Boston, Massachusetts
April 1957

The constant rattle and sway of the train as it swept by farms, through fields, the way it made her body sway with it if she did not resist and hold herself still, was the small reminder every second that Maria was alive, that she still knew how to breathe.

She had fallen asleep for a while on the stretch of her journey between Gloucester and Nottingham, and that had been more restful than she expected, but she had also been more spent than she anticipated. Arguing with her husband had, apparently, drained her. Now, on the final stretch to Boston, with only around an hour of the journey remaining, Maria peered down to check her watch and did the thing she did most, nowadays: she choked back a sob.

Something had changed, this last stay in hospital. She had come away so completely done in, there was no room in her head for anything else. She was weak, her stomach was not tolerant of much, she still felt a great deal of pain, and her newest malady was both cause and result of this horrific stretch: recovery from a miscarriage.

The only clear thought that Maria had about any of this was that the loss of the child itself was not the root of her anguish. Its origins had more to do with what the loss represented. As much as she had hated it, and was loathe to admit it to him, Georg was right. She did not want the baby. It scared her, it spelled trouble, it was not in the shortlist she kept in her head of things that meant staying alive.

If she were healthy, as she had been when her four children were born? God, she wouldn't hesitate. Perhaps she would have matched Agathe Whitehead's number. Somehow, she did not think so. But the sentiment applied.

Picking up the telephone and speaking to Brigitta was the easiest thing Maria had done in months. Lies were not necessary with this daughter of hers, and Brigitta would never require more words from anyone than what one wanted to give. The conversation was simple. Maria said hello, asked after her daughter and her family, and simply said that she had been unwell and needed space to recuperate for a while.

Brigitta, bless her, had jumped on the idea immediately and even said, "Robert and I would be happy to take you to see the top kidney specialist here, Mother. If you want. He's the best in the world. I've read all about him."

Of course she had, Maria thought to herself with a smile as her head knocked against the train window. Adjusting herself, she looked down at the valise she held in her lap and sighed. She knew her daughter and son-in-law would be more than merely happy; they would be thrilled.

What they did not know, however, was that Maria had spent the last twenty years of her life squelching a crippling fear of doctors out of sheer necessity—eleven children required rather a lot of doctoring—and somehow, in the latest events of the ongoing saga that was her constant medical crises, she did not want anything more to do with it. And she certainly did not want to meet some stranger who wanted to cut her open. She had only agreed to let the staff at Copley Hospital treat her because she knew them well enough to trust them by the time it was she under their care and not one of her children. She had felt safe.

But that safety was gone, and perspective was enormously difficult to come by. Gaining clarity was made no less difficult by the hovering of her husband, who so desperately wanted her to have these serious surgeries and be well, who wanted to be close to her at all times.

Sometimes, even if he was on the opposite side of the room, Maria would close her eyes and bite back the urge to shout at him to stop smothering her. But it would only cause hurt and bewilderment, so she bit her tongue.

Until she came to the end of her fuse.

Separating fault from hurt and need was not something Maria had ever been particularly good at. She recognized that she was better at it now than when she was young, but it was still a sore spot for her. If she were truly better at it, she would not have lashed out at her husband the way she had. She knew that. But still, a sizeable part of her was angry and wounded that when she had lacked restraint, he had not tried to hold her back.

In a clean bill of health, she would not blame him in the slightest. But a not-small piece of her heavily relied upon Georg to stop her from doing things that were in her own worst interest, and what happened that Christmas afternoon between them was rather a substantial lapse of judgment for them both.

He had said he wanted to be close to her, but all she felt now was closed in. She was suffocating under the weight of her illness and his need to be present. She could do one or the other, she thought, but certainly not both—and as her recent hospital stay had reminded her, the illness would not go anywhere. And Georg would not go anywhere.

So she had to go somewhere.

Maria wrote letters to her husband and children with heightened awareness that this was not dissimilar to when she had fled the von Trapp villa in the dead of a summer night almost twenty years ago. Her husband would see the parallel, she knew, and he had called it out. She supposed he had a right to. He did not know to expect anything different, after all. She had up and gone and left him in the lurch. This wasn't much different, now, except that their four children were all capable of looking after themselves.

