Willa was a good baby otherwise, a calm and still child, but she made no sound, not even a peep, and even when she cried, which was rare, she made no noise, her tears falling silently until they dried up and disappeared, leaving her long eyelashes beaded together, and the faintest silvery trail down her pink cheeks, grains of salt that sometimes her mother licked off.
It was lunchtime on a Tuesday, and Annette was expected at two at one of the hospices on her regular route, a request for a violin vigil, made by the man himself. When he called, he said, “I’m 110, so there’s no time like the present. To be bathed in the sweetness of the violin in the hands of a master like yourself must be one of the loveliest ways to go. I have come to terms with it all and I am ready to close my eyes for the last time, to be taken away by the melody of a nigun, the Baal Shem specifically.” A nigun was the most taxing of soulful and religious Jewish songs, calling upon Annette’s deep improvisational abilities, but the man’s choice of the Baal Shem meant she had centuries of that nigun to follow, its overarching form structured by so many other violinists who had come before her, reflecting the mystical joy of intense prayer.
As she fed Willa the mashed peas she adored, one spoonful at a time, the Baal Shem was soaring through Annette and droplets collected in the corner of her eyes. Any crying by a thanatologist had to occur in advance, but certainly outside the walls of the hospice.
Another spoonful of the green mash and when the food slid in, Willa closed her perfect little cherry-red mouth and swayed with happiness. The kitchen clock never made any noise, but suddenly Annette heard the ticking, turned to look, watched as the second hand stopped sweeping, then moved forward again, one noisy click at a time. She felt her heart flutter, watched the spoon flip over in her hand, a dollop of green landing on the black and white tiled floor. Her head whipped back to her lovely little daughter, and she screamed.
Willa’s unspoiled face had altered entirely, was suddenly abstract. There was her original mouth, the cherry-red one, so pert and lovely, but right next to it, as well-shaped as the first, was a second mouth, the deep purple of an overripe plum.
And then Willa spoke for the first time. From the cherry-red mouth came the words, “I love you, Mommy,” and simultaneously, from the plum mouth, came the words, “You are a witch with a black heart, Mommy, I know what you really think about when you play your music, send those people to death”—
and Fancy inhaled so sharply that Daniel turned his head at the sound and let out a funny little laugh.
*
There was a timelessness for Joan in the act of creating these stories, a harkening back to when she was a young girl and beginning to write. After the failure of The Sympathetic Executioners, it was a relief to write without thoughts of publication, awards, and best-seller lists. The writing was pure again, the way it had been with both collections. And by reading aloud parts of the Rare Baby stories to Daniel and Fancy, she experienced the youthful pleasure denied her as a child, all that intense longing for a different mother who would have sat on Joan’s bed and read Joan’s stories aloud, exclaiming over what her child had produced. In the nursery, Joan’s good voice floated, and the words of her strange stories rode the quiet air, and something way deep down inside of her was soothed, a release of the anger and hatred she had long carried about her mother, Eleanor Ashby, the force that colored Joan’s earliest memories.
Each time she sat down to work on these stories, she knew they had something specific to tell her, perhaps about how she would be as a mother to Daniel as he grew up, encouraging his creativity, making true the positive effects of the buttercup-yellow paint. She sensed they were not meant to be heard by any others, not to be read by anyone else either.
At least once a weekend, Martin said, “How’s the work coming? When can I read them? When are you going to send them to Volkmann?” He asked these questions, one or all of them, again and again, opening the door to her study while she was working, throwing her a kiss when he finished his querying, until shivers ran through Joan when she heard the knob turning, making her breath catch in her throat.
Each time, she said, “Soon, maybe,” the way she had when he wanted to read pages from The Sympathetic Executioners, then said, “Martin, I need a little more time, then I’ll be out.”
Her husband, brash and brave in the operating room, in his focused research for groundbreaking ocular surgeries, seemed truculent in those freighted moments, before she responded, petulant even, and she felt incapable of explaining—had no desire to explain—the intrusiveness of his endless questions.
One day when they were alone in the living room, Fancy with Daniel in his room, Joan said, “Does it work for you that when you want to talk about your successes or failures in surgery, whether the research is going well or not, I listen, but otherwise I don’t try to burrow into your world, just give you space to move and roam and be on your own, with your thoughts, hopes, and beliefs?”
“You’re wonderful that way,” he said, failing to make the leap he should have been able to make, to see that he was trying to burrow into her world, a place where he did not belong, and the single unspoken sentence jammed in her mind: You’ve got to leave me alone.
For a man so attentive to his patients, aware of their fears and their foibles, how had he forgotten this about her, her need to keep her work to herself? At the very least, when he was home, why didn’t he notice that Fancy never, ever, knocked at the study when Joan was inside? If she thought a sign on the door would do the trick, she would have hoisted that sign right up, written in big black words: MARTIN—DO NOT DISTURB ME, but even that, she knew, would not keep him out. Sometimes she thought the only way to silence his voice, extinguish his interest, would be to stone him to death.
Breast-feeding ended, and bottles began, then rolling over and baby food, then gummed toes, solid food, first steps, and when Joan was not with Daniel or working on her Rare Baby stories while he napped, she and Fancy planted infant red maples, elms, and Cleveland pears around the property’s entire perimeter, a weeping willow tree not far from the house. They hoed and raked the ground, eliminated the weeds, prepared the soil, tilled and fertilized it, then planted Kentucky bluegrass, tall fescue, fine fescue, Bermuda grass, Zoysia grass, and perennial rye, and took turns watering every morning and afternoon from spring to late fall. On weekends, Martin pitched in, allowing Daniel to think he was helping, his small hands gripping the hose just behind his father’s big ones.