Sometimes, though, the air changed. We’d walk up for a closer look at a pile of apples and see a man shoulder through the crowd pushing a clip into his gun. My mother would grab me by the back of my shirt and pull me close, out of danger; she had a way of disappearing into the background of a scene that I’ve never been able to replicate. Once we saw a whole building come down, the wall in front of us crumbling to its knees and catching a girl who’d been about to offer us a mouthful of cider. I swear in an instant my mother turned us both to smoke, that we floated above the rubble and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t cry, as men kicked through the market’s husk and shot survivors in the face so no one would be left to remember. Some of these men we’d seen before, laughing, ruffling the same girl’s hair. But this was also my mother’s wisdom: she knew that even the nicest person could turn a nastier cheek.
My father had disappeared the year before, and we would never know where. Though we could guess. (A memory: One day I came home from school and he was missing, his absence somehow a presence in the rooms. My mother sat at the kitchen table with a lock of hair between her lips, which she wouldn’t move to brush aside. She sucked on her hair and I crept to the bed I made each evening on our sofa to hide myself beneath the blanket.) Our house became more cramped in his absence, and watchful, though I would still not admit that the Party had done or could do wrong. So, I thought, she must be the one who was.
Before the agents reached our door I sprinted out to meet them, closing my mother in behind me. What happened to her when the men kicked their way into our home? I don’t know. I didn’t see. I imagine her flickering between forms, now the wooden grain of a chair, now the filament in a bulb. I imagine the agents hauling her up by the arms as she disappeared into the fabric of her dress, so it fell empty in their fingers. Perhaps she became the waxed thread in a cross-stitch, or the brass button on my father’s shirt, which she’d kept and worn like a sweater. The stain on the rug from when I had the flu as a child and threw up before she could get me to the sink. My birthing blood. Any putrid element, mouse shit or exposed wire, which the men might overlook or drop with disgust. Maybe she escaped somehow, melting into that deep and glorious blue, which I hadn’t known before was the color of despair at its most unutterable.
But even if she did manage to transform—into an elixir, a miracle—I know the men would’ve just barged in and soaked my mother up in sponges, then wrung her out on the floor of a prison so cold she froze. Into a puddle of ice. Into the purple body of a woman left for dead. Later I saw pictures of such bodies, printed in newspapers as evidence of the horrors of war. But who was I to judge people, to judge war, when I had run into the arms of my captors with a grateful cry at being rescued by the Party faithful? Later letting myself be smuggled out of the home for girls and onto a boat when I realized there was no fidelity except to life. No creed of truth, no heart that’s home.
I’m beginning to change my mind about this, but it’s taken an awfully long time.
The flower show was held in a big pavilion—a series of tents connected by muslin walkways, which was also used for state fair exhibitions and smelled of pigs and hay. John and I enjoyed the birds of paradise, each shaped like a Technicolor blade, and picked one up that was orange and magenta just to make the Donne girls squeal with glee. The local plants were mostly mundane, but several farmers had lugged in prize gourds from the previous fall, dried out and hollow but still impressive. When you held your ear up to the larger ones, they made a sound like the ocean, akin to a seashell. We ate popcorn cooked in a kettle and drank the chocolate I insisted on dragging around; too warm, perhaps, but delicious all the same.
“What about this?” John asked, looking at an Italian grapevine, which offered itself as low-maintenance fruit.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What about a coffee bush?” We each popped a red coffee cherry into our mouths, and though I understood John’s aversion after biting too hard and almost cracking a tooth on the bean, I thought it tasted sweet and good. We dragged a wagon behind us, filling it up with flowers and shrubs, and John occasionally patted my shoulder, as if he were my proud old dad.
Near the end of the show, I saw a man and woman crouching around a yellow rosebush, holding hands. She was leaning into the flowers, sniffing each one as if they were telling different stories. The man was laughing, and picked up the pot with obvious pleasure, despite miming shock at the cost. A decoration, perhaps, for a new home. You saw couples like this often at the spring shows, looking to restock their gardens, and I don’t know why these particular people made me catch my breath, but I stopped mid-step, leaning on a nearby table and pretending to inspect a very ordinary blueberry bush. John paused with me.
“Nice looking couple,” he said.
“Hmm?” I checked the price on the blueberry. Outrageous.
“Well, sure, isn’t that what a girl wants?”
“Is it?” Was it? I realized I was no longer certain. Though they did make me want something. The rose woman, as it happened, looked a bit like Margaret, five or ten years on. Same bouncy hair, same nose. She would make little Margarets and send them to nice schools too, outfitted with pressed wool skirts and a sense of exhaustion at the idea of dealing with the housekeeping staff. “It isn’t that I don’t like them,” Margaret had always said when required to ask maintenance to fix something, or beg a favor from the maids. “It’s just that I’m so tired by everything I already have to do, it seems like, why should I have to do this?”
I understood her fatigue, now, because I felt it too. About—everything. Lev had become insistent that I was the only one who could rid us of Vera. That my hand must push her towards the cliff, even if she took herself over. It had to be me, and it had to be soon, because he was leaving in early summer to rescue a book he’d hidden years before in what was now the USSR. He’d secured help sneaking in from the U.S. military, having charmed a pilot into adding him to an overseas flight manifest by implying he’d model a character off the man in his next story, and he needed Vera to be gone before he got back. She would destroy the book, he was sure, and that was something he couldn’t abide. The plan was so magnificently ill advised that I almost wondered if he’d dreamed it up as an excuse just to get out of town—or I would have, that is, if he didn’t speak with such moving tenderness about the book, which he really thought would save his life. It, and me. First thing he ever wrote, and (his words) the last woman he would ever love. He was aiming to depart sometime in June, which didn’t give me much time to decide.
“When I have that book,” he said, “then I’m really free. But I need you to stay here and make sure things go on as planned. Have you talked to her? You’ll have to talk to her. I think I’ve come up with a way.”
Men and women met; they married. I’d always thought that was important. Lev still spoke of his passion for his wife, her spectacular galactic beauty; before him, I’d had nothing, and if I lost him, things would go back to the way they’d been. The rose couple at the flower show tugged at some part of my heart, but when I followed Vera I felt a different pull. A tightening in me, a rumble of power. And I wondered: was that so bad?
“Let’s go,” I said to John, who seemed, in spite of my best efforts, to see something unsettling behind my careful expression.