When the Lights Go Out

by Mary Kubica

  I think of all those times I sat cross-legged on the closet floor beside her feet, watching as she stared sullenly at her own reflection in the mirror. What I thought was that she didn’t like what she saw. A modest, unpretentious face, a bit earthy with dark hair and dark eyes.

  And then, years later when the cancer settled in, that same face became cadaverous. She lost more weight than she had to spare, face thinning, cheekbones hollowed out—an image she despised. That’s what I thought she was looking at when she stared in the mirror.

  But now I think that maybe she wasn’t looking at herself as much as she was looking through the glass, reflecting on the life she left behind, the one she kept hidden from me behind that mirror.

  eden

  July 21, 1997

  Egg Harbor

  What Aaron told the emergency room physician was that there was blood, “Some blood,” he said, “spotting,” which to me equated to a teaspoon or two, enough to dirty a single pad, but the amount of blood I saw was measured in liters and gallons.

  It came gushing out of me, a deluge of blood pouring down from the sky, rivers and streams overflowing their banks, dousing the earth, sweeping homes from their foundations. Everywhere I looked there was blood.

  The day was hot and I wore shorts, and the blood, it saturated my underpants first before snaking down the inside of my bare leg, a thin, red zigzag emblazoned against my fair white skin.

  “I have my period,” I told Aaron as we were there in the backyard—he staring openmouthed at me, on his knees, installing chicken wire around the flower bed so the deer couldn’t poach from us again, making off with our beautiful hollyhock blooms.

  In retrospect there were warning signs, maybe: the suggestion of a cramp, some lower back pain, tokens of pregnancy as well as menstruation and miscarriage. The fact that the nausea had abated during the last twenty-four hours was, to me, a welcome blessing and not once a sign of catastrophe.

  “You’re pregnant,” Aaron said lightly, rising to his feet and coming to me, but I couldn’t process his words, couldn’t make sense of what was happening. It was my period again, come to me like it does every month without fail. There was dirt on his forehead, and his hands were red, etched with the impression of chicken wire. “You don’t have your period, Eden,” he said, dropping the wire cutters to the ground and taking my hands into his.

  He wiped the blood from my leg with his own sweaty T-shirt.

  In the car I sat on a kitchen towel.

  We didn’t speak on the way to the emergency room.

  He told the attending physician that there was some blood, that I was spotting.

  An ultrasound was performed. This time, there was no heartbeat.

  The baby’s heartbeat had disappeared.

  Both Aaron’s and the doctor’s eyes wandered to mine, though I wouldn’t meet theirs, too busy staring at the black gestational sac on the monitor, at the stillness of the screen, the lack of movement. The absence of sound.

  Aaron reached out a hand to mine but I couldn’t feel it. I only saw that it was there.

  I was insensible. I was stone-cold.

  “What now?” Aaron asked the physician who’d been sent down from obstetrics to perform the ultrasound, a woman who would soon return to labor and delivery to deliver someone else’s healthy newborn.

  “We’ll perform a dilation and curettage,” she said, “to eliminate any remaining tissue from the womb.”

  Tissue. As if only a few hours ago that tissue hadn’t been a child.

  In that moment, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even bring myself to cry.

  They put me to sleep for the procedure.

  I prayed I’d never wake up again.

  jessie

  I leave Albany Park, taking the train into the Loop, where I make my way to the Art Institute to collect my bike. From there, I pedal to the coffee bar on Dearborn, the one where the man at the garden had purchased his coffee, the name I’d read on the paper sleeve of his coffee cup. People are religious about their coffee and their routines, and so it seems logical enough to think that if he was here yesterday, he’ll come again today. I need to find him. I need to ask him why he was in the garden—Mom’s and my special garden—sitting there, reading her obituary. I need to hear why Mom’s obituary made him sad. How does he know Mom?

  I bring the photograph of the man with me. I carry it in the front pocket of my bag.

  The man who I think might be my father.

