The Curiosities Read online

  Dedication

  For Bill and my boys, with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Nell

  Chapter Two: Nell

  Chapter Three: Paige

  Chapter Four: Nell

  Chapter Five: Betsy

  Chapter Six: Annie

  Chapter Seven: Annie

  Chapter Eight: Odin

  Chapter Nine: Nell

  Chapter Ten: Betsy

  Chapter Eleven: Paige

  Chapter Twelve: Annie

  Chapter Thirteen: Betsy

  Chapter Fourteen: Nell

  Chapter Fifteen: Paige

  Chapter Sixteen: Betsy

  Chapter Seventeen: Odin

  Chapter Eighteen: Nell

  Chapter Nineteen: Annie

  Chapter Twenty: Nell

  Chapter Twenty-one: Annie

  Chapter Twenty-two: Odin

  Chapter Twenty-three: Paige

  Chapter Twenty-four: Nell

  Chapter Twenty-five: Betsy

  Chapter Twenty-six: Nell

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Annie

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Betsy

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Nell

  Chapter Thirty: Paige

  Chapter Thirty-one: Odin

  Chapter Thirty-two: Nell

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Nell stood atop a stone retaining wall, next to a frozen lake, clutching a shoebox full of the remnants of a dead woman’s dreams. Her coat pockets bulged with the credit card bills she’d nabbed from the mailbox that morning before her husband could see them. She knew they were marked Past Due without even opening the envelopes.

  A gust of wind whipped up from the rippled banks, causing her to turn her head away from the shore and toward the mansion behind her, dark except for the lamp she’d left on in the office. What on earth am I doing here? she wondered.

  The wind died down and Nell looked at the box in her hands. Nestled inside were notes written in the sort of perfect, slanted cursive no longer taught in public schools. Jumbled along with them were pages torn from catalogs of galleries long since shuttered and snapshots of people Nell had never met.

  She felt as drained of color and life as the frozen landscape laid out at her feet. A year earlier, she never could have imagined keeping secrets from her husband. She would have pictured herself rocking a baby to sleep at the end of each evening instead of slipping into bed alone. She would have predicted that by now she’d have found a tenure-track teaching position.

  Instead, her next career move hinged on a box full of paper scraps, a cast of unpredictable artists, and a turn-of-the-century mansion in need of modernization. Nell had no idea how she was supposed to make sense of it all. All she knew was that she had to figure it out, somehow. She had no choice.

  Chapter One

  Nell

  PIECE: Edwin Blashfield, Pioneers, circa 1917. Oil painting. Currently on long-term loan from the Elizabeth Barrett Trust for the Fine Arts to the University of Wisconsin.

  Outside the windows of the dean’s residence, white lights left over from the holidays twinkled on bare tree branches, lending a festive glow to the otherwise quiet neighborhood. But inside the walls of the stately brick home, Nell Parker wasn’t feeling particularly festive, despite the cocktails being passed and the red dress she’d bought for the occasion.

  She hadn’t wanted to come. Not today, when she was expecting news. But Josh had insisted. Rumors had already begun to circulate among the law faculty that in the wake of his recent award, the young professor might leave Madison for one of the East Coast schools that kept courting him. He and Nell both needed to be at the reception, Josh had said, to show people that they planned to put down roots here.

  “To be honest, I don’t really want to go, either,” he’d said earlier that evening. “I’d much rather just put a movie on and stay in tonight. But showing up at stuff like this is important for tenure. And maybe the party will help get our minds off waiting.”

  Nell had zipped up her dress and said, “I don’t think there’s much chance of that. But I’ll go.” She’d walked over to where he stood in front of the mirror and kissed him just below his earlobe, her lips brushing against his short-clipped beard.

  Now, she set her still-full wineglass on the windowsill and dug in her purse for her cell phone. She stole a glimpse at the screen to check the time. 4:47. The clinic would be closing in thirteen minutes.

  What could possibly be taking so long? she wondered. She curbed the impulse to call the clinic yet again. She’d already called three times since she went in for blood work that morning. Each time, the receptionist had told her, “Your lab results aren’t in yet. A nurse will call you as soon as they are available.” The woman’s tone was calm and even, which only served to highlight how frantic Nell felt, how light-headed and desperate. The receptionist talked about how the wait time so far wasn’t outside the “usual time frame” it took “the lab” to process samples. It all sounded so neutral, so medical. Nothing about any of this felt neutral to Nell.

  She stared at her phone and watched the digital display turn from 4:47 to 4:48. She’d give the clinic five more minutes and, if she still hadn’t heard anything, she’d call again. The last thing her nerves needed was to be in limbo all weekend, waiting for the clinic to open Monday.

  Across the wood-paneled room, Josh looked to be deep in conversation with an older, taller version of himself, right down to the square glasses and sweating glass of Scotch. Nell recognized the other man as a member of the law faculty, but couldn’t remember his name. She and Josh had lived in Madison for a year and a half now, but Nell still couldn’t keep Josh’s colleagues and all their disciplines straight, even with mnemonic devices. Square glasses and Scotch go with Stanley Something Something, she remembered. But did he teach Constitutional Law or Contracts?

