LITMIR.BIZ

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her miraculous son, a writer just like she was. She nearly said something, until she thought back to the Joan in the story she was actually living, and knew that Joan would not interfere prematurely in the creative life of her firstborn.

      “Daniel wrote a story,” Joan told Martin in bed that night. She felt the mattress depressing as his long body rolled over, felt his breath on her cheek. She stared up at the white ceiling. Why hadn’t they painted their bedroom a color specially chosen to increase or decrease the particular characteristics of its inhabitants, as they had done with the rooms their children lived in? Fancy had never presumed to suggest they paint their room, but what did she make of their white box? What did white signify, aside from purity, cleanliness, simplicity? Hostility, Joan thought, considering the pages of those notebooks stashed and unmarked. But why not white, and why bother now, when no paint color in their bedroom could alter their own long-formed personalities.

      “I know,” Martin said. “He’s been showing them to me.”

      “Them?” Joan said, and sat up. “He’s written more than the one Fancy and I overheard today?”

      “Maybe three or four,” Martin said. “He finds me and hands me a story and waits until I read it, then wants to talk about it with me, asks me what I think. I’ve told him he’s inherited your talent.”

      Joan twisted her hair up in a bun, found a pin on the nightstand, and stabbed it in. “Why wouldn’t he bring me his stories instead of you?”

      Martin pulled Joan back down. “Maybe it’s a father-son thing, who knows.” She let him stroke her face, her neck, but when he reached to kiss her, she said, “I’m wiped. I’ve got to sleep.”

      But he was asleep before her, and in the dark, the moon through the open drapes highlighted the whiteness of their room. Joan thought of Daniel writing away and debated how long the duration could be, without writing, before a writer was no longer considered a writer.

      It took Daniel several months before he told Joan he was writing stories. She didn’t ask why he had chosen his father first, kept all that to herself, just said, “I think that’s absolutely wonderful, I can’t wait to read them,” and Daniel dashed away into his room and came back with three one-pagers. Then the stories grew longer, to two pages, then three, then more, and Daniel brought Joan every new one first, and every single one featured Henry the Squirrel.

      She marveled how Daniel made him a Cub Scout, an animal tracker, a hiker, a surfer, a sailor, a long-distance swimmer making his way from Miami to Cuba, finding the particulars of the ocean’s currents from the set of encyclopedias kept on the bottom shelf of the living-room bookcase. Daniel put Henry into risky situations, ascribed to him a catalogue of fears, and then forced the squirrel to use his wily imagination to overcome the challenges he faced. What would Henry do now that he was stranded at the Everest base camp; how might he tame the shark following him in the ocean; how could he pull a teenager drowning in a pool to safety?

      In the stories Joan wrote when she was Daniel’s age, she had murdered her characters, while Daniel had his one character facing down dangers and searching for answers. The genesis of the stories was clear to her: because Daniel felt loved and safe within his family, he could imagine himself taking risks, venturing out onto figurative limbs. He was lucky, Joan thought. She had only felt loved and safe within the worlds she created.

      Joan encouraged his writing, praised him honestly, offered him help when he said a passage wasn’t coming out right. He would return to her again, saying, “I think I got it now,” and Joan would find he had not changed a word, or he had changed words, but not as she suggested. At first she was taken aback, reacting, she realized, as a writer, as her own editor, as the editor she had been for other novelists at Gravida, and not as a mother of a little boy finding his own storytelling path. The way Daniel threw away her suggestions—her editorial advice actually—stung, but she had done the same thing with her own editors. When Malcolm West was assigned to Other Small Spaces, he was just a few years older than Joan, his youth and inexperience turning him dictatorial, forcing her to attend their meetings with a false piety, calling him a few days later to report that her attempts to execute his suggestions had all failed. My fault, not yours, she always said, and her first collection was published as she wanted, unspoiled by a heavy hand. With Fictional Family Life, a senior editor named Philip Krauss took Joan under his wing, her accolades making her worthy of his attention, but even against him Joan had won every battle.

      When she stopped feeling hurt, she applauded Daniel for his resolve, his firmness, his inability to be swayed by the suggestions of another. To keep him excited about what he was doing, she bound every one of his stories, even those that were a single paragraph, between cardboard covers that she ornately decorated and titled, with By Daniel Manning in huge letters on the front cover.

      Still, it was disquieting, disconcerting, to be reading her child’s stories about achievement, when she was not writing a thing, other than lists of errands, of things either she or Fancy should buy at the market, of calls she was to make to set up playdates with the mothers of the boys in Daniel’s first-grade class, with the daughters belonging to Augusta, Carla, Dawn, Emily, Meg, and Teresa, the former Pregnant Six, who each now had birthed three to Joan’s two, dental appointments for her and Martin, pediatrician appointments for the boys, the phone company when the telephone line fizzed and died.

      When she buried The Sympathetic Executioners, she did not blame Daniel, then kicking around inside of her. She had been right—it wasn’t Daniel who had thinned her out, any fetus would have caused the same harm. She knew now how children were—how Daniel was—their smiles, their kisses, their tears, all the precocious methods they employed to ensure their futures mattered, came first. Would she be writing now if Daniel weren’t beautiful, loving, inquisitive, creative, good at tangling his arms around her neck, whispering, “I love you, Mommy”? At this age, as unconditional as a cat or a dog.

      Glimpsing her typewriter on the shelf in Eric’s nursery, it seemed long ago that the room was her study. Somehow Eric, who could not move around furniture, alter the position of his mobiles, change the location of the books on the shelves, had made it his own. Would she end up writing about Eric one day, about a child in his infancy who already knew his own future?

      No, no more rare babies.

      She would do right by her real ones, but they weren’t entitled to populate whatever she might write in the future. The millions of ideas she used to have each day had disappeared. Where had they all gone?

      On Fancy’s first day back with the Mannings after her father’s funeral in Canada, she joined Joan and Daniel in the kitchen for breakfast and said, “He was such a good man. He couldn’t do everything he wanted for us, but his heart was in the right place. It was a lovely ceremony. There’s nothing like the sound of dirt hitting the top of a coffin. Makes me ache, but it’s the ring of time, calling a tired soul back to the earth. The cemetery was so pretty, bushes and flowers everywhere, and I spent an hour walking around, reading what people had etched onto gravestones, so much love for those buried in the ground.”

      Martin was home early, not at the hospital late, not in some distant country, and when he walked in the door, Fancy said, “We’re having steaks and baked potatoes.”

      An hour later, Eric was in his high chair, already fed, with a plastic bowl of cereal to play with, and everyone took their seats as Martin came in bearing a bottle of red wine. “Fancy, let’s toast your father,” he said, and Fancy brushed a tear from her eye.

      The bottle was opened, wineglasses filled, and Martin lifted his glass. “I never met your father, but you’re a treasure, and he must have been one too.” Fancy said, “He was. Thank you. This means so much to me.”

      “Fancy,” Daniel said then, “what happened after they buried your father in the ground? After the dirt hit the coffin? Did flowers grow fast?”

      Fancy ruffled his hair and said, “So here’s what happened. Down in the ground my father went, the coffin this big old pine thing, huge because my dad was seven feet tall, where I get my own height from. There were prayers and poems and people sniffled

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