She slides past him and begins to load wet clothes into the dryer.
“Did you get any calls today?”
Each night he asks this. He wants to know if any of the papers have tracked her down. As if they would doubt the tabloid story that she is rehabilitating at Fainwright. In an effort to reassure him Vee made a call to the hospital and was promised that they wouldn’t tell anyone whether Vivian Kent is there or not—not because she is who she is, the woman was quick to add, but because of policy. And Vee understood. Half their patients, famously, were famous, most far more so than Vee.
She told Philip about the woman’s promise. She reminded him that she has no family for people to badger, no aunts or uncles, no parents, no siblings, and that the only people who know where she is are Alex and Hump, who have no interest in sharing that information. She explained that no one recognizes her, that even on her trip northward, the driver, an Albanian man who was silent for 99 percent of the ten-hour drive, did not insist on any kind of costume when she got out at rest stops.
But Philip is not assuaged by any of this. He insists she wear a hat on her walks. When she tells him now, “No calls,” he stays in the doorway, silent, until she twists around to face him. Philip is shorter than Alex but broader in the shoulders and meatier in the arms, like he might have been a wrestler once upon a time and has the potential to grow a little fat as he ages. He stands tilted against the jamb, arms folded, frowning, and for the first time it strikes Vee that he may be afraid not only of attention but of her.
“I’ll leave as soon as I can,” she says.
“Good,” says Philip.
Vee nods.
“This is a quiet house,” he adds. “Rosemary and I would like to keep it that way.”
A flush of anger moves through her and as she turns away, and sinks her hands into the cool, wet clothes, she begins to hum, pretending great concern about locating care labels, until, finally, she hears Philip’s footsteps in retreat.
SUSAESTHER
The Queen, Nine Months Pregnant
You had to understand it couldn’t be prevented. She is eighteen, ripe as a rabbit. Her stomach sits in her lap. Her feet are being rubbed. The midwife doing the rubbing discreetly avoids the bulging knuckles on Esther’s big toes, remnants of her beastly transformation, but that does not mean she—or any of the midwives—trusts her. They have been too close to her for too long. They know the other changes, as well: the slight deformation of her ears, pointed where they used to be round; the permanent rash that runs along the tops of her thighs; the way her nipples have turned from pink to purple. Granted, this last problem could also be linked to her condition. Either way, they will never go back to pink, just as her ears and skin and toes will never return to their original forms.
You had to know she didn’t escape. Smart girl, very brave, became a beast. But this is not fantasy.
Esther’s face is altered, too, though this has nothing to do with accidents of amateur magic or ravage by hormones. The minister’s scratching did it, striped her cheeks with vertical paths slightly lighter in color than her skin.
She lives well, Esther. Like a queen! She is a queen. There are jewels and silks and velvet pheasant dinners and rare wines. Yet none of this has dulcified her. Last week, when she was invited to dine with the king, the king’s minister—the one who scratched her and held the knife to her throat and who has turned out to be the only minister who matters—informed her that the wine in her glass cost more than the diadem on her head, but to Esther it tasted like overdried fig. She knows her chambers are basically another harem, if the upstairs version. There are plenty of windows, and she is allowed outside, but only in the courtyards, and only within the boundaries of the palace walls. The king and his minister mistrust her, for obvious reasons.
The walls of her chambers are so soft you could sleep on them if the world fell over, which it might have as far as Esther is concerned.
Another girl would have relented by now. But Esther, possessed of an extraordinary self-regard that pitches her alternately toward survival or doom, is still at war. If she cannot save herself, she has determined, she will make good on Marduk’s ludicrous boast and save her people. They are still out there, she has learned, still being attacked, still leaving themselves attackable. It doesn’t matter what makes them stay, she has decided, whether it’s inertia, or stupidity, or some delusion Marduk managed to make them believe about Esther’s powers of persuasion. All that matters is that they go. All Esther does now is to make sure that happens.
She tried Lara first, some weeks after the choosing, found her lying on her bed, as hairy as she was born to be, eyes closed. Esther’s old bed was empty, and in the light then streaming down from the slit of a window Esther could suddenly see
