Joy Comes in the Morning

Excerpt fromJoy Comes in the Morningby Jonathan Rosen. Copyright 2004 by Jonathan Rosen. Published in September, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. SOMEONE WAS DYING. Deborah felt it in her chest. She felt it along her spine. She felt it, though she could not have explained how, in her womb. The feeling stirred her out of half sleep. She opened her eyes. The shades were drawn but a blue light had begun to seep in around the edges. It was 6 a.m. Now would be a good time to hear a voice. She would like to have been called.Deborah! Deborah!But it no longer happened that way, if it ever had. Deborah smiled at herself for a childhood fantasy that had never left her. The window glowed. She heard the flop ofThe New York Timesagainst her front door. The newspaper delivery boyactually a middle-aged black woman; Deborah had spied on her once through the peepholestood in the open elevator and flung the papers, as if dealing a giant pack of cards. After a sleepless night Deborah found the sound reassuring, a town crier's reminder that the world was still there. Lately, there had been a lot of sleepless nights. The strange sensation darkened her again, an inner shadow. Someone was dying. She tried to think who it might be. William who had emphysema and couldn't talk but whose hand she often held. The old woman on the eighth floor nobody came to see who had given her a recipe for sponge cake. Frank the trumpet player with AIDS for whom the complex cocktail no longer worked. That poor baby in the neonatal ICU, baby Emily the nurses called her, who had been born with a hole in her heart. Deborah shuddered at the memory of the tiny blue child. Angry Caroline with ovarian cancer, scarcely older than she herself was. That might explain the strange sympathetic sensation nestled in her own belly. She rested a hand there but her body told her nothing. Somehow, she didn't think it was any of these. Of course, someone was always dying. It didn't have to be someone you knew. Visiting a hospital regularly you learned that pretty quickly. She should make herself a cup of coffee and start the day. The newspaper was waiting for her. Reuben, when they had been together, all but heard theTimescrying on the doorstep like an abandoned child. He would bring it into bed. Deborah could never look at the paper first thing in the morning. Though she was keenly attuned to the world's sorrows, internal matters always concerned her more. Deborah decided to pray. She had promised herself that she would pray more regularly. She rose and stretched. She was wearing a T-shirt and nothing else. She stepped into a pair of underpants. It didn't seem right to stand bare-assed before God, though of course everyone was supposed to be naked before Him. Not that she thought of God as a seeing presence. Or a Him. Still, she slipped on a pair of red running shorts over the underpants. Barefoot, she padded across the wood floor and removed a large zippered velvet envelope from her top drawer. She left a smaller velvet envelope behind. While she was up she shut off the air conditioner. It had been in the high eighties the past few days but Deborah hated the artificial cool. There was something dishonest about it, though this was the kind of observation that drove Reubenwho had bought the air conditioner for hercrazy. She always imagined that the heat was still lurking somewhere in the room, hidden behind an invisible veil of refrigerated air. If you exerted yourself only slightly you felt hot and realized that the whole thing was a kind of physical illusion. This belief was, in Reuben's words, a pantheistic delusion. But Reuben was gone, though his machine lived on, sucking life out of the room in his absence. Deborah's grandfather had been surprisingly tall; she was reminded of this as she unfurled hisRosen, Jonathan is the author of 'Joy Comes in the Morning', published 2004 under ISBN 9780374180263 and ISBN 0374180261.