When the Lights Go Out

by Mary Kubica

  “Jessie?” I hear, and when I look up from the street, I see Liam making his way toward me. All dressed up in a black suit and tie. Looking undeniably sleek but also tired like me.

  I rise from the curb and bridge the gap, and, as we close in on one another, his face darkens. “Your shirt,” he says as he points to it, to my shirt, and tells me that I’ve got it on inside out. Which wouldn’t be so obvious were it not for the label sitting smack-dab beneath my chin, a blaring thing. I pluck it from my skin for a better look.

  Not only do I have my shirt on inside out, but it’s backward. And now that Liam has pointed it out for me, I feel the high neckline, the cotton taut in places it isn’t meant to be taut. In that moment I have no memory of ever grabbing the shirt from the closet, slipping it from its hanger, of ever putting it on.

  It’s a blessing that I’m even dressed.

  “Come inside,” he says, his eyes hanging on a little longer than they ordinarily would. “You can fix it there.”

  But I say, “No,” shooing him off, feeling suddenly asinine. “It’s just a stupid shirt anyway; it’s not like anyone noticed.” And then I sigh, feeling completely exasperated. Exasperated and exhausted. He hears it in my voice.

  “Jessie,” he says, his voice far more resolute this time. “Come inside. Keep me company.”

  We step inside the building and wait for the elevator to come. “Did you sleep last night?” he asks. I don’t say yes or no, but my silence gives it away. In my head, I tally the days up. I lose track at number four and have to start again, counting on my fingers this time, reaching seven.

  It’s been seven days since I’ve slept.

  “I looked it up,” Liam tells me as the elevator comes for us. Though it doesn’t align with the lobby floor—a fact that I realize all too late—and so I trip on the way in, stumbling over that one-inch rise. Liam latches on to my arm, steadying me. He doesn’t let go. Not until I draw my arm away, stepping closer to the wall so that I can use it for leverage if need be.

  “Looked what up?” I ask as the elevator sweeps us up to the sixth floor. I feel suddenly rocky on my feet. Nauseous.

  “The longest a person has ever gone without sleep,” Liam says.

  He tells me how people die from lack of sleep. About lab rats who died from lack of sleep. “How long?” I ask.

  “Eleven days,” he says. “Eleven, Jessie,” he repeats to drive the point home, I think. “You need to sleep.”

  “I will,” I say, but chances are good that I won’t.

  I ask how the funeral went because I don’t want to talk about my lack of sleep or the fact that in four more days I’m liable to die because of it. The funeral, he says, went as well as to be expected for a funeral. His shoulders shrug and his expression is flat. He doesn’t say more.

  The elevator arrives at the sixth floor. He leads us to his apartment, walking a half step ahead of me. At the door, I stop a few feet back, waiting as he opens it. Inside, the space is big and roomy with ceilings that are extraordinarily high, track lighting, exposed brick. Sunlight pours in through floor-to-ceiling windows. “You coming?” he asks.

  I walk past him and into the apartment as behind me he closes the door.

  He offers me something to drink. I say no because I have my Coke, which I uncap and take a swig of. But as I raise the bottle up to my lips, there’s that tremor to my hand again, the one I can’t make stop.

  Liam tugs the tie from his neck and slips the suit jacket off. Throws it over the arm of a chair. Unbuttons his shirt. Rolls the cuffs of it to his elbows. Finds himself a water in the refrigerator and sinks into a low-slung chair. He never asks what I’m doing here.

  I give the article to Liam, my hand still shaking as I do. I sit on a chair opposite him. I don’t bother fixing my shirt.

  “What’s this?” he asks, but it’s one of those questions that isn’t really a question because already he’s reading the story of Jessica Sloane, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver at the age of three. When he comes to the end of it he tells me what I already know. He says that this is strange.

  I assert, “I mean, it’s just a coincidence, right? A mistake?”

  His face is impassive. He doesn’t say an emphatic yes as I’d hoped he would; he doesn’t put my mind at ease. This time, there are too many holes that don’t line up.

