The baby was born with a hole in her spine, and all the love that Estelle and Art poured into it was not enough to seal her tiny soul inside. Estelle--daughter of Florida, tall, thin and elegant--chain-smoked cigarettes in a silver holder and clung to Art’s broad chest. She swallowed her grief, buried it in her vacant womb, polished it to a fist-sized pearl with unshed tears. A year later, it thrust itself into the surgeon’s hand,leaving her barren.

I was born then, Art’s sister’s first girl. Baby-simple, I warmed to my aunt’s caresses, not knowing I had stolen them.

Estelle and Art lived exotic in the brick jungle of Chicago, while I tended cows and schoolbooks. I saw them little. But in my tenth summer, they drove me with them to Florida. My mother said, "You have always been her favorite."

I cared nothing for the Why. Wild with ocean, shoes leaking sand, I body-surfed breakers and gobbled crayfish, and ogled as Estelle’s tiny mother dipped snuff from a jeweled snap-top box. I filled my Brownie camera with wonders: Mountains, motels, segregated beaches. Art and Estelle; her regal poise; his frayed black stogies. Leaning on the Buick. His broad hand brown on her lady-white shoulders. Her bobbed black hair against his muscled arm.

Summer died. I stumbled fiercely about the barn, kicking chickens, stabbing cows with truculent stares.

For Art, summer’s end was death. Mother told me one wind-whipped school afternoon: his heart.

I felt loss. But I was selfishly young, filled with books and plans and,yes, the dreaded cows. Estelle pulled Art’s old Buick up to the house. Her head high, she drew me to her narrow smoky bosom, laid a scarlet-tipped finger on my cheek and searched my eyes—for what, I did not know. Then she nodded and drove away. To replant herself in Florida, with her mother.

I grew away from farm and family, grew like Jack’s beanstalk through clouds into a blue sky of airplanes, into far-flung agoras and feluccas and minarets and yurts. I fell in love in a jungle, far from cows; we shimmered with life and purpose and made perfect children.

In Florida, a past land, Estelle’s mother shrank and faded, and disappeared. I sent the obligatory letter. I received pictures—Estelle tall, pole-thin, rail-straight, long now-holderless cigarette held split-fingered at her chin. Alone. Old. In her new Buick. Her letter spoke, strangely, of Art: Ah, I miss the man. He knew me.

She was eighty when her smoke-brittled bones crumbled. Estelle was gone, drifted ash, before I reached Florida. Side by side, my mother and I boxed away chic size-two dresses for charity in her haunted, orderly house.

In a bedroom redolent of pine and old smoke, buried deep beneath sweaters and lavender sachet, I found a small snow-white box.

Inside, cradled lovingly in rose-dotted tissue, lay hand-knit pink baby booties.


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Susan O'Neill lives and writes in Andover, Massacusetts.

Her new collection of short stories of Vietnam entitled Don't Mean Nothing are the subject of The Editor's Pick - Potpourri's book review this month. It can be ordered from Amazon by clicking here: Books We Like. She can be reached by email at skoneill@hotmail.com