The Book of Essie Read online

  ALSO BY MEGHAN MACLEAN WEIR

  Between Expectations: Lessons from a Pediatric Residency

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2018 by Meghan MacLean Weir

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Oxford University Press Canada for permission to reprint an excerpt of “Variations on the Word ‘Sleep’ ” from Selected Poems II, 1976–1986 by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1987 by Margaret Atwood. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Oxford University Press Canada. All rights reserved.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Weir, Meghan MacLean, author.

  Title: The book of Essie : a novel / by Meghan MacLean Weir.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017032041 | ISBN 9780525520313 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525520320 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Teenage girls—Fiction. | Celebrities—Fiction. | Families—Fiction. | Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.E4324496 B66 2018 | DDC 813/.6—DC23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017032041

  Ebook ISBN 9780525520320

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph by Sarah Toure/plainpicture

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub

  v5.3.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Meghan MacLean Weir

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Esther

  Roarke

  Liberty

  Esther

  Liberty

  Roarke

  Esther

  Roarke

  Liberty

  Roarke

  Esther

  Liberty

  Roarke

  Esther

  Liberty

  Esther

  Liberty

  Roarke

  Liberty

  Roarke

  Esther

  Roarke

  Liberty

  Esther

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  For my family

  And the king loved Esther above all the women, and she obtained grace and favour in his sight more than all the virgins; so that he set the royal crown upon her head, and made her queen.

  ESTHER 2:17

  Then Esther the queen answered and said, If I have found favour in thy sight, O king, and if it please the king, let my life be given me at my petition, and my people at my request:

  For we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish.

  ESTHER 7:3–4

  Esther

  On the day I turn seventeen, there is a meeting to decide whether I should have the baby or if sneaking me to a clinic for an abortion is worth the PR risk. I am not invited, which is just as well, since my being there might imply that I have some choice in the matter and I know that I have none. I listen in, though, the way Lissa and I used to before she went away. It was Lissa who discovered the vent in the wall of the laundry room, who realized that you could eavesdrop on everything that was said in the production office if you climbed onto the dryer and put your ear up against the filigreed bronze grate.

  The winter Lissa broke her leg, she was fourteen and I was nine. I remember she chose an orange cast that Mother hated and the doctor laughed and said something about Lissa being a firecracker and Mother frowned but didn’t dare to disagree, not with the cameras rolling. I could tell she was worried that the color was too bright, that it would bleed on-screen or at the very least be distracting. It lasted only a second, the withering look she shot my sister as the fiberglass was unwrapped and wound round and round the crack above Lissa’s ankle. But even at nine, I was well versed in Mother’s methods of wordless communication. I knew exactly what to look for, just as I knew to look for the flash of defiance in Lissa’s eyes that was my sister’s only reply.

  The doctor signed the cast when he was done and so did all the nurses, then Lissa and I were given Popsicles for the ride home. They were orange, to match the cast, but Mother made us throw them in the trash as soon as we reached the parking lot. She said the sugar would ruin our teeth, but I think really she did it just to punish us, to remind Lissa that she shouldn’t count on the cameras for protection, that they might delay the consequences of her actions but would never entirely prevent them. She needn’t have bothered. It was the first lesson any of us learned.

  That cast was the reason it became my job to climb up and report everything the grown-ups said, because Lissa couldn’t do it herself without breaking the only good leg she had left. It’s possible that without that orange cast, Lissa would never have told me about the vent at all, since trusting me was a risk. She might have kept the secret to herself, ferreting away this little piece of knowledge the way she used to hide the chocolate bars she stole from Stahl’s Sweet Shoppe when she stopped in with Becca Twomey on their way home from school. Lissa never bought anything, but Becca was allowed to spend her allowance on whatever she wanted; in any case, that was how it seemed.

  Lissa and I, on the other hand, were allowed chocolate only on birthdays and Easter. I always wondered, after she was gone and I found the box of unopened candy under her bed, why she bothered to steal it at all, why she took such a chance. If she had been found out, it wouldn’t have been only Daddy’s paddle she’d have had to contend with. Mother’s silent punishment would have been much worse. It meant something, I realized, that Lissa could sneak the Milky Ways into her bag without Mr. Stahl noticing yet never bring herself to open them. Eating the chocolate, I saw much later on, would have been the thing that made the stealing real.

