Jane

She didn’t trust easy. If she tried to account for the substance of her life, and of the lives of other people she picked up along the way—other people she made—she might start there.

“Anything that’s easy isn’t worth doing,” her father used to say, and her brothers would snort and snicker. Jane used to think they were laughing only at their father, always aboard his creaky carousel of platitudes. Later she knew they were also laughing at the shape anything took on in their minds: the mute curves of a compliant girl. A girl who might be easy; a thing who might be worth doing. This girl had a discernible figure—or pieces of one—but not a face. A swinging ponytail on the Bethune High School basketball court. A tender stripe of flesh above a waistband. Jane herself could be this girl, conceivably, to boys who were not her brothers.

Jane earned three dollars per hour to put the Vine kids to bed and stay in their house until Dr. and Mrs. Vine returned from their Saturday-night bridge game at two or three in the morning. Dr. Vine was an emergency room physician in a perpetual state of convivial jet lag. Mrs. Vine read novels and took naps and crafted delicate silver jewelry in their basement. Sometimes Mrs. Vine would press a trinket into Jane’s hand along with the wad of bills at the end of a night. Tiny earrings with the face of a smug cat, or a necklace strung with an ambiguous locket—a pear, a teardrop, a heart. The Vines were lean and tawny, with matching chestnut hair; each stood the same height as the other in their stocking feet. They spoke in low murmuring tones and touched each other frequently and were the first adults Jane ever imagined having sex.

The Vines could not be long for the village of Williamsville, for the suburb of Amherst, for the city of Buffalo, a place that you left if you could, or so Jane’s mother always said. “He can’t be such hot S-H-I-T if he could only get a job in Buffalo,” her mother replied when Jane said something admiring about Dr. Vine. The Vines were shaping their time in Buffalo as a droll anecdote well before the story was finished. On Saturdays, sleepy and elated with drink, they wandered into their own living room—fly-spotted skylight, floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, cherry shag carpet that they never vacuumed—to the sight of Jane awake on their harvest-gold sofa, back straight, eyes red and round, a book to her face. A ghost in their house, swaying like a naked bulb.

“We don’t stay awake all night when we’re with our kids, and we don’t expect you to, either,” Dr. Vine said, kindly, the first time Jane babysat for them.

“If you’re going to keep watch for predators all night, would you like a rifle?” he asked the second time, also kindly. After that, he stopped mentioning it. The Vines weren’t the sort of people to keep guns in their house anyway.

“You don’t have to call him Dr. Vine if he’s not your doctor,” Jane’s mother said.

The Vines’ bookshelves provided Jane with the tools of maintaining a silent yet bustling vigilance into the night. Guided by the photographs in a biography of Martha Graham, Jane choreographed tiptoeing dance routines, unidentified grit from the cherry shag accumulating on the balls of her feet. She stood at the older Vine girl’s easel, gripping the crayon that mapped out the constellation of radial lines from the cover of Be Here Now. She willed herself not to check the cuckoo clock above the fireplace, and when her resolve disintegrated and she finally looked over to see 1:49 a.m., she took a book that felt to her forbidden—a Bukowski, an Anaïs Nin, a Helter Skelter—turned to page 149, read that page aloud to herself in a fierce whisper, then attempted to walk across the first floor of the Vines’ house, northeast corner to southwest corner, in exactly 149 steps.

She trusted hard. Staying awake was hard. So she did it, she trusted it, Saturday night after Saturday night.

One of these nights, exiting Dr. Vine’s car as it idled in her family’s driveway, her bones and muscles liquefying under the pressure of sleep deprivation and Delta of Venus, Jane slung her hips from side to side as she approached her front stoop. She didn’t know why she did it, and she was too tired even to relish the gratification of giving herself over to something perverse. Slinging her hips felt compelled, as compulsive as any of the games she’d played with numbers and words for the previous six hours. She didn’t know if Dr. Vine was watching from the car in the driveway. She didn’t know what shape she took in his mind. What kind of anything was she?

 

Jane awoke a few hours later, Sunday, sweaty and jittery with shame and fatigue. A clammy heat inside her head, her brain rolled up in the Vines’ dirty rug. In springtime, her father and brothers, Brian and Mike and Joe, used to skip mass for baseball practice, and in other seasons they skipped mass for football practice or hockey practice or to get a beef on weck at Anderson’s Frozen Custard. Now her brothers were all either in or out of college and presumably could do whatever they wished on their Sundays. For Jane, there was no getting out of church. “God will see you,” their mother said, a warning, and it was tacitly understood that God on a Sunday would see her brothers at the batting cages differently than he would see Jane in bed with a 101-degree fever or vomiting into the bayberry outside the back entrance of Saint Benedict’s. Jane’s hair was in a ponytail, leaving both hands free to hold the flappy collar of her sailor blouse flat against her chest. Returning inside the church, she paused beside the stoup to dip her hand in the holy water, then ran her wet fingers along her lips and gums. She didn’t think anyone noticed, but God would have noticed. It didn’t matter whether or not Dr. Vine had watched Jane slinging her hips last night, because God had watched her, and sorrowed for her, she thought. She felt another tremor of shame, for the hubris of thinking she had the power to cause God sorrow.

Saint Benedict’s was a bizarre sandstone fortress, no spire, no belfry, no front-facing windows, but it was the church closest to home. Today was April 29, feast day of Saint Catherine of Siena. Jane opened the photocopied pamphlet, tucked inside the Sunday missals, that summarized Catherine’s life. As a toddler, Catherine babbled to angels. At age six, she saw Jesus; at age seven, his apostles. She swore off marriage and children long before her beloved older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth. When Catherine’s parents urged her to marry Bonaventura’s widower, she protested: cutting off all her hair, willing her skin to erupt in a hideous rash, fasting. Her parents relented on the marriage. Her hair grew back; the rash, a full-body stigmata, faded. But Catherine’s fasting became a routine, or a pledge: an act of solidarity with the poor. She aspired to survive solely on the wafer and the sip of wine at daily mass.

The pamphlet had an epigraph, a quotation from Catherine. It read: Build a cell inside your mind from which you can never flee.

The edges of the pamphlet were wilting between Jane’s fingers. Her eyes were gritty and sore. Her mother nudged her to fall in with the voices surrounding them as they stood to recite the Nicene Creed. Jane’s lips parted, but the words didn’t come.

Build a cell inside your mind from which you can never flee.

Jane knew she had shamed herself the night before, sauntering away from Dr. Vine, because her mind had slipped outside its cell, and her body had swung free of her mind. Fatigue was no excuse—fatigue was to be trusted, not blamed. An underoccupied mind, a mind not pushed to its outer limits, was dangerous: its contents jostling around, causing contusions and swelling. The cell of the mind needed either to be completely full or completely empty. It needed either to be packed tight with problems to be solved, challenges to be met, or it needed to be blown out, scalded bare, by effort, exertion, exhaustion.

A cell needed rules. Jane already had plenty of those. The rule for how many Acts of Contrition she had to silently say before she released her bladder or started a math test or, lying rigid in her bed at night, before she allowed herself to fall asleep. The rule for how many times she had to kneel and cross herself when she passed the little brass crucifix hanging outside her parents’ bedroom. The rule for how many times she had to chew each morsel of dinner before she permitted herself to swallow—the number was always a multiple of three, in honor of the Holy Trinity. She had no rules for breakfast, which could be safely skipped so long as Jane dawdled enough getting ready for school before the bus came. Lunch was a brown bag that could be thrown away, the sin of the waste subsumed by the virtue Jane felt in the act of stuffing it between the lips of the garbage can next to her locker, the ping of the lid closing shut as clear as the single bell rung at Eucharist.

All Jane needed to keep her mind quiet was to know there was no end in sight. No end to the hunger, the fatigue, the kneeling, the crossing. No end to the nights at the Vines’. The end was the void, terrifying and purposeless.

Build a cell inside your mind

Behind the altar at Saint Benedict’s Church, thirty feet high and fifteen feet across, hung a crude wooden bas-relief of Christ on the cross, jagged mourners piled at his feet like kindling. So much of church was staring at a broken and bleeding man as he dies, in real time, week after week, right in front of you. Nobody doing anything about it. Jane didn’t know how Jesus had died, exactly—of suffocation or exposure or blood loss or what—and she wanted to ask her mother, but suspected that the question would anger her. She felt the boundaries between herself and the world dissolving. Perhaps Catherine of Siena had felt the same. The church’s overhead lights sparking and shorting behind Jane’s own eyes. Her dumb wooden hands grafting themselves onto the pews, hardening painfully into the knots and nodules of tree trunks. Her wooden head pitching forward, whirling with hunger and diving for sleep, the weight of it becoming Christ’s body atop her own, pinned beneath him on the cross. She gasped, pushing her lungs against the fallen bulk, struggling to free her arms so she could wrap them around him.

“Jane,” her mother whispered through clenched teeth. The voice she would use if Jane ever asked her how, exactly, Jesus died. “What is wrong with you?”

And Jane smiled, because she knew the answer.

 

Jane volunteered at the Clearfield Library on Sunday afternoons. Usually she rode her bike there without eating breakfast or lunch. When she hit the downhill section of Klein Road, she stood up on the pedals and felt pleased by the tremble in her thighs. At the library, she sat on the floor toward the back stacks, the Military & War section, next to the cart of returned books she was supposed to be putting on shelves, and reread the authorless Stories of the Saints, a slender green hardback whose filigree of pen-and-ink illustrations, suitable for a children’s book, belied its graphic content. It was Catherine of Siena in Stories of the Saints who imagined herself married to Christ, his foreskin fashioned into her wedding ring. Jane clapped a hand over her mouth when she first read this, looked around to see if anyone was watching, shut the book, reshelved it, tried to forget it. According to legend—Stories of the Saints itself seemed half-convinced—Catherine also once sucked pus from a leper’s sores.

There was a word in Stories of the Saints that was new to Jane: kenosis, or emptying out. To become a vessel for God’s will, blank and scrubbed, no sustenance, no desire. The saints were saints because they had the gift of imagining themselves onto the cross, into the suffering that was also salvation. The saints were good at this because the saints were insane. This was a blasphemous thought, but it was also true. Frances of Rome burned her genitals with pork grease before sharing a bed with her husband. Teresa of Avila renounced all her companions, choosing exclusive fellowship with her ecstatic visions. When she prayed, she asked other nuns at the convent to hold her down, to keep her from levitating. And all Jane had managed was to get the shakes on her ten-speed.

“Jane?” Mrs. Bellamy, the head librarian, was standing over her. “We need you up front, checking people out.”

Mrs. Bellamy’s tone was soft, amused. But Jane still felt herself to be in trouble, and worse, in a stupid, trivial trouble, not the important trouble you could get into if you stuck an onion ring from Anderson’s Frozen Custard on your finger and proclaimed it the foreskin of God.

“Sorry,” Jane mumbled, getting to her feet.

Once, Teresa’s prayers summoned an angel, a winsome curly-headed boy. He wielded a golden spear tipped with fire, and he stabbed Teresa again and again with it. Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, or the splotchy black-and-white photograph of it reproduced in Stories of the Saints, depicted the scene. The fabric of Teresa’s dress fluttered like a funnel cloud above a mounted cross. A plume of smoke signaled that Teresa and the angel penetrating her were on the verge of disappearing before Jane’s eyes. Jane imagined the boy angel squealing with glee each time his blade plunged into Teresa’s flesh, in a rhythm.

 

Jane wanted to see the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in person. Her church was a doll’s house, but Rome was God’s home, where Elizabeth Seton had just been canonized as the first American saint, though Jane’s mother wasn’t impressed. She was “really just a snooty Anglican, stooping to our level,” she said. “Not a real Catholic.” She didn’t believe a word of those stories about Mother Seton curing a girl’s leukemia.

