All morning, Rosalie had been migrating between platforms in Amsterdam Centraal, from Track 4 to Track 10 then to Track 7 to Track 11 and back to 4. The trains to Brussels, both express and local, had been cancelled one after another. A family—tourists, judging by their appearance, as Rosalie herself was—materialized at every platform along with Rosalie, but now, finally, gave up and left, pulling their suitcases behind them. A group of young people, with tall, overfilled backpacks propped beside them like self-important sidekicks, gathered in front of a monitor, planning their next move. Rosalie tried to catch a word or two—German? Dutch? It was 2021, and there were not as many English-speaking tourists in Amsterdam that June as there had been on Rosalie’s previous visit, twenty years before.

She wondered what to do next. Moving from track to track would not deliver her to the hotel in Brussels. Would cancelled trains only lead to more cancelled trains, or would this strandedness, like ceaseless rain during a rainy season or a seemingly unfinishable novel, suddenly come to an end, on a Sunday afternoon in late May or on a snowy morning in January? Years ago, an older writer Rosalie had befriended inquired in a letter about the book she was working on: “How is the novel? One asks that as one does about an ill person, and a novel that’s not yet finished is rather like that. You reach the end and the thing is either dead or in much better shape. The dead should be left in peace.”

A novel would not get better if the characters spent all their time wandering between platforms. What Rosalie needed was not a plot twist or a dramatic scene but reliable information. She found a uniformed railway worker and asked about the cancelled trains.

The man, speaking almost perfect English, acknowledged her dilemma with an apology. “There was an incident near Rotterdam this morning,” he said.

“An incident,” Rosalie repeated, though she already knew the nature of such an ambiguous term. “Was it an accident?”

“Ah, yes, the kind of sad accident that happens sometimes. A man walked in front of a train.”

Rosalie noted the verb he used: not “jumped” or “ran” or “leaped,” but “walked,” as though the death had been an act both leisurely and purposeful. Contrary to present circumstances—it was summer; this was the twenty-first century—she imagined a man in a neatly pressed suit and wearing a hat, like Robert Walser in one of those photos from his asylum years. Walser’s hat had been found next to his body in the Swiss snow, on Christmas Day, 1956. But, even if the man near Rotterdam had worn a hat, it was unlikely to be resting in peace near him.

The railway worker opened an app on his phone and indicated some red and yellow and green squares to Rosalie, reassuring her that the service would return to normal soon.

Really? Rosalie thought. Are you sure there are only those two types? Surely some mothers, having done a better job, fall into neither category? Rosalie did not remember writing those lines in her notebook, but they were on the same page as a couple of other notes that she had a vague memory of having written. One of them read, You can’t declutter an untimely death away; the other consisted of two lines from a nursery rhyme: Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go. She must have written those lines on a Wednesday. Marcie had been born on a Wednesday, and had died on a Thursday, fifteen years and eleven months later. For a while after her death, every Thursday had felt like a milestone, and every Thursday Rosalie and Dan had left flowers at the mouth of the railway tunnel where Marcie had laid herself down to die. One week gone, two weeks gone, then three, four, five. It occurred to Rosalie that the only other time when parents count the days and weeks is when a child is newborn.

After some time, however, the counting stopped. No parent would describe a child as being seventy-nine weeks old or a hundred and three weeks old. The math for the dead must be similar. Air oxidizes, water rusts. Time, like air and water, erodes. And there are very few things in life that are impervious to time’s erosion. Thursday again became just another day in the week.

Rosalie carried three notebooks in her purse, but she no longer knew her original intention for each. They had become three depositories of scribbled words in the same category, “Notes to self.” It was a most lopsided epistolary relationship: whoever that self was, she was an unresponsive and irresponsible correspondent. Had Rosalie decided to address the notes to Marcie, there would have been some room for fantasy; nobody could say with certainty that the dead were not reading our minds or our letters to them. Rosalie, however, had not written to Marcie. She had written to herself, notes that she had not read until that Wednesday in June, while waiting for the disrupted Nederlandse Spoorwegen to resume.

