Notes on an Execution(48)

Lavender did not want to cry, but the intensity of the day had compounded. It reverberated, an ache in her jaw.

The next photo featured a little girl, maybe six years old. She reached one hand up toward Ellis, while the other stretched to examine something on the sidewalk. A dandelion.

“Her name is Blue,” Cheryl said from behind.

“Blue,” Lavender said.

Cheryl rolled her eyes. “Her name is Beatrice, actually, but the locals nicknamed her. She’s a precocious little girl, very empathetic. Last month they found an injured garden snake in a box under her bed—she’d been nursing it back to health.” Cheryl chuckled. “That’s the restaurant. The Blue House.”

The following photographs were set inside the restaurant. Blue perched on the kitchen counter while a pretty brunette chopped a large bowl of scallions. Ellis and the woman, his wife, attended to different tasks at the industrial stove—the camera captured a glint of spatula, a curl of steam, a garbage can overflowing with corn husks. There was a shot of Blue, her lips clasped around a straw as she suckled soda from a plastic cup. Blue, sitting in a booth with French fries up her nose, playing walrus. The last photo in the collection felt, to Lavender, like hyperventilation. Ellis and his wife hunched at a long oak bar, seemingly blind to the camera. Little Blue was tucked between them, her parents’ cheeks resting on either side of her head. Looking, Lavender could almost smell the girl’s scalp. That child scent, sticky and sweet.

“Please,” Cheryl said.

Lavender’s heart was an orchestra, crashing delirious.

“Please, Lavender. Promise you won’t go to him. Ellis knows himself, his world, his life. He has been perfectly happy without you for a long time now.”

Cheryl faced the photographs with her arms crossed, a familiar expression written along her cheeks. Lavender recognized it instinctually. She had felt such a thing herself, many years ago, for the very same child. Protection and love, desperation and sacrifice.

“Okay,” Lavender breathed. She turned away from the photos, unable to look any longer. She was crying now, so terribly unraveled. “I should go. Thank you, Cheryl. Thank you for showing me.”

“Won’t you stay for the opening?”

“I don’t think so,” Lavender said. She pushed past Cheryl, toward the exit. The sky outside had darkened to a ripe evening purple. “Just one last thing. My other son, Ansel. Does Ellis know about him?”

“No,” Cheryl said quietly. “Ellis never knew about the brother. We only saw him once. In the hospital, when we went to pick up Ellis. The social worker took me from the NICU to the pediatric ward. He was in a little room, reading a book in a beanbag chair. He looked okay, through the glass. Healthy. Fine.”

“What happened after that?”

“I don’t know. They asked, of course. But we couldn’t take him, too.”

It was startling, the envy. Like a slap. Cheryl seemed so at ease in this tasteful room, wearing her beautiful clothes as her staff bustled around. Cheryl was graceful. Cheryl was assured. Cheryl was confident enough in her understanding of the world to tamper with its colors, to turn darks to lights and brights to empties. She had been kind to Lavender, for no reason at all. In another life, Lavender thought, all this would have been hers—color and solace, a clean sense of conviction. A good mother, satisfied.

“You just left Ansel there?” Lavender asked, surprised by the blame in her own voice.

Cheryl’s gaze softened, like she could see straight through Lavender’s body and down into the raw.

“Oh, Lavender,” Cheryl said. “Ansel was never our child. He was yours.”

*

Dark, now.

The gallery spat Lavender unceremoniously back onto the street. She stumbled down the sidewalk on jelly trembling legs, her body shocked into numbness, as the swell of memory rushed up from her rib cage, clouding everything. She walked until the buildings all looked different, until she’d lost Cheryl’s photographs in the maze and chaos.

Eventually, she reached the waterfront. Lavender glided to the edge of the sidewalk, where concrete met the sea, grateful for the relative abandonment. If she plugged her ears and looked up, the blank and starless night could almost be home. Lavender staggered forward, the motions of the city beating like capillaries against the stun of the day.

The memories swamped. Filled her mouth to choking. That dusty yellow mattress, huddling her boys. Dried blood beneath her fingernails. She could still smell Ansel’s hair, his stiff dirty curls, could still feel the gummy melt of his palms after a day in the yard. She could still see the baby, soft in the fortress of sheets, a trickle of drool forming a bridge from chin to chest.

Her molecules. Her very soul. Safe, beneath the blankets.

Lavender reached into the pocket of her hemp shirt. She had sewn a pocket on the interior of every garment she owned, for exactly this purpose. Inside, she kept the locket. The charm she’d promised to her child then accidentally stolen away. In the dim city light, it looked worn, haunted. She did not know why she carried it still—she could not bear to clasp it around her neck, but she also could not bear to set it down.

Over the years, Lavender had learned many different ways to love. There was the love of a friend, good conversation late at night. The love of a party, whiskey in the moonlight. The love of sex, tinged magenta—for a few years, there had been a woman named Joy. And Lavender had finally learned how to love the stretch of her own limbs, first thing in the morning. But it was clear now, in the devastating narrow of her memory. There was nothing like the love you had for your own child. It was biological. Primal and evolutionary. It was chronic, unbanishable. It had been living inside her all this time. Bone-deep.