The Burning Season by Alison Wisdom

Author:Alison Wisdom
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2022-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

When we get home, there’s a bassinet on the front porch. As we get closer, I recognize it from Julie’s house—a pretty wicker basket with a muslin lining, perched on curved legs that rock from side to side. “Rob said he would bring it by,” Paul says, picking it up. He puts it in our bedroom, on the floor next to my side of the bed, and I carefully place Lily in it. As I do so, she wakes up, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that. I don’t even know when babies go to sleep. It’s nine o’clock. Do I just leave her there?

“When is someone coming to get her?” I ask Paul, following him as he walks out of the bedroom, back down the hallway, into the kitchen. “What’s this?” I point to a bottle warmer sitting on the counter next to a brown paper grocery bag.

“A bottle warmer,” says Paul.

“I know it’s a bottle warmer,” I say. “I’m not an idiot.”

“You asked,” he says. He reaches past me and opens the refrigerator, pulls out a small container of breast milk, then dips his hand into the brown paper bag and pulls out a plastic baby bottle. He hands them both to me. “Do you know how to do this?” he asks.

I sigh and take them. “I can figure it out.”

“It’s just for a little while,” Paul says. “Until Rob is ready to have her back. He needs some time.”

“Why wouldn’t someone else take her?” I ask.

“Because this makes the most sense,” he says. “There aren’t many people here with the room to spare. Everyone else has their own children already.”

I press some buttons on the bottle warmer—it looks like a small rocket ship, sleek and aerodynamic, expensive-looking, and I wonder where it came from—until a little clock appears and starts a countdown. I turn back to Paul and lean against the counter.

“What?” he says. “Why are you looking at me like that? I don’t get why you’re being so combative with me. We want a baby. Here is a baby.”

“‘Here is a baby’?” I ask. “Seriously?”

“There’s something else too,” he says. “Okay? Another reason. I should’ve led with it, I guess.”

“Okay,” I say warily.

“Papa had a prophecy, about Lily of the Valley and Julie,” he says. “And about you.”

A basket held by unseen hands. A canyon filling with water, a flash flood building, unstoppable. Vanity and a pair of scissors. I am a thing, always a thing. The bottle warmer beeps. I open it, letting loose a small cloud of steam. The bottle feels hot. Too hot? How can you tell?

“Lily is a special baby,” Paul says. “Julie was right that she isn’t just an average baby, but otherwise she had it all wrong. God has imbued her with so many gifts. Ears to hear, eyes to see. That’s how Papa was able to call her back to him during her birth.”

“Okay,” I say. “Tell me the story.”

“Papa saw a castle,” he says. “Moat, drawbridge, tall towers.

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