  At random stoplights I slip my hand into the pocket of my bag and pull it out. I try to spot some nicety I haven’t yet seen, some minor detail in the image I’ve managed to overlook, like the swollen clouds or the gangly-looking bird that perches on a rock at the water’s edge.

  The sleeves of the man’s flannel shirt are shoved to his elbows in the picture. A raised red line bridges a lower arm. Scar tissue, I think, or maybe just an anomaly in the photograph, a streak of light or a reflection. I wonder what any of it means. If it means anything. If the clouds or the birds or the scar can provide details about the man or the land on which he stands.

  Where was this picture taken?

  And more importantly, who is he?

  I search in vain for the smoking gun to tell me who he is. How I know him. What this man has to do with me. I wonder if the answer is there, staring me in the face, and I simply can’t see it.

  And then the light turns green and I carefully shove the picture back into my bag and pedal on toward the coffee shop.

  When I arrive, I press in through the door, past people who are coming out. The coffee bar is eclectic, cluttered with mismatching tables and chairs. There are stacks of magazines and books.

  Between the grinding and gurgling of the espresso machine, the roar of people talking, the coffee shop is loud. I order a coffee and carry it to the kiosk to douse it with sugar. A blue velvet sofa lines a wall, and I help myself to it, sinking into the wilted center, watching as caffeine-deprived customers come and go. The line grows long enough that the last person stands in the doorway because he doesn’t clear the doorframe. Instead he props it open with his body, letting the fall air in. Napkins blow from a table and litter the floor.

  As I sit there waiting for the man from the garden to magically appear, I pull the photograph from my pocket one more time, taking in the man’s stature, the color of his hair. Imagining his eyes. In the image, they’re looking out toward the sailboat, away from the camera lens, and so I can’t see them. I can’t see what they look like, but I can imagine.

  They’re blue like mine, and he has dimples too.

  I sip from my coffee, place the photograph back in my bag.

  My mind drifts and I find myself thinking about the other Jessica Sloane. The one who is not me. And I know with a sudden translucence that I am not Jessica Sloane, but that I’m somebody else. That Jessica Sloane died when she was three and for whatever reason, Mom stole her social security number and gave it to me. This is no longer a hypothetical. I know.

  But there are ways of finding out who you are, aside from a birth certificate, social security number or name. Because if I’m not Jessica Sloane, then I need to know who I really am. I think of forensic identification, stuff like fingerprints, DNA, handwriting analysis, dentistry. Ways to prove one’s identity aside from birth certificates and social security numbers. Everyone in the whole wide world is supposedly unique, like the stripes of a zebra or the spots of a giraffe. Snowflakes. It’s near mathematically and scientifically impossible that any two could be the same. Even the creases of our feet are distinct, which is one of the reasons babies’ footprints are taken after birth. For identification purposes. Because no two footprints are alike. So hospitals know which baby is which if ever they get separated from their moms or dads. In case the ID bands slip from their ankles or wrists. I stare at my fingerprints, thinking the answer to who I am is sittin
g there, in all those miniscule lines that make me unique, a single snowflake, one in twenty trillion falling in a snowstorm, drifting aimlessly and alone.

  I don’t know who I am, but I’m not Jessica Sloane.

  It’s hours later when I catch a smidge of orange pass by the storefront window, and I know right away: it’s him. It’s the orange baseball cap that he wore, slipping it over his hair before he left the garden. He’s here, come and gone for coffee and somehow, in a daze, I all but missed him.

  I rise too quickly from the blue velvet sofa, spilling a lukewarm coffee, my third of the day, down the front of me, staining my shirt a translucent brown. I don’t bother blotting it with napkins before I go scurrying for the door, knocking into a stanchion post along the way. I knock it over with a clang, leaving it on the floor as people stare. “What’s the hurry?” I hear breathed through the air. “What’s her problem?” followed by a giggle, a snort.

  I press my way out onto the city street, following the pinprick of orange in the distance, a beacon of light as it slaloms this way and that down the street. I run, pushing my way past people walking too slowly, trying desperately to bridge the gap from him to me.