  “I don’t know,” he admits, saying, “It’s just that it’s strange, Jessie. I mean, yesterday it was a coincidence. Yesterday it was a mistake. Yesterday someone screwed up. But now it’s like it isn’t so much an accident as it is someone intentionally trying to keep you off the radar. You have no birth certificate, you can’t find your social security card and the social security number you think is yours matches up with that of a dead girl. One who might just have the same name as you.”

  The expression on his face says it all. Something sordid is going on here. Something bad.

  “It’s just hard to believe that she’s not you,” he says while motioning to the photograph in the article, but when I look at the child’s face, I see nothing but a stranger looking back at me. I’ve never seen this girl before.

  “But it’s not me,” I argue, voice trembling. “She doesn’t look a thing like me. Look at the shape of her eyes, her nose. It’s all different,” I allege, rising to my feet. “It’s all wrong.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” he says, his voice gentle. “That’s not what I meant, Jessie. I just mean,” he says. “I just mean that I think it’s possible there’s something going on here, some sort of identity theft.”

  “What do you mean, identity theft?” I ask, except I know what he means. What he’s suggesting is not that my identity has been stolen, but that I’ve stolen the identity of someone else—unpremeditated on my part, but still identity theft.

  “Jessie,” he starts, but I shake my head and he stops.

  At first there’s nothing but silence. I drop back down into my chair. I think it through. “You think my mother changed my name, gave me a phony identity and passed me off as a dead girl?” I ask, the words themselves unthinkable. Not something that could possibly be real. For a second I feel like I might vomit. The Coke gathers in my stomach, burning the lining of it. There’s hardly any food inside me, which, when coupled with everything else, doesn’t sit well. The pain starts somewhere around my navel and creeps up my chest. An agonizing lump that plunks itself behind the breastbone.

  “But no,” I say decisively, rising to my feet again and beginning to pace. Why would Mom do that? Why in the world would Mom steal the identity of a girl who had died and give it to me? “Why?” I ask out loud, though the answer slowly dawns on me, that if Mom went around passing me off as a dead girl, then no one would know she had stolen another child’s identity. Because that child was dead.

  I watch as Liam grabs for a laptop on the coffee table and types quick, harried words into it. He moves from his chair and comes to me and together we stare at the words on the screen. There’s a whole word for it, he tells me. “Ghosting. Thieves open bank accounts and credit cards using a dead person’s social security number,” he says. “They pore over obituaries to see who’s died, and then rack up thousands of dollars of debt in some stiff’s name.”

  “But why?” I ask dumbly, though I’m not that dumb. I just can’t wrap my head around it. People do this kind of thing for financial gain, but Mom and I were never rich. We weren’t living a life of riches. We lived paycheck to paycheck.

  Besides, Mom would never do anything to harm someone; she would never steal.

  There has to be more to it than that.

  If—and that’s a big if—she took the identity of a dead child and gave it to me, then it was for some other reason than financial gain. But what? I can’t even begin to guess.

  I swallow the last of my Coke. It’s like rubbing salt in an open wound. The pain in my chest gets worse so that I co
ugh and, as I do, all I can think of is corroded pipes, the lining of my esophagus plugged up and rusty.

  I let an idea dwell for a short time, and then quickly expunge it from my mind.

  Find yourself, Mom told me. One of two wishes she had for me before she died.

  Maybe she didn’t mean for me to apply to college. Maybe it was far less esoteric than that. Maybe it was quite literal.

  Find yourself, she said, because Jessie Sloane isn’t you.

  eden

  May 28, 1997

  Egg Harbor

  As spring ripens into summer, tourists reappear. The town comes to life with a certain vivacity that was missing during the dismal days of winter. Trees burgeon, flowers bloom.

  Miranda and her three boys appear like magic at my front door each day that I’m not working—and often, I’d venture to guess, when I am—toting blueberry loaves and apple pies.

