Story of the Month: Spice

“You’re going to eat that?”

“I’m hungry.”

“We’ll get something on the plane.”

Fran frowned at her husband.  “That hardly counts as food.”

“But that bread…”  Mark was whispering so that the old woman at the sidewalk stall wouldn’t hear him.  “The flour could’ve had bugs in it.  Somebody kneaded it with their bare hands on God-knows-what kind of surface…”

“It looks fine to me,” Fran answered.

She picked up one of the round, brown loaves and dug in her shoulder bag for money.  After she’d paid the old woman, she broke off a chunk of bread and put it in her mouth.  It had a spicy, un-breadlike flavor.

“What’s in here?” she asked the vendor.

“Now you ask,” Mark groaned.

Fran shushed him.  He gave her a momentary scowl and then turned his attention up the bright street to watch for the taxi they’d called for fifteen minutes earlier.  Though it was barely mid-morning, the tropical sun was already intense, as if it were being beamed down on them through a magnifying glass.  Fran saw a trickle of sweat run down the back of Mark’s sunburned neck; he raised his hand to rub the insect bites there.  This had not been an easy vacation for him.

“Cardamom,” the old woman answered Fran.  “Jes’ the wheat bread like ever, but with the spice, too.  My mother’s touch.  Keeps the blood young, she said.”

“Cardamom,” Fran said.  “I must try that.  How much cardamom?”

“A pinch or so.”  The old woman pulled a small plastic bag out of her apron pocket.  It contained a dark powder.  She offered it to Fran.

“No, thanks,” Mark interrupted, waving away the bag as if it were giving off a bad odor.  “We can get some at home.”

“Not like this one here,” the woman said.  “Jamaica mix.  From my own mother.”

“Right,” Mark said.  “That’s what I mean.  Really, we don’t need it.”

The old woman slowly put the bag back into her pocket.  She glared at Mark, who had turned again to look up the street, and Fran worried that she’d taken offense.

“He has a weak stomach,” Fran explained.  “He likes things bland.”

The woman kept staring at Mark, but when the taxi swerved up to the curb, reggae blaring from its radio, and Mark began helping the driver load the suitcases into its trunk, the woman shifted her gaze to Fran.  In one quick movement, she took another plastic bag, smaller than the first, from her apron, leaned over her narrow table, and dropped it into Fran’s shoulder bag.

“Even more so special,” she said, nodding.  “Make him try.”

Fran smiled and returned her nod.

“Thank you.”

“Young blood,” Mark scoffed when they were ensconced in the taxi.  “She looked 100 if she looked a day.”

Fran broke off another hunk of bread and ate it.  She turned away from Mark to the side window for a final look at the beaches and palm trees and the impossibly aquamarine Caribbean Sea.  By the time they reached the airport, she had finished half the small loaf.

***

It was a perfect day for baking.  February winds were pelting the kitchen windows with cold rain.  It was Sunday, and Fran was pleased to have no reason to go anywhere.  Mark was asleep on the couch in the den, sections of newspaper strewn over him like huge autumn leaves.

Two loaves of raisin bread were in the oven, and the kitchen smelled of yeast.  A ball of white bread dough sat on a floured board waiting to be kneaded.  Fran stood in front of her spice rack trying to decide what, if anything, to add to the dough to make it more interesting, even though Mark liked plain white bread perfectly well.  She selected a jar of cinnamon and a can of sesame seeds.

She decided to brown the sesame seeds in butter, and when she went to the refrigerator, she spied the Jamaica photos affixed to it with magnets.  Mark had just gotten them from the photo place yesterday.  In one, the long white beach at Negril stretched into the far distance, and Fran, knee-deep in crystal clear water, held up a pink and gold conch shell.  In another, a Rastafarian man with a machete was opening coconuts for a group of giggling children.

“Cardamom,” Fran said to herself.

But the cardamom container turned out to be nearly empty.  Fran went to the hall closet and retrieved the shoulder bag she’d used on the Jamaica trip.  Sure enough, there on the bottom, stuck under a fold of the lining, was the little bag from the old woman.  The spice in the bag didn’t taste quite like cardamom, or like anything much really, but Fran mixed it with the little bit of cardamom she had and with some cinnamon and kneaded the mixture into the white bread dough.

At dinner, Fran set out slices of both breads.  Mark, who had a sweet tooth, helped himself to two pieces of raisin bread.

“Taste the other, too,” Fran said.  “I used cardamom.  You know, like that bread I got on our last day in Jamaica.”

“Your cardamom bread I’ll try,” he said.

But when he bit into it, he grimaced.  “Sort of bitter.”

“I like it,” Fran said.

“Feeling any younger?” Mark teased.

“Just wait until later tonight,” she replied, laughing.

The funny thing was that later that night, Fran did feel younger.  At least, that was a way of looking at it.  She entered into their lovemaking with the enthusiasm of a girl winning a new lover.  She and Mark hadn’t been that lively together in years.  In the morning, she had to drag herself out of sleep.  She was scratchy-eyed, and the muscles on the insides of her thighs ached.  It was a delicious kind of hangover, one she remembered with sudden fond clarity from their dating days.

But a dulling sleepiness was still weighing her down at 2:00 that afternoon.  She made three mistakes counting out change to customers who were cashing checks before she decided she’d better ask to go home early.

“It might be a flu coming on,” she told the bank manager, even though the terrible sleepiness was the only symptom.  No fever.  No aches.  Except for her thighs.  But she couldn’t very well say she had to go home because she’d had too much wild sex the night before.  She wondered if Mark were feeling tired, too, but she couldn’t summon the energy to call him.  Anyway, he’d said at breakfast he’d be in court all day.

She took a cab instead of the bus because she could barely keep her eyes open, even while walking.  The cabby had to wake her up when they arrived at her house.  She was vaguely aware that she’d tipped him extravagantly.  He wore a mammoth grin and actually took off his hat to her.  She had simply grabbed the first bill she’d seen in her wallet and shoved it in his direction.

Fran stripped off her clothes on her way upstairs and fell into bed in her slip and pantyhose.  When she awoke, the illuminated dial of the bedside clock read 6:30.  She picked up the clock and shook it.  She couldn’t believe she’d slept that long.  She didn’t feel refreshed at all.  Then she heard Mark coming in downstairs, and she knew the clock must be right.  Pulling on a robe, she went to greet him.

“I thought you weren’t here,” he said when he saw her on the steps.  “There are no lights on.”

“I was lying down.”

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.  But I’m incredibly sleepy.  I literally can’t keep my eyes open.  I had to leave work early.”

Mark placed his palm inquisitively on her forehead.  She concentrated on keeping her eyelids up.

“No fever,” she informed him.

“My God, Frannie, do you think you could be pregnant?”

