by Anna Solomon
Apart from Senator Kent, Mrs. Kent has no surviving family. Fainwright Hospital, which has treated luminaries such as the poet Evelyn George and the musician Sid Healey, refused to comment. Asked when Mrs. Kent might return to Washington, DC, Mr. Sumner said, “I would be remiss to make any promises with regard to that.”
SUSA
ESTHER
Of Course She Will Not Return
She looks again in the mirror. The taloned toes are still there, the kumquat breasts, the misaligned face. The only thing that appears unchanged is her hair, which looks out of place now, its black lushness like a plant springing from stone. She can’t find the strip of leather she tied it back with before the pageant. Before the pageant is another life—her fingers tying the simple knot.
“What have you done?”
The king peers at her from behind his fingers, clearly terrified, and Esther shrugs in his direction, as if to say, You can see what I’ve done. It’s not only her body that’s been transformed, she realizes. A strength has oozed into her, like the tar that bubbles up sometimes into the sands near the river. A slick of dominance. She thinks of her uncle. He wasn’t smarter than her aunt. He was just in charge. Esther picks up the wine bottle, still lying at her remarkable feet. It feels small in her enlarged hands—small and light, as if she could throw it a great distance. A thrill washes over her, awe and shock at what she’s done, and is still doing.
“Please.” The king begins to whimper. “What do you want?”
Esther sets her paddle hands on her wide hips. “To be let go.”
If a hero in this moment would add, And my people—I want them protected. Stop the cleanse, then our Esther does not behave heroically. She is too intent on freeing herself for selflessness, too desperate to dare ask for more. To the extent that she thinks of her “people,” she thinks of Itz and Nadav and her aunt, the ones she most wants to see when she is returned. Mostly she worries about the trick of turning back into herself. She decides she will have to visit the Gadol tent first, for help. But before that can happen, she must be released, and before that happens the door the king is pressed against is shoved open, sliding the king forward and revealing a man carrying a tray.
Here is the bottle of wine the king called for. But the man is no eunuch. On his substantial frame he wears a high man’s robes, on his face the particular blankness of a man unwilling to appear shocked. He was on the stage, Esther remembers, a member of one wall. He sets the tray down now with an elegant swish, then faces her, his chest no more than an arm’s distance from hers, his gaze piercing. For a moment, she is daunted. The king himself seems to be afraid of this man—he has already leaped up from the floor, wiped his face, straightened his robe. Esther squeezes the wine bottle, draws the beast’s strength into her throat, and says, “Let me go.”
The man narrows his eyes. He is taller than she is, even in her current form. His mouth curls into a smile that can only—and will only—be described as evil. In a calm voice, he says, “The king chose a beautiful virgin.”
“She isn’t here anymore.”
His entire face slides upward, a sleeve of composure tightening over his rage. He goes to the king and begins whispering in his ear, his mouth twitching like a rodent’s, his words inaudible but audibly venomous. The king takes a breath so deep Esther can see his robe strain. Esther can imagine what the man is saying. Some part of her thinks: I am standing too close. But another part is determined to show no fear, and this part is more persuasive. The king’s nature is gentle, she thinks—she is almost sure of it. He isn’t capable of attacking her. And she turns out to be right, because in the next moment it’s the tall man who is pouncing, who pushes her to the floor and presses a knee between her legs, hard enough she feels her flesh open. She hears herself shriek as he pins her hands; the wine bottle slips from her grasp. He is stronger than she thought possible; even in her augmented form, she has to use all her might to flip him onto his back, and once she has him there, he pushes her off, flips her, and pins her again. She has never fought anyone, she realizes, and a bolt of fear gets in, slicing through her skin. Above her, his eyes are full of hatred. He yanks her hands, positioning her arms above her head and jamming both her wrists beneath his forearm. This, she thinks, is where he grabs the bottle and rapes her with it. He will cut her throat and burn her body; he will find a way to hide her. Her mother’s voice comes to her, a thing she used to tell Esther to do if she ever met a boar in the hills: Play dead or run. Trapped under the man, Esther sees no way to do either. Mother! But the man doesn’t go for the bottle. Instead, with his free hand he begins to scratch at her face. No matter how fast she tosses her head, his nails find her. He moves to her chest, clawing. She smells blood.