  As I narrow in on him, I reach out and tug on something, my hand bearing down hard. A little boy cries out, and, as they turn to me, I see. A little boy in a superhero costume. The Flash. He’s perched on his father’s shoulders, making him tall. The costume is red and yellow with a mask that covers his face. It’s the type of mask that covers everything, leaving only slits for the mouth, nose and eyes. Like the costume, it’s also red and yellow. Not orange, though my mind mutated them for me, mixing the red and yellow, turning them into orange.

  Once again, my eyes have deceived me.

  He isn’t the man from the garden after all.

  eden

  June 17, 2005

  Chicago

  It’s been a couple of hours since it happened, and still I can’t get my heart rhythm to slow. I feel off, a dull headache in the back of my neck that simply won’t quit, my handwriting like chicken scratch from the shaking hands. Jessie is quiet now, tucked into bed with her lights turned off. I’d read her a story before bed, hoping it might help her forget. Hoping it might replace the photograph she saw with the fun of leading imaginary beasts on a wild rumpus around her bedroom. She was laughing by the time she went to bed, and I can only pray that she dreams tonight of Emile and Bernard, and not of Aaron.

  I, however, will dream only of Aaron.

  I think I covered my tracks quite well, but I won’t ever know. There’s no telling what goes on inside a little girl’s mind, which details of our lives are committed to memory and which we forget.

  For the first time tonight, past and present collided, and it made me realize one thing: that I have to be more wary of where I hide my things. Jessie is older now and more inquisitive. She’s liable to have questions for me that I can’t answer because I don’t want to answer them. I have to be more careful if I’m going to keep my past from her.

  It’s not that I don’t love her. It’s that I do.

  We’d just finished up dinner when it happened. I was in the kitchen, wiping down the countertops, and she’d disappeared down the hall to, presumably, go play. She was in her room, or so I thought at the time, quiet as a church mouse. That should have been my warning, because for as fiery and high-spirited as she is, Jessie is rarely quiet.

  I don’t know how much time passed—ten minutes, an hour while I was stupidly relishing in the quiet and didn’t once think to check on her—when she appeared there in the doorway to the kitchen with an item in her hand, asking of me, “Who’s this?”

  Her eyes, when I turned to her, were doe-eyed, her hair falling into her forehead like it hadn’t seen a brush in weeks. There were dust bunnies clinging to the fabric of her pants and I knew right away that she’d been somewhere she shouldn’t have been, on her hands and knees, digging through things.

  “Where’d you find this?” I asked, taking it from her hand. I heard my voice crack as I said it, and though I couldn’t see it, I was certain my face was masked in fear. My voice wasn’t angry. It was scared.

  Jessie had found it under my bed, of course, where she’d been snooping. The photograph had been stashed inside an envelope, inside a box, and under the bed, the kind of thing one didn’t just happen to stumble upon. She went searching for it. Or rather she went searching for something and she found it, because up until a few minutes before, she didn’t know this photograph existed, the photograph I’d snatched all those years ago in the yard of our cottage, a photograph of our glorious view—the lake with a sailboat out at sea—meant to be only of the lake and the sailboat, though Aaron stepped into the frame just as I took the picture. He’d apologized and later, after the pictures were developed, we’d laughed over it. Aaron thought he’d ruined my photograph, but what he’d done was the opposite of that. He’d made it perfect. He’d made it complete.

  Up until a few minutes ago, Jessie didn’t know Aaron existed because those Who’s my father? questions have only just begun to surface, and so far I’ve been able to quell them all with the suggestion of milk and cookies or ice cream.

  “Who is it, Mommy?” she asked again when I didn’t respond.

  “Just an old friend,” I said, trying to settle my jittery voice as I opened a kitchen drawer—the closest thing to me—and slid it inside. I’d find a better hiding spot later after she’d gone to sleep. I could feel my cheeks inflame, my hands start to shake.