The three notebooks read like a record of a chronic disease—not cancer but some condition so slow-building that it could hardly be distinguished from the natural progression of aging. Rosalie remembered reading a novel in which a character seeks advice from an old woman on how best to poison her husband. The most effective poison, which would go absolutely undetected, she is told, is a pear a day, sweet and juicy. A pear a day? What kind of poison is that? the woman asks. Every husband has a finite number of pears allotted to his life, the old woman says. What’s wrong if he doesn’t die on a specific day? There will be that final pear, which will finish him off one day.

What was the title of the novel? Rosalie tried to recollect it, and then laughed, remembering. This was an exchange she had once sketched out, thinking that she could use it in a novel if the opportunity arose. Are you sure you made it up? her questioning self immediately asked. No, Rosalie could not be sure. The longer one lives, the more porous one’s mind becomes, the less reliable. Perhaps Alice Munro had written a story about pears and poisons? Or, more likely, Iris Murdoch?

And you, my dear—the old woman in Rosalie’s imagination says now to the woman with the mariticidal aspiration—you, too, should take a pear a day; it’s a tonic that’ll do you good, and it’ll keep you living longer than your husband. Let that sweet and slow poison do its job properly, won’t you?

Indeed, why the hurry to get in front of a moving train? Why not let a death be timely, rather than disrupting the schedule of a national rail system? Rosalie considered writing these questions down in her notebook, but they would make it sound as though she were having an argument with Marcie, or with the stranger who had died that morning. “Never argue” was Rosalie’s motto; especially, never argue with the dead.

Rosalie had read the Kristóf trilogy during a cultural-exchange trip to Moscow. The narrative labyrinth of the novels had baffled her. Corridors built of metaphorical mirrors, real and fake doubles, reflections of reflections—all those devices which might fascinate or frustrate a reader, though Rosalie had felt neither fascination nor frustration. What she had wanted was to talk with someone about the novels, and so she had asked Marcie to read them.

“I can’t believe you asked me to read these books,” Marcie said when she had finished.

“Are they confusing?” Rosalie asked. “I was confused, too.”

“Confusing? No. But they’re rather, what do you call it, graphic.”

“They’re not pornography.”

“They’re worse than pornography.” Marcie, who by middle school had become a better cook and baker than Rosalie, was carving out balls of cantaloupe with an ice-cream scoop. “I think they may have permanently destroyed my appetite.”

There was plenty of violence in the trilogy: rapes, mutilations, executions. Before Marcie’s remark, it had not occurred to Rosalie that the books might not be age-appropriate. In eighth grade, Marcie had quoted C. S. Lewis in her application to a highly selective prep school—“I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years”—and then gone on to catalogue all the thinking she had done. Might not this come across as a bit . . . arrogant? Rosalie had asked, and Marcie had replied that, if any of the adults dared to judge her so, it was they who were arrogant. They, Marcie had said, instead of you, thus, to Rosalie’s relief, excluding her from the indictment. If those adults judged her, it meant that they had not done their share of thinking when they were young; older now, they felt they had a right to treat children like miniature poodles. “Miniature poodles, I’m telling you!” Marcie had said with a vehement shudder. “Not even standard poodles!”

Rosalie watched Marcie arrange balls of cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon in a glass bowl, then squeeze half a lime over them before sprinkling some salt flakes on top. The bowl of melon was Marcie’s afternoon snack. Rosalie had no idea where Marcie had acquired such a demanding standard for everyday living; she herself would have eaten a slice of melon over the sink.

“I think your appetite is going to be all right,” Rosalie said.

Marcie pointed a two-pronged fork at Rosalie. “Sometimes things are all right, until they turn all wrong.”

“Where did that fork come from?” Rosalie said. The fork, slender, with a pinkish metallic hue, was unfamiliar.

“I bought it. The color is called rose gold. I liked how ‘rose gold’ sounded.”

