1.

When Rosaline Jones’s husband came to her all those months ago and informed her he was in love with a brilliant and passionate younger woman, she’d felt as if her insides were bleeding, but she wasn’t surprised, not really. For twenty years, she’d lived with the knowledge that she wasn’t enough for this man, this lusty, lionhearted man who could make miracles with his hands. For twenty years, she’d lived with the knowledge that this man would cause her pain.

The young woman comes to the parsonage in a white minidress, dark hair piled up on her head. Like a beautiful white cat slinking up the porch, making everything her own. Eve.

Rosaline winces away from the window’s floating lace. It was wrong of her to shift her head from the stricture of the orthopedic pillow, wrong to look anywhere but the ceiling, those dancing frills of light. From outside, she can hear the slap of a basketball against the driveway’s concrete, the shouts of her boys, their blood-sports she will never comprehend.

Because even if she had the strength to lift herself out of bed, to throw off her back brace like one of Jim’s miracles, Rosaline has no desire to compete with this other woman.

She comes to the parsonage in that white minidress, doesn’t knock to be let in. She is all hunger and pristine purpose. As if wanting him were a virtue, being wanted by him.

‘Ev-e-lyn.’

Jim’s voice in the hall, his happy crowing voice: it hurts even more than that lace-edged glimpse of her. Eve says something in reply, and her crisp voice is just another thing Rosaline can’t compete with. The voice of a woman taught to raise her hand in class, to value her own opinions, to believe she might change the world. Jim laughs and Rosaline feels a flush of irrelevance.

Wondering: what could this young woman possibly have said to amuse him?

Then their footsteps on the stairs, and for a brief time it seems like a reprieve. But before long the ceiling is squeaking, groaning, and when Rosaline shuts her eyes in protest, the lush red behind her lids only makes it more intimate. As if they’re in the room with her, bucking up against the furniture, fierce and arrogant as fallen angels.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. But, no: she knows Jim. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

And she knows about Eve, things no wife should have to know. That she plays him records by creaky-voiced folk singers, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen; that she recites French poetry, the Song of Solomon. That she believes in past lives; claims to have been his mistress in a former life, when they were revolutionaries in Russia. That she’d rather kill herself than live without him. All these things, Jim has felt the need to tell Rosaline, as if to shock her into silence.

Also, in ecstasy, Eve cries out for God and Jim.

‘Oh — God! Oh — Jim — God!’

Rosaline doesn’t want to think badly of this other woman, doesn’t want to think of her at all. Still less does she want to think badly of the father of her children. Yet she has to wonder at their ruthlessness; in her own home, her children’s home, right above her head.

She has to wonder: do they want her gone, or merely to keep her in her place?

The pain of easing her neck from the orthopedic pillow makes Rosaline whimper, yet her whimper is only a ghost of Eve’s cries. Her pain is only a ghost of their pleasure, inching to unstrap the brace from her back, the traction weights from her ankles. Her feet thud against the floorboards, like proverbial trees falling alone in the woods. Her spine sears and then numbs as the adrenaline overtakes her, and it’s not hard to imagine how it is for all those sisters on Sundays, cheating age and illness to the cheers of the congregation.

‘Jim — Oh God — Jim —’

Rosaline hobbles into the hall, past the framed cherubim of her children’s faces. Outdoors. The harsh midmorning sun blinds her, afterimages exploding like gunshots. She closes her eyes and imagines her insides in those same vivid red tones, vertebra grinding vertebra. A dragonfly flits past and she opens to the clear blue, the evergreen hills.

A beautiful morning, despite everything.

In the early days, when she was just a trainee nurse and Jim a dirt-poor schoolkid working nights as an orderly, Rosaline believed he’d heal people someday. Not a faith healer, but a man of medicine, with whom she’d travel to poor brown-skinned nations. It was the way he saw the preciousness of imperfect bodies: bodies that stank, coughed, gurgled, only a weak pulse away from being corpses. It was the way he was unashamed to shed tears over an unwed mother’s stillborn baby. Maybe, looking at his gold-hued hands, she’d even allowed herself to imagine his touch curing her of all her ills: her freckled face, her rabbit teeth, her wallflower personality, the rheumatism that made her old at nineteen.

I can’t help you, Ro’, if you don’t wanna be helped. Fool my ass, married to a martyr when I could have anyone.

The sweet smell of roses wafts from below as Rosaline climbs down the same way Eve had come up, every step a reminder that she shouldn’t be walking. It hadn’t been this bad last summer, had it? Fine summer days, lying in the shade, slathered in sunscreen, as Jim and the boys romped in the lake. Eve no more than a speck on the opposite shore.

The boys are still at war, their scuffs and shouts echoing from around the corner. ‘You fucker!’ yells one of them — Martin Luther, she’s sure, at Jimmy Jr., she’s sure of that, too. As the sun hits her back, bones, marrow, Rosaline is glad of their rough noise, their boyish obliviousness to all rivalries but their own.

Eve comes out of the parsonage in that white minidress, smoothing the fabric over her slim belly. A snail-like sheen to her thigh. A look on her face that’s almost queasy, like a drunken partygoer about to throw up in the bushes. She closes the door and starts toward the stairs, a mermaid on dry land. She spies Rosaline.

Her face changes.

An ugly look. Ugly in a naked way, which makes Rosaline feel just as ugly. A dozen platitudes dry up in Rosaline’s mouth: oh hi there, good morning, whatlovelyweathermyLord. She averts her eyes before Eve can.

‘Excuse me,’ Eve murmurs coolly as she descends.

Then she slips past Rosaline, the feline tang of her mingling with the roses, that dark knot of hair blazing so bright, it’s painful to see.