The Light Through the Leaves - Glendy Vanderah Page 0,2
to Ellis’s questions about him.
She dabbed a dribble of breast milk on the side of the baby’s lips with her finger. Viola reacted to her touch, turning her mouth instinctively toward it, but stayed asleep.
Even now, more than two months postpartum, Ellis sometimes couldn’t believe Viola was there, another being she’d created, another little person who depended on her. Just when she’d finally gotten used to her routine with Jonah and the boys, when she’d almost come to terms with the strange future the unplanned twins had thrust upon her and Jonah. Thrown from campus life into suburbia. Botany texts traded for parenting books. Singles’ parties replaced by playgroups. Graduate school applications buried beneath research into preschools.
Ellis suspected the sudden reality of another baby had been as much of a shock to Jonah. Maybe that was why he’d escaped into the affair with Irene. Yet, he’d been the one who pushed for another baby. As the boys approached four, when they looked more “little boy” than toddler, Jonah had said he wanted a baby in the house again. He missed the infant stage, hoped for a girl.
And here was his little girl, left mostly to Ellis—an exhausted, milk-dripping matron, also juggling two active boys, while Jonah got to act his twenty-nine years, talking to adults at work, going out for drinks, feeling attractive with a beautiful young woman.
“Stop it!” River said. “Mom!”
Tadpole catching was not going well. None of it was. Ellis had come to the woods to calm herself, but she felt worse than when she’d arrived and still been in shock. Now she was angry.
And she felt guilty, she realized, because that inkling she’d had from the start, that she and Jonah weren’t meant to be, must have been real. Even months after they’d been together, she’d sensed an absence of passion in him, though he frequently proclaimed his love for her. She’d mistrusted her doubts, assuming the deficiency—if there was one—had to do with her. She had plenty of proof that she was to blame. Her mother hadn’t wanted her. Zane had left her, hadn’t even said goodbye. Ellis wasn’t like regular people. She was unsociable and peculiar, not the kind of person anyone wanted to stick with.
She had to get out of the forest. For the first time in her life, her favorite environment felt all wrong, as if it had also betrayed her. The trees and rocks, the dark water, whispered about her, telling the story of the needy little girl who’d written notes to no one.
She hastened the tadpole catching. The boys complained about her helping, but at the rate they were going—Jasper with two tadpoles in his jar, River with four—they would be there for hours. Ellis scooped tadpoles into the net she’d taken from Jasper and dumped them into their jars. When she tried to get them moving, River complained that Jasper had more in his jar.
“It doesn’t matter. They’re all going into one tank,” she said.
“It’s not fair,” River said.
She dropped another net of the wriggling creatures into River’s jar, increasing his catch by at least half a dozen. He shot Jasper a triumphant grin.
“Mom . . . ,” Jasper began.
“Enough,” she said, screwing the lids onto the mason jars.
Viola was still asleep. Ellis wrapped her arm around the carrier handle, picked up the bag with nets, and headed down the trail. Every step closer to the van was like heading for a cliff edge. When Jonah got home, she’d tell him what she’d decided. She had to step off the precipice, end this charade they were calling a marriage.
No, she wasn’t ending it. Jonah already had. She had to be firm with herself about that.
A raven called its guttural croak from the direction of the trailhead parking lot. Something had it riled up, maybe a hawk near its nest. As Ellis arrived in the parking lot, she saw the raven. It was perched on a branch over her van, calling with strange urgency, voicing the wretchedness of her situation. She wished it would shut up.
River and Jasper were already arguing about who got middle and who got back. Ellis hated to do it, but she gave easier-going Jasper the short straw as she often did to minimize conflict.
“But River got middle on the way here,” Jasper said.
“Did he?” Ellis said. “Go on, get in.”
“But, Mom, it’s not fair. It’s my turn.”
Of all days for him to start challenging River’s authority. But Ellis liked his sudden confidence.