he was fourteen, alone in her uncle Bud’s den, in the kind of quiet conferred on a place that grown-ups might return to at any minute. It was how Marilyn would wait to lean into him until he pressed the small of her back, her face flushed and lips hot. (Were there women you were born to kiss?) Joy was seeing a movie with her in Hollywood when he was in medical school, on his one precious day away a month. They’d planned to go to the beach but it had started to rain, and joy was sitting with her in the cool theater, feeling her arm and leg pressed against his as if the touch itself was secret. She wore short white shorts from which her bathing suit peaked out; she was tan beneath her white blouse. The movie was Shadow of a Doubt, and joy was listening to her explain its meaning as the credits rolled, how the director had portrayed Joseph Cotten’s character as a vampire: “Did you notice how he avoided sunlight and slept during the day?” Joy was following the operations of her mind. “You look like Teresa Wright,” Sheppard had said. “You do. You’re just as beautiful.” They sat in the theater together long after the lights went up, the attendants bent cleaning the aisles. It was telling her afterward, “You could never bore me.” Joy was delivering Chip himself during his residency. The OB had invited Sheppard to scrub in, and for sixteen hours Marilyn had labored, all her fear of dying giving birth, of following her mother into oblivion, vanishing once her water had broken, the terror she’d tended for months replaced by an athlete’s determination to get the baby out. This one needed forceps, and Sheppard was shocked at how hard the doctor urged him to pull, the child like a screw stuck in plaster, until the incremental give he could feel down the birth canal. “Give me everything you’ve got,” he told Marilyn. And joy was Chip’s sudden rubbery slide from her, which left Sheppard, beholding him, in a state of shock. In his hands, the newborn’s arms were free to bend at the elbows, his fingers to wriggle in the air. He howled so loud it seemed the umbilical cord, uncut, was supplying the boy with additional power and disclosing to Sheppard the limitless supply of Marilyn’s own. The boy was covered with her blood and amniotic fluid, the latter as yellow as pollen, and Sheppard, holding the baby’s ankles between his fingers and cradling his head in his palm, offered him to his wife. “I love you,” he said, all of them crying. “I love you so much.”
Joy was revealed in its utter absence.
In February, Susan called him at the office to tell him that she was moving to Los Angeles, where she’d secured a job at Good Samaritan. She was going to start her life over.
The day before she left, he took her to lunch at Leytonstone’s and brought her two presents: a suede jacket and a bloodstone signet ring.
He told her he’d see her by March.
It was all he thought about until then.
“Some people memorize poems,” Mobius said, “others famous speeches. Me, I memorize confessions. And yours, of course.”
“I never confessed to Marilyn’s murder.”
“Would you like to hear it?”
Sheppard shifted in his chair.
“It’s from the journal you kept in prison.” Mobius cleared his throat. “‘When this tragedy first occurred and for several months thereafter I gave not a thought to love, except Marilyn, and I could never love again like I did M. I’d never consider serious love again. I had feelings of remorse that I had not been more tender to M at times and that I had not taken time to enjoy home a little more.’”
Sheppard thought for a moment. “Can I tell you something I’ve learned about love?”
“Certainly,” Mobius said.
“If you love someone truly, and they love you, there’s no such thing as a confession.”
Somewhere over the desert, on the flight from Cleveland to Los Angeles, Sheppard noticed Marilyn was crying.
She was facing the window and weeping so silently that he wouldn’t even have heard her but for a brief sob, and when he asked what was wrong she said, “Nothing”—an answer she’d given him so many times over the course of their marriage that he again