That was the autumn that the red-haired little Manson girl tried to kill the president and the sun was always low in the sky. Jane’s mother warned them about glare—when Jane’s father took the car out in the morning, when Jane biked to the Vines’ house in the late afternoon. Saint Benedict’s subsidized an annual fall trip to Rome for high school seniors, and to pay her way, Jane had earned more than enough from babysitting, the cash stored in empty tins from Parkside Candy. Every birthday and Christmas, Jane’s mother gave out these tins, filled with fancy sweets. They made a satisfying small bwip sound when you squeezed and slid them open. Jane would hand over her sponge candy and saltwater taffy to Brian or Mike or Joe and keep the tins, which had old-fashioned pastel illustrations winding around them: a turn-of-the-century carousel, ladies in petticoats and big wavy hats dancing the maypole. The tins lived in a couple of hatboxes at the back of her closet that also held old birthday cards, her first pair of shoes, her christening dress, the thin garland of honeysuckle and baby’s breath she wore at her first communion. The objects inside the box, the box itself, were a chronology of her life that she could hold in her hands, and the antique veneer of the tins enhanced this sense of permanence, like they were heirlooms Jane was handing down to herself, the money inside them the stuff of her future. She felt the most tenderness for her mother when she sat cross-legged in front of this box to count her bills, only to find herself rereading each of the cards, studying the tiny hammocks of her mother’s cursive rs, the special swoop of the J in her Jane, pressing a finger to the dried garland. However careless or cruel her mother could be, this was her own squarish cursive, this was the garland she braided herself, and it was only for Jane, youngest of four, the girl she had waited for. Her mother drove to Parkside Candy and picked out the tins. Like Jane did, she put in the work.

But when Jane brought her mother the stack of candy tins piled to their hinges with the ones and fives and occasional tens and a single, spectacular twenty, the money collected from the Vines and the Goslanders and the Felmans and all the other neighborhood families whose children Jane had diapered and spoon-fed and bathed and sang to over years, Jane’s mother spent an afternoon in a pique of insult. She took no pride in her daughter’s thrift and work ethic; instead she was affronted by Jane’s secrecy and her presumption of something earned. Her mother litigated the case with Jane’s father.

“Why do you think that money is yours?” her father, once fully briefed, asked Jane. He was wearing his glasses and sitting in his lounger behind a newspaper, like all the cartoon dads in the picture books Jane read to the kids she babysat. “You take my money for the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the bed you sleep in. When you have enough money to pay me back for seventeen years under my roof, whatever is left over, you can have it for your travels.”

“Might be enough for a bus to Rochester,” Jane’s mother said.

“I’ve worked hard for this,” Jane said. “I’ve been saving for a long time.”

“No, but that’s the thing, Jane—the idea that you could save money is absurd.” He turned to the sports section. Jane could see the top of his head. “Be logical. Saved it from what? Saved it from going toward the mortgage for the house you live in? Saved it from going to pay our taxes?”

“Now, if you could bring your brothers to Rome with you, that might be a different story,” her mother said.

Her father cracked the spine of the sports section and folded it back. “Now,” he asked Jane brightly, “how about those Bills?”

This was the line her father used to declare a conversation over, that it would be tawdry and dark-minded to continue it. The Bills had won their first four games of the season, and the division title was plausible, her father pointed out. O. J. Simpson had run eighty-eight yards in one go, in the game against Pittsburgh. The Juice. O.J. was something good, someone they could all agree on.

Jane knew her father would relent eventually. She could make him. He was a certified public accountant, an orderly and logical man, attentive to numbers, stats, formulae. Watching sports suited him because he seemed to approach it like a monthslong word problem. On the day of the home game against the Broncos, if O. J. Simpson misses his train out of Syracuse and has to run all the way to Buffalo, what pace per mile would he have to maintain— Her father struck Jane as a person who had freed himself from interiority, from psychology and foibles and God; he believed in his platitudes, took them literally, and his life was simpler and better for it. He edited out choice wherever possible, a tendency he had in common with Jane. He built his cell. His need for order and logic in his day-to-day life would be thwarted by the fury of Jane and the Rome trip, fury for days, his youngest and most obedient child, the one who helped around the house without complaint or prompting, the one who always agreed. She wept for hours from the moment she arrived home from school in the afternoons, so violently she choked on her own spit. One vessel in her eye broke the surface, then another, each the width and color of the little red string on a Band-Aid. She flung herself against walls and onto linoleum. She bit the backs of her wrists and scratched at her forearms and yanked at her hair.

“Stop acting!” Jane’s mother shrieked at the height of these fits, fleeing into another room. The admonition further incensed Jane for being correct, because she did feel an actorly distance from her tantrums; she hesitated, measuring arcs and wingspans, before she threw her books against the wall; her fingernails raised red runes on her forearms that flattened and faded after a quick shower. Even in the fullest grip of her saintly convulsions, Jane felt more pity for her mother than righteous, levitating rage. Pity or resentment. How fiercely Jane resented her now, how desperately she wished she could bite down hard enough on her arm to drain the resentment forever, to burst it open with the sweet pain of God. Because God could see all the way inside her mother.

God could also see all the way inside Jane’s resentment. Sometimes she thinks he can even now.

 

So Jane fought and cried until her candy tins were handed back to her. First time on an airplane, first time in a hotel. She signed up to room with Elise Davis, pale-freckled and dun-haired, scholarly and sarcastic. Assiduously Catholic. A girl who based her constantly exercised moral judgments on a bedrock of rueful compassion. Jane suspected that her own life would be easier if Elise were her best friend and thus her steadiest influence, if she could mold her opinions and the management of her time solely according to Elise’s preferences, even if Jane herself was too high-strung and daydreamy, too often half swooning under the spell of devotion and semistarvation, to lock perfectly into Elise’s orbit of scholar-athletes: Christy Torres, who had regional honors in both violin and chess; Sonja Spiegelman, the only girl on the Mathletes team and the only cross-country runner with a shot at qualifying for States; Geeta Banerjee, a varsity gymnast who was already taking premed classes at the local Jesuit college. Jane made straight As, but generic ones, Regents and the occasional AP. It seemed cosmically unfair that Jane was ranked fifth in their class, right behind Geeta, who should have been valedictorian but who had tanked her GPA as a junior when she tried to take calculus and AP Physics a year early, at the same time.

“I don’t really know how they calculate the rankings, but you shouldn’t be punished for having ambition,” Jane remarked to her mother. She was surprised by her ranking and happy with it, and hoped her mother would be, too.

“That Geeta—what is she?” Jane’s mother asked, not for the first time.

“Geeta is Geeta,” Jane replied, as she had before.

“But where is she from?” Jane’s mother asked.

“She was born at Children’s Hospital, like me,” Jane replied.

“You know what I mean,” Jane’s mother said. “Where did your other friends land?”

“Elise, Christy, and Sonja went one-two-three,” Jane said.

“That Sonja,” her mother said. “She is so Jewish-looking.” She had said this before.

“Whatever that means,” Jane replied. As she always did.

“Well, not all of them look like it,” her mother said. “You don’t always know for sure.”

Jane was puzzled yet again by her own habit of trying to chat with her mother about her friends.

Although Jane often joined Elise’s Friday-night homework parties and tagged along to cheer Geeta and Sonja at their competitions, the people with whom Jane spent the most time were children. The children she babysat were why she made it to Rome. The Vine girls, those sweet sparrows. Jane fantasized about living with the Vines, sleeping on the gold couch beneath the skylight. She could be their governess, swooshing around them in hoop skirts, running conjugation drills in multiple European languages.

The children were why she made it to Santa Maria della Vittoria, where the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa hung too high in a chapel shrine for Jane to see it closely. Jane logged her disappointment as a minor entry in that day’s catalog of saintly pain. She had consumed nothing but water and Coca-Cola for breakfast and lunch. She refused to apply bandages to the blisters mushrooming across her heels, one of which had started to bleed and stick over the miles they covered on foot through the city. Jane looked up at Teresa as she worked her heel against her shoe, the friction turning wet and warm, the corners of her eyes crinkling with virtuous discomfort.

Behind Jane, a boy muttered, “Fairy stuck her with his spear,” as another boy laughed.

Colin Chase and Patrick Brennan. Pat. Football players. B+ students. Smart enough, but indifferent to school. Colin tall and horse-faced, shaggy-blond, jaw strong or overbearing depending on the angle. Pat slighter, darker, objectively pretty. Wide-set deer eyes. Elise and the others called them Thing One and Thing Two.

At the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, the Salus Populi Romani glittered atop the altar. Mary, Mother of God, was pinched, maybe resentful, gaudy crown perched atop her hooded robe, state-fair baubles hanging from her neck and pinned to her shoulder. Baby Jesus, a skinny homunculus, sat stiff on Mary’s lap, peering up at her skeptically. Are you my mother? he seemed to wonder, the same question that haunted the just-hatched baby bird in the book that Jane had read a hundred times to Jeanette Vine.

Behind Jane, big blond Thing One muttered to dark pretty Thing Two, “Mary got fucked by God.”

Gaat fucked. Gaad. Jane’s mother made sure her children were vigilant about the Buffalo accent. “Round your vowels,” she commanded them.

Thing Two laughed as Thing One huffed and grunted in an orgasmic imitation of Mary. “Oh Gaad. Oh Gaaahhd.”

Jane’s upper lip kicked. A puff of air escaped her throat. It was funny—all of it. The carvings, the sparkles, the incantations, the incense, the spectacle, the money. Her money. How many little piles of fives and ones would equal the value of one marble pillar in this place, one square foot of mosaic? Jane’s tears dropping on a cheap dumb candy tin as she sobbingly latched it shut, her mother yelling in the vicinity—the whole thing was hilarious.

Jane looked at Elise beside her, who rolled her eyes. For almost laughing at Colin’s blasphemy, Jane assigned herself ten Hail Marys and a few smacks to the head the next time she had a bathroom stall to herself.

Sister Tabitha, their catechism teacher, had told them in class that sinful thoughts didn’t put your soul in danger, “so long as you don’t consent to the thought,” she said.

“But how do you consent to a thought?” Alyssa Piotrowski asked without being called on, her hand in the air. Jane felt gratitude toward Alyssa for always posing the questions she was too timid to ask herself. Maybe someday Alyssa would ask Sister Tabitha for Jesus’s precise cause of death.

“You consent by taking pleasure in the thought,” Sister Tabitha replied. “By not fighting it off with prayer.”

“But—the thought is still there,” Alyssa said. “Didn’t you consent to the thought by thinking it in the first place?”

“Alyssa got raped by her own brain,” Thing One said, and Thing Two laughed into his sleeve.

In Vatican City, Michelangelo’s Pietà presented an optical illusion: vast and solid Mary, curtained knees spread, Jesus’ shrunken corpse slung across her lap. Jane squinted at the sculpture, willing Jesus and Mary to change positions, to strike new poses for her mind’s camera. She guessed that if the sculpted figures thawed and rose to their full heights, Mary would tower over her son, twice his width.

“Jesus died because Mary sat on him,” Thing One said to Thing Two. “Fat cow.”

At the Santa Maria del Popolo, Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus and Crucifixion of St. Peter hung facing each other. The apostle Paul, fallen from his horse, his arms outstretched, his dirty legs parted and quivering, his eyes closed against the light of God. Peter at first appeared decrepit, wretched in the hands of his captors and tormentors, but further contemplation revealed him as powerful in his insistence to be nailed to the cross—not just nailed to it but nailed upside down, so as not to offend Christ through straight mimicry. Peter was powerful in the pride he took in his degradation, in confronting the desecration of his flesh. His flesh would be seen. It was evidence. His tormentors would look him in the eye.

An odor of old sweat wafted from the canvases. Burlap and hay. The paintings heaved and groaned. Their lights flickered beneath the shadows of shifting bodies. The paintings were alive, animal. They stirred like a sleepy beast who slowly emerges from darkness. The first thing you’d see would be the blinking yellow eyes.

Jane never could have said—she could not say now—what constituted a “religious experience.” But if she had to guess, standing right there between the Caravaggios, it was a nauseating little quake of dread and ecstasy. Your throat opens up and you think you might be in love. For a second, it’s like the ghost of God is inside you. You can contort yourself however you want to see his face, but he will always elude you.

He is not even looking at you, Jane thought. It existed beyond language, or before it. You had to kill it first, before you could put it into words.

Not for the first time, in another church but far from home, Jane felt the boundaries dissolving. If only for a second, she could flow in and out of her surroundings, take on their colors and compositions without hardening or getting stuck in place; she could absorb and reflect light like a panel of tesserae. She was no longer petrified by the eyes of God. Between the Caravaggios, something opened up in Jane, just then, and it would never close.

Behind Jane, Thing One muttered to Thing Two, “Cara-fag-io.”

Jane turned away from the paintings and toward the voice. She met Colin’s eyes, then Pat’s. Colin bucked his big jaw at her and thrust his tongue inside one cheek. Pat stared placidly back at Jane.

The next day, on the Metro, Colin pulled to the edge of his seat across from Jane and Elise and said, to Jane, “Fucking you would be like fucking a rag doll.” Beside him, Pat snickered into his collar and looked away.