That conversation had taken place the week before Marcie started at the prep school she had applied to with her youthful confidence. Three weeks later, during second period, she walked off the campus to a nearby railway. For some time afterward, Rosalie had replayed their conversation over the tricolored melon balls. She wondered if she had missed something that Marcie had been trying to tell her. Would rereading “The Notebook Trilogy” help her? It occurred to her that at least Marcie had known, just shy of sixteen, that the world had the potential to be as violent and bleak as something written by Ágota Kristóf. The world was not as bland and harmless as it was in those novels with long-haired girls on the covers, which had been devoured by Marcie’s classmates in middle school. “OMG, I CANNOT STAND THEM. STUPID. STUPID. STUPID,” Marcie had said a few times, with such passion that Rosalie could see every word in capital letters. But a girl who read those novels might not so resolutely give up all hope. There were more books with long-haired girls on the covers than had been written by Kristóf.

“What do you mean?” Rosalie asked. Like many people, she asked that question only when she knew perfectly well what the other person meant. It was more about earning a moment for herself, like a tennis player flexing her legs, bouncing, readying herself to return a serve.

“Any time a child chooses that way out, you have to wonder what the parents did,” Rosalie’s mother, who refused to use the words “died” or “suicide” but was O.K. with “passed away” or “took her own life,” elaborated.

It was cruel, what her mother had said to Rosalie, but it was far from the cruellest thing she had ever said. Besides, Rosalie knew that her mother was only expressing what other people tried not to, some less successfully than others. The week after Marcie’s death, the mother of one of her middle-school friends texted Rosalie, conveying her condolences and ending the exchange with “I’ve read that there are ways to cure adolescent depression. Didn’t you guys know?”

Parenting was a trial. The lucky ones were still making a case for themselves, with cautious or blind optimism. Rosalie and Dan had received their verdict.

One specialty of the Netherlands, for a visitor, is its picturesqueness. “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” Alice asks, sensibly, before going down the rabbit hole. She might as well have asked, What is the use of a life without pictures or conversations? For a week, Rosalie took photographs of canals and windmills, of wheels of cheese and parades of blue-and-white figurines in shopwindows, of museum gardens and market stalls. Amsterdam, Delft, Utrecht, Haarlem—all were picture-perfect, just as she knew Brussels and Ghent and Bruges would be, on the next leg of her trip. Marcie would have jeered at Rosalie’s behavior as a tourist; she would have quizzed Rosalie on the Benelux countries in order to demonstrate to Rosalie her ignorance of the region she so avidly photographed; Marcie would have said, “What’s the use of this skimming on life’s surface as though that would do the trick?”

How do you know it won’t work? Rosalie would have replied; is it not the same as your baking those cookies with the perfect jam decoration? She then realized that, once again, she was back at the same argument, the one that Marcie had already and definitively won. What’s the use of an argument without the promise of further arguments?

Rosalie sent the best of her travel pictures to Dan. In return, he sent photographic documentation of his progress: piles of rotten wood, pristine planks first stacked and then nailed into the right places, new windows with cardboard wrapped around the corners, paint-sample strips and cans, empty beer bottles in the garage, arranged in groups of ten, like bowling pins. Skimming was preferable to dredging a bottomless pain. Every parent who has lost a child will one day die of that chronic affliction. Why not let the sweet pears do their work?

The train to Brussels arrived. All waiting has an end point, Rosalie thought, and instantly her other self said, All waiting? Surely some waiting will always remain that: waiting.

Like what? Rosalie felt obliged to ask.

Like waiting to be contacted by an E.T., waiting to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, waiting to believe in an afterlife.

Oh, you unbending soul. Life is held together by imprecise words and inexact thoughts. What’s the point of picking at every single statement persistently until the seam comes undone?

