The Life She Was Given

When Julia goes to the barn to check on the horses in the cold, she tries to get information out of Claude about her sister because she knows he has worked for the family for 27 years. He is evasive, telling her that he heard something about Mrs. Blackwood losing a child but that he stays out of the personal lives of his employers. Julia is determined to prove herself to Claude by taking care of the barn and horses, hopefully getting him to trust and confide in her.

Lilly stands in the center ring of the big top while Cole, his father Hank, and Mr. Barlow watch. Pepper effortlessly performs every command Lilly gives her. Mr. Barlow is unimpressed—combining two of his star attractions into one performance means losing money. When Cole asks why Mr. Barlow doesn’t force Merrick to pay Lilly given her star power, Mr. Barlow angrily retorts, “As long as Merrick pays me my share of her take, I don’t give a damn what he does with his” (193).

Julia goes through her father’s study to find the key to the locked desk drawer. As she examines bookshelves, going through each book for clues, she comes upon a set of six leather-bound books between two elephant bookends. Inside one, Julia finds a cutout hole; in it are old newspaper clippings and multiple ticket stubs from the Barlow Brothers’ Circus. The clippings feature pictures of a bejeweled performer called “The Albino Medium”; some show her in the ring with elephants. Julia wonders why her father would have taken such an interest in the circus and this girl.

Fletcher arrives to check on Julia, and the two sit by the fire and drink brandy. When Julia asks if Fletcher knows anything about her late sister, he instead shares that he is single and wonders if he has to fight off anyone for Julia’s affections. Flustered, Julia can’t tell if he’s serious, so she asks him to leave. After he’s gone, though, “to her surprise, she [feels] like a schoolgirl with a new crush, with sweaty palms and quivering knees” (201). 

The Barlow Brothers’ Circus is at its biggest venue, just outside New York City on the Fourth of July weekend. The pressure is on to make the show a success. One of Lilly’s customers, hoping to communicate with his deceased son and wife, is belligerent and aggressive, accusing her of being a fraud. When Merrick arrives and fights with the man, he overturns Lilly’s table, exposing its trick mechanisms. The man then rips down the tent walls so that the other rubes can see the setup. An angry line forms, demanding their money back and hurling insults. Mr. Barlow arrives with guards to break up the fight and then demands that Merrick find a new act for Lilly since she has been exposed. Lilly is relieved to be free from the trap of lying to these poor customers, but Merrick and Mr. Barlow are furious. Mr. Barlow tells Lilly that she must perform in the “cooch show”—a standard 1930s women’s performance that involved striptease—until she has a new act. Merrick adds, “I don’t give a damn what you want. You do what I tell you to do. Without me, you’d still be locked in your parents’ attic, half out of your mind. I saved your sorry ass and I own you” (208).

Two days after the ice storm, the power comes back on, and the ice begins to melt. Julia is unnerved by her interaction with Fletcher but unsure of what to do about it. She sees a truck approach the barn and office. Claude explains that they have brought in a nurse mare—a horse to nurse Samantha Blue so that Bonnie can stop producing milk and go into heat again. This way, Bonnie can get inseminated to produce another foal as soon as possible. Julia is appalled to learn that nurse mares’ own foals are sold at auction and face death or starvation as a result (biologically, nurse mares need to have recently foaled so that they can produce milk). Demanding that Claude return Samantha to Bonnie and find this nurse mare’s foal, Julia orders this practice to end immediately at Blackwood, even if they lose money. Julia is distraught at imagining the suffering of the young horses and their mothers: She “could almost feel the horrible, heavy pain in their chests, the terror and helplessness in their minds” (213). After Claude storms off, Julia enlists Fletcher’s help with reuniting Bonnie and Samantha and wonders how her parents could allow their greed to overrule their care for the horses.

Twins Ruby and Rose help Lilly prepare for the cooch show, but Lilly doesn’t think she can go through with it. She is worried about what Cole will think of her after she is forced to show her naked body to other men and terrified of what the men watching will do. The twins give her whiskey for her nerves. To Lilly’s surprise, the men only whistle and clap, but performing makes Lilly feel horrible, as she is reminded of her mother’s insistence that no one should ever see her body. Crying at “the horrible realization that she had been cheated out of a normal life” (220), she runs off stage and vomits in the grass while the men in the audience yell at her and throw things.

Merrick finds her and is furious. He threatens to send her out back behind the wagons where other men are waiting to have sex with some of the circus workers. He grabs Lilly, forces her to the ground, and attempts to rape her. Lilly feels herself dissociating from the situation, as something deep within her soul “split[s] wide open. It [is] the only part of her that she’d managed to keep hidden and protected, even while people stared and made fun of her in the freak show” (223). Cole rushes in and hits Merrick with a bull hook. Cole apologizes for not protecting Lilly, carries her to his car, and promises that he will stay with her from now on.

In her father’s study, Julia keeps searching for the desk key. She looks at her framed high school picture again and realizes there is another picture underneath it—one of Coralline as a young woman during much happier times. Taped to the back of the photo, she finds the drawer key. In the drawer are a camera, a jewelry pouch, and a poster from the Barlow Brothers’ Circus. The camera case has the name “Lilly” inside. Fletcher has another surprise for her: an abandoned filly from a nearby farm that needs to be bottle-fed to stay alive, which Lilly agrees to do.

Julia presses Claude about the camera, Lilly, and the circus, but he gruffly denies any knowledge. Julia can’t understand why her parents kept so many secrets and why they were so cold: “[F]or the thousandth time, she pulled herself apart piece by piece, trying to figure out why she felt so unloved” (234). She spends the next days taking care of the young filly, which she names Molly. When the film from the camera is developed, the photos all feature the circus and the performers. Julia realizes that the albino woman from the newspaper clippings is named Lilly, who is also in the developed photos, the last of which shows her with an infant on her lap and a stuffed patchwork elephant that Julia recognizes as her favorite childhood toy.