Perfect Little World(19)
Izzy’s mother was working on a vague, book-length manuscript debunking history’s most famous UFO incidents, staying up well into the early morning hours, taking diet pills and amphetamines to stay awake, before she continued her homeschooling of Izzy during the day. Izzy asked to participate in the research, to at least sort the piles of pamphlets and weird photocopies of government documents that came in the mail, but Catherine gently refused, saying this work was hers alone. When Izzy asked why UFOs were so important to her, Izzy’s mother replied, “I don’t like the idea that there are other worlds where life could be better for me. I want to make sure they aren’t there, that this is all I have.”
When Izzy was thirteen, her mother died of heart failure brought on by her morbid obesity and her use of stimulants. Izzy was, thank god, not the one who found her, slumped over her desk, pictures of UFOs taped to the wall. She woke up one morning and her father was standing over her, two policemen and an EMT behind him. “Where’s Mom?” she asked, and not a single one of the men responded.
After her mother’s death, Izzy went into the attic and retrieved Miss Tenny C, who looked vaguely similar to Izzy’s mother when she was a teenager. She would sleep with the dummy, carry it everywhere with her, making it talk, saying the things that Izzy’s mother no longer could. While she and her father would sit in the living room, eating lukewarm fish sticks and watching late-night TV, Izzy would operate the dummy, Miss Tenny C saying, over and over, “You are special, Izzy. You are so, so special.”
Izzy looked at the question one more time and then wrote: “They loved me without reservation and tried their best to make me happy.” The way she answered, it sounded like both of her parents were dead, but she decided not to rewrite the answer. She skipped ahead a few pages and looked at the next question: What role do you see your family playing in your baby’s life?
Izzy slammed the journal shut and placed it back in the nightstand drawer. She pulled her feet out of the tub, her toes pruney and pale white and soft. Once again, she asked herself how in the world she was going to do this and, once again, she had no real answer.
She wished she knew Hal’s thinking in the lead-up to his suicide. Had he made a logical and evenhanded assessment of his life and made the judicious decision to end it, or had he simply read Izzy’s letter, torn it into pieces, written his own suicide note, and then waited for the chance to finally enact his own death? Was death preferable to a life with Izzy and the baby they had made together? Was death preferable to any life? Izzy wondered. She opened her laptop and checked Google again for any mention of Hal’s death, using different search terms to narrow the results for Hal Jackson. She found nothing of note, but then simply typed his name into the search engine and added the word art. On the image search, she found several examples of his paintings and she stared at them for at least thirty minutes, clicking back and forth among the images.
In Hal’s earliest work, before he started painting portraits, his method was to set different objects on fire, take a detailed and close-up photograph of the slow, controlled burn, and then turn that photo into a painting. Canvas after canvas of white and orange and red, as if the image could incinerate what was special inside you. She had asked Hal about the paintings and he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “I keep thinking I can find the moment when the object is not what it once was, but it also isn’t ash yet. I want to find the moment that the fire transforms us. I never do, though.”
She closed her browser and opened a file folder called Finances. She hated looking at the spreadsheet, but couldn’t look away. She looked at her annual income, at the minimum wage, of nearly $13,000, before taxes. She looked at her expenses, even considering the fact that she did not have to pay rent because she still lived with her father. She looked at the payment plan she’d worked out for the $2,000 in prenatal care with the OB/GYN, no real belief that she could pay it off in a timely fashion. She didn’t even try to add up the cost of diapers and formula and all the things a baby demands. Nothing matched up; the equations did not exist that would allow for Izzy’s financial comfort.
Mrs. Jackson’s phone number was on the desk next to Izzy’s computer. She looked at the numbers, imagined what would possibly transpire if she called it. Hal was gone. There was nothing she could do to bring him back. The Jacksons were going to pay her in order to save them some measure of embarrassment. They had so much money that, no matter what Izzy hoped, taking it would not be a punishment for them. Izzy knew what was happening, the way she was allowing weakness to override her sense of pride. For Izzy, there was no direction left to her but forward, away from Hal and into something new and unknown. Like any journey, she needed supplies to help her get there. She called Mrs. Jackson, happy that at least it was late enough that it would interrupt the woman’s peaceful, dreamless sleep. Izzy waited for her to answer, knowing that she would take whatever Hal’s family would give her, whatever she could snatch from their hands and make her own.
chapter five
Izzy lay on the examining table, her shirt pulled up to her chest, her belly exposed. The technician, an unsmiling woman wearing Hello Kitty scrubs, held a bottle of gel and asked Izzy, “You nervous?” Izzy nodded. “Don’t be,” the woman continued. “This is the easiest and best procedure in your entire pregnancy.” The woman squeezed a glob of gel onto Izzy’s stomach, which wasn’t nearly as cold as she’d been led to believe, and spread it around. The technician gently moved the transducer over Izzy’s skin, but Izzy focused instead on the screen, the weirdest movie she would ever watch. As she listened to the baby’s heartbeat, cloudy and rapid, she watched as the gray smudges on the screen eventually, without warning, turned into the shape of her baby. She gasped; it was as if she had been looking at a Magic Eye poster and had suddenly seen the image appear out of the random patterns. There, on the screen, was the shape of the baby’s head.