Normal Women E-Book

Ainslie Hogarth

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 418

Beschreibung

New mother Dani has a lot going on. She's just moved back to her hometown, where her father was once known as the Garbage King; she's fed up of not being a manicure-sporting, perfectly coiffed Normal Woman; and most of all, she's worried that her seemingly healthy husband, Clark, will drop dead, leaving her and her new baby Lotte destitute. And then Dani discovers The Temple. Ostensibly a yoga center, The Temple and its guardian, Renata, are committed to helping people reach their full potential. And if that sometimes requires sex work, so be it. Finally, Dani has found something she could be good at, even great at - meaningful work that will protect her and Lotte from poverty, and provide true economic independence from Clark. But just as she's preparing to embrace this opportunity, Renata disappears, leaving Dani to step into another role entirely - detective. Darkly comic, sharply witty and fiercely smart, Normal Women asks how our societies truly value female labour - and what independence really means.

Leseprobe

Also by Ainslie Hogarth

Motherthing

First published in the United States of America in 2023 by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Ainslie Hogarth, 2023

The moral right of Ainslie Hogarth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 80546 003 9

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 80546 004 6

EBook ISBN: 978 1 80546 005 3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For J and W

1

THEY’D ENDED UP slicing her open, which was great. She was sort of hoping for a C-section. The stories Anya’s friends had shared about their incontinence, their prolapses—one of the women, Ellen, describing the way a hunk of her bladder or vaginal wall (who knows!) would slip down throughout the course of the day. Bulge. She’d framed it as a minor irritation, easy enough to poke back in, no different from enduring the day with a sock that keeps slipping beneath your heel. Except it was every day. And it was body parts. Very inside ones. Creeping out like some activated fungus. Which was why pretty soon, Ellen explained, casually, hooking an invisible hair from her mouth and tucking it behind her ear, she’d be looking into some sort of scaffolding. A mesh—interlocking her fingers, miming weight—that would hold it up for her. Like basketballs, piped in Dawn, another one of Anya’s friends who Dani had recently met, in a high school gym equipment room, remember?? Laughing, nodding. Though Ellen, Dawn, and Anya had all gone to different high schools, the equipment rooms, with their suspended basketballs and oily, low-frequency stench, were very much the same.

And Ellen, Dawn, and Anya had all heard of the mesh too. Because they all knew someone, a woman, secretly held together by it. Dani wrapped her mouth gracelessly around a blast of corn chips and wondered why the fuck no one had told her about the mesh before she got pregnant.

“Well, Elaine had a fourth-degree tear,” Anya revealed, thumbing a wayward gob of guacamole back onto her chip. Anya, in many ways the worst of them, Dani’s oldest friend, who she loved like a sister but also found unkind, judgmental, manipulative, competitive, and actually a bit racist in ways she seemed to perceive as simply good sense: “Immigrants are driving up the cost of living in the top cities, I’m sorry, but it’s true. If you come here from somewhere else you should have to start in, I don’t know, some middle-of-nowhere town that needs the economic push, you know? It’s only fair. And it’s good for everyone.”

Anya had experienced both, a C-section and a vaginal birth, and though the vaginal birth had been amazing, oh my god, it’d also left her with chronic incontinence (Do you know that I piss myself? A little bit? Every goddamn day?) as well as what the doctor referred to as sexual dysfunction, which was so severe her husband, Bill, had taken up yoga. His back, once a densely knit tapestry of chronic pain, was now limber as a river reed. We should have stopped fucking years ago, he joked, and Anya nodded readily—honestly, though, a hand on Dani’s arm, her tone edged with a conspirator’s sincerity, he’s like a different person.

By almost every metric Anya was a very Normal Woman. At the very least she engaged with the material trappings of their sex in a way that Dani had never been able to—Anya exercised regularly, or at least complained regularly about not exercising enough; she had defined triceps, lean thighs; she monitored her protein intake, and knew the difference between soluble and insoluble fiber. Anya spent time outside, her chest and shoulders tanned to a fine, freckled hide. Nails always buffed, cuticles repressed, hair a multifaceted illusion of fresh blonds. Her leggings were expensive, their crotches fortified, and she’d always, since high school, had her bikini area waxed professionally, sugared when that was the trend. Eyebrows too. Threaded now. By a woman in the mall who apparently Anya would have preferred to start her life in the prairies. Dani imagined a small farming community with perfect eyebrows, in stark contrast to the shaggy and wild wheat they sowed.

Basically, Anya was the portrait of self-care, a pursuit the mothers in the online mom forums held sacred, and another maternal obligation for all but the lucky few to fail at spectacularly.

Dani wasn’t exactly sure how she and Anya had managed to remain friends for so long other than they both liked drinking too much and had once known, intimately, the versions of one another they hated most: the raw, cruel, earnest material of their youth they’d both taken great pains to pasteurize and recast into forms more consciously selected. When Dani and Anya were alone with one another, they allowed these former selves to unfurl languorously from their facades, accessing big, true laughs and rare peace, despite having, technically, nothing in common.

“What’s a fourth-degree tear?” Dani had asked at that lunch with the mom friends, the last lunch, she didn’t realize at the time, before she would go into labor. She leaned back in her chair as though distance from the explanation might inoculate her from it. She folded both hands over her moon of living belly, protecting the little person inside too. Nine months pregnant. Almost there.

