Barnes & Noble, where she spent a good deal of money on pregnancy and parenting books.

“Wow, we’ve really had a run on these lately,” the clerk said.

Sylvia liked having a secret. It wasn’t that she was ashamed. She just liked having this private relationship with her baby. Once her neighbor, Lara Bravemeen (whose upstairs windows brooded over Sylvia’s garden) asked why she’d stopped going to yoga, and she just shrugged. Sylvia had recently discovered that most people accepted a shrug for an answer.

In January, Sylvia learned that Lara Bravemeen was pregnant too. Their children could play together. That is, if the Bravemeens stayed married and continued to live next door. Lately, there’d been a lot of shouting over there.

Never having been pregnant before, Sylvia had nothing to compare it to except TV shows, but she thought it was perfect. She felt wonderful the whole time. Holly, the midwife, said, “Sometimes it’s almost harder if you have an easy pregnancy. It makes the birth just that much more of a shock.”

Sylvia, who had been feeling very much like a madonna—not the rock star, but the perfectly peaceful mother type—just smiled.

The pain was monumental. Right from the start. Ed called the doctor and she said, “How far apart?” and Ed asked Lara, “How far apart?” and Lara screamed, “What?” So Ed repeated the question. “There’s no time between, you moron,” Lara hollered. Ed relayed this to the doctor (editing out the “moron,” of course), who said, “When did the contractions start?” and Ed said, “Five minutes ago.” That’s when the doctor said, “Bring her in now.” Ed said, “Right now?” and the doctor said, “Wait. You’re in Voorhisville, right?” and he said, “Yes,” and she said, “Call the ambulance,” and Ed said, “Is there a problem?” and Lara screamed and the doctor said, “Call them.” So Ed called the ambulance and they came right away. It was Brian Holandeigler and Francis Kennedy (no relation to any of the famous ones), who tried to make jokes to calm Ed and Lara down, but between screams of agony, Lara was vicious. “She’s not usually like this,” Ed said. “Fuck you!” Lara shouted. “You’re going to be all right,” Francis said. “Fuck you!” Lara screamed. “Try to breathe,” Ed said. “Remember the breathing?” “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Lara screamed.

Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. She knew it. And here she was, surrounded by these idiot men (“Idiots!” she shouted) who thought she was hysterical.

“I’m dying!” she screamed.

“You’re not dying,” Ed said.

It felt like she was being scraped raw inside by talons. It felt like her guts were being carved out. Or like teeth! It felt like small sharp teeth were chewing her up inside.

“Do something!” she shouted.

“Well, we really can’t do much,” Brian said.

“What?” Ed and Lara said.

“I could take a look,” Brian said.

“But we’re not supposed to transport women in labor,” Francis said. “We’re supposed to stay here. Unless there’s a problem.”

“There’s a fucking problem!” Lara shouted.

“Do you mind if I look?” Brian said as he slipped his hands around the waistband of Lara’s pants. Ed found the image disturbing, and turned away. Lara saw him turn away. She managed, through her pain, to form the words again: “Fuck you.” Brian sat up. “Hold your legs together,” he said. “What?” Lara said. “Is it coming?” Ed said. “Of course it’s—” Lara interrupted herself to scream. “Close your legs!” Brian shouted. “Are we taking her?” Francis said. “Yes. Yes. Oh God, yes,” Brian said. “Close your legs!” he yelled at Lara. “Oh, God; oh Jesus,” Brian said. Lara screamed. Ed leaned down and held her hand. “Please,” he said, “close your legs.” “I want it out!” Lara shouted. “Please,” Ed said, “do what they say.” “Excuse me,” Francis said, and shoved Ed away.

Brian and Francis set the stretcher on the floor beside the couch. “I’m dying!” Lara screamed. Brian and Ed lifted her to the stretcher. “Close your legs,” Brian said. Lara closed her legs. “Don’t drop her,” Ed said as he opened the door. “Can I come with you?” “Two steps,” Francis said to Brian, who was backing out. Ed shut the door. He looked at Sylvia’s dark house. Death could come to anyone, anywhere, he thought. “Are you coming?” Francis said. Ed jumped into the ambulance. The siren screamed, but it was nothing compared to Lara’s screams. “Let me see where you’re at,” Francis said. He spread a sheet over Lara’s lap and bent under to have a look. When his head came out of the sheet, his eyes were wide, his skin white. “Oh, Jesus,” Francis said. “Hold your legs together.”

Lara tried to hold her legs together, but it felt like she was being sliced by knives. “Ed,” she shouted. “Ed?”

“I’m here, baby, I’m right here.” He squeezed her hand.

She screamed. She screamed the whole ride from Voorhisville to the hospital in Becksworth. When they got there, the doctor was waiting for them.

“How about an epidural?” she said. “You better take a look,” Brian said. She lifted the sheet and looked. “Take her to the OR,” the doctor said. “What’s happening?” Ed said. “You stay here,” a nurse said. “What’s happening?” Ed said to Brian and Francis. They both stared at him, then Francis said, “There might be some complications.” Ed sat down. Brian and Francis left. The hospital was so quiet Ed thought he could still hear Lara’s screams. But it couldn’t have been her, because Lara had gone to the right, and the screams were coming from the left.

Jan Morris lay screaming in her hospital bed, but no one was paying much attention. Someone had checked her when she came in, and pointed out that she wasn’t even dilated yet. Jan insisted they contact her doctor. “She wants to know,” she said. But Jan’s doctor was busy with some other emergency, so Dr. Fascular took the call instead. The nurse checked Jan again, decided that she was making a big fuss over nothing, and administered an epidural. The mother was in her forties, and they were often the biggest pains. They wanted everything a certain way. But Jan kept screaming until it finally occurred to someone that there might be a problem.

The nurse who looked at Jan later said, over coffee and eggs with her twelve-year-old son, that it was the most shocking thing she’d ever seen. The woman hadn’t even been dilated ten minutes ago—or, okay, it might have been closer to twenty minutes, but then suddenly there was . . . she thought there might be an arm, a leg, something like that. Anyway, after she saw the strange thing protruding from Jan Morris’s vagina, she ran to call Dr. Fascular again.

“What thing?” the nurse’s son asked.

“I don’t know how to describe it. It was just sticking out, and it was like a, like the tip of a triangle, and it was sharp.”

“You touched it?”

“Look,” she said, and showed him the small cut on her finger.

“What happened next?” the boy asked.

She remembered touching that bloody tip with her finger; she remembered the sear of pain and running to call the doctor. The next thing she knew, several hours had passed and she was punching her time card to go home. Even though she was tired and her feet were sore and she certainly wanted to be there when her son woke up, she went to the nursery where she found the baby, a sweet-as-they-all-are prune-shaped thing, wrapped tightly in a blanket, sleeping. She read the chart and saw that there was nothing unusual noted.

