My mother talked to a policeman. Emergency workers scurried around, people chattered, reporters interviewed witnesses in the crowd. I dropped my bike and ran to Mom.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her, knowing the answer, wanting to be wrong.
“Janelle.” Her glassy red eyes held mine.
“I saw you on the news. Where’s Aunt V?”
“You shouldn’t be here, baby.”
“Where is Aunt Vanya?” I pulled her arm, my voice rising.
Olivia dropped you off at six forty-five. On the ride over, you’d wanted to tell her everything. You’d tried the night before. You’d spent the night so you could get to the clinic early and maybe avoid the people with the posters chanting, “Baby Killer!” as you walked into the clinic. You’d wanted to tell her before you went to bed in Nelly’s room, but you could not find the words. As you got out of the car, she matter-of-factly uttered, “Call when you’re ready.” No smile of assurance, no hug for strength. Five or six protesters lined the sidewalk and you tried to ignore them, tried not to see the tiny baby parts splattered across their signs.
Inside, your eyes wandered the room and you noticed you were the only one not dressed for a workout or an afternoon at the mall. A tall man wearing jeans and a T-shirt walked in, and you wondered if he was picking up his wife or daughter. He sat down. You felt out of place in your bright dress, but this time you’d at least kept up your appearance and you wouldn’t let it go now. You dressed how you wanted to feel. The girls waiting with you appeared no older than Nelly. You could have been their mother. One side-eyed you, her eyelids squinched, her lips pursed, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. You sat up straight, hands folded in your lap, legs crossed at the ankles. The chair was cold and hard underneath you, and you thought back to the hospital the night your mom died. You hoped no one there would recognize you, which is oddly enough something you never thought about as you gulped martinis in dark bars, sniffed coke in bathrooms, and checked into seedy motels off 91 with men like Nelly’s father, this baby’s father. The man shifted in his seat and tapped his foot against the linoleum floor. They called your name and, in a tight, dimly lit room, a nurse walked you through your options, and you gazed out the window and thought about tomorrow and starting over again. You took a breath and began answering her questions. Heat seared your skin and you were melting. You tried to run but had no legs, and rubble rained down on you, and you thought of Nelly, your baby, her baby, and you saw him lying in the bed next to you, his face, her face.
A snatch of color caught my eye. I squinted and focused on it — a shoe. A scorched, light-green slingback. A pale pink rose bloomed from its toe. I knew the shoe because I had photographed it only a few weeks earlier. My mother walked in a tight circle, hugging herself. A breeze blew and carried the reporter’s voice to me as I stared at the shoe: “Now, back to the studio...”
I’d had to ride my bike home as my mom finished talking to the police. When I got there I lay down on the other bed in my room where Aunt V had slept the night before and felt something hard under her thin pillow. A diary with The Queen of Secrets scrawled across its worn cover in Aunt V’s spidery cursive. I opened it and started reading.
About the Contributors
Amy Bloom is the best-selling author of three novels, three collections of short stories, a children’s book, and a collection of essays. She has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has won a National Magazine Award for Fiction. She lives in Connecticut and taught at Yale University for the last decade. She is now Wesleyan University’s Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing.
Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor at Yale Law School. He is the author of eight works of nonfiction, most recently The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama. He has published six novels under his own name, others under a pseudonym, and over eight hundred short stories, articles, op-eds, and reviews. He could do none of this without the love, support, and deft editing of his wife, Enola Aird.
John Crowley is a recipient of the American Academy and Institute of Letters Award for Literature and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. His sci-fi novel Engine Summer is listed in David Pringle’s Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. His books include Little, Big, the Ægypt Cycle quartet, The Translator, Lord Byron’s Noveclass="underline" The Evening Land, Four Freedoms, and several volumes of short fiction. He teaches fiction writing and screenwriting at Yale.
Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and Pulitzer Prize), The Snow Queen, Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as the nonfiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. His latest book, A Wild Swan and Other Tales (illustrated by Yuko Shimizu), was published in November 2015. He lives in New York and teaches at Yale.
Lisa D. Gray’s writing tackles issues of race and class while highlighting the intersections between identities and groups. She currently teaches at Mills College and earned her BA from Spelman College and her MFA from Mills College. She’s attended VONA, completed a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for distinguished writing from the San Francisco Foundation.
Chris Knopf’s latest Sam Acquillo novel, Back Lash, received a starred review from Booklist. The Last Refuge, Two Time, and Black Swan were reviewed by the New York Times. Dead Anyway drew starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus, and Library Journal, was named a Best Crime Novel of 2012 by the Boston Globe, and won the 2013 Nero Award. Kill Switch was short-listed for the 2016 Derringer Award.
Alice Mattison’s most recent book is The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control — and Live to Tell the Tale. She’s the author of six novels, including When We Argued All Night and The Book Borrower, and four collections of stories, including In Case We’re Separated. She lives in New Haven and teaches fiction in the MFA program at Bennington College.
Karen E. Olson, a New Haven native, received the Sara Ann Freed Memorial Award for Sacred Cows, her mystery debut set in her hometown, and a Shamus nomination for Shot Girl, the fourth in the Annie Seymour mystery series. A longtime journalist, she was an editor at the New Haven Register and is currently working at Yale while writing her third crime series and enjoying the best pizza anywhere.