“It doesn’t scratch off!” she cries.
The man snarls. “But of course it does,” he says, and his sneering reinvigorates her—she kicks him away and rises to her knees. He will give up, she thinks. I am terrifying and repulsive. But as she pushes herself up to stand, she sees that her hands are getting smaller. This is what he meant. “It’s working,” he says to the king, and before she can breathe again he’s pushed her back onto the floor. Esther tries to fend him off with her elbows but she is distracted by what’s happening in her body—it’s not the scratching causing it, she knows, but her fear. But this thought delivers more fear, and now she can feel the reversal happening, she feels herself sinking again into the vortex but there is no violence now, only a peaceful cycling, neither hot nor cold, a terrain so familiar she starts to weep, for she is turning into a girl as they watch. The king looks as shocked as he did when she became the beast. But the man—he is the king’s highest minister, Esther will soon learn—lowers himself to straddle her and clamps her head between his forearms. “You will not mock the king,” he says, raining spittle across her face. Esther closes her eyes and he uses his thumbs to pry them open. “Do you understand?”
She can’t nod. He grips her head too tightly.
“His entire court was present on that stage. It was you they saw him choose, and it will be you who is his queen.”
He releases her for an instant then grabs her again by her hair and with his free hand shows her a knife, which she feels a second later at her throat.
“What we do,” he says, speaking softly now, enunciating with exaggerated care, “we do for the people.”
The blade presses. Esther works not to swallow.
“If we falter, who can they trust? If we fail to rule, how will they live? Queen Vashti disobeyed. If she wasn’t punished, think what would happen. Imagine, across Persia: In the houses. In the beds …” The minister’s eyes close. His face twists. At first Esther thinks he is merely demonstrating his instructions, but as the moment stretches, she sees that he is fulfilling them, and imagining, and that his fury is genuine. A string of saliva hangs from his lips. A scream forms in her gut. Then the minister sucks back his spit, opens his eyes, and says, without a hint of emotion: “The queen is dead. You are queen now. Do you understand?”
His face begins to melt. In the night station one morning, Esther heard a girl from somewhere else talking about how in death, in order to give birth to yourself again, for the next life, you become a man for a short while, until you’re through to the other side. This is nothing Esther is meant to believe. It’s nothing she has wished for. But as she passes out, the new queen, her exile complete, it’s what enters her vision. The chest that could have been hers, the jaw, the hands that might have killed. Better than becoming a beast would have been to become a man.
Part TwoWandering
MANHATTANLILY
A Clean, Blank Room
“Go home.”
“I want to stay.”
“Sweetheart. I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“Tonight I am.”
“I want to stay.”
A machine by her mother’s bed issues forth a string of beeps. The machine has been beeping all day without apparent pattern or consequence, but still Lily jumps each time she hears it, shooting forward in her chair. Earlier she asked a nurse, What does the machine mean? only to be given an answer at once so basic yet unintelligible she became worried that the nurse didn’t understand either. Since then—many ages seem to have passed since this morning, when Ruth was admitted to what is unhelpfully called “the step-down unit”—nothing any nurse or doctor has done or said has reassured her. She knows this is “the best cancer place” in the city, and that their survival rate for stage IV non–small cell lung cancer—Ruth’s kind—is better than anyone else’s. But it’s still devastatingly low. And somehow the staff’s certainty, the speed with which they’ve decided what must be done with her mother and the efficacy with which they carry it out, upsets her even more. Can there be nothing mysterious or new or unique about Ruth’s cancer, nothing in her character—her sharp, dry, critical, forceful, optimistic, loving self—that prophesies a different ending?
“Relax, Lil,” says Ruth. “It’s like a fart. The machine just farts now and then.”
“At some point it has to mean something.”
“Lovie. You’re so tired.”
“I’m not.”
Ruth sighs and closes her eyes. Lily’s brothers have gone home, Ian back to California, Lionel to Connecticut. The diagnosis was four days ago; the initial shock has passed. Lily’s hurt at the fact that Ruth called Lionel first has been buried. Ruth will stay in the hospital for a couple more days, then, it’s likely, go home. She’s in good hands, Lionel keeps telling Lily. Don’t burn out too quickly, Adam says. She has extended June to full days Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, all the school had space for, and employed one of their occasional sitters to cover for pickup, etc., when needed. Adam supports all this—emotionally, financially, though the latter will be a stretch—but reminds her: The woman drives you crazy. Lily would tell herself the same thing, if she were the old Lily, of four days ago.