That’s when Jane knew. Knew it was going to happen. Not that day, probably not on this trip—the students’ days were too scheduled, too chaperoned, their hotel rooms closely monitored. She hadn’t even found the opportunity to smack herself in the head for laughing at the Virgin Mary. But Thing One and Thing Two had discussed and evaluated her as a prospect, and come to a decision, and now, gathered and seated here on the Metro, she was being advised of their decision.

“And you would know, wouldn’t you, Colin? You love to play with your dollies,” said Elise, as Jane flushed hot with her shame and her power.

She tried and failed to find a reproduction of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome. Instead she brought home a print of Caravaggio’s Madonna and Child with Saint Anne: a buxom, sexy Mary and a naked toddler Jesus stomping decorously on the evil serpent, as Anne, gaunt and ancient, struggles to pretend to admire their work while still remaining upright. Jane also bought a packaged chunk of the Colosseum, about as big as a softball.

“That’s not real,” her mother told her. “How many hours did you have to babysit to buy that hunk of crap?”

Cree-ap. Jane’s mother, too, at moments of high dudgeon, could fall prey to the Buffalo accent.

Jane propped up the Caravaggio reproduction on a matboard atop her bedroom dresser, and as she expected, her mother said nothing about it. Surely she objected to it—Mary’s bosom, Jesus’s penis—but if her mother said a word, she would only be revealing the places where her own dirty mind could go.

 

Jane felt prepared for the pain. Sonja had done it with Larry Priven over Thanksgiving, much to Elise’s restrained dismay; Sonja said the pain was narrowly preferable to a torn ligament. On the thinly carpeted cement floor of Pat’s family’s freshly drywalled basement, where Pat and Colin and Brad Bender spent off-season afternoons lifting weights and drinking smuggled Budweiser, Jane observed the pain from a distance, her body splayed alongside a kettle ball and a dumbbell rack, but her mind’s eye elevated, like Teresa atop her plume of marble, as Pat’s courtly ministrations—the tender forehead kisses, the stroking of hair—began to give way to a procedure more autonomic and zoological, something Jane seemed almost incidental to. For an instant, Jane wondered if God was watching, if pain, even in this case, was the presence of God. She bit down on her tongue to punish herself for the thought. God was not so lewd, so prurient. His mind didn’t go to those places; he had better things to do.

He is not even looking at you.

Pat was two different people, and Jane liked that, for a long time. When he was sweet, he was so sweet. Mostly when they were alone. Jane loved how much he loved how skinny she was. She loved how easily he could scoop her up and sling her over his shoulder, how he kneaded her rib cage and hip bones with the pads of his fingers, called her String Bean and Mrs. Bones and Fatso and the Buttless Wonder. She loved that he loved how she would order French toast and souvlaki at Stavros’s Diner or hot wings at the Anchor Bar, manage a couple of small bites, and smile apologetically as she pushed her plate away, because she did love to eat, you see, but she was too dainty and adorable, too easily overwhelmed, too much his sweet girl—because when he was sweet, he saw her, too, as sweet—to eat up the world she was hungry for.

“She tries so hard to pack it away,” he said to a waitress at Perkins one night, while they were waiting for Colin and Brad to join them, and she nibbled at pancakes already going cold.

If Jane and Pat were with other people, they were usually with his squad of jocks, who found few points of intersection with Elise’s coalition of high achievers, although Elise and Christy did find time to sit beside Jane on the bleachers during Pat’s home games. With his friends, Pat tended to turn away, irritated, if Jane murmured in his ear; he’d scowl if she spoke to one of his friends in a way he found untoward.

“Why do you have to say colossal when you can just say big—who are you trying to impress?” he asked at Perkins, after Colin and Brad showed up.

And then: “Why do you have to make that face?” Her hand went up to her cheek to find out what kind of face she was making.

But just when Jane would begin to grow bored of her own embarrassment and vigilance, when she was ready to retreat from Pat into Elise’s sober and mostly chaste world of homework parties and volunteering for bingo night at the senior center, the Saturday nights at the Vines’ and the Sunday afternoons in the chirring walnut chairs of the Clearfield Library, he would return to her. He would place her hand in his and gaze at their fingers curled together, tug playfully at her ponytail, press his thumb and forefinger on the nape of her neck or the base of her spine. Right there in front of his friends. He wouldn’t do his crossword puzzles in front of his friends, but he would do this. Jane’s head tipped back beneath the gravity of his benediction, his tactile declaration of ownership, his pride in what he owned. With his letterman jacket draped over her shoulders, she felt the privilege of being owned, of being wanted exclusively, and the joyous unlikelihood of Pat’s choice—that he’d passed over any of the cheerleaders waiting to pair off with him, all yellows and golds with their Farrah-feathered hair and fourteen-karat nameplate necklaces, in favor of her, of all people, shy and gangly, tongue-tied and flat-chested Jane.

One time in the basement, Jane apologized for her small breasts.

“Tits are for milking,” Pat said, and Jane was moved.

She had accomplished something hard. Pat’s intervals of snappishness and indifference were the proof that she’d achieved a hard thing, because turning him sweet was hard. Convincing Pat to love her, and to like her, was hard, and it was work that was never done. She trusted hard.

 

The time came to make the necessary arrangements. A wedding over Labor Day weekend at Saint Mary’s, Pat’s aunt Diane, the director of the Saint Mary’s children’s chorus, putting in a word to fit them in. Neither Jane’s nor Pat’s family was inclined to discuss why the happy event needed to be so hastily planned.

Plenty of other girls who found themselves in the same situation would make a different kind of necessary arrangement.

It’s not that she didn’t think about it.

It wasn’t difficult to get done.

She knew somebody who knew somebody who’d done it. You just had to know who to ask. How to ask. It would be like it never happened. Instead of getting married in September, she could start at the University of Buffalo, with Pat. Geeta and Christy were going to UB, too. Elise off to Vassar, Sonja to the University of Michigan. Jane would be showing by September, probably. But she didn’t have to be.

The idea followed her around even after the wedding date was set. The idea was a tall lithe nurse in white linens: paper dressing gown over one arm, one hand beckoning Jane toward a small room with a large chair, a tray of sharp and gleaming instruments beside it. The nurse had a scent Jane couldn’t place, not antiseptic, but as wholesome and foreboding as peat and heavy rain. She smelled of wildflowers spattered with freshly dug earth.

Jane turned away from her again and again. She wouldn’t look her full in the face.

How do you consent to a thought?

 

Her mother slapped her when Jane told her she was pregnant. Her mother always lost her nerve just as open palm met cheek. Jane wondered if she’d resent her mother’s blows less if they could ever be delivered with conviction.

Her mother’s revulsion dissipated, however, once she could pause to consider the prestige of the match, even if it had been sealed under less-than-ideal circumstances. Patrick Brennan Sr. had cofounded Brennan & Menzari, which built dozens of the higher-end Town of Amherst homes, and he’d parlayed his wealth and standing into the chairmanship of the largest local auto dealership. The Brennans managed to be both affluent-for-Williamsville and salt-of-the-earth. They were soft-spoken and churchly, and the six of them lived well within their means in a four-bedroom split-level of Mr. Brennan’s own design. They were, Jane’s mother said, “the right sort of people,” people who “could buy you out if you looked at them funny” yet don’t “go begging you to count their money.” Her mother could count the Brennans’ money without being asked.

Mrs. Brennan, whom Jane could never quite bring herself to call Dee and so rarely called her anything at all, was slight and tanned and usually dressed for the tennis court. She could have probably shared clothes with Jane’s mother, but her mother’s conspicuous thinness seemed a by-product of perpetual exasperation, while Dee’s felt, like everything about her, quietly intentional. She would help get Jane set up in the holly-green clapboard house on Maple Way. Pat’s dad was building out the development and others in Williamsville, half-acre lots carved out of forest. The candy tins would be replaced by a checkbook, drawing on a bank account that Pat’s parents would control at first. Pat would go to work for the family firm, as had always been expected, while enrolled part-time at UB. Jane could enroll, too, someday. It was the only school she had applied to. She wanted to major in early childhood education. But she would have to wait at least until all the children were in school, because of course there would be more children.

“And then you’ll wonder why you ever thought you needed a degree,” Mrs. Brennan said cheerily. It was not a dig, not one of her mother’s just you waits. It was meant to reassure her that everything would work out fine, and just as it was intended to.

Mrs. Brennan took Jane shopping for furniture, paints, fixtures. Jane deferred so consistently to the older woman’s judgment—botanical prints, reproductions of Colonial-era furniture, deep blues and reds and greens—that her participation felt like a formality. One of Jane’s few suggestions was to find a frame for Madonna and Child with Saint Anne. Another was to place the chunk of the Colosseum on the living room mantelpiece. Jane had not yet removed it from its cardboard packaging.

“You know that’s not real, honey,” Mrs. Brennan said gently.

“No, it is,” Jane said, gripping the box, watching the mantelpiece. They hadn’t laid the carpet yet and their voices echoed slightly against the bare white walls. “I bought it right across from the Colosseum site.”

“Sweetheart,” Mrs. Brennan said, with soft remorse, “they wouldn’t just let you bring home a piece of the Colosseum.”

“No, it’s—see, look at the stamp on the side, it says, certificado come genuino.” Jane’s treasure looked all at once to her like a Happy Meal prize. A sheer plastic square cut into the packaging so you could peek inside at the rock, like the Tonka trucks on the shelves at Kay-Bee Toys. Jane laughed and covered her eyes, and Mrs. Brennan laughed, too.

“I’m a moron,” Jane said.

“You are not. Hey, it doesn’t even matter if it’s real,” Mrs. Brennan said. “It’s a memory for you, and that means something. For Pat, too. That trip brought you together.”

Mrs. Brennan placed the chunk on the mantelpiece, flush against the wall, behind a twin frame holding Jane’s and Pat’s baby pictures.

When Jane told her friends what she would be doing instead of college, Elise wore a look of stricken compassion. Geeta mentioned that she was learning how to knit, and that she could knit the baby something—booties, she thought, or a cap.

“I can’t wait to have kids,” Christy said.

“Well, you can,” Jane said, smiling.

“When I finish my residency,” Christy said.

Sonja’s brow furled in perplexity. She had gathered enough information from the Human Reproduction section of her old AP Biology textbook to formulate a strict birth control methodology for herself and Larry Priven, one that required neither clinical intervention nor furtive drugstore runs. She had shared her findings with Jane.

“I showed you how to use the calendar,” Sonja told Jane. “Remember? I showed you how to count the days.”

Jane smiled. “I guess that’s why you’re the Mathlete and I’m not,” she said, and Sonja seized her in a long hug.

For years after, Jane could still summon a physical memory of that hug. Its breathtaking pressure, its frankness. How their friendship had caught them both by surprise. At the time, Jane didn’t know if the hug was a reaffirmation of their friendship or a goodbye.

 

There was another physical imprint from those weeks of celebrations and planning for celebrations, when Jane’s future glowed inside her, unseeable and undeniable. A late-summer party at Rhonda Lacey’s house, too crowded, Rhonda’s parents in Myrtle Beach. The air already cooling, foretelling fall. The Laceys’ golden retriever eating pizza and lapping beer on the deck, Brad Bender bellowing in the backyard, snatching cheerleaders one by one by the waist, tossing each over his shoulder like a knapsack as the girl shrieked in laughter or pain or alarm—no one could tell, and no one asked. Pat, plastered, made a blowtorch out of his lighter and Brad’s little sister’s aerosol hairspray, but he fumbled it and lit his left hand on fire. Maybe whatever he was drinking acted as an accelerant. Pat was screaming, and Brad thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

“Baby, are you okay?” Jane asked when she found Pat in the Laceys’ kitchen, his hand in the sink under cold running water.

“I’m fine,” he said. Annoyance bordering on anger, like Jane was the one who had burned him.

Jane leaned over the sink to see. “That looks nasty. Let me ask Rhonda if we can find some ointment, or some Vaseline.”

“I’m fine. Stop making such a big deal out of it,” Pat protested, and stamped out of the kitchen, like Jane was going to burn him again. Tomorrow, two of his fingernails would turn black and fall off, the webbing between his thumb and forefinger turned to fatty uncooked bacon.

He’d left the water running. Jane took a Solo cup from a stack on the counter, held it under the water, and switched off the tap. She turned and leaned back against the Laceys’ countertop, sleepy, sipping, as classmates jostled past her in either direction. Colin loomed up in front of her, eyes meandering, tongue swollen with drink. The big jaw looked soft and crumbling. He was built from old paving stones.

