surprise and darkening all at once, so that she frightened me, and a sound escaped my throat, and Evan, leaving me, stood up. Karen said to me, although I think not to Evan, What is it that you do? To which question I could no more have made an answer than I could have explained to her the mystery of the sacraments. Evan left the room, and I do not believe that he spoke. Karen came to me and hovered over my bed, examining me, her hair pulled tightly back off her head, her dress with its shell buttons rising to her throat, and I remember thinking to myself that though the wondrous forgiveness I had so recently felt encompassed everyone around me, I did not really like Karen much, and I felt a pity for her I had not consciously realized before. I believe I closed my eyes then and drifted back into that state from which I had only a short time earlier emerged.
Not long after that incident, I recovered my health. Never was anyone so glad to greet the lustrous mornings of that spring, though I was quickly advised by Karen that my childhood was now over and that I would have to assume the responsibilities and demeanor of a young woman. Around that time, perhaps even immediately after my illness, it was decided that I would remain sleeping with Karen in the kitchen behind the curtain, and that our father would permanently take up the bed I had shared with Evan. This was because I had reached, during my illness, the age of fourteen, and that while I had been sick there had been certain changes in my body, which I will not speak of here, which made it necessary for me to move out of a room that Evan slept in.
Our mother having died, and our father out at sea for most of the hours in his day, I was put under the care of our sister, who was dutiful in her watch, but who I do not think was ever suited for the job. Sensing something, I know not what, a reluctance on her part perhaps, I was sometimes a torment to her, and I have often, in the years that have since passed, wished that I might have had her forgiveness for this. To her constrictions I gave protest, thus causing her to put me under her discipline until such time as I did not have so much freedom as before.
I would not like to attribute the loss of my liberty, my uncompromised happiness, to the coming of my womanhood, and I believe it is merely a coincidence of timing, but I was, nevertheless, plagued with extremely severe monthly pains, which may have had, at their root, the more probable cause of my barrenness.
I must stop now, for these memories are disturbing me, and my eyes are hurting.
WHEN I LOOK at photographs of Billie, I can see that she is there — her whole self, the force of her — from the very beginning. Her infant face is intricately formed — solemn, yet willing to be pleased. Her baby hair is thick and black, which accentuates the navy of her eyes. Even then she has extraordinarily long lashes that charm me to the bottom of my soul and stop passers by on the street. Our friends congratulate me for having produced such a beguiling creature, but inwardly I protest. Was I not merely a custodian — a fat, white cocoon?
In the first several weeks after Billie’s birth, Thomas and Billie and I inhabited a blur of deepening concentric circles. At the perimeter was Thomas, who sometimes spun off into the world of students and the university. He bought groceries, wrote at odd hours, and looked upon his daughter as a mystifying and glorious interruption of an ordered life. He carried Billie around in the crook of his arm and talked to her continuously. He introduced her to the world: “This is a chair; this is my table at the diner.” He took her — zipped into the front of his leather jacket, her cheek resting against his chest or her head bobbing beneath his chin — on his daily walks through the streets of the city. He seemed, for a time, a less extraordinary man, less preoccupied, more like the cliché of a new father. This perception was reassuring to me, and I think to Thomas as well. He discovered in himself a