Rosalie used not to have so many quibbles with herself. Had she developed this tiresome habit because of Marcie’s death? Marcie would have said right away, Don’t you dare blame anything on me. That Rosalie had never, while Marcie was alive, given her an opportunity to speak that line—was that a comfort for either of them? Rosalie wished she had spoken a variation of the line to her own mother, though it was too late. Her mother had died two months earlier. Were there an afterlife, she would have conveyed a message to Rosalie by now, pointing out that her death and her afterlife, both being disagreeable, were Rosalie’s fault, just as her life before death had been full of disappointments caused by having to be a mother to Rosalie, for whom she had abandoned her training in architecture. She had never stopped believing that she had been destined for fame and accolades, all sacrificed for Rosalie.

Would her mother have asked Marcie to give a daughter’s account of Rosalie’s failures in motherhood?

Rosalie remembered learning, in a college psychology course, about how pregnant women were likely to think that, statistically, more women were getting pregnant than in the past, but that it was only a trick of their attention. Were it not for the pandemic, would Rosalie have noticed on this trip more young people about the age that Marcie would have been? After her death, a grief counsellor had explained to Rosalie and Dan that all sorts of everyday things might devastate them without warning: a hairpin, a ballpoint pen, a girl Marcie’s age walking down the street, with the same hair style or in a similar dress. None of these, however, had happened to Rosalie. The whole wide world was where Marcie was not; Rosalie did not need any reminder of that fact.

Marcie would have turned nineteen on her next birthday. Immediately after her death, Rosalie had written in a notebook that her daughter would now remain fifteen forever, and she—Rosalie—would never know what Marcie would have been at sixteen, or seventeen, or twenty-six, or forty-two. What surprised Rosalie—and so few things surprised a parent after the death of a child that this realization had struck her with a blunt force; she would have called it an epiphany had she been religious, or the kind of writer who believed in epiphanies—was that, contrary to her assumption, Marcie had not stayed fifteen. Her friends had continued progressing, going through high school, and they were now about to leave for college. Marcie, too, had aged in Rosalie’s mind. Not in a physically visible manner—Rosalie would never allow herself to imagine a girl who looked any different from the one she had dropped off at the school gate on the final, fatal morning. “I want you to remember the living Marcie,” the funeral director had said gently on the phone, explaining his decision not to allow Rosalie and Dan to view Marcie’s body before the cremation. “I don’t want you to always dwell on her last moments. That’s not what her life was about.”

No, Marcie had not changed physically, but how she felt to Rosalie had altered. She was older now, less prone to extreme passions; she was still sharp, critical, and dismissive of all those people she deemed stupid. Rose gold would be the right hue for Marcie now.

The woman across the aisle gave Rosalie a look: quizzical, if not entirely unfriendly. She must have been staring at the woman’s body. Rosalie nodded in an amiable manner, as though to say she understood the travail of late pregnancy, and then turned her face to the window. She had no intention of causing any concern to the woman, who needed all her energy to focus on her discomfort.

My eyes won’t hurt a single one of your cells, Rosalie’s mother used to say when she inspected Rosalie’s body, assessing every minute change. It used to drive Rosalie into a rage, but she soon learned that the more upset she was, the more calmly and insistently her mother would examine her. What kind of mother would scrutinize a daughter’s body with a collector’s interest? Marianne Moore’s mother, it turned out—or, at least, Rosalie could not shake off that impression after reading Moore’s biography. Poor Marianne had not, it seemed, solved the problem the way Rosalie had: instead of wrapping herself in a bathrobe, Rosalie had carried every single piece of her clothing into the bathroom, where she’d buttoned and zipped and made herself as unavailable and unassailable as possible before stepping out into her mother’s gaze. And her mother, with a cool, ironic smile, would say a few words that made it clear that, no matter how well a child hid her body away, a mother’s eyes could always disrobe that child. “You came out of my birth canal, you suckled my breasts—how could you imagine there’s anything I don’t know about your body?” Had Rosalie’s mother spoken those precise words? It did not matter. Not all words have to be spoken aloud to convey their message.

