with motherhood, everything out in the open. There was a heroic disorder to their lives, but she could not abide it. This coalescing amalgamation of the disparate parts of her life—writer, wife, mother, pregnant woman again—was not what she had ever wanted. She had a baby, was going to have another, was writing about babies, had a husband who wanted to know everything about what their baby did in his absences, about how the baby inside was treating her, what her rare babies were up to, and how they had come to be. She was consumed by domesticity: the normality of her flesh-and-blood family juxtaposed against her manifested world, which was mystical, numinous, sometimes supernaturally odd, filled with erudite babies illuminating what others could not see.
She put her shaking hands on her typewriter, watched them settle, all the while feeling the impulse to walk out, to disappear, as she had considered doing when she told Martin she was pregnant the first time, their incongruent stances about the life she was carrying rocking her entirely, an earthquake upending the life she had anticipated for herself.
Her soul, she realized, was in disarray, and this second pregnancy was not helping. It was not at all like the first. She had morning sickness day and night. She was not miraculously glowing. A second baby would intensify the disorder she needed, somehow, to compartmentalize.
Over the next several days, she read through all fifty of her Rare Baby stories. They were beautiful, the writing strong and densely molded, but she did not want to publish such a collection, did not want to be yoked forever to these creatures who had been intended only to help her maneuver through that first vital metamorphosis.
She would not read them aloud to the new baby, when it finally arrived. She could not indulge in this exercise any longer. If she did, she would slip entirely away, become irreal, an outline when she was made more solidly than that. It was the first Joan Ashby, the realest Joan Ashby, the one who was neither wife nor mother, that she was in immediate danger of losing. She had to eliminate the concentric circles that dominated her life, otherwise she would not be able to carry on building the family they were building, would want only to cut the bonds that tied her down.
With Daniel, she had imagined herself as a character who would hang on to the love she had been given and love her unwanted baby, and she had done that exceedingly well. She would do it again when the new baby arrived. But before that happened, she needed to reframe her existence, fracture her life, bifurcate Joan Manning, wife and mother, from Joan Ashby, the writer, erect boundaries to prevent any accidental bleeding between the two.
Volkmann called only twice a year now to confirm Joan had received her royalty statements and checks. She no longer asked about Joan’s plans for her first novel, assumed Joan had ceased writing entirely, consumed with something like the joys of motherhood, and Joan allowed her that belief. The same was true with Annabelle Iger, who called every couple of months, saying, “Haven’t you had enough of this pastoral existence, all this mothering and wifedom? Aren’t you sick of love and diapers? Start writing again before it’s too late.” She and Iger talked of so many things, their editing days together, the men Iger was toying with, the plays Iger saw, the dance clubs Iger still frequented, but Joan never mentioned The Sympathetic Executioners or the Rare Baby stories to her either.
She was again at a critical juncture, and this time, she needed to maintain the divide, husband and children out in the real world, but on her own, the writing she did would be truly private, consecrated, known only to her. No more reading her work to Daniel and Fancy. The new baby’s arrival would eliminate her study, soon to be transformed into another nursery.
She watched the reddened sun pale and set, and she pictured a castle with a tower that soared into the sky, a moat that rendered it inviolable, an imaginary place where she would write for the next years, without Martin knowing. She would throw him off her scent, lie and tell him she was taking a break, void entirely his inquisitions. She did not want to hear him talking about her work, suggesting, pontificating, analyzing. On the walk, the names of her characters had been far too familiar in his mouth. He had her and Daniel and the child to come; that would have to be sufficient.
In that high tower, that place of pure self, she might find her way to that first novel, at last write a book worthy of the reputation she had developed. She only wanted what belonged to her—what she created, her characters, her people, those with whom she spent the clearest hours of her days. It was, she thought, the way to make that truest part of herself whole once again. And if she protected her most essential qualities, the core of Joan Ashby, she could continue to give the rest of her heart to Martin, to Daniel, to the baby inside.
She thought about Fancy. She could trust Fancy to keep her secret when Joan returned to her work, after the early months with the new one.
She looked at Martin’s father’s clock on her desk. It had taken only thirty minutes to arrive at her plans for the future. Joan opened the study door and headed toward the living room, where her family was gathered. She could hear the roll of dice, the movement of plastic pieces, Martin and Daniel laughing, accusing each other of cheating, and she was aware how those voices both attracted and repelled her.
The delivery-room music was raucous in her thirty-second laboring hour. The baby was ten days late, and at the twenty-fifth hour, she had still been ticking off appropriate words: troublesome, exasperating, perverse, contrary, recalcitrant, obstreperous, disobliging, and then the few u words she could recall: unaccommodating, unhelpful, uncooperative, unwanted. Wait, she’d thought, when unwanted spiked, an articulated word she hoped only she heard. And then: entirely true, entirely not true, this time, last time, true and not true. She was sidetracked, the dictionary in her brain slipping away when a nurse increased the sweet epidural drip, and the music changed nature entirely. There had been Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart sailing through the delivery room, she was not an expert in classical music, but they were easily recognizable; now electric guitars were wailing, drumbeats pounding away, licks and harsh syncopations, and Joan’s voice croaked when she yelled, “Please! Change the station.” Nothing changed and she couldn’t tell if the music and her yelling were only inside her own head. Please, she prayed then, though the years had not changed her position about God, or gods, and she had already run through the panoply of words she used to invoke, could remember.
Daniel’s birth had been rapid, like a rocket, he set a record, leaving Joan with most of her self-respect intact, but not this time, this one already determining the time line of life. Her sweat, rivers of it, started out sweet, had gone sour, then yeasty, and now there was a meaty scent she was inhaling. She felt like a sick and cowering dog.
The bright lights all at once dimmed—why hadn’t they been lowered from the start, hadn’t they asked for a calm, quiet, melodic delivery?—and then Martin was soothing her forehead, whispering into her ear, “It will be okay.”
A contraption rose over her belly, gloved hands draping reams of thick plastic over it, cutting off everything below from her view. She was in parts, leaving those on the other side to contend with what was beneath her curved flesh. Scrub caps darted around, white, pink, and yellow disks rising and falling, rapid voices chasing each other’s tight tails, words like maternal tachycardia, fetal distress, spinal block, catheter, IV lines, and Joan felt something sting her hand. Out of the cyclone came her doctor’s quiet voice, “Scalpel. Starting Pfannenstiel incision.”
How wonderful now that everything was silent, the pain and fear gone, just the slow, slow beating of her own heart, her mind in a white haze that transformed into bleedingly bright primary colors. She remembered the pictures of a C-section that she had seen in one of Martin’s medical books, the scalpel so sharp against the thin skin that the underlying yellow fat layer burst, revealing the shiny, tough, fibrous fascia,