  * * *

  —————

  The dryer is running and slightly warm when I sit on it. It’s a pleasant sensation, but the clang of some sort of metal clip getting thwapped against the drum covers up the sound of the producer speaking on the other side of the wall, so I turn the dryer off. Once the drum has stopped turning, I can hear well enough to make out what Candy is saying. The name fits her. Sweet as sugar but hard enough to break a tooth on. She has been with us since before I was born, since that first Christmas special when Matty was not quite three and my parents had just been told that there would be no more children.

  Daddy had spent so much time on television by then you’d have thought it would have come naturally, but Mother said he was as nervous as a pig in a bacon factory the day the new crew started filming. Up until then, the cameras had only been at church, where they were entirely under Daddy’s control. Could he tell then that the balance of power was subtly shifting? In any case, Mother had to force Daddy to let the crew int
o the house and even then he did this thing where he scratched his wrist incessantly anytime the cameras were pointed at him. Candy’s team did their best to edit this out, to use the close-ups of his pensive expression and his clear blue eyes, but there are a few shots where you can see him moving his fingers back and forth compulsively, as if possessed, like an addict scratching at invisible bugs burrowing just beneath his skin.

  Mother stole the show, though, so it didn’t matter. She cried real tears when she revealed their struggles to conceive, their disappointment. She was candid when she confessed that they had always wanted a big family, a brood, a flock to tend and raise up in His grace and light. After all, if children are a gift from God, surely Daddy was deserving of more than just a single blessing since he had made it his life’s work to speak His truth and praise His name even in these darkest days. She sighed and reached out and took my father’s hand then, stilled it, and held it tight to keep him from scratching. With her eyes turned up to the ceiling, the tears welled at first but did not fall. Then Mother looked directly at the camera and breathed something about accepting God’s will and those fat drops rolled right down her tastefully rouged cheeks as if she had control over gravity itself.

  That hour-long special probably would have just been a one-off since Daddy said the focus should be on his ministry, not on his family, but on Christmas Eve they found out that Daniel was on the way and people called it an honest-to-God miracle and there was no stopping after that. Nine months later when my brother was born, ten million people tuned in to see it happen. Not the actual moment, of course, but everything leading up to it: the praying, the hand-holding, the reciting of bits of verse. Then he was lifted, slick and shrieking and still streaked with blood, and Daddy let loose a heartfelt alleluia and a regular television phenomenon was born.

  * * *

  —————

  On the other side of the wall I hear Candy say, “Are you sure?”

  To her credit, there is no judgment in her tone—none that I can detect, in any case. Her face might be an entirely different matter, but I cannot see it. I can imagine, though, the near silent signs of disapproval: the slightly downturned lip, the light tap of a perfectly manicured nail on the polished wood surface of the table. Candy has no children, after all. We are all the family she’s got. It’s possible that this feels personal, though I doubt she would ever admit it.

  “I watched her repeat the test myself.”

  This is my mother’s voice, smooth and velvety and utterly composed. You would think she was discussing which muffin recipe she might bake for an upcoming church fair, parsing the relative merits of currants and pumpkin spice. She almost sounds bored. The words fall evenly from her lips, with a hint of a drawl that I recognize as an affectation. Like her modest light blue suit and single strand of pearls, this voice is something that has been carefully chosen; cultivated, even. The vocal coach comes once a week on Tuesday mornings and stops by on an as-needed basis to deliver special lozenges if Mother’s throat is sore, which is more often than you would expect. She is forever sipping tea with honey and telling people how exhausting it is, running the household all by herself since Daddy has to conserve his energies for more elevated pursuits. Except she doesn’t really run the household; Candy does. But no one would ever dare tell Mother that.

  In the early days, when it was just Daddy’s church services that were being broadcast and before Mother herself was properly a star, they used a voice double for close-ups of Mother standing in the front row during hymns. As the voices of the congregation swelled behind her, Mother would hold her hymnal open at her waist, never looking down at the page but instead keeping her eyes glued to the stained glass window above and behind the altar. She had each and every song in that book memorized, knew even the page numbers by heart. The organist would play a few bars of introduction and then Mother’s mouth would open and shut in rhythm with the music, soundlessly I knew, but it looked for all the world like she was really singing, as if the music itself had her in its thrall.