They both knew by heart the early signs of pregnancy, and daytime sleepiness was one of them.  Every day for seven months now Fran had been carefully charting her basal body temperature; her ovulation dates were outlined in red on a small bedside calendar.  With the combined respect for details of a bank teller and a lawyer, they never missed one of those days, though the sex was often streamlined and mechanical.  The trip to Jamaica had been planned around red-lined dates.  On vacation, they’d be more relaxed, a favorable condition, everyone said, for baby-making.

“Pregnant?  I wouldn’t know yet, but I don’t think so.”

“Why don’t you go back to bed anyway?  I’ll heat up some soup and bring it up to you.”

When Fran entered the bedroom, she didn’t bother to flick on the light.  So when she saw it for the first time, it was in the dark.  She always thought of it as an “it,” not as a “her.”

Humped under the blankets on Fran’s side of the bed was a human figure about her size, lying on its side.  For some reason she could never explain, Fran didn’t cry out, as she would have expected herself, or anyone, to do under such circumstances.  It was the heavy tiredness, perhaps.  Just as it had blurred the money she gave the cabby, now it blunted her shock and fear.  Slowly, with a sick feeling in her stomach, Fran walked around the bed to inspect the front of the figure.  Then she did scream.  It came out as a strangled gasp, but from within, it felt like a scream, a scream as jolting as a thunderclap.  For the figure in the bed was wearing Fran’s slip and robe, and it wore Fran’s wedding band on the hand that lay curled softly beside Fran’s sleeping face.

She ran out of the room, calling Mark at the top of her voice.  He met her at the bottom of the stairs, a worried expression on his face.  She threw her arms around him and held on tight.

***

Opening her eyes, Fran found she was in bed, still in her robe and slip.  The room lay ordinary in the pale sunlight of a gray winter day.  The quiet of the bedroom was almost a physical thing, like wind.  The clock read 9:00 AM.  Fran’s mouth felt pasty, and her body was too warm.  She threw off the covers and sat up.

She longed to throw open all the windows, though it was probably no warmer than 30 degrees outside.  Fran’s parents had been fresh-air freaks, and she had never slept in a closed room until she married.  In winter, the cold inflamed Mark’s sinuses, in summer, the pollen.  Fran had gotten used to sleeping sealed off from the night air.  But the two or three times a year Mark went away overnight on business, Fran kept the bedroom windows open, even in the rain, and it always made her feel like a kid again.

The phone started ringing.  Fran located the cordless unit on the floor beside the bed and picked it up.

“Hello, Fran?  I didn’t wake you, did I?  I thought it’d be safe to call by now.”

“Mark?  Where are you?”

“At work, of course.  I just called to see how you were and to tell you I already called the bank and told them you wouldn’t be in today.”

Fran pushed two pillows against the headboard of the bed and leaned back against them.

“You should have wakened me.  I feel fine.”

“I tried my damnedest, but you were dead to the world.  I tried last night, too, when I brought up the soup.  I figured you must really need the sleep to be that far under.”

“You say I was asleep when you brought up the soup?”

“Like a rock.”

“You didn’t hear me scream?”

“Scream?”

“I had the strangest nightmare.  I saw myself asleep.  And I screamed and ran downstairs to you.”

“Doesn’t sound too scary, as nightmares go.”

“It was so real.  That’s what made it scary, I think.  I was sure it wasn’t a dream.”

“Well, after 18 hours in the sack, you won’t be doing any more dreaming today.  Look, I’ve got to run.  Soup’s in the fridge, and I left the coffeemaker on.  I’m afraid I finished the raisin bread, but there’s still some of that other stuff.”

***

Though Fran had expected to have trouble falling asleep that night, she actually dropped off quite easily, right in the middle of Mark’s lengthy recounting of an office incident involving a disorganized secretary and a misplaced brief.

When Fran opened her eyes later, she felt instantly wide awake.  The room was iced with moonlight.  Mark was snoring beside her.  The digital clock read 3 AM.  Fran slipped out of bed and walked to the window.  Snow was falling in soft, large flakes; the yard and the trees and bushes were already coated.  She remembered a night snowfall in high school when she’d leaned out her bedroom window and twisted around to catch the wet snow on her upturned face.  Now she put her forehead against the windowpane to feel the cold.

She saw the figure below immediately, probably because it was so conspicuous against the white landscape.  It stood bareheaded and barefoot in the snowy yard, its head thrown back, mouth wide open to the sky.  Fran imagined the metallic taste of the tiny droplets of snow melting on its tongue.  This time she didn’t scream, even though the figure was wearing a long flannel nightgown suspiciously like her own and was her height and build and had her length hair.  The thickly falling snow mercifully obscured the details of the face.

“Mark!” she called, but it didn’t come out as loudly as she’d intended.

Fran stared at the figure in the yard a moment longer.  There was a meditative stillness to it that said it would not move even if Fran should stand watching all night.  But if Fran turned away, would the figure be there when she turned back?  She had to chance it.  She went quickly across the room to the bed.

“Mark, wake up!”  She shook his shoulder roughly.

He jerked upright on one elbow.

“What is it?”

“Come to the window.  Hurry,”  Fran insisted, returning to the window herself.

The yard was empty.

“You woke me up to look at snow?” Mark said from behind her.  She turned to find he’d put on his robe and slippers before following her to the window.

“You forgot to comb your hair,” she said bitterly.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Is there something I’m missing here?” Mark groused.

Fran turned again to the window.  The snow was falling more heavily now.  She watched a miniature whirlwind spin across the white lawn and then peter out at the edge of the empty flower bed.

“Let’s go out,” she said suddenly.

“Out?  Where?  There’s nothing open at this hour.”

“Not out somewhere, just out.  Into the yard.  Into the night.”

“Get all dressed to go stand in the yard in the middle of the night?”

Mark sounded so incredulous, Fran had to laugh at him.

“We could make love,” she said.  “We wouldn’t need to get dressed for that.”

Fran pulled her nightgown up over her head and dropped it to the floor.  Another laugh burst from her, this time at the comic-book precision of Mark’s open-mouthed expression.  Then she skittered past him, out of the room and down the stairs.  The absence of clothing and the chilliness of the house made her feel incredibly light-footed, as if her body were made of cornhusks and butterfly wings instead of bones and muscle.

As soon as her bare feet hit the snow, however, she regained the awareness of her body’s density.  Her feet ached with the cold, and the ache was spreading up her legs.  Shivering, she hugged herself and hunched her shoulders, but in the next moment, she forced herself to spread her arms wide and to move quickly around the yard, spinning as she’d seen the little whirlwind do.  Her heart pounded and her skin tingled.  Rivulets of cold water ran over her breasts and belly and back as her body heat melted the snow.  She didn’t even feel cold any longer.  Her feet were numb, and the rest of her throbbed with a pleasurable pulse.

Then Mark’s hot hands were on her arms, halting her.  He pulled her against him and threw a blanket around her shoulders.  Fran crawled into his warmth like an animal who’s found a dry cave.  He tried to lift her, but she wriggled, and he had to give up his attempt in order to keep the blanket from falling to the ground.