The words she wrote to her children—oh, those sweet, precious children of hers—were more or less the same, with a few things tailored to each of them. There was a brief explanation that she was staying with Brigitta to continue convalescing, and that she would be back as soon as her health allowed. She loved them, and would telephone with a number to contact her with any time of the day or night.

For her husband, it was somewhat different, and more reflective of the truth:

Georg,

I shan't blame you for being angry with me. I know this looks like what I've done before. However, I feel that if I am to come away from this latest episode with any semblance of myself intact, I need to step away. I need space, and I need time. Perhaps I'll even heal a bit from what has broken.

Know that I will come back, and despite our angry words, I love you. That has not changed, nor can it.

M

Writing those words, Maria was a little surprised to find how much she meant them. She meant them wholeheartedly, in fact, unlike the words she had hurled at her husband in her pain and anger. Perhaps she might find out what it meant to put the pieces of the shattered looking glass back together and move beyond it.

Now that she thought of it, this had all been rather a long time coming.

Brigitta was waiting by a bright red car that Maria had never seen before when the train pulled into the station, her arms crossed over her chest as her long hair fell down her back in waves. When she saw her stepmother, she waved her over, greeting her with a kiss and a smile.

"How nice to see you, Mother," Brigitta said warmly.

Maria took the opportunity to engulf her daughter in a full-armed hug, then stepped back, saying with a small smile, "Let me look at you."

Laughing, Brigitta said, "I promise, I'm just the same as always! Perhaps a few pounds heavier and a bit less sane, but nevertheless, I am very much me!"

Maria heard the authenticity of her daughter's words and smiled, masking the pain that it caused her to realize that she could not say the same. She smiled, hoping that her expression reached her eyes, and drew away, looking around for her valise, which she had dropped.

"Here, let me get your bag," Brigitta said, seeming already to have noticed the lag between reactions, and she moved quickly to take Maria's valise for her.

"That will be everything," Maria said with a wave. "I don't intend to be a burden, overstay my welcome!"

"Oh, don't start," Brigitta rolled her eyes, hoisting the valise and going around to the trunk of her car to place it inside. As she pulled it closed, she said firmly, "You are always welcome, Mother, you and Father both."

Maria opened her mouth to protest, but thought better of it, and instead dropped her arms and clasped them behind her back, bowing her head. "If you insist, darling."

"I do," Brigitta said firmly, then nodded as she went around to the driver's side. "Well, get in, then! You're the first to take a ride in it since Robert brought it home! Not even the kids have been allowed to ride in it, yet!"

Maria tried her best to absorb herself in the sensory experience of riding in a brand new red automobile—surely Robert would call this his red roadster—to notice the gleam of the paint, the glint of the metal door handle, the luxurious beige leather interior and the newly-soaped leather scent inside. It was all there, she could see it and feel it, but she could not begin to be able to bury herself in the novelty, having never once in her life been inside a new automobile. It felt hollow.

She couldn't even bring herself to start a distracting conversation about Brigitta's children. She loved those babies so much, and yet her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth—

Brigitta's matter-of-fact voice broke through the wallowing. "It was bad, wasn't it, Mother? This last attack?"

Tightly, Maria nodded. "It was."

Glancing over at her mother nervously before returning her gaze to the road in front of her, Brigitta could not shake the sense that there was something looming, unsaid. It had to be worse than the usual, different from the usual, if her mother had shown up here, alone, with one little valise full of her most essential things.

"You have my confidence and my discretion, if you have need of it," Brigitta said.

For some minutes, there was no acknowledgement of this statement. Brigitta had begun to wonder if Maria had heard her when finally her mother reached over across the space between them and grasped her forearm.

"Thank you," Maria whispered.

The remainder of the drive to Brigitta's fine home in Cambridge, a towering three-story brick and stone beauty set in a small neighborhood where each house had a garden with a wrought-iron fence and plenty of green ivy adorning the brick fronts, with flower boxes in the windowsills, passed in silence.