“A bad rip,” said Ellen, still chewing, clearing away nacho debris with a long pull of margarita. “Poo hole to goo hole.” She raised her eyebrows.

And maybe that’s why the C-section happened. Because Dani had just wanted it so very badly: sweating, panicked, coiled helplessly around every contraction, incapable of just letting go, of breathing, her mind’s eye yoked to Ellen’s salted lips, tight around the vowels: “poooooo hole to goooooo hole.” And the body is just such a mysterious thing, especially as it pertains to childbirth. In fact, after reading book after book about the connection between fear and pain, the orgasmic, ecstatic, rapturous birth experience, the power of visualizations—I am petals unfurling, I am huge, I am opening wide as a cave, exactly as I should, for my baby to spill without pain—one might even come to the conclusion that the body is only mysterious as it pertains to childbirth. That otherwise it’s actually pretty predictable: a system of sphincters and pipes and cables that harmonize chaos like the warming of an orchestra pit, ins and outs and organs thumping, processing fuel, petals unfurling, becoming huge, ejecting waste and sometimes life, and that was Lotte, Dani’s precious baby, who mercifully bypassed her vagina, cried only when she really meant it, and completed a truly sublime figure eight when she pressed her face into Dani’s breast to eat.

Wide awake in the hospital that first night, Dani’s facade warmed, then thinned, to accommodate her new identity, this new love. And not just for Lotte either. She loved everyone now, every human being, because they’d all been babies once. And she cried from exhaustion but also because everyone was actually so good inside.

To love something this profoundly.

It was no wonder some people were destroyed by it.

Dani spent the first two days of Lotte’s life gathering information from the nurses. What if she’s constipated? (Rub her belly, this way.) What if she stops latching? (Just keep trying, this way.) What’s the difference between spit-up and vomit? (There’s no retch to spit-up, no effort, you’ll know.) Look at her hips—are her hips too small? (I’m not sure what you mean.)

These women who answered all of Dani’s questions, who cleaned the blood that gushed from Dani’s numb nethers, who grabbed her breast and pressed it into Lotte’s face as if it were some mess the infant had left on the carpet, they somehow erased the decades of shame Dani had tattooed all over her body: flat, runny breasts and nipples too big; trunk-like thighs, coarse, forever razor-burned, even in places she never shaved! Being treated this way, like a piece of machinery designed to keep this baby alive, was the freest Dani had felt in maybe her whole life.

Clark sat in a grubby vinyl chair in the corner of the private hospital room, watching curiously as she was manhandled, ready to jump for whatever Dani or Lotte might need. Thick and dark around the eyes, maybe as exhausted as Dani but certainly less severed in half. He made a little performance of reacting to Dani’s relentless questions, hands up, head shaking, my wife, my crazy wife! But after the nurses left, he huddled up with Dani, going over the answers, greedy for more, and with new questions of his own, which, of course, Dani didn’t have the answers to, but she would soon enough, whether she found them online or through another shameless session with the next unsuspecting nurse.

They acted this way in front of people, settled into these public roles without ever really discussing it: Clark, the laid-back one, easygoing, a golden retriever of a man; Dani, the neurotic, a shih tzu or chihuahua or some other quivering abomination of nature. It was important to Clark, Dani knew, to project this particular image of masculinity: A man is calm; a man is rational. A man doesn’t fret. And Dani didn’t care if people thought she was neurotic. She was neurotic. They both were; in their truest private they were both that way, simmering with dread for the moment they had to leave the hospital room, cross the parking lot, all alone in the car with their maybe abnormally small-hipped daughter. Clark’s road rage intensified by exhaustion, by their brand-new, precious cargo. Dani hunched over the car seat, screaming at him from the backseat: Would you just fucking relax, for fuck’s sake?!

And now here they were! At home! Everyone alive and well, and Lotte about to give Dani another intoxicating shit to mark in the poop chart! Dani loved—loved—to watch Lotte take shits. The real hard work of it, when a body was this small. Tense, as though a string had been drawn tight through her face and fists and feet. Dani sat down low, legs crossed, leaned in close to Lotte, secured in her bouncer chair, offering help, rubbing Lotte’s stomach, four firm fingers clockwise along the intestine’s curve just like the nurse had shown her.

And then Lotte would embody the kinetic still of a raindrop caught in a window screen, lock in to Dani’s eyes as though she were about to upload every secret she’d borne from the womb, Dani teary-eyed—I’m listening, sweet angel, I can hear your perfect voice—and then Lotte would release a long, shockingly robust fart alongside an ooze of odorless gold. Lotte’s mouth tuning into the shape of her own tiny asshole, a cinched, roving O until it was all over. And Dani shrieked like a hysterical disciple, kissed Lotte’s feet, her hands, her head—Amazing baby! Amazing girl! You’re so strong! You’re so good!—and Lotte would accept the kisses as a dog does: intrigued, unthreatened, but not entirely sure.

