Loved

Author: Keren Ziv
Disclaimer: Leave me be to my box and my clowns. I own all original characters.
Author's Note: This is a prequel (1960s era) to my story Biblical Transgressions, though Lord knows that you could read this and never need to read that story at all. This was dangerously fun to write and that's saying something. I halfway dedicate this story to my mother, because I wouldn't have come up with Kate if I had never tried to imagine a more glorious life for her.
Rated: Hard R. Violence, adult content. I allowed my grandmother to read this
Archive: If CM will take it ... sure. Everybody else, okay. Just tell me where.
Thank YOU: To all of my beta's, specifically my twins (hee! yeah, baby!) and my namelys! There were SO many of you, and I had so many great suggestions. What to cut and what to add was very difficult ... and I feel like when I didn't take someone's advice (Brittany L! sorry!) that I was letting them down. You betas make it hard on us!

Summary: Companion to Biblical Transgressions "Jacob wept over the body and prayed for the soul of the poor girl who could not help but be a sinner."

Kate cried when she found out she was pregnant.

There was no one to offer her comfort. There were no husbands to rush to and share the news with. There wasn't even the act of sitting alone in the doctor's office, surrounded by people, the silence threatening to deafen her. None of that had been necessary since she just found out one day, between jobs, in the bathroom of the same dirty motel room she had been using for a week.

She sat on the edge of the toilet and cried, quietly, so that the man in the next room wouldn't wake up and wonder why the hell his whore was bawling like some rookie on her first job. Tremors raced through her body as she kept her sobs inside, bundled up, and tried to keep the tears restrained if not stopped. She didn't want this thing inside of her. She didn't want it, damnit.

She washed her eyes, carefully, and reapplied her make-up, deftly masking her face and herself with a few strokes. Trashing the kit she had bought at the corner store, she turned off the bathroom light. The dark yellow tiles looked tired in the darkness. She opened the door and walked out of the bathroom, careful to check that she didn't step on any of the clothing that had been tossed on the faded brown carpet.

Standing over the unmade bed, she surveyed the sight coolly. The alarm clock, with its round face, ticked contentedly from its perch on the bedside table. Sprawled over the top of the sheets was the body of a middle-aged balding man. His back had lots of hair on it, in dark curls. It disturbed her, seeing the curls.

Quickly, she walked over to him, her steps thundering only in her ears. She touched him on his side, gently. "Wake up," she whispered. He opened his eyes groggily, then smiled up at her with what she assumed was a seductive smile for him. He patted the bed next to him and murmured something incoherent. "Not unless you have some more dough. Otherwise I can't. I'd love too, but a girl's gotta make a living." Actually, no, she wouldn't love to. He smelled like pickles and bananas and a million other bad things all pushed into one package. She tossed him his pants and looked at him expectantly, her eyebrow cocked.

His response was to reach into his pants, retrieve his wallet, and then press two twenties between her cleavage. She took the bills and placed them in the Gideon's book as the customer untied her panties and slipped them to the floor. He reached up impatiently and yanked off her top, causing some of the seams to rip. It didn't matter to Kate. She could fix it. She slid down on the bed, next to him, and gazed at him underneath her eyelashes.

He wasted no time, guiding her hands down to his cock, observing as she slid her fingers around it. Kate watched him as he watched her, fascinated with how coarse he made it all. He soon closed his eyes and told her in a hoarse whisper, "Stop." He reached out and grabbed one of the condoms on the dresser, opening it swiftly. Slowly, Kate rolled it on, pretending to giggle, pretending to care.

Suddenly they were a tangle of sheets and elbows as he launched himself on her, his weight knocking the breath out of her, and was kissing and petting her in all the wrong places and telling her how beautiful she was and how damn sexy and how he wanted to just screw her until she bled and oh, it had better be soon because he was losing it and suddenly they were joined together, her legs around his hips.

