Jessica Chiarella - And Again

“Exactly,” I say, turning my hand over so I hold the roughness of his palm in mine. “Exactly.”

He doesn’t think he will ever be selected for SUBlife. He’s lying, and I know it, and I let him. I wonder if he knows I’m lying too, and is letting me just the same. Either of our truths would mean I have to leave here, to leave him behind, to go out into the world and live through all the danger and possibility afforded to a woman born with my face. I don’t want to leave. He doesn’t want me to go. So there is nothing left for us but to love each other, and lie.

I wake early on the morning I’m going to leave. Tom is still asleep next to me, breathing in heavy, open-mouthed snores. One of the kids is up, I’m not sure which one, but I hear the TV on downstairs. I try not to think about them. They will be better without me, without a mother like mine, silent and remote, a mother who will leave them eventually anyway, and will make the leaving their fault. I lay in a bed for years pretending I had no history, that I was no one, because my mother chose to see my tragedy and raise it with her own.

Still, memories wash up. I indulge today, only today, because what I am about to do is such a high crime that any little indulgences along the way will be surely, fully eclipsed later. I play the game, the one I never allowed myself to play in the hospital, tracing my way back, trying to pinpoint the moment that would have prevented my accident and spared me all of this. Don’t change lanes. Don’t get in the car. Don’t answer your phone. Don’t sleep with Scott, again and again, no matter how much you want to. Don’t wish you hadn’t married Tom. Don’t marry Tom. Don’t get pregnant three months before graduation.

That is where I must stop. Because I cannot, no matter what I do, wish away my daughter. I can remember, so clearly, that morning. Fainting after speed work at cross-country practice, how panicked Tom looked when he met me at the health center, wrapping me up with both of his arms and taking a deep breath of my hair. Anemia, they said. Could I be pregnant?

I told them I wasn’t. There was no way, we were always so careful. But as Tom drove me home we talked about the nights when we weren’t so careful. Admitting to each other the things we couldn’t admit to anyone else, as we always did. We stopped at Walgreens on the way home, and I waited in the car while Tom bought me a pregnancy test and the biggest bottle of water they had. I chugged while he drove.

I made him wait outside the bathroom of our little apartment, because no matter how long we’d been dating, I still couldn’t pee when he was in the same room. Then I made him plug his ears and sing Tom Petty outside the door so he couldn’t hear, and he did so with such gusto that I was laughing so hard I nearly missed the stick.

“I’ll buy you dinner if it’s positive,” Tom said when I finally let him back in the bathroom, as we sat on the counter and waited for the timer to run down.

“And if it’s negative?” I asked.

“No way.”

“Cheapskate,” I said, just as the pink lines appeared in the window of the test. It was a feeling of my entire world clicking out of joint, a train derailing at high speed, running along without tracks for a few perilous moments while everyone inside held their breath, waiting for its inevitable tumble. Tom’s face fell in a small way, and I saw my first glimpse of the look I would come to know so well, the couldn’t you have done better look in his eyes that seemed to make all of it my fault. But then he took a breath and smiled, and there was resignation in his expression.

“Well,” Tom said, “where do you want to go to dinner? And will you marry me?”

I check again to make sure I have everything I need, ruffling gently through my stacks of clothes, the money I’ve pilfered from Tom, the hair brush and toothbrush and box of tampons. These are the things a person needs for life, I think. Not a trunk of keepsakes or a collection of stolen artifacts. These things, the practical things, should belong to a person without history.

I leave the suitcase in its place for now. It’s too early to drag it down, to catch a train into the city, to buy a bus ticket at Union Station. It’s still dark outside. Tom is still asleep. So I descend the stairs, with my mind’s eye still firmly on the suitcase, on my escape. I’ve had good practice at this, being a woman who resides in two worlds at the same time.

The TV is flashing a bright Looney Tunes pallet of color across the carpet, but no one is watching it. I can hear a commotion from the kitchen, and I walk in just in time to see Jack on his knees on the counter, reaching into a high cabinet and pulling something down, bringing down a glass measuring cup with it. The cup shatters on the countertop beneath him. I can see a shard of glass open up the skin of his leg, and he’s so startled by it that he teeters on the edge of the counter.

Something kicks me forward, an impulse so ingrained that I don’t have to think before I’m moving, grabbing Jack by the waist. He lets out a little wail of surprise, then bursts into tears. I haul him over to the sink and sit him on the edge of the counter, wetting a paper towel and pressing it to the bleeding cut on his leg.

“Mommy,” he says, between hiccupping sobs. His face is crumpled and wet.

“You’re okay,” I say, remembering how I would say it to Katie when she first started walking, when she would plop down onto the cushion of her diaper, looking up at me with huge eyes, trying to gauge by my reaction whether it was a fall worthy of tears. I react the way I used to with her, wiping the fat little teardrops from his cheeks and kissing him on the forehead. The smell of his hair is different from what I remember, the powder and milk smell of babies. My boy. “My poor boy,” I whisper.

“I was trying to make pancakes. For you and Daddy,” he blubbers. “I couldn’t reach the mixing bowl. I broke one of the good measuring cups.”

“That’s all right,” I reply, checking his cut. “Don’t you worry about that.” It’s not deep, just a glancing touch of sharp glass. The bleeding is starting to ebb even now. “Oh, this isn’t too bad,” I say. “Where does Daddy keep the Band-Aids?”

He motions to a cabinet over the sink. There are two boxes, one Cinderella, one Batman. Tom is good at this, this parenting thing. I pull out a huge Batman bandage and apply it to Jack’s leg. He seems pleased. His tears are beginning to ebb as well.

“Why were you making pancakes, Jack?” I ask, as my phone begins to vibrate. I ignore it.

“It’s July eighteenth,” he replies, and then he looks at me expectantly.

“What’s July eighteenth?” I ask. He looks puzzled, then must assume I’m playing a game with him, because he breaks into a smile. My phone buzzes again, cutting into our conversation. Who on earth would be calling at this hour?

“Your anniversary with Daddy,” he replies, clearly proud that he passed my test. “We celebrated it every year you were gone.” I nod, because suddenly I can’t speak anymore. Instead, I pull my phone from the pocket of my sweatpants, clearing my throat before I answer.

“Hello?”

“I didn’t wake you, did I?” comes the voice over the line, a familiar voice. A male voice, his tone so wry I can picture the self-satisfied grin that must be playing over his face.

“No,” I say, and feel myself smile, as if I were an observer of this body’s impulses.

“So, tell me Linda, are you staying out of trouble?”