Maddy

Yeah, well, that nurse didn’t see nothing wrote down about it because they could hold them inside like the way you put your fingers in a fist, or maybe more like the way you close a eye. That’s what the babies did. They pulled them in real tight and it just looked like, I don’t know, kind of extra wrinkled and stuff. Who pays attention to a baby’s back, anyways? Not most people. Most people wanna look at a baby’s face or fingers and toes. There is a weird fascination with grownups looking at a baby’s fingers or toes. Also, baby’s shit. My mom could go on and on about JoJo’s shit. Was it greenish? Was it runny? She’d get mad at me when I rolled my eyes. “You can tell things about your baby’s health, Maddy,” she’d say.

My mom liked to behave all superior about babies with me ’cause she had two, and she figured that made her a expert. Also, I really think she liked the fact I was a teenage mother ’cause it proved her theory that I was a fuckup all along. Weird as it is, though, I sometimes wish I had my mom here with me like Elli has hers. But how fucked is that? Both of them doing it with the same guy? It makes me shiver every time I think about it.

JoJo was born at home, even though we didn’t plan it that way. Just ’cause we had a midwife renting Billy’s old room in the basement don’t mean we was going to use her. Holly was really busy. Once she came upstairs and asked me to turn the music down, but she asked like she knew it was a big pain for me to do, and so I turned it down. And one night we sat on the front steps and talked. I thought she was nice.

But it’s not like I got to choose much about JoJo. My mom liked to act like everything was up to me. “He’s your baby,” she’d say. “He’s your responsibility”—she said this about diaper changing and when he was crying. But other times she’d say, “Just ’cause you had a baby don’t mean you’re all grown up now.”

My mom said I had to go to a hospital. “It’s just ridiculous that in this day in age, with all the best modern medicine has to offer, a woman would choose to give birth at home like they was living in Afghanistan or something.” My mom loved to mention Afghanistan whenever she could. My brother Billy got killed there, and after that she blamed Afghanistan for anything wrong in the world.

After I talked to Holly that night on the porch, I wanted her to help when the baby came. It’s not like she tried to convince me, or nothing like that. We barely talked about it. Mostly we talked about other stuff. But I liked her, and I didn’t like Dr. Fascular. He has cold hands and is always grumpy and shit.

My mom was all like, “No way,” and said it had to be at the hospital. But there wasn’t much she could do when it happened the way it did, all of a sudden, with me alone in the house. I didn’t expect it to hurt like it did. It hurt a lot. I didn’t scream, even though I really wanted to. I just went down to Billy’s old room and laid down on Billy’s old bed, which was now Holly’s, and waited for her to get home. It hurt so bad I took the bedspread and rolled it up at the end and stuck it in my mouth. Every time I felt like screaming, which was pretty much all the time, I bit down.

I don’t know how long it was before Holly came home. She said, “Maddy?”

I just screamed. I let the bedspread fall out of my mouth and I screamed loud enough to bring my mom and dad down the stairs, and then there was this whole part where they got mad at Holly, and even though I was screaming and shit, I had to explain to them that she didn’t have nothing to do with it, and then my dad said he was going to get the car, and Holly was looking at my vagina and saying, “I don’t think so.”

I heard it hurt a lot to have a baby, but nothing nobody said told me how much. I don’t even want to think about it.

So Mom starts arguing with Holly, and then all of a sudden Holly says, “This baby is halfway here. If you want to take her all the way to Becksworth, you go ahead. But I sure hope you are prepared to deliver it.” Which, ha ha, got my mom to shut up.

Okay, so like it hurt more than anything I ever imagined. It hurt more than when Billy got killed, and I didn’t think there would ever be nothing that hurt worse than that. Later, Holly told me it was not a usual birth. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever do it again. Like I could! Ha, stuck here with all these women.

I was exhausted. I just wanted to go to sleep. Holly said, “What are you going to name him?” And I said, “JoJo.” And my mom said, “I knew it. I knew it was Joey Marin.” My mom was obsessed with trying to figure out who JoJo’s dad was. “It ain’t Joey Marin,” I said, but she just looked all superior. Holly cleaned him up and she said he was beautiful. And that’s coming from someone who delivered hundreds of babies, so that should tell you something. Then she gave him to me, wrapped up like a bratwurst in a bun. Everybody stood there, even my dad. Like I was going to breastfeed in front of him! I guess Holly figured that out, ’cause she said she had some things to talk to them about in private. When Mom and Dad were both out the door, I told Holly I was sorry I got her in trouble. “That’s all right,” she said. “I thought this room could use a birth.” I saw what she meant. Except for Holly’s clothes and a little glass jar on the dresser filled with some wildflowers, the room was just the way it was when Billy left to get killed in the war.

So I took off my T-shirt and put JoJo up by my boob, and he started sucking.

The next day, after I moved back upstairs and my mom cleaned all of Holly’s sheets and even baked her a tube of chocolate chip cookies to thank her for everything she did, I was undressing JoJo, and the next thing I knew, my finger was bleeding and JoJo was crying and my mom was standing there going, “What are you doing to him?”

“I ain’t doing nothing to him,” I said. “I pricked my finger.”

“This is no longer all about you,” she said, and, “You better make sure you keep one hand on him when he’s on the changing table, or it won’t be long before he’ll just roll off.” About as soon as JoJo was born, my mom started imagining all the horrible ways he could die.

I looked at JoJo laying there with his face all scrunched up and all I could think was that I had a huge problem. I didn’t love him, all right? For the first time in my entire life I wondered if this is what was wrong with me and my mom, that she just didn’t love me and couldn’t do nothing about it. I felt real bad, and angry too. I decided that wasn’t going to happen with me and JoJo.

I picked him up and took him with me to the bed, and that’s when I saw them sticking out. They were tiny, like his fingers and toes were tiny. They were tiny like that.

“Holy shit, JoJo,” I said. “You’ve got wings.”

Tamara

When Tamara met Raj and found out he was Hindu, she didn’t think much about it. It wasn’t until she was already falling in love that she discovered how much his faith mattered to him. She told him she wasn’t sure she could convert, but he said she didn’t need to. It might have been easier if she could fool herself into believing that her infidelity had been Raj’s fault, but Tamara could not believe that. She had cheated on him for the worst reason of all: because she felt like it.

There was justice in her pregnancy. It was a Catholic thought, she knew, but no matter how many years had passed since she’d gone to church, she could not escape the idea that God did things like this to Catholics. He punished them for being bad.

Tamara knew it was not uncommon for pregnant woman to have horrible dreams, but she was sure hers were the worst. Several times, Raj died. Once, she drowned the baby. (How could she even dream that?) She had many dreams that featured birth defects. When she woke up crying, Raj held her, soothed her, made her tea, told her jokes. He was the perfect husband, which just made everything worse.

Tamara thought of confessing. Being raised Catholic, how could she not think of that? But she couldn’t decide. Was she confessing to help their marriage, or just to relieve her guilt? What was the right thing to do? She no longer trusted her judgment. How could she, after she’d displayed such a colossal lack of any? (After it all came out and everything fell apart the way it did, she would decide she must have been put under some sort of spell, though the other women say things like, “Sure, if that’s what you wanna call it, honey.”)