This, finally, was work that Dani enjoyed. Work she was actu-ally good at. Each day brought with it some new victory: a warm, fresh roll of fat, evidence of the hard work of breastfeeding; a smile at just the right time, proof that she’d grown a good and standard baby. When Lotte transitioned out of her newborn clothes and into her 0-3-month wardrobe, Dani felt it like a promotion, beaming with pride. For a moment she understood the thrill the witch must have felt in “Hansel and Gretel” when she’d sufficiently fattened up those naughty children for roasting.

Ten pounds, then eleven. Twelve! Which seems like nothing until it’s a squirming, bouncing, fragile twelve pounds, mass that wriggles and twists and buckles at the hinges.

Dani and Lotte, they were moving on up, into the next pay grade, where the stretches of sleep were longer, the feedings less frequent, the need less intense. And the returns—smiles and giggles and chatter and sustained eye contact—rich beyond her wildest dreams. They were becoming real humans together, for Dani a return, though, in her opinion, as an improved version of her former self, and for Lotte a whole new form.

And there was nothing better than this. Not the perilous exhaustion, of course. Not the purgatorial boredom. And certainly not the intense pressure to make everything perfect for this brand-new creature you created, the world reminding you, with what felt like renewed wrath, of what a shithole it is. But rather this—this wholesome and complete sense of meaning. It was warm, thought Dani, actually warm, places she’d been cool inside now honestly and truly warm. Finally she could stop thinking about herself, about what she had or hadn’t accomplished with her life. It didn’t matter anymore if Dani was special. Because she didn’t matter anymore. Lotte had obliterated her, released her from that suffering.

And despite being more stressed than ever at work, helming the flagship project of a brand-new office in a brand-new town, late nights, sometimes weekends, emails all the time, Clark was the most incredible dad—eager to take Lotte whenever he could, endless endurance for peekaboo and patty-cake and head-to-toe raspberries. He leaped for every diaper, scarfed his dinner so he could take her off Dani’s hands. “My mind is so calm around her,” he said one night while they watched Lotte asleep in her crib, wrapped tight as a cigar in a bamboo swaddling blanket, a gift from Anya.

This wasn’t true, of course. Clark was as troubled as ever, maybe even more so. Tricked by love. Confusing it for peace. To see him fooled this way filled Dani with the urge to kiss him. So she did. In a way she never had before. Like their intimacy mattered now. And this kiss triggered a hunger within them both, more mouth, more skin, but also more love between them. Less fighting. They loved each other, didn’t they? How could they have ever fought so much before? And was it a lot? Or was it actually just the normal amount of fighting that two humans in love must do in order to not subsume one another, actively keeping parts of themselves too prickly to be absorbed.

It was healthy to fight this much, Dani decided. Despite what the moms in the mom forums said. They were all lying anyway. Women like that were incapable of acknowledging unhappiness in their marriage, for the same reason a soldier might find it difficult to acknowledge shortcomings in the country he’d killed for.

Clark and Dani were parents now. A family. Something more sacred about the way they engaged with and treated one another. Their lovemaking a solemn act that produced little angels like Lotte, who would be looking to them as models for her future relationships. From now on there would be a terrible punishment for failing to love each other properly: having to watch their most precious treasure lock herself into the same miserable patterns that they had. Neither of them could take that, they both knew. So they agreed, tenderly, without words: We’ll never be careless with each other again.

Everything was perfect. Everything seemed perfect. It should be perfect. Dani had a beautiful baby who filled her poo charts like an absolute prodigy. She had a renewed love for her husband, even enjoyed having sex with him again, despite the warning from the forum mothers, and Anya, that a husband’s touch might trigger blind rage for a while after baby. And most of all, she’d been annihilated, blissfully, finally, by true meaning in her heart.

But of course, over the long days and the longer nights, all that began to fade. Dani’s positive connection with her body severed, her perception of it drifting back to its familiar patterns of shame and disgust—Lotte was still perfect and beautiful, but sex with Clark again became the chore it’d been before they’d started trying to conceive (TTC in the mom forums). Purpose-driven sex was a real turn-on to the women in the forums, Dani included, it turned out. The trick after baby, they said, assuming you weren’t facing the additional challenge of having been fortified with mesh, was to find a new purpose. Maintaining a happy marriage. Creating a devoted husband. Could you possibly want that as much as you’d wanted a baby? asked one of the forum moms. Try it, try it, and you may. A quote, they all knew, from Green Eggs and Ham. So they commented their LOLs. Dani lolled too, but she would never have posted it.

Many nights, sitting awake in the rocking chair, enjoying the hydraulics of Lotte’s feeding, always feeding, somehow always, endlessly feeding, Dani would scroll through the mom forums, seeking advice and reassurance from women who chronically misspelled aww as awe and called each other hon, which didn’t seem right to Dani—shouldn’t it be hun? And she could never not read it as a dig, even though she knew that many of them didn’t mean it that way.

How much Vaseline are you using, hon? Sorry hon, we chose not to mutilate our son’s genitals so I’m not sure what to do about an infected circumcision.

Well hon, why did you post at all? If you have nothing to say? Mamas please be more intentional about how you post, I’m sorry, it’s just a pet peeve of mine, all this digital clutter.

