Annabelle
You didn’t die, like you thought you would.
Instead, you rose up on shaking legs and walked through the woods.
You took what you needed from the house when you knew you had to leave.
Hitchhiked to the bus depot, hoping the rags in your pants would be enough to stanch the blood for the time being.
Used the cash from Della to buy a ticket that trembled in your hand.
But the driver didn’t even glance at you or your ticket. You could have been holding a McDonald’s receipt for all he knew. He only looked at you when you hesitated too long, eyeing the empty seats, unable to choose one. Were they assigned?
Everything okay, miss? His voice snide. You managed a nod and sat, were dismayed when you looked up and saw his eyes on you in the huge panorama of the rearview mirror.
You slid down in your seat—winced at the pain—and still, you were caught in that reflection.
Violet rings under your eyes, the blue of a vein standing out along your neck.
You rested your head against the window, banged your skull when the bus hit a pothole. Sleep came eventually, a deep, dreamless sleep like falling into a pit.
Figuring out how to survive in your body was one matter.
To find food and money and a place to sleep, all the mechanics of keeping the machinery of yourself humming.
Your was mind another. For a long time, you survived on inventing stories.
The ones you clung to were the ones in which everyone was okay.
Sabrina came back, heard the baby’s cries, swaddled it—her—tight in a soft cloth.
She had done it. Gotten the money, the apartment by the sea, the stroller.
She shook the rattle and the baby laughed at the clatter of dried beans in the tube.
The ocean crashed and hissed along the shore while the baby slept.
Sabrina’s hair salt-tangled, her face a little rounder, the hollows of her body filled up with slices of boardwalk pizza and soft serve, a sprinkle of freckles across her cheeks.
More beautiful than she’d ever been. Happy.
Miss Hamilton finally put everything together, sped up the drive in her Toyota, and she knew everything there was to know, knew where to find the baby in the woods.
She took it home and it became hers and the baby could name the treaties that created the map of Europe and the dates they were ratified.
The baby learned about feminism and the lyrics of all of Kate Bush’s songs.
She could cook vegan meals and marched at protests and shopped for her clothes at vintage stores, patched the sprung knees of her jeans with leopard print fabric.
The baby became so much wiser than you had ever been.
Your mother came back, lingering between the trees in her white nightgown like a ghost. Your mother wanted another start.
A daughter who would heed her. Who would remain faithfully hers.
They sped across the country seeking out sunlight.
New Mexico, Arizona, California. Anywhere they could turn their faces up to the sky and feel warmth reaching down for them.
The baby was covered in freckles. Even the soles of her feet were tan.
They laid crystals in one another’s palms. Had their auras read.
The baby’s was yellow, the color of sunshine.
The baby grew wings, like the devil, and flew away. The baby knew better than all of them how ugly life could be and decided to become the ugliest thing it could. To rule the woods as a monster. Because once you become a monster, you have nothing left in the world to be afraid of.
Or so you thought, until you built your family.
Until a man smiled at you from across a café and you felt a zip of joy shiver through you, and let yourself think more.
Until you had an orgasm for the first time.
Until you heard each of your children laugh for the first time.
Until a child held their arms to you from the safety of their crib and smiled up at you like you were the sun.
Until you sent each one of them to kindergarten, wearing backpacks that looked too big on their small bodies.
Until you woke to construction paper Valentine’s cards slipped under your bedroom door, signed in Magic Marker with shaky, crooked handwriting.
Until your husband cried on your shoulder when his grandmother died, because he could trust you with his pain.
They all did. You kissed hurt fingers and bandaged knees.
You tracked homework and nursed every hurt.
It meant something, all this caring, this joy that you grew in your body and protected within the four walls of your home.
A counterweight against the past, the harm you have done.
All this love you created and tried to give and give and give.
And that is what shocked you the most—that you never ran out, that the well always refilled itself.
That you never reached the end of your feelings for this family, this world, you have made for yourself.
Love wasn’t scarce or conditional, as you were made to believe.
And yet. You never could tell them. You could not tell them who you had been, and how you learned exactly how precious a life was.
That night, after the police chief leaves, you cook dinner for your family and remind your son to study for his math test and fill out a form for your daughter’s upcoming field trip and scour all the dishes and rub lemon along the knives to mediate the smell of garlic on the blade.
You pair all the clean socks in the laundry basket and put them away, sweep the mudroom and the kitchen and the living room, take out the garbage, reline the bin.
And when there is nothing left to busy yourself with, to clean or organize or dust, you sneak into each of your children’s rooms to watch them sleep, the way you used to when they were small, to observe them in the perfect safety of their warm beds.
After Ben climbs into bed and reads three pages of his new biography of John Adams before falling asleep, you stand in front of your bathroom mirror and take off your jewelry.
The earrings he gave you after Blair was born, sapphire for her birthstone.
Your wedding band and engagement ring, which leave indents in your skin.
The watch for your tenth anniversary, with the mother-of-pearl face.
The bracelet Kyle saved up for at the school fair last spring, little red-and-yellow seed beads in the pattern of daisies.
You need to know how it would feel, to get used to your hands bare.
Bare as when everything is taken away. Bare as when you are taken away.
Bare as when you are first born, as when the stories you told yourself in order to survive don’t work anymore.
The bag you packed one sleepless night years ago is one more fiction: You couldn’t leave any of them if you tried.
But you might be taken. And that is a feeling you need to make room for.
It sits uneasily, makes you jittery, restless.
You feel the fabric of your world pulled taut, about to split.
After you slid the notebook from under a stack of sweaters you checked the suitcase pocket for the lighter—how it still gave you a shiver to touch it after all these years, bile rising in the back of your throat—the other for the canister of film.
You ran your hand along the lining of the bag once, twice, a third time, checked every crevice but it was no use. The film was gone.
Ben? But no, your husband is not the type to snoop.
Your sons? You doubt they have the guile to take something of yours and not ask you about it.
Blair? Would she even recognize what it is?
When, though? When was the last time you even dared to open this bag, dared to acknowledge its existence?
A year, at least. Who knows how long these pieces of your past have been taken or lost?
All those pictures of Sabrina you snuck while you were practicing for yearbook committee.
The picture of the Coyote and his friends.
You have held on to these things for so many years, the promise of evidence, the promise of seeing Sabrina’s face again.
And it was that possibility that kept you from developing it.
You were waiting for a time when it would not hurt so much to see her, not how you used to, but as an adult, from a place of safety.
You would not be able to bear the anger in her face.
The hurt. She, like you, had been a girl who had seen and been through more than most at her age, and yet had so much to learn.
You hadn’t promised a photo to the detective, and you felt relief in that, as you handed over the notebook and lighter.
You would have sounded insane. More insane.
And you hadn’t told her the truth about the last time you saw the bracelet.
Broken. That in your jewelry box you keep a single amber bead.
It would have brought you close, too close. To the moment everything changed.
The detective had said she was not here for punishment, not here to investigate you. That she wanted to help. Even if that is true you feel it, the woods, the ever-present mineral cool, creeping into your body. The woods, the long shadows of the trees, coming for you again.