Tamara had passed the bar exam, so she was technically a lawyer, but hardly anyone knew that. She never practiced. She hated law school, but didn’t dare quit after her parents had put so much money into it. She hadn’t really mentioned, in any of her phone calls or e-mails to her parents, that she wasn’t doing anything with her degree, but instead was working part-time at the Voorhisville library while writing another novel. She’d never told them about the four previous novels she’d written (but not published) so it was difficult to tell them about the fifth. They wouldn’t approve. Her father used to make fun of her art major friends. He called them “the future poor of America.”

She and Raj moved to Voorhisville because they had fantasies about small town life. Raj, who worked as a litigation attorney in Becksworth, and therefore wasn’t really in Voorhisville much, still believed it was a quaint community, a perfect place for children. Tamara wasn’t so sure. She’d seen things: the way Michael Baile (whose cousin was on the school board) got all the contracts for the school maintenance jobs, even though there were consistent complaints about the quality of his work. The way almost everyone talked about Maddy Malvern’s spiral into sexual promiscuity, but did nothing about it. The way Roddy Tyler flopped around in those duct-taped shoes even in the winter, despite the fact that he worked for the richest people in town. Tamara did not think Voorhisville was quaint, though it did have the annual Halloween parade with all the children dressed in costumes walking down Main Street. That was quaint. And Fourth of July in Fletcher’s Park, with Girl Scouts selling baked goods, Boy Scouts selling popcorn, and Mr. Muller twisting balloons into animal shapes while the senior citizen band played God knows what . . . well, that was quaint too. But Tamara saw the looks Raj, with his dark skin, got. “Doesn’t it bother you?” she asked, but he just laughed. That’s just the way Raj was. He didn’t care. It had been harder for Tamara. She wasn’t used to being a victim of prejudice.

“It would be like this in almost any small town in America,” Raj said. “You can’t let it upset you.”

But it did. It upset Tamara very much. It confused her, too. She could never be sure. Had the man at the post office been rude because he knew she was married to someone with dark skin, or had he just been a rude man? What about the checkout girl at the supermarket, and the lady who cut her off at the corner of Henry Street and Wildwood?

The novel Tamara was working on was called Underskin, about a nomadic tribe of tree dwellers and the consumers who ate them. It was a love story, a dark fantasy, a brutal indictment of prejudice, and her best work. But after her strange encounter with the blue-eyed man, it was contaminated. Also, Tamara would later note, wryly, she had to resist the urge to put in a band of avenging angels. They weren’t part of her plan for the book, and yet they kept appearing. She kept crossing them out.

Essentially, the work that had been going so well before she cheated on her husband started going very badly. This, Tamara knew, was God’s way of getting her. This and her pregnancy; that’s how she thought of it. She thought God had made her pregnant just to prove a point—which, she reasoned, was unnecessary, because she already knew she shouldn’t have cheated, so why’d God have to make her pregnant as well?

After Tamara took two home pregnancy tests, she called Planned Parenthood and made an appointment she never kept. Much later, when the bad things happened and she was stuck with all the other women chronicling their stories, she wondered if this decision had been a matter of enchantment.

When she told Raj they were expecting, he kissed her all over. (Raj, thankfully, mistook her tears for joy.) They talked about names and the dreams they had for the child. “I just want her to be happy,” Tamara said, and Raj laughed and said, “That’s a big dream.”

Over the next several months, Tamara found herself praying. She prayed to God, and she prayed to Krishna too. She prayed to everyone she could think of, like the Virgin Mary, and her Great-Uncle Cal (who would probably be embarrassed by all this, but was the only dead person Tamara had been close to.) Hi, Uncle Cal, she’d think. This is Tamara. I’m married now. And I made a mistake. Please, please make sure that this baby is Raj’s and not, well . . . I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. I know that. Thank you, Uncle Cal. She prayed to Kali, with her four arms and that mysterious smile of hers. She even prayed to that elephant—she could never remember his name, but Raj had a small statue of him in the living room, and she prayed to him because he looked nonjudgmental. For eight months, Tamara suffered in fear and anguish while her body blossomed, effortlessly. “I don’t know why women complain about being pregnant,” she told Holly.

“Sometimes it’s more difficult to have an easy pregnancy,” Holly said, “because then you’re not really prepared for the birth.”

At this, Tamara smiled.

But when the pain arrived it was the worst feeling Tamara could ever imagine. One second she was sitting at her desk crossing out angels, and the next she was on the floor, screaming. She was in so much pain she couldn’t even move. It hurt to breathe. It was torture to get up or slide across the floor, which is how she tried to reach the phone, because Raj had gone into work even though her due date was approaching. (“I’ll just call if anything happens,” she said. “We’ll have plenty of time. All the books say so.”) Tamara screamed and writhed on the floor for hours before Raj found her there. During those hours, Tamara accepted that she was being punished. She also accepted that she was going to die. She even reached the point where she wanted to die.

“I’ll call Holly,” Raj said.

“I’m dying,” she said.

“You’re not dying,” he said. Then she opened her mouth and screamed, and his eyes got round, and he called Holly.

Later, Holly said it was not an ordinary birth. “I think something’s happening here,” she said, mysteriously. Tamara was studying her baby, trying to decide who the father was. After several minutes of intense scrutiny, she asked, “Who do you think he looks like?”

Holly looked down at the baby, then at Tamara.

She knows, Tamara thought. How could she?

But Holly did not reach into her bag of birthing supplies to bring out a large scarlet letter. Instead, she left without addressing the question.

He did have blue eyes, but lots of babies do. His hair was dark, his skin was pink, and his body was an amazing, intricate, perfect blessing. After all those horrible dreams, and the months of guilt, and most especially the horrible pain of birth, Tamara felt blessed. In the end it didn’t matter who the father was. Well, it mattered, of course, but also, it didn’t. The only thing that really mattered was the baby.

Tamara thought she knew how she’d feel about her first child: protective, loving, proud. She had not been prepared to feel the way she did. In fact, she would say she had underestimated the power of the love she would feel for this little boy as much as she’d underestimated the pain of his birth.

It was three days later, after Raj had gone to the Becksworth airport to pick up her parents, when Tamara discovered the tiny sharp wings protruding from her baby’s back. By then she already loved him more than she had ever loved anyone or anything else. Her love was monstrous. When she saw the wings, she turned him over and stared into those deep eyes of his and said, “Nobody is ever going to know, little one.”

When Raj came home with her parents and their frightening amount of luggage, he kissed her on the cheek and said, “Everything okay?” She nodded. Later, when she had time to consider the disturbing events that followed, she pinned her ruin to that moment. The “thing she’d done with the stranger,” as she’d come to think of it, had been wrong, but she could no longer wish it away without wishing away her child.

No, what had sealed her fate was that moment when she decided to lie to her husband about the baby’s wings. It was no longer the three of them against the world, but mother and child against everyone else.