There was one particular woman, a beast called MUM2GABBY, whose posts were usually all-caps gripes about other mothers. Subjects like YOUR BABY WANTS TO LOOK AT YOU NOT THE BACK OF YOUR PHONE! And then a long rant about having spotted a mother who dared to be reading on her phone while nursing her child at the park. Other things poor Gabby’s horrible mother hated: working mothers (You HAVE a job, you’re a MOTHER NOW!), daycare before the age of three (Why even HAVE KIDS if you’re not going to RAISE THEM!), the actress Kristen Bell (DO NOT GET ME STARTED!).

Often these forums presented themselves because they contained some extremely specific phrase Dani had typed into the search bar, usually a query about one of the many infinitesimal defects that present in every human body, minor deviations introduced over three hundred thousand years of reproduction and not a big deal at all. Things like:

four or five purple veins along newborn’s temple

slightly dark cuticles newborn

purple beneath eye newborn??

Dani searched through galleries of rashes and skin conditions. Galleries of healthy stools. Unhealthy stools. Diarrhea. Spit-up.

spit-up slightly clear???

signs of pyloric stenosis

small white bump on roof of baby’s mouth

are Epstein pearls painful??

Galleries of gingival cysts.

newborn one eye a bit wonky when first waking up

breaths per minute awake baby

breaths per minute sleeping baby

breaths per minute sleeping baby SIDS???

Galleries of cyanotic newborns.

baby won’t sleep

baby won’t sleep in crib

baby won’t sleep in crib SIDS

baby only sleeps when dead—she blinked—when held

Baby only sleeps when held.

Baby only sleeps when held.

Dani’s chest tightened around her racing heart. Eyes overwhelmed with tears. She shoved her phone beneath her thigh. Bit her lips to keep from sobbing out loud.

And Lotte’s chin bounced and bounced and bounced, rhythm undisturbed.

Lotte, I’m sorry, I would never, I would never ever, ever, my love, my sweet angel baby. I don’t know why I saw that, I certainly didn’t type that. I didn’t type that. I would never, ever type that.

Feeding, feeding. Eyelids slowing. Sealing.

Content. Oblivious. No sense yet that she’d been born to a monster.

2

THEY’D BEEN LIVING in the city when they found out Dani was pregnant. A condo: one bedroom, plus a pitiful, windowless den, and a whole closet taken up by a washing machine and a dryer. They looked at a few houses in their neighborhood and beyond, almost all of them near dangerously run-down, hastily disguised with fresh paint and pot lights and still well out of their price range. They decided to revisit the matter of their inadequate housing after the baby was born. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad having an infant in a seven-hundred-square-foot sock drawer, sixty feet in the air.

“We’ll make it work!” Clark declared, with suspicious optimism. Almost as though he’d already known about the promotion he announced six months later. The real estate development company he worked for was opening a new office. In Metcalf, of all places. Dani’s hometown. An area positively booming thanks to the grand reopening of the Silver Waste Management Corporation (now known as the Silver Waste Management Campus, or SWMC around town), where innovative approaches to managing garbage had attracted a haughty crowd of environmental consultancies, AI think tanks, and tech start-ups, which, all together, began to resemble what people like Clark called a hub.

Naturally, the coffee shops appeared first. With a hermit crab’s entitlement, they began occupying the criminally small cubbyholes that developers like Clark carved from crumbling strips of brick storefront. They sold cortados in short brown cups and hot new literary fiction and austere notebooks and expensive espresso machines that would collect dust on the counters of hectic businessmen, checking their teeth for sesame seeds in the chrome dash before zipping out the door to grab a cortado before work.

And then there were the taco joints with takeout windows and vegan carnitas, where you could buy a jar of homemade salsa for $10, queso for $12.

And that pizza place with the graffiti walls and COWABUNGA signature pie to appeal to the nostalgic millennials, the former Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans spending a fortune on real estate and nacho dips.

It was Dani’s father who’d started the original Silver Waste Management Corporation. Daniel “DJ” Silver, the Garbage King of Metcalf, even back then a sizeable kingdom of waste-processing innovation. At one time he employed almost the entire town, made more money than any single man could know what to do with or spend in his life. He sponsored Little League teams and bought decadent dinners for the soup kitchen every holiday; he supplied public schools with sports equipment, bought a trampoline for the musty downtown Y. There was a fountain named after him, his portrait above a plaque in city hall, and tales of his famously humble beginnings nurtured false hope in underprivileged children all over the county.

For a long time Dani didn’t know they were rich. She grew up in the same drafty old farmhouse her father had, where her mother still lived: a basement besieged by warm-blooded vermin, cold air gushing between warped bones. No one with money would have lived that way. But they did. Thirty years ago this unnecessary suffering signaled proof of DJ’s fine character; today locals thought Dani’s mother should feel ashamed to still be there—the woman who’d squandered his fortune, carrying on, unpunished, in his beloved family home.

Metcalf.

Dani squished her eyes shut.

Metcalf.