The train entered a tunnel. Pale fluorescent lights flickered on in the carriage. The window returned the inside of the car like a mirror, and, between her reflection and that of the woman, Rosalie chose to rest her eyes on the woman’s. She was sitting in a manner that looked nearly unsustainable. The last days before a baby’s arrival! Even the most seemingly restful position—sitting, lying, leaning against the back of a sofa—would not bring relief, though that ordeal would soon come to an end. And then you moved on to the next stage, with newly discovered discomforts: vaginal tears from delivery; cracked nipples and inflamed breasts from nursing; worries about diaper rash and cradle cap, about the right kind of bottle to avoid colic or the right time to start solid food so as not to burden the developing digestive system; about growth percentiles, toilet training, preschool applications. And one day all of those things would come to an end, too, whether gradually or abruptly.

The saving grace, Rosalie thought, is that not all pains and worries are permanent. Some, time-sensitive, can be desensitized by time. How else could a parent, or anyone, go on living courageously? A character in a Rebecca West novel, before going to France to be immediately killed in the Great War, says to his mother, “I am sure that if you had been told when you were a child about all the things that you were going to have to do, you would have thought you had better die at once, you would not have believed you could ever have the strength to do them.” Rosalie could very well have said that to the woman across the aisle, or indeed to herself as she was twenty years ago.

A memory, long forgotten, came back to her: when she and newborn Marcie had been discharged from the hospital, Dan, carrying Marcie in a baby carrier and waiting for the elevator door to open, suddenly looked alarmed. He placed the carrier gently on the floor, knelt down next to it, and placed one ear next to the baby’s face, holding his breath, listening. Two old women, both wearing blue ribbons that said “volunteer” on their blouse fronts, stopped to appreciate the sight. “That’s what I call a brand-new dad,” one of them remarked. “Now, this is something I wouldn’t mind seeing every day,” the other woman said. She selected a giant black-and-white cookie from her basket and put it in Rosalie’s hand. “No, no need to pay, dear,” the woman said when Rosalie indicated that she did not have any money on her. “Here, another one for you. That one is for your hubby.”

The woman across the aisle made a muffled sound behind her double masks. Her position in the seat seemed to have changed from discomfort to agony. “Are you all right?” Rosalie asked. “Tout va bien?”

The woman shook her head, and looked back and forth again, with greater difficulty, at the other passengers in the train car. Rosalie knew what had happened before she stepped across the aisle to the woman. Her pants, made of lightweight, oatmeal-colored fabric, revealed a darker patch. The woman’s eyes, looking at Rosalie from above the mask, appeared astonishingly large.

None of the other passengers was yet aware of the emergency. Aside from the mother in the family of three—her child was no older than three or four—none of their fellow-travellers seemed qualified to deal with an imminent birth.

How do you know that? That man sitting there might be a doctor.

Oh, shut up, Rosalie ordered the voice.

And how do you know it’s imminent? Her water broke, yes, but it might still take an hour or two, or even half a day, before the baby is born.

Marcie had been born on a Wednesday morning, at a quarter past eleven, but Rosalie’s water had broken almost eight hours earlier. So there was still time, there was no reason to panic. She told the woman not to worry, then walked to the end of the car and pulled the emergency cord.

The passengers were roused out of their inertia, and now they were like actors moving into their assigned roles. The mother of the young child joined Rosalie, while the father carried the child to the far end of the train car despite the boy’s loud protest. Rosalie opened her suitcase and fished out her rain jacket, which she spread out on the aisle floor. Another passenger—she did not see who it was—handed Rosalie a travel pillow in the shape of a plump piglet. The young mother and Rosalie helped the woman out of her seat and onto the jacket. Two young men hovered over Rosalie’s shoulder, one of them making a call on his mobile phone, and she could tell he was speaking Dutch, but the seriousness in his voice grated on her nerves. What did he know about such an emergency? The next moment, a railway employee rushed in, joined by a colleague from the other end of the car. Already it was promising to be an exciting day, which would be recounted at dinner parties or in phone calls to friends and family.

Hundreds of thousands of untimely deaths, Rosalie corrected the statement in her mind.

