The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

In September 2012, Lenni’s mother took 15-year-old Lenni to live with her ex-husband and moved back to Sweden alone. When Lenni’s mother came to say goodbye, the girl refused to leave her room and was shocked when her mother left without saying goodbye. Lenni burned the forwarding address her mother left.

Back in 2014, Margot asks Lenni if her mother knows about her condition. Lenni hopes that her mother is blissfully ignorant, “happy, free, traveling around Sweden, and sleeping through the night” (171). Even if Lenni’s mother knows, the teen is glad that she can spare her from the haunted expressions she has seen on the faces of other children’s mothers in the May Ward.

In London in July 1966, when Margot was 35, Jeremy the chicken—whom Meena kept as a pet when she liberated the animals at the farm 11 months earlier—went missing. As Margot helped Meena search for him, her memories about Davey resurfaced. She recalled how frightened she felt when Johnny first left her alone with the baby—and she remembered how Johnny looked at her with contempt when she awoke in a panic after Davey’s death and thought for a moment that he’d been kidnapped. She remembered how she wept when her mother-in-law unilaterally chose the wording for Davey’s headstone and how she hated the inscription because it seemed to suggest that God might not show mercy to her baby.