fanaticism, she was so far beyond his reach that he no longer even
attempted to influence her decisions.
Bewildered by the changes in Gina, unable to cope with the new woman
she had become, Joseph spent less and less time at home. He owned a
tailor shop–not an extremely prosperous business but a reliably steady
one– and he began to work unusually long hours. When he wasn’t
working he passed more time with his friends than he did with his
family, and as a result Ellen was not exposed either to his love or to
his fine sense of humor often enough to compensate for the countless,
dreary hours during which she existed stoically under her mother’s
stern, somber, suffocating domination.
For years Ellen dreamed of the day she would leave home, she looked
forward to that escape with every bit as much eagerness as a convict
anticipating release from a real prison cell. But now that she was on
her own, now that she had been out from under her mother’s iron hand
for more than a year, her future looked, incredibly, worse than it ever
had looked before. Much worse.
Something tapped on the window screen behind the booth.
Ellen twisted around, looked up, startled. For a moment she couldn’t
see anything. Just darkness out there.
Tap-tap-tap.
Who’s there?” she asked, her voice as thin as tissue, her heart
suddenly beating fast.
Then lightning spread across the sky, a tracery of fiery veins and
arteries.
In the flickering pulse of light, there were large white moths
fluttering against the screen.
“Jesus,” she said softly. “Only moths.”
She shuddered, turned away from the frantic insects, and sipped her
bourbon.
She couldn’t live with this kind of tension. Not for long. She
couldn’t live in constant fear. She had to do something soon.
Kill the baby.
In the bassinet the baby cried out again: a short, sharp noise almost
like a dog’s bark.
A distant crack of thunder seemed to answer the child, the celestial
rumbling briefly blotted out the unceasing voice of the wind, and it
reverberated in the trailer’s metal walls.
The moths went tap-tap-tap.
Ellen quickly drank her remaining bourbon and poured two more ounces
into her glass.
She found it difficult to believe that she had wound up in this shabby
place, in such anguish and misery, it seemed like a fever dream. Only
fourteen months ago she had begun a new life with great expectations,
with what had proved to be hopelessly naive optimism. Her world had
collapsed into ruin so suddenly and so completely that she was still
stunned.
Six weeks before her nineteenth birthday, she left home. She slipped
away in the middle of the night, not bothering to announce her
departure, unable to face down her mother. She left a short, bitter
note for Gina, and then she was off with the man she loved.
Virtually any inexperienced, small-town girl, longing to escape boredom
or oppressive parents, would have fallen for a man like Conrad
Straker.
He was undeniably handsome. His straight, coalblack hair was thick and
glossy. His features were rather aristocratic: high cheekbones, a
patrician nose, a strong chin. He had startlingly blue eyes, a
gas-flame blue. He was tall, lean, and he moved with the grace of a
dancer.
But it wasn’t even Conrad’s looks that had most appealed to Ellen. She
had been won by his style, his charm. He was a good talker, clever,
with a gift for making the most extravagant flattery sound understated
and sincere.
Running away with a handsome carnival barker had seemed wildly
romantic. They would travel all over the country, and she would see
more of the world in one year than she had expected to see in her
entire life. There would be no boredom. Each day would be filled with
excitement, color, music, and lights.
And the world of the carny, so different from that of her small town in
Illinois farm country, was not governed by a long, complex, frustrating
set of rules.
She and Conrad were married in the best carnival tradition. The
ceremony consisted of an after-hours ride on the merry-go-round, with
other carnies standing as witnesses. In the eyes of all true carnival