What Lies Between Us (29 page)

She says, “Mama,” and tries to hand me the sippy cup.

“What? How's that, my love? It's just your juice.”

“Icky. Don't wan it.”

“No, baby, it's just your juice. Drink up. It's good for you.” And she, wanting to please, ready to do what Mommy said because Mommy is the sun and she is the smallest flower, listens. This is the bane of childhood, isn't it? That the small person is entirely powerless, entirely dependent on the large person despite whatever grace the larger might or might not possess.

I watch her face in my mirror, the eyelids fluttering, the color changing, the sippy cup slipping out of her fingers, the lid coming off. I hear what's left glug onto the carpet. In the rear mirror I see these things: her head lolling, her body twitching and shaking, a milky froth spilling out of the corner of her mouth, her eyes rolling upward once twice thrice, and then her face settling against her shoulder. She is cradled in the car seat like a nut inside its shell.

*   *   *

I don't look in the mirror anymore. I drive along the smooth avenues, past the park. I remember the bison there, trapped in their meadow. Once not long ago they had thundered across this land in the millions; they had been the monarchs of this continent, unrivaled in strength and number. Seeing them cover the earth, in their day, you would have found it impossible to imagine an end to them. Now there are only these few shaggy outcasts in a far field like deposed kings in exile. We had visited them once. We had stood hand in hand and looked at these lone survivors. We had felt sad for all they had lost, but then we had kissed and were again reminded of luck and love. We had felt blessed. I had not known then how happy I was. Now I know. Now I know exactly how happy I had been in that moment.

I drive across the span to the other side. This is the place that has been waiting for me all along. I pull the car into the parking lot. At this time, it is not crowded. Later there will be tourists, but for now they are all tucked into their various hotels dreaming of the sights they have seen in this most beautiful of cities. I almost cry out when I open the back door and see how her head leans, her moon-silvered eyes. I unbuckle the car seat, pull her out of it, her blanket wrapped so very tight around her. I have to hold her close, so very close. She's like a big doll now. I walk with her head cradled in my palm, held tight and steady against my breast, her sunlit curls bursting forth between my fingers, pulled this way and that by the playful wind.

There are a few people about. The famous red-orange span flies overhead, the tossed sea is below. I linger. On my left, the wide ocean flows. Asia lies that way. Asia like a beckoning glow, far, far over the curve of the earth. The water is full of ghosts; they could claim me and show me how to catch the currents all the way home. All the way to childhood, before cohesion was broken, before skin was split.

One-handed, I pull myself up and clamber across the barrier. We sit on the rim, against the edge of the world; the abyss opens under my feet, the void gapes its toothed maw and cackles. The ocean plays in the sparkling early light. There are voices behind me. I turn and look at suspicious, uneasy faces, unsure whether they are seeing what they think they are seeing, but none coming too close, none bold enough to try and catch me and risk my slipping away from between their fingers. One has pulled out her phone. But there can be no help now.

Samson is here. Looking at me with those eyes, that sad smile. But he means something else now. He's not the one I have to run from. He nods, I turn away.

It is like being an ant on the side of a mountain. The drop beneath my feet makes my nerves tingle. The wind is pulling at her Winnie the Pooh blanket like a dog nipping and tugging at a bone. I let it go and people gasp as it sails away on the currents of the sky, dipping and rising like a kite, fondled and played with by the affectionate streams of air before it's swallowed by the smashing waters. I look down and cry out to see her face slumped against my skin, slightly smashed at the edges, her mouth open.

A man is coming closer, trying to talk to me, trying to tell me it is okay, and I know he will soon try to grab at me. So there is nothing to do but release my arm and let her go tumbling toward the waves and then I step out like my father before me, one hand still holding on, everything else bent toward the open sky, and I unclench my hand and am instantly falling, unable to breathe, a panicked sensation of nothing under my feet, no solidity anywhere, just rushing air and the wind thrusting like needles into my skin. The water below churns like heated oil. I am sobbing and gasping against the wind.

What have I done what have I done what have I done?

