the profile of its spindles. He had a business, Halvorsen Restoration, with two trucks and four guys and a logo of a sawtooth gable that Tessa had designed on a napkin. They bought the narrow blue house on Tenth Avenue East, a 1908 foursquare with a view of the lake if you leaned out the attic window, and they were happy in the noisy, overspending way of people who think happiness is a thing that compounds.
Linnea came at the end of October, two weeks early, on a night of freezing rain. Nora drove up the next morning with Pickle in a carrier on the passenger seat and found her sister sitting in a hospital bed at St. Mary's with the baby in her arms and a look on her face that Nora would not have a name for until much later.
"Isn't she perfect," Tessa said, and her voice was perfectly normal, and her eyes were not.
For the first ten days, everyone said it was the baby blues. Tessa did not sleep, but no one with a newborn sleeps. Tessa cried, but everyone cries. Tessa talked fast and laughed in the wrong places and once, in the kitchen, told Nora in a calm, reasonable whisper that the baby's eyes changed color when Daniel was in the room and that she needed to figure out what that meant. Nora laughed, because it sounded like a joke, and Tessa laughed too, and then Tessa did not laugh, and the not-laughing went on for too long.
On the eleventh night, Daniel found his wife standing barefoot on the back steps in the freezing dark, holding the baby out from her body at arm's length, saying in a low, patient voice that she was only checking, she just needed to check, she would put her back in a minute.
He got the baby. He got Tessa inside. He called 911, and then he called Nora, who was asleep on an air mattress in the dining room twelve feet away and had heard none of it.
Postpartum psychosis, the psychiatrist at the hospital said the next morning, in a small beige room with a box of tissues on every flat surface. Rare. Serious. Treatable. Not anybody's fault. She said those last words twice, looking at Daniel and then at Nora, as though she knew from experience which of them would need to hear it more. Tessa would need to be admitted. After that there would be a partial program, and after that, maybe, if she was willing, a longer residential treatment, because there were other things underneath this, things that had perhaps been underneath for a long time, and this had only brought them up into the light.
"How long," Daniel said. His voice had gone small.
"I can't tell you that," the doctor said. "I'm sorry. Weeks, at least. Possibly longer."