And where is Abby? the police would ask. They’d call the number you gave them, and somewhere in Topanga my phone, out of batteries, would go straight to voicemail.
Back in Hesperia, I checked into a different motel under the name Shelby Hightower, just as I’d done at the Econo Lodge. The new place encircled a pool and had iron railings to prevent guests from falling into the water. Our room was small and dank with a mud-colored carpet and scratchy orange bedspread. Although it was late at night, Amara was awake and beginning to cry. The sound was an alarm in itself. Holding her, I clambered onto the bed and propped myself up. When I took off my shirt, she stopped crying, and my nipples hardened with anticipation. She put her tiny hand to the side of my breast and began to suck, sure of belonging. The tide in my blood crested. I knew that even with my preparations, it would take several days of suckling before the aqueduct finally opened and my breasts grew heavy, before my body convinced itself that your baby was mine.
That night, curled in the motel bed with Amara, I had the bridge dream for the last time. Bare feet, snow crystals, headlights. The shock of the ice, the shock of my speed through the water. But this time, it was ecstatic. This time, I was a torpedo. Instead of sinking, I kept going. I shot through the river, navigated its delta, and broke out into the open sea. This time, I could breathe underwater. I soared over reefs and caves, through darting schools of herring and bluefish, a pod of humpback whales. At last, I surfaced in a sapphire lake. Another place, another continent. Around me was an alpine village. Trees, white mountains.
Once the birth certificate arrived from Michigan, we went to the post office to apply for passports. I presented the whole collection: Shelby’s driver’s license, her medical office ID, the Social Security cards, the birth certificate. The postal clerk with a lazy eye xeroxed everything crooked, dropped it all back onto the counter. I stood in front of the white backdrop for my photograph, then held Amara up for hers. In the picture, you can see my fingers encircling her waist.
We rarely left our room in the weeks while we waited. Amara is fair skinned, like you, so it was better that we stayed indoors. If we’d gone out into the desert sun, she would have burned. Instead, we spent the days curled on the bed. I gave her just enough formula, but not too much, and eventually, incredibly, lactation began. It was a miracle. The baby nursed herself to sleep.
With Amara against my chest, I felt the tender swell that must come to women postpartum. I stroked her head, and she melted into my body. Had my own mother held me like this? Had she felt the kind of ardor for me, or for Shelby, that I felt for this child? It was impossible. The feeling I had was incapable of ever lessening, ever souring. I could never be disappointed by Amara the way our mother had been disappointed in us. And yet it made a kind of sense. Perhaps it was biology that poisoned maternal love. Holding expectations for one’s genetic heir was natural but ruinous, a product of eugenic narcissism, inimical to love. What I felt for Amara was superior. My love was undiluted by pride, and stronger in that it wasn’t required but freely given.
At last the passports arrived in the post office box. With the Cavalier loaded, we drove south past San Diego, to San Ysidro. The border agent smiled when he saw the diaper box in the backseat, the rear-facing car seat. “Buen vieje,” he said.
You should know that I never endangered her. We didn’t spend the night in Tijuana but flew to Mexico City the same day and to Amsterdam that night. Amara slept through most of it, and within twenty-four hours we’d cleared the mountains and entered a new world.
EPILOGUE
I’VE STOPPED reading the news. I know the innocent still roam the world helplessly. The girls are still raped; the guns are still drawn. But here in Küsnacht, we’re safe. Above the lake is the white house on the hill. I’d found it in the first hour of our arrival. It was impossible to miss, visible from all parts of town. The door was the door from my dreams—the thick blue paint, the knocker in the shape of a winged head: Hypnos, the god of sleep—and when I rapped the knocker on the brass plate, there’d been a brief moment of suspension, a dizzy reel, before the sound of footsteps came through the hall and the madman opened the door to me.
He wore a wrinkled seersucker suit. When his clear eyes struck mine, I saw a change in them, an advancing movement of recognition, as if he’d stepped forward to meet me. “Je peux vous aider, mademoiselle?” he said, in a voice that came from deep in the sea.
I hesitated. My own voice was thin, birdlike. “I hope I’m not intruding.”
Amara wriggled in my grip and arched her back like a cat. Up close, Perren’s white skin was like softly crinkled paper. He looked down at me, and I squinted up into that bright light.
“Have we met?” he asked.