Forward. Backwards. While her hips worked and he murmured her name from somewhere around her breasts, she thought insanely about her baby. Was this hurting her baby? She went faster, harder, and prayed for it to hurt the baby. He grabbed Kate's breast in one hand and squeezed it, his nails digging into the flesh, her nipple pressed painfully into his palm.

"You so good," she said automatically, falling easily into the slang of her customers. She gasped when he bit down hard on her breast. "God," she said. That had hurt. She tightened her legs around him, almost viciously, and he sighed in delight. He hadn't come yet, and was trying to stimulate her to stimulate him. There were always these types wherever you picked them up. She clenched and unclenched her vaginal muscles, all the while murmuring his name. "Alfred . . ."

"Miss Kitty," he called out. Then he was done and he rolled off of her and took off the condom and threw it in the trash and she was left on the bed, feeling slightly out of breath, but not at all surprised. She watched with a bored air from atop the comforter as he dressed himself. He looked frantically for his pants and wallet before finding them on the television where he'd tossed them.

When he left, still zipping up his pants and telling her she was a great piece of ass, here's a fiver as a tip, she cried again.

She made arrangements. There are tricks to every trade. For Kate, it was as simple as making a few discreet inquiries from some of the girls and getting a few numbers slipped in her bag. She dialed the number one rainy day, stamping her feet and rubbing her hands in the phone booth, trying to get warm. The way the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder hurt, but she didn't have enough warm hands.

As she dialed the number, the rain came down steadily, soothingly. It blurred the colors of the cars racing past on the road and distorted the faces of the children playing in the wet. Kate didn't need that reminder, so she faced away from them, drawing her free arm around her waist and cradling the phone in between her cheek and shoulder.

The man on the other end of the line didn't speak very good English. Kate thought wildly of one of her first customers. He had been a Middle Eastern man, with a heavy accent. He had drawn hearts on her stomach and told her she was pretty. The man on the phone was Hispanic, probably from Puerto Rico with his accent. When he asked her name, she didn't give him her street name.

"Look," Kandy had told her earlier, "the best way to get the Bastard on your ass " Kandy jerked her head towards their pimp, who did go by the pseudonym of the Bastard, "is to let him know you're loaded. You don't want him beatin' the kid out of you. Just give your real name. Nobody thinks you use 'em. Betcha half the guys on this block don't even remember their girls' real names."

So Kate said her given name into the phone in smooth, even tones, a way she hadn't used for so long (months upon months, now that she thought of it) that her own voice sounded hoarse to her. "Mary Katherine O'Brien."

"One moment, please," he said. "Repeat that, please."

Please. Please. Please.

She repeated her name.

"Irish?" came the mild chuckle, another voice. This voice was deep with a southern accent. The phone had switched hands? "You've got the name and the accent. That's neat." He was obviously trying to make small talk with her, trying to calm her down. Kate breathed in deeply and cursed her Irish parents and grandparents and great-grandparents as far back as she could travel on her father's side. Living at home with Irish-born parents had given her the slightest bit of an accent that even being born and raised in the Midwest couldn't cure.

"I want to make an appointment." Her voice was strange to her own ears, strained almost. It sounded like a man with his wife's hands around his neck trying to scream but failing splendidly raspy, uncertain at what was happening, but forceful. He had to scream, and Kate had to do this.

"I'll transfer you to the Jesús, Mary, so we can make sure that you are certain you know what you're doing." Kate didn't correct him on her name.

"Hello?" The voice was thick, soothing, like the Irish priests of her childhood, and Kate allowed his words to drift slowly though the haze of confusion in her brain. She hadn't seen a priest since she was seventeen and had run away from home with Eddie and dreams of marriage and fame on television shows, where the men would swoon at her and the girls would hate her with envy and Eddie would kiss her at night, whisper Katie, and touch her and, oh, it would be so nice and feel so good and be so right. But then Eddie had gone to prison and she had gone to the funeral of the boy who had put him there before she'd realized she'd been left alone with no way to support herself, a girl from rural Idaho only halfway to LA. Kate didn't dream any more.

