Peck knew that her family, readers all, had never read a single one of her books, not the three story collections, not the two novels. They did not know that her collections had been honored. They did not know her second novel won a major award. They would have been astounded to learn that a hairstylist tied Peck’s long brown hair up in an intricate chignon with tendrils trailing her neck, and that another woman turned Peck’s pale and pretty blue-eyed face into something golden and fetching, and that a third woman found a long black column for Peck to wear and silver heels to stand in when the press spoke to her before and after the awards ceremony. No one in Devils Creek subscribed to People or Vogue and so they did not see Peck’s photographs on bright shiny paper, the silly phrase Lit-Beauty dashed in a tough font below. She had clipped her own images, struck by her slim and bare shoulders and her long curved eyelashes, and taped herself behind books on the shelves in her study. The old saw that the only publicity a woman should ever desire is on the event of her birth, marriage, and death was something the people of Devils Creek would hold true, if they ever considered it, which they did not. The news that a local girl had been nationally feted failed to make the town’s single paper, a daily comprised of ten weightless pages, eight of them classifieds. Her family was still unaware of the felicity that attended Peck and her award.
On Wednesday nights, Peck did tell Margo about how her work was going, these days a third novel, but she did not pretend that Margo was actually interested; it was a ten-minute monologue Peck used to untangle recent kinks in her writing, and as a counterbalance to Margo’s joy in her children. And although Peck also told her sister about the men she dated and discarded, scores of men since she landed in New York, whatever their names, whatever they looked like, however they spent their days, Peck identified the wrong with each of them, or what should have been present within, but was, instead, absent completely. When she detailed those wrong or absent traits, Margo said Peck was missing something magnificent about what love provided a couple, the truth that children lay bare. “Isn’t it enough that I’ve spotted the problems right up front?” Peck often said, in some form or another, and then listened to Margo sighing her Devils Creek sigh.
She never told Margo about all the men who sprang forward after that ceremonial evening, and then again after the pictures of her were published; that she had acquired an international dating pool if she wanted it. Men from Maine, Nevada, Rhode Island, Texas, New Mexico, and other places, and even from Italy, France, and Spain, sent her postcards, or wrote her long adverbial letters, all expressing a fervent desire to date or marry her, the most honest writing that they just wanted to bed her, to experience for themselves the wanton woman they assumed was Peck in the stories. It was only a year ago that the award altered the physical mass of correspondence she received, and her postman said, “Listen to me. Too many people know where to find you. You need to erase any reference to your address, set up a post office box, turn in any letters that seem off to the 27th Precinct. Take heed, Peck, about what’s in your hands.” Peck heeded.
On a heated Wednesday night in early July, Peck called Margo at the usual time. She pressed the phone to her ear, ready for the obligatory dipping-in before settling down to a tell-all when Margo rushed ahead. “I have to tell you, I’m nearly five months along, but I waited to make sure nothing went wrong this time.”
Peck was surprised that Margo had held the secret tight, though it wasn’t news that should have startled her—her sister and brother-in-law had been trying for a third child for a while—but something serious unraveled within Peck anyway. With the phone cricked against her chin, Peck rose from the couch and walked into the kitchen as Margo detailed her now-dissipated worries.
When Margo said, “Now that the iffy stage is past, we’re teaching Bug and Bea about the new life growing inside of Mommy,” Peck retrieved the bottle of Jim Beam from the back of a cabinet. Bourbon was Peck’s out-of-bounds drink, the way it released the memories of her wayward youth, her long-ago ability to find trouble even in a place as small as Devils Creek, but Margo’s news had already opened that door, and so Peck poured herself a shot and tossed it back.
“Mom and Dad are excited, of course,” Margo said, and Peck poured herself another. In the kitchen’s low light, the burnished liquid of her past gleamed, waiting to be swallowed down once again.
She tossed the second shot back as Margo said, “I want you to be this baby’s godmother, Thessaly.” The bourbon burn hit the back of Peck’s throat and she coughed.
“Sorry, sorry,” Margo said. “My screw-up. I should remember. I do remember. I’ll never get why you ditched Thessaly. I would want to be a Thessaly. I always did want to be you, Thessaly.”
The rising fumes of the bourbon brought back all those times of mistaken youthful frenzy when Peck was fifteen and up on the Devils Creek cliffs, and the boy, five years older than she, cleverly used his silent mouth, his broad hands. Once, she had thought all of life was there in his arms, with her back pounded into the dust, the distant stars suddenly close and bright, the moon waxing and waning.
“Will you do the honors?” Margo said. “Teach this child everything I can’t teach it. Love it as much as I love you?”
On Thursday morning, when she woke, Peck did not remember the end of her conversation with Margo, whether or not she had agreed to shepherd, in some unclear way, her sister’s unborn child, but she knew that she had not dreamt while she slept, and she wasn’t sure the bourbon was responsible for that intimidating blank. She had not had a dreamless sleep since she was fifteen-year-old Thessaly on Traynor land in Devils Creek, sneaking out most nights and running to the cliffs where she met the boy and got naked, and afterward drank enough bourbon to kill something, although it failed to kill that which it should have. That year, when her body swelled, she began dreaming every night, about many things, and always saw herself writing in notebooks, and on large pieces of paper, sometimes using a pen, sometimes a pencil, once or twice a quill she had only ever seen in movies. The family divided about whether the baby should be kept, given away, or done away with from the start. Her father wanted the baby brought up a Traynor. Her mother wanted Peck to have a chance first at a life of her own. Peck would leave them all downstairs to argue it out and, when she wasn’t in school, she cloistered herself in her room, started writing in the diary she mocked when given to her on her twelfth birthday. Nine months later when certain decisions were lost and the diary was all filled up, Peck sweated, pushed, and screamed, and figured out that her stories, about whole lives blown apart on the land, were really about faith eliminated.
In the hospital, Peck saw her daughter for an instant before the baby was delivered to her new life, which Peck hoped would unfold in California or Florida, someplace with an ocean that had endless tides and starfish and shells.
Such thoughts as these, and more, had been brought on by Margo’s news, the omen of bourbon, and a night bereft of the dreamy lifeline to her own lost past. Peck rose from her bed, unglued her eyes, and rinsed the cobwebs from her mouth.
In the kitchen, she dropped the half-empty bottle into the trash and started the coffee. When the drops were fat and slow, she thought the time had come to finally take action, to do what she had long desired.
An hour later, she was pointing out to the building’s assistant super the walls that sliced apart living room and dining room, and those that enclosed bedroom and study.
“Can you tear all these walls down, Miguel?” she asked.
“If it’s possible, of course, I will do it for you, Peck,” he said, and she followed him through the apartment, listening as he tapped each wall from top to bottom. The taps sounded hollow to Peck, which she thought was a good thing, that particular structures were not essential.