The Day She Died

by S. M. Freedman

  “Say Na-na.” Button said it more slowly, moving her mouth in an exaggerated way.

  “Nnnnna!” He chortled and waved chubby fists. A chunk of banana flew from his hand and hit Button’s cheek.

  “Na-na,” Button said, wiping her cheek with a dishcloth.

  The baby clasped his hands together. His face turned red with mounting pressure, and he let out a high-pitched squeal that reminded her of a kettle on the boil.

  She saw that his eyes were the colour of amber just like hers, and with that everything clicked into place. The world around her made sense again, and she awoke to her place within it.

  She had taken a break from her studio to grab a snack. She was preparing for her third art show. The baby was her son. His name was Gabriel.

  Button dropped more Cheerios on the tray. “You’ve almost got it. Say Nana.”

  “Nnnna!”

  “What a good boy! You bring me such naches.” She handed over more Cheerios. He grabbed a fistful from the tray and stuffed them into his mouth.

  “No fair,” Eve said. Her throat felt dry and painful. She poured tea into her favourite cup and took a sip. The warmth was soothing. “Mama should be his first word. Payback for the cracked nipples and drooping belly.”

  She took a candy bar from the cabinet, tore open the wrapper, and dunked a square of chocolate into her tea.

  “Maybe you should quit eating so much junk food, if you’re worried about your weight.”

  “Chocolate is the only thing keeping me sane,” she said around a gooey bite.

  Button rolled her eyes and turned back to the mess in the high chair. “As for the cracked nipples, you’re doing that to yourself. He’s past a year. There’s no need to breastfeed anymore.”

  “He likes it.”

  “Of course he likes it. But he doesn’t need it. You’re spoiling him.”

  “You can’t spoil a baby, right, Gabe?” She moved over to the high chair, found a clean spot, and planted a kiss. His head smelled like banana and lavender shampoo.

  He gave her a sticky smile before stuffing another fistful of food into his mouth.

  “And if you can spoil a baby, you’re doing a fantastic job at it.”

  “I’m his great-grandma.”

  “Gurg!” Gabriel dropped Cheerios out of his mouth and pumped a fist in the air in apparent agreement, making both women laugh.

  “Rock on!” Eve pumped her fist in the air, and he squealed his delight. “Are you okay to put him down for his nap? I’ve got to get back to the studio.”

  “What are you working on?”

  Button asked it casually enough, but she remembered how much her new style of painting disturbed her grandmother. She didn’t come into the studio anymore, nor did she want any of Eve’s new pieces to cross the threshold of their house. This was fine with Eve. She didn’t like her new paintings, either, even if they made her a lot of money.

  Since The Resurrection of Sin art show at Hector’s gallery, everyone seemed to want an Eve Gold painting. There were four downtown galleries currently selling her artwork, and she’d been approached by six more. She’d also recently finished a commission with the Aquilini family for a series of portraits. And for those who couldn’t afford an original, she’d signed a generous contract with Hector to reproduce several of her paintings as giclées.

  She could barely keep up with the demand, and her fatigue and stress intensified the symptoms of her head injury. She frequently lost time, was easily confused, or found herself drifting in and out of silver dreams with no real understanding of who she was or what she was doing.

  The worst of it came when she’d left Gabriel in a baby swing at the park and wandered away. Someone had called CPS and remained with Gabriel until they arrived. Eve was missing for hours, and her disappearance ended up on the evening news. Search dogs found her the next morning in the Crook. She was near the field of quicksilver, unconscious and bleeding from a gash on the head.

  The upshot of the whole miserable experience was that she now had a social worker dropping in at unexpected times, and she was forbidden to be alone with her son. Her guilt only served to increase her stress, which worsened her other symptoms. Sometimes Eve felt like she was drowning.

  “Eve?” Button said.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I asked what you’re working on.” Button was wetting a cloth at the sink and didn’t turn to look at her granddaughter. But Eve knew her mouth was turned down at the edges, the way it often was these days.

  “Oh. I’m playing with painting in negatives. Here, let me.”

  She took the cloth and wiped Gabriel’s face. He opened his mouth and sprayed her with soggy bits of Cheerios.

  “That’s disgusting, dude,” she told him, wiping her arm. Gabriel seemed to think it was very funny.

  “What’s painting in negatives?” Button asked.

  “Hector suggested it, and I thought I’d give it a try. I start by colour-washing a blank canvas. And then instead of painting the actual object, like a tree or whatever, I’m painting around it to define its edges.”

  “Well, that sounds interesting. So, you’re painting trees instead of people?”

  “Kind of. Hector asked me the other day why I thought my work since the accident was so different. I mean, is it because of the head injury?”

  Button shrugged. “I’d imagine so.”

  “It got me thinking, though. Before the accident, I painted whatever caught my eye and captured my imagination. I was trying to harness the beauty of nature, or of some everyday object, or a person. It was like taking something external and putting my own spin on it.”

  “And now?” Button asked.

  She sighed. “And now it’s like my eyes have turned inward. I’m painting what I see inside myself, what I fear, what I don’t understand.”

