“What will it be?”
“Different. Better. I promise.”
He kissed her again before he left. He loved her. Maybe it could be enough.
ALICE
Alice took the test, and the test confirmed. Benjamin Strauss was her father. Benjamin Strauss had inserted himself and his genetic material into her mother’s body, when her mother was someone else. He had done so with her permission, or he had done so without. He had known she was carrying his baby, or he had not. Alice would have to content herself with the either/or, because fact was out of reach. She did not want a new family, a stepmother, a half sister; she wanted her father back, and her mother. But she was not her mother. She would not refuse a reality simply because it was one she did not want.
Elizabeth had speculated that Alice’s mother was trying to protect her—that Wendy Doe had wanted the baby but couldn’t find a way to love it. An adoption, of sorts, for the good of the child. Alice thought this sounded like her mother. Not Wendy Doe, but Karen Clark, the mother she had known, who had lied to her, then disappeared. She believed her mother had been trying to protect her. She believed, tried to believe, that her mother had wanted her, but even if this was true, her mother was still gone.
* * *
Her father was not her father. Her father was a dead man she would never know and never want to. The man she wanted to be her father had claimed her as his own. He loved her as his own, but that was before she knew she was not. Alice thought it might be harder for him, now that he could no longer pretend. He was a mild man, but he was stubborn in defense of what he believed to be right. He had once hit a deer, then sat on the side of the road beside its bloody wreckage until it died, because no one should have to die alone.
Her mother was still gone.
* * *
She left Philadelphia. She watched clouds swallow the skyline, reclined her seat, stretched out in the extra legroom she’d acquired on Elizabeth’s pity dime. She didn’t tell her father she was coming home and she wasn’t yet, exactly. She used her stolen camera to take pictures of the mountains as they came into view, then left it behind on the seat when she got off the plane. No one noticed. No one was watching. This no longer felt like a threat. She was almost ready to go home, to face her father, to begin again as a family of two. She was almost ready to find out who she was going to be without her mother. But not yet. First she went to the cemetery, where she had never been. It was time to visit her mother.
She’d expected to feel something, standing over the grave. Here was her mother’s name, carved into marble. Here were dates, her first and last. No body, but that didn’t matter; wherever the body was, Alice knew, her mother was no longer in it. In another kind of story, her mother would be lurking in the graveyard shadows, haunting her faked death, and upon Alice’s arrival would finally succumb to temptation and reveal herself. This was Alice’s story: her mother was not coming back.
Alice knew this, too: her mother’s life was not defined by its end, any more than Alice’s life was defined by its beginning. The eighteen years in between, eighteen years of care and caretaking—these were not stories or suppositions, these were facts. The fact that her mother eventually left couldn’t invalidate the eighteen years that she’d stayed.
She’d chosen a stone from the woods behind the Meadowlark. It was the color of a burnt sienna crayon, smoothed to a shine. Alice rubbed a thumb over its surface, then set it on the gravestone. Elizabeth had said this was how Jews mourned their dead. She felt a little silly and a little sacred.
“So? You tell me. What am I supposed to do now?”
She wondered if she should wait for a sign, something to prove her mother was watching. She searched herself for the faith that her mother, that anyone, was watching, came up empty, and found that she did not mind. The sky was clear, and so much bigger here. She’d forgotten that. She’d forgotten also the smell of the columbine, the cool, clean comfort of peaks on the horizon, proof the world was more than traffic and plastic and pain. She’d forgotten the sharp taste of cold, the way snow made everything new. The way her mother would always button Alice’s jacket up to the top, wrap a wool scarf tight around her nose and mouth, insist on a second pair of socks, gauge carefully her daughter’s readiness to battle a cold world, then kiss her forehead in benediction, say okay, you’re ready to go. Now, she remembered.
ELIZABETH
Gwen looked old. Unlike herself, but still familiar—like her mother, I realized, and felt lighter imagining the look on her face if I said so. Except this was a new Gwen, who might by now have deemed her mother beautiful. It sat heavy again: she was a stranger.
The Wok, on the other hand, looked precisely the same. Low-lit and grimy, air thick with fried delight. The strip mall was located precisely between our two childhood homes, just close enough that once we were allowed to roam semifree, we could rendezvous there, lock bikes to lamppost, pool babysitting spoils for a steaming plate of beef lo mein and an extra-large wonton soup. We didn’t actually like the food there; no one actually liked the food at the Wok, but the price was right, the ritual comforting, and Gwen’s parents loathed it just enough to make each visit a small rebellion. Small was the only kind of rebellion either of us ever dared.
I’d saved every fortune, pasting each strip into an album expressly for that purpose. It gave Gwen a reliable opportunity to mock, another Wok perk. It’s not like they’ll give you your money back if it doesn’t come true, she would say, and I wouldn’t explain that I wasn’t preserving the future, I was preserving us. If I had, she would have shrugged. The past wasn’t real for Gwen; I was its designated keeper, while she was charged with dragging me, clingy and reluctant, one day at a time into the future.
