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By Root 408 0

Papa bundled mother and child into the jeep, wrapping them in blankets against the drafts. They tried to think up a girl’s name over the roar of the engine. Mama was so sure the child was a boy, due to differences in the pregnancy, including more morning sickness and carrying lower, that all they’d prepared were boys’ names. Leif, after Leif Ericson, Starbuck after Coleman ancestors. David for Mama’s father. They even flirted with Eliot the Third, but dismissed the tradition of giving a son the father’s name, as Papa had been given his. Not until two days later did they decide on Heidi, a nickname for Adelheid from the book Heidi, about the orphan girl who finds a home and many adventures with her grandfather on a remote mountainside in the Swiss Alps.

It makes sense we’d have a girl, Papa thought to himself. Based on something he read and the amount of stress he’d been under that year, he theorized that the gender of a child was determined by which partner was under more stress during conception. If the man was more stressed, the child would be a girl; if the woman was more stressed, it would be a boy. This was nature’s way of looking out for us, he reasoned; either the man needed more females around to nurture him, or the woman needed more males around to take care of the hard work. It was one of Papa’s less enlightened theories, but at the time it made sense—he was certainly stressed, and perhaps something in him was also disappointed not to have a son.

They fetched me from the Nearings’ house, where they’d left me with Keith and Jean, and let me hold the tiny sleeping parcel in my arms. I felt a mixture of fear and then tenderness when she mewed and began to fuss. Mama took the bundle back and lifted her shirt to nurse. Another feeling came suddenly and inexplicably. Mine! I hovered next to Mama and clung to her arm.

“Mama,” I said, “Mia,” which was what I used to call nursing when I was little.

“You’re a big girl now,” Papa said. “Mama needs all the milk for the baby.”

I felt the blue egg rise from my belly. It didn’t come all the way up to my throat, but it didn’t go back down either. It lingered somewhere near my heart for a while.

“When will she be ready to play?” I pouted.

“Not yet, but we’ll get you a doll so you have your own baby to worry about,” Papa suggested. That evening while Heidi was sleeping, I was glad to go alone with Mama to milk the goats, as I had the night before. “I gave birth and didn’t even miss a milking, just like the she-goats do,” Mama bragged to Papa when she returned still high on postpartum hormones, with the full bucket.

Though it was not as exciting as I imagined it would be, I finally had a new sibling. Sadly, around that same time, an old friend was on his way out. Norman the Normal Dog spent most of the day on the padded benches, his back legs useless, moaning when he moved.

“It isn’t right to make him live in pain,” Papa said. “We’ll have to put the old guy to sleep.”

It didn’t sound so bad, to go to sleep, but I started to cry at the thought of Norm lying there still, his nose quiet on his paws.

“Papa, why does he have to go to sleep?” I sobbed.

“He’s really tired,” Papa said, his eyes as hard as they were about the billy goats.

Norm knew. He whimpered and licked my hand when we made him comfortable in a blanket. Papa wrapped it around Norm and lifted him in his arms to take him to the vet in the jeep. The bundle seemed so little.

“Don’t take him away,” I cried.

“Norm will come back to rest in the orchard with the billy goats,” Mama said, her nose reddening. I flopped down on the couch where the hairy imprint of Normie’s body in the cushion was still warm and dog-smelling and cried until I, too, felt like sleeping.

“Lissie, come rest with me and Heidi,” Mama called.

“No,” I sobbed. I didn’t want to go to sleep and not wake up. Whenever I thought of Norm “sleeping” in the orchard, the old lump rose again to my throat.

Before we knew it, the days lengthened and Papa was out in his rubber boots, turning the compost with a pitchfork and starting seedlings in the greenhouse.