“Why don’t you drink some bleach, you bitch,” he said, stumbling against her. He steadied himself with a hand against her breast, which was small and hard and swollen. “Why don’t you shove a coat hanger up your cunt. Why don’t you do us all a fucking favor.”

His head pitching forward, diving for sleep, pinned her shoulder against the cloudy-yellow tiles on the wall. She thought of pouring her cup of water over his head or kneeing him in the groin. Instead she waited underneath him, head turned from his beery panting, one hand behind her gripping the edge of the countertop, until he slumped away, sliding down the wall in a stupor. She smiled down on him, her profile turned beneath a flattering light toward an invisible eye—Mary beholding a different son, not dead, just drunk and sad. The Solo cup, unspilled, still in her hand. She watched his fallen bulk, crumpled beneath his letterman jacket. She hadn’t worn Pat’s jacket tonight. Even this early on, the baby kept her warm.

She had practice in loving her enemy. And she knew, too, how painful it could be, to be in love with Pat. It could leave you in pieces on the floor of someone else’s house.

 

Even her friends who enrolled at UB seemed to be there only for the cheap tuition. They’d leave Buffalo, probably, as soon as they had their degrees. Jane wondered if part of the problem with Buffalo was simply the name: a hirsute, lumbering beast, plodding a flat frost landscape, resigned to its ultimate destiny as ground meat or drive belts or fertilizer. Bilked, buffeted, befuddled, Buffaloed. Buffalo was a puffing freight train hauling eternal bad luck, inscribed in the collapse of coal and Bethlehem Steel, the pathos of wingless chickens, the endless blinding nihilist snow. Lake Ontario to their north and Lake Erie to their southwest fogged the lines between water and sky, washing their stars in gray milk when they weren’t dumping snow on them for spite. All the historical flashpoints were bad, comically bad. An assassin in Buffalo killed President McKinley. The only president that Buffalo could rightfully claim was Millard Fillmore, muddy dullard, who died there, too. Buffalo had a Frank Lloyd Wright building and they tore it down, in dead of night. Diphtheria in Buffalo killed Mark Twain’s baby, his firstborn son, Langdon, at home. They tore that house down, too. Even the name was a blunder: Buffalo, supposedly a garbling of beau fleuve, beautiful river, a name that French fur trappers may have used for a local creek, as a joke. No bison ever set foot in Buffalo, except on the jerseys of local sports enthusiasts. The baseball team doubled down on this misapprehension by calling themselves the Buffalo Bisons, although the plural of bison was bison. The namesake of the football team, hapless but for the splendid O.J., was Buffalo Bill Cody, a man with no ties to the city, who in fact won his nickname for being a prodigious killer of buffalo—his sharpshooting provided meat for the crews building the Kansas Pacific Railroad, thousands of miles southwest. Stacks of dead buffalo, nowhere near Buffalo. To be from Buffalo was to have made a mistake.

Jane gleaned most of this from the Local History section of the Clearfield Library, where she passed the autumn days as her belly grew and the new house sat waiting. Her friends were all in school. Geeta photocopied the syllabi from the UB Intro Early Childhood Development courses for Jane, and Jane looked up the names of all the authors in the Clearfield card catalog. Perhaps because they were English and wrote about children, Jane imagined the names embossed in fussy cursive on the cover of an old storybook: John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, D. W. Winnicott, authors of tales about earnest rabbits and doleful bears with terry-cloth fur, tumbling in their bonnets and waistcoats into spots of pastoral mischief. Every backdrop rolling green. Winnicott sounded cuddliest of all: Winnie-cot, a pooh-bear bundled in his crib. Winnicott worked at a hospital called Paddington Green, which was a real place, and wrote a book called The Piggle, named for a real girl. The cover of one of Winnicott’s books showed a curly-headed toddler in an old-fashioned two-button romper, chubbily working his way down porch steps. The baby of one of the ladies from Jane’s candy tins.

Jane was going to have a baby, too, and her whole world would be as gentle and green and terry-cloth soft. Pushing a pram to Paddington Green.

She drew up flash cards: transitional object, object permanence, strange situation, good enough mother. She could keep up with her friends at college, remain interesting to them, she really could—she just had to put in the effort. But the books made her dozy the way a bedtime story would. She would end up with her forehead down on a table, the book resting against her belly in her disappearing lap, and if her napping bothered Mrs. Bellamy, she never said so.

 

The fatigue of pregnancy was an elaborate prank. There was an exhilaration to it, too, as with the reveal of a prank—the release of the laughter, the endorphin rush of every cell in her body yawning, every fiber stretching to find more oxygen, more energy, for the creature dancing inside her, inhaling the iron in her blood with every somersault. It was almost orgasmic, to be pushed to a limit and then plunge into sleep. It was even better than those nights at the Vines’.

Pregnancy quieted Jane’s mind. She slept without sin. Her head did not race with prayers left unsaid. At first, she ate as sparingly as ever, but only out of nausea. Halfway through her pregnancy, she woke up beside Pat at four in the morning—and how strange it was, that after so many assignations in basements, on mudroom floors, crunched and folded in the backs of cars, that overnight she could awaken and raise herself on one elbow beside her husband, this callow and priapic and unconquerable boy her husband, in their own house, this pair of children playing at being their own parents, their baby, a girl, Jane knew it was a girl, asleep inside her—and Jane felt a new hunger, not the familiar dizzy emptiness but something new and violent, dirty fingernails scraping and squeezing her innards, clawing her guts toward her pelvic bone. She stumbled in the darkness to the staircase, down into the kitchen, and took a pack of white dinner rolls from the pantry, the inside of her mouth raining with saliva as her teeth clamped down on the spongy, tasteless bread.

Jane became consumed with the idea that if she was hungry, then the baby inside her had to be starving. She could see the baby writhing with hunger, tiny limbs kicking. The baby in a dark liquid prison, unsure if or when her jailer might return with a tray of crusts and brackish water. For years, Jane had seen her want of food as sinful. But now it was a need, and there could be no sin in need.

“You are young, and you can snap back,” Dee said, toward the end of Jane’s pregnancy. Jane was more comfortable calling her Dee now. It was the Thanksgiving that O.J. rushed for two hundred and seventy-three yards in a single game, made two touchdowns, and the Bills still lost. Early evening, Dee’s table cleared, dishwasher humming, all the older siblings dispersed to friends’ houses, and Jane had just helped herself to another slice of Dee’s pumpkin pie. “You are a lovely girl. It would be such a pity if you let yourself go,” Dee said.

“Mmm,” Jane agreed, licking a dollop of filling off an index finger. She pressed around her lips with her fingers, checking for stray bits of pie crust.

“You know Rhonda Lacey’s sister?” Pat asked later that night, back home, Jane putting water on the stove for tea. “Meredith, I think her name is? She’s a skinny girl like you—like you were—but when she was pregnant it was like she swallowed a bowling ball.” He waited and watched her. “Like a snake that’s swallowed a mouse! And then right after the baby, she looked the same as before.” He waited, watched. “Wearing short skirts and stuff. Tight jeans . . . I guess I thought that’s what you’d be like,” he said.

“I guess I never paid as much attention to Meredith Lacey as you did,” Jane said. Pat’s eyes widened in warning, and Jane looked down at the pot, one finger pushing idly at its handle, its lip. She wanted to dunk her hand in the water, to see how close it was to boiling.

“I’m so hungry all the time,” she said. “I worry that the baby is hungry, too.”

“Yeah, well,” Pat said. “That sounds like making excuses.”

“The baby can’t speak for herself,” Jane said. “I have to guess what she needs. Maybe I don’t always guess right.”

The water simmered. Jane opened a cabinet and took down a box of macaroni and cheese.

“You cannot possibly be hungry,” Pat said.

“She is,” Jane said.

“You don’t know it’s a girl,” Pat said. “What if it’s a boy?”

“I know her,” Jane said, ripping open the box and pouring the elbows into the pot.

 

Pain could be trusted. Pain was the presence of God. She told her doctor she didn’t want any drugs. She needed to feel what was happening.

“All that hippie natural-birth shit. You read that at the library?” Pat said.

Her best chance for feeling the pain, all of it, was to wait as long as she could before she asked Pat to drive her to the hospital, almost until it was too late. When the contractions started, she locked herself in the upstairs bathroom and ran the taps in the tub until they could no longer camouflage the noise—not a noise she herself was making, not a mechanism of lungs and larynx and vocal cords, but a shifting of plates, mantle roaring through crust, an avalanche somehow sliding upward through her esophagus, a geologic boom of awful movement. Her water broke and kept breaking, pouring out of her fathomless body. She never guessed what she could contain. Seeing her bellowing down the stairs—seeing what she had done, the secret she had kept—Pat was too scared to be angry. The baby was crowning by the time the hospital people got her on a table.

Before she gave birth, Jane imagined pain as a visitation, a localized phenomenon to be accommodated, managed, at times encouraged. She didn’t yet know that a person could become pain, that a body could become both stimulus and response and explode the higher mind, leaving a dumb howling beast to crawl in its wreckage. There was no thinking-Jane to trust the pain or see God in it. She was tortured, she thought later—the thought was blasphemous—like a saint. The stretching on the rack. The crackling fire. But amid the torture she saw no visions, remembered no prayers. Most saints, after all, did not become mothers. For most—there were exceptions, and it was a sin to think yourself exceptional—it was a disqualifying event. Not for Mother Seton, but again, Jane’s own mother said she didn’t count.

A groaning beast, a buffalo prone on the plain. Put her out of her misery. If you can bleed out that bad and not die, then you must be an animal.

Thinking-Jane returned to herself on the final push, the baby hurtling out of her body, a meteor, a rocket, a slick, downy aeronautic shell reentering the earth’s atmosphere. Jane’s insides scorched black, endless as outer space. Her kenosis.

“It’s a girl,” a voice said, a doctor or a nurse.

“I know,” Jane said, reaching out with both hands.

It wasn’t yet hospital protocol in western New York State at the beginning of 1977 to accede to a mother’s request that a newborn be placed immediately into her arms, but Jane wasn’t asking. The astonishing baby draped on her chest, swampy and stern, eyes liquid and unblinking, bottomless. Once again there was nothing between them.

 

They named her Lauren, a laurel, green and fragrant, a wreath for the Christmas just gone past. The ceramic nativity scene at Saint Benedict’s was still installed in a side chapel, there until Epiphany: officious wise men in their jewel-toned robes, watchful Joseph, an exuberant angel, beatific Disney livestock. Jane stood dumbfounded by the display, Lauren bundled under her coat, grunting wetly against Jane’s collarbone. Beneath her clothes, Jane was soaking through a maxi pad. Mary was draped in puddling porcelain silks, sunk to her knees in pillows of straw, her hands pressed together in prayer toward the swaddled Jesus in the manger. The mother of God had labored on a donkey and then labored in a barn, her body breaking itself open centimeter by centimeter amid hay and shit and cold, an animal among animals. Away in a slop trough, no crib for a bed.

Jane felt a certain kind of way that Christ’s suffering on the Cross was exalted, itemized station by station in this same church, an infinity of wood and stone, while Mary’s suffering was heated in a kiln and painted in cartoon colors for a children’s seasonal diorama. She fumbled around inside the cloudy dome of her postpartum brain for the sound of the feeling, hoping she’d recognize it by touch. Earlier that morning, she told Pat that they needed to buy more diaphragms, or more diamonds, or more diapers—that was it. What was the thing she felt? Put out. Pent up. Perturbed! That was it. Perturbed, the er-er-buh requiring an indignant pursing of lips.

Ringing through her head: O night when Christ was born / O night divine

Would Jane’s high school English teachers have circled Christ was born in red pencil? Was that passive voice? Mary is the subject and Christ is the object. She couldn’t remember the rules. The cell was empty.

“I love that they add something every year,” Dee was saying. “Look at the darling little lambs, right there at the angel’s feet.”

“Who helped Mary clean herself?” Jane thought, and the thoughts turned into muffled words in the air close by—she could hear them. “Who helped her clean the baby?” It was Jane who was speaking. “Did Mary need stitches? Did they find a spare manger for the afterbirth?”

“Okey-dokey, that’s all, folks,” Pat was saying as he placed his hands on Jane’s shoulders and nudged her toward the exit. The Porky Pig voice he used when he wanted to change the subject, make Jane stop talking. It was Pat’s version of her father’s How about those Bills?

Later, Jane’s mother told her that Mary didn’t suffer labor pains, because she wasn’t a sinner.

