Chapter Thirty-Five
There, on the street, as a blue Nissan Pathfinder pulls into the lot, I feel the world lift.
Like the trees, grass, concrete underground are all peeling themselves up up up, away from gravity.
They hover, up there, in the air, and then they slowly begin to turn.
Ten, fifteen, twenty, forty, ninety degrees.
Everything now faces north when before it was east.
Now looking at a new horizon, things click back down into place. And it’s only when I feel the sidewalk underneath me once again, the cars honking nearby, the call of a father up the street that I understand that this was always supposed to be where we were.
No. We were always here.
I look at Marcella. She has tears streaming down her face, but for the first time I feel like I can really see her.
Not because she saved me, but because she is telling the truth about her story—and the truth is always the shortest distance between two points.
Here the two points stand, outside a hospital, meeting, finally.
“I love you,” she says. “My life started the day you were born and started over again the day you lived.”
I think about that day in my room, my mother and Sylvia sitting me down. Marcella had pivoted. She had replaced the truth because what kind of woman tells their fifteen-year-old daughter that she has just died?
“But what about Dad?” I ask.
And now I see it—why she was always so worried about him.
It wasn’t because she had saved him once before.
It was because she never had, because she knew about his heart, knew what might be coming for him, and was already aware that there would be nothing she could do to stop it.
It was the worry we all have—the worry of the unknown.
The worry of what it means to be human, to love someone, to be powerless in the face of it.
“Dad knew, too,” she says. “He told me to tell you so many times. He said I’d get you off his back.” She laughs. “But he knew it was my choice to make.”
Hysterical strength, the term used to address the phenomenon of the adrenaline mothers get when their children are in danger.
The superhuman capabilities these women uncover.
The mom who lifted a car off her baby, who scaled a building to save her toddler.
What was the ticket if not hysterical strength? What has our life been if not that?
“I’m sorry you had to carry this,” I say, and when I do I see her body crumple.
She pitches forward, and I catch her in my arms—my mother.
She folds into me, and I hold her, and once her body is pressed against mine, once we are connected, in ways we haven’t been in so long, I feel myself give way, too.
And it’s there in the passage—mother and child, child and mother, grief and love and love and grief, the indistinguishable nature of these things, their inherent ties, that I finally understand the legacy I come from.
We are saviors.
What does it mean that I chose—selfishly, hastily, thoughtlessly—to save myself?