The Life She Was Given

Julia is determined to eradicate the rats from the attic, but she has no idea how to access the space. She tries to get Claude to help her, but he refuses. She confronts him about his behavior, asking if she has done or said something wrong, but he doesn’t give anything away. Deflated, she attempts to find the attic on her own, returning to the small room with the tapestry on the wall on the third floor. She sees no way up but refuses to give up because she knows that attics often store memories “[a]nd sometimes answers to family secrets” (254). She searches tirelessly until she finds a cord on the tapestry and uncovers the door beneath it.

Four months later, Lilly and Cole are in Mr. Barlow’s office telling him the news of her pregnancy. Lilly won’t be able to perform with Pepper while pregnant, so Cole asks if she can help with the elephants in the meantime. Lilly comes up with the idea to tell audiences that she’s away performing in Europe so that when she and Pepper return to the ring, audiences will flock to see them. When Lilly demands that she get paid when she returns to work, Mr. Barlow and Merrick laugh in her face. Cole and Lilly argue that it’s only fair that she be compensated based on her drawing power as a star attraction, but Mr. Barlow refuses.

Julia finds the key to the hidden door and ventures inside the decrepit space, wary of rotting wood and missing planks as she makes her way up the stairs. The attic is completely covered with belongings—trunks, china, furniture, and boxes line each wall and floorboard. She walks along the narrow path into a portrait-lined space where one door leads to yet another.

Cole and Lilly’s daughter, Phoebe Lillian Holt, is 12 months old when the circus stops in Oklahoma. Lilly and Pepper’s act is bigger than ever, and the money is pouring in, making even Mr. Barlow happy. Lilly cannot believe how happy she is in her “strange circus life that had been forced on her” (264). Cole photographs their life and decorates their train car with the pictures.

Before the evening’s show begins, the sky around the circus turns green and the wind picks up, putting the animals on high alert. As the parade starts in the big tent, a tornado is spotted in the distance, and the wind whips through the tent. Chaos breaks out as the tent’s walls and ceiling tear apart, sending the audience and performers running for their lives. Debris flies everywhere, and people trample one another as they try to escape. Lilly and Cole guide Pepper and JoJo out of the tent to safety while the other animals and performers flee in all directions around them. When Lilly maneuvers Pepper near the center of the tent, Mr. Barlow blocks their path, insisting that Pepper remain in the tent. Cole and Mr. Barlow fight while Lilly escapes with Pepper. Outside, she realizes why Mr. Barlow wanted to keep Pepper indoors: In the rain, the white paint drips off the elephant as onlookers realize that “The Albino Elephant” is a fake. Lilly knows Mr. Barlow will blame her.

Days later, when the circus stops in Tennessee, everyone is uncertain if the show will continue on or shut down. To purchase a new tent, Mr. Barlow agrees to sell one of the elephants to another circus. The buyers select JoJo and attempt to separate him from Pepper, but Lilly intervenes, and Pepper breaks free and tries to get to JoJo. When Merrick and the other workers attack Pepper with bull hooks and shoot at her with their guns, Pepper bats Merrick around on the ground, striking him with her trunk and legs, killing him.

The local sheriff demands that Mr. Barlow get rid of Pepper. Lilly tries to reason with him: “You can’t punish a mother for acting like a mother, or an animal for acting like an animal” (280). However, after nearby towns refuse to allow the circus to perform there, Mr. Barlow decides to publicly execute Pepper to satisfy their demands.

Julia discovers Lilly’s attic bedroom behind the final door, appalled by the notion that her sister was locked up here. She realizes that her parents’ coldness and unloving nature was not entirely because of Julia: “Mother had blamed her for Father’s drinking and death, but something else was going on inside Blackwood Manor, something that seemed straight out of a nightmare” (291). Finding the skeleton of a cat in the armoire, Julia imagines a little girl trapped in this room, curled up with her cat and wondering why she is so unloved. The space carries “a profound sense of loneliness and misery […] as if every emotion absorbed by the bedroom walls had been released all at once” (293). Disturbed by the scene in the attic and irrationally fearful that her sister is somehow still living there, Julia rushes downstairs, locking the doors behind her. The date of the entry in her father’s diary, 1940, would have made Julia two years old when the Blackwoods buried their firstborn.