him Joan had won every battle.
When she stopped feeling hurt, she applauded Daniel for his resolve, his firmness, his inability to be swayed by the suggestions of another. To keep him excited about what he was doing, she bound every one of his stories, even those that were a single paragraph, between cardboard covers that she ornately decorated and titled, with By Daniel Manning in huge letters on the front cover.
Still, it was disquieting, disconcerting, to be reading her child’s stories about achievement, when she was not writing a thing, other than lists of errands, of things either she or Fancy should buy at the market, of calls she was to make to set up playdates with the mothers of the boys in Daniel’s first-grade class, with the daughters belonging to Augusta, Carla, Dawn, Emily, Meg, and Teresa, the former Pregnant Six, who each now had birthed three to Joan’s two, dental appointments for her and Martin, pediatrician appointments for the boys, the phone company when the telephone line fizzed and died.
When she buried The Sympathetic Executioners, she did not blame Daniel, then kicking around inside of her. She had been right—it wasn’t Daniel who had thinned her out, any fetus would have caused the same harm. She knew now how children were—how Daniel was—their smiles, their kisses, their tears, all the precocious methods they employed to ensure their futures mattered, came first. Would she be writing now if Daniel weren’t beautiful, loving, inquisitive, creative, good at tangling his arms around her neck, whispering, “I love you, Mommy”? At this age, as unconditional as a cat or a dog.
Glimpsing her typewriter on the shelf in Eric’s nursery, it seemed long ago that the room was her study. Somehow Eric, who could not move around furniture, alter the position of his mobiles, change the location of the books on the shelves, had made it his own. Would she end up writing about Eric one day, about a child in his infancy who already knew his own future?
No, no more rare babies.
She would do right by her real ones, but they weren’t entitled to populate whatever she might write in the future. The millions of ideas she used to have each day had disappeared. Where had they all gone?
On Fancy’s first day back with the Mannings after her father’s funeral in Canada, she joined Joan and Daniel in the kitchen for breakfast and said, “He was such a good man. He couldn’t do everything he wanted for us, but his heart was in the right place. It was a lovely ceremony. There’s nothing like the sound of dirt hitting the top of a coffin. Makes me ache, but it’s the ring of time, calling a tired soul back to the earth. The cemetery was so pretty, bushes and flowers everywhere, and I spent an hour walking around, reading what people had etched onto gravestones, so much love for those buried in the ground.”
Martin was home early, not at the hospital late, not in some distant country, and when he walked in the door, Fancy said, “We’re having steaks and baked potatoes.”
An hour later, Eric was in his high chair, already fed, with a plastic bowl of cereal to play with, and everyone took their seats as Martin came in bearing a bottle of red wine. “Fancy, let’s toast your father,” he said, and Fancy brushed a tear from her eye.
The bottle was opened, wineglasses filled, and Martin lifted his glass. “I never met your father, but you’re a treasure, and he must have been one too.” Fancy said, “He was. Thank you. This means so much to me.”
“Fancy,” Daniel said then, “what happened after they buried your father in the ground? After the dirt hit the coffin? Did flowers grow fast?”
Fancy ruffled his hair and said, “So here’s what happened. Down in the ground my father went, the coffin this big old pine thing, huge because my dad was seven feet tall, where I get my own height from. There were prayers and poems and people sniffled and cried, and when it was over, my mom said, ‘Fancy, are you coming home now, we’ve got lots of people coming to mourn.’ And I said, ‘Not yet, I’ve got to go to Dad’s favorite place,’ and my mom understood, and off I went to the bridge, where he used to cast his fishing line on Sunday mornings at dawn, and I stood there, and the hours passed, and the sun grew hotter, and I waited and waited, and then all of a sudden, one fish, then a second, then a third, came flying out of the river, arcing over me, their fins flat out, their gills flapping, until they landed back in the water and swam away.”
Daniel’s eyes were huge, and he said, “That’s a great story, Fancy.”
And Martin said, “It is. That kind of stellar experience, being a part of an experience cherished by another, is what I see when I operate on people’s eyes, their profound and genuine dreams, the wishes they have for their lives, if their sight is returned.”
Daniel stared at his father, then said to Joan, “Does everyone in the whole world tell stories?” There was a fillip of concern in his voice, a fear perhaps tied to Fancy’s father’s grave, the sound of dirt hitting the coffin.
“Lots of people do. A story requires two things: a great story to tell and the bravery to tell it,” Joan said.
Daniel cut into his meat, sawed a bit off, put it in his mouth, chewed, nodded, then said, “Oh.”
“You are brave enough,” Joan said, wanting to allay his concern, but she sensed that Daniel feared something that might be more awful than death or looking into the depths of someone’s eyes: that perhaps the world was overrun by storytellers better than he.
“Book, book, book,” Eric yelled, and Joan heard Daniel yell back, “Get away, that’s mine. Don’t be a pest.” Since turning eight, Daniel was not only writing, but also climbing what he called his ladder to literature, a plain metal ladder he dragged in from the garage, warned about using without the steadying hand of either Joan or Fancy.
That first time he climbed up, Joan found his perfect little toes gripped around the top rung like pale commas, his hands pulling down big, heavy books. “Mom, I want to read the good stuff on my own,” he said, and she understood, she had been just like him at the same age.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, Kozinski’s The Painted Bird, he read each of those books and dozens more, drawn to the Russians, to a Romanian, to love and war and infidelity, to the Soviet police state and terminal illness, to tales of cruel acts and heroic escapes. The suggestion Martin had once made—that Daniel read books geared for children his own age—had been roundly rejected by Joan, a child-rearing debate she had won. “It just makes me sort of sad,” Martin had said. “I don’t want him losing his innocence so soon.”
“That ship seems to have sailed,” Joan replied, and Daniel read whatever he wanted.
Once, The Happy Hooker was among the books he pulled down. “Mom,” he yelled out, and when Joan came into the living room, Daniel was staring at the cover, the salacious book a dead golden bird in her son’s small, outstretched hands, and she was disturbed to find herself thinking of the way the hooker had screwed her brother-in-law, then allowed herself to be penetrated by the stubby red penis of the brother-in-law’s German shepherd.
“Can I read this one too?” he asked, and Joan said, “Of course, but only when your baby teeth are so long gone you will have no memory of them, and you live on your own, far away from Daddy and me.” Clutching the sex book against his chest, Daniel said, “But why would I ever live far away from you and Daddy?” She gathered him up into a tight hug and gently removed the book from his grip. That night she handed it back to Martin to hide well.
One afternoon, when she was feeding Eric in the kitchen, Daniel pulled up a chair and said, “I think we should talk about the books I’m reading,” and in the late
