by Marly Swick
When she first started law school, she was obsessed with theories of causation. All the various legal tests for assigning blame. The last human wrongdoer test. The “but for” rule. But for X, Y would never have happened. They all sounded reasonable enough until you started applying the theory to messy real-life cases. Her favorite was a Mississippi case in which a custodian was cleaning a vending machine with an oil-soaked rag. The oil fumes permeated the fur of a rat hiding under the machine who then ran over to some docks that subsequently burst into flames, resulting in thousands of dollars in damages. It was obvious that but for the rat, the fire would never have occurred. But since you couldn’t sue a rat, the last human wrongdoer was the custodian. So the real issue was whether it was foreseeable that the oily rag would turn the hidden rat into a Molotov cocktail. Under the highly extraordinary consequences test, also known as the hindsight test, the custodian could not be held liable for such consequences that a reasonable person could not foresee.
Giselle would, of course, lie awake at night applying the various theories to her own life. But for Bill Beemer’s buying the gun. But for Eric’s finding the gun. But for Lois’s being in the rec room. But for Giselle’s not taking the kids to the beach that day instead of putting Trina in the wading pool. But for moving to California. And so on. The test was stupid. It reminded Giselle of one of her mother’s favorite homilies: But for the grace of God . . . And it was really just your basic “if only” all dressed up in legalese with nowhere to go. And as to whether it was foreseeable that Eric would find the gun and that Teddy would fire it, who knows? After all these years she still remembers, word for word, her favorite sentence from Prosser: “To one gifted with omniscience as to all existing circumstances, no result could appear remarkable, or indeed anything but inevitable, as a matter of hindsight.”
The law was useless. It was nobody’s fault; it was everybody’s fault. She started reading books about Buddhism instead. The books told you to put aside logic. They gave you koans, Zen braintwisters, that forced your rational mind to short-circuit. Does a dog have Buddha-nature? What is the sound of one hand clapping? Who is this I you call yourself? How can something be nobody’s fault? And gradually she began to understand that even if she could understand, it wouldn’t make any difference. She tucked a quote by Takuan into the mirror over her bureau: “One may explain water, but the mouth will not become wet. One may expound fully upon the nature of fire, but the mouth will not become hot.”
She flips the back cover of the book open and stares at the photograph of Dan, barely larger than a postage stamp. He looks the same, she thinks, and imagines that the young women in his poetry classes must hang on his every word. The sensitive, wounded poet. Somehow she is not surprised that he has never remarried. She is, in fact, surprised that she feels no bitterness at the thought of Dan seeing Teddy again after all these years. The two of them eating pizza at some college hangout. She can’t imagine the conversation, but she hopes it goes well, for both their sakes.
Her high heels are sitting under the swing. She takes off her panty hose and tosses them into a pile of dead leaves beside the porch. Teddy still shows no signs of stirring. She decides she will call him from the airport to say good-bye. At the last minute she slips his essay out of the book and into her purse. She wants to keep it. As proof that despite the odds, he has turned out all right after all. A son any mother would be proud of. Giselle picks up her shoes and walks barefoot across the wet grass. It is quiet, pristine, just before the morning rush. A pretty girl with a perky ponytail jogs by with her German shepherd keeping pace right beside her. She smiles at Giselle, who smiles back.
It is an extraordinarily beautiful morning. After four years in the desert, she feels almost drunk on the dew and lush greenery. Trees, grass, shrubs. She feels as if she’s been transported to the Emerald City. For the first time she feels a nostalgia for the Midwest with its sober shade trees and tall, square houses, the archetypal houses of children’s drawings with a scribble of crayon smoke curling from the chimney. At the same time she pictures, with pleasure, her rambling adobe ranch house with its cacti garden and postage-stamp pool in the backyard. She pictures Hal, who is an early riser, sitting in the sunny breakfast nook, reading his morning paper, waiting impatiently until it is time to leave for the airport to pick her up. It is not the romantic sort of love she felt for Dan, or the familial sort of love she felt (feels still) for Ed, but some other sort of thing that she doesn’t think she could have come to any earlier in her life. Even though sometimes she wishes their wrinkles and loose skin could be airbrushed away, she knows that they are a necessary part of it. Hal has two grown daughters and an expensive ex-wife. Sometimes, lying in bed, they like to fantasize about what they would have done if they had met each other in their twenties or thirties. But then usually one of them says, “And we’d probably have gone our separate ways by now,” and the other nods in agreement, grateful to have what they have. As Hal said one morning not long ago, “This is as close to enough as it gets.” Not that a day goes by that she doesn’t think of her daughter. And now that she knows Dan isn’t even in California, the thought of Trina buried out there all alone is enough to make her cry.
But it seems to her that something is different. She feels different. She can’t put her finger on it. And then it hits her: she is breathing more easily than she has in years. It feels as if some obstruction in her chest has, overnight, dislodged itself or dissolved, as if, for the past decade, her heartbeat has been stuck in phase one and has finally moved onto phase two, something she still remembers from Biology 101: Each heartbeat has two main phases. The phase when the heart muscle is fully contracted, squeezing out blood, is called systole. The phase when the heart relaxes and refills with blood is called diastole. She also remembers a children’s encyclopedia of Teddy’s that showed a scary-looking picture of the heart with a caption that said, “The adult heart is the size of a clenched fist.” Which was precisely what hers felt like. Sometimes she would wake up in the night and hear it punching her ribs, beating her up from the inside. But now, suddenly, or maybe not suddenly, it feels as if the fist has opened its fingers and let go of whatever it has been holding on to, clutching so tightly, for all these years.
***
The sun is higher and brighter now, and she can see the white hotel at the end of the walking mall. A couple of stray dogs are chasing each other around the fountain. A young man with copper-colored dreadlocks and a Rasta cap is playing the flute; an open case lined with gold velvet shimmers in the bright sunlight. Giselle digs a five-dollar bill out of her skinny purse — something a teenage girl would carry — and drops it into the case. He nods his head and launches into a silvery, birdlike trill of gratitude.
Then she remembers something else, something she hasn’t dared to think of in a long, long time. A bedtime ritual. It went like this: Trina would be lying in the crib and Giselle would say, “Anybody want a nighty-night kiss?” Trina would wriggle her arm out from under the pink quilt and hold up her cupped palm for Giselle to kiss. Like a little pink flower. Giselle would bend over the crib, inhaling her sweet baby scent, making a bzzzz-bzzz sound like a bumblebee, and land a kiss in the center of her pudgy hand. The instant that Giselle’s lips brushed her skin, Trina’s fingers would curl shut, into a small, tight fist. And she would fall asleep, still holding on to the kiss.
It was enough to break your heart. Even then.
About the Author
MARLY SWICK has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a James Michener Award, an O. Henry Award, and the Iowa Short Fiction Award. She is also the author of the novel Paper Wings and two story collections, The Summer Before the Summer of Love and Monogamy.
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