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The lactation specialist who came into Joan’s room with pamphlets said it had been a long time since she had seen an infant latch on so easily, as Joan’s did with her, that really, for now, there was no instruction she needed to give. And Joan felt a sense of pride, that at the start, she managed to do something right. She had not cursed it while it was baking inside of her, and he had emerged unscathed, with all his fingers and toes, with lungs that rose and fell, with a rosy mouth, with perfect lashes and brows, and the tiniest little bud between his legs that made both she and Martin laugh.
Martin cradled the baby against his chest and said, “We really should figure out what we’re going to call him.” On the table next to her hospital bed was the baby name book Martin had packed into her bag at the last minute, after she left a puddle in the kitchen, before he helped her out the back door, into the Toyota, racing out of Peachtree, down, through, and out of Rhome proper, to the campus where Martin spent most of his hours, Rhome General ablaze at four in the morning.
Joan picked up the book and let the pages fly. Then she closed her eyes, opened randomly, put her finger on the print, and looked down.
“Daniel,” she said. “A Hebrew name. The biblical prophet and writer of the Book of Daniel was a teenager when taken to Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem in 607 BC.”
“We’re not Jewish,” Martin said.
“We’re not anything, so does it really matter? What do you think of the name?”
“Daniel Manning,” Martin said. “I like it, it’s strong, the two names work well together.”
They looked at each other and Martin said, “So is that this little guy’s name? Daniel?”
“Yes,” Joan said. “I think it is.”
If Martin wanted to look up the name’s other meaning, the book was right there beside her. She did not know why, not exactly, not in thoughts she could have articulated, but it seemed right to her that Daniel meant “God is my judge.”
Joan saw their reflections in the glass doors, mother in the hospital-required wheelchair, blanket-wrapped baby in her arms, father standing behind, the bizarre manifestation of an instantaneous miracle, all at once a family. Then they were through the doors, and the baby was in the infant seat hooked into the back of Martin’s Toyota, and Joan felt the frigid clouds on her skin, and they were on their way home.
Within hours, the snow began falling. They moved Daniel’s crib into their room, and during the nights, while Martin slept, Joan lifted the baby out and breast-fed him, marveling at his perfect weight in her arms, his sated burps smelling richly of her own milk. In the mornings, at the living-room windows, she gazed out at the frozen range of white with peaks, summits, and ridges, and each time Joan bent down to kiss Daniel’s soft forehead, he was already looking up at her, his eyes studying her face, never once looking away.
It took no time for her to fall deeply in love with her unexpected child, with the rigors and rituals of unwanted motherhood, with having Martin home, so naturally fathering, doing all that he could, cleaning the kitchen, changing the diapers, singing to their infant son in his crib. They were dreamily nesting, just like the no-longer Pregnant Six had engaged in, and Joan found it utterly satisfying, thought then she might be capable of having more than one dream, might possibly thrive in the pursuit of both.
She was not writing at all, did not expect to sit at her desk in these early days, but happiness, pleasure, elation, sweetness, treat, treasure, and gratefulness were added to her list of favorite words. Daniel was so good, easy to satisfy, to fill up, to put to sleep, and she knew it was only luck that had created this angelic child.
And then Martin returned to the hospital and the lab, a husband around only at dawn and at night when the stars were their brightest, and caring for a baby with only two hands, no matter his goodness, was like boxing up the Sahara with a spoon. Showers, if at all, happened in the late afternoon; she subsisted on crackers and cheese, relied on Martin to market, the hamburger meat, the steaks, the fish he bought sliding into the freezer and never considered again. She kept up with the laundry, but otherwise the house was a mess, and still she resisted Martin’s suggestion of a nanny to help out.
“I’m wary of having another body around the house all day long,” she said. Martin insisted, striking where she was weakest. “A nanny could let you get back to work.”
Eight weeks in, Joan stepped into her study for the first time since giving birth. Illuminated by the cold winter light, the room was a frozen preserve. The typewriter on her desk, lifeless and cold, the dictionaries she hadn’t reshelved still sat there, hulking books she barely remembered paging through with delight, finding words she once lovingly, ecstatically, used in her writing. When Martin returned home that night, she agreed.
A week later, Joan opened the front door to a tall young woman wearing a high-collared, long-sleeved dress in bright tropical colors, magenta and teal and cobalt blue and orange. Flower earrings budded from her earlobes, and her hair, the color of wet sand, was pulled back tight in a ponytail. It was barely thirty degrees outside, high drifts of snow in front of all the houses, small paths from front doors to road, but the young woman wore no coat, no hat, no gloves, and did not seem at all cold.
“I’m Fancy,” and she shook Joan’s hand with a hidden might. “Sorry,” she said when she saw Joan’s face. “I think I’ve gotten rather too vigorous. I joined the gym at the community center, been working out with weights every day since landing here in Rhome.”
At the kitchen table, she tightened her tight ponytail, and said, “So I’m Canadian, grew up on Lake Ontario, the eldest of seven brothers and sisters. There comes a time when all chicks must leave the nest, and when my time came, I grabbed my best girlfriend, Trudy, her family lives down the block from mine back home, and we jumped on a bus and kept traveling until we stopped in Rhome. Strada di Felicità is just so pretty, and it seemed to me like this would be an interesting place to live, the way the town is a bunch of circles, getting larger and larger and larger, all the lovely stores, the lovely houses, so I turned to Trudy and said, ‘This is the place, you game?’ and she said she was, so we got off the bus and got down to business. We’ve got an apartment over Rudolph’s Delicatessen on Tennessee Place. Such good food there, I must say. And I loved learning that the Italian man who founded Rhome thought every town should have a Street of Happiness running through it. I figured I could be happy in a place with a Strada di Felicità. And it’s true, we are, the two of us, and we just love the busyness of the town, how there’s always people out and about.”
Joan thought Fancy’s Canadian hometown must be minute indeed, because Rhome was charming, but sleepy, even with the hopefully named street.
“When I saw your advertisement for a nanny at the community center, I thought, ‘Fancy, that’s the job for you.’ And now looking at you, such a pretty mother, I know I made the right decision to call. I’m nearly twenty, the oldest in my family by five years, so I’ve got tons of experience taking care of little ones. I practically raised my siblings myself. And this might be important to you, to gauge my seriousness, so I’ll tell you now that I have no interest myself in men or romance. I leave all that to Trudy. Do you mind if I make us some tea? That’s a nice kettle you’ve got on the stove. Just point me to the cabinet with the cups.”
Joan did not laugh although she wanted to, listening to this Fancy, this odd young woman with her whirlwind of words, and instead said, “The cups are in that cabinet,” pointing to the cabinet next to the sink, “and there are all kinds of teas in the drawer next to the fridge. Choose whatever you’d like.”
Fancy was up and out of the kitchen chair, smoothing down her tropical dress, opening the cabinet, taking down two cups and saucers. “Nice, bone china,”