Lily thinks of her kitchen memory—Lily on one side of the glass, Vivian Barr on the other. Does Vivian Barr have the same one? Is she trying to apologize in some way? Lily cannot ask this. She cannot say to this woman, I remember you in a robe, there is something desperate about you, in the robe, you are in a robe in my kitchen, maybe with my father … They have already discussed Lily’s father. That is done. If there is anything else to the story, if Lily is not the only one here who has grappled with another woman’s husband in a kitchen, Vivian Barr is not telling. So Lily says—and it is true, and it was true last night when she said good-night to the girls, her blood still firing from her trespass: “I feel that way with my older daughter sometimes. Rosie. She looks at me, and I think she can see not just something but everything. It’s very unnerving.”
Vivian Barr looks at Lily for a long moment. Then she sits back from the table with a sigh. One of her hands drifts downward. Within a second, the dog is there, fitting himself to her fingers. “Girls are always unnerving,” she says.
SUSAVASHTI
Is Her Mind Sound?
For an instant, engulfed by the tent’s blackness, Vashti fears she is in the earth again. The sky, the breeze, the sand, must all have been a hallucination. Fevered answers to questions she’d thought she’d stopped asking. Sour air fills her nostrils. A keen forms in her throat. I am entombed again.
Then a torch flares. An arm shimmies into view, a chest, a man—or not quite a man. A man-sized boy whose bones have stretched faster than they’ve been fed. He wears only a cloth at his hips; in one hand he holds the torch, in the other a knife. Vashti knows at once that he is Itz. The boy who lost his mother’s spoon and accidentally stole another, the boy who started the war on the camp. He would be the first to wake. His head lifts the tent’s ceiling; his jaw has the overshot squareness particular to pubescent boys; an Adam’s apple slides in its slot. Vashti takes it all in. She will relay what she sees to Baraz—each hair, every angle, the kinds of details he will miss on his own—and instruct him to bring all of it back to Esther. Not the small number of tents remaining, nor the empty-stomach smell, but the beauty of her cousin as he brandishes that tiny blade. This will be Vashti’s token of thanks, however small, for the hours Esther spent in her cave, telling Vashti what she needed to know.
“We won’t hurt you,” Baraz says. He lifts a hand, his gesture for peace, a gesture he used so often on Vashti in her first days in the hole that she began to think—because it worked on her—that he possessed hypnotic powers. But it doesn’t work on Itz, who continues wagging his knife at them, and whose eyes, dark in their hollows, are impossible to read.
Vashti is sorry, to come upon them like this.
The others are stirring now, a collective rumbling like a caravan. They are more than one family—they are, she will learn, four families and assorted abandoneds—and Baraz, trying to preempt attack, says loudly: “Esther sent us.” He says it again, making sure they hear the name, for though Esther insisted they speak basic Persian, and though Baraz loves Esther, he has the same view of her tribe as most, Vashti included, that they are an insular and stubborn people.
He says it a third time, and as their faces rise into the torchlight now, creased with sleep, blinking, they are silent, with the exception of one man who leaps up and says, “How can you prove it?”
This is Marduk, of course. Vashti recognizes him right away. A bit like the king, Esther said, and this is true: the uncle puffs his chest and steps in front of Itz. He looks from Vashti to Baraz and back with a practiced violence in his eyes, though it’s easy to see, in his stooped form—his son, behind him, stands a full head taller—that his gaze is more forceful than any harm he can actually inflict.
She thinks of all the proof she can offer. All Esther told her to help her ingratiate herself with them. Vashti knows about the goblin. She knows about the rugs that rolled Itz back and forth from the river, and she knows how Marduk and his wife laughed, like vultures, before he slapped his niece. She knows more still: that Marduk was forever jealous of his brother Harun; that he lives in fear that he’s a fool. A blowhard, Esther called him, perhaps not with that word but with another that meant the same in that time and place.
But not everything Esther told her will be of help. Much of it—most of it, probably—they do not want to hear. And some of it would only stretch their disbelief further. The malformed tips of Esther’s ears, for instance, or the bird she brought to life. Even if her exertions might demonstrate her devotion to the people in this