Clark sensed her reluctance, feelers sharpened by his trade. He leaned forward, slid his fingers between hers. “I know,” he said, forcing his way into her eye line. “Trust me, I know. But Dani, you’re not failing by going home. Quite the opposite. Honestly, that the idea of going back home has somehow been warped into failure, that’s got to be, I mean, I don’t know, you’re the philosopher, but that’s got to be by capitalist design, no?” Dani raised an eyebrow; he pressed harder. “Unmooring us from ourselves, our roots, making us wary of such easy and inexpensive peace. Boosting the illusion of this endless journey, endless growth, all so we can buy our idea of home instead. Create the void, then fill the void, right? You know, all that stuff. Look, the fact is, this is a huge promotion. And a fuck ton of money. The signing bonus alone is basically our down payment on a house. And you won’t have to work again at all if you don’t want to. You could just be with the baby.” He drew a long, meaningful look at her stomach. She rolled her eyes and shook an offended whinny from her snout as she tipped big, jiggling curds of scrambled egg onto their plates. “Except I don’t want to just stay home with the baby,” she said, setting the pan on the table and docking herself in her seat. At almost seven months pregnant, Dani’s belly was no longer even remotely adorable. She was a big, sweaty spectacle. Ample. Enormous. A reluctant god: Crowds parted for her on the sidewalk; bus seats materialized out of thin air. She accepted these grand genuflections hurriedly, without eye contact, hating every second of it but not wanting to seem ungrateful. She snatched a bite from her toast and left the crumbs where they landed.

Clark sat down across from her. He picked up his fork, speared a cherry tomato, glittering with salt, and pointed at her with it. “You know I didn’t mean it like that.” He slid the tomato off his fork with his teeth.

Clark didn’t know what he was talking about. He had no idea how he was supposed to mean it or how he wasn’t supposed to mean it. He knew he didn’t want to seem like a man who would prefer his wife to stay home with his child. He knew that.

And Dani didn’t really know what she wanted. She should feel proud to be a stay-at-home mother. She should feel lucky. It’s the hardest job in the world, that’s what everyone always said, and though Dani was sure the work itself was indeed very difficult—extremely difficult, possibly much more than she could even handle—she suspected that what made the job even harder was the utter lack of respect a person got for doing it, from assholes like her.

It wasn’t completely preposterous for Clark to have made this suggestion either. On the advice of the forum mothers, she’d put their unborn daughter’s name on all the daycare lists within reasonable walking distance from their condo—Six months pregnant? Girl, you’re already too late!—and then cried on and off all night picturing some aromatic administrator pulling her baby screaming from her arms, fists full of Dani’s jacket, refusing to let go, cortisol boiling scars into her as yet unmarred brain, all so Dani could, what, return to another pathetic office job? Some insignificant little company, disseminating worthless digital content for very little money, where the only thing she did with any care at all was ensure she was out the door at exactly five o’clock. Maybe if Dani were a human rights lawyer, performing good work for those who needed it; a dentist, securing a sound financial future for her family. Even if she simply enjoyed her work, at all, it might be different. But none of those things was the case. Despite identifying strongly as a feminist, Dani didn’t have a career. And while maybe she could technically be a feminist without financial independence, having to ask Clark for money certainly didn’t feel in the spirit of the thing.

“I just . . .” She prodded her scrambled eggs with her fork, struggling to come up with a reason they couldn’t move to Metcalf, but everything she thought of withered against the argument of more money, cheaper housing, her mother nearby. Anya. Her oldest friend. Probably still her best friend, really. “I’ve just got a bad feeling, Clark, about moving to Metcalf, I’ve got this”—she swallowed. “I’ve got this”—she swallowed again—“gulp-resistant lump in my throat. Honestly, it’s not going away.” She gulped, audibly, putting her neck and shoulders into it, making it hurt this time. She raised her fingers to her throat, pressed gently, feeling for the sea urchin that must surely be lodged there.

And Clark, a good person at the moment (sometimes he was a bad person), honored her nebulous dread; he raised the fingers not currently occupied by cutlery, a calming gesture, and cooed, “I understand. I really do. It’s different for you, to go back home, you’ve got your . . . legacy.” Dani winced. Embarrassed. It was fine for her to secretly believe she had any kind of legacy in Metcalf, but she didn’t want anyone else, even Clark, to know that she felt that way. If she did have any legacy, her continued absence was all that sustained it. A generation of Metcalfians who once knew her, paused from time to time to wonder whatever happened to that Danielle Silver. Where did she get away to? And the possibilities were endless. Because she’d been royalty, the Princess of Trash, vanished without a trace: A kind of Anastasia Romanov. A garbage Anastasia Romanov. If she returned now, they’d know exactly what happened to her: Whatever happened to that Danielle Silver? Oh, I just ran into her in the mall, actually, she was in line at Kernels, yes, just waiting her turn to purchase a small bit of popcorn, yes, a little treat for herself, yes, she deserves a little treat. That Danielle Silver? She lives in one of the cozy pre-wars near the creek. She got married, yes, had a baby, yes, just the one, yes, and now stays at home to raise her just like the rest of us. Yes. She stays at home. With just the one. That’s right, just the one. Just like Bunny. More like Bunny, it turns out, than DJ. Away from us, we hadn’t known. Away from us she might have been anyone. But back home we see, we all see. Her mother’s daughter, through and through. Too bad. Really too bad. We could have used another DJ Silver. Remember the feasts DJ Silver put on at the soup kitchens? Remember the graphing calculators he bought the remedial school? And my god, remember that trampoline? I don’t know any kid in this town who didn’t just come alive on DJ’s trampoline.

