Chapter 1 #10
I’d applied to study painting, but once I got to school and started studio classes, I knew I wanted to change my focus. Mosaics, that’s what I was meant to create.
It was easier to work with broken things, because like calls to like.
The hospital discharges me on a cocktail of Haldol, Zoloft, and Ativan. I picture them like stallions, tied to me, ready to bolt in three different directions and tear me apart.
At home, I hold Molly for hours, unwilling and unable to let her go.
I let Evie braid my hair with my red ribbon.
I don’t protest when Adam takes the baby, gives me my nightly medication, and then leads me to the guest bathroom shower, where I wash the residue of hospitalization and shame from my skin.
Finally—-finally—-I sleep.
It is the Ativan that makes that happen. The doctors told me my body and my brain needed rest. But this sleep, it’s not restorative. It is full of nightmares with dripping jaws and snapping teeth.
In my dreams, I’m in a coffin in ten inches of water, and I cannot move. If I were able to just break the surface of the water, I could breathe. I’m that close.
But I can’t save myself. I am drowning, in the truest sense of the word. A verb. A gerund. An action that keeps going and going.
Because I cannot seem to die, either.
I wind up in the ER again. This time, an endocrinologist says I have thyroiditis and takes me off the Haldol.
I stop feeling like the world is viscous. When I slam my hand in a drawer, it hurts. When a pot is too hot, I burn my skin. When Molly cries, I respond.
But that isn’t all that comes rushing back.
(Oh, you little fool.)
(Did you really think you could get rid of me?)
One night I drag the little plastic baby bathtub from the master shower/bath, where I store it because we don’t have room in the kitchen.
(You’re running out of time.)
I go through the motions of filling it.
(The question is: Will you protect your daughter?)
I stand at the kitchen counter, Molly squirming naked in my arms while the water cools enough for her to sit in it. “How?” I whisper.
(You know how.)
Tears stream down my cheeks onto her round pink belly. I slip her into the tub. I curl my hand over her little foot.
“I can’t,” I sob, closing my eyes.
When I open them, Molly is staring at me, her gaze red as a demon.
(If you don’t take her, I will.)
The night before Adam is supposed to leave again on a business trip, we live a perfect day.
We walk Molly together to a street fair, where we eat dumplings and homemade fudge.
We wander to the Cloisters and sit in the park on an old blanket.
Adam stretches out his long legs, and I lay my head in his lap and reshape the clouds into mythical beasts.
Around us, people play Frisbee and get stoned.
It is September, and autumn is a ripple in the air.
“Wife,” Adam says, smiling down at me. The sun gilds him.
“Husband,” I reply, grinning back.
If I could only take one minute of my life with me when I go, it would be this one. The three of us, believing foolishly that we’d have a million more moments like this.
I have spent the last few days getting ready.
I gave Evie a sweater of mine she has always coveted.
I went to the Hudson View to say goodbye to Maeve, and didn’t correct her when she thought I was just moving away.
I tested the blades of all the knives in the kitchen to find the one that was sharpest.
But today? Today is for us. I tug at Adam’s neck, bringing him closer so that I can kiss him.
Molly, gumming a stuffed elephant, suddenly squeals. Adam runs a finger over the dimple of her thigh. “Did you know babies aren’t born with knees?” he says.
“She has knees.”
“Kneecaps,” he clarifies. “It’s just cartilage, at first.”
“How is she ever going to pray?” I muse.
He bursts out laughing. He gives Molly the elephant she has dropped and looks at me. “I didn’t think you wanted her to grow up with religion.”
We had been married by a justice of the peace. We did not own a Bible. I wanted none of that near my child.
(And look where it got you.)
I shove the voice down. “We’ll see.” I watch the baby, babbling and kicking. “What do you think she’s thinking about?”
“How lucky she is,” Adam says immediately. “How lucky I am.” He watches me pluck a wild daisy and start to pull off its petals. “It’s really good to see you like this, Ellie.”
“Like this?”
He tilts his head. “Happy. Here.”
I take the mangled daisy stem and tie it around his finger. Adam glances down at it. “Renewing my vows?”
“Would you?” I ask.
“In a heartbeat.” He picks a stalk of grass and begins to knot it around my finger.
My pulse starts hammering. “Will you promise me something?”
“Anything,” he says.
“Will you marry someone else?”
His eyes catch mine. “What?”
“I want you and Molly to have a good life,” I say.
“We do have a good life.”