Without a word, Brigitta tossed the car keys in the glove box, fetched Maria's things from the boot, and led her mother inside. They passed through the front hallway, past the drawing room where a nanny was playing with Brigitta's twin boys and her toddling, dark-haired little girl.

"The baby is asleep," Brigitta explained perfunctorily as they passed by.

Maria nodded, and they continued on, going through to the back of the house where a state-of-the-art kitchen was to be found, and then went out the back door and into the yard. The little garden house that Maria would stay in was set far back on the property, hidden in a little cove of trees.

Both women walked in great strides, and Brigitta said as they went, "I won't ask you to discuss or dwell on anything when you aren't inside the garden house that you have no interest in, but I do promise you that anything you say to me in the privacy of the garden house is between us and it will remain so. Also: it is perfectly safe for you, should you fall ill. A spare telephone has been installed in the bedroom. The other is in the front room."

Studying psychiatry, it turned out, had been one of the best things to happen to Brigitta von Trapp. Not only was she afforded a comfortable life with a husband who adored her, she had her four wonderful children, and she got to work every day doing a job that made full use of her extraordinary skill of observation, her cool level-headedness, and no-nonsense matter-of-fact demeanor. It suited her better than one might imagine, and in her circles, she flourished.

Maria found herself achingly aware of all this now as she watched her daughter fish a key out of her coat pocket and fit it in the lock of the door in front of them. The lock turned without resistance, and a moment later, the door scraped open, welcoming them inside the tiny abode.

The décor was simple and breezy, light and inviting. What it lacked in size, it made up for in coziness and sophistication. A rare combination, indeed!

"The bedroom is straight back this way," Brigitta said, pointing toward an archway to the right of the front door, "as well as a small adjoining bath. This way is the kitchen and dining area," she said, gesturing toward the left.

"It's lovely," Maria said, looking around. "I shall be quite comfortable here."

"Did you want some tea?" Brigitta asked. "If you go through the kitchen, you will find you have been stocked with a small pantry. If you're missing anything, call up to the main house."

"Tea would be lovely," Maria sighed, placing a hand to her head as she circled in place, trying to be present in this bizarre and wonderful moment with her daughter. "If I had known I was moving into the Ritz, I would have dressed appropriately!" she exclaimed at last, entirely overwhelmed by the abundance at her fingertips.

Was this what nurture looked like?

The thought was a brief flash, but it was so clear while it remained. Maria felt something warm flicker in her chest, and she decided to let it be whatever it was. Maybe it was nurture, but maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, she hoped it would linger, bring companions… teach her something.

Ravenous.

Suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to cry, Maria sat down in the chair of the tiny kitchen table where she waited for Brigitta to brew tea for them. Somehow, lost in thought, she had come here with her daughter, and she couldn't even recall if they'd been speaking of anything. Twisting her hands in her lap nervously, trying to distract from the urge to spill untold tears, she suddenly found that her shoulders were shaking with the sobs she couldn't quite release, and once again she couldn't breathe.

"Oh, Mother," Brigitta said gently, turning around at the sound of strangled gasps. "Mother, breathe!" she exclaimed and she abandoned the boiling kettle and knelt in front of Maria and said, "You'll pass out if you don't, and if you knock your head, it'll feel worse, I promise."

Maria snorted back a laugh at this, recognizing it as one of her oft-repeated phrases while raising her houseful of children, most not even her own, and at once could not hold back the rush of pain that broke from her chest in that same jarring reminder.

Brigitta said nothing for some time, simply laying a hand on Maria's knee and squeezing her hand tight. When the kettle began to whistle, she got up to fetch it for them, returning the few feet's distance to sit down across from Maria. She had with her two saucers and teacups, her own tea black, while Maria's was heavily sugared with milk.

Maria pulled her saucer toward her and fixed her gaze on the pattern of the china. There was only the slightest crack in her teacup, otherwise she would be in a fine position to continue her observation about her ritzy lodgings, keep the joke going. But instead, she traced a thumb over the crack and said in a thick, strained voice, "I lost a baby this time."