So many women were pregnant Shreve started a prenatal yoga class. “Something in the water,” they’d say, or “Who’s your milkman?”

Emily and Shreve thought they shared the biggest joke of all. Emily liked to say that they were “fuck-related,” though Shreve found this crude. They could not agree on what had happened to them. Emily thought Jeffrey was a jerk, while Shreve thought he was some sort of holy man.

“I can’t believe you think that,” Emily said. “Saints don’t have sex.”

“Not a saint,” Shreve said. “A yogi. And they do.”

“Oh, come on! He was just a man. He was just like other men.”

Shreve sighed, apparently remembering something wonderful beyond words.

This, of course, stressed Emily out. Did Shreve have better sex with him than Emily did? Was he gentler? Rougher? Had something profound happened between those two? Was he more attracted to Shreve? Was Shreve better at sex than Emily was?

She suggested that, in the interest of peace, they stop talking about it, and Shreve agreed.

Agreeing to disagree on the nature of what occurred with Jeffrey had been the first big test of their friendship. The next big test happened later.

Emily discovered her baby’s small, sharp, featherless wings on June fifth, while changing Gabriel into one of his cute little baseball outfits (Red Sox, of course). She watched in amazement as the tiny wings unfolded and folded shut again, drawn into his back. She touched the spot, certain she’d imagined the wings, a weird hallucination. (Maybe she’d just never gotten to that point in the pregnancy books.) She almost convinced herself that was what had happened, when, with a burp, the wings appeared once more. Emily reached to touch one. The next thing she knew, she was walking down the street with Gabriel secured in his Snugli against her chest. She patted the baby’s back, but didn’t feel anything unusual.

At that exact moment, Shreve was saying to her baby, Michael, “You’re going to meet your half brother today.” She believed Jeffrey had been some kind of an angel sent to her by her dead fiancé. She wasn’t sure why her dead fiancé had sent the angel to Emily also, except that it gave her son a brother . . . and that was a very good reason, the more she thought about it.

Michael had blue eyes, a remarkable head of dark curls, and two dimples. His pink flesh was already filling out, losing that newborn look. He had a round face and a round body, round hands, almost round feet, and a little tiny round penis. When Shreve turned him over to admire the beautiful symmetry of his little round butt, she watched, in amazement, as two wings blossomed from his back.

“I knew it,” she said.

She wanted to investigate the wings, but Emily would be there any minute, so Shreve hurriedly dressed Michael in a pink romper (she didn’t believe in the certain-colors-for-certain-genders thing) and wrapped him in the yellow blanket Emily had given her. It was rather warm in the house for a blanket, but Shreve thought it the best protection against any revelation of his wings.

Right then, the doorbell rang. “Hellooo,” Emily called, in a soft singsong voice. “Is there a mommy home?”

“Come in,” Shreve singsonged back, walking to the door with Michael in her arms.

“He’s beautiful,” Emily said. “He looks a lot like his brother.”

“Oh, let me see.”

“He just fell asleep. I don’t want to wake him.”

“Okay,” Shreve said, realizing that she had no idea what kind of mother Emily would be. “Well, come in. I’ll make some tea.”

The first time Emily had seen Shreve’s tiny kitchen—which was painted blue, yellow, and red—she thought it quite strange, but she had grown to like the cozy space. She sat at the small wooden table while Shreve prepared the teakettle and teapot, all while holding Michael.

“You look completely comfortable,” Emily said. “You probably gave birth like it was nothing.”

Shreve couldn’t even smile the memory away. She turned to her friend with an expression of horror. “No. It was terrible.”

“Me too,” Emily said.

“I mean, I expected pain, but it was—”

“I know, I know,” Emily said, so loud she woke up Gabriel. She didn’t move towards unstrapping the Snugli; but remained seated, jiggling her knees while the baby cried harder.

Shreve did not like to judge, but the thought occurred to her that Emily might not be very good at this mothering thing. “We could go in the living room,” Shreve said. “Lay them down on the blanket and introduce them to each other.”

“Sometimes he cries like this,” Emily heard herself saying, stupidly.

Shreve thought that even the way Emily tried to soothe her baby, like a police officer patting down a suspect, proved that not all women are natural mothers.

The teakettle whistled and Michael joined in the crying. Shreve, laughing, turned to take the kettle off the burner.

“Okay,” Emily said over her baby’s wailing. “Let’s go in the living room.”

It was warm enough that Shreve had opened the windows. The chakra wind chimes hanging outside were silent in the still air. Shreve realized she wouldn’t be able to justify laying Michael down wrapped in a blanket. Instead, she got the little carrier seat one of her yoga students had given her.

At the time, Shreve had not expected to ever use the thing. She intended to raise her child without ever making his body conform to the unnatural rigidity of plastic. Now Shreve placed the carrier at the edge of the blanket on the floor. She set Michael—who had already stopped crying—into it, and adjusted the straps. Emily could see his beautiful face and perfect little body, but there was no danger of exposing his wings.

“Oh,” Emily said. “I thought we were going to lay them down together.”

“I’ll get the tea. If he gets fussy, just leave him there, okay?”

Emily unfastened the Snugli and took Gabriel out. He looked at her with those intense blue eyes of his. She patted his back, and he started to make small noises. “Shhh, it’s okay,” she cooed. “Mommy’s just checking.” Satisfied, she laid him on the blanket in the sun, facing Michael.

Immediately the two babies grinned at each other.

“Shreve,” Emily called, “come quick. You have to see this!”

Shreve ran into the room. “I told you not to touch him,” she said, stopping short when she saw that Michael remained in the carrier.

Emily decided to forgive Shreve’s odd behavior. She pointed at the brothers. “Look,” she said, “it’s like they recognize each other.”

“I can’t believe he can do that already,” Shreve said.

“What?”

“Lift his head up like that.”

“Oh, yeah,” Emily shrugged. “He’s really strong.”

“Look at them,” Shreve said.

“It’s like they’re old friends.”

Shreve walked back to the kitchen and returned with the tray, which she set on the table next to the futon. She poured a cup for each of them. Emily sipped her tea, still focused on her baby’s back. That’s when she remembered that there had been a paper mill in Voorhisville, years ago. She’d heard about it once, she couldn’t remember where. Maybe there were chemicals in Voorhisville, in the soil, or perhaps in the water. “Have you ever heard anything bad about the city water?” she asked.

“Oh, I use bottled water,” Shreve said. “He’s beautiful. Have you thought of a name yet?”

“Gabriel.”

“Like the angel?”

“I guess it’s old-fashioned.”

“I like it,” Shreve said, but was thinking, Does she know something? Is she trying to trick me? “Why’d you choose it?”

Emily shrugged.

The two women sat sipping their tea and staring glumly at their beautiful children, Michael and Gabriel, who continued to coo and gurgle, occasionally even thrusting little fists in the other’s direction, as though waving.

“Emily?” Shreve asked.

