What bothered Heather about the unfortunate situation of giving birth was not so much that the child had no eyes, but that he was blind, and what nauseated her about his blindness was that there was no hope for the reinstatement of his sight, and what was most unstomachable about that was that her body had failed to create for its fetus an integral body part that would so concretely and irretrievably dictate the baby's life. How could she have failed so miserably at something that was so completely beyond her control? How could she be expected to make any right decisions on an overtly conscious level when her own uterus, without any input from her, had so tragically and unspeakably failed her?

Furthermore, it was her own physiology that had betrayed her, first by refusing to honor the cardinal rule of pregnancy--that its afflicted gain weight--and then by neglecting to form, without explanation or apology, two organs which are so terribly relevant to a person's upbringing. Heather was now sublimely afraid of her own body, which she now knew had the power to unleash untold suffering on an innocent being, and it was only a matter of time before it turned such unharnessed aggression against her.


Joel's living room had hardwood floors. In his bedroom the carpet was red with cloud-like shapes carved into the threads. The cupboards were smooth and white and the ceiling was white too. The kitchen floor was the same hardwood as the living room but had been covered with a pattern of metallic blue and purple to look like a calming ocean at sunset. Sometimes Jessi claimed she had an artist's temperament, as if her painting ability was not an end but justification of her atrocious behavior. The painting was very convincing and for longer than Joel realized, Jack did not think that water had to be wet. The soft, round pools of light on the kitchen floor, where Jack spent a great deal of time, mirrored the amorphous, unlabeled images floating in his mind, and they gave him a sense of profound agreement between the worlds within and outside him. Thus he grew up, thanks to Jessi's artistic caprice, with both an unshakable spiritual tranquility and a fundamental misunderstanding, neither of which were known to Joel.