  “Are you mad at me?” Jessie asked then, eyes swelling with tears, mistaking what I was feeling for anger when what it was was sadness and regret and shame.

  “No, baby,” I said, dropping down to my knees and drawing her into me. “Mommy could never be mad at you,” I told her, and then I smiled as widely as I could and grabbed a hold of her hand. “How about some ice cream before we get ready for bed?” I proposed, and of course there was no hesitation, no wavering. Jessie screamed an easy yes! while jumping up and down, and so we carried bowls of chocolate ice cream onto the front porch to eat, watching as the sun made its final descent beneath the horizon. I helped her with a bath and we read about the wild rumpus. I tucked her into bed. She asked me to lie with her as she always does these days, and so I curled under the covers beside her, and she pressed her body into mine, a lean arm flung across my chest, pinning me down.

  This was everything I ever wanted and more.

  I lay there until her breaths became flat and slow, and then I returned to my own room. There I sat on the bed, clutching the photograph of Aaron in my hand, still trying to catch my breath. This photograph had been hidden beneath the bed for years. I’ve known it was there, of course, but couldn’t bear the idea of looking at it, not until it was forced quite literally into my hand. It was the only keepsake I kept of him, just the one single photograph—not our wedding photographs, not my engagement ring—because in it, he’s looking away. He’s not looking at me, and so I can’t see that love and adoration in his eye.

  I can’t see the anger.

  I stare at the photograph, wondering what Aaron must look like now. Is he graying slowly like me, or is his hair still a chestnut brown? Is he fuller around the middle, or maybe he’s more slim? And then I start to wonder if he’s eating okay, if he’s sleeping okay, if some other woman now spends her nights beside him in bed. My mind gets stuck there, a skipping record. I can’t unsee this image, imaginary as it may be, of a woman lying beside Aaron, peacefully asleep—her head tucked into the crook of his arm, his hand on the small of her back—where I used to be.

  I won’t let myself dwell on the past.

  I move quickly, having to get rid of the evidence before Jessie wakes up and goes snooping again. I put the photograph where she’ll never find it, and then, when it’s done, I tiptoe back into Jessie’s room and stand there at the edge of the bed, forcing the past to some loc
ked chamber in my mind, the same spot where that woman’s voice is buried, the high-pitched squeal as she chased me down on the street.

  Get your hands off my child.

  I slip back under the covers beside Jessie so that when she awakes in the morning, she’ll never know I was gone. A simple sleight of hand.

  jessie

  That night, I climb into bed with my clothes still on. I don’t bother changing them. I just want to get into bed, to be in bed. The bed used to be my safe place. But after all these nights not sleeping—eight of them, eight days and nights without sleeping now—the bed is my torture chamber too.

  I read once about a man who died because he couldn’t sleep. Fatal familial insomnia, it was called. Within twelve months from the time symptoms appeared, he was dead.

  I think this is what’s happening to me.

  It started with a single bad night of sleep. For whatever reason, his mind wouldn’t shut off. Wouldn’t let him rest. One night turned into two, and before long he’d gone weeks without a decent night of sleep. Relaxed wakefulness is what it was called, though it was anything but relaxed. He never made it past stage 1 of non-REM sleep, the stage between wakefulness and sleep. He never dreamed. It was a light sleep at best when he was lucky, lasting less than ten minutes at a time, the kind of sleep interrupted by a hypnic jerk, by an overwhelming sense of falling.

  I have it worse, I think. Because a light sleep, to me, would be a dream come true.

  He walked the earth in a stupor, asleep but awake. Awake but asleep. He spent his days in a hallucination of sorts, not sure if he was alive or dead. He heard buzzing noises all the time. People calling out his name though no one was there. A voice whispering odd decrees on repeat. Just do it already. Just jump. A hand touching his arm and he’d whirl around, agitated and afraid, to find himself alone. The panic attacks were infinite. His brain was on overdrive all the time. There was no way to hit the switch and shut it down.