But that’s not the way it goes. About an hour in, the story takes a turn I don’t like. Frances, wandering through her borrowed house one rainy day, comes upon some of Cleo’s journals. After an unnecessary and rather drawn-out “will she or won’t she?” scene in which Frances stares at the pile of books as she drinks an entire bottle of wine, she finally opens one up and begins to read. And she learns something disturbing about Cleo. She learns that Cleo has given some thought to the possibility of “inducing” a near-death experience in her son.
It may already be clear that my feelings toward Sara are rather prickly. Our friendship has gone through its share of ups and downs over the years. Once when we were still students, I told her about a humiliating experience I’d had in high school gym class, and she listened with an expression of casual interest; her next short story contained the episode, almost verbatim, and I watched in shocked silence as our professor and fellow students praised her imaginative plotting. Still, we were close for a while; she was at my wedding, and she sent gifts for each of my children when they were born. She published her first book quite a long time before I did—hers came out in 1985, while mine wasn’t until nearly a decade later—but we were good writing friends, exchanging manuscripts long-distance and taking each other’s comments seriously. I didn’t know many other writers, and I valued both her insight and the sense of companionship forged by our shared experiences.
Then Mitch and Rosemary died, and Sara was among the first batch of people that I called. Her reaction was like everyone else’s at first—shocked, sad, kind. And then she said something that absolutely stunned me.
“This is going to sound horrible,” she said, and for one last moment, I still trusted her enough to think that no honest thing she could say to me now would be horrible. She went on: “But I’m almost jealous in a strange way.” I remember her laughing then, awkwardly, a hollow sound. “At least you’ve found your material,” she said. “I’m still waiting for my tragedy.”
I can’t draw the lines easily here. It’s not that she’s Frances and I’m Cleo; it’s never really that simple. And Sara has never once suggested that I was in any way responsible for what happened that day. But the emergence of this plot twist—a mother actually putting her child in danger because it will further her work—reminds me of that comment all those years ago, and suddenly I know that she was thinking of me when she wrote it. And it makes me sick.
I consider getting up and leaving, but endings matter to me, and I want to see how she’s going to wrap this up. There’s some convoluted business about the sudden death of Frances’s mother, whose last words are about a beautiful, shining light, and it turns out I’m right about Frances’s affair with Cleo’s ex. But eventually Frances discovers that Felix truly is in danger, and she rushes back home to save him. Cleo is sent to prison for attempted murder, and in a bit of writing requiring a rather substantial suspension of disbelief, Frances is granted custody of Felix. To top it all off, Frances hits pay dirt in her research and discovers a new way to alleviate human suffering, for which she wins a fictitious award that seems to be just one notch down from the Nobel. And I can only assume that this particular university never again supports scholarship involving any aspect of the afterlife.
I stay in my seat all through the credits, until the lights come on and someone comes in to sweep up the popcorn. I’m thinking about a particularly colorful critique I heard once, years ago, when I was teaching a writing seminar. “Jeff’s stories,” this young woman said, “always make me feel like I’ve stepped in vomit.” (With a mind like that, I don’t know why she wasn’t a better writer.) I’ve been waiting a long time to use that phrase myself, and I’ve finally found the opportunity, even if it’s only in my own head.
I leave the theater and make my way down the escalators. Finally I turn my phone back on, and I see that I have a new voice mail. I listen to it expectantly and find that it’s from my agent, who on most other days is the person whose messages I’m most interested in hearing.
“Hi, Octavia,” she says. “It’s Anna. I hope you’re doing okay in the middle of all this … God, what a horrible situation. I wanted to let you know that I’ve heard back from Lisa at Farraday about The Nobodies Album. Which is pretty remarkable, given how short a time it’s been since you sent it to her. Give me a call when you get this. It’s not exactly what we were hoping for, but I think it might be good.”
Her vagueness makes me uneasy. I don’t know if what I’m feeling is typical nervousness—my opinions about my own work are spectacularly unstable, bouncing between swollen overconfidence and debilitating insecurity—or a hint of doubt about the project itself, but I’m apprehensive about hearing Lisa’s reaction to the manuscript. When I first told her the idea for The Nobodies Album, the question she asked was, Why? It seemed like something I should have an answer for, but the reasons that came into my head—because I can; because as long as I’m alive, nothing has to be set in stone—seemed paltry, not nearly substantial enough to justify the outlay of risk and money required to publish a book.
I won’t pretend that there were no personal factors involved in my decision to revisit my earlier novels. From this remove, it’s hard to recapture the desolation of the Octavia who began this project, the woman who was afraid she might die before she ever saw her son again, who would have bet money that she’d never sit on a sofa with a grandchild at her feet. It had been almost three years since I’d spoken to Milo, almost three years since I’d received his brusque note saying that he’d read Tropospheric Scatter and would appreciate it if I wouldn’t try to get in touch with him.