"I just want to make an appointment, please," Kate repeated, rubbing her index finger and thumb together in an oddly soothing motion. From the phone she could hear the man speak about the dangers of the abortion. He spoke for a length on the feelings that a woman went through after having an abortion. For quite some while, he elaborated on different options that a person could take instead of having an abortion. It almost sounded as if they didn't want her to visit the clinic. Kate closed her mind to their words and just waited. There was nothing to do in her life but to wait. Wait for customers to come to you, wait for them to come, and then wait for them to leave.

Kate interrupted him. "Look, what time should I come?"

There were the smallest of moments passing on the other end and she found herself listening to the muffled sounds of people talking back and forth over the receiver in hushed whispers. So she had taken them by surprise, apparently. Maybe they were used to more emotions. Kate had wasted all of her tears when she found out, and with the tears she lost the ability to care. At the moment, she just wanted to get it over with so it wouldn't be looming over her head, a storm-cloud willing itself only with desire to burst.

"Yeah," they told her finally, the southerner speaking. He told her the address and the time. Kate hung the phone in its cradle and stepped out of the booth. The wind was back and hit her hair, swirling it around her face, getting into her mouth so that she had to raise her hand to her lips and hook her finger, capturing the thin strands that danced in and out.

A man stepped up to her, dressed in jeans and a dark black shirt with the words LIVE LONG AND LOSE FRIENDS in bright neon yellow writing splashed across it. Kate smiled apologetically when he touched her arm. "Sorry," Kate said, "I'm not working."

He looked at her, bewildered. "I was just asking for the time," he replied after the briefest of pauses. Kate pushed up the sleeves to her coat to reveal her bare wrists. The man shrugged half-heartedly when he saw this. He held out his hand. "I'm Father Andrew."

Kate blushed. "I'm sorry, Father," she stammered. "I didn't mean to . . ." she floundered for a few more seconds before stopping. "I've got to go," Kate told him. "It's late, is all I know. It's late, Father. Too late." She wasn't speaking to him anymore, and time was the last thing on her mind.

"It's never too late."

She rushed off, scared he could see her soul, the child growing in her, the men she had screwed, the scars on her as if they were physical. She ran to the street corner and beyond and didn't stop until she was out of breath and gasping. She wasn't in life to win, she told herself. She was in life to finish it.

That night she dreamed of high school dances and first kisses.

Kate didn't remember where she got it, she just remembered that she sat in her car for twenty minutes, smoking it, trying to remember if it was marijuana that had been known to cause miscarriages. Kate remembered, almost completely done with her smoke, that it had only been shown to lower birth rates. She flicked the butt away, disgusted. At least it had calmed her down. She didn't have to go in there and think about what they were doing. She could go in there now and not remember why she didn't want to be there, why she was hating herself.

She got out of the car, happy that she was moving. The ground was a little rockier than what Kate would have normally liked, but she attributed it to the heels she was wearing. Nothing like dressing to impress when going to an abortion clinic. She was just getting over a few pebbles without tripping in her impossibly high shoes when she realized there was someone standing in front of her. That realization caused her to slip on a Twinkie wrapper she hadn't previously noticed. She ended up landing face first on the sneakers of the person. They were very dirty Adidas superstars. It made Kate sad, for some reason, to see them.

She looked up to see two knees just below a white pleated skirt. She labored to her feet and stepped back, looking at the owner of the knees in full. It looked to be a chubby little redhead wearing a tennis outfit and carrying a tennis racket made of gold . . . or maybe not gold. It was, at the very least, spray painted in gold. The girl grinned and dimples appeared.

"Who're you?" Kate asked, slightly wary of this stranger with the valuable racket. She watched, fascinated, as the girl swung her racket casually around, much as an ax-murderer in a B-movie horror flick might. Kate stepped back when the gold-carrying tennis dressed girl stepped forward.