“Let’s go in now,” he said.

She undid the first button of his pajama top.

“Fran.”

She pulled at the soft fabric, and the rest of the buttons slid out of their holes in one swoop.  Then she yanked the drawstring at his waist and his pants dropped to his ankles.

“Frannie, for God’s sake.  What if old Mrs. Wilson next door is up getting herself some hot milk?”

“Hot milk.  Not a bad idea.”

Fran dropped to her knees.  Mark didn’t protest any longer.

***

“So, were you like that when you were pregnant?” Fran asked Midge at lunch next day.

“Honey, I was never like that.  I’m strictly into missionary.”

“No, I mean, did you feel sexier?  Were you more aggressive with Bob?”

Midge took a bite of her tuna fish sandwich and screwed up her face in thought.

“Maybe with the first one,” she answered.  “I can’t really remember.  Not with the other three, though.  I’m sure of that.  Having kids lowers your sex quotient, and not just while you’re pregnant.  It’s probably some kind of law of evolution or something.  Gain a permanent inch on your waist for every baby, and lose two fucks a month.”

Fran, who normally laughed over Midge’s blunt irreverence, pushed her salad around on her plate with her fork and concentrated on holding back a surprising push of tears.

“Hey, you’re really worried, aren’t you?” Midge said.

Fran nodded.

“If you think you’re pregnant, get checked, or buy one of those home tests.”

“I want to wait until there’s something stronger to go on, like missing my period.  I’m tired of being disappointed.”

Midge studied Fran for a moment.  Then, with a decisive reach, she retrieved her purse from the floor, rummaged through its compartments, and pulled out a small blue business card.  She set the card next to Fran’s water glass.

“If you won’t go to a doctor, go here.”  She tapped the card with one of her squared acrylic nails.

“A psychic?” Fran said, reading the card.

“I know.  You probably think I’m too hard-boiled for that sort of stuff.  But this gal is the real McCoy.  Going to see her is the only decent piece of advice my mother-in-law ever gave me.”

“But what’ll she do?”

“She might be able to tell if you’re pregnant.  Or when you’ll get pregnant.  Or she could shed some light on whatever else is going on with you.”

Fran took a roll from the basket in the center of the table.  She broke it apart and then set it down on her plate.

“There is something else,” she said.

Midge nodded encouragingly, leaning back in her chair as if to say, now we’re getting to the real meat.

“I’ve been having these…visions.”

Midge lifted her eyebrows.

“Or maybe they’re dreams,” Fran added hastily.  “I read that pregnant women can have really strange dreams.”

“When I was pregnant with Joey, I dreamed I gave birth to a cat that promptly jumped off the bed and out an open window.  Wishful thinking, I guess.”

“The thing is,” Fran continued, “I’m always awake.  Or I think I am.”

“What do you see in your visions?”

“Myself.  Even down to the same clothes I have on at the time.”

“What are you doing?  I mean, what is this vision doing?”

“Nothing much.  Sleeping.  Standing in the yard.  I saw it last night before…before Mark and I went outside.”

“Well, then, it’s a safe bet she wasn’t the Virgin Mary.”

Fran laughed.  She could have hugged Midge for providing a momentary relief from her anxiety.

“Thanks for not thinking I’m crazy.”

“Hey, not my department.”  Midge tapped the blue card again.  “Go see her.  She won’t think you’re crazy, either.”

***

Fran pulled up beside the small white house and checked the address on the blue business card.  She didn’t know exactly what she had expected, but certainly not this ordinary house in a modest suburban development old enough that the trees were full-sized and the similar homes had grown distinguishing touches such as lawn ornaments, garage apartments, and pastel aluminum siding.

The door was answered by a woman in her early fifties wearing loose jeans and a mohair sweater.  Her graying hair was pulled back into a silver clip at the nape of her neck, and she wore no make-up.  Fran, who’d come straight from work, felt over-dressed in her tailored suit and silk blouse.

“Fran?” the woman said, smiling.  “I’m Dorothy.”  She held out her hand for Fran to shake.

The inside of the house was as ordinary as the outside.  Tasteful but unremarkable furniture, beige wall-to-wall carpeting, a coffee table with magazines on it, a few landscape paintings on the walls.

Fran followed Dorothy to a nook off the kitchen.  They sat down at a circular wooden table.  A low vase on the table held an ikebana arrangement of curling willow and yellow chrysanthemums.

“There are various ways we can do this,” Dorothy began.  “You can ask me a question, or I can give you a general reading on whatever I pick up.  Also, I do Tarot.”

Fran was flustered.  She’d thought Dorothy would have a set procedure, and that she, Fran, would be a more or less passive recipient, like getting a pedicure.  What if Fran made the wrong choice?  You could pull socks over a bad pedicure or stay away from open-toed shoes for a couple of weeks, but what kind of remedy was there for a poorly illumined soul?

“Most people go for a general reading their first time,” Dorothy offered.

Dorothy asked Fran for a belonging to hold, and Fran gave her her watch.  After a few minutes, Dorothy laid the watch on the table.  She clasped her hands under her chin and leaned her elbows on the table.

“You’ve taken a trip recently,” Dorothy said without any prologue.  “To a place with palm trees.  And something got started there.  Something that could change your life.”

Fran held her breath.  Had she conceived at last?  She wondered what Mark would think of Jamaica as a girl’s name, or Montego for a boy.  Maybe as middle names.  It’d be a little story for the child to tell its whole life: how I got my name.

“Can you be more specific?” Fran said when Dorothy didn’t go on.

“I’m picking up a strong flow from you,” Dorothy explained, “but it’s very complex, a double flow, two interconnected streams, like a piece of music with point and counterpoint.”

“Could it be a baby?”

Dorothy sat back in her chair and frowned.

“Maybe.  There’s definitely been an augmentation of your life force.”

“Can you tell me anything else?”

“I get the impression of you being on an island.”

“In the Caribbean?”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

Dorothy sighed.  “I’m sorry.  I’m usually able to be more clear.”

Fran shrugged.  This had been a long shot anyway.  A small adventure.  She opened her purse.

“No charge today,” Dorothy said, waving her hand at Fran’s wallet.

At the front door, Dorothy placed her hand on Fran’s arm to keep her a moment.  Inexplicably, the woman’s casual touch caused Fran to tense up and blush.

“Do you have a twin?” Dorothy asked.

“No, why?”

“Sometimes, with twins, I pick up vibrations from the other one.  I thought that might be what I was sensing with you.”

“No,” Fran repeated.  “I’m an only child.”

***

It was Sunday again.  Fran sat at the kitchen table with a cup of mint tea and the final heel of the cardamom bread, which she had toasted and spread with strawberry jam.  Only a week ago, she’d been happily mixing dough at this table.  The hard weather had cheered her, contrasting pleasantly with the warmth and light in the fragrant kitchen.  The monochrome of bare trees and frozen mud in view through the windows had seemed clean and sculptural.  Now the same scene struck her as desolate.  The tree branches spread tortured silhouettes against an ugly gray sky; dried sunflower stalks stood forgotten and accusatory at the corner of the garden.