My thinking about The Nobodies Album with regard to Milo was not quite as simple as “Writing caused this problem; maybe writing can fix it,” but it was along those lines. Rock stars are good at making themselves inaccessible to the general public, and that was the group I had become a part of. Letters and e-mails were ignored; packages were returned undelivered; phone calls dead-ended in high-pitched tones and automated voices that told me the number was no longer in service. I was running out of ways to reach him, and The Nobodies Album felt like a loophole, a back door: the plot twist where the guy delivering the balloon bouquet serves you with legal papers. I’d made a name for myself, and I might as well use it to my advantage. I couldn’t make him read it, but if I did it right, there was no way he could prevent it from entering his consciousness.
I didn’t realize then how important the timing would be—that the very day I intended to place the book in someone else’s hands would be the day it became too late. The situation I find myself in now, this gnarl of doubt and accusation and lives irrevocably changed: this is what I was trying to prevent.
But redeeming myself to my son was not by any means my only concern. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough. My work matters to me, and I hope that it matters to my readers; I may be self-absorbed, but I would never presume that a public gesture of apology was any basis for a work of literature. The day I began writing The Nobodies Album was a day of artistic epiphany for me. It was a day of wonderment and humility and assumptions tumbling to the ground.
I suppose you could say I’d been thinking about endings. I’d had a biopsy; my doctor had found a mass in my breast, and I was waiting for him to call with the results. It was a morning like a blank page, and I couldn’t really do anything but wait and see what kind of words were going to fill it.
My Only Sunshine had been published a few weeks earlier, and lines from some of the reviews were still floating around in my head. I’ve mentioned, I believe, that critics were not exactly rising to their feet as one to cheer my achievement, and one writer had suggested (not particularly kindly) that the problem with the book was that it covered the wrong period in the protagonist’s life. He said that the only time the novel captured his interest—and this is where I can almost garner some sympathy for the downtrodden reviewer: can you imagine hating a book so much and not being allowed to simply put it down?—was the second-
to-last page, when we flash forward to the hours before this unnamed woman’s death. This character lives seventy-one years, he wrote, seventy-one years amid the aftermath of her mother’s committing suicide, leaving her to be raised by an abusive father, and this is the part of the story the author has chosen to show us? Teething and diaper changes?
It wasn’t that I necessarily agreed with him. But from the vantage point of the tightrope I found myself walking that day, I suddenly wished, very much, that I had given that baby girl a chance at a better life than the one she ended up living. It hit me with a force as strong and sudden as grief: I had created this character, made her out of nothing and set her down in the world, and then carefully and systematically sucked away every bead of hope. And I felt I had made a terrible mistake.
Which is not to say that I thought everything should be happy and sunshiny. Her life was her life; unless I started from scratch and wrote something completely new, there were a lot of circumstances that neither she nor I could change. But I wanted to remove some of the bleakness I had written for her so blithely. I wanted to give her a chance.
I went into my office and pulled a copy of the book from one of the boxes I’d received from the publisher. Just as an exercise, just to lessen my own guilt, I wanted to see if there was any way I might have done things differently. I’ve always said that the ending of a novel should feel inevitable. You, the reader, shouldn’t be able to see what’s coming, but you should put the book down feeling satisfied that there’s no other way it could have gone.
And yet, as I paged through the story I’d settled on, I could see the traces of the hundred different stories I’d rejected. Here I’d made a choice, and here, and here. It was all butterfly wings and tornadoes: even a slight deviation in any one of those places would be enough to set the whole book on course for a different outcome.
I hadn’t felt so invigorated by an idea in a long time. It seemed to me powerful, and revolutionary, and … inevitable. The questioning of the artistic process; the redemption of character and author in a single blow. By the time the phone rang—and I picked up to hear the voice of the doctor’s receptionist instead of the doctor himself, which told me everything I needed to know—I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by all the books I’d written, looking for ways to change the course of history.
I look at the time to see if it’s too late to call Anna. It’s after nine p.m. on the East Coast, nine on a Friday night. I have her cell phone number, but I’ve never used it, and it doesn’t really feel appropriate to do so now. She usually answers e-mail over the weekend, so I’ll just have to hope I can get in touch with her that way.
I walk out of the theater. I see that it’s gotten dark, and I feel a sense of loss: another day in my life spent without Milo. A week ago such a thing wouldn’t have been extraordinary at all, but now it feels like a fresh wound. I wonder if he’s punishing me, making me sweat before he reaches out. Or has he decided to cut me off completely once again?
I’m trying to decide whether to go back to my hotel or get something to eat at the diner I see across the street when my phone actually rings. I look at the number; it’s Chloe.
“Hello,” I say, sounding regrettably eager.
“Octavia,” she says. “It’s Chloe. I was just wondering—did you get Milo’s text?”
It takes me a minute. “No,” I say. “I don’t even know how to read text messages on my phone.”
Chloe laughs. “See, that’s what I told him. You’re lucky I’m around. I mean, not that you’re not totally-I’m-sure tech-savvy, but texting is kind of a generational thing.”
“Right,” I say. “So … what did it say? Is everything okay?”