  As the boys play in the tree swing (that by now was meant to hold my own child, the two of us nestled snugly together, he or she on the seat of my lap, weightless and grinning as we lift off from the ground and take flight), Miranda and I sip lemonade. As always she sells short the joys of marriage and motherhood, while little Carter crawls on the lawn before us on all fours, eating dirt. She complains about everything from what a jerk her husband, Joe, can be—coming home late from work, missing dinner, not helping with the boys’ bedtime routine—to the monotony of her days, to the amount of food three growing boys consume. She can never keep the cabinets fully stocked, she tells me, because the minute she buys it they eat it all, which leads into an onslaught on the difficulties of grocery shopping with three boys, and she describes it for me: the poking and the prodding of each other, the name-calling—birdbrain, imbecile, idiot—the running off headlong down the market’s aisles, bumping into strangers, begging and crying for things that Miranda has already said no to, trying to sneak it past her and into the basket, screaming and calling her names when she snatches it out of their dirty hands and returns it to the store shelf.

  “That must be so difficult,” I say, trying my hardest to sound empathetic, but when Miranda replies with “You have no idea, Eden. Can you even grasp how lucky you are, getting to grocery shop alone?” it’s all I can do not to scream.

  I would give life and limb to grocery shop with a child.

  Miranda doesn’t bother asking how the fertility treatments are going, though just last night Aaron and I made the decision to give in vitro fertilization a try. Or rather, I should say, I made the decision to give in vitro a try. The cost of it is extortionate, thousands of dollars for a single cycle, for Dr. Landry to go inside one time and pluck an egg or two from my ovaries to combine with Aaron’s sperm, making an embryo, a baby, in a culture dish. As one grows bacteria. It seems scientific, synthetic, and yet there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for a child.

  I know this now.

  But Aaron isn’t so sure. As we stood in the kitchen last night, both of us speaking in acerbic tones, he calculated the costs we’ve paid over the year, all the pelvic ultrasounds and semen analyses, the Clomid cycles, the trigger shots, intrauterine insemination. The grand total tallied up to some ten thousand dollars already spent trying to create a child, an expenditure that will nearly double with one single cycle of IVF. Aaron and I don’t have this kind of money. He reminds me of this relentlessly, as he reminds me how happy we used to be before we ever made the decision to start a family, and I have this vague recollection of a couple, a man and a woman—as if in another life—sitting on a dock, holding hands, watching sailboats float by on a bay.

  “I think we should stop, Eden,” he said, trying hard to reach out to me but I pulled away. “I think we should be happy with what we have.”

  “And what’s that?” I asked, up in arms. What did we possibly have without a baby?

  “Us,” he said, looking sad. “You and me. That’s what we have.”

  I wouldn’t be deterred.

  “We will do this,” I told him of the in vitro fertilization. Hands on hips, my expression flat. An imperial fiat.

  I left the room so it couldn’t be further discussed.

  I’ve taken out three credit cards in my own name, and charge each appointment with Dr. Landry to them in sequence. Never are we able to pay more than the minimum payment for each. The interest fees soar monthly as the cottage degenerates bit by bit. The furnace went out; we need to replace the plumbing throughout the entire home before the decades-old steel pipes wear out for good. The windows are drafty; they too need to be replaced before another winter comes or we’ll spend an arm and a leg to heat the home, watching our money quite literally go out the window.

  But each of these plays second fiddle to making a baby.

  Aaron and I argue daily about money. The cost of groceries, the cost of clothes.

  What concessions can we make so that we can save more for a baby?

  Do we really need two cars, cable TV, a new pair of shoes?

  “This is ridiculous,” Aaron says as he holds up a shoe, the outsole flapping loose like a hangnail. “I can’t go to work like this.” And yet I argue with him, claiming he’s being extravagant by not making do with the shoe. “Surely you can get another month out of those shoes,” I say, suggesting he use some glue, though it isn’t about the shoe, but rather what the hundred dollars for another pair of shoes will buy. An appointment with Dr. Landry, a hormone shot, a month’s worth of Clomid.

