When the Lights Go Out(56)

My mind drifts and I find myself thinking about the other Jessica Sloane. The one who is not me. And I know with a sudden translucence that I am not Jessica Sloane, but that I’m somebody else. That Jessica Sloane died when she was three and for whatever reason, Mom stole her social security number and gave it to me. This is no longer a hypothetical. I know.

But there are ways of finding out who you are, aside from a birth certificate, social security number or name. Because if I’m not Jessica Sloane, then I need to know who I really am. I think of forensic identification, stuff like fingerprints, DNA, handwriting analysis, dentistry. Ways to prove one’s identity aside from birth certificates and social security numbers. Everyone in the whole wide world is supposedly unique, like the stripes of a zebra or the spots of a giraffe. Snowflakes. It’s near mathematically and scientifically impossible that any two could be the same. Even the creases of our feet are distinct, which is one of the reasons babies’ footprints are taken after birth. For identification purposes. Because no two footprints are alike. So hospitals know which baby is which if ever they get separated from their moms or dads. In case the ID bands slip from their ankles or wrists. I stare at my fingerprints, thinking the answer to who I am is sitting there, in all those miniscule lines that make me unique, a single snowflake, one in twenty trillion falling in a snowstorm, drifting aimlessly and alone.

I don’t know who I am, but I’m not Jessica Sloane.

It’s hours later when I catch a smidge of orange pass by the storefront window, and I know right away: it’s him. It’s the orange baseball cap that he wore, slipping it over his hair before he left the garden. He’s here, come and gone for coffee and somehow, in a daze, I all but missed him.

I rise too quickly from the blue velvet sofa, spilling a lukewarm coffee, my third of the day, down the front of me, staining my shirt a translucent brown. I don’t bother blotting it with napkins before I go scurrying for the door, knocking into a stanchion post along the way. I knock it over with a clang, leaving it on the floor as people stare. “What’s the hurry?” I hear breathed through the air. “What’s her problem?” followed by a giggle, a snort.

I press my way out onto the city street, following the pinprick of orange in the distance, a beacon of light as it slaloms this way and that down the street. I run, pushing my way past people walking too slowly, trying desperately to bridge the gap from him to me.

As I narrow in on him, I reach out and tug on something, my hand bearing down hard. A little boy cries out, and, as they turn to me, I see. A little boy in a superhero costume. The Flash. He’s perched on his father’s shoulders, making him tall. The costume is red and yellow with a mask that covers his face. It’s the type of mask that covers everything, leaving only slits for the mouth, nose and eyes. Like the costume, it’s also red and yellow. Not orange, though my mind mutated them for me, mixing the red and yellow, turning them into orange.

Once again, my eyes have deceived me.

He isn’t the man from the garden after all.





eden

June 17, 2005

Chicago

It’s been a couple of hours since it happened, and still I can’t get my heart rhythm to slow. I feel off, a dull headache in the back of my neck that simply won’t quit, my handwriting like chicken scratch from the shaking hands. Jessie is quiet now, tucked into bed with her lights turned off. I’d read her a story before bed, hoping it might help her forget. Hoping it might replace the photograph she saw with the fun of leading imaginary beasts on a wild rumpus around her bedroom. She was laughing by the time she went to bed, and I can only pray that she dreams tonight of Emile and Bernard, and not of Aaron.

I, however, will dream only of Aaron.

I think I covered my tracks quite well, but I won’t ever know. There’s no telling what goes on inside a little girl’s mind, which details of our lives are committed to memory and which we forget.

For the first time tonight, past and present collided, and it made me realize one thing: that I have to be more wary of where I hide my things. Jessie is older now and more inquisitive. She’s liable to have questions for me that I can’t answer because I don’t want to answer them. I have to be more careful if I’m going to keep my past from her.

It’s not that I don’t love her. It’s that I do.

We’d just finished up dinner when it happened. I was in the kitchen, wiping down the countertops, and she’d disappeared down the hall to, presumably, go play. She was in her room, or so I thought at the time, quiet as a church mouse. That should have been my warning, because for as fiery and high-spirited as she is, Jessie is rarely quiet.

I don’t know how much time passed—ten minutes, an hour while I was stupidly relishing in the quiet and didn’t once think to check on her—when she appeared there in the doorway to the kitchen with an item in her hand, asking of me, “Who’s this?”

Her eyes, when I turned to her, were doe-eyed, her hair falling into her forehead like it hadn’t seen a brush in weeks. There were dust bunnies clinging to the fabric of her pants and I knew right away that she’d been somewhere she shouldn’t have been, on her hands and knees, digging through things.

“Where’d you find this?” I asked, taking it from her hand. I heard my voice crack as I said it, and though I couldn’t see it, I was certain my face was masked in fear. My voice wasn’t angry. It was scared.