As a teenager, she had read all of the short stories by the Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand, but only after Fictional Family Life was published had she come upon an old interview with Anand in which he discussed some of what Joan’s own writing was after. With this first novel, she had sought to wrangle with the concept obliquely, had researched Stockholm syndrome, and the statistics about how many vulnerable people could be persuaded to resist their own morality, how likely people were to be hypnotized. She had been interested in exploring what happened to children abandoned at birth, who were later dropped into a strange alternative world. What happened especially when those children had been well tended by caring foster parents—would the tragedy of their unwanted births and abandonment wipe out the interim temporary love, make them amenable to killing? If they were led in that direction, given the tools and a code to live by, a rationalization tucked into their skin that allowed them to consider the work noble, would they become euthanasiasts for hire? She had liked the underground group of foster parents analyzing the children they sheltered, searching out those with the requisite aptitudes. She had wanted to see what happened with Silas and Abe, if they naturally took to the work because they unconsciously tapped into the early realities of their existence.
Now, on the couch, the rain sheeting down, their four acres a muddy field, Joan was debating her authorial choices. She’d deliberately begun the book on their eighteenth birthdays, with just a quick summation of their fostered years. She had wanted to get to the crux, to the meat, was most interested in writing about what happened next, the path they were led to discover, whether they had the strength and rectitude to resist, or whether they would give in, welcome the lives chosen for them, the work they were told they were suited to do.
Had she made a mistake? Should she have begun further back in time, written in depth about Silas and Abe’s entry into the world, the parents who had made them, the nature of that relationship, whether it was abusive or simply bad luck, two kids finding themselves parents too early in their lives.
The questions she had not had to answer by starting the book where she did raced through her brain: Who had abandoned the infants at the firehouse—the mother, the father, the two of them skulking before dawn to leave the basket at the door? Was the mother all on her own, living in a falling-down shack, pumping her milk to fill those bottles she inked with a pink marker? Or were the parents still a team, with regular jobs and tax returns, but the prospect of raising two at once, and identical, was overwhelming, far beyond what had been anticipated?
Had she made a grave error by not exploring the twins’ early years, the balance of power between Silas and Abe, how it might have teetered, before settling?
Perhaps it was the hormones, her brain no longer wholly her own, her intelligence usurped by the baby, but the dismay did not lift away.
She read on:
Then Silas and Abe were through the double glass doors. A fat man with stringy black hair and a silver ring through his nose was manning the minimart’s cash register.
“Come closer, young gentlemen. I’m Milt. No last name needed and absolutely no reason at all to be frightened. I get that it’s a scary time for you, but all will be explained, all will be okay.”
It was Abe who bravely approached the counter when Milt held out a rolled-up magazine. Abe took it and stepped back and Silas leaned over his shoulder. The magazine fanned out and revealed no name on the cover, no sharply photographed picture. The back and front were completely blank, shiny though, and solidly black, the paper of good quality, heavyweight.
“You can read the articles later, a fascinating bunch this time around,” Milt said. “Lots to learn in there. But for now, I want you to read the classifieds, really read them carefully, then come back in and talk to me, tell me which one grabs your guts first. Only then will I explain what’s going on, the presents you were given, the reason for the suits, the shirts, the ties. In those classifieds, young gentlemen, is your future. Anyone need something to drink before taking the first step?”
Abe stepped forward again and nodded. “I’d like a chocolate Yoo-hoo, Milt,” then turned to his brother and said, “Silas, what do you want?”
In later chapters, they learned to pick locks, to move stealthily, to disguise themselves utterly, to kill gently with their bare hands and not leave a mark. The code the twins would live by was drilled into them: Only by knowing the truth of a person can I guarantee that those I free from pain are dispatched with pure beating hearts, belonging to both killer and victim. Their preparation included boning up on their subjects. They were handed large blue three-ring notebooks that contained the voluminous histories of their targets, everything about their lives, their loves, the people they had cared for or hurt.
Joan liked the shocking intimacy of the twins befriending those marked for death, the murders paid for in advance by thoughtful family members who wanted their loved ones no longer to suffer from brain tumors and cancers and cirrhosis and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and systemic organ failure and any other disease that broke down the flesh or the mind.
Their first target, an elderly lady named Ginny Sauvage, pink-fleshed and white-haired in her retirement community bed, looked innocent in old age, held out her hands when the twins introduced themselves, after slipping past the guards, evading the nurses roaming the floor. But with those hands, now crippled and clawed, Ginny Sauvage had once beaten every one of her children.
Now that Ginny Sauvage had been found, her location determined, her mobility assessed, the twins made their way out of the retirement community and waited at the leafy entrance for their ride.
Abe said, “She was a brute, Silas, you’ve got to remember that, when we return to do the job. I’ve found what I need, something black in my pulse, and I’ll teach you how to find it in yourself, how to feel it moving through you, the way you can harness it, and let it do the work for you.”
Hours later, when Joan finished reading, the manuscript pages were out of order, no longer neatly sequential, but it didn’t matter. It seemed to her there was something all wrong about the book. Was it too dark and deadly? Did it suffer from the lack of that unwritten familial history and backstory? Whatever it was, she had not found her way in.
She huffed into a seated position, then up off the couch, and made her slow way down the hall, into her study. She dropped the manuscript on her desk, turned away, then turned back. One by one, Joan dropped the four shelved dictionaries onto the five-hundred-page manuscript, listening to the booms of those tomes, feeling the reverberations in her body, until her work was completely hidden from view.
She thought about calling Volkmann, asking her to read it, as a reader, not as an agent ready to deliver the anticipated book to an eager publisher, having Martin read it as well.
In the novels of others, Joan always flipped first to the acknowledgments page, read the names of those who had provided the author with immeasurable help, essential help, critical help, guidance, love, good meals, a place to write looking at the ocean, a lake, a pond, a sand dune. There were no acknowledgments listed in Joan’s collections; she had not sought input from others, had relied on her own instincts to determine when the work was complete, exactly as she wanted it to be, had fought against the editors assigned her and won. She had not felt anyone deserved to be thanked.