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Rae Meadows

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Mercy Train

St. Martin's Griffin

Sam

Sam was hungry for pound cake. Or at least for the making of it, for the recipe's humble simplicity—one pound each of flour, butter, eggs, and sugar—which had a certain elegance. The old-fashioned-ness of pound cake appealed to her, too, its satisfying solidity and lack of pretension, its buttery richness. Blame it on Wisconsin, she thought.

The trees had begun to change with the sugar maples leading the way, their golden-red leaves glowing through the rain-spattered windshield. It was October. Sam loved the ephemeral majesty and beautiful decay of fall, yet she couldn't enjoy it. Winter loomed. The promise of cracked lips from parched indoor heat, burned cheeks from pinprick winds, the grit of sand and salt everywhere. This would be their third winter in Madison, and she wondered how she would bear it, stuck inside with Ella, who was increasingly mobile, crawling circles around the living room, as darkness closed them in by four o'clock.

She sat in the backseat nursing Ella across the street from her friend Melanie's large Arts & Crafts house near Vilas Park on the Westside. She ran her thumb across Ella's forehead, the skin poreless and heartbreakingly soft, and then traced the tiny curlicues of her ear. Ella's hot baby hand braced against Sam's chest in close-eyed concentration. How easily Sam was forgetting the last eight months, each developmental milestone quickly replaced by another. When had Ella first smiled? Rolled over? Sat up? It would soon be lost in a fuzzy hodgepodge of that first year, of "when Ella was a baby," the specifics no longer interesting or important.

Today was the first time she would leave Ella with a babysitter. She didn't want to, but she was doing it to show Jack that she was normal. He had been urging her to get back into her studio for months. She knew he was starting to find it worrisome that she never wanted to leave Ella, that she thought she was the only one capable enough to look after her.

Jack was right. Sam did think that. The fear of something going wrong with the baby was overpowering. No one would be as watchful and anticipatory as she was. What if Ella fell back and cracked her skull? Swallowed a penny and choked? Got stung by a bee and went into anaphylactic shock? At times she resented the primacy of her role as mother. She felt all-consumed by her daughter, a need to smell her neck and see her breath and feel her weight and warmth. Jack was bemused by her irrational scenario spinning, wondering what had become of the woman who used to exude composure. A twenty-pound being had inverted their life together and made it unrecognizable, his wife unrecognizable.

But it was more than just leaving Ella. There was the matter of the commission. A teapot for the head of the English Department, an old-guard scholar whom Jack needed to win over. A gift for the man's wife, requested almost a year ago. Sam knew Jack had to restrain himself from mentioning it as the months ticked on. She hadn't used her studio since she was six months pregnant, when her belly made it impossible to center clay on the wheel properly. She did miss the damp-chalky smell of her porcelain. The luminous gray-white glow of pots not quite dry. The centrifugal birth of opening a shape, a vessel, from a lump. Something from nothing. But now going back to work spun an anxiety that was new and ferocious. With porcelain she had to bring total consciousness, to be vigilant with form, because there was no roughness to hide behind. She had a lingering fear that her hands would no longer work in steady tandem, that she had lost her ability, her eye. Or, almost worse, that her pieces would be lackluster, relegated to craft fairs or a tent at the farmers' market, her creativity lost to motherhood. Cobwebs now ran from the window to her tools, and a strange crystalline mold grew up from her wedging table.

Ella pulled away and sat up gurgling and, with a large burp, dripped milk from her satisfied lips. Sam still got up a few times a night to nurse her. She couldn't bear to let her "cry it out"—to let her scream for an hour until she collapsed in exhaustion—as if a baby's need was something to be drained. Jack didn't mind Ella's wake-ups since he slept right through most of them. To the pediatrician and her friend Melanie, Sam lied and said Ella was sleeping through the night, not wanting to defend herself, expose her weakness. Sam had become the type of parent she used to disparage: the pushover, the hoverer, the handmaiden to the royal empress.

The rain had stopped, and the stately neighborhood was drenched in shiny yellow and red leaves. Ella twisted and squawked, climbing up Sam's front.

"Okay, okay, baby," Sam said. "We're moving."

Her phone rang as she got out of the car, bobbling Ella and baby gear. She banged her knee against the door and spilled the diaper bag.

She answered her husband with a clipped "Hi," trying to keep the baby from flipping out of her arms.

"Hey," Jack said. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fumbling everything. Heading into Melanie's."

"Oh, sorry. I thought you'd be on your own already. I'm proud of you, you know," he said.

"It's just a babysitter."

"Still."

"We'll see how it goes." She felt herself love him again. Since the baby, it seemed her feelings toward him required moment-to-moment readjustment.

"The rooter guy is coming today," Jack said.

"I know," she said quickly, irritably. She had, of course, forgotten.

Roots from the big maple tree in front had invaded their sewer pipes, and every six months they had to be drilled out. Sometimes Sam would lie awake and feel their old house decomposing around her, the foundation cracking, the roof leaking, the wooden clapboards rotting. What a transparent metaphor, she clucked to herself, but she was still powerless against the feeling that their home was going to seed faster than they could repair it. One of these days as she bathed Ella she was sure the claw-footed tub would fall through the soggy floorboards into the basement.

"Hey, you know how I told you about the committee search for David's job? How Samuels wants a theory person even though that would leave no one to teach Modern American?"

"Uh huh."

Sam still didn't know much about the esoteric workings of academia, but she supposed Jack didn't know what raku meant, or what terra sigillatta was, or how a glossy brown-black temmoku glaze would turn yellow-green in a salt firing. Their professional lives were secret lives, to some extent, the details not really part of the marriage. She wondered if this made their work dangerous or necessary or both.

Jack lowered his voice. "There's some stuff going on here."

"Dadadadada," Ella said, yanking Sam's hair with her dimpled fist.

"Got to go," Sam said to Jack. "I'll call you in a bit."

Sam squatted to pick up the diapers, now wet and dirty from the pavement, and tried to stretch her free hand under the car to get the pacifier that had rolled underneath, all without bumping the baby's head. She stood, blew the hair out of her face, and kicked the door closed behind her.

"I'm walking, honey," she murmured. "Let's get inside, shall we? I'll only be gone for a few hours. Nothing to worry about."

Sometimes Sam thought that having a baby allowed her to act like a crazy person, talking to herself in public, even singing, and not always in a desperate...