That month was Roots—there was O.J. sprinting across the screen in loincloth and warrior beads, like Pegasus wings could sprout from his back as he broke from the cold storage of Buffalo—and that month was the blizzard. Midnight in the afternoon, flaying winds, snowdrifts taller than Pat and packed like cement. The roads were unpassable, but the lights and the phone stayed on, the furnace and sump pump chugged away, and so the little house on Maple Way became a moon station, a glowing, lonely pod. Jane and Lauren didn’t leave the house for weeks, Jane living off stockpiles of dried pasta and canned beans, Lauren living off Jane. Pat studied and watched a lot of TV in the basement, talked to Colin and Brad on the phone. He was good with the baby. Jane could rely on him for a solid half hour, forty-five minutes at a stretch, of cuddling on the couch or google-eyed play on the carpet, and she could use the time to do laundry.

It was good that the roads were unpassable because nursing the baby agitated Jane’s parents. “That’s obscene,” her father said, fleeing the room, the first and only time he saw the baby at her breast. Until the blizzard interrupted her daily visits, Jane’s mother brought with her can after can of Similac—she’d happened to have a coupon for it, and she’d needed to go to the store anyway, she was driving right past, it was right there, so why not grab some, you see, she was only trying to help, just let her help, for goodness’ sake, Jane, you have always been so stubborn—and Jane’s mother stood in the pantry stacking and restacking the cans, each smack a clap of judgment. If Jane gasped or moaned because of a bad latch or a sore nipple, it struck her mother’s ear as an echo of her screaming and crying over Rome—her outlandish need for attention, her perverse insistence on having her way.

The corners of her mother’s lips turned down when Jane told her the baby’s name. Her mother’s tongue thrust out on the L like she was gagging on it. The only Laurens her mother knew of were the two in Jane’s year, Goldstein and Cohen.

It occurred to Jane one afternoon as she was changing Lauren’s diaper, the snow and wind pounding their dark against the window, that her mother had probably hit her for the last time. To entertain the baby and to pass the hours, Jane narrated even her stray and most fragmentary thoughts. “I am therefore declared unslappable,” she told Lauren with a cheery nod, oddly buoyed by the goofy pa-pa-ba of the word she had made up, unslappable, three brisk little kisses, and she blew a raspberry on the baby’s taut round belly. Lauren gurgled appreciatively, all four limbs dancing, looking up at her mother with a surprised pride.

“I’m unperturbed! I’m unslappable!” Jane said again, tickling Lauren’s ribs and blowing another raspberry, and that was the first time Lauren laughed.

 

“Bernice in the rectory office says they have a backlog of baptisms scheduled,” Jane’s mother told her in March. “Nothing major. The blizzard threw everyone off. But you don’t want to leave it too late.”

To let Lauren go unbaptized was to give her an Achilles’ heel. A sprinkling of holy water would be a vaccine against the disease of the unclean soul. Jane still prayed every night and at Sunday-morning mass, but her prayers had lost their compulsive charge. She tensed up when she reached the point in her litany when she asked God to watch over Lauren. Her throat tightened with what felt like a lie. She remembered how funny it had all seemed in the church in Rome. Now the joke was stale, but she kept telling it out of habit.

“People get their kids baptized,” Pat told Jane. “It’s what people do. You’re overthinking it.”

Jane put Lauren in the eggshell-colored gown that Dee’s daughters had worn to their baptisms. It was nicer than her own christening dress had been; its fabric was thicker and softer, the layers of tulle more delicate and numerous. Lauren angled her dribbly chin away from the dress’s lace collar, wearing the same quizzical, stoic gaze she’d cast up at Jane after she’d hurtled down from outer space. Her downy hair, still somehow damp. The baby gestured toward one corner of her mouth, her chubby wee hand an elegant comma, as she did when she was hungry. It made Jane think of how Robert De Niro would write in the air in the second Godfather movie—graciously refusing a parcel of groceries, persuading his friends of a plan over spaghetti, his voice low and trilling, patient. Jane and Lauren sat down in a pew to eat.

“Not in God’s house, Jane!” her mother said as Jane bent over the baby.

“Happy Lauren’s christening day, Glenis,” Pat said to her mother, shrugging and opening his palms upward.

That same spring, late one afternoon, Jane saw Mrs. Vine in the canned food aisle at Bells market. Lauren round-eyed and drooling in the shopping cart, her face its usual picture of startled delight. Jane in duck boots, an old pair of Pat’s jeans, and a maternity coat belted snugly against her still-soft stomach, its hem scarred with dirty snow and road salt. Mrs. Vine had not yielded to sloth during that brutal winter and the sodden, sloppy season that followed: patterned cashmere coat cut to her figure, pants unscathed by sodium chloride, heels high and regal. She moved at precise angles as she chose among cans of green beans, a mission engrossing and humorous. She was a model dropped into an exotic and overlit location for a magazine shoot. Somehow the Vines still lived in Buffalo.

Jane smiled eagerly at Mrs. Vine as they passed each other. Mrs. Vine grinned back and winked as she said, with a conspiratorial note in her voice, “Why, hello there,” caressing the can of beans, like a jewel thief with her loot, like she was about to press her treasure into Jane’s hand, and it occurred to Jane that she had no idea who she was.

 

After first steps but before confident walking, after babbling but before real words, no longer a baby but not yet a toddler, there was a time when Lauren, getting sleepy at dinner, would take Jane’s hands, open them palms up, like Pat at her christening, and then rest her little head in them, pressing her cheek against the creases. Then she would return her mother’s hands to their rightful owner and get back to the business of getting her mashed potato onto her spoon and making the unpredictable voyage from bowl to lips without spilling. Lauren was equally interested in and pleased by any outcome of this journey.

Jane pressed her own hands together as she watched her child. She felt a crushing panic in moments like this, remorse for the crime she had briefly considered committing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the phantom nurse, who probably wore a fond smile, who probably would have convinced her it was all for the best if Jane had even once looked her full in the face. Jane was terrified of something she hadn’t done, that could now never be done, as potently as if it could never be undone, as if the nurse could tug her by the arm, press her into a parallel world, white and ceaseless, without Lauren in it. Alone in a pod on the moon. All because Jane had consented to the thought. It was Jane who had invited this apparition into the nursery, something out of a bad movie, her cold, elegant fingers drumming on the wooden rails of Lauren’s crib.

Lauren. Her crooked, crinkly-eyed smile. The honey-and-almond folds of her knees and elbows. The café au lait mark on her hip, the size of Jane’s thumbnail; Jane had flipped through an atlas one feverish night, Lauren wheezing in the crook of her arm, and determined that the mark was in the shape of Finland, with particular fidelity to the topography of its eastern border with Russia. The feathery fur on Lauren’s shoulders and in the V between her shoulder blades, still lingering there long after her infancy. Toddler Lauren’s heartbreaking byeee-bye when a door closed that she wished to stay open. Lauren telling an anecdote in her own slushy, temperate language, gesticulating in fluent De Niro, furrowing her brow as she searched for the perfect turn of phrase. In these moments Lauren looked a lot like Sonja, who still called when she was home on break, who still came around.

So did Geeta, but only with Sonja. They were a package deal. Elise would join them or come on her own. Christy faded out, although she was going to UB and still living at home.

The worst was the first year. Geeta and Sonja brought Mylar balloons when they visited Jane after the baby. Nursing Lauren on the couch, her friends cross-legged on the matching overstuffed chairs that Mrs. Brennan had chosen from Kittinger, Jane watched the balloons nudging against the ceiling of the living room, clumsy and aimless blobs, and saw herself as an invalid in a hospital full of false cheer, as if she were recovering from a severe head injury as her friends guided her through some remedial small talk. Part of her rehabilitation. She told them too eagerly about what she was reading, Wordsworth and Winnicott and Ordinary People, but she didn’t admit that she couldn’t pay attention for more than a few pages at a time.

What cannot be taken for granted is the mother’s pleasure that goes with the clothing and the bathing of her own baby. If you are there enjoying it all, it is like the sun coming out for the baby. That was Winnicott.

“I’ll definitely have to check all those books out,” Geeta said finally, and Jane’s uterus performed one of its last contractions, letting go a sorrow that she could not name but was nonetheless sitting in front of her.

Enjoy being turned-in and almost in love with yourself, the baby is so nearly a part of you. That also was Winnicott. And it was true that Jane could enjoy this, so long as it was only her and Lauren.

Pat’s sister, Marie, ten years older, businesslike in her courteousness and with three small children of her own, always included Jane in her card games and PTA fund-raiser meetings with her friends, all in their late twenties or older, with children who were mostly in school already. But Jane could never entirely learn their repartée of weary disparagement: of their husbands, their children, and the mothers in the group who didn’t happen to be present that day. Jane’s mother frequently commented on how Marie “carried herself with such grace,” like she was a widow or bearing the burden of some unjust opprobrium—or maybe the burden was the fact that Marie looked exactly like Pat and yet, by some abstruse geometry, he was the pretty one. That was the kind of thought that Jane’s mother would have.

Her mother often told Jane, “You are so lucky to have Marie.” Or, “She gave you a leg up.” Or, “She showed you the ropes.” Or, “She’s been very good to you, really gone out of her way.” These were accusations. Her mother’s praise of Marie was a euphemism for a darker thought: that Jane had cut corners, received a gift in error, gotten away with something, she had cheated, she had lied, and look, it had all worked out for her anyway, like it always does, this smooth, easy life laid down for her by the work and thoughtfulness and compassion of others.

In the ordinary things you do you are quite naturally doing very important things, and the beauty of it is that you do not have to be clever, and you do not even have to think if you do not want to. Winnicott again.

 

Three years with Lauren, the idyll of the only child, was so much of what Jane imagined the first months of a romance to be: the hours alone together doing nothing in particular, staring into each other’s eyes, laughing at jokes they couldn’t have explained to others or even themselves, lolling in grass or snow, kneading each other’s flesh, eating off each other’s plates. Even Lauren’s tantrums, infrequent and easily resolved, could be observed with some degree of detachment. A summer storm through a frosted pane.

Duck, Lauren whispered for dark, when she woke in the first inklings of dawn. Bight, Lauren whispered for bright, when her mother switched on the lamp by her crib. Her little face opening like a flower when she found the names for things.

“That’s right, Lauren. It was duck and now it’s bight,” her mother told her. This was the best time of day, at dawn, before Pat woke, when Jane and Lauren could share secrets about their world and decide, just the two of them, how to name everything in it.

Marie’s friends complained about the early starts, the relentless menial labor that multiplied with two and then three children. Pretty much everyone was stopping at three these days. “You’ve only got the one,” they would say. “Just wait—you’ll see.”

They complained about having to read the same books aloud over and over. For Jane, who could recite The Snowy Day and The Story of Ferdinand and Goodnight Moon by heart, extreme repetition had granted these stories the calming, incantatory quality of the prayers that she no longer felt compelled to say. “Where mouse go?” Lauren asked on every page of Goodnight Moon, and Jane intoned the rodent’s Stations of the Cross with a lowing reverence. Mouse on the mantelpiece. Mouse on the drying rack. Mouse near the fire.

“Where mouse go?” Lauren asked when the book was closed, and Jane was happy to begin again.

 

When Pat was sweet, he was so sweet. But even in the midst of the sweetness, there was the foreshadowing, the menace of when he would not be sweet. The two Pats were always in the room with Jane and Lauren.

The first time Jane thought about running away was the night he snapped a garbage bag in her face when she was holding Lauren, whipping it like a suburban matador as he harangued her about—what? What was it? How could she forget? Something about the cat food, or the cat litter, or the cat. Jane laughed, out of nerves. He crowded her against a wall of the kitchen for laughing and then he taunted her for cowering. He shouted until the baby began to cry—a frightened, staccato cry that Jane had not heard before—and he taunted Jane for letting the baby cry. Lauren had just started holding up her head on her own.

“I will leave you,” Jane told Pat. “I will take the baby, and I will get a divorce.”

“You would never,” he said.

A Saturday in summer, not long after Lauren had started crawling. Jane sensed the stink of incipient anger on Pat as the three of them finished lunch. Proximity to him was dangerous, but packing Lauren into the car for a “shopping run” might be seen as a rebuke. She took Lauren into the backyard with a pitcher of lemonade and a blanket: a storybook scene she hoped Pat might see from the kitchen window, a scene that might calm him, a young mother and her gorgeous baby girl lounging in the low summer sun, discussing the grass, exploring the clouds. He could watch from his house and savor the privilege of what he owned. There was a sinful vanity in this little scheme, the same vanity that poked at the corners of Jane’s lips whenever a stranger mistook her for Lauren’s big sister. But still: she would set a scene that belonged to Pat, awaiting his benediction.