The black coat billows around me like the wings of the angel of death that used to sit on the roof of our hospital waiting for the souls streaming out of our windows, and now I am streaming down, down toward the rushing, roiling water. Dear god, what have I done? I have killed her.

I am sobbing and gasping against the wind, pain like a bomb through my chest, and the water is rushing up closer and closer and I will hit soon and then I smash through liquid like hitting a brick wall and it is in my nose and mouth and I am screaming and struggling and fighting and flailing and then suddenly silence explodes in my ears, all around me. The waterweed that has existed in my body sucks me down, pulls at every limb in slow motion. I am suspended, all is silence. I open my eyes and see the yellow blanket undulating so close to my grasping hands. And if it is here, then where is she? I turn my head and see my baby girl. She is just inches away from me, her eyes open and staring, their chocolate brown transmuted into deep green in this place, her fair hair streaming, so much longer now, the curls unwound, reach out as if they would twine about me, pull me to her like golden spider webs, but they don't reach, they only kiss the sides of my face. I stretch my hands out to catch her, but she is just out of reach. She undulates like shimmering ink spilled into water, a gorgeous slow ballet of limbs and movement. She is dancing away from me. There are other forces that want her. They suck her away slowly until she is only a tiny thing so very far away. Then she is gone. I struggle and thrash to follow, but they do not want me.

I am alone.

All around is a viscous, uncanny silence. The hum I have heard all my life, that awful echo is gone. It is all gone: light, sound, pain, time, familiarity. I lie on a bed made of darkness. I have fallen into some other realm, unknown, unseen, and felt only in dream. I float as if I am in amniotic fluid. The void opens around me. I have leapt from the planet. Now there are only fires in the distance, stars burning, silent galaxies slowly, serenely twisting and forming. I am in the grasp of the sacred. I am beyond the reach of my species.

Sunlight drops through the darkness, illuminates thin columns of water like blades come to touch my skin. It gathers about me. The sun god is calling, is claiming, is pulling me up and out of the silence. I don't want this. I need to stay in the abyss. Instead, the water around me too is churning me upward. I am sucked toward light, and above me there is movement, chaos, noise, and then like a cork popping, I break into air and am surrounded by smashing waves and the implosion of my internals, excruciating, panting terror. I am thrown like a toy through the breaks and then a boat comes and men jump into the water, reach for me, haul me onboard. I am shattered, and one of them leaning over me in his huge white suit, looking down at me with tears in his eyes as he cuts away my clothes, asks, “Why?” and darkness wraps midnight around my head.

 

Part Five

 

Epilogue
Twenty-four

I had wanted to die. I had jumped and the water was supposed to take me. But for its own and secret reasons the water did not want me, and so I lived on.

I wake up in a hospital bed, a guard at the door, people coming and going, needles thrust into my arm. The nurse is not gentle. I keep trying to tell her that she is hurting me, but then I realize that she is doing it on purpose. She wants to hurt me. My brain muddled on sedatives swims up to the surface. Why would she do that? What have I done to warrant this? And this question “What have I done?” leads to a room of such horror that I can't open the door. It is so much easier to sleep. To lie in this slim bed between these cool, clean sheets and sleep.

*   *   *

Through the drugs there is something gnawing at me. My mind is like a vulture circling; it spots the red ragged thing in the center, but is not able to swoop down and grasp the relevant facts.

In the midst of these days, his face. My love. My lost beloved. He screams and fights. His ravaged frame barely recognizable—the caverns beneath his eyes, the flesh worn, all that solid flesh, all that gleaming muscle has melted away in anguish. This is a wraith of the man I knew.

They have to hold him away from me. “Why! Why? Why'd you do this?” he shouts and sobs. Tears running down his face, he howls, “How could you?” His fists hurl out, itching to make satisfying thuds against my skin. The cops pull him away. They will not give him the pleasure. But they wish for it themselves, to smash my soft face, to let loose a cascade of my teeth, to break my bones. Their job is to pull him away, so they do it, all the while patting him on the back, saying, “It's okay, man. It's okay.”

But none of this matters now. The worst thing has already happened.

