The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve Page A

thick and black, which accentuates the navy
     of her eyes. Even then she has extraordinarily long lashes that charm me to the bottom of my soul and stop passers by on the
     street. Our friends congratulate me for having produced such a beguiling creature, but inwardly I protest. Was I not merely
     a custodian — a fat, white cocoon?
    In the first several weeks after Billie’s birth, Thomas and Billie and I inhabited a blur of deepening concentric circles.
     At the perimeter was Thomas, who sometimes spun off into the world of students and the university. He bought groceries, wrote
     at odd hours, and looked upon his daughter as a mystifying and glorious interruption of an ordered life. He carried Billie
     around in the crook of his arm and talked to her continuously. He introduced her to the world: “This is a chair; this is my
     table at the diner.” He took her — zipped into the front of his leather jacket, her cheek resting against his chest or her
     head bobbing beneath his chin — on his daily walks through the streets of the city. He seemed, for a time, a less extraordinary
     man, less preoccupied, more like the cliché of a new father. This perception was reassuring to me, and I think to Thomas as
     well. He discovered in himself a nurturing streak that was comforting to him, one that he couldn’t damage and from which he
     couldn’t distance himself with images and words. For a time, after Billie was born, Thomas drank less. He believed, briefly,
     in the future. His best work was behind him, but he didn’t know that then.
    In the middle circle were the three of us, each hovering near the other. We lived, as we had since Thomas and I were married,
     in the top half of a large, brown-stained, nineteenth-century house on a back street in Cambridge. Henry James once lived
     next door and e. e. cummings across the street. The neighborhood, thought Thomas, had suitable resonance. I put Billie in
     a room that used to be my office, and the only pictures I took then were of Billie. Sometimes I slept; sometimes Thomas slept;
     Billie slept a lot. Thomas and I came together in sudden, bewildered clutches. We ate at odd hours, and we watched late-night
     television programs we had never seen before. We were a protoplasmic mass that was becoming a family.
    And in the center circle — dark and dream-like — was the nest of Billie and myself. I lay on the bed, and I folded my daughter
     into me like bedclothes. I stood at the window overlooking the back garden and watched her study her hands. I stretched out
     on the floor and placed my daughter on my stomach and examined her new bright eyes. Her presence was so intensely vivid to
     me, so all-consuming, that I could not imagine who she would be the next day. I couldn’t even remember what she had looked
     like the day before. Her immediate being pushed out all the other realities, blotted out other pictures. In the end, the only
     images I would retain of Billie’s babyhood were the ones that were in the photographs.
    At the Athenaeum, I put the papers back into the flesh-colored box and set it on the library table. I fold my hands on top
     of it. The librarian has left the room. I am wondering how the material can have been allowed to remain in such a chaotic
     state. I don’t believe the Athenaeum even knows what it has. I suppose I am thinking that I will simply take the document
     and its translation and then bring them back the following week after I have photocopied them. No one will ever know. Not
     so very different, I am thinking, from borrowing a book from a lending library.
    I put the loose letters, photographs, sermons, and official documents back into the folder and eye it, trying to judge how
     it looks without the box. I put the three books I have been given on top of the folder to camouflage the loss. I study the
     pile.
    I cannot do it.
    I put the box back inside the folder and stand up.
Goodbye,
I say, and then, just as I am leaving, in a somewhat