Next he set fire to the photos, one by one, and dropped them, flaming, into a crystal serving bowl. Except for several explicit ones of him and Marilyn. Those he waved at me.
"Perhaps I'll start my own scrap book with these."
He eyed the photos for a moment, gave me a look, then threw back his head and laughed. I was struck at how honest and open that laugh sounded. He hadn't sounded so open in years.
"God, Joan. It's great to be free at last. Free to tell you how much I hate you. Your jealousies and suspicions, your pettiness, your clinging and complaining and prudishness and controlling, bitchy nature - you've made my life a living hell.
"But that's over now. From now on, you are Clara's mother and that's all. You have nothing to say to me, nor I to you. You'll be my wife to the public eye, but there's nothing between us any more. And if you ever try anything like this again," he waved the picture at me, "I swear I'll kill you."
He put them in his wallet and then picked up the phone again.
"Hi. It's me." I could tell by how his voice grew husky and by how a bulge swelled in his trousers whom he'd called.
"I arranged for our babysitter to take Clara overnight," he said. "She's sick with the flu. I need a place to stay. I need to see you."
Pause. "Can't you find a sitter?"
Another pause. "I read about it in the papers. I'm so sorry. But, you know, he is a threat to our work, with his position on the wild card."
A pause. "Who told you? Wait - don't hang up. Damn it!"
He slammed the phone down and rubbed his face, looking at me. Anguish was stamped on his face like someone's shoeprint. He really loved her. I was curled into a tight ball, riding out the fireball of pain spreading through me, and couldn't focus on him, even to taunt him.
I don't remember him leaving.
***
That night, I became intimate with the virus. It was the longest night, the worst pain I have ever lived through.
***
The next morning I awoke to Frou Frou's yaps, welcoming Jessica and Clara into the apartment.
The night's agony was fading, though a thousand aches and twinges tormented me along my body. I had that lightheaded, floating clarity one feels after a high fever breaks, and also a terrible, cavernous hunger. Morning sunlight streamed in through the sheer curtains. Jessica clattered about in the kitchen, making breakfast. Clara's voice rose and fell in a dialog with Frou Frou in the living room.
Clara. I wondered if the prior day's torture had been a dream. I wanted Clara in my arms. I propped myself up on my elbows.
Great tufts of my hair lay strewn about my pillow. With a strangled gasp I touched my scalp and felt - baldness. Brushing backward, the skin was smooth and cool and dry; brushing forward it felt like sandpaper. My arms were covered in scales, in a pattern that vaguely mimicked the roses and dark green leaves twined on the comforter.
Throwing off the comforter, I meant to put my feet on the floor. But when I tried to swing my legs out from under the sheets nothing happened. My toes were down there somewhere; I could even wiggle them, but whatever was moving in there wasn't my toes.
I strained to lift my legs again. Nothing happened except the sheet moving. I was afraid to lift the sheet.
I heaved with all my might. My lower torso slid out from under the sheet - and slid, and slid, and collapsed onto the floor in a single looping, rubbery limb: a growing, sinuous tangle. The weight of it pulled the rest of me off the bed.
I grabbed at the bedsheets to keep from striking my head on the bedside table. Then I twisted around to see what I had become.
No legs. No toes. I felt them but they weren't there. My torso, my navel, even my genitalia - or so I thought then - gone.
From below my breasts, I was all snake, eighteen feet of scaled coils about the thickness of one of my former thighs and mottled now like our carpet, gleaming moonstone and sand. Even the flesh of my nipples was scaled, a slightly darker brown. My lips, too, felt scaled. How beautiful the scales were: luminous, translucent, like semiprecious stones. Beautiful, and horrible. My fingernails were long, horny claws, a lizard's claws.
My lace nightie had slipped off my shrunken shoulders and gotten tangled in the loops of snake flesh. I struggled with the nightie, sliding it over the coils, heaving portions of myself back and forth, till I could pull it off over my head. That small exertion exhausted me and I had to rest for a moment.
Then, hand over hand, I dragged myself over to the mirror by the door and propped myself upright, supported by shaky arms. From the breasts up the thing in the mirror was mostly me, though the wrong color, scaled and hairless, with an altered nose, mouth, and ears, shrunken shoulders and arms. From there down, I'd become monstrous.
I reared back in horror and shock, and my lower body clenched into a mass of coils. The thing in the mirror bobbed like a cobra about to strike. Its color - and mine - went a brilliant parrot blue with yellow, black, and red striping, as a cobra hood spread behind its head. Its reptile eyes dilated. A bitter taste bled from my lengthened canine teeth as a milky substance leaked from the mirror thing's canines.
It wore my face. A scaled, reptilian face, but unmistakably mine. The colors were fading now to a softer, smoky blue as I studied it, with sand-, ash-, and rust-colored stripes.
I ran my tongue over my lips and saw it had lengthened and forked at the end. After extruding it, when I brushed the tongue against my pallet, it could - taste the air, smell it; neither of those words is right, but it was a little like both. It could taste the scent of Brand's belongings and mine, and taste faintly the presence of Jessica and Clara and Frou Frou in the other room, of frying eggs and bacon and toast.
Hands over my face, I lurched away from the mirror with a soft cry.
First I thought, a dream. A nightmare spawned by my fever.
I But I knew differently. What Dr. Isaacs had said would come to pass, had come to pass. My body had been stolen from me during the night. Some malevolence had traded it for this mass of heaving, scaled coils. I'd become in body the predator I'd always had in my heart. I'd become a lamia.
***
One's priorities shift when survival is at stake. Hysteria was definitely called for; I felt it bubbling around the edges of my thoughts. But now was not the time. I couldn't be certain Brand had gone for the night - he might have borrowed Clara's bed, since she'd been at Jessica's. And Clara, I couldn't bear for her to see me like this.
On the other hand, I couldn't bear to lose her.
Brand had always hated the wild card and its victims, as much as I had. He would never tolerate a joker wife. I didn't know what he would do when he discovered what had happened to me, but given that he had been involved in the murder of two men, I didn't want to find out.
But first things first. Food.
When I thought about eating my tongue flicked, flicked again, tasting the air. The smells it detected made me writhe into knots of hunger and revulsion. The cooking eggs and bacon and toast turned my stomach. Raw animal flesh was what my body needed. A prospect equally revolting, but imperative.
Three prime, New York cut strip steaks were in the refrigerator. Those would do.
I lurched and slung and dragged my elongated self over to the door. It was exhausting work; slithering is not as easy as it looks, especially when one is starved, weakened by illness, and unaccustomed to the motion. Heart racing, I turned the knob, pulled the door open, peeked around the corner. The blue was fading from my scales and a dark brown with moonstone and sand mottlings, the combined colors of the door and carpeting, faded in.
My scales gave me protective coloring. With a sudden, faint hope that I could escape this situation unharmed, I slipped out onto the cool wood floor, my colors shifting as I moved.
Frou Frou's ears pricked up when the door opened. He looked over at me. I froze.
Clara had arranged Frou Frou and her dolls in a semicircle beyond the couch. The circle included the dog, Barbie and Ken, the plastic Crybaby Cathy baby, the fine, antique China doll my mother had given her for Christmas, and stuffed animals of assorted types, colors, and sizes. Clara told Frou Frou to sit down but instead he came around the end of the couch, suspicious and confused, with a growl rumbling in his throat.