You can’t be so stupid as to think that people’s deaths were timely because those people did not die on a battlefield.

No, but I know all those deaths on the battlefield were untimely.

So?

There is no so. Not every argument has to have a so in it. I simply want to go to a place where many people lie buried.

Why not Normandy?

No, I just want to go to Ypres.

Do you remember how I used to call Ypres “Wipers” ?

Rosalie paused. That question, she now knew clearly, was spoken by Marcie. In middle school, Marcie had read some history books about the two World Wars, and one day confessed that she thought Ypres was pronounced “Wipers.” They had both laughed, but later Rosalie read that “Wipers” was exactly what the English-speaking soldiers had called Ypres.

You know, that was what they had called Ypres—“Wipers.” I read it in a story, or maybe in a novel.

By whom?

Elizabeth Jane Howard? Rebecca West? Mavis Gallant? Pat Barker? Rosalie could not say for sure. But what did it matter? The young men in those books went to war. Some returned intact or maimed, some were killed in action, and others went missing forever. They would be where Marcie was now, and yet Marcie would know none of their stories. Sometimes I wish . . . Rosalie thought, as slowly as if she were writing out each word.

I know. Don’t wish.

That’s right, Rosalie agreed, and yet she insisted on spelling out this one wish of hers, for Marcie, or for whatever phantom had remained in this conversation with her all these years. She wished that nature had installed a different system for people to choose their genealogy—not by their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents but by the books they read, a genealogy that could be deliberately, purposefully, and revocably created and maintained.

Don’t you mean irrevocably?

No, revocably.

But that’s impossible. You can’t unread a book.

No, but you can edit out that book, just as in genetics a segment of DNA can be edited out.

What’s the point?

The point was that Rosalie wished that she had not given Marcie “The Notebook Trilogy” to read. She wished that Marcie had taken a longer route to arrive—or, even better, had never arrived—at that bleakness. She wished there had been more time for Marcie to skim on the surface of her life. What’s wrong with being superficial? With depth always comes pain.

The young mother gathered Rosalie’s rain jacket and returned it to her. They both raised their hands to the ambulance as it sped away, a gesture more for themselves than for the woman, who would now go on to her own battlefield, and give birth to a Wednesday’s child. Was it illogical of Rosalie to think that she should have refrained from gazing at the woman’s body for so long? Perhaps her mother had been wrong to claim that her scrutinizing would not harm a single cell of Rosalie’s body. Perhaps Rosalie, with her surreptitious study of the woman’s body, had caused some shift and changed the course of events—a Thursday’s child born on Wednesday.

Don’t be silly.

It’s just a thought.

Forget about it.

How?

Like that baby song. How does it go? The wipers on the bus go swish swish swish, swish swish swish, swish swish swish . . .

Not all things, Rosalie thought, can be swishily wiped away. Mothers rarely murder their own children. More often they are vandals, writing out messages in ink both visible and invisible, which can never be entirely erased. Rosalie’s mother, not long before her final decline, had stated her verdict on Marcie’s death. “I call it karma,” she said to Rosalie. What she meant was that, because Rosalie had refused to love her own mother wholeheartedly, it was a fitting punishment for Rosalie to lose a child and feel the greater pain of a more absolute abandonment. Rosalie had not replied; since Marcie’s death she had been anticipating such a remark. Her mother could have surprised Rosalie, and carried her verdict to her grave, but, like many people, she could not resist the urge to inflict pain where pain could be felt, to cause wreckage when anything wreckable was within reach.

But now, on this Wednesday, the recollection of her mother’s verdict did not arouse any acute feeling in Rosalie. She was on her way to Brussels, and later to Ypres. It was a sad thing that Rosalie’s mother, who had loved her, had loved only with cruelty, but at least Rosalie could take solace in the fact that her love for Marcie had been kinder, and that she had never demanded that Marcie repay her, with love or with kindness. ♦

This is drawn from “Wednesday’s Child: Stories.”