She learned, too, how little Daniel knew. Not because he was careless. He was gone from six in the morning until dark, chasing jobs, and when he came home he was so tired he would fall asleep on the couch with Linnea on his chest, both of them snoring, and Nora would stand in the doorway and feel something soften in her toward him that she did not examine too closely. He was trying. That was the thing she would remember later, when it would have been easier to forget it. That first winter, he was trying.
Tessa was moved from the hospital to the partial program and from the partial program, in January, to a residential women's treatment center outside Rochester, two hundred and thirty miles south, on a hillside of oak trees and snow. She called on Sundays. At first the calls were short and confused and full of apologies. Later they got longer. She asked about the baby in a careful, frightened way, as if she were reaching toward a hot stove. Nora told her everything. She described the baby's first real smile, which had happened during the car dealership jingle. She described the way Linnea grabbed fistfuls of Nora's hair and held on like a climber. She did not say you should be here. She did not say when are you coming home. The doctors had been clear about that.
"Does she look like me," Tessa asked once, very quietly.
"She has your chin," Nora said. "And she's furious all the time. So yes."
Tessa laughed, a real laugh, the first in months, and Nora went into the bathroom afterward and ran the faucet so that no one would hear her.
Ruth Halvorsen came by on Tuesdays and Fridays, in those months, bringing hotdish in Pyrex dishes labeled with masking tape, and she was polite to Nora in the way a Lutheran church secretary of forty years is polite to a volunteer who has rearranged the hymnals without asking. Ruth was seventy, small and upright, with white hair she had set every Saturday at the same salon on Superior Street. She had raised two boys alone after her husband died on an ore boat in 1994, and she had opinions about how babies should be swaddled, and she voiced them. Nora let her. It cost nothing, and Ruth's swaddles were, if Nora was honest, better than her own.
Once, in February, Nora came downstairs at five in the morning and found Ruth sitting in the rocking chair by the window, holding the sleeping baby and looking out at the black lake.
"I didn't hear you come in," Nora said.
"Daniel gave me a key." Ruth did not look away from the window. "I couldn't sleep. I thought I would come sit with her and let you rest. You look like death, you know."
"Thank you."