“It doesn’t scratch off!” she cries.
The man snarls. “But of course it does,” he says, and his sneering reinvigorates her—she kicks him away and rises to her knees. He will give up, she thinks. I am terrifying and repulsive. But as she pushes herself up to stand, she sees that her hands are getting smaller. This is what he meant. “It’s working,” he says to the king, and before she can breathe again he’s pushed her back onto the floor. Esther tries to fend him off with her elbows but she is distracted by what’s happening in her body—it’s not the scratching causing it, she knows, but her fear. But this thought delivers more fear, and now she can feel the reversal happening, she feels herself sinking again into the vortex but there is no violence now, only a peaceful cycling, neither hot nor cold, a terrain so familiar she starts to weep, for she is turning into a girl as they watch. The king looks as shocked as he did when she became the beast. But the man—he is the king’s highest minister, Esther will soon learn—lowers himself to straddle her and clamps her head between his forearms. “You will not mock the king,” he says, raining spittle across her face. Esther closes her eyes and he uses his thumbs to pry them open. “Do you understand?”
She can’t nod. He grips her head too tightly.
“His entire court was present on that stage. It was you they saw him choose, and it will be you who is his queen.”
He releases her for an instant then grabs her again by her hair and with his free hand shows her a knife, which she feels a second later at her throat.
“What we do,” he says, speaking softly now, enunciating with exaggerated care, “we do for the people.”
The blade presses. Esther works not to swallow.
“If we falter, who can they trust? If we fail to rule, how will they live? Queen Vashti disobeyed. If she wasn’t punished, think what would happen. Imagine, across Persia: In the houses. In the beds …” The minister’s eyes close. His face twists. At first Esther thinks he is merely demonstrating his instructions, but as the moment stretches, she sees that he is fulfilling them, and imagining, and that his fury is genuine. A string of saliva hangs from his lips. A scream forms in her gut. Then the minister sucks back his spit, opens his eyes, and says, without a hint of emotion: “The queen is dead. You are queen now. Do you understand?”
His face begins to melt. In the night station one morning, Esther heard a girl from somewhere else talking about how in death, in order to give birth to yourself again, for the next life, you become a man for a short while, until you’re through to the other side. This is nothing Esther is meant to believe. It’s nothing she has wished for. But as she passes out, the new queen, her exile complete, it’s what enters her vision. The chest that could have been hers, the jaw, the hands that might have killed. Better than becoming a beast would have been to become a man.
Part Two
Wandering
MANHATTAN
LILY
A Clean, Blank Room
“Go home.”
“I want to stay.”
“Sweetheart. I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“Tonight I am.”
“I want to stay.”
A machine by her mother’s bed issues forth a string of beeps. The machine has been beep
ing all day without apparent pattern or consequence, but still Lily jumps each time she hears it, shooting forward in her chair. Earlier she asked a nurse, What does the machine mean? only to be given an answer at once so basic yet unintelligible she became worried that the nurse didn’t understand either. Since then—many ages seem to have passed since this morning, when Ruth was admitted to what is unhelpfully called “the step-down unit”—nothing any nurse or doctor has done or said has reassured her. She knows this is “the best cancer place” in the city, and that their survival rate for stage IV non–small cell lung cancer—Ruth’s kind—is better than anyone else’s. But it’s still devastatingly low. And somehow the staff’s certainty, the speed with which they’ve decided what must be done with her mother and the efficacy with which they carry it out, upsets her even more. Can there be nothing mysterious or new or unique about Ruth’s cancer, nothing in her character—her sharp, dry, critical, forceful, optimistic, loving self—that prophesies a different ending?