Fran carried her cup to the door of the den and peered in at Mark, stretched out as usual on the couch.  He was asleep, also as usual, though today with a yellow legal pad instead of the Sunday papers on his chest, and two fat law books open next to his feet.  This scene, too, affected Fran differently from the previous week.  Then, she had felt an amused, benevolent affection towards Mark’s Sunday napping.  The fact that it was such a cliché only rendered it more endearing.  Dagwood Bumstead incarnate.  Today, it depressed and annoyed her.  Mark seemed to grow thicker and broader as she watched, like some horrible, huge toad.  When he started to snore, she clenched her teeth and turned away.  If she stayed another minute, she was sure she’d go dump him bodily onto the floor.

When she came into the kitchen again, it was there.  She’d never seen it in daylight before.  There was no denying the resemblance.  Fran shakily set down her cup, careful not to let her eyes stray away from the figure standing at the opposite wall, next to the phone.  Did it mean to block her from the phone?   No matter; Fran had no urge to call anyone.  She didn’t even want, just yet, to raise Mark.  She was afraid, but she was curious, too, desperately curious, and though summoning Mark might dissolve her fear, it would not satisfy her curiosity.  Besides, she thought with sudden and surprising nastiness, what would a toad know or care about such a thing as this?  This chilling miracle.

It did not move, but it had an aura of animation about it, a kind of potentiality.  Fran recalled Midge’s crack about the Virgin Mary.  The Blessed Mother.  When She appeared to rural peasants and feverish maidens, didn’t She always have a purpose, a message?  Didn’t She once deliver an actual letter?  Of course, She gave it to an illiterate, who gave it to the priests, who promptly locked it away with a promise to open it at a far-removed date.

As a child, Fran had longed to know the contents of that heavenly letter.  She’d been thrilled when she realized that it would be opened in her lifetime.  A nun in eighth grade had assured Fran that it would profoundly change the world, including Fran’s own mundane niche.  But Fran had never heard anything about the letter later.  She had even forgotten which year had been designated for its disclosure.  Maybe, like some people used to be fond of saying, God is dead after all, Fran thought, and we have to muddle through with insufficient data.  There was something oddly comforting about living in a state of imperfection, like when the computer went down at work and the tellers had to hand-write receipts and add and subtract like in their schooldays, with little secret numbers for carrying and borrowing written in soft pencil above the line.  The customers seemed friendlier on those days, the work more real, the passage of time more tangible.

“Why are you here?” Fran said quietly.

It remained motionless and silent.  Fran studied its face and saw that, while it had her features, it was not an exact copy.  It didn’t have the worry lines that were beginning to show around Fran’s mouth and between her eyebrows.  It didn’t have the same tightness in the jaw line.  In noting these fine absences, Fran acknowledged for the first time their undeniable existence in her own face.  The wrinkles were like squatters she’d never be able to evict, squatters who were sure to spawn more and more of themselves until Fran’s face finally turned into her mother’s face, or her grandmother’s.  Was she wrinkling up inside, too?  Were all the old habits of thought and desire and dismay creasing her spirit?  Would she eventually be unable to move out into fresh landscapes of action or even of hope?

“Why are you here?” Fran asked again.

This time it slowly lifted its right hand and placed it flat on its chest, like schoolchildren do when saluting the flag.

“I pledge allegiance…” Fran said.

The rest of the recitation had been largely an incoherent blur to Fran when she was a girl, a set of syllables to be memorized by sound rather than sense.  Even when her fourth-grade teacher had made the class look up all the big words and write down the definitions, Fran didn’t really understand what they meant put together.  But those initial words were different.  She knew they were a way to begin a solemn promise, a commitment of self to something outside the self.

“I pledge allegiance…” Fran would say, adding her voice to the roomful of students, but then, in her mind, she’d trail off from the flag and the republic to her best friend Sally or her dog Jake or her mother, and once, rashly, to the new boy who had been seated in front of her and whose close-cropped hair ended in the center of the back of his neck in an intriguing whorl which she found herself tempted to trace with her fingertip.  Fran had supposed that being grown up would mean knowing where to place her pledge for keeps.

But, of course, it hadn’t been like that.  Five years ago, after a year of dating Mark, Fran had married him, foremost because he wanted her to, then because she loved him, and also because everyone seemed to expect it and she could assemble no precise reasons not to.  It was a pledge, certainly, and one she took seriously, but somehow it didn’t resonate with glory and daring the way she had anticipated it would from her vantage as a girl.

With a start, Fran noticed that the figure across the room was fading.  She could see the pattern of the wallpaper through its body, which had looked as substantial as her own only moments ago.  Its hand was still upon its breast, but the fingers had relaxed and were curled gently in towards the palm, so that now, instead of a salute, the gesture was more suggestive of sorrow and heartache.  The eyes faded last, floating disembodied for a moment, like two shiny-backed beetles.  Fran thought of the Cheshire cat’s lingering smile from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  Alice, lost, had asked the cat for directions, and the cat had replied, in true Wonderland fashion, that it didn’t matter which way Alice went, she was sure to get somewhere if only she walked long enough.

***

“You should definitely visit Dorothy again,” Midge was saying as she scooped Yuban into the bank’s Mr. Coffee machine.  “God, I wish they’d spring for some decent coffee around here.”

“I don’t know,” Fran replied slowly.

“Just be square with her.  Tell her what’s been happening, and see what she can pick up about it.”

“I haven’t even told Mark yet.  It seems disloyal somehow to go to a perfect stranger before going to him.”

Midge looked up from sponging some spilled grounds off the white counter top.

“Why haven’t you told him?”

Fran shrugged.  She looked around at the small, utilitarian room as if an answer might be found written somewhere on the windowless walls.

The door opened, and Ben Leighton, a young trainee, started to come in.

“Coffee’s not ready yet,” Midge said.  “I’ll let you know.”  Her tone had such an air of direction about it, Leighton offered the women an apologetic smile and left without comment.

“Maybe he didn’t come for coffee,” Fran said.  “Maybe he wanted something out of the refrigerator.”

“Yeah, and maybe he wanted to beg me to run away to Tahiti with him, which on his salary would be a bad mistake, so it’s better for all concerned he didn’t come barging into the conversation.”

The coffee had brewed, and Midge poured a cup for herself and one for Fran.

“I got my period this morning,” Fran said.

Midge reached out and touched Fran’s arm.  “Oh, too bad,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?  After months of saying—”

“I know, I know.  But this…thing…has made me wonder if Mark and I having a baby is such a good idea.  Anyway, when I saw the blood this morning, I was relieved.”

“Did you tell Mark about getting your period?”

