but it was paler now, a fine sort of blue. Like a work of art, really, a sculpture on a pedestal in a cool downtown gallery, with a placard beneath it that would read Drained of Life.
But the finger glittered because of the engagement ring she had been so excited to own, to wear, a rare and perfect four-carat diamond that sparkled in the sun and had no inclusions, no spots, no clouds, no cavities, nothing to disfigure the view, the opposite of her own pocked eyesight when she had looked at Stuart’s smooth exterior, that handsome face, and said, “Yes, Stuart, I say yes,” having no idea of the violence he could not contain. And nestled next to the diamond ring, curled up tight around it like a sleeping snake, was the golden wedding band that had always been too tight.
She could not imagine Stuart’s face when he returned and saw the bloody floor, her dead finger on the counter in a position of accusation and blame. How strange all that sawing had not damaged its fine tapered shape, had not chipped the polish on the nail. Even now, the shade was still pretty, a pale pink color called Princess Fairy Tale—
Joan thought it might not be too late to slip off her own wedding band, tell Martin their young marriage was at an end, that the only conception she was interested in was what she birthed on the page.
Their house was in a new development, some of the roads still waiting to be paved, the market ten miles away, the wine and liquor store next door. Perhaps there was an hour before Martin returned, and imagining him back in the house, beaming, popping corks, making toasts, set Joan panting, her mouth open like the dog they should have gotten immediately. She felt faint, her vision blurring in the middle, as if her blue irises were turning black, a shade dropping over them. She made it into her chair before her legs gave way, dropped her head between her knees, and waited.
When her eyesight cleared, and her heart was only galloping, she sat up and looked at the shelves Martin had hung, stocked with copies of her two award-winning, best-selling books, all the different covers, the titles in myriad languages, proof that she had readers around the globe. She looked at the goose-necked lamp they’d found at a yard sale when she joined him in Rhome; at the old battered wooden dining-room table brought from New York, on which she had written her stories; at her solid typewriter atop, an Olivetti Praxis she loved; at the four hundred pages of her first novel she was calling The Sympathetic Executioners. She wished she could unravel time to the moment before she accepted Martin’s offer of a drink in that Annapolis bar.
She looked down at the narrow wedding band on her finger, the inscription—MM loves JA—hidden underneath, and thought it would be easy enough to place it in Martin’s hand, to separate their belongings, to let him buy the house, or perhaps she would simply give it to him, deed it over as a kind of consolation prize for the end of their marriage. She would return to New York. She had some money now, would not be stuck in the sooty East Village with its pungent streets, its buildings marked with aggressive graffiti. It would take less than a week to pack up and arrange for the movers. While she searched for a new place to live in the city, she could stay with Iger, a senior editor now at Gravida and the new owner of a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. Joan could accomplish everything, she thought, without losing too much time, without being away from the book for too long. Too much was happening in the lives of Silas and Abe, her young killers for hire, the sympathetic executioners, for her to break stride.
The blare of the ice-cream truck’s tune shattered her hectic silence, the song growing louder as the truck journeyed through the unfinished neighborhood, a man yelling, “Wait, wait! You’ve got two little customers coming!” making Joan think of the lonely, stilted childhoods she and Martin had both endured. His mother dead when both he and she were too young, left with his stern father, ever the navy vice admiral who never wrapped his son in a hug, did not put a warm hand on his head or his shoulder; and Joan’s life, unwanted in her parents’ house, lost and alone unless she was reading or writing her stories up in her bedroom, or tucked away in the town library doing one or the other. How her parents had stared, as if her connection to them, her very existence, was an unsolvable puzzle. She instantly could see her father at the end of his working day, nearly motionless in his chair, the news on the television, a crossword in his lap, a glass of neat bourbon by his side, head turned away from his wife, from Joan’s mother, who stood on the other side of the living room, phone against her well-tended wash-and-set, her lipsticked mouth wide in pretend surprise as she listened to friends’ secrets, to gossip making the rounds. The furtiveness between the people Joan called Mother and Father, when her mother hung up the phone and sashayed over to sit on her father’s lap, a soldered circle of two Joan observed from the fringes, seated at the top of the staircase when she, no matter her age, was done with her reading and writing for the day. How they inclined their heads toward each other in those long minutes in the living room, and later at the kitchen table, telling each other about their days, neither ever asking Joan a question about anything. She remembered those awful dinners of her mother’s calf’s liver, and her father, so pale and bloodless, tearing into the flesh, his knife and fork scraping across the plate.
Martin was not pale and bloodless, she thought, sitting in her Rhome study. He was brilliant, as passionate about his work as she was about hers. He was strong and engaging, good and handsome, always looking as if he were fresh from a sunny day at the beach or from a whirlwind run down the slopes, burnished from the inside out. His days were spent on the campus, in the laboratory, or in the hospital’s operating rooms, but when he emerged he liked music and conversation and an abundance of others, as she did not. Her ability to sometimes be charming made people mistake her for a social creature when she preferred the turning of her own thoughts. She had learned to enjoy the parties they went to by considering them experiential interludes, potential fodder for her work one day.
People sought out Dr. Martin Manning, wanted to be in his presence, thought of him as their best friend. And he was a good friend, caring, considerate, kind, taking under his wing the newly minted doctors doing their rotations. Children flocked to him too. In New York, on his weekends there with her, she had seen infants and toddlers smiling up at him, waving to him from their strollers, as the two of them walked past, she evading the fat wheels of the buggies, he leaning down with a quick hello, saying, “Nice hat, buddy, you going fishing?” or “You’re wearing such a pretty dress, I wish I had a camera right this minute.” He had told Joan more than once that when he was a boy he wished for the impossible—for siblings and cousins to play with at the holidays, for holidays at all, celebrated with laughter and noise. His parents, like Joan’s, had been only children.
How did she miss so completely that Martin might want people who belonged to him through bonds more durable than friendship, that being a surrogate big brother to scared medical residents might not suffice, that waving to the children of others would not heal the hole in his heart? He had vowed to her they would not reproduce. Perhaps he had been honest when he swore to it, perhaps not. Regardless, Joan had proof that he wanted a child, he wanted this child.
She looked at the clock on her desk. An old-fashioned thing that had belonged to Martin’s father, one of the few items Martin kept when he sold everything in the Annapolis house, sold the house itself. It was bulky like Martin’s father. The hands sluggish, as Martin’s father had not been, its tick-tock loud when Joan’s writing was difficult, otherwise she didn’t hear the noise at all. She was surprised Martin had held on to it once she heard how fearfully he watched that clock when he was growing up, counting down the hours, then half hours, then minutes, then seconds, until his father was home from the academy. Before dinner, he pushed Martin out of the house, into the backyard, yelling out the navy calisthenics Martin was to do: “Get down, boy, give me forty push-ups.” And after they had eaten their dinners in silence, Martin watched the clock again. It was always ten minutes after Martin cleaned up the kitchen that his father demanded to see his finished homework, a red pen clutched between the vice admiral’s thick fingers.
Looking at the second hand’s slow sweep, Joan couldn’t figure out how many minutes had passed since Martin’s departure in pursuit