“Relax, Lil,” says Ruth. “It’s like a fart. The machine just farts now and then.”
“At some point it has to mean something.”
“Lovie. You’re so tired.”
“I’m not.”
Ruth sighs and closes her eyes. Lily’s brothers have gone home, Ian back to California, Lionel to Connecticut. The diagnosis was four days ago; the initial shock has passed. Lily’s hurt at the fact that Ruth called Lionel first has been buried. Ruth will stay in the hospital for a couple more days, then, it’s likely, go home. She’s in good hands, Lionel keeps telling Lily. Don’t burn out too quickly, Adam says. She has extended June to full days Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, all the school had space for, and employed one of their occasional sitters to cover for pickup, etc., when needed. Adam supports all this—emotionally, financially, though the latter will be a stretch—but reminds her: The woman drives you crazy. Lily would tell herself the same thing, if she were the old Lily, of four days ago. But this Lily can barely take her eyes off Ruth for long enough to go find a sandwich. Something has cracked in her, a pocket of fear she didn’t know existed has burst its seams and it turns out to be infinite, an infinitely renewable resource that rages through her like fire; if in one moment it calms to coal, the next a wind comes through, reigniting the flames. She has not taken a true breath in days. What is she scared of? Adam wants to know. Other than death, of course. Her mother has had a long life. There is that. He is trying to pull her out just enough so she can see: the whole world isn’t burning. He has rubbed her shoulders and brought her tea and taken her on a long walk in Prospect Park and shown her a map in the latest National Geographic depicting the earth in 250 million years, the continents merged into one mass. He reminds her that he and the girls love her, they are here for her, they will be here for her. Gratitude cools her, then slides away, feeble compared to her fear. She is interested only in her mother’s aliveness; she wants only confirmation of it, again and again and again. She watches Ruth now, surprised once again at how undiminished she appears, despite the tube under her nose, the saline needle in her arm. Her mother’s ferning eyebrows are still dark, a hint of glamour marking an otherwise earthy face. Her gray hair is not thin; she went to Lily’s stylist recently and had it cut short. Her ears look almost elfin with the oxygen tube curled around them, her hands atop the blanket well veined and capable. She wears her own robe, of navy silk, brought by Lionel, who thinks of such things. Normally, Ruth wears some combination of jeans and a plain top, a turtleneck or pocket tee or crew-neck sweater, paired with hiking-style shoes or boots, all of it well fitting, even youthful, but still stolid, restrained. Stripped down like this, Lily thinks, to nothing but her robe and her beautiful eyebrows, she looks like a Ruth Lily has not really known. The navy sets off her tawny skin. Lily has always envied her mother’s skin color—her own she finds pasty, a mix of pallor and freckles inherited from her father—and now she finds herself willing its loveliness to be their salvation, to somehow overrule the invisible but apparently inarguable facts: that inside her mother a lung has collapsed; that cancer cells are spreading, and not slowly.
Ruth opens her eyes.
“Are you having an affair, sweetheart?”
“What?” Lily’s voice cracks. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m thinking maybe you’re sitting here because you’re having an affair and you’re waiting for the right moment to talk to me about it.” Ruth looks into her eyes as she learned to do decades ago, at a HinJewBu retreat center set into the folds of a valley in the Berkshires, so that—to Lily, at least—it seems she is silently shouting: I am looking into your eyes!
“I’m not having an affair,” Lily says.
“Okay.”