"God," the girl said simply. Kate looked at her and shrugged. It fit. And God was a southerner, if Kate could read the slight accent She had. The Baptists really did have a ticket to Heaven. Kate again cursed being Irish and Catholic. She was never going to make it. Perhaps there was a sort of test they gave you that would let you in, like a GED. Not that Kate had hers.

"What can I get you?" Kate asked God. God only smiled, deepening the dimples. Kate wondered if God would mind it if she reached over and stole one of the dimples. They looked like they were stealable. Of course, if they weren't, God might get mad that she had tried.

"You're pregnant," God said, not answering her question. Kate didn't dignify this with a response; God was able to see into her mind, after all. God was far more stupid than Kate had always figured Hr to be. In fact, Kate had always seen God painted in a more masculine light. "You're going to give birth to a boy."

No, she wasn't. It wasn't going to be born. "No," Kate said. "I'm fixing it." Fixing her life. If Kate amended this wrong thing, maybe she would win at something; maybe she would be able to walk down the street and not accuse the priests of hitting on her; maybe she would get pregnant and cry for joy instead of fright and an overwhelming sadness, with someone with her instead of alone.

"I will love him so much," God said, almost to Herself. "I will watch him and he will be so beautiful. And when it is time for you to name him, you will have already done so. Even now I am whispering to your fingers the pages to turn, to find the name that is right for your son." She closed Her eyes and tears formed under the edges of Her lids. "While you've been doing what you've been doing for so long," God wondered slowly, "have you always remembered how much I love you?"

"Of course, God," Kate said quickly. "I have always loved you."

"I know. But you've got to remember that I love you, too." She turned to leave and Kate saw that the back of Her knee needed to be washed where God had apparently sat on a magic marker. It was green, and if it had been several shades darker, Kate would have mistaken it for a bruise. However, it was bright, almost neon, and obviously ink.

"Hey, God!" she said. God turned and looked expectantly. "Don't forget to scrub your legs when you take your bath tonight. You sat on something." God just continued looking. It was unnerving. Did God always give people the creeps, or was it just Kate? "You're welcome," she said.

God nodded once, but didn't move. After a minute of almost stationary behavior on both their parts, God began to rotate slowly on one foot; like a ballerina in a music box except She didn't have Her hands above Her head and She still looked rather frightening.

Kate had to tell Her. "God " Kate called out, scared. "I . . . I was lying." God would damn her to hell and her bastard child with her, Kate was sure, and so she squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the flames to begin.

"There's always a bit of truth behind the lies," God said kindly.

Kate felt something wet land on her eyelid. She shook her head, dispelling the drop. Kate opened her eye and looked around, suspicious. "What?" she asked, but God was already gone. Kate stared at the spot on the wall for a long while, trying to remember Her words. All she could recall, though, was that she was going to have a baby loved by God. God would love her son.

She turned and walked as it began to rain. From somewhere in the back of her mind she knew she was in no condition to drive, what with having been visited by the Holy Spirit of the Lord God on Earth. But she didn't want to leave the car on the street and come back and find it missing. In fact, she wasn't quite sure where the car was now. She stopped and looked around frantically. Had someone taken it while Kate was speaking to God? How dare they? Why, she ought to ... oh, there it was.

She got in the car and started the ignition, carefully breathing through her nose so she wouldn't inhale any of the fumes left in the car. She wasn't stupid enough to drive high; but she figured that God knew Kate had to get home and would take the drugs right out of her system. She just didn't want to put them right back in. As she stopped at a red light, she murmured to herself, "I didn't inhale ..." For some reason, this struck her as funny and she giggled.

The motel pool was dirtier than Kate remembered it being. The water was scummy and obviously in need of service. She stared at it a long while, pensive. Kate didn't need to think, she didn't need to breathe, she supposed. After hours or years, she couldn't tell, Kate got up off the concrete and made her way to her room. She nodded once to Kandy, standing on the top of the stairs smoking a cigarette, who gave Kate a sympathetic look, and then closed the door quietly.