"Oh, Mother," Brigitta said again, but this time her voice was filled with sorrow rather than sympathy. Empathy instead of platitudes. Her voice wavered and cracked ever so slightly, and Maria noticed too how her daughter's knuckles were white around her teacup. She must be thinking of her own baby, just two months old, sleeping peacefully right now in his nursery.

"It's stupid," Maria said. "We didn't plan—I didn't—it was my… It—it was horrible. Dreadful. I was so ill. The pain makes me feel insane, some days, only now it's not just in my body. It's in my mind and heart—for something I did not want."

She was rambling and babbling. She knew it. That is what she did when she was nervous, otherwise she would have stopped at the obvious stupidity of it all—having a baby at this age! Falling pregnant with an extremely dangerous kidney condition! It just was not done, not any of it. And she never would have dreamed.

Brigitta, however, did not blink, did not even seem to hesitate. "It's not stupid. It is certainly not your fault, for it requires the effort of two, and even when all is said and done, things end sometimes, through no error but fate. And I suppose that Father is being rather suffocating about—well, about the baby, the risks. You're still so young."

Flushing and ducking her head to hide it, unused to hearing such frankness about her own intimate endeavors, Maria muttered, "He does not mean to be. I understand him. I understand why. It's only that… Brigitta, it's too much!"

Maria finally said it out loud. After all these weeks, just minutes, mere minutes in a safe haven and she was unraveling.

But… why wasn't her husband her safe haven? He had been, once. Her heart ached to have that again. But try as she might to set things to right in her mind, the overwhelm of the jumble began again, and Maria had to return her thoughts to the one thing that she seemed able to focus on: the baby conceived at Christmas, a small miracle. Because she had invited it. Because she had slipped. Had she miscounted on purpose? She had never been so careless in all these years. She knew better than anyone the high cost she would pay to make such an error, and yet she had done it anyway.

She had made love with her husband.

Remembering across the years, Maria could recall when it had all been new and wonderful, and how she knew in her heart of hearts that this was how she always wanted it to be, how she vowed to herself that they would not stray too far, so help her God, and that they would always have a passionate marriage bed, and if he wanted babies, well, she wanted them too.

Somehow, for six or seven years, they had lived an impossible dream, so full of fire and passion for one another, and it had all been ruined by the reality that such passion could cost Maria her life.

It was a bitter pill to take. Those first seven years? Those first seven years were supposed to be forever. And even if one had to accept that the universe required balance, there should only have been seven bad years in return for the good, not fourteen, for God's sake!

It had all slipped away, so frighteningly easy.

"Was it your condition?"

Looking up, Maria realized that Brigitta was asking her a question, and that her daughter was very much real and present.

"Yes," she replied. "Having a baby has become especially dangerous in the past three or four years, but we knew of the danger it would pose because my kidneys might not handle the stress well from the very beginning."

"And there is no surgery for you to try, not anything? What about… well, what I mean is, every woman in these days knows there is more control over the size of her family than she will talk about. There are contraceptive devices. They're even saying that soon, there will be some sort of hormone pill one can take for prevention. It's set to be all the rage, apparently."

Maria turned her cup around in her saucer for a while, thinking carefully about how much to divulge. Hooking a finger around the handle of the cup, she admired the blue floral print on the china, then said quietly, "There are French letters, of course. I don't know what Americans call them, your father sees to that. And I have had a diaphragm—I've had it almost as long as this has gone on. And of course, the oldest tool in the book: time."

At this, she smiled wryly, looking up at her daughter. "But such things are, as yet, imperfect, and rely on imperfect people, don't they?"

Brigitta did not at all seem taken aback by this information, and Maria had half-expected such, considering her daughter's age and the very Brigitta-ish timing, shape, and size of her own family. The only wild card had been her twins, and at that news she had been utterly delighted at the prospect of two for one. "It rather simples things up," she had said gleefully over the phone, for at the time her husband was abroad finishing his post-doctoral fellowship, "as we won't need to play catch-up as long as we thought!"

