The Husband’s Secret

gift. Don’t just hand it over to any old fellow,’ her mother had said to her in one of those conversations where she was trying to pretend to be cool, as if any form of premarital sex would be okay, as if her father wouldn’t fall to his knees and pray a thousand novenas at the thought of someone touching his pristine little girl.
    Janie had no intention of handing it over to just anyone. There had been an application process, and today she would be informing the successful candidate.
    The news came on, and most of it was boring, sliding right off her consciousness, nothing to do with her; the only part that was interesting was that Canada’s first test-tube baby had been born. Australia already had a test-tube baby! So we win, Canada! Ha, ha. (She had older Canadian cousins who made her feel inferior with their sophisticated niceness and their not-quite-American accents.) She sat up in bed, grabbed her school diary and drew a long thin baby squashed into a test tube, its little hands pressed up against the glass, its mouth gaping. Let me out, let me out ! It would make the girls at school laugh. She snapped the diary shut. The idea of a test-tube baby was somehow repellent. It reminded her of the day her science teacher started talking about a woman’s ‘eggs’. Dis-gus-ting! And the worst part? Their science teacher was a man. A man talking about a woman’s eggs. That was just so inappropriate. Janie and her friends were furious. Also, he probably wanted to look down all their shirts. They’d never actually caught him in the act, but they sensed his repulsive desire.
    It was a shame that Janie’s life was going to end in just over eight hours because she wasn’t her nicest self. She had been an adorable baby, a winsome little girl, a shy, sweet young teen, but around the time of her seventeenth birthday last May, she’d changed. She was dimly aware of her mild awfulness. It wasn’t her fault. She was terrified of everything (university, driving a car, ringing up to make a hairdresser’s appointment), and her hormones were making her crazy, and so many boys were starting to act kind of angrily interested in her, as if maybe she was pretty, which was nice but confusing because when she looked in the mirror all she could see was her ordinary, loathsome face and her weird long skinny body.She looked like a praying mantis. One of the girls at school had told her that, and it was true. Her limbs were too long. Her arms, especially. She was all out of proportion.
    Also, her mother had something odd going on at the moment, which meant she wasn’t concentrating on Janie and up until recently she’d always concentrated on her with such irritating fierceness. (Her mother was forty! What could possibly be going on in her life that was so interesting?) It was unsettling to have that bright spotlight of attention vanish without warning. Hurtful, really, although she wouldn’t have admitted that, or even been aware that she was hurt.
    If Janie had lived, her mother would have returned to her normal, fiercely concentrating self, and Janie would have become lovely again around the time of her nineteenth birthday, and they would have been as close as a mother and daughter can be, and Janie would have buried her mother, instead of the other way around.
    If Janie had lived, she would have dabbled in soft drugs and rough boys, water aerobics and gardening, Botox and tantric sex. During the course of her lifetime, she would have had three minor car crashes, thirty-four bad colds and two major surgeries. She would have been a moderately successful graphic designer, a nervy scuba diver, a whiny camper, an enthusiastic bushwalker and an earlier adopter of the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. She would have divorced her first husband and had IVF twins with her second, and the words ‘test-tube babies’ would have flitted like an old joke across her mind while she posted their photos on Facebook for her Canadian cousins to like. She would have changed her name to Jane when she was twenty and back to Janie when she was thirty.
    If Janie Crowley had lived, she would have travelled and dieted, danced and cooked, laughed and cried, watched a lot of television and tried her very best.
    But none of that was going to happen, because it was the morning of the last day of her life, and although she would have enjoyed watching the mascara-streaked faces of her friends as they made a spectacle of themselves, clutching each other and