I ordered the lo mein and she ordered the soup, as ever. We shared.
“I was glad you called,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to reach out, but… it didn’t seem like my place.”
I thanked her for coming to the funeral, and for the card she’d sent in its wake. She asked polite questions about the house, the Meadowlark, my mother; I asked about Charlotte’s plans for after college and Andy’s new business. It was polite and it was excruciating.
Then she made a noise between groan and shriek that I remembered from her tennis days, the agony of missing a serve. “I’m fucking sorry, Lizzie.”
“For what?”
“For being an asshole twenty years ago. For letting twenty years go by. For not, I don’t know. Doing anything after he died.”
“What were you supposed do?”
“How about fucking something?” Gwen said, and I knew then how little we had both changed.
I told her that if she’d caught me a month before, I would have eagerly accepted the apology and presumed it deserved. But that after all these years of thinking she was indeed shitty—that I was the flattened roadkill, she the one at the wheel—I’d recently been reminded the past came in different versions, and I no longer had much faith in the infallibility of mine.
“Midlife crisis therapy? You, too?”
“More like, catastrophe?”
“God, I’m so sorry, again, losing him, I just can’t imagine—”
“No, not that. I don’t want… I want to talk about us. What happened back then with us. Will you tell me? Your side of the story?”
“Lizzie, it’s forever ago. Can’t we just agree we’re both sorry and get on with it?”
“Please.”
She told me our story. In her version, I was not the protagonist. Her story was the story of a young mother trying to keep a baby and marriage alive. Back pain, breast pain. Never alone, because always the baby, grabbing, feeding, shitting, crying, wanting; always alone. Also, in love, swamped by inchoate joy, unable to speak of it, unable to speak of anything else. Finding time to shower: a gift. To sit on a toilet uninterrupted: a rare and miraculous blessing. Her husband pawing at her in bed, impatient, as if she could ever again fathom inviting friction and rub, the pleasure of pain. She kno
ws her body differently now. It is fortress; it is food; it is earth mother goddess warrior queen; it is nothing that belongs to him. He stops pawing. She lies awake in the dark, imagining fires and car crashes and rape-murders and nuclear holocausts, all the ways her child will die. She touches herself gently, tries to carry herself to sleep. While all the while, the best friend, the one person definitionally supposed to understand, won’t even try to understand. Talks endlessly about the sex she is or is not having. Is having said sex with a man who no longer desires his wife, now that his wife is a mother. Occasionally remembers to ask about the baby, about whom she plainly gives no shits. Keeps secrets. Exactly like the husband: rebuffed once too often, reciprocates by pill bugging into a tight ball; if you don’t need me, I don’t need you. No one sees how much the mother does need, or would, if she had the energy to do so. “I was just worried about you, and it felt like you were punishing me.”
“I was an asshole.” Then I was crying, in the middle of the Wok. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Well, then I basically told you I hated the guy you were going to marry. We might be even?”
I let it stand, but we were not even. I could see it now: I’d walked away from her because I was too weak to walk away from him. Without her to witness it, I could pretend I was strong.
I told her everything about Alice and her parents, the real ones. I told her about Alice leaving, and how quiet the house was with her gone. I’d dreaded her saying, after all these years, I told you so—but I couldn’t have blamed her. Gwen had told me so. Gwen was the only one who knew that a different future had been possible, and I’d willingly picked this one.
“You regret it? Marrying him?”
“Can you regret your whole life?”
She told me she and Andy were separated. Nothing dramatic, nothing traitorous, just too much quiet between them with Charlotte gone. “So if it makes you feel better, my whole life is a cliché, too.”
“I’m sorry. Am I sorry?”
“I don’t know yet. I don’t know… well, basically, anything, really.”
“In that case, you’re welcome.”
“For what?”
“For living proof that there’s someone’s life more fucked up than yours.”
“I can always count on you.”
When we cracked open our fortune cookies, mine said You are talented in many ways and hers said The object you desire will come to you. Gwen handed it to me without asking. I tucked both into my wallet, because this was what we did. Does this mean we’re friends again, she asked, before we drove home to our separate empty houses. We’re something, I said, which seemed like progress.
* * *
Modernity is fracture. One century ago, we remade the world, broken. Tore apart the map of Europe. Portioned the brain into neurons, the stream of consciousness into discrete, synaptic spark. Monet and Seurat pestled beauty into blots of color; Flaubert and Rimbaud splintered the language of daily life. Cantor and Frege split infinity; Einstein and Bohr quantized light, time, space. Life divided itself into genetic material. Photography sliced memory into moment. This was the Western world into which hysteria and fugue were born. Women broke from their bodies; men broke from themselves; no one was surprised. Everything was falling apart. Nature’s primal law: everything is always falling apart.
* * *
On an island off the coast of Maine, there is a house with no locks. There are neighbors made invisible by trees. There is the smell of the sea. There is a farmers’ market in a shed, payment on the honor system. There is a lighthouse in the distance, keeping watch. There are no memories here for me.
