For Sally those moments were excruciating. She couldn’t remember Gann having ever given her an orgasm or having ever given any indication he cared to; now she clung to some uncomprehending unworthiness, never believing herself deserving of the climax to which her new lover dedicated himself. When the no slipped from her lips at the surge of her body onto his own lips she had no idea what it meant, though she had the sense of having been pleased like this before, and of how the orgasm was at once a transcendence she never believed in and a capitulation she could never forgive herself for making. In the dark she tried to make out the place and time into which these climaxes hurled her. In the dark she tried to make out the name and face of the man who knelt before her. She was overwhelmed by his insistence on beginning his life anew. She could barely stand the burden of his happiness. She could barely live up to the possibilities of her own happiness. He gave everything and took everything, and since she couldn’t get over the feeling that, where he believed there was everything, there was in fact only nothing, the fraud of it filled her with remorse. She knew, in the dark delirium of his pleasing her, that she’d been borne out of being owned into this blackness where she owned him; and in that blackness the one clue to who she really was was there right in front of her, and farther from her reach than ever. And thus what she released onto his lips from the center of her was the echo of a distant memory that would determinedly abort the birth of the person in her who had sworn never to be owned again. She wouldn’t settle for happiness without meaning. She clutched his black hair that fell across her thighs. When his tongue found in her the clearing where the small child waited, in the embrace of the small child’s arms was a small white baby seagull not yet strong or knowing enough to fly from the blinding white circle that engulfed it. Like the tragic alchemy of her face, by which her beauty was released by sorrow, Sally could only fly alone. She could not fly with the only lover she’d ever known who believed in her wings.
Three months after her affair with Etcher began, Sally became mysteriously ill.
It began in the middle of her, in the small of her back, as if the small white seagull was growing inside and beating its wings for release. For some time it was merely pain, and then one morning it overcame her and she collapsed. For an hour Polly wandered the unit, absently playing with this toy or that and crying to her unconscious mother; finally she opened the door and wandered out into the circle, where Cecilia the neighbor saw her. Cecilia went out to talk to the child. “Mama’s sad,” Polly told the woman. “Well, let’s go see what she’s sad about,” Cecilia answered, taking the little girl’s hand. Cecilia found Sally shuddering on the floor. When Etcher returned that night Sally was in bed, the pillow beneath her wet hair a ring of sweat. What dismayed him most was her whiteness. She was as white as anyone he’d ever seen in the Ice. He held her all night to conjure the blackness back into her; in her ear he coaxed her with advice, he beseeched her to breathe the night deep into her lungs, that it would flush her body with the tinge of twilight. The next morning she seemed to have rebounded.
But that night she was worse. Etcher returned from work to find Polly alternately poking at her mother’s somber daze and playing with her mother’s jewelry, having strewn them from one end of the unit to the other. Now Sally was white like ice itself. Her lips were cracked and her hair was matted; the black lines of her eyes and mouth were the very scrawl of death. One moment he’d touch her and she was clammy and cold, the next she was on fire, and she was only fleetingly aware anyone else was there. Polly began to cry. Etcher was astounded. He scooped up the child and wrapped her in the tiny pink blanket of her bedding and paced the floor with her as Sally moaned to the sound of her daughter. “Why is Mama crying?” the little girl bawled. After almost an hour she finally fell asleep. Sally croaked with thirst. In the fit of her fever she hurled her blankets off her. The sheets of the bed were soaked beneath her. Etcher lifted her from the bed and set her on the couch as he plundered the various drawers and shelves for more bedding. He changed the sheets and put Sally back to bed; now she was freezing. He buried her with blankets and laid himself across her. She shook violently beneath him.
It continued all night. All through the night Sally thrashed in a rage of heat and cold, as Etcher would lift her from the bed and remake it, changing the sheets that were wet with her sweat. His hope was that she would expel the disease in the torrent of her fever; he held her so close and she was so hot that their embrace seared him, and when he wasn’t holding Sally he attended to Polly, who woke hourly through the night and called to her mother. When her mother didn’t come she cried. When she cried Sally stirred from the sleep that Etcher spent the night fighting for. At dawn, when the little girl tumbled from bed and came over to pull her mother’s hair, Etcher bathed and dressed Polly, fed her some breakfast, and took her to the neighbor. “Help me,” he begged.
“Where’s her father?” Cecilia answered, taking the child.
For the first time Sally seemed to sleep peacefully in the morning light. Etcher, allowing himself to hope the crisis had passed, crossed downtown on the way to Central; he didn’t make his usual morning stop to see Tedi. At the archives in the early afternoon he was gripped by a sense of something ominous. He took the lift up to one of the offices on the next level, where he found one of the priests. “I have to go now,” he told the priest.
“What are you talking about?” the priest said, taken aback.
“I’ll return when I can.” He had found a new capacity for ruthlessness in his life. It was part of a new power that didn’t allow for second-guessing in the matters about which he’d found a new determination. When he returned home, a moment beyond the door’s threshold he discovered a metamorphosis taking place. Laid out on the bed she was drained of color or cognizance. The blood in her was as still as stone. She was lividly caught in some abyss that denied Sally Hemings had ever existed. He put on his coat and went to the next circle and found a doctor.