  But Aaron swears he needs the shoe, which inside makes me fume.

  How selfish can he be? Where are his priorities?

  At each unwelcome visit, when Miranda and her boys appear at my door without invitation, her belly continues to swell, another baby on the way, “Hopefully a girl this time,” she says, fingers laced together in the air.

  If Aaron and I hurry up, she reminds me for the umpteenth time, joining me in the backyard for another glass of lemonade, her baby and my baby can one day go to school together. They can be friends.

  I smile.

  And though I don’t say it aloud, I think to myself that I’d rather die than have my baby and Miranda’s baby be friends.

  June 13, 1997

  Egg Harbor

  The hollyhocks are in bloom. Just the sight of them lined up defiantly against the weathered picket fence stabs me in the chest. They stand high above the rest of the flowers in the garden, six feet tall or more. Their bold bell-shaped flowers burn red against the greenery.

  It’s been a year then since Aaron and I planted the seedlings in the lawn against the fence where they’d be sheltered from the rain and the wind. And now here they are, exhibitionists in my flower bed, outshining the roses and lilies.

  Reminding me of all the wasted time Aaron and I have spent trying to have a baby.

  When Aaron was at work, I took a pair of scissors to them, cutting hard through the thick stem. I seethed as I did it, crying, taking out a year’s worth of rage on the flowers. I screamed like a maniac, grateful that, thanks to the deep rim of trees surrounding our yard, no one was around to see or hear my outburst. I grabbed handfuls of stems and tugged with all my might, wresting the roots from the ground where I stomped on them like a child. I tore the flowers from their stems, shredding them into a million pieces until my hands were yellow with pollen and I was out of breath from the outburst.

  When I was finished, I threw them away, beneath the garbage where all the negative pregnancy tests go.

  The deer, I’ll blame, when Aaron asks what happened to the flowers. I’ll say that the deer have had their way with the hollyhocks, eating them to the quick.

  And he’ll be more upset about this than he is our lack of a baby.

  After all our hard work.

  “Such a shame,” he’ll say, before waging a war against the innocent deer.

  jessie

  I take the Brown Line back to the carr
iage home, walking the last couple of blocks from the station at Paulina. I feel lost without my bike. I don’t have my bike, Old Faithful, because I left it outside the Art Institute, tethered to some sort of loopy bike rack, when I walked to Liam’s, chasing after the mystery man.

  It’s dark inside by the time I arrive, night falling quickly. I close the door behind me and jiggle the handle a couple of times to be sure it’s closed tight. I’m in a trance, thinking about little else but the dead Jessica Sloane. The one who is three years old. The one who is me but not me all at the same time. Lines from the newspaper article run through my mind, committed to memory already.

  A four-lane highway with a speed limit of just twenty-five.

  The road twisted through the small seaside town.

  The driver rounded a bend at nearly twice that speed.

  Every time I close my eyes I see her face.

  I have only a vague recollection of riding the elevator downstairs; of pushing my way through the turnstile doors of Liam’s apartment building; of walking to the Merchandise Mart to catch the train with him at my side. He’d offered to cover the cost of a cab for me but I said no.

  Still, he walked me there, to the Merchandise Mart, and paid to stand on the platform beside me, waiting until the Brown Line came. And now that I look, I see his jacket draped over me, keeping me warm. He must’ve put it there, but that I don’t remember.

  I turn and walk up the carriage house’s stairway, a rickety old thing with steps that are a bit concave, the edges worn away. The steps sink at their center. They squeak. The tread pitches downward from a century’s worth of weight, and I cling to the railing so I don’t fall.

  When I get to the top I have to fight for breath. The steepness of the steps isn’t to blame, nor for once my overwhelming fatigue.

  What knocks the wind from my lungs is something else entirely.

  Because as my feet hit the wooden floorboards and my eyes size up the open rooms, I see that the white window curtains I’d pulled shut before I left, so that no one could see inside while I was gone—every single one of them is open wide.