Jane wondered if her father had ever menaced her mother like this, if his blandness ever turned like Pat’s sweetness did. If there was a precedent, if this was normal.

When it was time for Lauren’s nap, Jane lifted her off the grass, cuddled in the blanket, to carry her inside. She turned the knob of the back door and, curiously, found it locked; with Lauren on her hip, she walked around to the front of the house to find that door locked, too. She knocked on the door intermittently for an hour, tapped at windows, and otherwise sat on the stone stoop, drowsy Lauren slumped on her lap, thumb in her mouth, Jane hunched over to shield her from the afternoon sun. The glare her mother had warned about.

When Pat finally opened the front door, he wore a mask of contemptuous disbelief.

“Why are you out here?” he yelled. Lauren rubbing her cheek against Jane’s neck.

The best thing was to enter the house as quietly as possible, put the baby to bed, wait for the menace to dissipate. There was nothing she could say or do to make it better. She was the cause and she would be the effect.

Don’t say a word don’t react don’t say a word don’t—

“Because you locked us out of the house, you asshole!” she said.

She was already halfway through the doorway, and the door was slamming against her shoulder, it was slamming against her head, and points of light were behind her eyes and the baby, the baby, the baby is okay, they are outside again, sitting down on the stoop, Lauren is still in her arms, the baby is okay, the baby, the baby is okay.

He hadn’t hit her. He hadn’t meant to hurt her with the door. He was just angry, that’s all. Something came over him. Something had come over her, too! She couldn’t help it, and neither could he. He hadn’t meant to cause her any pain. Let’s be fair about this. She had a part to play, too. It takes two. Why was she so tough on him? Why was she standing there? Right there, right in the way of the door?

Sometimes she wanted so badly for Pat to hit her, with his hands. She had stopped herself in the act of praying for this, and then prayed for forgiveness for wanting this. She wanted this because if he ever laid his hands on her, then she could ask God for forgiveness for taking Lauren from him and running away—then she could justify it. Broken skin or a broken bone—then it would be Pat who had broken the vow.

You would never.

Was God looking now? Could he see that she wasn’t provoking Pat’s anger, that his anger only fed off itself? Was she provoking Pat’s anger by praying for it, or wanting to pray for it? Would God forgive her? What would there be to forgive?

He is not even looking at you.

In the midst of Pat’s rages or in their aftermath, Jane took a steadying comfort in discomfort: the near-scalding water she used to sterilize Lauren’s bottles; the juice of an orange stinging her cuticles; Lauren’s chubby knee digging into her rib cage as they climbed the stairs to her room, Pat’s clamor trailing after them, a colander striking the kitchen floor, a cereal bowl cracking open against the wall.

One afternoon as Lauren napped, Jane was on her hands and knees in the living room, picking up toys, when she drew back one arm and smacked it against the wooden foot of the rocking chair. She closed her eyes against the pain, willing it to sustain. She dived into the blood swimming under her skin. She couldn’t plan out these opiate bursts of oblivion; they depended in part on surprise. She was grateful for the pain, its dazzling clarity, its sweeping away of everything but itself, and she wanted the pain not to stop but to be smothered and forgotten in more pain. And then the pleasure of it being gone, the pleasure of a pain that goes away.

Discomfort, especially when it breached the borderlines of pain, was clarifying. It was a form of truth. It relieved the damp pressure of the humming in her brain. Jane remembered the call of pain, the seductions of it. She remembered trying to be saintly in her pain. But while Pat’s rages were something a saint might endure, saints did not marry. Saints didn’t have children. Saints didn’t permit men inside them, or babies inside them. Mother Seton didn’t count.

She was no saint, Jane told herself over and over again. And he never hit her.

Even before she discovered she was pregnant again, she mourned her solitary romance with Lauren, and she mourned the fantasy she’d been harboring since the night Pat whipped the garbage bag at them: that they could get away. That Jane and Lauren could slip free of the bonds of holy matrimony, local infamy, and the financial and social apparatus that the elder Brennans had built around their son’s small sudden family—house, car, budget, gainful employment and college tuition for Pat, the crib, the furniture, the checkbook, the Sunday dinners, the awkward, Marie-facilitated playdates—and run off together, consummate their romance, elope.

The checkbook. Faux leather, a froggy green. Pat gave her cash for her grocery-store runs, and Jane had been setting aside the change, the fives and ones slowly stacking up again. Maybe by now they would fill one and a half of her old candy tins. But she could get the checkbook. Pat kept it in an unlocked drawer, or sometimes left it out on his desk. She could walk into the bank with that checkbook and ask for money. She didn’t know how much was in the account. It had to be at least a few thousand dollars, she thought. She could breezily mention to the bank teller that she was buying a used car, or something. She could have a whole story prepared. She wouldn’t have to tell the story, wouldn’t have to say a thing, it wasn’t a clerk’s business, but she’d have the story anyway, another small gift to offer herself.

The Monday after the slamming door, Jane went to the faux-Tudor efficiency complex on Evans Road, Lauren in her arms. One-bed, one-bath, wall-to-wall carpeting, black grime behind the toilet. Cash deposit in her purse. Can’t use the coffee maker and the toaster at the same time or you’ll blow a fuse. Cute baby you got there. Your husband coming to see the place, too?

She could do this to herself, but she couldn’t do it to Lauren. Jane was the one who had gotten them into this situation. Lauren was not at fault. Jane closed her eyes against the image of Geeta or Elise coming over to the apartment with flowers or a basket of fruit, murmuring, “How nice, how nice.” Mylar balloons nudging against the bulges in the ceiling, the flaking plaster. Her mother stopping by with Marie, Marie hyperventilating with false cheer and laughter, her mother lingering in the doorway, refusing to sit down, making a show of not touching anything.

Lauren would not have brothers or sisters. Lauren would never be anyone’s sister. She would not know anyone at school who was alone in the way she was. Alone with a crazy mother who’d chewed off her own leg to escape the trap she’d set for a nice boy, a boy who only wanted to do right by her.

“I will leave you,” Jane told Pat. “I will take the baby, and I will get a divorce.”

“You would never,” he said.

She did remember Sonja’s birth control math. Pat might get impatient, but he didn’t force it. There were other things they could do.

Still, though, it was time. She couldn’t leave Lauren alone.

Build a cell inside your mind from which you can never flee.

 

They named the new baby Patrick John III, or PJ. Just short of a year later, there was Sean.

“Irish twins,” Dee said fondly.

“Like rabbits,” Jane’s mother said darkly.

PJ was fussier than Lauren in his observance of standards and customs: the angle at which Jane offered her breast, the optimal conditions under which he would come to terms with his car seat or stroller or diaper. Sean was as easy and sweet as Lauren had been, only now there were three of them. A memory so crystalline it must have been a composite: the boys side by side on changing blankets on the living room floor, PJ crying himself hoarse, kicking, Sean staring puzzled at his brother from atop a diaper explosion up to his hips, and four-year-old Lauren standing off to one side, chewing her lip, ruminating on some big and mournful decision, and then padding to the opposite side of the room to sit down cross-legged with a book, her back turned to them.

“Lauren?” Jane asked over the din and shit, hearing the helpless tone in her voice. “Are you okay, honey?”

Lauren nodded without turning around.

“Come here, my love,” Jane said. “My one and only girl.” She wouldn’t turn around. They were falling out of love, Jane feared, and this was where it started.

The sweet Pat faded further once one child became two and then three, once the scenes he departed each morning and came home to each night compounded in their noise and mess, as the friends of Marie said that they would. And yet Pat was safest at home: in public, Jane embarrassed him, and the proximity of the children multiplied his embarrassment, turning it more quickly into anger. The five of them clambering out of a booth at Perkins, Jane bending over Sean to unbuckle the strap on his high chair. Pat stepped on her foot, hard, his dried-muddy work boot flat on her open-toed sandal, and she didn’t react, of course it was an accident, a grunt of pain escaped her throat, but that was it, she didn’t mean anything by it, she wasn’t faking it, she kept her smile, she didn’t look up, she only hovered over Sean an extra minute, tickling his velvety earlobe with her nose, blowing his hair like dandelion fluff to erase the seething in her ear.

“I didn’t see you there—why were you standing so close to me?” Pat asked.

Jane teethed Sean’s earlobe and he giggled.

“You’re like a dog that’s always underfoot,” he said. Standing so close to her. People in Perkins would start looking at him, and his anger would double for having been witnessed. Jane had made him do it, and Jane had made them look at it. It was what she had wanted to happen. He was sure of this, he knew it, he was righteous in his knowledge of her transgressions, her power over his will.

It always felt the same: hands shaking, heart seizing, the metallic taste on her tongue. The sensation of a dank gray blanket thrown over her head. She would have to move through her day and attend to her children with the blanket over her head, and she couldn’t complain about or even acknowledge the blanket over her head. The palm of a hand pressing against her forehead. The sinking, sinking. She kissed Sean’s soft, perfect cheek, made friendly growling sounds in the sweet folds of his neck. He giggled, and the palm pressed down, down. Her cheek against Sean’s, and she was sinking. Her poor baby, having to sink with her. He must know something, must feel himself sinking. She shifted Sean to one hip and hoisted the diaper bag over the opposite shoulder. “I love you,” she whispered in Sean’s ear, and he giggled again. Maybe Sean didn’t want to giggle, Jane thought, maybe he was faking it just like her.

Outside the restaurant, PJ was on Pat’s shoulders, pointing and squinting happily at the cars moving up and down Transit Road, Lauren listening attentively as Pat described to her the basic properties of the internal combustion engine. Pat’s enthusiasm for the engine and for his children was evident. Lauren looked up at him and took his hand.

 

They used to fight all the time, but fighting with Pat was an attempt to win a debate in front of an audience that didn’t exist. No one was observing or adjudicating. No one would congratulate Jane for being right, or for being locked out of the house, or for having a body that occupied space. She tried to move through the world like a blessed machine, silvery and shimmering. She tried to move through the world like a light field, all energy and no mass. She tried not to move through the world at all, but aspire instead to the friendly frozen sheen of nativity livestock. Pleasant and bovine. Who could be angry with a cow?

Though Pat’s anger would dissipate, for days and weeks at a time, the air was always stagnant with it. Pat could cough, just cough, and Jane would start, and he would notice and accuse her of “performing,” and then that would be another two, three days right there.

“Stop acting!” her mother would say.

Pat was a roar, a maw, famished for outrage. He still wanted her, even when he hated her. He could still make her come, or rather she could still accomplish that in the midst of him using her body to make himself come. Years after they no longer had to fuck in cars and laundry rooms, it still felt furtive. Something not to talk about, certainly not with each other. How he moved her around, flipped her over, yanked one leg this way and that, pushing and kneading her hips or her ass one centimeter this way or that to attain maximum friction, depth, torque—it used to be funny, flattering, revelatory of all the things she previously hadn’t known her body could do. What he could do to her body, what her body could do to his. He was teaching her. That’s what she used to think. But who had taught him? And when would it be her turn to teach? And why didn’t he ask her? It was too late to ask any of these questions.

 

She woke up one dawn beside him, soaked in her own blood. “Were you even going to tell me?” he whisper-yelled at her. She stood silhouetted against the bedroom window as she peeled the sheets off the bed. She thought she was nineteen weeks.

“Were you?” he asked.

He could have told himself, had he been paying attention. Marie had figured it out. Lauren had, too. “I see your belly, Mommy,” she said, two mornings ago, peeking through the bathroom doorway as Jane emerged from the shower.

“You are far enough along,” the doctor said later that morning, “that we have two choices here.”

Two ways to get her out. It was a girl. She knew it like she’d known with Lauren. She knew her.

She wanted to tell someone else. She wanted to tell her mother. Not her own mother, but the mother you could tell these things to.

 

A month later, Pat came home with an ice pack down the front of his pants.

“We are done,” he said that night in bed. “Three is enough. More than enough.”

“It’s a sin,” Jane said, and he groaned with the effort of turning away from her.

She dreamed she gave birth to a loaf of bread, and when she cut into it, she cut into the baby sleeping inside.

You are far enough along

She tried to put the baby back together as everything crumbled in her hands.

that we have two choices here.

Blood in the bread like a jelly.

She asked God for forgiveness. She knelt on the bathroom floor, door closed and tap running, and tried to explain Pat’s position to God, and she chided herself for her presumption. Praying like this, with some special request, like she was calling in to some celestial radio station, felt fraudulent and lonely. Begging for a favor—a vestige of her narcissistic adolescent self. At least as a teenager she prayed every night without fail, and not only when she wanted something.