“I’m not going to have an affair.” Though it’s impossible to say this without thinking of Hal. Last night, at theater class pickup, which Lily’s sitter couldn’t do, Jace was nowhere to be seen. But Hal was there, apologizing for her. She wanted to do the pizza plan, he said, but a work thing … and Lily nodded, forcing herself not to look at his hands, or even at his wrists, which she had also noticed, because they were covered in ginger hairs and very appealing. Let’s do it anyway? Hal said, in the kind of helplessly flirtatious way that helplessly flirtatious people have, people who may mean nothing by anything, who simply exude sex by standing there. Flustered, Lily declined, telling him about her mother’s diagnosis by way of explanation, though nothing about the diagnosis explained why she and the girls couldn’t join him for pizza and though as soon as she told him she was flooded with guilt at the intimacy she had shared, for there were people she knew far better whom she had not yet told. Like that, she had crossed a line. And now, as Ruth spears her with that dogged gaze, Lily feels as though her mother can see the thoughts she has provoked, Lily’s fantasy: those hands, on her hips; a gruff altercation nowhere near a bed.
“Okee doke,” Ruth says, doubtfully.
“Aren’t you going to ask me if maybe Adam is having an affair?”
“I know Adam’s not having an affair.”
“Why?”
“I know. Your father had affairs.”
“Yet you’re asking me.”
“You’re not entirely unlike your father.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hard to satisfy. There’s a kind of engine built into your brain, always churning. Your nature is to be angry.”
“It sounds like you’ve thought about this. But I’m not angry.”
Ruth smiles. Her teeth are small and straight and pearly—another thing Lily did not inherit. “You’re not staying tonight,” she says. “I’ll call the nurses and tell them to put the cot away.”
“Mom!”
“Go home. Bring the kids tomorrow. I want to see the kids.”
“They’ll be too loud.”
“That’s life.”
Her mother flings an arm in the air, a flamboyant gesture that takes Lily’s breath away for a second. She places her hands atop the blanketed mound of her mother’s feet and squeezes.
“Are you hiding from them?”
“What?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. I don’t.” Lily removes her hands from her mother’s feet.
“I don’t mind it here, is the truth,” her mother says. “At home there’s so much—so many things I need to do, and want to do, and so many, just, things. It’s peaceful—this clean, blank room.”
Lily nods before she can stop herself. Of course she knew what her mother meant. It’s impossible not to recognize that the hospital has its appeal, despite the noises and the lights and the reason they are here. Here, you can be nowhere. A kind of free. But she does not want to admit this to her mother, let alone hear her mother essentially speak her own thoughts. Her mother has always done this, and always it makes Lily feel as if she’s been pickpocketed. She knows this is unfair, that they are both allowed to have the same common human thoughts. Still, she feels an urge to slap her moth
er away. She felt this when her mother asked for her hair stylist’s number, too; she wanted to say, No! Not yours! Instead she said nothing, because she is middle-aged and semireasonable and should be able to share a hair stylist with her mother. Still, she was peeved.
In the hospital, stricken with fear, it’s a bit of a consolation, to feel peeved.
Her mother reaches for the wand that calls the nurse. “I’m going to push this button now, and you’re going to come back tomorrow with the girls.”
“Please don’t! They have school.”
“If you can skip three days of home, they can skip a day of school.”
“Mom.”
“Bring books. I’ll read to them.”
Any further argument Lily might have made is deflated now, because the book the girls would most want to bring is the very same one her mother would most want to read to them: Esther. Besides, what kind of person wanted to keep her mother from her children? “I’m staying over,” she says, “but I’ll go home early and get them. Maybe you can talk June out of being Vashti, because that’s her current plan.”
Ruth’s right eyebrow rises. “There’s no shame in Vashti, Lily. Didn’t I teach you that? It’s all the same costume anyway, some old scarves, a little thrift-store jewelry.”
“I’m making them dresses this year. And no one wants to be Vashti.”
Her mother smiles, though it’s not quite a smile. “Since when do you sew?”
“A friend is teaching me.”
Her mother nods, then lets out a long sigh. “You’ve made a place for yourself, my Lily.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it means. Nothing more, nothing less. It means I love you.”
Ruth thinks she has insulted Lily; she is trying to smooth it over. But Lily genuinely wants to know. What is the place she has made for herself?