  Button looked at her sadly. “What do you fear?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, although she knew exactly what she feared. It waited for her in the fog and quicksilver.

  Button tilted her head to the side, examining her granddaughter shrewdly. “Do you want to know what I think?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I think whatever it is you’re afraid of, you’re trying so hard to run away from it that it comes out in your paintings and in your dreams. It’s like your own personal devil keeps rising to the surface.”

  “My own personal devil,” she said.

  “Yes. And the only way to chase away the devil is to face him head-on.”

  “How do you do that?”

  Button studied her as though debating whether to push forward or retreat. Gabriel decided for her, shouting “Uppa!” He reached for Button, waving his arms.

  “Are you sure it’s all right?”

  “Of course.” Button’s smile almost reached her eyes.

  “Come on, Gabe. Let’s go play for a bit, and then we’ll have a nice shluf.” She lifted the squirming boy out of his high chair and carried him toward the living room. “Grab your sweater if you’re heading back to the studio. You look cold.”

  She was cold, but that was nothing new. She lived with permafrost biting the marrow of her bones.

  She stood in the kitchen, eavesdropping as she drank the rest of her tea. Gabriel was playing with his new favourite toy, a set of plastic giraffes that made different noises when hit against something solid. One made a whooping sound and another sounded like a spring being loaded. Gabriel favoured the one that sounded like a whoopee cushion. He banged it repeatedly against the floor and giggled each time it made a farting noise.

  “You’re such a boy,” she whispered, and heard Button say the same thing in the living room.

  A smile curled her lips. She drained her tea and headed for the studio, leaving her mug in the sink.

  “She’s getting worse,” Button said.

  Eve paused in the hallway outside the kitchen door, listening.

  “It’s the lack of sleep. The stress,” Leigh said quietly in r
eturn. There was a clanking sound of the kettle being placed on the stovetop, and then the click and whoosh of the gas fire being lit.

  “Don’t tell me that,” Button said. “That’s bubba maisa and you know it!”

  “Language.” Leigh sounded amused.

  “She’s getting worse,” Button said again, stubbornly.

  “Maybe. But I don’t think we should sound the alarm yet.”

  “She barely remembers to feed her child or change his diaper. Not because she doesn’t care, but because she forgets he exists.”

  “Now, that’s not true,” Leigh said, and Eve realized how much he sounded like her; in denial, they called it.

  “What happened at the park, then? I’m telling you, she does things like this every day. If I weren’t here —”

  “And we’re so grateful you are here,” Leigh said.

  She imagined her grandmother making that sweeping arm gesture she used when something wasn’t worth acknowledging. “I’m not looking for a pat on the head. She spends hours in her studio —”

  “Her paintings are in demand.”

  “She won’t eat or even come out for a breath of fresh air if I don’t force her to do it. And Lord knows I hate going anywhere near her studio. I can’t even look at what she’s painting.”

  “I think they’re pretty good,” Leigh said. “Maybe a tad —”

  “They’re the devil’s work.”

  “Since when do you believe in that?”

  “Since I saw my granddaughter die and come back a different person!”

  Her grandmother’s words were like a gut-punch. Eve slapped her hands over her face so hard her eyes watered from the sting. Behind her closed eyelids, she saw a man wearing a fedora.

  “Take my hand, Eve.”

  At the touch of his fingers, the top of her skull had popped open. The inside of her head became a wind tunnel spiralling toward a blinding, horrifying white light.

  “She’s running from something.” Button’s voice was so soft she could barely hear her. She wished she couldn’t.

  “And whatever it is, I think it’s catching up to her.”

  “What do you think she’s running from?” Leigh asked.

  She whipped to the opening, toward light that screamed — and somewhere beyond, she’d felt certain she would find her reckoning.

  “From the abyss,” she whispered into her hands.

  “I don’t know,” Button said with a sigh. “And she’s not saying.”

  “Look, this is what happens with head injuries. There’s no straight path to recovery. The brain is a complex organism —”

  “You’ve explained all this before. Last time you used the circuit-board analogy.”

  “Well, it’s true,” Leigh said.

  She pictured him shrugging in that one-shouldered way that was either endearing or annoying, depending on the circumstances. The fridge door opened, and she heard the clank of bottles hitting each other — Leigh grabbing a beer. There was a pop as he twisted off the cap.

  “I’m telling you,” Button’s voice lowered in a way Eve knew all too well. It was her “Button knows best” voice, and to ignore it was to set off fireworks. “This isn’t happening because of her head injury. There’s something going on at a deeper level, with her neshama.”

  Leigh choked, then hacked and spluttered, clearing liquid from his lungs. “What? You think there’s something wrong with her soul?”

  “Don’t act like it’s a ridiculous concept. You grew up with a mezuzah on every door of your house. Even if your family never kept Shabbos, or only attended shul on the High Holy Days —”

  “Eve was raised the same way.”

  “Yes, she was. Donna put no stock in religion. But my grandfather was a great rabbi, and I was learning at his knee before I could talk. Eve grew from those roots of belief.”

  “All right, I hear you.”

  “What do you believe in?” Button asked.

