When the Lights Go Out(36)

What a dimple really is is a birth defect. A short facial muscle that pulls on your skin when you smile, causing indentations in the cheek. My father and I are, therefore, both defected.

I made up names for him. Occupations. I sized up men with dimples at random, wondering if any of them were him.

I imagined him with a different wife and kids. Me with half brothers and sisters, a family. In my delusion, every last one of them had dimples.

Before bed, I’d leave the porch light on, so that he could find our home if ever he came to visit. So that he’d know which one was ours. Which bungalow in a sea of bungalows belonged to me.

When I was fourteen, I attempted a crop top for school. It wasn’t my thing, bearing my belly button for all to see. But it was a camouflage T, soft and green, and I was fourteen. Feeling rebellious. Trying to fit in with the crowd but failing. Instead I stood out like a sore thumb, always light-years behind the latest fad.

Mom’s mouth dropped. She shook her head. She said no to the crop top, told me to march upstairs and change. To march. I put up a fight, standing with my hands on my hips, pouting. Sputtering the nonsense of a fourteen-year-old girl.

But Mom would have none of it. It wasn’t up for discussion, she told me, saying for a third time to march. Pointing at the stairs.

My words were brisk. I bet that if my dad were here, he’d let me, I said. She looked hurt, visibly wounded. I’d hurt her and I was glad I did.

Are you ever going to tell me about him? I asked. It was a fair question. I deserved to know, or so my fourteen-year-old self believed I did. I didn’t once consider the reasons she kept him from me, or the ramifications of knowing who he was. But Mom did.

Qui vivra verra, Mom replied, holding her hands up in the air. Her favorite saying, one that rolled eloquently off her tongue. Only time will tell is in essence what it means, but this time what it was was a way to be evasive. To avoid my question yet again.

I stormed out of the room. Marched up the stairs and slammed a bedroom door. I put on a sweatshirt that covered every square inch of me.

Not a year later, the cancer came.

And then I started wishing I’d never asked about my dad.

I dwell on those memories now, hating myself for what I put Mom through.

But every night around 3:00 a.m., when I’ve exhausted all the thoughts of death and grief and guilt for a single night, my imagination begins to take flight. My imagination or my memories, though some nights I have a hard time determining which is which. Tonight it’s a memory, I think, one so far-flung that my brain has to cobble pieces of it together, adding to the gaps so that it makes sense. Filling in the blanks. I see that kindergarten classroom, a poster of the golden rule taped to the cinder block walls. A big bookcase, a rectangular rug with the alphabet depicted on it—the alphabet plus simple pictures, an apple for A, a bird for B—the American flag. A chalkboard with the teacher’s name written on it in perfect penmanship. I see Mom standing there before the teacher, making an introduction, saying to the teacher that she is Eden and I am Jessie, and then the teacher squats just so and reaches out a hand to me and I shake it. Her smile is warm and sincere as she rises back up to Mom.

Mrs. Roberts stands with the clipboard in hand, making sure each child’s paperwork is complete and that they’ve brought their supplies. Mom hovers self-consciously before her, hands behind her back, fingers laced. Mom and Mrs. Roberts talk and as they do, words reach my ears—birth certificate, I think I hear—and Mom stiffens at Mrs. Roberts’s request.

“Pardon me?” Mom asks, and Mrs. Roberts explains how there’s a note from the school office that she’s yet to provide a copy of my birth certificate with the other registration materials. A certified copy, with the raised seal.

Mom doesn’t miss a beat. She says something about a house fire. “We lost everything,” she says, and Mrs. Roberts’s face turns sad.

“How awful,” Mrs. Roberts says consolingly as I, six-year-old me, asks unsuspectingly, “What fire?” Because there was never a fire. Not in our home. We didn’t lose a thing.

Mom shushes me. Mrs. Roberts lays a hand on Mom’s arm and says just as soon as she can get a replacement, that would be fine.

But then, like that, the memory disappears, and I have to wonder if it was a memory at all or only my imagination.

Tonight as I lie on the mattress in a misplaced belief that if I lie here long enough, eventually I will sleep, I think of a dead three-year-old Jessica Sloane, having to remind myself that it’s a typographical error only, that she doesn’t exist.

The room is quiet as I lie in bed wondering what she looked like. For three years old, I picture chubby wrists and knees, innocent eyes, an endless smile. I wonder if that’s what she looked like. But then again I remember. There is no other Jessica Sloane. She is me.

A heavy silence flattens me in bed, filling every crevice in the room like a poisonous gas. I think that maybe it could kill me, that silence. Displacing all the oxygen in the room with a smothering quiet. The only thing I hear is the tick, tock, tick, tock of the wall clock, keeping time.

I rise to my knees and gaze out the window into the yard, seeing only the back of Ms. Geissler’s home from here. It’s tall and imposing, three floors of limestone and brick. Such a big home for one woman alone.

There’s a balcony in the back of the home, a basic, rudimentary sort of thing. Wooden scaffolding that soars up three floors, a wooden slab to stand upon. It looks unsafe to me. Unsound. Not up to code.