They had returned stateside, established their work, bought their home using some of Brigitta's inheritance from her mother to secure the mortgage, and settled into their comfortable little life. Her husband practiced medicine, and Brigitta typically did contract work for government agencies in these uncertain times, profiling and providing counsel on policies and procedures. But she did maintain a small clientele of weekly or bi-monthly visitors to her little office in Boston, where she spent most mornings listening to problems and helping her patients to untangle their thoughts, with great patience and compassion, just as she did this very moment.

"You ought to charge me," Maria said, attempting to joke but knowing she did not stick the landing, for the punchline was her own life.

"A penny for your thoughts," Brigitta smiled across the table, understanding the macabre timber to the words uttered.

"Dr. Levin asked me to consider a hysterectomy," Maria said bluntly. "Kidney operation, we have not discussed in months, maybe years. And now, here I am, with one health-related miscarriage, and this is the main conversation, between us all. I understand that pregnancy is incredibly dangerous to my body as it is now so unwell, but so is that surgery. It is so extensive, and costs a woman so much of herself." Here, she sighed, and thought, and cleared her throat, then continued bitterly, "But, I suppose if, a man is forced to look too long upon the gruesome reality of a woman's discomfort in life, that is the first response. It truly is astounding."

"Tell me more," Brigitta said, noncommittally, blowing on a fresh cup of tea to cool it.

Maria sighed, looking out the window beside her. "I did not even have this thought, not for weeks. Not until the anger set in. After the numbness. After Georg tried for the hundredth time to start the conversation about it. Now, it is all I can think of."

"Why no talk of a kidney operation?"

"It was written off years ago as not viable," Maria replied. "I can't function with one, for they both appear to be diseased. My only matches likely to be timely are my own children, and even if I dared do such a thing, they were still small and unable to make that choice themselves." She fell silent, lost in thought, then said dully, "The likelihood of finding someone to give me a kidney is extraordinarily low with this idiotic war that's on, and either way medicine still has no method to make sure the body won't reject the new one. Everything they've tried fails eventually."

Brigitta quirked a wry, sad smile of her own. "I see."

There was a lot of information here, both said and unsaid. Brigitta could remember from her training many of the things that Maria was implying just now, including the details of a typical hysterectomy. Methods were changing, and more of the reproductive system was now able to be left intact, but that reality was more true of surgeons in big hospitals than it was of surgeons in small hospitals like the one her mother spent most of her time in. In that respect, the fact that her mother was speaking in terms by now ten or fifteen years outdated for a Boston surgeon did not surprise Brigitta.

And as far as the kidney operation went, her husband was not trained in renal disease, and she had only herself learned what was necessary to pass exams, but she and her husband both spent a great deal of their free time reading the latest publications and research about developments and advancement of treating renal disease. The outlook was still shaky, but far less bleak than this. It was why she was so eager have her mother stay, even if, below the surface, Brigitta was quite sure she was enabling the runaway instinct of a certain scared governess she had known so long ago.

Unable to stop herself from wondering about this doggedly avoided aspect of a horrible and complex situation, Brigitta said softly, "If you did it, you can be close with Father again."

Maria looked up. "Save recent momentary lapses of judgment, I think that ship is long sailed."

Brigitta stared at her mother, hard. "I don't believe that. I remember how it was. Mother, I have the man I have because first, there was you. You and the marriage you and Father have. And I know him. He would not still be here if he did not want to be."

Maria winced at this, at the reminder that Brigitta knew all too well that Georg was more than capable of removing himself from a situation he could not bear. For years.

"Besides," Brigitta continued stubbornly, "ships always come back to where they came from. Father taught us that much."

"Unless they go down," Maria rasped, her heart wrenching at the recklessness of saying such an awful, unforgivable thing aloud.

Brigitta's gaze was still boring into Maria and she remained silent at this observation. The women sat together at the table in silence, time stretching on. Maria, uncomfortable, glanced down at her watch, not to check the time, but to see if it was still passing. Further, her daughter had an uncanny and startling knack for reading faces, so it was also a convenient way to hide it from her.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

"You're afraid of something," Brigitta said at last. Comprehension seemed suddenly to dawn across her face, sweep over her posture as she leaned back in her seat at last. "What is it, Mother?"

