“It doesn’t scratch off!” she cries.
The man snarls. “But of course it does,” he says, and his sneering reinvigorates her—she kicks him away and rises to her knees. He will give up, she thinks. I am terrifying and repulsive. But as she pushes herself up to stand, she sees that her hands are getting smaller. This is what he meant. “It’s working,” he says to the king, and before she can breathe again he’s pushed her back onto the floor. Esther tries to fend him off with her elbows but she is distracted by what’s happening in her body—it’s not the scratching causing it, she knows, but her fear. But this thought delivers more fear, and now she can feel the reversal happening, she feels herself sinking again into the vortex but there is no violence now, only a peaceful cycling, neither hot nor cold, a terrain so familiar she starts to weep, for she is turning into a girl as they watch. The king looks as shocked as he did when she became the beast. But the man—he is the king’s highest minister, Esther will soon learn—lowers himself to straddle her and clamps her head between his forearms. “You will not mock the king,” he says, raining spittle across her face. Esther closes her eyes and he uses his thumbs to pry them open. “Do you understand?”
She can’t nod. He grips her head too tightly.
“His entire court was present on that stage. It was you they saw him choose, and it will be you who is his queen.”
He releases her for an instant then grabs her again by her hair and with his free hand shows her a knife, which she feels a second later at her throat.
“What we do,” he says, speaking softly now, enunciating with exaggerated care, “we do for the people.”
The blade presses. Esther works not to swallow.
“If we falter, who can they trust? If we fail to rule, how will they live? Queen Vashti disobeyed. If she wasn’t punished, think what would happen. Imagine, across Persia: In the houses. In the beds …” The minister’s eyes close. His face twists. At first Esther thinks he is merely demonstrating his instructions, but as the moment stretches, she sees that he is fulfilling them, and imagining, and that his fury is genuine. A string of saliva hangs from his lips. A scream forms in her gut. Then the minister sucks back his spit, opens his eyes, and says, without a hint of emotion: “The queen is dead. You are queen now. Do you understand?”
His face begins to melt. In the night station one morning, Esther heard a girl from somewhere else talking about how in death, in order to give birth to yourself again, for the next life, you become a man for a short while, until you’re through to the other side. This is nothing Esther is meant to believe. It’s nothing she has wished for. But as she passes out, the new queen, her exile complete, it’s what enters her vision. The chest that could have been hers, the jaw, the hands that might have killed. Better than becoming a beast would have been to become a man.
Part Two
Wandering
MANHATTAN
LILY
A Clean, Blank Room
“Go home.”
“I want to stay.”
“Sweetheart. I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“Tonight I am.”
“I want to stay.”
A machine by her mother’s bed issues forth a string of beeps. The machine has been beeping all day without apparent pattern or consequence, but still Lily jumps each time she hears it, shooting forward in her chair. Earlier she asked a nurse, What does the machine mean? only to be given an answer at once so basic yet unintelligible she became worried that the nurse didn’t understand either. Since then—many ages seem to have passed since this morning, when Ruth was admitted to what is unhelpfully called “the step-down unit”—nothing any nurse or doctor has done or said has reassured her. She knows this is “the best cancer place” in the city, and that their survival rate for stage IV non–small cell lung cancer—Ruth’s kind—is better than anyone else’s. But it’s still devastatingly low. And somehow the staff’s certainty, the speed with which they’ve decided what must be done with her mother and the efficacy with which they carry it out, upsets her even more. Can there be nothing mysterious or new or unique about Ruth’s cancer, nothing in her character—her sharp, dry, critical, forceful, optimistic, loving self—that prophesies a different ending?
“Relax, Lil,” says Ruth. “It’s like a fart. The machine just farts now and then.”
“At some point it has to mean something.”
“Lovie. You’re so tired.”
“I’m not.”
Ruth sighs and closes her eyes. Lily’s brothers have gone home, Ian back to California, Lionel to Connecticut. The diagnosis was four days ago; the initial shock has passed. Lily’s hurt at the fact that Ruth called Lionel first has been buried. Ruth will stay in the hospital for a couple more days, then, it’s likely, go home. She’s in good hands, Lionel keeps telling Lily. Don’t burn out too quickly, Adam says. She has extended June to full days Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, all the school had space for, and employed one of their occasional sitters to cover for pickup, etc., when needed. Adam supports all this—emotionally, financially, though the latter will be a stretch—but reminds her: The woman drives you crazy. Lily would tell herself the same thing, if she were the old Lily, of four days ago. But this Lily can barely take her eyes off Ruth for long enough to go find a sandwich. Something has cracked in her, a pocket of fear she didn’t know existed has burst its seams and it turns out to be infinite, an infinitely renewable resource that rages through her like fire; if in one moment it calms to coal, the next a wind comes through, reigniting the flames. She has not taken a true breath in days. What is she scared of? Adam wants to know. Other than death, of course. Her mother has had a long life. There is that. He is trying to pull her out just enough so she can see: the whole world isn’t burning. He has rubbed her shoulders and brought her tea and taken her on a long walk in Prospect Park and shown her a map in the latest National Geographic depicting the earth in 250 million years, the continents merged into one mass. He reminds her that he and the girls love her, they are here for her, they will be here for her. Gratitude cools her, then slides away, feeble compared to her fear. She is interested only in her mother’s aliveness; she wants only confirmation of it, again and again and again. She watches Ruth now, surprised once again at how undiminished she appears, despite the tube under her nose, the saline needle in her arm. Her mother’s ferning eyebrows are still dark, a hint of glamour marking an otherwise earthy face. Her gray hair is not thin; she went to Lily’s stylist recently and had it cut short. Her ears look almost elfin with the oxygen tube curled around them, her hands atop the blanket well veined and capable. She wears her own robe, of navy silk, brought by Lionel, who thinks of such things. Normally, Ruth wears some combination of jeans and a plain top, a turtleneck or pocket tee or crew-neck sweater, paired with hiking-style shoes or boots, all of it well fitting, even youthful, but still stolid, restrained. Stripped down like this, Lily thinks, to nothing but her robe and her beautiful eyebrows, she looks like a Ruth Lily has not really known. The navy sets off her tawny skin. Lily has always envied her mother’s skin color—her own she finds pasty, a mix of pallor and freckles inherited from her father—and now she finds herself willing its loveliness to be their salvation, to somehow overrule the invisible but apparently inarguable facts: that inside her mother a lung has collapsed; that cancer cells are spreading, and not slowly.