For a suspended moment I felt that we were surrounded by liquid, warm and dense, and were both weightless inside it. There was a low thrum of kinship, a reverberating tremolo that confirmed my long-held conviction. He opened the door, and I walked in as I’d rehearsed so many times in my sleep. I went into the house and sat on the gilded sofa, which was where I knew it would be. He sat across from me on the pink damask wing chair. I looked up at the familiar ceiling, the plaster medallion, the crystal chandelier, the crown molding like wedding cake.
“You’ve traveled a long way I think,” he said. “Why have you come?” There was expectancy in his eyes. I sensed that he knew the answer already.
I took the drawings from my backpack and gave them to him. We sat in the room that I knew, and he looked at my drawings of the satyrs, the bridge, the loveseat. He looked at my detailed drawings of the sofa where I now sat, the wing chair, the plaster medallion, the chandelier. He looked at my pictures of the children and the clocks. He slowly examined each page.
On my lap, Amara tucked her face inward and whimpered, and I lifted my blouse to nurse her. I did this without hesitation, with a movement that was instinctive and sure. There was no need for shame here. This was an ease so complete and utter, this certainty that I was understood, that nothing I did or said could be shocking, offensive, or even new—like falling into the arms of a saint.
When he finished, he looked up at me and asked if I was planning to stay.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Good,” he said.
That was all. The rest is money, and you know there’s no absence of that.
In the back of the white house is a room full of clocks. Some of the clocks run backward and some don’t run at all. It’s in this room that Auguste keeps his flat files—dozens of them, stacked one upon another—containing children’s drawings. Some are by his own children, others by those at the Rhizome. The youngest children’s drawings are particularly evocative for him. The native imagery of their nightmares, their frequent dreams of animals. Evolutionary, elemental. He doesn’t mention any of this in interviews. Using the dream images of others could be misinterpreted as stealing or cheating. But he knows—and I know—that there’s no crime in it. A true artist is never a thief. He’s a borrower, an inventor, a magician. You know this too, Elise. No artist is a thief the way an actor is.
He’s adopted children from all over the world and lavished them with freedom. The house contains a multitude of little studios for them to draw and paint in. It’s a creative daycare of its own. The children are beautiful—eccentrically dressed in their own designs, or naked—and always making something. There are twelve of them, all different colors and ages. He likes to have at least one very small child at all times, and so is in a continuous process of adoption.
Now he has Amara, and me. He doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t want to know. Our understanding is implicit. We’re of the same breed, haunted, unfit for human society. But in the deep-folded caverns of imagination, we survive. We protrude, and disseminate. I harvest images, and Auguste applies his wizardry. He’s making my swimming pool film now. He’s built a set with a suburban yard and an aboveground pool, and he’s finding actors to play the woman who refuses to come out of the water and the man she�
�s left behind. My name won’t be on the movie—either my old name or my new one—but still, the movie is mine.
Auguste is reclusive, soft-spoken, volatile, as I am. He stays in the house on the hill. I stay in the cottage near the lake, which he purchased for me and furnished himself. It resembles a Swiss stage set, with traditional woodworking. To close the shutters against the dazzling lake, to dwell inside with Amara—or Briella, as she’s called now—is to receive a secret communion. Her hair is growing into heartbreaking ringlets. It’s remained black as ink, as dark as mine. Her skin is so fair that the emotions are visible upon it, the blood vessels painting cherries of pleasure, scarlet patches of frustration. Other than that, she’s nothing like you.
When she wakes, there’s a liminal look in her eyes, as if she’s rising from undersea forests and cities. At these moments, I remember myself as a child. I remember the dirty snow of Michigan, the mayonnaise pot roasts, the lonely hours in my bedroom, the bleak future that seemed written for me. I think of Shelby and Briella languishing in their trailer. They’ll never think of leaving. They’ll never need passports, never apply and learn that they have them already, that they’re living in Switzerland.
We cherish our island out of time, here in Küsnacht, the erstwhile home of Jung himself. Amara and I are learning French and German together. I’m giving her what you wanted her to have: a childhood out of the lights, away from the cameras and tabloid hacks, the suppurating crudeness of Hollywood, of America. We wander the curving Swiss alleys, and I teach her the names of things. Together, we examine the mountain flora. When I come across an interesting stone, I pause to pick it up and put it in her hand. Who knows what meaning it might hold? These early moments are sacred, I know, the basis of all her future dreams. I hold my own stone, too. I check my meteorite often, even now, to confirm that this dream is real.
