When the Lights Go Out(87)

I sit on the sofa in Mom’s and my home in Albany Park. Because for now it’s not yet on the market, though I know that soon it will be. I carefully pull the cover back. A flattened leaf slips from its inside and onto my lap—red, with edges that fold up slightly at their edges—as does a photograph, which falls facedown on my thighs. There’s a name etched on the back. Aaron. I know what the picture is before I ever look. The photograph I found as a child. The one Mom hid away in this journal so that I couldn’t find it again.

My heart breaks at the familiar sight of Mom’s handwriting.

My eyes wade through the pages, tears blurring my vision. Making it hard to take in the words. But I do anyway, curled into a ball on the sofa, beneath a blanket Mom and I once shared, listening to her favorite records over and over again on repeat.

Aaron showed me the house today, it reads. I’m in love with it already—a cornflower blue cottage perched on a forty-five-foot cliff that overlooks the bay. Pine floors and whitewashed walls. A screened-in porch. A long wooden staircase that leads down to the dock at the water’s edge where the Realtor promised majestic sunsets and fleets of sailboats floating by...





eden

November 10, 1997 Egg Harbor

When I awoke this morning there was the most unpleasant sense in my stomach, as if I’d swallowed some sort of gastric acid in the middle of the night and there it sat, lost somewhere between my throat and my intestines, not sure which way to go. Up or down. There was an awful taste in my mouth, as if I’d drunk a vat of vinegar before bed, and when I hurried for a glass of water to wash it down, I wound up hurling the water and everything else inside my stomach into the kitchen sink and then stood, clutching the countertop, tasting vomit, trying hard to catch my breath. There was saliva on my chin and tears in my eyes.

What did I eat last night?

Whatever it was, it wasn’t much. I haven’t eaten much for weeks, having subjected myself to a life of seclusion since my brush with that bartender in the back seat of my car. I haven’t left the house other than for the bare necessities, for fear of running into him on the street. My home is my prison. I’ve been too ashamed to go outside.

Ashamed for a whole slew of reasons, my promiscuity only being one of them.

Overnight I had gone from being a respectable human being to a voyeur, a kidnapper, a misfit, a freak. The morning after my encounter with that bartender, I came home to find bruises on my neck from where he sucked my skin raw so that I couldn’t leave the house until they healed, my skin returning to its usual shade of peach. Day and night I stared at those bruises, hating myself. What kind of person was I? What kind of person had I become?

I remembered the feeling of little Olivia’s hand in mine.

Had that really happened, or was it only a dream?

Did I nearly steal another woman’s child?

Two women’s children?

The bartender had taken off with my purse too, snatched it right from the front seat while I lay in the back in a daze, leaving the car door unlatched, the interior lights on so that by morning the battery was completely drained. I walked the three miles home with a swollen ankle, clutching the plackets of my shirt together since the buttons had snapped clear off at his hasty hand. I spent the morning after on the telephone with various credit card companies, reporting the cards stolen, despising myself for getting into this situation in the first place, for letting myself be a floozy and a victim. I avowed to pay off my debt and cut the new cards the credit card company would no doubt send me to shreds.

I would never be a victim again.

I’d never trust anyone again.

I would never leave the house for fear I might try and pilfer someone else’s child.

And so I’ve become a recluse, plunged into a state of depression where I go unshowered for days at a time, oftentimes not getting out of bed from morning until night. I eat only when I need to, when the hunger pangs are more than I can bear. I’ve lost my job, no doubt, though no one told me as much, but one can’t expect to stay employed when they haven’t gone to work for thirty-odd days. I’m drowning in debt, I assume, though I haven’t found the energy to drag myself to the mailbox to retrieve the bills, but I’m certain I must be because just last night when I flipped a light switch on, nothing happened. I jiggled the toggle up and down and when that failed, tried another light switch.

It appeared the electricity had been shut off for nonpayment.

I went back to bed in the dark, planning to stay there for the rest of my life, which would be short as I swore off water and food too.

But then this morning the nausea wrenched me from bed, dragging me to the kitchen sink, where again and again I heaved, wondering what in the world was wrong with me.

And it was a slow dawning then, daylight arriving at its own sweet time, one shaft of light at a time.

For thirty-odd days I had lain in bed since my encounter in the back seat of the car, and in those thirty-odd days, my period—my ever-reliable period—hadn’t come.

And now there was the nausea, the vomiting, and though every rational thought in my mind told me it wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true—after all, I was infertile; there was no way I could get pregnant of my own accord, without Dr. Landry’s menagerie of drugs and devices—I knew instinctively that it was true.

I was pregnant.

To say I was happy would be a lie.