But now Baraz is slowing and pointing. Now Vashti is scanning for the tent with the bright, beautiful flaps; she is prodding herself, Stop thinking of that night, pay attention to this one, you are supposed to be dead, you will be dead, but this warning only reminds her of the second choice she had to make that night—would she play dead or would she run?—which just like the first choice quickly revealed itself not to be a choice at all because a queen could not run and so she said she was sick, too sick to stand, and as soon as the words left her mouth it was not untrue, there was the wine, after all, and his cracked demand, and the party all around her, swaying, and a necklace she wore that was heavier than her crown, which she also wore, so that she began to tip backward, and once she was down she could not get up. But now—
She sees it! The tent is as Esther said it would be, the door’s fabric bright enough that it conquers the dark, so bright it seems to make sparks fly, and Vashti looks up, straight at the sky and its staggering sweep of light, and thinks, I am doing both now, I am playing dead and running, and she starts to laugh, and Baraz muzzles her, and then they wait until the noise has settled back into her bones before they pull open the tent’s flap.
MANHATTANLILY
Out of Eden into History
After the memorial service, an emptiness opens up in Lily. It comes without words; it is sensation only, a physical presence distended with absence. When she wakes it is waiting for her, nestled in crevices like a dark moss, and it crouches there, almost politely, until she gets through lunches and shoes and hugs and sees the people out the door. But once she stops moving, to drink her tea or sit on the toilet or stand in the shower, the emptiness unfurls like a great, pungent fern, an elegant slayer of anything that is not it.
Adam tells her it will be okay. He tells her not to rush whatever she has to go through; he’s here for her; what can he do for her? He says all the right things and even does a lot of the right things, like calling the preschool and saying they’d like one more month of three full days a week, and calling the sitter and asking her to cover the other two days. This even though she has seen him madly tallying on scrap paper while reading through their bank statement, and hears him working late each night, once talking with a colleague about the need to employ teenage girls at the camp’s developing fish farm so as to reduce violence against them in their tents. Lily’s need feels pathetic in comparison to these other needs, and this feeling, combined with the fern, drops her into a low-grade paranoia. When he says, What can I do for you? is he following some kind of manual? When he finds her in a listless moment and hugs her tightly, is he hugging her only because he fears what she will do if he doesn’t?
On day four, she manages to sit at the computer and read the news. It is good to be made to think of the world, even if the world consists of crap. The goodness lasts for a couple minutes, then she opens up the online White Pages and types in Vivian Barr. Her brothers have built the woman up to such a degree—the exiled wife, the smoking seductress—that Lily has come to think of her as not only estranged from Ruth but in hiding, more generally, from the world. Yet here is her address and phone number, publicly displayed. When after four rings Vivian Barr answers, she does not seem surprised to hear from Lily, nor does she force Lily to stumble toward some kind of ask. “You’ll come for tea,” she says, and they make a date, for Friday. It is Wednesday. Lily goes back to bed.
The next day, day five, she tells their sitter not to come; she’s going to spend the day with June. She thinks this will help fend off the fern but she is wrong. The day passes in a soup—they lie down together twice, but June never falls asleep, only Lily, who each time she wakes has an instant of forgetting her grief. Then she remembers. At two, in the shower, she is so overcome, nearly paralyzed, by the pore-opening steam that by the time she gets out, June has liberated an entire box of tampons from their wrappers. At six they go to pick up Rosie from theater and Hal, who has already said how sorry he is about Ruth, says it again, and does Lily want to come for chili? Jace made some last night. He is solid, standing there, his voice a cup of comfort. And Lily goes, because Adam has a late meeting and won’t be home until nine and at home there are only noodles to eat and the empty soup to stand around