  Then the camera would zoom in even closer and in the version that TIL would broadcast, one voice would be heard rising above the others, a voice like an angel’s, or so Daddy liked to tell his parishioners during coffee hour. This sort of compliment always made Mother blush demurely and shake her head so that the gaggle of old women who followed Daddy around at events like this would transition directly from talking about Mother’s voice to remarking upon how modest she was. No one knew that the voice was not really hers, that it belonged to a music teacher in Cincinnati named Tracey Goldberg. No one knew that Tracey, raising three children all on her own after her husband skipped town with a waitress from Des Moines, had not even read the nondisclosure agreement Candy had handed her, had not stopped to think what sort of lies she would be helping to perpetuate, since signing that single piece of paper meant that she would never again have to worry about how to feed her children.

  These days they still dub in Tracey’s voice for the singing, but even the speaking voice that Mother uses now, a voice that she probably thinks of as entirely her own, is a complete work of fiction. This used to make me angry, especially when she was yelling. I used to yell back, to try to push her into revealing her true self, that sharp twinge of Appalachia, the dropped consonants, the seemingly arbitrary vowels, but she never did. Eventually I began to suspect that maybe she had no true self remaining, that it was not just covered up but had been destroyed entirely.

  “You watched her?” Candy asks, and here there is a hint of amusement.

  I know she is picturing me on the toilet, skirt hiked up and underwear around my ankles, holding the stick with just the tips of my fingers as I try to pee on it without getting any on myself. As if such a feat were even possible.

  “I watched her.”

  In truth Mother had turned away once I began to shimmy down my cotton briefs. She hasn’t seen my bum since I was potty trained, I don’t think, and just the idea of that much flesh probably embarrassed her. But she heard the stream of urine, heard me place the stick on the edge of the sink beside her, watched as it turned blue. A mother’s worst fear, or so some people say. But not my mother’s.

  “And she told you she was afraid she might be pregnant?” Candy asks.

  How would that conversation have played out? I wonder, and once again I consider it. First off, I would have had to catch Mother alone with no risk of interruption, no easy task given the number of people who walk freely through our house. Then I would have had to make sure she was listening, truly listening, and not just nodding her head and gazing vaguely in my direction the way she often does. No, a conversation would have been too risky. There was too great a chance it would have gone according to her plan instead of according to mine. So I bought the pregnancy test and left it in my bathroom where I knew she would find it. Actually, I bought three, though I left the money on the shelf rather than going to the register. The first I used to confirm what I already knew. The second I left for her to find. The third I hid underneath my mattress in case denial kicked in and she threw the second away.

  “No, I found a pregnancy test in her bathroom where she had stashed it and I knew right then that something must be wrong.”

  From my perch on the dryer I almost laugh out loud. I find the notion that Mother does not realize that I know she goes through my bathroom drawers almost tragically comical. But more than that, this proposition that she possesses some heightened intuition, that she picked up on some subtle clue and swooped in just in time to play the hero, is blatantly absurd. The pieces to this puzzle should have been apparent to her all along.

  “And the father?” Candy is asking.

  Here Mother is silent. There is the sound of papers being shuffled. Has she really brought notes to this meeting? She couldn’t have. She wouldn’t want there to be anything in writing, anything that might be tracked. The papers must be for something else, or mayb
e they are even blank, just there for effect. Maybe she is playing a part even within that room, just as she does outside it.

  Finally, Mother answers Candy’s question without really answering it at all. “We don’t have to worry about him. He won’t say a word.”

  Of course he won’t, I think. He has the most to lose.

  “Well then,” says Candy, who has lasted as long as she has by learning when to stop, when not to push. She can tell that this is information that Mother does not plan to share. “Let’s run through our list of options. Gretchen?”

  At this I sit up straighter and turn my head so that my ear is pointed up toward the grate. I am curious to see if there are any options besides the ones of which I am already aware. I hear Gretchen clear her throat. She is younger than Candy and Mother, who are roughly the same age. Brown hair, sharp features, mousy, though that descriptor applies more to a tendency to twitch and scurry rather than to her actual appearance. Her face, taken by itself, is actually rather pretty. Gretchen works in media relations or publicity or whatever it is you call it when your job is to make a fairly unremarkable family universally recognized and adored.

  At this, she and the others who came before her have been surprisingly successful. Recently I’ve tried to dissect this improbability, but when I was growing up, I never really wondered why the show became so popular. Contrary to what some left-wing bloggers might say, this wasn’t because I am at all conceited. It was because I lacked perspective. Mother said we were Called to lead by example, and the capital C hung in the air like something holy. So I believed her. I didn’t know any better.