After Amara’s disappearance, you vanished from public view. There were articles about you, guesswork, speculation that you went mad. There was speculation that you spiraled out of control, drank yourself to oblivion. There was speculation that you drowned yourself quietly in the Pacific or in the frigid depths of Lake Michigan.
I don’t pretend to know. To wonder isn’t useful, can only pollute my mind. Regardless of the details, your disappearance proves that I was right. Even rid of your burden, you couldn’t save yourself. My decision had been a sound one. The execution of the plan had been inspired, miraculous in the way of ordained things. Every moment had clicked firmly into place, revolving into the next like the gear of a clock. When I finally came down from my elevation, a few weeks after my arrival in Switzerland, when I finally landed from that long, divine flight that had begun in Topanga, it was like awakening at home.
I do hope you’ve found your way to some sort of peace. I still harbor a habitual kind of concern for you, Elise, a nostalgic affection, although it doesn’t really matter. Ultimately we’re all part of the same vast organism, drifting and bubbling through history, this eternal Spring. We’re the same being, only temporarily fragmented into bodies. Throughout our lifetimes, we busily observe each other, bewitched by our varied incarnations.
Whether you’re alive or dead, happy or miserable, your role in this life is over, the stage set has changed. You’ve danced, and the satyrs have ravished you.
Curiously, our cottage in the woods is not so different from Paul’s. I imagine, sometimes, that we’re in the woods of Topanga. I’ve learned to sew by hand and have begun making kites. Auguste is tickled by this; he orders the fabric and hardware for me. The hills of Küsnacht are ideal for flying, and Amara loves to hold the spool, toddling and falling, laughing as the kite tries to pull her aloft.
Sometimes I think I see Paul—just an impression, a dark flash in a crowd. But he wouldn’t know to look for me here, if he looked for me at all. I’ve heard nothing of his film, read no rhapsodic review. He’s still looking for funding, most likely: studio backing, distribution. But he’ll find none. There will be no interest. Things have changed these past years. Now people know about the crisis, which has only worsened. They know about the fractured families, the lost children. They’re all too aware of the detention centers; the fiendishly named “tender age shelters” like prison barracks, like something from a war; the proposed border wall of concrete and razor wire. They know too much already. What good would a movie do? No one would see it. Only a few theaters would even screen it. What Paul is learning, I’m sure—what I would have told him if I’d known how—is that no one wants the truth. We don’t want to live with it; we don’t want to bathe in it. We want to supplant it. We want the dream, not the real. We long for fabrication, hallucination, false catastrophe. We hunger—all of us—for the distorted mirages that Auguste and I can provide.
The girls are still raped, the guns are still drawn. The world still burns.
Paul and I nearly meet in dreams sometimes. It’s always the same dream, walking in the desert toward a campground of tents where I know him to be. In the dream, I walk through deep sand toward the tents, but they recede from reach. Sometimes the dream turns lucid, and I fly over the desert and enter a tent where he sits, surrounded by bruised, dirty children. He holds out a hand, but my grasp goes through.
Not everything that’s found can be claimed. I know this now. Choices must be made, one firmly embraced, the others rejected. I’ve learned to release the things I’ve refused. Whatever I lack, I can pull up through the Spring, through that infinite well of yes. And, really, there’s so little lacking.
We look at the lake. The sun snaps off its surface, blinding like the light of the afterlife. The water is silken and clear, far from the gelid murk of the Huron River, the jagged teeth that once pulled me down. This water is gentle, pellucid, reflective. Another kind of death, much closer to the one we want.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DEEP THANKS to the wise and wonderful Elisabeth Schmitz and Katie Raissian and to all at Grove: Morgan Entrekin, Judy Hottensen, Deb Seager, Justina Batchelor, Paula Cooper Hughes, and Julia Berner-Tobin. My gratitude always to Bill Clegg. For special insight and guidance, thanks to Michelle Caplan, Melissa Hile, Sara Shepard, Sana Krasikov, Sandra Bark, Kate Fujimoto, and Markus Mentzer—and to Emily Fromm, who lit the first spark. Love and thanks always to my mother, Mary Ann Acampora; to Tom and Linda Doyle; and forever to Thomas and Amity.
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