When the Lights Go Out(68)

And then it happens again. My eyelids close. They do it against my will. My head slumps forward, my neck no longer able to hold it up. It lasts a second. Only a second.

For one blissful second, I am asleep.

But then a jolt of electricity tears through me and my head snaps to. I’m awake.

“Jessie,” I hear. I see Liam’s hand fall to my knee. I turn to face him, his blue eyes so well-meaning. I’m overcome with a sense of belonging that I’ve rarely known before, only ever with Mom.

He touches my hair and for a single moment, something inside me feels warm.

He urges me to lie on his sofa. He offers up a pillow and a blanket, but I say no thanks. That I’m all right. “Jessie,” he argues, but I say it again. I’m all right, though we both know that’s not true.

I excuse myself, pushing my body from the sofa as if I weigh three hundred pounds. In the bathroom I splash cold water on my face. I stare at my reflection in the mirror. My skin has a grayish-green tint to it. I look sick, like I’m dying. My eyes sink into their sockets, deep bags formed beneath each. I press a finger to them, watching as they sink and then swell. Sink and then swell. My lips are dry, chapped around the edges, blistered, my cheeks concave.

I count the days on my fingertips. The days since I’ve been asleep.

The longest anyone has gone without a drop of sleep is eleven days.

I stare at my own sunken reflection, not able to make sense of what I see, but knowing that by this time tomorrow, I will be dead.





eden

September 23, 1997 Egg Harbor

I tried not to let the desperation get the best of me, too afraid of what I might do if it did. I tried hard to keep busy, taking on extra shifts at the hospital, working overtime because being at home, alone, threw me easily off balance and I didn’t like the feeling of being off balance, of being desperate, of feeling like I was losing control.

My home, Aaron’s and my utopian cottage, quickly became a dystopia to me, a place where everything was undesirable and sad, and where I was in a constant state of dysphoria; I couldn’t stand to be there and so I took to keeping myself out of the home all day, every day, doing everything imaginable to avoid the pine floors and whitewashed walls, the glorious tree swing that had once deceived me into believing this place was home.

I spent ten hours a day reading through patient files, trying to decipher what they were to be billed for and entering it into the hospital’s system. It was meaningless and mundane, and yet a wonderful way to waste time. I took odd jobs on occasion, answering ads for a temporary cleaning lady or a dog walker or a driver to take a sweet elderly woman for dialysis treatments, keeping her company for the four hours it took to eliminate waste from her blood three times each week. It kept me busy and more than anything, I needed to be busy.

Time passed.

Last week I came home to find a separation agreement in a manila envelope, set beside the front door. In it, Aaron left me the house and all of our assets, taking from me only the debt, as much as he could anyway, the credit cards that were in both of our names.

Even in divorce he was protecting me.

I signed the paperwork post-haste, knowing that the sooner I did, the sooner the divorce was complete, I could ask for donor sperm without Aaron’s consent.

In the meantime, I did everything I could to keep busy, knowing it would take months, nearly six of them, until the divorce was finalized.

Could I wait that long for a baby?

Oh, how I would try.

But as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Because the minute the well ran dry and I found myself with nothing better to do, I drove by the quaint dance studio on Church Street and sat on the park bench, watching the little ballerinas come and go, and it was different now because I hadn’t been there in months, since springtime, but everything was still the same. The bigger girls scurried out of the studio first, followed by their mothers, who carried coffee and talked.

And then, just when I’d begun to think that was it, the end of the procession, there came little Olivia with her short legs lagging behind, waylaid by things like heavy doors and sidewalk cracks, struggling to keep up. Her hair had been cut short, no longer in a bun but pinned to the sides of her head with barrettes. She was still easily distracted, that I’d come to learn, sidetracked by things like birds and bugs and today a leaf, bright red on the white concrete, the first indication of fall.

She paused to poke and prod at it as if it were alive, examining the redness of the leaf, the shape of its lobes, while the others gravitated away at their own pace so that the distance between them grew exponentially, and this time, Olivia’s mother was too caught up in her conversation that she didn’t see her daughter on her haunches, examining the leaf with the concentration and single-mindedness of a microbiologist. The woman’s feet hit the street and she crossed the intersection, unaware of the fact that she and her child were now separated by a highway, the very same highway that once took a little girl’s life when her mother was also not watching.

Some women were not meant to be mothers.

And some who were, some who would make the very best mothers, were refused the right.

It didn’t seem fair.

Oh, what a good mother I would be, if only the universe would let me.

Suddenly Olivia’s eyes peered up from the fallen leaf and, at seeing that she was alone, she began to cry. It was a process that went by degrees, a feeling of excitement first at finding the leaf, followed by frustration that there was no one around to show the leaf to, before sadness crept in, a great heartache that the others had left without her, leading to panic. Sheer panic. Olivia gasped first, choking unexpectedly on her own saliva, and then she began to cry, quiet tears, choked-up tears, while her little knees shook beneath their shiny white tights.