“Uh-huh?”

“Do you believe in miracles?”

“Now I do,” Emily said. “You know, I’ve been thinking. Let’s say that we found out there was some kind of chemical, oh, in the soil, or something—you know, from the paper mill, for instance. Let’s say it was doing something to the people in Voorhisville. Would we call it a miracle? You know, if it was a chemical reaction or something? I mean even if what happened was, well, miraculous? Or would we call it a disaster?”

“What are you talking about?” Shreve asked.

“Crazy thoughts, you know. I guess from the hormones.”

Shreve nodded. “Well, you know what they say.”

“What?”

“God works in mysterious ways.”

“Oh,” Emily said. “That. Yeah. I guess.”

The two mothers sat on the futon, sipping green tea and watching their babies. The sun poured into the room, refracted by the chakra wind chimes. The babies cooed and gurgled and waved at each other. Shreve took a deep breath. “Do you smell that?”

Emily nodded. “Sylvia’s roses,” she said. “They’re brilliant this year. Hey, did you know she’s pregnant?”

“Maybe there is something in the soil.”

“I think maybe so,” Emily agreed.

On that day, it was the closest they came to telling each other the truth.

Theresa Ratcher had joined the library book club with her daughter Elli right after her fifteenth birthday. They left the house at 5:20 p.m. with the car windows rolled down, because the Chevy didn’t have air-conditioning. Elli sat in the front seat, leaning against the door, which Theresa had told her a million times not to do, in case it popped open. Theresa drove with one elbow sticking out the window, the hot air blowing strands of hair out of her ponytail. Elli had been humming the same melody all week. Theresa reached to turn on the radio, but thought better of it and pretended to wipe a smudge off the dashboard instead. She knew they would just have an argument about what station to listen to. The news was depressing these days.

“Maybe you could think of something else to hum?”

Elli turned, her mouth hanging open, a pink oval.

“You’ve been on that same song for a while.”

“Sorry,” Elli said, her tone indicating otherwise.

“I like to hear you hum,” Theresa lied. “It’s just, a change of tune would be nice.”

Elli reached over and snapped on the radio. Immediately the car was filled with static and noise, until she finally settled on something loud and talky.

Theresa glanced at her daughter. Did she really like this sort of “music”? This fuck-you and booty-this and booty-that groove-thing stuff? It was hard to tell. Elli sat slumped against the car door, staring blankly ahead.

Theresa glanced at her pretty daughter leaning both arms on the open window’s ledge, as though trying to get as far away from her mother as possible. She resisted the urge to tell Elli to make sure her head and arms weren’t too far outside the car; this was the sort of stuff that deepened the wedge between them. Still, Theresa argued with herself, she had heard that story about the two young men driving home after a night of drinking, the passenger, his head hanging out the window, hollering drunken nonsense one minute and the next—whoosh, decapitated by a guide wire. “Stick your head back in the car this instant.”

Elli gave her one of those you’re-ruining-my-life looks that Theresa hated.

“I just don’t want you getting your head chopped off.”

“This isn’t Iraq,” Elli said.

“What?”

“Nothing. I was making a joke.”

“It’s not funny. That’s not funny at all.” Theresa glanced at her daughter, hunched against the door, arm crooked, elbow hanging out the window. “Billy Melvern died over there. The Baylors’ daughter is leaving in a week.”

“It was Afghanistan.”

“What?”

“Billy Melvern didn’t die in Iraq. It was Afghanistan.”

“Still,” Theresa said.

Elli sighed.

Theresa snapped off the radio. Elli snickered, loudly. They drove the rest of the way to Voorhisville in silence.

What was it about him? Later, Theresa would spend many hours trying to name the thing that made Jeffrey so attractive. He arrived late, and, with a nod towards the moderator, sat down. That was it. He sat there, nodding, occasionally recrossing his legs as they talked about Faulkner, Hemingway, Shakespeare, and Woolf.

Theresa felt like she was in way over her head. She thought this would be like Oprah’s Book Club. Well, before Oprah started doing classics. To Theresa’s amazement, Elli was talking about one of Shakespeare’s plays. That’s the first time the stranger spoke. He said, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” and Elli smiled.

It was just a smile. There was nothing extraordinary about it. Well, other than that Elli had smiled. Theresa didn’t give it another thought after that. Certainly she hadn’t thought it meant anything.

Afterwards, when they were trying to decide if they would all go out for coffee, Mickey Freedman showed up and invited Elli to spend the night. “Are you sure it’s okay with your mother?” (Theresa was perpetually suspicious of Mickey Freedman who, though only Elli’s age, always acted so confident.)

“Yeah, it’s no problem,” Mickey said. “You wanna call her?”

Theresa considered the small purple phone the girl dug out of her backpack. The truth was, Theresa had no idea how to use these portable devices. She turned to Elli, who was chewing gum as though it was a competitive event. “Well, have a good time,” Theresa said, trying to sound breezy, fun.

The girls didn’t wait a second. They were gone, leaving the scent of gum, as well as something Theresa only noticed after the fact: a worrisomely smoky scent, wafting in the air behind them.

At that point, Theresa discovered everyone had left without her. There were only two places in Voorhisville where a book group could meet for coffee and conversation: The Fry Shack, out on the highway, or Lucy’s, which was a coffee shop in the pre-Starbucks sense of the word—a diner, really; though Lucy was fairly accommodating of the new fashion for only ordering coffee, as long as it was during off hours. Theresa walked out of the library and took a deep breath.

“Smells nice, doesn’t it?” the stranger said.

He was standing by the side of the building. Almost as though he’d been waiting.

Theresa nodded.

“Mind if I join you?”

What could she do? She couldn’t be rude, could she? He seemed perfectly nice, it was still light out, and it was Voorhisville, for God’s sake. What bad thing could possibly happen here?

“I’m not going to Lucy’s,” Theresa said, turning away from him.

“Neither am I,” he said, and fell in step beside her.

What had it been; what had it meant? Over and over again as the leaves fell to the dry flameless burn of that season, Theresa Ratcher asked herself these questions, as though if she asked enough, or in the right mental tone, the answer would appear. What had it been; what had it meant? As leaves fell in golden spiral swirls, on autumn days that smelled like apples. What had it been; what had it meant? As ghosts and vampires and dead cheerleaders carried treat bags and plastic jack-o’-lanterns through town—Theresa had forgotten what day it was—she returned home to find her husband in the living room watching The Godfather again, and she stood in the kitchen and stared out at the lonely unbroken dark.

What had it been; what had it meant? When she said, “I’m pregnant,” and her husband looked at her and said, “Are you kidding?” and she said, “No,” and he said, “This is going to be expensive,” and then, “Wait, I’m sorry, it’s just . . . are you happy?” and she had shrugged and gone to the kitchen and looked out the window at the lonely dark fields of broken corn.

What had it been; what had it meant? Standing in the frozen yard, snowflakes falling, swirling around her and then suddenly gone, leaving a cold ray of sun and the feeling in her body as though tortured by her bones.