Dani closed her eyes. Listened to the gentle ruckus of Clark’s utensils against his plate. Toast shattering between his teeth. “Nothing’s happening yet”—his voice muffled by food. “It’s just an offer for now, something to think about. And if I don’t take it, we can figure something else out. The condo’s not so bad for now.” He swallowed. “We’ll make it work!”

Dani nodded, closed her eyes, rested a hand over her belly.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.” She exhaled. “Just kicking.” The baby pounded her legs, dragged against the fleshy upholstery of her uterine perimeter, the slow, exploratory pace that Dani already understood to be part of her personality.

Metcalf.

Moving to Metcalf.

Because Dani didn’t really have a choice, did she? Clark was acting like she did, because of course, once again, he knew he didn’t want to seem like the kind of man who allowed his salary to influence the power dynamic of his marriage. But of course it did. And they both knew it. The money had made a decision. And Dani would go where the money went. So she opened her eyes, found Clark innocently wiping yolk from his plate with his last scrap of toast, awaiting her approval like a very good man, like a man who would have halted his career based on the vague anxieties of his chihuahua wife. At least this way she could feel as though she had some control too. Better this way, wasn’t it? She shuddered, fighting off a hazy picture of the alternative: how it would look to do away with the performance altogether. Dani swallowed the sea urchin with wincing effort. And agreed to move back to Metcalf.

That night Dani sweat through the bedsheets, Lotte thrashing inside her like she never had before. A protest. A warning. The Princess of Trash returning to her kingdom. The king dead. The queen insane. And Lotte the trigger to some hellish prophecy that would destroy them all.

If Lotte could have known Dani’s thoughts that night, the way she’d be able to in thirteen years or so, with all her teenage powers, she would have read her mother with the precision of a surgeon, hormone-mad, sociopathy laser-focused on the pathetic host she’d shed like snakeskin. The way it ought to be. The way it had been since mothers started having daughters. Wow, Mom, do you really think you’re that special? That you’ve been in anyone’s thoughts at all? A hellish prophecy, for god’s sake? It must be exhausting, honestly, to be so fucking bored. And even Clark, accustomed by now to Lotte’s casual cruelties, would wince at that one, barely exhaling the word daaaaaaaamn as Lotte turned and left. Leveled up. Mother eviscerated. Eviscerated, but also, secretly, sickeningly delighted. Because finally Dani knew, once and for all, a gift from her daughter, exactly who the fuck she was.

3

TWELVE MONTHS went by in Metcalf without incident.

Not a single trace of a single hellish prophecy.

Twelve months in the cozy Dutch colonial they’d purchased in Corkton, an area recently christened by real estate agents and young newcomers. Young newcomers like their neighborhoods to have names; they like a coffee shop they can walk to—extra points for a tasteful graffiti mural showcasing the neighborhood’s new name. Newcomers like a bus route, even if they never use it, and a library, and a decent park. And though Dani wasn’t technically a newcomer to Metcalf, she also very much was, so they’d paid a premium for their little spot in Corkton, with its fluorescent patch of yard and charmingly uneven brick driveway.

There were four bedrooms, in case of more babies. Two bathrooms, in case of simultaneous food poisoning. One good-sized garage, equipped with bike racks and plywood cupboards and a pegboard for the tools they’d eventually need to acquire. For maintenance—an annoying little word, halted by consonants, and intimidating to them both. People their age couldn’t be too choosy about homes, though—not enough inventory, low interest rates. It’s basic supply and demand, their real estate agent parroted when they had to go slightly outside their budget for this place. But it was homey, and you can’t beat Corkton, so they’d both been very happy to get it.

Twelve months tripping on the driveway’s treacherously dilapidated brick.

Twelve months developing their eyes for weeds, yanking them up by the roots from the lawn, the garden, the walkway, clutching them as they quivered dirt, all the way to the leaking, bloated yard-waste bag in the backyard, which one of them, probably Dani, would have to deal with somehow, and soon.

Twelve months populating the garage with other things too, like a pruning saw, a weed whacker, a multi-bit screwdriver and a stud finder and a wheelbarrow, which Dani had genuinely thought didn’t exist anymore, a relic, like a butter churn, but it sure came in handy when Clark had tripped in the driveway for the last motherfucking time and insisted on etching up the bricks and lugging heaps of gravel back and forth from the garage in an effort to even it out. It didn’t work exactly, but it was much improved, and a few times Dani caught Clark glancing at his handiwork with pride. Sometimes she found his pride quite sweet: traces of some hale stock, bolstering his marrow. Other times she found it quite obnoxious: evidence of his unseemly appetite for praise. As though moving a few wheelbarrows full of gravel was such an incredible feat; as though he should be honored for his hard work by way of braised meats and blow jobs and quiet, unconscious gestures of respect. The way dogs do it: Clark going through doors first, getting the prime spot on the couch, the bigger piece of meat, all because he’d ever so slightly evened out the driveway. Not even all the way. She still tripped sometimes, a fact that she’d sharpened to a point and hurled at Clark to great effect in the deepest dark of their most recent argument. And how he looked at her, the fucking baby, as though denying his well-earned fanfare were the apex of cruelty, emblematic of everything that was wrong with her.

There were twelve months of centipedes.