“Oh, everything’s fine. Well, you know, not fine, but not worse than yesterday. I think he just said that you should come over to Roland’s for dinner if you want to. We’re just ordering some takeout.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Yes, I’ll come. Can you tell me the address again?”
She does, and I repeat it. “Lia will be glad you’re coming,” she says. “She was just talking about you.”
“Really?” I say.
“Mm-hmm. She asked me what Uncle Milo’s mommy’s favorite color is.”
I look around me: rust-colored taillights, red and green neon, black-denim sky. And I think of Lia as she looked when I met her, violet dress, auburn eyes. “Purple,” I say. “Tell her it’s purple.”
“She’ll like that,” Chloe says. “That’s her favorite, too.”
We hang up, and as I start to look for a cab, I’m thinking about time-lapse video and the way that it can reveal the aging of a flower from bloom to wilt or turn a dotted procession of headlights into an unbroken white line. Imperceptible movements made visible; the sum of our progress revealed. I think of the furrow my footsteps have made upon the earth, my life’s passage written as a single continuous crease, and I wonder what obeisance I can make, what prayer I can offer, to keep that line moving in this direction, on and on, until my time is through.
From the Jacket Copy for
SANGUINE
By Octavia Frost
(Farraday Books, 1997)
Matilda, a young widow in sixteenth-century England, supports herself and her son, Hugo, through her work as an “empiric” lay healer. Her skill at bloodletting and delivering babies has made her an indispensable member of her community. But now, as more and more female healers and midwives are charged with witchcraft, Matilda reluctantly puts away her lancet and her herbs. Until Hugo falls ill.
A novel about redemption, maternal responsibility, and that vital substance that flows through our veins, Sanguine is a poignant and gripping achievement.
Excerpt from
SANGUINE
By Octavia Frost
ORIGINAL ENDING
On the tenth day of June in the year of our Lord 1572, I was taken to the Court of Assizes held at Chelmsford for the County of Essex, before Sir Edward Saunders, Lord Chief Baron of His Majesty’s Court of Exchequer. When I was called to the Bar, I proclaimed to all assembled that I wished to plead not guilty, whereupon the jury heard the details of the Crown’s evidence, as shown in my examination before the Justice of the Peace in the Quarter Session in my own town of Maldon.
The jury—fine men all, I’m sure—heard how Sarah Baker had come into my house carrying a basket of eggs and found me kneeling beside Hugo’s bed, my hands splashed with blood. (No matter that he had been cold and melancholic a half hour before, and that bleeding him was the only way to release the evil black bile. No matter that any physician or barber would have done the same.) They heard that I had been present at the birth of Sarah Pilly’s baby, and that the girl had been born blue and still, and again that I had been with Beatrice Spynk at the birth of her son, which child is now a drooling idiot who spends his days tied to a pew in the church in the hope that the divine words of the Mass will soothe his mad soul. They heard how Margery Carter examined me and found me to have a Devil’s mark in the shape of a crescent moon between the blades of my shoulders. (This I have never seen, but I know it is there because my husband would sometimes put a finger on it and say that it must be good luck to have a wife who carried the moon on her back.)
There seemed to be no end to it all. I keep a frog; I have used love magic to provoke a depraved infatuation in the chaplain Thomas Corker; my son was once heard to say that “Mama can see me even when she’s not looking,” and subsequently I was discovered to have two freckles that appeared as eyes on the back of my neck.
When at last the alleged evidence of my wrongdoing had been presented, the jurors retired with a list of the prisoners whose fate they were to judge. There were sixteen of us, and the jury took only an hour to return with their decrees. I watched as a vicar was ordered to be pilloried for slander and a peddler was sentenced to hang for stealing birds’ eggs. And then the judge read my name, and one of the jurors—a bony man who I suspect suffers from a harmful excess of phlegm—pronounced me guilty. T
he judge had me brought forward so that he could look at my face as he told me my lot: death by hanging, for the crime of witchcraft. I shall be executed tomorrow week.
• • •
In the gaol, as I starve and freeze, I have much time to reflect upon my various crimes and to ready myself for my reckoning. I am kept with the other women who are awaiting punishment. We sleep on the floor with the rats and mice, and when the food is brought in, we fall upon it like wild beasts. None of us is above using our fingernails or yanking at someone’s hair to try to get a larger share for ourselves. When villagers pay the turnkey tuppence to come and jeer at us, we take it in turns to stick an arm through the metal grate in the hopes that one of them will pass us a bit of hard bread or an apple gone soft and brown. How many times have I given a penny at church for the Souls in the Hole, thinking it would provide them with something more than this?
Because I am known as a witch, I am given a bit of space. There is one other here who is to be hanged for witchcraft, but as her crime was merely attempting to learn the span of the Queen’s life through divination, she is not as feared as I. I am the one who killed harmless babes and sickened my neighbors’ pigs. I am the one who took a lancet to my child’s arm and drained his blood into a basin for Heaven only knows what evil purpose.
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