Fran peered down into her coffee and shook her head.

“Look, Fran, you know me—I don’t think just ’cause a man lets you put your cold feet on him every night for a few years, you gotta spill your guts out to him on a regular basis.  But if there were beady eyes floating around my kitchen, and they were making me start to think maybe I’d just as soon wear wool socks to bed, I’d talk to the guy.  Call me romantic, but I’d figure I owed him that.”

Despite Midge’s flippant phrasing, Fran heard the concern between the lines.  Her friend was right.  Mark deserved to know.  Fran realized that somewhere along the line, she had decided to close him out.  She realized, too, that the decision had been imperceptible because it had been relatively easy to make.

***

“You went to a psychic?  A psychiatrist would be more to the point, don’t you think?”

Mark’s tone was belligerent, but Fran wasn’t rankled by it.  She was observing him almost dispassionately as he sat beside her on the couch in the failing light of early evening.  He was pulling his fingers through his hair.  In response to what?  Exasperation?  Worry?  Fran looked at his prematurely receding hairline and calculated that he could be bald by the time he was 50.  Perhaps sooner.  He was probably going to have a hard time with that.

“It’s not a mental problem, Mark.  It’s not even a problem, except in the sense, maybe, of a chess problem or a riddle.”

“You tell me that you’ve been seeing things, that you’re getting messages from the great beyond, and I’m not supposed to think there’s a problem?  Listen to yourself, Frannie.  Christ, just listen to yourself.”

Mark stood up and walked to the fireplace.  He poked vigorously at the glowing logs and threw a fresh log on top of them, producing a small fount of sparks.

“Maybe that’s exactly what I’m trying to do: listen to myself.”

He turned and faced her.  Backlit by the fire, he was a figure built of shadows and memory.  The scene, Fran thought, was like something out of Dickens—two people at a winter hearth, on the edge of some cavernous secret.  But in Dickens, the revelation of secrets usually united people, and Fran felt, instead, that she was terribly alone and growing more alone by the moment.  She thought of the old conundrum which asserted you could never leave a room because each time you halved the distance between yourself and the door, there was always another half-length left to traverse.

Suddenly, Fran wanted to forget the apparition, abandon any search for its significance.  Mark, though not a thorough prince, no longer seemed a toad.  She knew she could not have married a toad; and it was unthinkable that she might have married a man who had slowly, by degrees, become one.

“What does it all mean?”  Mark spoke so quietly, Fran thought for an instant that he hadn’t spoken at all, but that the question had arisen in her own mind.

She crossed the room, and until she reached him and felt her arms slide around his waist and her face touch his chest, she felt unnaturally exposed, as if she were walking naked across a stage.  For a fraction of a second, Mark didn’t return her embrace, and in that wisp of time, Fran was seized by dread.  Though it was brief, the feeling was intense, so that even after Mark had put his arms around Fran and kissed her hair, an echo of her fear lingered, like the final tone of a long organ note in an empty cathedral.

“It’ll be all right, Frannie.”

“Will it?”

“Of course it will.  It’s going to turn out to be some kind of sleep disorder, I bet.  Maybe you just need a sedative for a while.  And it probably wouldn’t hurt to stop reading right before you go to bed.  Your dream center or whatever gets over-excited maybe.”

“It wasn’t a dream, Mark.”

“Okay, okay.  But it was in that family, right?  In the ordinary course of things, people just don’t go around seeing themselves.  Right?”

***

Dr. Nichols prescribed Prozac and gave Fran the name of a “lady” psychiatrist in his building.  He offered to have his receptionist call down for an appointment for Fran, but she declined, saying she’d have to go home first and consult her calendar.  On the way to the parking garage, she threw away the prescription.

Dr. Nichols had been Fran’s physician from the time she was six, and though she now was enrolled in an HMO through her job at the bank, she kept on with Dr. Nichols for things like the flu and poison ivy.  Fran’s mother was dead, but Fran knew she’d feel Selma’s disapproval anyway if she stopped seeing Dr. Nichols, however sensible and impartial the reasons.

Selma had never given her trust easily, and after Fran’s father moved out without notice and without so much as one backward glance, Selma became even less inclined to rely on anyone.  She doubted the dependability of old friends, resisted meeting new people, and scrutinized the fine print on cereal boxes whenever Fran wanted to send away for some plastic trinket.  She railed against “satisfaction guaranteed” advertisements and went out of her way to buy those products just so that she could return them, well-used, and demand her money back, saying only that she “wasn’t satisfied.”  She never went out without an umbrella and a pocket of change for the pay phone, even after the advent of the free 911 line and cell phones.

But Selma trusted Dr. Nichols.  She said it was because he had a gift for healing, but Fran came to believe that Selma trusted Dr. Nichols simply because he was predictable.  No matter what your complaint, he weighed you and took your temperature and asked what your last meal had been.  He never sent anyone away without a prescription.  He sent a small wreath of peppermints every Christmas.

Fran’s father chose to leave home on the afternoon of her ninth birthday party, obliging Fran to ice her own cake and blow up 15 balloons alone and blindfold her guests herself for pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey because Selma was prostrate in the bedroom with two boxes of Kleenex and a sticky bottle of Tia Maria, the only liquor in the house, bought as an ingredient for a fancy ice cream dessert she’d tried out once on her snooty in-laws.  Fran had not liked celebrating her birthday since that awful day.  Selma wisely confined her notice of it to a Hallmark card containing a new ten-dollar bill, upped to a twenty when Fran reached 18.  Mark selected a different day each year as Fran’s “un-birthday,” on which he took her out to an expensive restaurant and gave her a piece of jewelry.  The first time he did this was the first time Fran recognized he was a man she could safely love.

Fran had begun telling Dr. Nichols about the strange apparition with only a minimum of embarrassment.  Even that fell away as she went along, but at one point, when she paused to find a word, Dr. Nichols nodded encouragingly at her, and she felt suddenly wary of him, as if he were a prurient stranger.  She recoiled from the carefully composed kindliness in his eyes.  She would not give away what had been sent to her.  She would not be robbed of it.  Fran abruptly ended her story.  She didn’t tell the doctor about the last time she’d seen it, standing in the kitchen with its hand over its heart.  Over my heart, she silently corrected herself.

***

Fran had not wanted to go away, though it was to be for only three days.  But she hadn’t protested.  Too often lately she’d caught Mark watching her with morbid suspicion, as if he expected her at any moment to start frothing at the mouth or speaking gibberish.

She’d promised him she’d reconsider the Prozac if the visions persisted or if any other disturbing symptoms arose.  Three weeks had passed without incident.  In the main, Fran wanted a return to normalcy as much as Mark did, but a part of her was waiting for the apparition to come again, and she felt that to take a long week-end in the mountains upstate was tantamount to a sentry deserting his post.  Of course, she couldn’t tell Mark that.  She could barely tell it to herself.