They ate the ants.

Twelve months of humidity.

It fed the mold.

Which was easy to keep on top of, not a dangerous mold, according to the internet, but it needed fairly regular attention and would eventually have to be addressed by adding an expensive dehumidifying apparatus to the heating and cooling system, a dangerously warm factory hidden in an unsightly part of the basement, bings and borps and grinds and whirrs that made Dani and Clark uneasy. Clark once referred to it as the reactor, and so now that’s what they always called it—a thud issuing from the basement after the heat kicked on, a shared glance, “Just the reactor,” he’d say, then laugh nervously, return his attention to whatever they’d put on the TV that night. Usually some television show Clark’s colleagues were talking about, something based on a British novel about a woman accused of murdering her husband or her child or her mother, or sometimes she’s solving the murder and discovering that she was the murderer the whole time because she has a drinking problem and blackouts and all signs point to her, but then it was the husband after all, who you thought it was in the beginning but then it seemed too obvious but then of course it’s obvious because it’s always the husband. Because even though sometimes you think they’re the best people in the world, you must never forget they’re actually the worst.

And this house was where they’d brought Lotte home from the hospital; where Dani had rocked and bounced and breastfed till her back muscles melted and fused. She watched a thousand movies with the sound low so as not to rouse Lotte, closed-captioning describing the 20th Century Fox intro—(dramatic percussion) + (brass fanfare)—Dani had found that funny. She told Clark and he’d found it funny too. And now sometimes, when either of them was about to do something quite unimpressive, like, say, yank up a small weed with a dainty claw of easily bested roots, they’d say “Dramatic percussion, brass fanfare!” as the other marched it sheepishly to the bag.

In this house Dani had coached Lotte through her first word, Mama! Had watched her cut bright white teeth so suddenly that Dani shrieked when she saw them, like something elves had delivered in the night. This house was where Lotte had learned to crawl, learned to eat, learned to sleep, because apparently babies couldn’t do that right either. Sleep-training. The hardest thing Dani’d ever done, listening to Lotte cry all alone in her bedroom, wailing for someone to pick her up and rock her out of her misery. Clark had held Dani close, almost unsettlingly stoic, while she sobbed in bed, clutching Lotte’s flashing monitor, vibrating with her every scream like some poor attempt at immersive theater. “She’s fine,” Clark assured her, as if he could possibly know. “She’s just tired. She wants to sleep. This is how she’ll learn.” He stroked Dani’s head. Oh, my silly little dependent. Always fretting. Never calm.

Baby only sleeps when dead.

That had happened in this house too.

In Metcalf.

Where every little thing was both much, much better and much, much worse.

And then one night Clark came home from work and told her that a coworker of his, someone she’d never met before and Clark barely knew, had been diagnosed with colon cancer.

Dani held a slice of roasted chicken between a large fork and a carving knife, like a woman who’d committed to a very specific way of life when she chose her prosthetics.

“What?” she said, not because she hadn’t heard him, but because she needed a moment to process the sudden shift in the room’s shadows, as though a bulb somewhere had fritzed. She blinked, glanced at the fixture above the table to be sure, scanned the dining room, which a moment ago had been the warm embodiment of her family’s lovable chaos, but now, in this new light, felt artificial and silly. Impermanent. A room drawn onto the interior walls of a shoebox.

“Eddie, the controller, he’s got colon cancer. Aggressive too. He hasn’t said as much exactly, but speaking with him today, I don’t know. I don’t think the prognosis is good.” Clark had washed his hands in the kitchen before entering the dining room; they were cool when he touched Dani’s arm, activating a patch of goose bumps. He leaned over and kissed her cheek, activating a patch of goose bumps there too.

“Is he going to keep working?”

Clark shrugged. “Probably.” Then he fixed his eyes on Lotte, already in her high chair, smiling at him, saying, “Da, da, da, da, da, da, da.” She reached up with both hands to touch him, then pulled back quickly and squealed with delight when he got close enough to kiss her too.

“You tease,” said Clark, sitting down next to Lotte. Dani bristled at the word and sat down in front of her plate. Roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli, something she’d flung together in the moments she was able to steal from Lotte’s fervent needs. Clark had no idea what a feat it’d been, but that’s fine. It’s fine. He ate it, of course, without comment, as though she’d pressed a button and it appeared, but that’s fine.

Lotte flung a spear of chicken from her tray in an act of gleeful rebellion; she toyed with a bucking, buttered egg noodle like prey; accepted a few peach slices into her mouth from Dani’s hands; and every few minutes dropped everything to eagerly slurp spinach-and-pear puree from a bag, iron-fortified, high in fiber. These bags were the real MVPs, Dani hated to admit, when it came to Lotte’s transition to solids. MUM2GABBY, she’d warned about the bags. And Lotte’s eyebrows were crusted over with some combination of it all, making her look angry and bewildered, but still smiling, like a dementia patient.

“Colon cancer, my god,” said Dani, scooping a few more noodles onto Lotte’s tray. “That’s really awful, Clark. How old is he?”

“Thirty-three.” Clark shook his head. “Two kids. Divorced, I think.”