I tangle my fingers with his. “I want you to be happy, and here . . . even when I’m not.”
Adam rears back. “Eloise, what is wrong with you? You’re not dying. And I’m not remarrying.” He gets to his feet, flustered. “I thought you were better,” he says, his voice breaking. He scoops the baby up and buckles her into her stroller. He folds the blanket and collects our trash.
It is so frustrating, how nobody understands what I’m trying to tell them.
For half the walk home, Adam speeds a few paces ahead of me, pushing Molly. Then he slows down and catches my hand in his. “I have to fly to California tomorrow. Let’s just have a nice day, all right?”
I nod. When my daisy stalk ring unravels between our fingers, we both pretend not to notice.
I hear something in the dark, but when I roll toward the bassinet, Molly is asleep. The sound is coming from my right, from Adam. In the faint gleam of the moonlight, I see the tracks of tears on his face. “I miss you, Ellie,” he whispers.
I try to say, I am right here.
But I don’t, because it’s not true.
I close my eyes and pretend to sleep until Adam’s breathing evens. The next time I open them, it is morning. It’s not the baby who wakes me, and it’s not Adam—-he has slipped out to get to the airport for his early flight. It’s what I have been waiting for.
(Your time is up.)
(You are going to Hell.)
(If you want to save your baby, she must leave this world before you do.)
That morning, Molly is content and happy. No crying, no fussing. She catches my eye as I lay her on the diaper table with trembling hands and peel her pajamas from her tiny body. She blows a bubble at me, surprising herself when it bursts. When her eyes widen, it makes me laugh.
I love that our last moments together are colored by joy.
I change Molly’s diaper, then start crying. I look around for something to wipe my eyes and grab a clean burp cloth.
My phone buzzes.
With one hand on Molly’s belly to keep her steady, I look at the text. It’s from Adam; he made his flight. With one thumb, I reply: I love you.
My hand closes around the burp cloth. It would be so easy. Let it hover over her face. Press down.
(You know what you have to do.)
But I do not want to.
(What you want doesn’t matter. There is no you anymore.)
My fingers flex on the soft cotton.
When the phone rings I grab it like a shipwreck survivor scrambling for a life preserver.
“Can you be in perimenopause when you’re in your thir-ties?” Evie asks, as if we are in the middle of a conversation. “Because I swear to God, I cannot sleep through the night anymore and I hear that’s a symptom. Did Adam leave today? I can’t keep track—-”
“Evie,” I sob. “Please come over. I think I’m going to hurt the baby.”
“Are you, like, a Mennonite?” This was the first thing my college roommate had asked when I showed up at RISD with a single suitcase, my red--ribboned braid, and a dress that covered me from throat to ankles. Evie D’Addario was kinetic, from her shiny black curls to her tiny form, always in motion.
Evie was studying graphic design, while I was going to focus on mosaics.
We were polar opposites. I was shy; Evie could converse with a brick wall.
I agonized over every assignment; Evie could knock out an A--level paper the night before it was due.
Evie knew the words to every song Pearl Jam had recorded; my musical library was limited to hymns.
We coexisted. Evie went out with friends and came back smelling of clove cigarettes after I’d gone to sleep.
Sometimes I would return from the studio and find a hair scrunchie around the door, and—-thanks to Evie’s ground rules, which she’d given me at the end of our first week as roommates—-I knew that meant I had to find somewhere else to be for a few hours.
Once, when she didn’t know I was in earshot, I heard a girl ask her what the deal was with her weird roommate.
“Who knows?” Evie had replied. “As long as it’s not contagious. ”
I didn’t care, or at least that’s what I told myself.
Evie’s reason for being at RISD seemed to be social, and mine was academic.
I spent my time studying the history of Byzantine mosaics and learning the reverse method classical technique.
I took tiny bits of glass and stone and gold and arranged them in a replica of the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna.
With each shard and pebble, I was putting myself back together.
Once, Evie took a shortcut through the building where I was doing this work. She stiffened when she saw me and then noticed the art blossoming under my hands. “Okay,” she said, her eyes narrowing as if she were seeing me for the first time. “That’s impressive.”
“Thanks,” I replied, and that was the extent of our conversation that week.
Everything changed Thanksgiving of freshman year. We each assumed the other would be leaving. After the campus had emptied out, Evie asked why I wasn’t going home. “I don’t really have one,” I admitted. “Why are you still here?”
“Because I don’t, either.”