It still seemed impossible that such lives, such places, could be real—and yet they had to be. Why would Dolores Wood write about them otherwise?
In A Love So Strange, Sam never spoke to her parents. She’d been forced to leave the family because of how she was. Betty was on good terms with her parents, but only because she kept up the pretense that she was normal. When Betty’s parents came to visit, Sam slept in the small bed in their spare room as though she were no more than a roommate, and the two girls were careful to make sure that room looked truly lived in, too, hanging pictures on the walls and storing knickknacks on the shelves. They intended to look innocent, even if someone were to report them to the police.
What would happen to Janet if her family discovered she’d kissed Marie? Or, for that matter, if they found the book tucked under her mattress?
Her parents would be devastated. Grandma, too.
Janet would never be able to live a regular life. She’d never get married. Unless she were to move far away, leaving behind everything she’d known, and somehow found a husband for herself in a strange new city.
Janet wasn’t entirely sure she wanted a husband anymore, though.
She’d never thought much about that particular question before. It had never seemed a question in the first place. Everyone got married. It was either that, or become a nun like the sisters at St. Paul’s.
Well, at least there was no need to worry about her family calling the police. Her father’s career was on shaky ground as it was, now that the Democrats had retaken Congress. If they found out about Janet, it would mean disaster for him. Besides, nowadays everyone knew these things were for doctors to handle. If Janet’s parents found out, they’d want her cured and quickly.
Perhaps they’d send her to St. Elizabeths. That was the new name for the local asylum, though some still called it the Government Hospital for the Insane. What if news of Janet’s admission got into the papers, though? The man who wrote the Washington Watch column was all too eager to write about the wrongdoings of Republicans, and a Senate committee attorney’s daughter entering an asylum would be news for at least a day or two, even if her specific illness wasn’t revealed. That day or two of news could be enough to ruin her father’s prospects forever.
No—most likely, her parents would confine her to the house. They might find a discreet doctor to make house calls until she was properly cured.
Janet wondered what such a cure entailed. All she knew about psychiatry was that the patients lay on couches and closed their eyes. That didn’t seem so terrible—but could it really change the way she felt about Marie?
Though the real problem was, Janet didn’t want to stop feeling the way she did.
Perhaps resistance to treatment was part of the sickness. Yet she didn’t feel sick. She felt healthier than she ever had before.
As Janet’s squat two-story row house came into view, she squared her shoulders and pulled off her cap. She ought to simply put all these worries aside for the time being. It was going to be a very busy summer.
The house was quiet as she approached. Her parents had gone to dinner at the club again, leaving Janet and Grandma to an evening on their own. On nights like this one, Janet usually warmed up a casserole and chatted with Grandma while they ate. After dinner they might listen to the radio awhile, then read in comfortable silence until bedtime.
The heat indoors was nearly unbearable on summer nights, so Mom and Dad usually slept on the screened porch at the back of the first floor, with Janet and Grandma on the separate porch just above. It had been their pattern ever since Grandma moved in. She’d declared as soon as she’d unpacked that, although she’d consented to live with them, she would not be forced to tolerate Janet’s father’s snores. It had been bad enough when he was a boy, she’d said, but now that he was grown she was no longer obliged to suffer.
Janet climbed the steps to the front porch, taking care to avoid the rickety old railing, and unlocked the front door, slipping off her shoes in the foyer in case Grandma was resting. In the evenings, every sound in the house was magnified.
A bright shape on the entry table caught Janet’s eye as she shrugged off her uniform jacket. A white envelope, solitary and stark against the shining black wood.
Janet snatched up the letter, her jacket falling to the floor. Panic rose in her throat at the sight of the typed letters across the front, spelling out her name in neat black ink. As her eyes flicked to the return address, she half prayed it was merely another letter from Holy Divinity.
Not this time. Bannon Press, the envelope proclaimed, followed by an address in New York City.
It had come.
Janet hugged the letter to her chest, her shoulders trembling under her thin white blouse. The envelope felt warm against her skin.
The seal was still in place. This letter was hers and hers alone.
Janet would take it straight to her room. She wanted to read the letter over and over, the way she’d done with A Love So Strange. She ran up the steps, her heart pounding, and didn’t slow when she reached the second-floor landing. Her hand was on the door to her bedroom when the voice came behind her.
“Why are you in such a hurry there, girl?”
“Grandma.” Janet tried in vain to steady herself before she turned. Her grandmother stood in the bathroom doorway, a fresh smile on her wrinkled face. Janet lowered her hand, wishing she were wearing a skirt so she could hide the letter in its folds. “Did you have a nice day?”
“Oh, your father came home for lunch and it was wretched, as always.” Grandma tsked. “When you’re not here to make it interesting, that is. I don’t know why they need you at that restaurant so much of the time.”
“Oh?” Janet racked her brain for a way to slip into her room without her grandmother following.
“Yes, yes. You know your father, always on about something.” Grandma folded her arms, and Janet steeled herself for a rant. “These days he’ll talk about nothing but that new bill. This ridiculous measure by the people who want to blaspheme the Lord’s holy name.”
“The In God We Trust bill?”
“That’s the one. The fools think if we put that on all our money, it’ll keep the Communists from blowing us into the sky. As if any one of those men down in Congress truly understands the first thing about Scripture. Or about Communists, for that matter.”
“Oh, Grandma.” Janet bent down to turn on the fan so it would cover the sound of their voices. The houses on either side of them were separated by no more than a narrow wall of bricks, and conversations carried so easily Janet sometimes felt she knew the neighbors’ problems as well as her own. Dad never liked it when Grandma talked about Communists, but he especially didn’t like it when the neighbors might hear.
Grandma had been a Socialist as a girl. She’d even been arrested once, for demonstrating against the draft during the first World War. She’d wanted to go on living in New York after Grandpa died, but Dad insisted she move in with them, telling the neighbors he wanted to look after her health. When they were alone, though, he said he’d made her leave because Grandma couldn’t be trusted not to walk into the United Nations one morning and tell Churchill himself to go fly a kite.
“Oh, don’t you worry about me, girl.” Grandma laughed as Janet switched on the fan. “Your father may act as though he’s in charge of what I do and don’t say, but trust me, he knows better! Now, enough political talk. You be a helpful child and tell me a happy story about your day.”
Janet tried to think, but her whole focus was on the letter tucked against her leg.
She hated having secrets from her