The Gideon's bible was in the drawer. Kate thumbed through it absently, looking for the forty dollars she'd put in there the other night. She couldn't find it and she swore. If she hadn't already retrieved it, which, come to think of it, was a possibility, then the maid had taken it. She wouldn't put it past the maid to take it. Kate pictured her, riffling through the book, finding the twenties, and shoving them in the pocket of her stained white apron.

Kate let the book fall open on the bed as she got up to wash her hands. She glanced down and saw Andrew Jackson's face looking defiantly up at her from the yellowing paper and noticed how his face was twisted in a cruel smirk. She snatched the twenties up and crumpled them angrily in her fist, her fingers taking the roughness of the paper against them as a sort of affront to their own lotioned feel. Kate sat on the bed and looked at the page with unexplainable tears in her eyes.

Her breath caught in her throat as she saw the passage that glared boldly up at her from below. Romans 9:13: Jacob I Have Loved; Esau I Have Hated. It struck a chord. Hadn't God said something about love? Oh, yes, God loved her son. Jacob I Have Loved ... This was what God meant when She told Kate that she would know her son's name. Kate dropped the balled bill and reached down to smooth the words, noticing the difference in the thin parchment against that of the bank notes. She would remember God's love; she would remember it for all her life.

And her reminder would be her son, Jacob.

He was beautiful. His eyes were gorgeous; Kate knew that, more than likely, the pigmentation would settle in his eyes in a year or less and they could be the dazzling blue they were now or a soulful brown or somewhere between the two. She didn't care. He was absolutely perfect, with ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes and hair already covering his small head and, God, was that another contraction? Kate breathed deeply and glanced hurriedly at the nurse standing to her right with an ambiguous smile on her face.

Jacob started fussing, moving back and forth with such strength that Kate was surprised, and the nurse came rushing over. Jacob's body pushed against her and his little limbs flailed, and then they became very still, stiff. She screamed in fear and from the pain that had just washed over her and called out her son's name as the nurse walked briskly to a gang of other nurses waiting next to an infant's bed two steps away from her own. Kate would have followed through with his care, she really would have, if it hadn't have been for the second wave of pain that had suddenly hit her. She gave a low moan.

"Jacob," she said, and they moved the bed closer to her so that she could see him, his face red from his squawking.

"Looks like there's going to be another one," came the voice of the doctor from somewhere between her knees. Kate really didn't want to believe him, but he was gazing down inside her and ought to know. A moment of panic swept over her and she wanted to scream out, No, no, this isn't right, she was going to give birth to a son, not a son and another, and her son, her only son, her first son, her true son, that son would be loved by God, the God who played tennis and was a Baptist. She closed her eyes and moaned.

Sometime during the next hour, Jacob was taken from her. She wasn't entirely aware of it, couldn't be certain that she hadn't hit the baby bed he was in with her fists. She just came to realize that the doctor was tying the umbilical cord and she wasn't near Jacob. Kate tried asking for him, tried calling for him, but her voice was hoarse from screams and cries that she didn't fully remember making and she found she couldn't. There was mingled in the air the soft voice of the nurse and the indignant screeches of the new one. Suddenly there was a disturbance and Kate knew something more was wrong with her son. She knew.

"Jacob," she said. As the second one was handed off to Kate by a harried nurse before she rushed across the room, she heard the harsh medical terms being tossed back and forth, none of it sinking into the fog that exhaustion brought with her. She strained to look across the room at her son, prayed to God to keep Her loved one safe. "Jacob," Kate cried insistently. Oh, what was wrong with him?

A doctor shifted; she could see her son, lying on the table, his small body white and blue and red with anger. He was also still. Very still. The sunlight streamed through the window and hit her oldest baby in heavy tones; the commotion stopped and she saw surreptitious glances in her direction. Kate inhaled, the smell of blood and afterbirth strong in the air. On her chest, the second one squirmed and she looked at it, the red face, the weary look it already possessed. A small hand waved at her and she wrenched her gaze back to her first, where the doctor and two nurses were still standing. Kate tried to make eye-contact with the first smiling nurse, but there were averted eyes.