So she put on a cheerful face and packed her bag and slept during most of the drive.  She walked into their room at the bed-and-breakfast and tried to look charmed by the lacy Victorian decor, and next day, she ate more than she really wanted of the full breakfast of fruit and yogurt and eggs and pancakes and bacon and coffee cake.  Now she was slipping on rental shoes to go cross-country skiing on a crystalline, sunny Saturday far away from her home and whatever might be seeking her there.

Fran started out tentatively, sliding one foot in front of the other carefully, using her poles as much to reassure herself as to push off.  But after a short while and one painless fall, she got into a rhythm with her arms and legs and didn’t need to think about them any longer, except when she hit an occasional patch of ice and had to make quick assessments of her balance and speed.  With her body working automatically, she was able to begin to enjoy her surroundings, as idealized a winter scene as a Currier and Ives print.  The sky was cloudless, and the groomed trail sparkled in the sun.  The cold air felt clean and new.  Tall, pointed firs cast triangular shadows across the crusted snow.  When Fran and Mark stopped to look around, a profound silence enveloped them, sweetened by the soft whoosh of snow falling off branches here and there and the sigh of the wind in the highest trees.  Fran felt at peace, and though she knew it was perhaps temporary and conditional, she relished the feeling.

The trail wound among widely spaced firs, then looped around a long, narrow frozen lake.  A small café on the far side of the lake offered a warm-up stop where skiers could sit in front of a fireplace with bowls of homemade chili and mugs of cocoa.  When Fran and Mark reached a fork where a side trail jogged off away from the lakeshore, she suggested lengthening their route so that they’d really appreciate the café when they got to it.  Mark pulled the trail map out of his jacket pocket and consulted both it and his watch before striking off onto the side spur.

They were soon out of sight of the open lake and into a thick pine forest.  It was colder and darker here.  Looking up, Fran could see only fragments of blue sky through the black, feathery branches of the closely set trees.  There were numerous animal tracks, squirrels and birds mostly, a few deer, one set of prints that could have been made by a fox.

Fran began worrying about bears.  Her skill on skis, about which she had become confident on the lake trail, was woefully inadequate for outrunning a bear.  She scanned the snow for fresh bear scat.  She’d insist they turn back, she decided, if she spotted any.  But she wouldn’t tell Mark about her fear.  It was the kind of thing he found amusing and endearing, and Fran didn’t like being cherished in that way.  It made her feel helpless and vaguely insulted.

Fran slogged on, her earlier sense of peace completely vanished.  She became aware that her fingertips were cold and that the muscles of her chest and arms ached.  She no longer saw the beauty of the snowy woods.  She was no longer invigorated by the outing.  She was just trying to get through it, skating one foot in front of the other, reaching forward first with one pole and then the other, dragging herself through a harsh, uncaring environment.  Up ahead, Mark was putting more and more distance between them.  The neat, parallel lines of the groomed track stretched endlessly beyond him.

“Mark!” she called. “Let’s go back.”

He stopped and looked over his shoulder.  She skied laboriously up to him.

“Back?  Why?”

“This trail is too shady and too hilly.”

“We might be nearer the end now than the beginning,” he said, digging for his map.

“I know, but…  I just want to go back, that’s all.”

Mark glanced up from the map and scrutinized her face.  “Did you see it again?”

“No!” she said, startled by his suggestion.  She looked down at the tips of her skis.  “It doesn’t come like that,” she said, irritated.

“Like what?”

Fran indicated the woods with a wave of one ski pole.  “Out here…”

“You saw it in the yard once.  Remember?”

“Of course I remember.  That’s not what I mean.”

Mark sighed.  He thrust both his ski poles into a snow bank beside the trail and began refolding the map.

“I’m trying to understand, Frannie.”

His voice drawled, like a record played at the wrong speed.  Fran felt suddenly dispirited.  Not only did she not want to try to explain herself , she resented Mark’s patient desire to understand her.  She felt his concern as a heavy weight, like being under a thick wool blanket in an overheated bedroom.  She couldn’t think beneath it; she couldn’t move; she couldn’t breathe.

“So you think you wouldn’t see your ghost now.  Why not?” Mark said carefully after a moment’s silence.

“Because you’re here,” she answered, with a sharpness that surprised them both.

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

Mark pulled his poles out of the snow, side-stepped to the groomed tracks on the other side of the trail, and began skiing back the way they had come.  Fran could tell from the way the muscles were flexing over his tightly clamped jaws that he was angry.  The ridiculous thing was that no matter how many times she caught him out at this, he always believed that his feelings were being successfully hidden.  There were occasions, she had to admit, when the fiction had been useful to her.  If she didn’t want an argument to continue because her position was weak or because she had lost interest in it or didn’t think it worth their mutual upset, she simply went along with Mark’s charade.  They both behaved as if harmony reigned, and, in time, it did.

***

“A doppelganger,” Dorothy said with a touch of awe.

“A what?” Fran asked.

They were seated in the spartan nook off Dorothy’s kitchen.  This time Fran had told the psychic her reason for coming.

“It’s a German word.  Literally, it means double-walker.  A sort of shadow self.”

“But how…why…?”

Dorothy held up her hands and looked mystified.  “Supposedly, we all have doppelgangers standing invisibly behind us.  Sometimes they become visible.  How, no one knows.  Why: that’s for you to say.”

“Can’t you give me some guidelines here?  I mean, what’s the point of being psychic if when you hit something really supernatural, you can’t even begin to answer the simplest…”

Fran broke off and tried to reel in her annoyance.  “I’m sorry,” she said.  “It’s just so frustrating.”

“That’s all right.  I’m used to it.  I make a handy target when people don’t get what they want from the spirit world, or from their unconscious or cosmic vibrations, or whatever it is they suppose I represent.”

“What do you think you represent?”

“Nothing.  No one.”

“Then how can you—?”

“Take the money and run?”

Fran felt herself blushing.  “I didn’t mean that.  I wasn’t implying you’re a…a fake or anything…”

“I’m not.  I’m the genuine article.  Even as a kid, I knew things, I saw things.  For years, I thought everyone did.”

Leaning back in her chair, Dorothy spread her arms open.

“This isn’t the only reality,” she said.  “Maybe it’s not even the truest one, but only the one we feel best able to grapple with.”

“And you think my…my doppelganger…comes from some other world?”

“Not exactly.  More likely, it comes straight out of you.  Or out of the circumstances of your life.  One thing I do believe, and that’s that it’s come because you need it.”

“Need it?  It’s turning my life upside down.  My husband and I were trying to have a baby, and now he tiptoes around me like I’m a vial of nitroglycerine.  Hell, if I did explode, at least we’d have a real mess to clean up instead of this…this hallucination.”

“Do you think it’s an hallucination?”

Fran shook her head.  “Not when it’s there.”

“In any case, even hallucinations can carry messages, if only about what we fear.”

“I do feel fear,” said Fran.  “Not in its presence, but later.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“That it’s come to take something away from me.”

