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“I just said no, okay? Can’t you pick something else?”
“Pleeeeease?”
“Ada,” he said, snapping the book shut and placing it back on the shelf, “let’s go to your room now. Come on, I’ll read you something before bed.”
“Fine.” She took him by the arm and led her into her bedroom. He sat in the fluffy desk chair, swiveling round to face her as she climbed into bed. Immediately she said, “Come up here,” and tapped the space beside her. This he took as a sign, a last moment of companionship between the two of them. He didn’t climb in, but as Ada sank further beneath the covers to snuggle her bedfellow—a teddy, in pinstriped pajamas, named Terence—he made a point of tucking her in before moving to the bookshelf.
“Would you read me some stories from the Bible?”
He plucked the large hardback from the shelf and flipped through its gilded pages. Daniel In the Lion’s Den, David and Goliath; they were all here, and up there among his favorites. He remembered doting on the Good Samaritan, on Jonah and the Whale, which merged in his mind with the animated Pinocchio and Geppetto in the whale’s belly. At St. Mary’s he’d been taught to believe that these words, in this very book, were the true word of God, of history. A documented fact. His own Bible had been hefty and battered, a copy that took him through from childhood into early adolescence.
It was the Bible, after all, that had taught him who he was today. He had always wished to understand if he was more like Adam or if he was really intended to be an Eve. He’d always enjoyed the advantages that came with being a man, and particularly enjoyed Adam’s task of naming the fowl of the air, the beast of the field. He also understood Adam’s feeling of loneliness, but was much more interested in the contemptible Eve. Having scanned the pages of Genesis, he was shocked to learn that Eve’s birth could be summarized in a single line:“Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.”When he’d asked Brother Mark where the rest of the creation story was, the clattering of rosary beads against the classroom’s chipped desks punctuated his answer: “Man came first, then woman,” Brother Mark explained, an elucidation worthy of documenting the whole creation of mankind. “The rest is history.”
As Bron witnessed the development of his own body, the wiry strands at his chin, the sprout at his navel like a weed, evolving just the same as those boys around him, he finally accepted that he could not be a woman, the rib taken from Adam without consent. Now there was David Bowie, Miley Cyrus, Billy Porter, Sam Smith, but back then it had been Genesis he read for clues, and he’d longed to revert back into a rib or a speck of dust, the ground from which man was made, and acquire a new form altogether. Something less distinct, less fixed. Having only two ways in which to exist was too restrictive. Not at all a viable way of living. Not for him. Adam, Eve—Adam, Eve; he couldn’t choose.
Then, he had that Eureka moment, that spasm of knowledge. The forbidden apple had fallen from the tree. He was not Adam, he was not Eve, but a variation on the universal human, who at one time had been neither, had been both. This is what the words in the Bible taught him. Man, woman: it was not grown from the earth itself, but established in the manmade walls of schools, churches, homes. It pressed itself like mildew upon panes of glass, and today he was able to feel amused by the cartoonish pictures that accompanied the abridged words of Ada’s gift-edition Bible.
“Let’s go with this one!” she said when he’d flicked back to the contents page.
“The Parable of the Lost Son?” he said, remembering it from his edition as the parable of the prodigal son.
“Yes, yes. It’s Daddy’s favorite. He’s always calling Darcy his prodigal son.”
“Why?”
“Because of all the time he spends away, I guess.”
He began to read, and was instantly captured by the story of a father and his two sons. He related to the child, who wanted to leave his former life behind, but felt compassion for the father, who was hopeful for his son’s return. When he turned the page, the cartoon laid out the big house atop the hill; the son returning, his head cast down; the father, with his long beard and headpiece, running down the lane, arms wide open to greet him.
This was not how he’d pictured the tale at all. The pages here were much too colorful, cheery. When he read, he tried to remove any bleakness from his oration.
“‘My son. You are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we must be glad because your brother has returned to us alive and well. Once he was lost, but now he is found.’Ada”—he stopped reading—“are you crying? What’s wrong? What is it?”
“I’m not crying,” she squeaked, only to prove that she was.
“You know it’s good for the soul,” he repeated.
“It’s just that—” She took in a deep breath and sighed. “Darcy. He won’t speak to me. He won’t even look at me. All he does is try his best to get rid of me, just like he did this morning. Haven’t you noticed?”
Hehadnoticed—the way Ada would address him at the breakfast table, only for him to grunt a response and ignore her, how he would get up and leave any time she entered the room.
“I’m sure he’s just got a lot on his mind.”
“He does hate me. I so wanted to come with you this morning. He’s been ignoring me ever since that night because he knows—he knows I did it!”
“What do you mean?” Bron said, soothing her when she covered her face under the sheets. “Did what, Ada?”
“It was me,” she said, her voice muffled by the duvet. “I started the fire in the library.”
“Of course you didn’t, silly. Why on earth would you think that?”
“I did, I did!” she screamed, emerging from the sheets. “But it was an accident, a complete and total accident. Please don’t tell Daddy, please! And Darcy—now he’ll hate me forever. I know he will, and they’ll send me off to boarding school as soon as they can.”
“Calm down, Ada,” he pleaded. Her face was panicked. He swiped away the tears that rolled down her cheeks, the mention of boarding school worming its way into his heart. He tried to settle her. “Of course I won’t say anything to your father, but he wouldn’t dream of sending you away. He loves you. Explain to me why you’re saying all this?”
“I heard them talking about it. At the party. Daddy and Uncle Gio—they were talking about me, and boarding school. I know that’s what Darcy wants, he’s always said so, and Daddy’s getting tired of me too. I can tell. Everybody’s always out of the house, away from me, and they say I can’t join them. Now even Daddy’s going off without me.”
“Did you say Uncle Gio? Giovanni was there? At the party?”