What had it been; what had it meant? Opening the door to Elli’s bedroom, and seeing her standing there, naked, and realizing that she had not merely been gaining weight. “I’m your mother. Why didn’t you tell me?” Theresa asked. “I hate you,” Elli screamed, trying to cover her distended belly with a towel.

Elli

We are running out of the library, giggling because we are free! I see the guy from the library, not the old one with the tie, but the cute one with the eyes like Eminem. He smiles at me and I smile at him and Mickey goes all nuts and says, “Who is that?” and I just shrug. We are walking down the street and Mickey says, “The graveyard,” and I go, “What?” and she says, “Old Batface’ll tell my folks if we have a party or anything, but I know where my dad hides his peppermint schnapps. Let’s go home and make hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps and go to the graveyard. You’re not scared, are you?”

“I’m not afraid of ghosts,” I say. “It’s real people that freak me out. What if Batface sees us leave?”

“She watches Seinfeld all night long. We’ll go out the back door.”

So we walk down the street to Mickey’s house and that line keeps going through my head: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” I feel like I am in a dream, like I have a body but I don’t feel inside it, like we are surrounded by fireflies, even though it’s light out, like the sky is filled with twinkling; and I feel free. Free from my mom with all her fears and rules and that depressed way of hers, and free from Dad with his stupid jokes, and free from the farm with its shitty smell and the silence except for all the birds and bugs.

Mickey says, “Who should we invite?”

“Where’s your brother?” I ask. “Isn’t he supposed to be watching you?”

“Vin’s got one goal between today and Sunday night, when my parents get back, and that’s to get into Jessica’s pants. He doesn’t care what I do, as long as I don’t get in his way.”

Sure enough, when we open the door, we see a purse and two wineglasses. Upstairs, there is the sound of pounding, and Mickey looks at me and says, “Do you know what that is?” I shake my head. (We are such stuff as dreams are made on.) “He’s doing her,” she says and we giggle until we are bent over. Then Mickey opens cupboards and says, “Here, make the hot chocolate. I’ll be right back.”

I fill the teakettle with water and put it on the burner and think, What are we doing, why are we doing this? Then Mickey is back, talking on the phone, saying, “Yeah, all right.” Through the window I can see right into Mrs. Wexel’s living room where she’s sitting in a chair in front of the TV, and in the TV is tiny Jerry Seinfeld saying something to tiny Elaine, and even from all this distance I think how big their teeth are. Mickey puts the teakettle on and says, “They’re going to meet us there.”

We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

I pour hot water into the thermos and the light begins to fade and we leave out the back door, cutting across driveways and yards until we are on the road walking past the crooked house with the roses that smell so sweet, going up the hill to the graveyard, which is glowing. Mickey says, “You’re sure you’re not afraid?”

I say, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”

“Did you make that up?”

Before I can answer, Larry is standing there and Mickey says, “Where’s Ryan? Where are the guys?” Larry says, “He couldn’t come. Nobody could come.” He looks at me and nods and we trudge up the hill, weaving through the graves, past the angel, back past where all the dead babies are buried. We spread out the blanket and drink hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps. I feel like one of those body diagrams in science class. I picture a red line spreading to my lungs and my heart and into my stomach as the hot liquid goes down, and I think, We are such stuff as dreams are made on. The fireflies are blinking around the tombstones and in the sky, which is sort of purple, and that is when I realize Mickey and Larry are totally making out, and just then she opens her eyes and says, “Elli, would you mind?” So I get up and walk away, weaving through the headstones and the baby toys, the stuffed animals on the graves. I head up the hill to where the angel is, and that’s when I see him sitting there, and he smiles at me, just like he did at the library, and I am thinking, We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and I must have said it out loud because he goes, “Yes.”

I thought I saw a light shining out of him, like a halo, but let’s face it, I was wasted and everything was sort of glowing—even the graves were glowing. He didn’t try to talk to me and he didn’t ask me to come over, I just did. He didn’t ask me to sit down beside him, but I did, and he told me I had beautiful bones: “Slender, but not sharp.” I never saw wings, but I thought I felt them, deep inside me. He smelled like apples, and when I started crying, he whispered over and over again, We are such stuff as dreams are made on. At least, I think he did.

I passed out, until Mickey was standing over me going, “Jesus Christ, Elli, I thought you were dead or something. Why didn’t you answer me?”

“Did you do it?” I asked.

“He didn’t bring any condoms.”

“But you still did it, right?”

“What are you, nuts? I don’t wanna get AIDS or something.”

“Larry isn’t going to give you AIDS.”

“Come on, I feel sick. Let’s go home. You all right?”

“I had the strangest dream.”

She was already walking down the hill, the blanket trailing from her arms, dragging on the ground. I looked up at the angel and said, “Hello? Are you here?”

“Shut up, Elli. Someone’s going to call the cops.”

I felt like a ghost walking out of the graveyard. “Hey, Mickey,” I said, “it’s like we’re ghosts coming back to life.”

“Just shut up,” Mickey said.

Dogs barked and lights came on the whole way back to her house, where the two wineglasses were still there but the purse was gone. Mickey dropped the blanket on the floor and said, “I am so wasted.”

I said, “Nobody even knows we are here.”

Mickey rested her hand on my shoulder and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much.”

I followed her up the stairs into her room where we went to bed without changing our clothes. It wasn’t long before Mickey was snoring and I just lay there blinking in the dark, and it kept repeating in my head, over and over again: We are such stuff as dreams are made on. I fell asleep thinking it and I woke up thinking it and I’m still thinking it and I just keep wondering, Is any of this real?

Tamara

June in Voorhisville. The sun rises over the houses, the library, Lucy’s Diner, the yoga studio, the drugstore, the fields of future corn and wheat, the tiny buds of roses, the silent streets. Pink crab apple petals part for honeybees; tulips gasp their last, red throats to the sun; butterflies flit over dandelions; and the grass is lit upon by tiny white moths, destined to burn their wings against streetlamps.

The mothers greet the day with tired eyes. So soon? It isn’t possible. The babies are crying. Again. The mothers are filled with great love, and also something else. Who knew someone so small could eat so much!

Cathy Vecker complains to her mother and grandmother, who encourage her to consider bottle feeding. “Then we can hire a summer girl,” her mother says.

Jan Morris calls the real estate office where she works and breaks down in tears to the young receptionist there, who calls her own mother, who shows up at Jan’s an hour later with two Styrofoam cups of bitter tea, bagels from Lucy’s, and a pamphlet entitled “Birthing Darkness: What Every Woman Should Know about Post-Partum Depression” as well as—inexplicably—Dr. Phil’s weight loss book.

Sylvia takes her son into the garden, where she sits in the twig chair and thinks how tired her husband was before he died, and how she feels tired like that now, except alive. She cries onto her son’s shoulders.