“So you’d be relieved if it never came again?”

“That’s the oddest part.  I wouldn’t be relieved—well, on one level I would, because then things could calm down at home.  But overall, I think I’d be disappointed if I knew it’d never come again.”

“Because you’re not through with it yet.”

“Not through?”

“It’s come to you, Fran.  Not to me or your husband or anyone else.  Of course you won’t be satisfied with its disappearance until you’ve figured out why you invited its appearance.”

“I invited…?”

“Something in you did, Fran.  Something”

***

“Well, Fran, congratulations are in order at last,” Dr. Nichols said.

“The home test was correct then?”

Dr. Nichols smiled and nodded.  “But you were right to come to me to verify it.  Now, you’ll want a good obstetrician, someone who can bring in all the big guns if a problem arises—not that you should anticipate any, a healthy young woman from good, sound stock.”

“I’m going to have a baby,” Fran said quietly to herself.

She had imagined this for so long, yet she couldn’t quite trust the reality of it.  She couldn’t even say whether she was glad or not.  Of course I’m glad, she thought quickly.  I’ve just held myself in check so long, been disappointed so often that the feeling’s slow making its way through.  Like those people on t-v when they’ve won the big lottery—they never know what to say, they grin stupidly at the cameras and stammer something about buying a new house or a boat, but you can tell they barely recognize their own voices.

“And that other matter, Fran,” Dr. Nichols was saying, “Did the Prozac clear that up?”

“It hasn’t come back,” Fran said.

“Good.  That’s just fine.”

“I didn’t take the Prozac.”

“Oh?  Well, that’s probably for the best, given your condition.”

“Dr. Nichols, could what I saw have been caused by hormone changes?”

“Perhaps.  Hormones are powerful things.  We don’t fully understand all their effects.”

“So, I might see it again?”

Dr. Nichols raised his eyebrows, managing to communicate his ignorance without in the least diminishing his authority.  No one can answer that, his expression announced.  It’s up to you, he also seemed to say.

***

It was Mark’s birthday, and Fran was making him a carrot cake.  She had opened the storm windows to the late March breeze.  The air had a nip to it, but it hinted at spring, too.  There was a fertile smell to it, of wet roots and softening earth.  Forsythia branches loaded with yellow flowers were dipping up and down outside the windows.  The weather was friendly enough that Mark had gone golfing.

Fran hummed while she greased the cake pans.  She was feeling good these days.  The period of morning sickness was over, but she hadn’t reached the stage of being cumbersomely pregnant.  The swell of her abdomen didn’t require maternity clothes yet.  The doppelganger had not returned.  Fran decided she had blessings to count and tried to ignore the fact that most of them were in the negative—no more winter, no nausea, no strange visitor.

Fran had searched the Internet for information about doppelgangers.  After sifting through some almost incomprehensible essays on out-of-body experiences and alien abductions, she came up with only a few “facts.”  Typically, doppelgangers appeared as flesh-and-blood duplicates only to their “owners,” though sometimes cats and dogs could see them.  A mischievous doppelganger might appear to friends or family members, often wreaking confusion and mayhem, though it could not act unless a germ of that action already existed in the owner’s mind.  Generally, they were sympathetic companions.  They occasionally gave advice by implanting ideas.  One web site called them walking thoughts.  Fran had shared none of this information with Mark.

After she learned she was pregnant, Fran burned her Internet research notes in the sink.  Simply throwing them away would have had the same practical effect, but she felt she needed a small ritual, a more deliberate turning aside from the fascination of her visions than the mere crumpling up of papers.  And she had felt freer since.  All her curiosity pivoted toward the baby growing within her—the weekly particulars of how he or she was forming, the precautions a mother-to-be should take, the near-theatrical process of giving birth.  With so much to learn about pregnancy and infants, how could she waste time on something she might never encounter again, something she might have just imagined?

Fran grated carrots and set them aside to add to the batter last.  She combined sugar, oil, and eggs in one bowl and sifted flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon into another bowl.  She returned the cinnamon to the spice rack and shuffled among the tins and bottles to find the vanilla.  The plastic packet of Jamaican spice fell from the shelf, its contents spilling on the floor.  She picked up the packet.  Only a pinch of the unknown powder remained inside.  She licked the tip of her finger, dabbed it into the plastic bag, and put her finger in her mouth.  The spice was as she remembered it from her bread-baking—slightly bitter, but not unpleasantly so, a little burnt tasting.  Again, she could not identify it.  She put down the packet and returned to her work.

With the cake in the oven, Fran got the whisk broom and dustpan, and squatted to sweep up the spilled spice.  When she stood up, she felt momentarily dizzy and had to lean against the counter.  The spell passed quickly, and she turned to empty the dustpan into the trash can under the sink.

It was standing in front of the refrigerator.  Same sweatpants and sweatshirt as Fran, same silly embroidered apron her aunt had sent her at Christmas, even the same Saturday-sloppy ponytail.  Fran gasped, more startled than frightened.  Then, despite all her resolutions, she felt a small thrill.  So it wasn’t over after all.

The doppelganger was resting both hands on its belly, which, Fran noticed, was rounded to the same degree as hers.  Could doppelgangers be pregnant?  She thought wildly of what a hit she’d be on the Internet with such news.  But in the next instant, she became alarmed.  There was something proprietary in the way the doppelganger’s hands were splayed across its belly.  This was her double, somehow a part of her, yet it was independent, too, and unpredictable.  It wasn’t supposed to be able to behave outside the boundaries of what Fran herself might do.  Or might want to do.  But where was the safety in that?  Didn’t everyone have fantasies or urges that were certainly not for acting out?  Could they sound the keynote that would allow the doppelganger to act?

“What do you want?” Fran demanded.  “What do you want from me?”

The doppelganger removed its hands from its belly and held them out palms up, as a person might do to calm a barking dog.  The gesture said I mean no harm.  It was, also, the classic gesture of a religious icon.  Fran almost expected to see rays of light coming from the doppelganger’s fingertips.

“Why are you always silent?” Fran said, leaning forward.  “You could speak if you wanted to, I just know it.”

“Frannie?” Mark’s voice was behind her.  She hadn’t heard the back door open.

She turned and found him at the threshold, his hand still on the knob, his golf bag slumped against the doorjamb.

“Who are you talking to?”

She rushed to him and took his hand, eagerly pulling him into the kitchen.

“Mark, don’t look like that.  I haven’t lost my mind.  Come see for yourself.”

He let himself be led.  She positioned him by the sink and pointed triumphantly to the doppelganger, still in its pose of benediction in front of the refrigerator.

“What?” he said.

“You don’t see it?  It’s right there.  Oh, God, you don’t see it.”

“What’s right there?”

“My doppelganger, of course.  How many visions do you think I have?”

She took a step toward the doppelganger.

“Show him,” she said, waving her arm.  “I give you permission.  If you’re here to help me in any way, show yourself to him.”