  Josh caught her eye and made a beckoning motion, as if to invite her into the conversation. She took a few steps toward them, enough to hear the older professor discussing an exhibit he’d seen at the art museum on campus, of paintings by Edwin Blashfield, the same artist who’d done the ceiling mural inside the dome of the State Capitol building.

  “My wife has a PhD in art history,” she heard Josh say. “I’m sure she’d love to check it out.” He nodded in her direction. “Nell, you remember Stan . . .”

  But her phone buzzed in her hand just then. Nell held it up to show him and said, “Excuse me, I’ve got to take this.”

  She hurried out to the foyer. More partygoers flowed into the house, checking their coats with a young hostess in a sparkly green dress, probably a student. Nell envied her. Not just for the way she wore the flimsy garment without even a suggestion of self-consciousness—no tug at the short hemline, no pulling up of the thin straps—but also for her station in life. Nell thought back to when she’d been around the same age, early twenties, maybe. She’d been living in Chicago and just starting grad school. Back then, her cares never extended beyond considering which jeans best flattered her backside when she went out with friends or which seminar to take (Poststructuralism or Postminimalism?). How things had changed.

  Nell answered the phone. “Hello?” Her eyes darted around for a private place to talk. She tried the door to a powder room she’d spotted earlier, but it was locked.

  “Hello,” said a familiar male voice. “Is this Nell?”

  “Yes,” she managed to say. “Dr. Lynch?” She could feel her heart thumping inside
her rib cage. She had been expecting one of the nurses to call.

  “Are you able to talk?” he asked.

  “Of course. Just give me a moment to get somewhere quieter.” Nell eyed the white-shirted servers flitting into and out of the kitchen. She followed one of them and crouched in the corner of a walk-in pantry, where she pulled the pocket door shut behind her.

  The voice on the other end cut in and out. “Can . . . oooo . . . hear—?”

  Of course her reception would decide to fail at this very moment. She silently cursed both her cell phone provider for having such crappy coverage and the walls of the old house for being so thick.

  “Hang on a second.” Nell got up and went back through the foyer, pushing open the heavy front door.

  The hostess called after her. “Wait! Do you want your coat?”

  Nell ignored the hostess and shut the door as a wall of frigid air hit her face.

  “Okay,” she said, exhaling.

  “Nell, I want you to know how sorry I am that it took us so long to get back to you today. There was a huge backup at the lab,” the doctor said.

  The results are bad, Nell thought. He wouldn’t apologize first if he were going to give me good news.

  “I’m not pregnant,” she said. Maybe if she said it first, tested out the words herself instead of hearing them from Dr. Lynch, their meaning would hurt less.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said. “Your blood test was negative.”

  So much for her theory about the words hurting less if she braced herself for them. The January wind against her bare legs stung much less than the harsh finality of what the doctor said. Nell wavered in her high heels, feeling light-headed again. She leaned against the wrought iron railing of the front porch, pulling gasps of icy air into her lungs.

  “Those were our last frozen embryos. And you put two of them in there.” Nell clutched her midsection with one hand, reeling with anger at her body. “I can’t believe neither of them took.”

  “I don’t understand it, either,” Dr. Lynch said. “I thought we’d gotten your meds just right this time. You seemed to be responding well to the hormones. I truly hoped this would be it.”

  “You and me both.”

  The doctor went on to talk about options and next steps. Something about a new IVF protocol that had been published for women of “advanced maternal age”—the medical terminology for women who, like Nell, were over thirty-five.

  She barely heard him, staring instead at the trees lining the sidewalk. The twinkle of lights strung up among them did little to hide their spindly, barren branches. Nell wondered how she’d possibly get through another winter without a baby—or at least the hope of a baby—to fill the hole left by the one she’d lost.

  When she hung up, she realized she’d been holding her breath. She let it out, and a puff of water vapor rose toward the sky like so much hope, then dispersed and disappeared.

  When Nell stepped back inside, shaking, she spotted Josh in the foyer, already waiting for her. He pulled on his gray wool jacket, his face creased with concern. He dangled his keys in one hand and Nell’s coat in the other.

  As soon as they made eye contact, Nell’s throat constricted and her eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them back. Josh closed the distance between them and put a hand on her shoulder. Stunned, Nell let him help her into her black dress coat and guide her to the door.

  As they walked down the porch steps, another couple was coming up. Josh gave them a polite nod, but Nell turned her face away, not wanting these strangers to see the tears that now fell freely down her cheeks.

  When they got to the car, Josh started the engine, but didn’t drive. Instead, he leaned his head back against the seat. “Shit,” he said. He leaned over to the passenger seat and wrapped his arms around Nell. “I’m so sorry. I was really hoping it would work this time. I mean, we doubled our odds, right? By transferring two.”

  Nell wiped her cheeks on his coat, then pulled back. “Apparently, increasing really crappy odds still gives you crappy odds.”

  Josh sighed and put the car into drive. He pulled away from the curb. “I just can’t believe we’re in the same place we started, after all the shots and surgeries . . .”