She reminded herself that such procedures as Pat had undergone were sometimes reversible. When things calmed down, they could talk about it. When Pat had a longer stretch of not being angry. When her nightmares stopped. When the children she did have were a little older. She liked how Pat was with the children, especially as they got old enough for chapter books and Uno games and Underoos. She had to admit that. His gruff there-ness. His love for the children was unremarkable, un-remarked-upon, not worthy of fuss. For him to be demonstrative, to verbalize his love, would be like jumping up and down on the floor and marveling that it didn’t cave in. He took a genuine interest in their sports teams, the architecture of their sandcastles and toy train lines. His engagement was not with who the children were, their inner lives and friendships and whether or not they liked their homeroom teacher that year—he would not have known their homeroom teacher’s name, would not have recognized her if she said hello to him in Bells market, had he ever stepped foot in Bells—but rather in what the children did. The children sensed the nature of his interest, identified its authenticity, and reciprocated it. They sought out Pat’s opinions. He was the person who explained the world to them.

Still, they knew who he was. If he yelled at Jane, really yelled, they would ask him to stop. Ever since they were tiny, if she went into another room because the fact of her body taking up space was provoking his anger, the children would follow her. Jane sitting on the edge of their bed, Lauren and PJ on either side of her, Sean still inside, Pat looming above all of them. Jane watched as PJ, the only one of her three who was never a thumb sucker, no man of the pacifier, crammed his fingers, one and then two and then three, into his mouth as he stared into space, waiting beside his mother and sister for his father’s anger to end.

The business of their father would end, but their mother never would. In subjecting her children to their father, she also sensed her permanence, authority, the eternal fact of herself. Her there-ness. She would always be more immovably there than he was.

Jane cooked and cleaned and drove, drove and cleaned and cooked. She was the primal parent, the chest where they wanted to bury their heads after a scraped knee or a bad dream. Hers was the name they called in the night, if they called at all. Soon enough, they didn’t.

At the library, one shelf above Stories of the Saints, was a book of fables from the animal world. She flipped through it a lot when she was pregnant with Lauren, when Winnicott’s friendly, encouraging sentences started swimming together. The book of fables was really a book of mothers. The panther who only ever has one litter, because her children claw their way out—tearing their first home to shreds, condemning it by escaping it. The bear who gives birth not to babies but to eyeless white heaps of flesh, which she licks and paws into shape and warms into life, their eyes flashing on in the moment of quickening. The tiger who awakens in the night to find her cubs stolen, and she sprints after the kidnapper, who throws down mirrors behind him to confuse her. She has never seen herself before. The tiger mistakes her own reflection for one of her babies; she stops short to wrap herself protectively around the curve of the glass. A pose of sleep and love. She wanted her baby, and she wanted revenge, and she wanted them so wildly that she lost them both.

Imagine, she thought, looking into your own eyes to find yourself so betrayed. Imagine the moon above you was a mirror. She is your mother, your sister, your child. She looks in the mirror and sees only you.

 

At times, Jane saw another life. They left all three children at his parents’ house for Elise Davis’s wedding. Elise got married barefoot on the banks of Lake Chautauqua, the reception on the grounds of an old auto baron’s mansion. Elise had finished law school and her new husband, Peter, had finished his medical residency, and they were moving to Arlington, Virginia. The weather was perfect. A deck for dancing, strung up with tiny lights at dusk. Colin Chase was there, God knows why, the smiling sociopath, going in for the both-cheeks kiss with Jane like they were fond old classmates from a junior year abroad. Pat was gregarious with various guests, conspicuously so, interrupting, touching first a wrist and then a bare shoulder blade belonging to Elise’s younger sister, sleeveless in her maid-of-honor dress. Then he disappeared. Jane found him at the outskirts of the dance floor. The DJ was playing the Go-Gos’ “Our Lips Are Sealed.” Three generations dancing.

“I love this song,” Jane said. She loved it because Lauren loved it, knew every word, and PJ and Sean would always come in on the title line. Ah-lips ah see-all! How she missed the three of them right now, holding hands in a circle under the tiny lights.

“Let’s dance, honey,” Jane said. Pat stared straight ahead at an empty patch of the parquet dance floor.

There’s a weapon

We must use

In our defense

Silence

“Oh, come on, let’s dance—it’s boring just to watch!” Jane said, touching his arm, smiling too hard, trying too hard.

Pat turned slowly toward her. An evacuated face, the skin hanging looser, as if some animating spirit had been sucked out through the black-marble hollows of his eyes.

“Oh, I’m boring, am I?” he said. A dead face that wanted her dead. “Am I boring you?”

And that was it—she knew that was it. That would be the rest of the night, the rest of the weekend. How many of Jane’s hours, days, weeks of her life vaporized like this.

“Let’s go,” he was barking behind Jane a few songs later. She had finally gotten her chance to speak with Elise, so pretty and sheepish in her makeup and bone-white garments. “I’m bored,” he whined, crowding over her, boozy mouth in Jane’s ear, Jane trying to transmit a mortified apology to her friend with one look as Elise squeezed her hand in silent understanding.

In the car driving home, flipping radio stations, ignoring the road, running over the speed limit, the car drifting back and forth across lane lines: “I’m so bored. This music is so boring.”

“Pat,” she said, as evenly and quietly as possible. “You’re going seventy in a forty-five-mile zone.”

Pat whacked on the brakes, squealing, Jane lurching forward before the strap of her seat belt locked. He puttered along at thirty for a bit. “You know,” he said, “it’s just as dangerous to drive under the speed limit as to drive over it.”

Even, quiet. “I didn’t ask you to drive under the speed limit.”

“So if John Law pulls me over I’m going to have to explain to him that you made me drive slow.”

“Pat, enough,” Jane said. “Just drive the speed limit.”

“But driving the speed limit is so boring.”

Arriving home, he bolted out of the car, slipped through the door to the mudroom, and locked it behind him before Jane could reach the steps. She hadn’t brought keys because she wasn’t driving, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she had—he would have blocked the door with a chair or with his body.

When he unlocked the door an hour later, he asked her, “Isn’t it boring out here in the garage? You must be so bored.”

She kept her head low as she edged past him through the door, her arm brushing his, a sickening closeness. She didn’t even hate him; she hated herself for wanting him to allow her back inside his house, for moving carefully but quickly in case he changed his mind, for granting him the privilege of ending her punishment. She didn’t know what else she could have done but come inside, and she hated herself for that, too. Pat was her whole life, and he could do with her life whatever he wanted.

That wedding was the last time she saw Geeta and Christy and Sonja, the last time she saw Elise. Elise called her as soon as she got home from her honeymoon in Hawaii. She called again and again. The last time, Jane listened as Elise left a message on the answering machine, then rewound the tape as soon as she clicked off, so the next message would tape over it. Elise wrote a letter—sunny, companionable, but ending on a firm plea for a response—that Jane never answered. She had nothing to offer her friend, except the raw material for a sympathy that she didn’t want.

But it wasn’t as if their friendship were over—Jane told herself this like a prayer, like somebody somewhere could hear it. Their friendship seemed dead but really it was saved, tucked away from where Pat could reach it.

 

The cell inside her mind wasn’t empty, and it wasn’t full.

Marie and her friends viewed the scars of childbearing as afflictions, indignities. But Jane liked the glossy silverfish streaks across her belly and the small pouch of flesh resting above her pubic hair. These were mementos saved from the first house her babies had lived in, testaments to forbearance. And her breasts were better since the children, actually, a solid B-cup even long after Jane had begun teaching herself again what real hunger felt like. After the last baby broke apart inside her, she felt the old emptiness, and she wanted more of it.

As long as her children were inside her, or drinking from her, and as long as she thought there were more children yet to come, the extra weight she carried was a natural resource, protective and productive. She stood in front of the full-length bedroom mirror and considered her sagging, dimpled stomach and wide round thighs with the same nodding equanimity with which one might assess a grain elevator. She was vast, renewable, in some respects automated. A windmill, the Hoover Dam. She was the Buffalo of olden days: coal and steel and good solid architecture. Hard-used, maybe used-up, but eternal.

But once the children were done, she felt entombed in greasy machinery. Buried alive in bad soil. Not Buffalo but buffaloed. She had forgotten herself, and she had forgotten God. Maybe that was why she lost the baby. The old dream that everyone has about finding an extra room in the house, but what Jane found in it were her own living children, disheveled, hollow-eyed with the hunger that should have belonged to her.

She remembered the guilty narcissism of hunger’s effects as her old self, or a version of it, began to reassert itself: the bas-relief of hip bone, rib cage, shoulder blade; the clean runner’s lines of her legs. A sandwich at lunch became a half sandwich, which became the filling of the half sandwich, which became an untouched half sandwich she would wrap and place in the fridge until such time as it was devoured indiscriminately by one of the three voracious males in her house. She began jogging the mile to Wilson Farms for milk, eggs, tea, and jogging home again with the groceries packed tight in her backpack, taking grim pleasure in the corner of the milk carton digging into the bottom of her spine. She rode her bike the three miles and back to Bells, tying her purchases to the front and back of the bike with bungee cord, a pack mule grunting up and down the shoulders of Transit and Muegel roads. A donkey for Jesus. Her head whirred to the cadence of he HAW, he HAW, he HAW, the stress landing on each pump of the pedals.

I’ve got a mule, her name is Sal

Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal

Jane did Meals on Wheels. She drove developmentally disabled adults to basketball games and pizza parties. She joined the Catholic Charities annual fund-raising drive committee.

She’s a good ol’ worker and a good ol’ pal

Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal

She attended an evening meeting of the Respect Life committee, in a kindergarten classroom in the Saint Benedict’s elementary school annex. She slowed down approaching the classroom door and then kept walking, heading instead into the girls’ bathroom down the hall, where she locked herself in a stall to pat down her sweaty forehead with toilet paper. She reemerged, approached the classroom again, and again hustled past the door, crossing her arms in front of her and stopping to stare with furious concentration at the kindergartners’ artwork lining the walls: family trees cut crookedly out of construction paper and decorated with Magic Marker and pipe cleaners.

“Jane Thirjong?” she heard behind her. She turned to see Mr. Glover, her ninth-grade science teacher at Bethune, always grumpy beneath his bushy white mustache and size-too-big orlon sweaters.

“Oh, hi, Mr. Glover,” she said. “It’s Jane Brennan now. So nice to see you again.”

“It’s nice to see you, too,” Mr. Glover said as they shook hands. “Would you like to join us? We’re just getting started.” He seemed kindlier now than he ever had in class. Maybe he only played the part of grouchy old man when he was teaching.

She had already cast and scripted this Respect Life meeting in her head, on the drive over. The committee leader asking each member to stand and offer his or her testimony to the cause: the cousin with Down syndrome, the dream visitation from a child not born. Jane in the role of the teenage mother emeritus, chagrined by her transgressions yet wholesome in her youthful verve, her attractive and moderately prosperous young family, her devotion to children and cause. Lauren was never just blood and tissue. She was never just an option. She was there from the start. She could confess to her new friends here about the nurse. She could tell them about consenting to the thought.

I couldn’t see Lauren; I didn’t know what she looked like. It didn’t matter. To be a person of faith, after all, is to believe in things you can’t see.

But the meeting had no introductions, no leader to deliver a prologue to Jane’s speech. Summer and Charity Huebler were chirpy twin sisters, UB students. Phil and Betty Andrower were older, their children grown and out of the house; Betty volunteered in the rectory office. Mr. Glover’s absent wife was incapacitated somehow—multiple sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease. They had no children. Jane always felt herself disarmed, at a strange loss, when she met an older woman without children—anxious on the other woman’s behalf, as if she needed Jane’s assistance filling her time. Jane never would have been able to account for herself alone. The ledgers would not have balanced out.

For one hour, this week and most every week, in a circle of chair-and-desk sets sized for five- and six-year-olds, the Respect Life committee members stuffed envelopes with leaflets designed and printed in a centralized office in Washington, DC. Hale fat fair-skinned babies in grayscale or sepia tones, often sleeping, their images overlaid with calligraphic Biblical quotations.

You knit me in my mother’s womb.

You have been my guide since I was first formed.

From my mother’s womb you are my God.

Jane used her tongue, not a sponge, to lick the envelopes, and refused Mr. Glover’s offers of a can of soda or a cup of water. She wanted to taste ashes, to repent for the thing she hadn’t done.