“Come sit down,” Mark said, taking her by the elbow.

She went with him to the table and sat down.

“Fran, I want you to see a doctor.”

“No, Mark, no.  It’s real, I tell you.  I’m not crazy.  I’m not.”

She looked over her shoulder.  The doppelganger had moved to the stove, where it could easily watch them.  As quiet as it was, as it had been each time, it gave the impression of being extravagantly, almost immoderately alive.  It pulsated with intention.  That Fran had not been able to discover the purpose of the doppelganger’s visits did not mean there was no purpose.  Fran turned back to Mark.

“Would you want me to see a doctor if I were simply having dreams about a doppelganger?” she asked, concentrating on keeping her voice reasonable.

“That depends.  If the dreams were upsetting you, making you talk to people who weren’t there, leading you to keep secrets from me.”

“What about this: would you think I was crazy if I got a singing telegram?”

“I don’t think you’re crazy, I just think—”

“Would receiving a singing telegram be grounds for needing a shrink?” she insisted.

“Of course not.  What’s your point?”

“Well, a singing telegram is not something you get every day.  In fact, you could go a whole lifetime and not get one.  Most people do.  It’s an unusual form of communication, but in the end, that’s all that it is.  It may not be as normal as a letter or a phone call, but it’s just as real.”

Mark sighed and dragged his fingers through his hair.

“All right.  Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that this doppelganger thing is in that category.  What is it trying to communicate?”

“Don’t you think I’ve already asked myself the same thing, over and over?  I need your help, Mark.  Not a doctor.  Not even a psychic.  You.  Because you know me and you love me.”

Mark looked hard at her.  His face was full of worry and sorrow.

“I do love you, Fran.  And I want to do what’s best for you, what’ll be best in the long run.”

He glanced around the kitchen.

“Is it still here?”

Fran looked toward the stove.  The doppelganger was waiting, exuding possibility as perceptibly as the baking cake was filling the room with its sweet aroma.  The doppelganger seemed, in fact, to be the only part of Fran’s life that held possibility.  With the long-awaited pregnancy well-established, Fran knew she ought to feel her life opening up to new promise.  Instead, she realized glumly, too often she felt automatic and ordinary, just another mid-thirties expectant mother with a doting husband and a nice house that they’d soon trade in for a bigger house with an attached garage so that she and the kids—of course, there’d have to be at least one more to avoid the stigma of being a one-child family—wouldn’t have to go out in bad weather to get into the mini-van that they’d inevitably buy.  She pushed down these thoughts as uncharitable.

“Yes,” she said, returning her gaze to Mark.  “It’s here.”

“Let’s look at the facts, then.  Tell me what you’ve figured out, no matter how slight.”

“Well, I think it’s connected to that spice from Jamaica.  It only appears after I’ve eaten some.”

“Christ, didn’t I tell you—”

“Mark, please.”

“Okay, okay.  We’ll stay on point.  Why do you think it’s got a message for you?”

“How could it not?  It must take effort to materialize.  Why would it waste its time and energy if there weren’t a message?”

“Are you saying it has free will?”

“I guess so.  It must have decided to appear.  Don’t you think?”

The lawyer’s mask of detachment slipped from Mark’s countenance.  He seemed to be deliberating over whether or not to speak his mind.

“It decided, or you decided?” he said at last.

“Me?” Fran scoffed.  “I’ve never decided a thing in my life.”

She felt her face flush hotly.  Opposite her, Mark slumped back in his chair as if he’d been struck.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said angrily.

“No, wait.  It’s an overstatement, but it’s true.  I’ve always taken the path of least resistance, followed my nose, let things come to me, let other things drop away.  It’s like—”

“It’s an insult,” Mark interrupted.  “To me.  To your own intelligence.  To our life together.”

He seemed terrifyingly apart from her at that moment, not because of his anger or his words, but because of her words and her excitement at them.  Was she finally approaching the truth the doppelganger had come to deliver?  Her own truth?  She twisted around to look for the doppelganger.  It was still at the stove, but it was beginning to fade.  She could see the black handle of the oven door through its body.  It raised its arms, as if to enfold her.  She pushed back her chair and stood up.

“Fran!” Mark called.  His tone was so imperative, she immediately turned around.  He came around the table and put his hands gently on her shoulders.  She looked again at the doppelganger.  It was barely discernible, but she could see that its arms were still raised invitingly.

“Fran,” Mark said softly, and she forced herself to look away from the doppelganger, even though she suspected it might be the last time she’d ever see it.  Mark had a right to exact that price.

“Do you really believe you’ve just let your life happen to you?”

She nodded.  Tears were sliding down her cheeks.

“It hasn’t turned out so badly, though, has it?”

“No, no, of course not,” she said, a small sob breaking her voice.

He pulled her against him and held her tightly.  His embrace was defensive and steadying, as if they were standing in a gale.

“You can still do it, you know,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Choose.  Decide.  Say that what you have is what you want.”

He released her.  She lifted her apron to wipe her face.  The timer buzzed, and she went to take the cake out of the oven.  She was tapping the second layer out of its pan and onto a cooling rack when Mark left the kitchen.  She looked slowly around the room, peered into the pantry.  The doppelganger was gone.

The dustpan was still on the counter beside the sink, waiting to be emptied.  She stared a moment at the swept-up spice mingled with spilt flour and floor dust, then she dumped it into the garbage, rattling the trash can so that the spice would be churned inextricably with carrot peelings and eggshells and the sticky crusts from this morning’s French toast.

She unwrapped the cream cheese and the butter that she’d left to soften on the sunny windowsill.  She put them in a bowl, sifted confectioner’s sugar over them, added a little vanilla, and took out the electric mixer to blend it into frosting.  While she was performing these tasks, she focused all her attention on her actions and her physical surroundings—the hard tile floor, the smoothness of the countertop, the band of sunlight across the cabinets’ blond wood, the white gleam of the stalwart appliances, the variegated leaves of her potted houseplants.  Gradually, these perceptions dominated her mind, manufacturing a solid, nearly blank tranquility, an inner motionlessness.

Holding a spatula of thick frosting poised over the top of the cake, she looked around her cheerful, well-equipped kitchen.  With her free hand, she stroked her belly. Mark was right.  Fran’s life, however unreflective, had not turned out badly.  No doubt, the same process could carry her capably into motherhood and whatever else came next and next and next, accreting eventually into a whole, round lifetime.  Was Mark also right that it was not too late to lay claim to her life, to agree to it?

She ought to go to him.  He needed reassurance.  So, for that matter, did she.  But she decided to finish the cake first.  She spread the frosting slowly, painstakingly.  To rush would be to invite the warm cake to crumble, littering the creamy curls of white frosting with dark crumbs and bits of carrot.  She didn’t want to make a new batch of frosting to cover her mistakes.  The mere thought of starting over wearied her.  Better, much better, to be careful.