  And all the money I’ve spent, Nell thought. But Josh didn’t know about the cost, at least not the full extent of it. She pushed that thought aside and instead said, “Don’t forget no caffeine. And no vigorous exercise.”

  “No dairy, no gluten.”

  “And no alcohol,” Nell said. “I think I need a drink.”

  “Do we even have anything at home you like to drink? It’s been so long. We could stop somewhere if you want.”

  “Like a bar?” Nell shook her head. “I don’t really feel like dealing with humanity right now.”

  “I was thinking more like a liquor store. I could just run in.”

  “Sure,” Nell said. What she really wanted was to crawl into bed and sleep for days.

  They drove through the campus area, past high-rise apartment buildings and dormitories. The sidewalks were crowded with kids walking and texting, smoking, or standing in line outside of bars. Friday night, Nell remembered.

  “I thought it was winter break,” Nell said. “Shouldn’t all the students be gone?”

  “A lot of students come back early for jobs and stuff. And some of them probably just come back early because they can’t stand living with their parents for a whole month,” Josh said.

  As he stopped the car at a red light, a group of girls in miniskirts darted through the crosswalk. Nell put her palm on the fogged passenger window and said, “You’re probably not thinking about babies right now, girls, but if you had any idea that some of you might struggle to have them later, you’d be freezing your eggs instead of freezing your asses off in those skirts.”

  Josh let out a half-hearted laugh and stepped on the gas when the light changed. “I’m sure you weren’t thinking about your ovaries when you were twenty.”

  Nell shook her head. “It’s a cruel joke of nature, really, that our bodies are ready for babies long before our brains.”

  “Biology hasn’t caught up yet, I guess,” Josh said.

  He pulled into a curbside parking space outside a liquor store on University Avenue. Nell opened her door.

  “I thought you said you don’t want to deal with humanity right now,” Josh said.

  “I can make an exception. Liquor store people are my kind of people at the moment.” Nell knew her attempts at humor did little to diffuse the disappointment practically suffocating her, but it was the only way she could keep the tears at bay. She got out of the car and stepped over a snowbank onto the sidewalk. Inside the shop, she walked straight over to the shelves stacked with spirits. She grabbed a bottle of midrange bourbon and brought it to the register. The cashier, a girl with a pierced nose and lip, looked up from the hardcover novel she was reading and eyed Nell’s selection.

  “Good choice,” she said, shutting her book. Nell recognized the title from the list of National Book Award finalists she’d seen online somewhere. A few years ago, Nell probably would have read most of the books on that list. Even when she was in grad school, she’d always managed to carve out time to read for pleasure. But in the last year, her reading had focused mostly on PubMed articles about IVF, with the occasional infertility blog post thrown in.

  The clerk swiped her credit card and picked up a brown paper bag. Nell held up her hand. “I don’t need a bag. I’m bringing this right home.”

  The girl gave her a knowing nod and opened her book again.

  In the car, Josh sat hunched over his phone, typing something onto the tiny screen.

  “Work stuff?” Nell asked.

  He nodded. “One of my students wanting to know if grades have been posted yet.”

  “Is this the same kid that emailed you on Christmas Eve?”

  “Yep. And New Year’s Eve, too.”

  “That was just a couple of days ago. Don’t you have, like, a p
ortal where you upload grades when they’re ready? Why is he emailing you?”

  “My thoughts exactly, and that’s what I told him for the third time.” He looked over at the bottle of amber-colored liquid in Nell’s lap. “Bourbon, huh?”

  “I need some Southern hospitality,” she said.

  On the way home, they passed by the park at B. B. Clarke Beach, which in the summer would be crowded and noisy, with teenagers sunning themselves on the sand and children jumping off the swim raft. Now the park looked desolate, its outbuilding shuttered for the season.

  Josh parked the car in the driveway next to their gray stucco bungalow, small but sturdy. Built in 1928, it would need some work eventually. An update of the tiny kitchen and a new roof, for starters. But the house was within walking distance of one of the best public elementary schools in the city, which was one of the reasons they’d chosen it.

  Inside, Josh stacked logs in the potbellied stove while Nell went upstairs to put on her sweats. She made the mistake of standing in front of the mirror as she stepped out of her party dress. Bruises and needle marks formed a purple map across her belly and backside from the hormone shots she’d given herself in the weeks leading up to the embryo transfer ten days earlier. She ripped a Band-Aid off her arm that had been covered by her three-quarter-length sleeves. Beneath the bandage was a small red dot left from that morning’s blood draw. When she’d sat in the chair at the clinic for her serum pregnancy test, she’d still felt optimistic, if cautiously so, chattering with the nurse about whether the forecast for six inches of snow that weekend was accurate or whether it was just the local meteorologists getting overexcited.

  Nell wished now that she could preserve those moments, those snapshots of hope before the wide window of possibility came slamming down on her fingers.

  She slipped on a sweatshirt and a pair of yoga pants and went back downstairs, where a fire now flickered in the wood-burning stove. Josh came out from the kitchen and handed her a tumbler containing a single ice cube and a generous pour of whiskey.

  He held up his own glass in his other hand and tapped it against Nell’s. “Here’s hoping the rest of the year turns out better than it started.”