Maria opened her mouth, but no words came out. Were there words? If she said the simplest thing, would it be enough to describe the depth and breadth of the fear?

Closing her eyes, Maria shook her head.

Brigitta, however, was determined, and would not be persuaded out of a revelation. She reached across the table and grasped her mother's hands in hers, a luxury she was not afforded in her work and thus both relished and did not take lightly.

"There's so much pain," Maria whispered, pulling one hand free to wrap her arm around her middle, clearly indicating her failing organs. "Brigitta, it's all-consuming. If I have an operation, what if there is too much pain and I don't wake up to tell them? What if it all goes away? How will I know then to tell them something is wrong?"

Brigitta's eyes widened. She could guess well enough that pain from a chronic condition like her mother's was not pleasant, but she had never imagined that it was so terrible that it made her afraid to be without it. Afraid not to be able to say if it became too much. What a miserable, terrible prison!

Her expression setting hard, Brigitta thought there had to be an easier way than all of this. Fear of operation aside, hysterectomies were so drastic, and for someone as young as her mother, such a surgery would take away more than it gave. She suspected that Maria knew this, too, and did not view the risks or the benefits as worth the cost, which was admittedly enormous.

Suddenly, as though divinely inspired, it came to her: the thing that was overlooked. It probably was not offered at Copley Hospital due to the small staff and lack of equipment, so Maria would have no reason to know of it. But Boston's hospitals did it routinely. Brigitta hadn't read any papers in obstetrics and gynecology since her training, but she had read enough, and Robert had recently been telling her about this very thing, excited to have observed a new surgical method to perform this very operation just months before.

Reaching across to her mother, Brigitta grasped her hand and asked, "What if there was an easier way? A way to prevent more babies, a surgery that poses far less risk to you, and costs you far less afterward as well?"

Maria's eyes narrowed. "What would this be?"

"It's called a ligation," Brigitta said eagerly. "It is a method used to close off the tubes of the female reproductive system where a fertilized egg travels from the ovaries to the womb in order to implant and cause a pregnancy to begin." Breathless, Brigitta paused to give her mother a moment to process, then continued, "There are restrictions on the procedure, but I am certain you must meet the criteria, especially if Dr. Levin was asking you to consider the hysterectomy. Your age and number of children also means that the odds of approval are in your favour. You will need Father's permission, though."

Maria tilted her head, considering this, ignoring the mention of her husband. "Nothing is removed?" she asked. "Only the tubes are altered?"

"Yes," Brigitta nodded encouragingly. "They will still need to make an abdominal incision to do the procedure, but it is far less invasive, less dangerous, less painful, and equally effective. You would continue to menstruate, and when the time comes, experience menopause, but you would likely never risk pregnancy again, and your life would not be jeopardized because of it."

"It sounds too good to be true," Maria said cautiously. "Too simple."

Brigitta leaned forward, some dangerous spark in her eye. "Mother, if you don't choose one or the other, it does not matter. You will die either because your kidneys failed or because another pregnancy strained them too far, and again I will lose the most important person I have. And this time, there are more of us. There are my sons, my daughter, your sons and daughters, and all of those of my brothers and sisters. There's Father. It's not just you anymore. It was never meant to be just you."

"No man is an island," Maria muttered, trying desperately to think, not to sink in this moment of complete overwhelm.

"What's that?"

"Something your father says," Maria said. She slipped her free hand into her dress pocket.

"John Donne," Brigitta nodded. "I remember. My mother loved his work. I didn't realize he shared it with you, too."

Maria glanced at her daughter. "He says it on bad days, sometimes he quotes the poem. I thought it was for him on his bad days. But maybe he meant it for me in mine."

Putting her hand on the table, Maria slid something across to her daughter. When her hand came away, Brigitta looked down and smiled. It was a copper penny, old and worn. Picking it up, she peered at it and turned it over, nodding satisfactorily.

"Perhaps a penny still has its value," Maria said.

"Perhaps this one does," Brigitta replied.