  Eve lifted her head, curious what his answer would be. Above her was the painting she’d done of the café on the Rue Saint-Honoré.

  “I’m a man of science,” he said.

  “ Vos iz der chil’lek? The one doesn’t counteract the other.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “When that Lexus hit her, how long was she dead?” Button asked.

  “The estimate was about ten minutes.”

  Ten minutes.

  “And what do you think happened to her during that time?”

  “She’s never said.”

  She was dead for ten minutes.

  “I keep wondering,” Button said. “Where she was, what she saw.”

  Eve put her fingers in her mouth and bit down.

  “Probably nothing. I think you’re letting your imagination get the best of you,” Leigh said.

  “I watch her in her studio sometimes.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She doesn’t know I’m there, of course. But when the baby is sleeping, sometimes I sneak out back to watch her. She talks, you know.”

  “Lots of people talk to themselves,” he said.

  “It’s not like that. She talks to the corner of her studio where that old desk and chair sit. The one where your sister used to do her writing.”

  “Oh.”

  “A few times this summer, when the windows were open, I heard her, too,” Button said.

  “What was she saying?”

  “She wasn’t speaking in English.”

  “What?” Leigh said. “She doesn’t know any other languages.”

  “No, she doesn’t. And it doesn’t sound familiar. It’s guttural like German, but with soft uplifts like French or Italian.”

  “Shit.”

  “What are you doing?” Button asked.

  “Calling a colleague at the hospital. She needs to be evaluated. I wish you’d told me this sooner.”

  “That’s why I didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I knew you’d want to have her tested. Maybe committed to Riverbend.”

  “Damn straight,” Leigh said.

  “And I don’t think she can survive being there again.” Eve dropped her head back to the wall, biting her bottom lip.

  There was a weighty pause, and then Leigh said, “What do you mean, again?”

  “Just please put down the phone. There’s more.” Button cleared her throat, and then continued resolutely. “I heard another woman speaking, too.”

  “She must have had the radio on,” Leigh said.

  “No.”

  “Or maybe —”

  “No,” Button said again.

  “I just don’t buy it,” Leigh said.

  “I heard her.”

  “Have you asked her about it?”

  “Would you want to ask her that kind of question?”

  “Yes.” Leigh’s voice shook. “You bet I would ask her.”

  She didn’t realize she was moving until it was too late to stop. She stepped into the yellow light of the kitchen, walking with the stiffness of a marble statue come to life.

  “Go ahead,” she said through numb lips. “Ask me anything you want. But I have a question for you, too.”

  Leigh swallowed hard. He stared at her, eyes wide and blue like the river in summer. “I think we should get you to the hospital,” he said instead. “Have them do an MRI, a psych evaluation —”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?” Button asked.

  “That I died during the accident. That I was dead for ten minutes.”

  “The paramedics revived and stabilized you before they took you to the hospital,” Leigh said. It wasn’t really an answer.

  “You should have told me.”

  Button wrapped her warm hands around Eve’s. “When Donna died, I would have followed her to the grave if not for you. When I think how close I came to losing you, too …” She shook her head. “But Baruch Hashem, you came back.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  S
ara’s Seventeenth Birthday

  “BUTTON?”

  Eve knocked on the door to her grandmother’s bedroom. “Grandma? Are you ready to go?” She paused, listening, but heard nothing. “Button?” She knocked again. “The limo is here. It’s time to go.”

  “In a minute,” Button said faintly from the other side of the door. Her voice sounded clogged and wobbly.

  “Are you okay?” She winced at the stupidity of the question.

  “Just … just a minute, dear.”

  “I’ll wait outside, then. Okay?”

  “Yes, fine,” Button said.

  There was a knock on the front door as she was slipping her feet into a pair of Donna’s heels. Her feet were half a size larger than Donna’s had been, and the shoes pinched her toes excruciatingly. She relished the discomfort. It felt like penance.

  “Just a moment!”

  She tottered down the hallway and opened the door, expecting the impatient limo driver. Instead, Leigh stood solemnly on the porch. He wore a charcoal suit with a dark blue tie. Since the last time she’d seen him, on her sixteenth birthday, he’d let his hair grow out and had shaved off that awful moustache. She hadn’t expected ever to see him again after that day — the day she had closed the door on him, both physically and emotionally.

  The memory of their last meeting was there in his eyes; she could see it adding to the weight of all they carried between them. She wondered how much more it would take to break him, the way she had broken. She wondered if he was breakable.

  “I’m sorry about your mom.”

  She stared at him, at a loss for words.

  He shifted from foot to foot, not meeting her eyes. “And I’m sorry about the last time …”

  She continued to watch him, letting the silence stretch and enjoying his discomfort.

  “What about all the other times?”

  He met her gaze, looking perplexed.

  “Do you feel bad about all the other times, too?”

  He opened his mouth to respond, but didn’t get the chance.

  “Hello, Leigh,” Button said stiffly, coming up behind her. She wore a large brimmed black hat, angled down over one eye, and an oversized pair of dark sunglasses. She looked like an old-time movie star playing the part of a grieving mother. In comparison Eve felt sloppy, a skinny kid adrift in her mother’s curve-hugging dress.