Dani lowered her head, wanting to honor the tragedy the way a good person would, by sitting for a moment, in the moment, with this awful, heartbreaking thing that’d brushed against their lives, but she was finding it very difficult to be still and present and grateful for her family’s health, too distracted by the fact that Clark honestly still hadn’t mentioned the meal, at all, sitting there like a clueless fucking boy-king, lovely meals as much a fact of his existence as morning erections. No idea what an absolute feat it was to execute a beautiful spread like this while chasing after a one-year-old dementia patient all day long. All he had to do was say thank you. He didn’t have to comment on the flavor or the cook or anything—both perfect, by the way. But just say thank you, just acknowledge that Dani had once again done it all, as she did every day, without complaint, far, far more impressive than answering emails, attending meetings, signing off on other people’s hard work. For this Clark got money, independence, and respect; he got to feel genuinely productive and connected to other human beings in the world. Meanwhile Dani was all alone, as always, a shameful necessity, tucked away, like the bulky wad of cords that kept their television working. Juggling, among many other things, carrots and lemon and onion and poultry seasoning, all while protecting Lotte from toddling into disaster.

Dani would never fish for a compliment, though, the way that Clark did about the goddamn driveway. The way a child would. She would be passive-aggressive instead, like a fucking adult.

Though she supposed she could also just tell him how much work it’d been, how much work it always was, to make sure dinner was on the table when he got home, which he’d technically never asked her to do, but that was the genius of it, wasn’t it? He didn’t have to ask her. The agreement they’d fallen into had existed long before they did: termless, conditionless, completely unvetted. His role clear and well-defined: go to work, make the money, provide. Hers fluid and shifting: duties tethered to the whims of a child, the fancies of a husband. Accepting duties outside the contract was for her an expectation; for him above and beyond, further proof (as though he needed any!) that he was a good, good man.

But she couldn’t bring that up now. Not right after he men-tioned the coworker, a man he knew a little, a man a year younger than he was, about to most likely die of arguably the worst kind of cancer, not just extremely deadly but also extremely undignified: colonoscopies, fecal tests, enemas, an assault on one of the body’s most guarded holes—a shared hole, existing across all bodies, bearing probably the most signifiers of any hole. Certainly the most signification.

Maybe Dani was just exhausted.

Or, she very suddenly realized—baby only sleeps when dead—a little depressed.

For a while now.

Twelve months, even.

She excused herself and went to the bathroom and cried, briefly but violently, then chased the red from her face with a cool towel.

4

THAT NIGHT DANI ROTATED her shoulders against the mattress, pulled her hair out from behind her neck. Still not comfortable. She sat up, assaulted her pillow. Lay down. Still bad.

Fucking colon cancer.

If detected early, colon cancer was highly curable. Screening, early detection, that was crucial. She remembered something from a job she had once, copyediting long-form advertising content for a group of media brands aimed at senior citizens—a colorectal polyp can take up to fifteen years to develop into cancer. Fifteen years with a time bomb ticking away quietly in your bowels; fifteen whole years to deactivate it! Healthy young men dying before their time, just because they’d been too proud to have their only hole probed, too scared to discover what secrets might lurk there.

Dani propped up on an elbow and leaned over so she could see Clark’s face, furrowed at his phone as he thumbed through barbecues. “Do you think we need a side burner?” he asked, without looking at her. “For, like, corn on the cob? It might be nice, but I also feel like they’re just—they get so filled with spiders, don’t they?”

“Do you know when Eddie’s last colorectal screening was?”

Clark closed his phone, set it facedown in his lap, and turned to her. “What do you think?”

“Well, do you at least know what Eddie usually ate for lunch?” Please god, corned beef. Please god, potato chips and burgers and processed cheese. And beer. He’d drink at work? Oh, yeah, every day, beers all day. Sometimes meth. Meth! My god. Oh, yeah, loved meth. Couldn’t get enough of meth. I guess that’s the problem isn’t it. And meth causes colon cancer? Well, I’m sure it doesn’t help! No, I’m sure you’re right!

“I don’t know, I never noticed. Usual stuff, I think. Leftovers. Sandwiches. I don’t know.” He picked up his phone again. “I’m not going to go for the side burner. We have too many spiders as is.”

“But he wasn’t a vegetarian, right?”

“I don’t know, Dani.”

“He probably wasn’t. You’d know if he was, I’m sure.” She looked away, lowered her voice—“They love to let you know”—visualizing Wanda, her mother’s best friend and most loyal defender, always dressed for gentle, joint-friendly exercise, yakking in Bunny’s kitchen between snaps off a pepperoni stick about how even though the doctor had insisted she reintroduce meat into her diet, she was still a vegetarian. “In the way that really counts, you know?” Bunny had nodded emphatically, and Dani, to dodge the grip of visible scorn, had drained her face so thoroughly of expression that she nearly slipped into another realm. Wanda then transitioned to her next favorite topic: the retired service dogs she fostered—their urinary crystals and hip dysplasia and unusually loud stomach gurgling, which she referred to, with the inexplicable smugness of a dickhead ordering a French dessert, as borborygmi. Dani didn’t know how Bunny could stand it.

“Did he smoke?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did he drink too much?”

“Well, not at work! Dani, come on.” Clark slid his phone onto the nightstand, rolled over to look up at her. “I barely knew the guy.”