*   *   *

I spend a long time in that bed. They tell me I am “lucky,” with their eyes averted. No one will ever look me in the eyes again. They say that I hit the water at exactly the right angle, feetfirst, as if I was sitting. A nurse says, “It's the only position that wouldn't have broken you into bits.” They say I survived what ninety-eight percent of those who jump don't. Human bodies are shattered by that fall. They hit the water with the force of a truck hitting a brick wall. It causes an implosion; organs smash loose from their moorings, ruptured by the jagged edges of broken bones. It is almost always a devastation. And beyond that there are the currents that rip a body miles away in minutes.

What they don't ever want to talk about: my little girl. She was pulled away by the water. They never found her. She was taken far away from me, from everything she knew. I knew as soon as I jumped that I was wrong. That everything I had thought was wrong. I had been given the gift that exceeded all gifts, the gift of a life had been entrusted into my hands, but I had flung this gift from me into the freezing depths. When the drugs lift and I remember this, I am the most anguished soul in the world. I turn my face to the wall and howl.

*   *   *

They take the picture from the frame that sat next to our couch. Her head tilted to the side, two tumbles of blond-brown curls, the pink T-shirt, the tiny denim jacket. I remember dressing her that morning. Toweling off her wet limbs, combing her hair into these two fluffy ponytails. We had laughed that day. It had been a good day. We had loved each other. All these things no one else can know. She was only mine then. Now this picture is everywhere. Now she belongs to the world.

*   *   *

Outside the trial there are a blur of faces, open mouths, screaming voices. People have brought blown-up posters of me with her on my lap, the word
Murderer!
scrawled across our faces. A child holds a poster that asks, “How could you kill a baby like me?” Her mother grips her arm. A man waves a sign that reads,
Justice for Bodhi Anne!
Everywhere my girl's face, her eyes, her lips, that pink T-shirt and denim jacket. The policemen drag me, my toes stumbling against the steps. I think,
Look, Bodhi girl, look, they've come for you because they love you. So many of them. They love you.
I have to smile and hear a hail of clicking cameras. They'll publish these pictures with captions that read “Baby-Killer Mom Shows No Remorse; Smiles Outside Trial.” I don't care. It doesn't matter now.

As the lawyers talk, I study my hands. The oval moons of my nails. I turn my hand over and look at the lines on my palm. Wonder that nothing there says, “Child-killer. Baby-killer. Medea.”

*   *   *

I sit in the courtroom. I let them say what they want. I can see that they are chilled when my eyes sweep their way. It is laughable. I want to lean forward and say boo. I want to make them shudder with my murderous breath.

They put up pictures of her. I keep my gaze steady. I refuse to cry. None of them will ever know the depth of my sorrow, the sights I see in the night. My pain will be a secret wound blooming just under my skin, filling the whole space of my body.

*   *   *

Fifteen years. It has been fifteen years since it happened, since I have been inside this place from where I speak to you. It hasn't been as bad as you would think. I have found a comfort in the institutionalization of life, the measuring out of hours one after the other into these long years, a security in being in one locked place on the planet, a comfort in being given my due.

*   *   *

I think about her every day. She who will always be two and a half but never three years old. Her small body as it was then, before I did what I did.

In dreams I stand on the bank and watch and know that far below the surface, someone is drowning. The air is leaving their lungs through their wide-open mouth. Oxygen is fleeing that dying body in a stream of silver bubbles that catches the light and dances all the way up to the surface of that dark water. Silver bubbles rising in a stream like a twisting ribbon. Whose body? My father's? My daughter's? Samson's? Impossible to tell. All distinction is lost under liquid.

Sometimes she comes to visit me. She's always a different age. She comes as the older child, the teenager, the young woman, as if she were merely somewhere else, in some other far country but able to visit me here inside these cement walls as easily as a thought. We sit on my narrow bed in this small white cell and talk like old friends. It's very easy, very cozy. She laughs often. I drink in her luminescent face, her carved features, the smooth skin. She shakes her hair that falls in a tangle of long corkscrews. It has darkened; her face too has darkened. She looks more like me now, I realize. The planes of my face are apparent in her now. This is my daughter. This is my girl, all grown up.