Chapter 3
Eight years later, sometime between the rise and fall of the Halloween moon, the man who called himself just Joe lay in his tree house, christened with dew, and dreamed an old, familiar dream.
It was a long, absorbing dream that pulsed and murmured with a red, pervasive tide and the endless beating of a heart. In his dream, he drifted along with the hazy tide, bumping gently against soft, engorged walls, and finally became wedged in a hot cranny, wrapped in a web of capillaries, as safe as he would ever be.
As he took hold of his mother, and as her body embraced him, he rocked with her gentle gait, thrived on her warmth, began to be her son. All was well. He trembled with tremendous growth.
And then someone else arrived.
Instinct told him that this arrival was in some ways unnatural. A mistake. A second passenger where only one belonged. Not a twin: a follower. But a sister nonetheless.
Through the long, hypnotic dream, he shared the womb with this second child, meted out whatever nutrients he could spare, made adjustments to grant her room. But long before she was ready for the world, he kicked out with his perfect heel in a moment of fetal selfishness as natural to him as sleep and left a furrow in the soft bone of his sister’s face. And there was nothing that either of them could ever do to change that.
Joe awoke. For a moment he lay completely still, not sure where or even who he was. Then he saw, through the window by his bed, the branches of the walnut tree, black against the milky sky, and he began to breathe again. He could feel the dream receding, and he knew he would soon be unable to remember any of it. He would wake again in the morning, his face stiff with cold, unsettled by a vague memory of the moon shining on his face, the dream gone.
Before it left him he clung to it as he always did, for it reminded him that life can be perilous, full of random repercussions, even for the innocent and the well-intentioned. But the only alternative was not to live, and not to love. He had to remind himself of this, for Rachel’s sake as well as for his own.
Just Joe was born Christopher Barrows. Healthy. Content. His sister, Holly, swept from the womb four weeks early, was smaller than her brother, bald and spindly, her face misshapen and her reactions slow.
“The male was conceived first,” the doctor explained to his gaggle of interns, “the female a month later when a hormonal irregularity permitted a maverick egg to ripen, become fertilized, and implant itself as a secondary embryo in a womb already inhabited.” The doctors were unforgivably excited about the baby’s combined ailments.
Chad Barrows, looking into the incubator at his infant daughter, was glad that her face was turned away. “What can you do for her?” he asked the doctors.
“She’ll need some special care,” one replied, “but she’s in no real danger.”
“Her face,” Chad said through his teeth. “What can you do about her face?”
The doctors looked at one another. “Nothing,” one said. “Perhaps when she is older, plastic surgery. Every year we are able to do more and more. But there’s nothing we can do for her right now.”
Though the doctors were right, Chad was unconvinced. He was very wealthy. There was nothing he had ever been unable to buy. But after hearing the same prognosis from the best specialists in New England, Chad finally relented. He had his son, after all.
The baby boy was perfect: healthy, happy, handsome. Wonderful to look at. Eventually, Chad even took to putting his open hand on his son’s warm, downy, pulsing skull, holding it there as if to convey by osmosis his own brand of wisdom.
“There’s no reason either of them should ever know what really happened,” he said to his wife, Kay. “He’s not to blame. He didn’t mean to hurt her.” Just as Chad, lowering himself onto his newly pregnant wife, had not meant to conceive an irregular child. “I’ll not have him feeling guilty later on, or her resentful. We’ll make something up. Tell them you fell down the stairs. They never need to know.” Chad was good at keeping secrets. He was a careful man who made sure that his wishes would be carried out. It was therefore a long time before his daughter found out what her innocent brother had done.
Nicknames were traditional in the Barrows family. In keeping with this tradition, Charles Barrows was known exclusively as Chad (never Charlie) and his wife, Katherine, as Kay. It seemed natural to them, then, to select nicknames for their children first, and more formal ones almost as an afterthought. The name they gave their daughter, Holly, reminded them of young girls in plaid frocks and ponytails, armed with hockey sticks, sweeping down a green field. (The formal name they put on her birth papers, Harriet Caldwell Barrows, was for her maternal grandmother, long dead, and Kay’s own maiden name, long relinquished.) And from the day he was born, their son, Christopher James, was known by all as Kit.
“It’s one of those names,” Chad mused as he watched his infant son waking. “Like something out of a book. It suits him.”
Kay Barrows lay curled in her hospital bed, suffering, joyful. “It’s the kind of name given to handsome boys. Kit. Clean. Sharp. Neat. Unforgettable. Girls are going to fall in love with him.”
When he saw his wife, later, nursing their daughter, Chad parted the small, sucking lips with his finger and pulled the blanket over his wife’s breast. “The doctor said she wouldn’t be able to nurse. Her mouth is askew, Kay. She won’t be able