Gwen and her husband bought the house years ago, when the island was a secret and the property cheap. In winters, it stands empty. Take it, she told me. As long as you need.
I wanted a place that would not feel like going backward. This place, this house and its rocky shore, has no past or future. Everything is sense and body—the reek of the mudflats, the freshness of pine, the weight of dark. Nina thought I was running away. I tried to explain that it was the opposite. Running to, rooting down—trading dissolution for reabsorption, in a place that refused boundaries, where I could be alone and remember how not to be lonely. Where I would stay as long as I needed, then no longer. She didn’t understand, and this was fine; there’s a luxury, I’ve discovered, in no longer having to explain myself.
In this house there is a pine desk, and I keep nothing on it but Benjamin’s collection of first memories, which I now read, a little each day, like one might read the Bible. Interspersed with the first memories of everyone he knew are all the versions of his own, written, rewritten, its edges sanded and sharpened then blurred again. The scar on his father’s lip that whitened with a smile. His hiding space beneath the dining table, bare knees raw against carpet. The taste of challah. The clatter of his mother in the kitchen. Sometimes he remembered the smell of soup, sometimes it was brisket. The memories chasing one another. His father’s head bobbing with the music, his father’s tears, his father’s eyes closing as he willed himself back to a murdered past. Always the scientist, Benjamin noted the circumstances of each version of the memory, what had happened that day to spark the emergence of some new detail, how he was feeling about his career, his daughter, his life, his wife. There was no mention of Wendy Doe; there were no names, no confessions. But he wrote, today I am feeling guilty, more than usual. He wrote, today I am wondering if I can ever be a better man. He wrote, today I remembered how to love her.
It was a different flavor of grief, mourning the man I thought I’d loved. Finding a way to forgive myself for having loved him. Sometimes I read the memories aloud, like poetry. Sometimes I play his Bach. Sometimes I stream old episodes of the soap, which they say will be canceled soon, though I doubt it. This is the bedrock principle of the genre, the reason it is secretly the art most true to life: it continues. One day at a time, through love and betrayal, divorce and death, forgetting, transforming. There are no happy endings, no tragic ones. There is only what comes next.
Things fall apart, this is nature’s law—but not its only one, Sam would remind me. Entropy breaks, conservation preserves. Continuity via radical transformation, the fluidity between states—matter that can change is never wholly lost.
* * *
On the island, there is one store. They call it The Store. There are men who make their living on summer lobster boats and spend winters in The Pub, telling and retelling the same beery fish tales. There is an infinite sea. Old women walk large dogs. On the island, everyone knows your name, or wants to. Everyone knows where you live, and who used to live there. No one wants to know too much. There is one hill. The beaches are made of rock, sea-smoothed boulders slick with algae and small, round stones. I collect sea glass. I imagine shipping our glass here—the wineglasses we gifted ourselves for our wedding, the grass-green dessert plates from a long-ago anniversary, the handblown menorah from Paris—and smashing it on the rocks, one by one by one. Broken pieces of us rubbed smooth by time and tide. On the island, children still ride in the back of pickup trucks. Groceries and mail arrive by ferry. It refuses to settle in my mind, that this is how people live. That here I am, living.
The ferry docks at three every afternoon, and most days I walk down to meet it. I wait through the unloading and the loading, the blast of the horn, and wave it goodbye when it goes. There is pleasure, there is power, in the choosing to be left, again, again, again. When the ferry’s out of sight, I pick my way down the gravel path that opens to the sea, where I wait for the sun to fall. I still have too much of the suburbs in me; I’m still afraid of the dark. Less so, every night. I’m getting used to the stars. I breathe, listen to the lap of the tide, remind myself there is no danger here. That it is my choice, moment by moment, to be afraid. Moment by moment, I make myself endure, and some nights I’m still there, huddled on the shore, when the sky sings its inevitable dawn.
* * *
I was a scientist for a while,
and picked things apart; I was a historian, in a fashion, and pieced things together; Benjamin thought I was a dilettante, and I believed him, but now I wonder. If the self and the past are both stories we tell ourselves, malleable and iterated, then maybe I’ve been working the same job all this time. Maybe I want more, and better, than I let myself imagine.
I want, finally, to write again—not about Benjamin or his Meadowlark, but about the building as it was before, and the women who haunt it. Women whose stories were mutated or erased by men who thought they knew better, women who were disappeared from their own lives. I have the asylum archives, along with the institute’s files. Mariana saw to that on her way out—patient and personnel records, all the names of all the women in Benjamin’s domain, and maybe I’ll tell that story, their stories, too; maybe there’s only the one.
I remember, more every day, how it felt to give myself to something so wholly—not a person, but a question—and every day, I think less about him, and more about the women, ghosts waiting for someone to hear them. I scour the files, I highlight, I note. I think, find something here to love, I think, yes, I will, I have.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book always feels improbable, but this one often felt impossible—and would have been without the wisdom and support of:
My literary agent, Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, whose determination that this book belonged in the world persuaded me to prove her right.
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