Lara dresses her baby in a yellow onesie, checking his back several times, convincing herself that the strange thing she saw had been an hallucination. She is very tired. She can’t believe how much she has to arrange just to walk down the street to her studio. She feels like she’s packing for a week: diapers, socks, change of clothes, nursing blankets, an extra bra, a clean shirt. All while the baby lies there, watching.

The mothers of Voorhisville are being watched. Rumors have begun to circulate about strange births and malformed babies, though the gossip seems unfounded. Sure, the mothers look exhausted, but there’s nothing unusual about that. Yes, they describe the pains of birth as severe, but women have always said so. The only strange thing about the babies, despite what Brian and Francis think they saw, despite the rumors that nurse spreads all the way in Becksworth, is that they are all boys, and they are all beautiful.

Far from the rumors of town, out past the canning factory, over the hill behind the site of the old paper mill, Theresa Ratcher stands in her pantry, staring at glass jars filled with jelly. She means to be assessing what remains from the winter; instead, she is mesmerized by the colors. She stands, resting her hands on her great belly, as though beholding something sacred; certainly something more spectacular than strawberry, jalapeno, or yellow-tomato jelly. Her husband is in the field. She has no idea where Elli is. Theresa doesn’t like to think about Elli, and she doesn’t like to think about why she doesn’t like to think about her. For a moment, Elli, with her long limbs and protruding belly, stands in Theresa’s mind. She shakes her head and concentrates on the jars before her.

Elli is in the barn. She has no idea why. They don’t have any animals except for cats and mice. But Elli likes it in the barn. She finds it a peaceful place, her dad out in the fields, her mom somewhere else. These days, Elli likes to be far from her mother, because even when they are in different rooms, she can feel the hate. Elli stands in the middle of the barn, beneath the beams, which her father still obsesses about. She is biting her fingernail when the sharp pain drives her to the ground. She lets out a scream, which rises past the spiderwebs and silent, hanging blobs of sleeping bats, out the cracks and holes in the roof, where it mingles with Theresa’s scream as she falls to the ground in the pantry, knocking over several jars that shatter on the floor—an explosion of red goo, which her husband, when he returns for supper, assumes is blood. He runs to get the phone, but she screams at him to help, so he kneels before her in the glass and fruit, and she screams the head and shoulders out. Later, she tells him it’s jelly. He licks a finger but it tastes like blood. He helps her upstairs and tucks her into bed, the baby in the crib.

He looks everywhere for Elli, finally going to the barn where he barely sees her in the evening light. She is lying on the ground, surrounded by pools of jelly (he thinks, before he realizes, no, that can’t be right). She looks at him with wild eyes, like his 4-H horse all those years ago when she broke her leg, and she cries. “Daddy? It’s dead.”

That’s when he notices the small shape beside her. As he leans closer, she says, “Careful. They hurt.” He doesn’t know what she means until he sees the tiny bat wings spread across the small back. But that can’t be right. He looks down at his daughter, horrified. “It’s some kind of freak,” she weeps. “Just get rid of it.”

He picks the creature up, and only then notices its barely perceptible breathing. “Don’t touch the wings,” she says. He looks at her, his little girl who gave birth to such a thing. Now she can get on with her life.

“Get it out of here,” she says.

He takes the shovel and walks out of the barn, bats flying overhead. Curiosity gets the best of him, and he touches the wings. The next thing he knows, he is standing in the cornfield, beneath the cold light of the moon, staring at his dark house, listening to screams. He looks around in confusion but he can’t find the creature, or the shovel, or any sign that the ground has been turned. He runs to the barn.

He finds Elli lying on the ground, surrounded by wild cats, and screaming. He hears a noise behind him, the snapping of gravel, and turns to see Theresa slowly making her way towards them. “Go back. Just go back in the house,” he shouts. She stops, washed with white moonglow like a ghost. “You’ll be in the way. Call 911.”

Slowly, Theresa turns and walks towards the house.

He reaches between Elli’s legs, relieved to feel a crown of head there. “It’s all right. You’re just having another one.”

“I’m dying!” she screams.

“Push,” he says, with no real idea if this is the right thing to do or not; he just wants it out. “Push, Elli.”

She screams and bears down. He feels the head and shoulders. Squinting in the dark, he barely sees the cord. He’s already forming a plan for suffocation, if it’s like the other, but what comes out is a perfect baby boy that he tries to hand to Elli. She says she doesn’t want it. He is pleading with her when the EMTs arrive. They help all three of them into the house, where Theresa sits in the dark living room, cradling her baby.

“Everything all right?” she asks.

Elli opens her mouth, but Pete speaks first. “Everything’s fine,” he says. “A boy.”

“And a freak,” Elli says.

“What?” Theresa speaks to Elli’s back as she walks up the stairs, leaving the baby with the EMT who carried him inside. He hands the baby to Pete Ratcher, who thanks him for coming all that way “for nothing.” He says it’s his job, and not to worry, but Pete Ratcher watches the man walk down the driveway to the ambulance, shaking his head like a man who just received terrible news. Pete searches the sky for a long time before he realizes what he’s looking for. “I have to take care of something,” he says, and steps forward as though to hand the baby to Theresa.

She looks at him like he’s nuts. “Give him to Elli. She’s his mother.”

He walks up the dark stairs and enters his daughter’s room. “Elli? Honey?”

“Go away.”

“I have to check on something. You know, the other one.”

“Freak.”

“Elli, these things happen. It’s not your fault. And look, you have this one.”

“I don’t want him.”

“God damn it, Elli.”

He thinks that, all in all, he’s handled everything well. It’s been a hell of a night. He tries once more for a calm tone. “I have to go check on something. I’m going to put your baby right here, in the crib, but if he cries, you have to take care of him. You have to. Your mother is tired. Do you hear me, Elli?”

Elli mumbles something, which he takes for assent. He places the baby in the crib. It squirms, and he rubs its back. Only then does it occur to him that the baby is not diapered or clothed, not even washed, but still coated in the bloody slime of birth. He picks it up, and by the moonlight finds what he needs on the shelves of the changing table (a gift from Elli’s high school teachers). He cleans the baby with several hand wipes, tossing them towards the plastic trash can, not troubling to make sure any of them actually land inside. Finally, he diapers the baby, wrapping him tightly in a clean blanket and setting him in the crib. “Elli.” She doesn’t respond. “If he cries you have to take care of him. You have to feed him.”

“I want Mom.”

He realizes Elli doesn’t understand that Theresa has given birth today too. He tells her this, saying, “You have a brother, a little baby brother. Your mom is too tired to help you right now.”

When he closes the door, Elli gets up and walks across the room to stand at the window. After a minute, she sees him walking towards the cornfield. What could he be doing out there? she wonders. She turns away, shuffling like an old woman. She stands over the crib and touches the flat of the baby’s back, places her hand on his soft cap of hair, then reaches in and picks him up. He cries softly. She says, “There, there.” She jiggles him gently on her shoulder, but the soft cry turns into a wail. Why are you crying? she thinks. I’m not going to hurt you.

