Then a tingling, a stinging as her milk trickles to him, sticky and yellow.
“Vormilch,” Sister Franziska says. “He won’t get much from you this first time. Just a few drops.”
Vormilch. Milk that comes before milk. Other Girls had Vormilch before Sister Franziska bound their breasts and brewed sage tea. Tilli stifles a sob of release when the baby sucks right away and his shrieks dwindle to sniffles at her nipple that fits him and unfurls his belly. He fills her arms, four times as heavy as her own girl.
She sees her mother lifting the ribbon with her amber moth amulet to Tilli’s neck. Saying, “Let me see how this looks on you.” But her mother’s hands tremble, and Tilli instinctively steps from the circle of ribbon—why? why then?—before the amulet can graze her skin. When it slips from the ribbon to the floor, Tilli’s mother laughs uneasily, such dread in her eyes, recognizing what Tilli can’t begin to understand though she lives on a farm.
From then on wrestling becomes a secret. Still, twice they get caught. Thrashed with the carpet beater. Locked into separate places: cellar and stable.
The morning their father saddles two horses and rides off with Alfred to board him with a farmer two hours away—Work him hard, he demands—their mother takes Tilli to the midwife’s house.
In the kitchen she makes Tilli lie on the table and presses one ear against her belly. “Pull her legs apart.”
“She can’t be pregnant,” cries Tilli’s mother.
“Wider.”
“She’s only eleven.”
“I had another eleven-year-old,” the midwife whispers. “Barely survived. The baby didn’t.”
Her mother’s hand on Tilli’s belly. A fish leaping oh—
* * *
Sister Franziska straightens the mother’s legs on the bed. Lowers her head to the pillow. But the mother spins her face toward Tilli. Streaks of silt on her neck and arms. Eyes like cracked glass. “You are a child—”
“She’s the only one with milk.” Sister Franziska kneels and brings her arms around the mother’s shoulders. “Lie down now.”
“Don’t you have someone older?”
“Veronika. But her milk has almost dried up. I won’t make her start over again.”
“How old?”
“Sixteen.”
“No, no—this child.”
“Eleven.”
“This is so very wrong.”
Tilli kisses the little boy. Too late, the Sisters said. Except now Tilli suspects why they haven’t let her nurse her own girl—because of this … this odd and sweet fusion of a baby’s mouth with your nipple that sets your body alight, stuns you with foreknowledge—more potent than memory—that he’ll be the last child to ever drink from you.
Think how much stronger this would be with my own.
Too late—
Think of all the children who are never chosen.
* * *
“We can tell people the child is mine,” her mother whispered. “Raise it as ours—”
“You don’t want that,” her father whispered.
“Some women raise—”
“If it came from anyone other than Alfred.”
“It’s family.”
“Too much so. What if it has a clubfoot? A harelip? Water on the brain—”
Tilli’s mother covers her eyes.
And Tilli becomes invisible. So invisible her parents no longer bother to whisper.
“And what if we raised it—what then? She’ll have more bastards … maybe one without a face.”
Without a face? Tilli can’t breathe.
“We never saw that one,” says her mother.
“Others saw. And those parents are just cousins. Brother and sister is worse.”
“A sin.”
Once they name it, sin takes root. Spreads. Blends their voices.
“The worst of all sins.”
“They must have known.”
“They’ve seen dogs hump. Horses.”
“Held a heifer ready to be mounted.”
“Those two cannot stay away from each other.”
“It’s rather that she won’t stay away.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“If we send her away he’ll take his seed elsewhere.”
* * *
Sister shifts the baby to Tilli’s other breast.
“How old?” Tilli whispers.
“Eight months.”
Eight months.
Two hundred forty days.
Two hundred forty times as old as my own girl.
Tilli misses her brother. Misses the habit of knowing he’s close by. He doesn’t have that either, knowing she’s close by. Itching in her palms circles her fingers, circles her palms to the backs of her hands as it does after she eats chicken, even just a few shreds in the soup last night. The baby’s pudgy hands pat her breasts.
“I’ll pray with you, Frau Jansen.” Sister Franziska nudges her rosary at the toymaker’s wife who twists her fingers into a knot that won’t let the rosary in. Tilli wants to snatch it, hide it, especially when Sister drapes it around the mother’s wrists.
I’ll steal the rosary, Tilli promises the mother silently. I will.
Downstairs the voices of the priest and the toymaker. The toymaker’s voice listless, not exuberant like yesterday at the Zirkus when Tilli saw him with his arm around his wife. A pretty man. Dangerous to marry a man prettier than you. Every girl knows that. But the toymaker’s wife felt pretty. Tilli could tell by the way she stood so close to her husband with this baby they made together balanced on her hip. For everyone to see. Two girls and a boy tug at them; the girls dark-haired like their father, the boy fair like his mother and baby brother. When the parents smile at each other, Tilli wishes they were hers. Parents like that follow their children to the concession stand, where the father buys little sticks with honeyed nuts for the three oldest, tickling beneath their chins to make them giggle. Parents like that keep their children close by.
* * *
“A birthing clinic,” Tilli’s mother said. “For girls like you.”
Her father said, “You leave tomorrow. On the train.”
“When can I come home?”
Tilli’s mother won’t look at her. Her face is gray.
“Two trains and a ferry,” says her father.
“He’ll travel with you,” says her mother.
Dawn. And her mother with her arms down her sides. Stiff arms. Arms too heavy to lift when Tilli embraces her.
“Mutti—” she screams. “Mutti—”
Her mother motions to the food she’s packed.
Hanover to Hamburg: Her father sits across from Tilli, one leg stretched across the aisle so she can’t run away.
Hamburg to Husum: His eyes are half-closed, and it comes to her that he’s ashamed of her.
Husum to Nordstrand: He won’t speak to her until he walks her onto the ferry. “I want to be clear about this. You cannot come home.”
“Never?”
“You must never contact us.”
“But I’ll give it away, the baby. I’ll—”