The Book of V.

has always belonged, with Vee, to the latter. Wasn’t it all bullshit, though, if you could move around at will? Preppy to hippie, Episcopal to Jewish, polished to buffed and back again? She is also thinking that she does maybe want to go to the meeting, if only to do something, and spend a few hours in the city, and that she will have to convince Philip to let her go, and of how demeaning that will be, to ask another woman’s husband for permission to go out. She is thinking that she cannot stay here forever. She is thinking of the argument she’ll make to Philip: if Alex wants her back, he is going to want to protect her; Hump is not going to send the tabloids after her; no one is going to come beating down Philip’s door. The more Vee thinks of the argument she’ll make, the more she wants to go to the meeting. She’ll tell him she won’t talk, only listen; she’ll act like a reporter, interested but not implicated.

She likes this idea. Interested but not implicated. As Rosemary says good night and heads upstairs, Vee thinks maybe, after what happened to her, she is not meant for solidarity. Maybe she was never meant for it—hence her ambivalence about babies, and her judgments of everyone: the wives, the women’s-group women, Alex. Poor Alex. Maybe Vee has never been on the right path. She climbs the stairs, her legs woozy with bourbon, her mind suddenly, startlingly clear: a vision of the wooded road to the man’s house; a recognition that she will walk it again tomorrow.

 SUSAESTHER

Her New Scheme

The idea comes to her as she’s walking in one of the far courtyards. It’s almost dusk, the time in the camp when the fires are lit, and Esther sniffs the air, thinking she smells the tang of the first smoke, a hint of sumac and rice. She imagines the shout that might have a chance of reaching her aunt or Nadav, then feels its possibility trickling back down her throat. Her voice can’t possibly be strong enough. Even if it were, by the time she got one word to them, the guards would haul her inside. She would not be let out again.

They stand in the corner now, tracking her. She still isn’t sure who they work for exactly, whether they answer to the king himself or to the wicked minister who acts as the king’s puppeteer. She used to think knowing this would help her somehow, but now she understands that it doesn’t matter.

What she doesn’t understand is keeping a thing that you know wants to escape. Keeping it, dressing it, feeding it, praising it, and all the while, you know it doesn’t want you. It seems to her it would be a great humiliation. Yet no one appears humiliated except for her.

The child has made it better, and much worse. He came in the middle of the night, waking her like the river was inside her, needing to get out, and the midwives arrived instantly, though it was, oddly, Baraz she turned out to want. She called out for him, she cried for him. When someone told her they had looked but could not find him, the weight that howled into her back in that moment, a hot, massive fist that contained her mother and Lara and Itz and her aunt and Nadav and her father and Mother Mona and Esther’s own birth, made her want to die. But she had no choice; the child’s seizing was hers. And then he was born, a boy, his little wand swollen and waving, and she gave up a cry.

He looks unlike anyone she has known. Even the king admits this; he wonders aloud if his child is of another world, a god; his mistrust of Esther deepens. Once upon a time, she has learned, the king served as a steward in Vashti’s father’s palace; whichever girl in the night station said he himself was not of noble blood was correct. So even as he reigns he is displaced, and his son’s entrance has displaced him further. The child is four months old now, with yellow hair the color of a grass that grew in the city where Esther was raised, along the washing creeks. His eyes are darker than brown. His name is Darius. The king’s choice. Esther is grateful for it, though her gratitude stings: Darius is not a Hebrew—or won’t have to live as one, at least. And he is, as the midwife knew, not a girl. He is the king’s first son. He is in line to reign. Esther is glad for all these things, though her father would mourn the child not knowing the stories and prayers. Maybe she will tell him someday; or maybe, she sometimes thinks, he will discover them on his own, like Moses. She is glad for Darius’s warmth, when he isn’t being taken away to be nursed or put to sleep. But she is also aware that he has sealed her fate, because even if she were released now, she would never be able to leave.

She knows from Baraz that the attacks on the camp have grown more violent. He goes as close as he can, he tells her, he looks and listens. This must be what he was doing when Darius was born, Esther decides. He is sorry—his sorrow is visible—that he can’t do more. He tells her everything he learns. He tells her children have died. He tells her women are raped.

But what do they gain now? Esther asks. If the camp is already in pieces, why do the Persians keep smashing it?

There are many poor among the Persians, too, says Baraz. It’s a solace for them. Not to be the lowest.

Oh.

A bird lands on the palace wall, choosing the last bit of sun. It’s the same type of bird Esther saw from her pallet in the night station one afternoon, black