What is she supposed to do? She takes it back to bed with her, where she sits against the wall, jiggling it, saying, “There, there,” over and over again, until she finally gets the idea of feeding it. She unbuttons her shirt and smashes its face against her breast. It cries and wiggles in her arms before latching on to her nipple and sucking until he finally falls asleep.

She would like to sleep with him, but she remembers hearing how mothers sometimes squash their babies by mistake. She thinks this is probably an exaggeration, but she isn’t sure.

Eyes half-closed, she walks across the room, lays the baby in the crib, and shuffles back to bed. The next thing she knows, her mother is in the room in her nightgown, standing over the crib, and the baby is crying.

“Mom?”

“You have to feed him,” Theresa says. “You can’t just let him cry.”

“I didn’t hear it,” Elli says.

“Him.”

“What?”

“You didn’t hear him, not it. You have to take care of this, Elli. I’m busy with your brother.” Theresa picks the baby up and brings him to her. “Do you know where your father is?”

“He said he had to go take care of something.”

“You have to feed him, Elli.”

“In the cornfield. I know. Could I have some privacy, here?”

“I don’t want to have to keep getting up for your baby, too.”

“I didn’t hear him. I’m sorry.”

“You’re going to have to hear him,” Theresa says. “What’s he doing in the cornfield?”

But Elli doesn’t answer. She’s turned her back and is unbuttoning her shirt.

“Can you hear me?” Theresa asks.

“I don’t know what he’s doing in the cornfield. It’s Dad, all right?” She pokes her nipple into the baby’s mouth.

Theresa walks out of her daughter’s room, trying to stay calm, though she feels like screaming. She hears the baby crying and turns back, but Elli, who gives her a look as though she knew her mother had plotted this surprise return just to look at Elli’s bare breasts, is nursing him. It takes a few seconds before Theresa realizes the crying is coming from her own baby. Suddenly life has gotten so strange: her daughter nursing a baby whose father she won’t name; her husband out in the cornfield in the middle of the night; her own baby, whose lineage is uncertain, crying again, though it seems like only minutes since she fed him.

Voorhisville in June: those long hot nights of weeping and wailing, diaper changing and feeding, those long days of exhaustion and weeping, wailing, diapering, and feeding.

Sylvia’s roses grow limp from lack of care and—just as some dying people glow near the end—emit the sweetest odor. The scent is too sweet, and it’s too strong. Everywhere the mothers go, it’s like following in the footsteps of a woman with too much perfume on.

Emily continues baking, though she burns things now, the scorched scent mingling with the heavy perfume of roses and jasmine incense, which Shreve sets on a windowsill of the yoga studio.

“I have to do something,” she says, when the mailman comments on it. “Have you noticed how smelly it is in Voorhisville lately?”

The mailman has noticed that all the mothers, women who had seemed perfectly reasonable just last year, are suddenly strange. He’s just a mailman; it isn’t really for him to say. But if he were to say, he’d say, Something strange is happening to the mothers of Voorhisville.

Maddy Melvern doesn’t know any different; she thinks it’s always been this way. She stares at her son, lying on a blanket under a tree in the park. She looks away for one second to watch the mailman walk past—not that there’s anything interesting about him, because there isn’t, but that just shows how bored she is—and when she turns back to JoJo, he’s hovering over the blanket, six inches off the ground; flying. She holds him against her chest, frantic to see if anyone’s noticed, but the park is filled with mothers holding infants, or bent over strollers, tightening straps. Everyone is too distracted to notice Maddy and her flying baby. “Holy shit, JoJo,” she whispers, “you have to be careful with this stuff.” Maddy isn’t sure what would happen if anyone were to find out about JoJo’s wings, but she’s fairly certain it wouldn’t be good. Even pressed against her chest as he is, she can feel them pulsing. She eases him away from her shoulders to get a view of his face.

He’s laughing.

He has three dimples and a deep belly laugh. Maddy laughs with him; until suddenly she presses him tight against her heart. “Oh my God, JoJo,” she says. “I love you.”

Tamara Singh has just secured little Ravi in the stroller—not wanting to hurt him, of course, but making sure the straps are tight enough to keep him from flying—when she sees Maddy Melvern laughing with her baby. It just goes to show, Tamara thinks, that you never can tell. Who would have guessed that the teenage unwed mother, the girl who’d done everything wrong, could be so happy, while Tamara, who’d done only one single wrong thing (the illicit sex thing), would be so miserable?

What is love? Tamara thinks as she stares at little Ravi, crying again, hungry for more. She parks the stroller by a bench and unbuttons her blouse. Well, this is love, she thinks—sitting there in the park, filling his hunger, holding down his pulsing wings; watching the ducks and the clouds and the other mothers (it certainly seems like there are a lot of newborns this summer) and thinking, I would die to protect you; I would kill anyone who would hurt you. Then wondering, Where did that come from?

But it was true.

The mothers were lying. They told each other and their loved ones about wellness visits, but none of the mothers actually took their son to a doctor. Because of the wings. Both pediatricians at St. John’s were under the impression that they were losing patients to the other, and each harbored suspicions concerning the guerilla tactics being employed. The lying mothers became obsessed with their sons’ health. Each cough or sneeze or runny nose was the source of much guilt. Nobody wanted to kill her child. That was the point, the reason they had stayed away from doctors: it wasn’t about putting the babies at risk, it was about keeping them safe.

Friends and relatives concluded that the mothers were protective, coddling, suspicious, and overly secretive. The mothers even concluded this about each other, never suspecting they harbored the same secret.

“This is impossible,” Theresa Ratcher murmurs to herself the first time she sees little Matthew’s wings blossoming, like some sort of water flower, while she is bathing him in the sink. She touches one tip; feels the searing proof of hot pain; and the next thing she knows, she is standing in the cornfield. She runs to the house as though it is on fire, tumbles into the kitchen, where Elli sits feeding little Timmy. “Where’s Matthew?” Theresa asks. Elli looks at her like she’s nuts. Theresa glances at the sink, which is empty and dry.

“Did you lose him?” Elli asks. “How could you lose him?”

“Matthew!” Theresa runs upstairs. He is there, asleep in the crib. She pats his back, gently. It feels flat. Normal.

“What’s wrong?” Elli stands in the door, Timmy in her arms. “Mom? Are you all right?”

“I had a bad dream.”

“Outside? You fell asleep outside?” Elli asks. “Are you sick?”

Matthew cries. “I’m not sick,” Theresa says, unbuttoning her blouse. “Before I forget: When is your doctor’s appointment? Did you make that yet? I can’t be keeping track of all this anymore.”

“Don’t worry about it, then,” Elli says, walking down the hall to her room; but when she gets there, it smells like diapers, and flies buzz around the window. Still holding Timmy, Elli walks downstairs and onto the porch.

Her dad is in the cornfield with the boys he hired for the summer. They aren’t boys Elli knows. They’re from Caldore or Wauseega, her dad can’t remember which. They come to the house for lun