“Thank you,” Martin said. “I know what this means.”
She was still down in the abyss, unable to see the treacherous path she would need to climb, to find traction again beneath her feet, and so Joan said nothing, remained silent, practiced what she thought Joan would do—stay quiet, keep her own counsel, figure things out.
Every so often, Martin thanked her again, and again, and again, always in a whisper of words, until the light bled out of the sky, the blue turning a sad, desolate gray. At the back door, before Joan followed Martin inside, she looked up once more, tried thinking of the sky as something more, as the heavens, the place where wishes were sent, where they were granted, but it looked only like an old rag wrung completely dry.
2
Even to herself, Joan Ashby could not deny the truth: she was a pregnant goddess. Hormonal forces had turned her naturally good health into something patent and extraordinary. Her skin glistened, the whites of her eyes radiated, and her long hair, always a waterfall of black curls, was growing at a breathtaking rate, had already reached the small of her back, a perpetual tickle against her naked skin when she slept. Her eyelashes had become palm fronds over her bright-blue eyes, which had also altered, the color exotically deepening, eyes that startled her when she looked up while brushing her teeth. She had always been objective about her beauty, but even she was surprised when she glimpsed herself in a mirror; she was a goddess, and in the bath, a new nightly routine, she felt like a mermaid.
She often silently thanked the baby for being more thoughtful than she had expected it to be. She had feared it would punish her, for not wanting it, but she suffered no morning sickness or exhaustion, and as it grew, it kept itself nicely contained, swelling her gracefully, not wrenching Joan’s natural physical delicacy into something cumbersome and ungainly.
The friendly people of Rhome frequently stopped her on the street, telling her she was a gorgeous mother-to-be, sometimes asking, sometimes not, before reaching out and rubbing her belly, every one of them saying, “For good luck,” though whether she was to bring them good luck, or they her, she didn’t know. At night, after her bath, when Martin wanted to do the same thing, she often said, “Please don’t. I’ve been rubbed so many times today, I feel like a Buddha.”
She was not the only pregnant woman in tiny Rhome. There were six others, but she was the town’s first star. The celebrated writer from New York, with the dashing husband who was a neuro-ocular surgeon, who’d purchased a house out in the new development that was not formally named but some had taken to calling Peachtree, which made no sense to Joan. There were no peach trees in their neighborhood, no trees at all, not yet, no grass or gardens, just neighbors set far apart who waved to one another as they backed out of freshly graded driveways.
Small-town life had its benefits; she was not pursued like a fox by hounds, as she had been back in New York, her banal errands there somehow worthy of recording, a constant irritation because everyone shopped at the market, read the paper at the Laundromat, bought fresh fruit from the greengrocer. In Rhome, however, she wasn’t completely anonymous. The Tell-Tale and the Inveterate Reader, the town’s two bookstores, one on either end of the pretty main street, imaginatively named Strada di Felicità, had been artistically displaying her books in their windows for months, and the books had been flying off the shelves, so people recognized her from her photographs on the back flaps, from newspaper articles about her in the New York Times and Washington Post that featured a picture, but they approached her diffidently, politely, with charitable words, asking that she inscribe the title pages of her books, wanting to know, after rubbing her belly, when the baby was due, if she had any favorite names in mind, if she and the doctor were having an easy time settling in. Joan smiled graciously at the gentle intrusions, introduced herself properly, learned names and professions, engaged in a different version of life’s chitchat than perhaps the locals were used to; she tended to dig quickly past the superficial, asking pointed, gritty questions. But she could see they liked her, and she felt welcomed, even if it was the baby that served as the icebreaker, the pregnancy making her seem less formidable, easier to approach.
Only once did a man tail her, when she was five months pregnant and taking a break late in the day from the novel, the new paragraphs still in her mind:
The magazine was glossy and expensively produced, printed in Englewood, New Jersey, and each month, there were twenty pages of classifieds under a single heading: Kind Killers Wanted. Each ad a heartfelt request seeking the services of executioners. The one that caught Silas and Abe’s attention read:
WANTED—CARING FATHER KILLER: My father once was a delightful man, a high school principal, who was fair and firm. He would be appalled if he knew how he groaned every hour of every day, if he knew the thick auburn hair that was his secret pride had thinned down to strands, exposing a skull tender as an egg. I can tell that he knows he has veered far from his course, that he has lost the thread of his life. He used to sling words with aplomb, but his eyes now reflect an awareness that he is regressing to an infantile state. He should not suffer this way. Please respond if interested. Will pay going rate.
The man tailing Joan froze in his spot on the sidewalk when Joan wandered into a store, then followed in her wake when she resumed her stroll. She turned to look back at him and white stars exploded in the air, the flash of the man’s camera, a photographer stalking her, and Odile, who owned the Tell-Tale, flew out the front door of her shop and gave him hell. When the man yielded instantly, throwing his hands protectively around his camera and running fast down the street, Joan knew he wasn’t a regular among the mob that used to trail her in New York—none of them would have given up so easily. But Odile didn’t stop yelling until he disappeared around the corner.