"What's wrong?" Why weren't they working on him? Was he sleeping? Oh, it had only been twenty minutes and she was paying them money, had paid them up front, had moved to this small town to be away from the drugs and the men and the boys pretending to be men to raise her son and she wasn't a bad girl so why did it look like they were punishing her suddenly?

"I'm very sorry ... " The voice was that of the doctor. Kate stared at him, shocked. "We tried all that we could do " No they hadn't. But Kate knew they understood how she had that baby, that precious baby. "but we couldn't save him. I am so very sorry for your loss of ..." he paused almost casually and a nurse supplied the name of the baby quickly. "... Jacob. But you have another son."

So it was a boy. Just like Jacob. Only not like Jacob. He could never be her son, her perfect son, the one that God had told Kate that She would love.

"He got a name?"

She looked down at him, his mouth twisted in an unattractive frown as he slept fitfully in her arms, his eyes scrunched tightly closed. She considered telling the Bastard that the child was his when she went back home, for of course she was returning now that she didn't have to worry about Jacob's welfare. "Esau," Kate told them. "His name is Esau."

And Kate hated God for loving Jacob so much that She could not bear to stay parted from him.

He was painfully thin. His eyes sunk deeply into his face and his lips were two lines stretched dangerously tight across faded brown skin. He had no eyebrows. This struck Kate as oddly calming as she surveyed him. He was sick. Cancer, chemotherapy treatments? Losing battle to AIDS? Kate found that she didn't care anymore.

She slipped the shirt she'd been unbuttoning off of his bony shoulders and carefully traced the ribs on his stomach, inwardly questioning how they would poke and prod her skin when he inevitably crushed his body to hers in a desperate try to place familiarity to the mechanical, impersonal act of sex. Kate understood, she really did; they wanted to pretend they were in love with her for at least the time building up to and the duration of their orgasm. After that it was anyone's guess as to whether or not he'd hit her up for a freebie or graduate to a more physical form of hitting when she refused.

Kate was already undressed. She could tell from his mannerisms that he'd never done this before, never bought: the quick glances around the already dimmed room, towards the windows, at the silent television. She wasn't certain whether she was dealing with someone who had lost his life or who was desperately searching for meaning in what he had left. People attributed too much emotion to sex, she realized, and it would break them down.

His skin felt like there should be more to it. It felt like it would break if she applied just a little more pressure to it, or if she used her nails on his back like some men liked to have done to them as proof later on in the locker rooms that they were actually having sex, and violent sex at that. They were so good they drove her to blood.

Once they started, he had a rhythm to him that she didn't expect. He was in unfamiliar territory, yes, but he knew what the game was, and now that they had moved past the preliminaries, he could take the reins for a bit. He managed to massage the curve of her breasts while subtly positioning her legs over his hips and drawing her closer to him. She smiled at his naivety: foreplay was for lubrication, but it had been a long time since Kate had found a man who remembered that. She kissed his thin collarbones and hoped he had AIDS.

The door swung open and a small figure was silhouetted in the light from the hall. The customer jerked his head up from where he had been watching their bodies merge, then pulled back when he realized there was a child in the doorway. Kate moved off of him and sighed, loudly, and tried to keep her voice amused. She wrapped a blanket around herself and walked over to the child.

"Are you looking for your mommy?" she crooned. The boy nodded as she steered him outside. Shutting the door, Kate hissed, "Esau, what have I told you? You've got to stay in Aunt Kay's room when I'm busy. If I've told you once, I've told you a million times you want to be feed, you've got to make some sacrifices. That means, stay away from me when I'm busy!" His bottom lip trembled. "I'm sorry," she added more kindly, "but you must go to Aunt Kay's."

