Janis Hallowell, author of The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn, is a MacDowell Fellow, and her short fiction has been published in Ploughshares. She lives in Colorado with her husband and daughter.

She Was

A NovelBy Janis Hallowell

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Janis Hallowell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061243264

Chapter One

Doreen Woods drives through the still neighborhood. It is 7 A.M. and the August sky over Denver is already baked to a high, hard shell. There is no breeze. It hasn't rained for two months and none is expected. But at this hour, even though it's already hot, there's a freshness that can't be denied. She punches the AC button on the dashboard but keeps her window open. Extravagant, she thinks, like Richard Nixon, thirty-five years ago, running the White House air-conditioning at maximum so that he could enjoy his fireplace in the summer.

Thirty-five years ago she was eighteen, the same age as her son is now. She would have rather died than compare herself to Nixon. Thirty-five years ago, she and her generation, in their well-fed arrogance, agreed that Nixon was bad, Vietnam was wrong, and it was time for revolution. For the three and a half decades since then she's chastised herself for that arrogance, but now, in 2005, the architects of the Iraq War make the Nixon administration look like amateurs. And echoes of the old calls for change can be heard. It will be interesting to see what this generation, her son's generation, will do with a bad war.

Cold air blasts out of the vents as she drives with her elbow jutting out the open window. At fifty-three years old, nothing is as black-and-white as it used to be. She's a wife, a mother, and a dentist. She's middle-class, middle-aged, and what they called back then bourgeois. She smiles at the word. Nobody uses it anymore, but that's what she has become.

The elms that shade the streets stand thirsty and exhausted. Because of the drought, Denver has become a city that conserves water. Their lawn, hers and Miles's, optimistically planted in May, was dutifully sacrificed in June when water restrictions forced them to choose between the new sod in front and the cherry trees in back. There was no debate. Miles is the gardener, it was his decision and he chose the fruit trees over a water-guzzling lawn. He'd planted the ten saplings when they first moved to Denver from Boston. They were the only things, at first, that gave him pleasure here. He watered, mulched, staked, and pruned the little trees. Now, six years later, they form a small orchard that, if there had been moisture, would be bearing its first fruit.

Most of the yards she passes are brown and parched, but three houses flaunt deep green lawns and lush gardens. All three are mammoth and ostentatious. Miles despises the owners. "They have this infuriating sense of entitlement," he says. "How could anyone expect them to sacrifice their landscaping?" Driving by now, Doreen gazes at the green, drinking it in. She understands why it irks Miles, but at the same time she can't help her surge of unwarranted joy in those three lawns, flamboyantly breaking the rules.

The truth is that in spite of drought and war, the mistakes of the past and the tenuousness of the future, this particular morning makes her absurdly happy. In spite of the vaguely disturbing realization that she has something in common with Richard Nixon, she's happy with the enamel blue sky and the fine linen of her skirt. And under the skirt her legs are still strong, though her belly and butt have gone soft. Right now, though, she doesn't care because the warm air from outside mixes with the manufactured cool and plays with her hair. The sun is still soft enough to feel welcome and nurturing. On such a morning she feels incredibly lucky. She has everything she needs; more than she ever thought she would get: a strong marriage, a son successfully grown and going off to college in the fall, a satisfying practice, and a beloved brother. Her elation subsides at the thought of Adam.

Adam's sudden decline over the last six months has been without mercy. He was functioning well with his MS, still building his sculptural stone walls. Then, one freezing day in February, when he'd been down with a cold and Doreen arrived with minestrone, she found him unable to see or walk. When the episode ended, he didn't regain as much as they'd hoped. Since then the cognitive symptoms have emerged: confusion, memory loss, and even some hallucinations.

Adam lives in a carriage house behind one of the old Denver mansions. She stops in every day now on her way to work. She uses her key to open the door, not wanting him to get up. In the small kitchen the dishes are clean and stacked in the drying rack next to the sink. The floor is swept, the stove is spotless, all evidence that Miranda's been here.

In Mexico, Miranda was a surgical nurse. Here, she's an illegal immigrant living with her son and daughter-in-law. She works for cash, prefers to do a split shift, coming to Adam's in the morning to get him up and give him breakfast, going home for the afternoon to watch her grandkids, and coming back again in the evening to give him supper, meds, and bed. Miranda makes Adam's illness bearable for all of them.

Walking through Adam's tiny vault of a living room with its high ceilings papered in William Morris is like taking a plunge into a tangled underworld. Doreen crosses over the threadbare Oriental, past the peacock green settee Adam bought in Boston. The door to the bedroom is open and she peeks in. His bed is not so large, it's only a queen ("Only a queen?" Adam has been known to say), but it fills the small room. The head and footboards are massively ornate with a canopy frame Adam has draped with sheer white and pale blue silk.

He's sitting up in bed, propped on pillows. His bare chest is thin, his muscles ropy, so that he has the look of a ruined ballet dancer. He's holding a short string of black beads in his right hand. In his left is a small dog-eared book the size of a box of matches, strung onto a leather cord. He doesn't turn to Doreen, but keeps staring ahead at some point in the mid-distance.

Continues...
Excerpted from She Wasby Janis Hallowell Copyright © 2009 by Janis Hallowell. Excerpted by permission.
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