“‘You knit me in my mother’s womb’—oh, I like that one so much,” Betty said. “To think of God busying away with knitting needles.” She frowned. “Although—I suppose—the connotations—”

“Like, kind of girly?” Summer Huebler asked.

“No—knitting needles have an—association with how—the terminations—in the old days—”

“Like a wire hanger,” Charity said darkly, and Summer crossed herself.

“It was Adam who said, ‘You knit me in my mother’s womb,’” Jane said.

“David wrote the Psalms,” Phil said, a reproach.

“He did,” Jane said, “but there’s an interpretation that he wrote them for Adam—as in, he wrote them in the voice of Adam.”

“How do you know that?” Betty asked.

Jane checked Betty’s face to make sure she wasn’t annoyed. Betty was both voluptuous and petite, her hazel eyes as big in her face as a baby’s. It was easy to picture what she looked like as a child, as a younger woman. “I know it by just—reading,” Jane said. “I read a lot. You know how it is, your kids get older and they don’t need as much of your time, and you fill it however you can . . .” She was trying for a jaunty tone, slightly joking, like one of Marie’s friends. Betty smiled. “So yeah, David wrote the Psalms in Adam’s voice, maybe,” Jane said, “which is interesting because Adam wasn’t knit in a mother’s womb. Right? Because a few lines later he says he came out of the depths of the earth.”

Phil frowned and shook his head. He was jowly but trim, holding on to his summer tan. “David wrote the Psalms,” Phil said.

“I know that,” Jane said. She sounded bratty. It was her nerves that were talking. “But how could you be made in a womb and be the first man at the same time? If there was no first woman to give birth to you?”

“Maybe it’s a play on words,” Betty said. “The depths of the earth like”—she introduced a hammy tremolo—“the nether-regions.”

Summer and Charity ewwwed. “Disgusting,” Phil said.

“A baby in the womb is disgusting?” Betty asked. “Or giving birth to the baby?”

“You’re mixing things up,” Phil said. “You’re twisting things.”

Betty was enjoying this, Jane could see. Goofing on her husband by aligning playfully with the young newcomer. She could imagine the couple in their car afterward, Betty tousling Phil’s hair in a conciliatory way, Phil trying to keep up a façade of disgruntlement. Speeding back home for some vigorous late-middle-aged make-up sex.

“It’s messy, but I’m not sure I would call it disgusting,” Jane said. “After all, Mary had a baby.”

“Don’t bring the blessed Virgin Mary into this!” Phil said.

“Mary didn’t have a baby?” Jane asked.

“That’s why we venerate her,” Betty said. “Because she gave birth.”

“We venerate her because she’s the mother of God,” Phil said, “and this conversation is over.”

“You know,” Betty said in a low voice, ostensibly meant for Jane but loud enough for all to hear, “those Presbyterians couldn’t give Mary the time of day.”

“I’m no Presbyterian!” gasped Phil, spitting the word on the floor.

“I didn’t say you were, dearest,” Betty said.

“It’s true that Mary is not in the Bible much,” Jane said.

“Maybe that’s because she wasn’t always pumping herself up!” Betty exclaimed. “She was busy doing women’s work, raising the son of God!”

 

On Friday afternoons, Jane cleaned housebound seniors’ homes. The work was saintly in its lack of glory, its repetitiveness, its occasional small degradations. Most of her clients had home health aides, or a spouse or nearby relatives, but one man was alone. Mr. Dennison wore cloudy glasses and always the same stained khaki pants, and it took him long minutes to get from his sagging plaid armchair to the front door when Jane rang the bell. He silently offered an apologetic smile, a gracious nod, and then returned to his chair.

October, the sun skulking, the breeze woodsy and lowering, the day closing in. Jane was scrubbing what looked like years-old dog food that she’d found encrusting a corner of Mr. Dennison’s mudroom. A sudden stench made her eyes water. Mr. Dennison had shat himself, right there on the plaid. She guided him into the bathroom, silently undressed him, got him into the shower, turned the handle on the window over the tub, pushing it open inch by inch. Got the clothes into the trash. She would have to root around upstairs to find some clean trousers, and maybe call the Goodwill; she would have to call the Department of Sanitation about proper disposal of the chair. The list tabulated in her head, each item a stern jolt of dopamine. It was saintly to be overwhelmed by thankless, invisible work.

As Mr. Dennison painfully exited the shower, one leg and then the other doing an excruciating bend and balance to surmount the lip of the tub, Jane held out a towel to him. She saw a rusty stain in one corner, but it would do. He looked at the outstretched towel and sank to the floor, knees to his chest. Raised gray moles snaking up and around his midsection, his penis, a clean slug, perfectly horizontal on the tile. They hadn’t taken off his glasses before he got into the shower. Jane lingered uncertainly over him, then got to her knees beside him, her hand patting his sloping gray shoulder.

“It’s all right,” she said. “We’ll get through this together.”

She felt smug in her saintliness and hoped that God would see her acts themselves unobscured by her smugness. As darkness fell outside, though, she accepted that no one could see them at all. No one could hear or smell or judge. They were alone in their suburban pietà.

She raised herself on her knees and nudged him to sling both of his arms over her shoulders. With their foreheads pressed on each other’s shoulders, she helped him to his feet.

You were a baby once, she thought, breathing under his weight. This same body. It was a baby. Go all the way back. Someone held you in their arms.

 

Pat and Jane watched 20/20 on Friday nights. Jane loved Barbara Walters. She loved the fluty music of her voice. She loved her floaty scarves and floaty hair. She loved imagining how Barbara Walters smelled, like hairspray and lilacs and Chanel No. 5. She loved how, whenever Barbara Walters coaxed a penetrating admission from a celebrity she was interviewing, her eyes would narrow in loving judgment: a snapshot of the maternal state itself. She also loved Barbara Walters because her mother hated Barbara Walters. “She puts on airs” and “she sounds retarded” and “thinks she’s such hot S-H-I-T”—these were the things she would say. Jane’s mother mocked Barbara Walters’s interchange of rs and ws in a manner that even PJ and Sean would find crude. Jane suspected that her mother performed her disgust with Barbara Walters’s comportment and voice to displace her actual frustration, which was that she perceived she wasn’t allowed to say what she really wanted to say about Barbara Walters, which was that she was an ugly Jew. Jane was always happy if her mother called the house in the evening and she could say, “We’re not up to much, just watching Barbara Walters.”

Jane hadn’t eaten before or after working at Mr. Dennison’s house, and she hadn’t eaten any of the spaghetti and meatballs she prepared that night for her family. A few bites of the leafy green salad was all. She folded herself into the sofa in front of the television in the living room. Tired and hungry, she stared at the 20/20 logo on the screen. Her peripheral vision darkened, her depth perception shot.

If her mother had called the house, right then, Jane would have told her that she saw Barbara Walters in a vision, just as Saint Bernadette saw an angel in the grotto—a holograph of the Immaculate Conception. Her mother would have heard the conviction in her voice, even as she would deny everything that Jane told her.

In the vision, there were children. Undulating mountains of them, wave upon unceasing wave of them, rocking, rocking. They were naked, their skin scabrous, their dark hair shaved close. Crooked mouths, eyes too far apart, limbs akimbo. Rocking, rocking. They had been abandoned, walled off, warehoused in cages or cribs. They were in a place that never could have existed, and they were here in their living room, one floor below where Jane’s children slept at night.

One of them, five of them, would have brought tears, but there were too many to cry for. The vision could only accommodate one child. Jane had to find the one child. Barbara Walters would help find her.

Her. It was a girl. Jane knew it was a girl. She was in the cacophony somewhere. She could be seen. Jane knew it. She would glow with her own light.

Jane felt it, that nauseating little earthquake of dread and ecstasy. In the year that followed, it was as if the ghost of the idea of that girl had been inside her all along. So many times in sleep Jane turned to see the girl’s face, but she would always elude her.

Not for the first time, at home sitting next to her husband, Jane felt the boundaries between herself and the world dissolving. She could flow into the images on the television screen. Barbara Walters, backlit by heavenly transmissions, with her childlike consonants and celestial cloud of hair, could take her by the hand and lead her toward the girl. Jane’s mother was right, if only about one thing—Barbara Walters wasn’t like them, she was from another place, she was beautiful in a way that Jane’s mother didn’t have the eyes to see, she did have a different first language that neither Jane nor her mother knew, and so Barbara Walters could interpret for Jane here. She could send the message, make the connection. She would gaze upon Jane in loving judgment, hoping and doubting she would come through. Jane had to prove it to her. Something opened up in Jane, just then, and it would never close.

“Did you see that one girl?” Jane asked Pat, turning toward him.

“There were hundreds of them, Jane,” Pat said. He was gray and shaken.

“No—you would know the one I mean,” she said. “She turned around in the crib and put up her hands. She had a—like, a light around her.” Jane paused. “Maybe it was just how the shadows—the camerawork—I don’t know what it was. Did you see?”

“I didn’t,” Pat said. He was looking at her closely, his face open and serious. “You saw something?”

When he was sweet, he was so sweet.

“Not something—someone,” Jane said. “I know her. I know I know her.”

 

Sunday morning. A near-sleepless weekend. Not since Sean was a baby had she slept so poorly. She sat stuffing envelopes in a Saint Benedict’s classroom with the Respect Life committee. The group was discussing their local leg of the upcoming National Life Chain.

“We can cover more ground if we stand one hundred feet apart,” Betty was saying, “but that’s not a chain. It’s more like a freckling.”

“What do we have against the more graphic signs?” Phil asked. “They grab the attention. If you just keep seeing abortion kills children over and over, you zone out. But a—and I’m sorry to say it, but—a dead baby—”

“Don’t, Phil!” Betty groaned beside him.

“Well, that’s what we are talking about,” Phil said. “Why can’t we see what we are talking about?”

“The repetition of a simple, irrefutable message leaves a lasting impression,” Mr. Glover said. “Drive the point home over and over, like a great advertising campaign. A more confrontational approach, the graphic imagery—it’s more likely to short-circuit an emotional response.”

“But don’t we want to confront people with the truth?” Phil asked. “Like what Operation Rescue does at clinics.”

“Oh-R gets you to think about Oh-R, and a bloody poster gets you to think about a bloody poster,” Mr. Glover said. He gestured to a teetering stack of signs propped up under the blackboard. “But these big block letters, spelling out the facts in black and white? There’s nothing to think about there but the truth.”

“Did anyone see 20/20 on Friday night?” Jane asked. Shaking heads, murmured Nos.

“Well, I mention it because it was confrontational—like how you said, Mr. Glover. Richard.” She swallowed, still clumsy about using his first name. “It was Barbara Walters.” Saying her name soothed her, like her prayers used to do. “Barbara Walters, and it was about children in Romania. Abortion and contraception are against the law in Romania. And the people are very poor. They don’t want the children, or they can’t take care of them, and the children are put in orphanages run by the state.”

“Good for them,” Phil said. “Whatever happened to orphanages, anyway?”

“Like Boys Town,” Betty said. “That movie? With Spencer Tracy?”

“Well, these orphanages are horrendous,” Jane said. “The children live like caged animals. Worse than animals. It’s unimaginable. You see it, but you can’t believe it.”

We believe in what we can’t see, Jane thought in the silence that followed. “It had an effect on me, although it was hard to watch,” she said. “Hard to believe.”

“Are you okay, Jane?” Summer and Charity asked almost in unison.

“But I thought—oh, yes, I’m fine, thank you for asking—I thought of this group,” Jane said. She kept having to swallow. “I thought of us while I was watching it. Us in the church, and the idea of respecting life, I—I thought there might be something we could do for the children. A fund-raiser, or—I don’t know.”

“We need to get going, friends,” Mr. Glover said. On Sunday mornings, the Respect Life committee attended mass at Saint Benedict’s, then walked in a single file, heads bowed, the half mile to the WellWomen clinic to pray the rosary in the parking lot, then another three blocks to Dr. Ben Rosen’s private gynecology practice, which he ran out of the first floor of a residential house.

“Or maybe—this is maybe crazy—we could bring some of the children here,” Jane said. “Here to live. To Buffalo. Give them a better life here.”

Her voice was alone amid the susurrating of papers folded and shuffled, chairs scraping the floor as people got up.

“There could be families who’d be interested in adopting the children,” she said.

And then: “I’m interested in adopting the children. Or one of the children.” Interested. That didn’t commit her to anything. She was interested in lots of things.

Betty was still seated and listening. “But, Jane,” she said in a confidential tone, “don’t you think God has already given you children to look after?”

And Jane smiled, because she knew the answer.