She turned then, but not so quickly as to miss seeing the tears welling up in his eyes. She ignored them and waltzed back into the motel room, purposely locking the door after she had closed it behind her. The customer was waiting on the bed, watching her with his lost eyes only half interested, too far gone to care after the first shock of adrenaline had worn off, and she was terribly glad that he hadn't left. It was true, Kate needed the money from this job to go shopping.

"Kandy's kid," she said, as she slipped onto him. "He's always looking for her."

The customer said nothing, just tried to work their bodies into the dance that he had initiated a while beforehand. He no longer touched her breasts with his soft fingers, but he kept his eyes on Kate's, and laced his fingers with hers. Kate found herself holding his hand back. She pulled him in deeper, saddened. She wasn't wet enough and the friction hurt. Kate hadn't prepared herself because of his soft touches. Surrounded by her thoughts, Kate only vaguely heard the voice coming through the thin door.

"Mama ... Mama ..." the voice bleated out piteously.

Kate closed her ears and stared intently into the dully bright eyes of her customer, murmuring words of endearment that he couldn't hear but could see plainly on her daringly red lips, lips that left scarlet stains on his body where they connected. The room around her pulsed with her heart, beat with each movement her hips made. She arched her back,; blocked out the sobs coming through the door, debated reaching down and touching herself. His eyes were steadily darkening. They were the color of her dreams, the color everything took when she couldn't breathe and she just needed to relieve stress and there were these splendid blades to help do the job. Up the arms, a bit of worry let out in red streaks, and it only left a little mark for every time. God, was he still crying?

"Mama ..."

She reached down and found the spot. As he came, Kate tried to pretend it was her, and began to cry.

"Mama?"

Kate looked down at the boy running dirty fingers along the lace edges of the teddy she was mending. He looked back up at her unconcerned and, with his free hand, scratched his chin. She inwardly sighed and snatched the outfit out his hands, scolding him for sullying the fabric after she had washed it and after she had told him not to touch her things.

"Mama, why don't you love me?"

It was such a simple question. Children were always terribly blunt, Kate reflected as she tried to find the best way to phrase her answer. There were so many things to say, but they were all so difficult to actually put into words. She wasn't verbally inclined at any rate. When she was a child, she had had a soft way of speaking, mostly because she could never find the words to express herself. Now that she'd been living away in a ghetto for so long that she couldn't remember not speaking with the easy rhythm of the streets.

What to tell him? That, perhaps, was the most important part. The story was so deeply intertwined within her soul that she could not help but see where the story and her life fit like two lovers, and where parts were awkwardly placed. It needed to go smoothly for Esau, though, so she inwardly rearranged a few, unimportant details for him.

"Because," she said carefully, "God hates you." She pulled out of the desk drawer the tired old Gideon's book that she'd saved since that first night she'd found Jacob's name. "Sit next to me," she instructed. As she read the passage aloud from the bible in her lap, Esau climbed on the bed and sat himself serenely next to her, his calm nature striking against her like a sort of whip.

"You had a twin, Esau," she told him. "A twin is a brother that is born on the same day as you. He was your older brother. He died, though, Esau. God loved him so much that She could not bear to be away from him. Sometimes I get very angry at God that She would take away Jacob, because he was so perfect and beautiful."

Unbidden, an image of Jacob as she had first seen him came to her mind. The little baby with the perfect eyes, of the infant blue that the babies had when they were first born. Kate remembered his tiny fingers waving in the air and his toothless smile as he gazed up at her. She shuddered slightly when she remembered the tiny body shaking, his short little fists flying in every direction.

"God told me that She would love him and that I would find his name. Well, I did, when I opened up this Gideon's. I saw this passage right here. I picked the name Jacob there, and I loved him. Then he died, and you came. You were a surprise. I named you after Jacob's brother, who steals what's rightfully Jacob's. Do you understand, Esau?"

Did he understand that he had taken Jacob's life and she had been left with Esau and nothing else?

Esau nodded and studied the page thoughtfully.