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You Were Made for This

Page 23

by Michelle Sacks


  I wonder if Merry will see me off at the door in the morning, to make sure I leave. To make sure she is rid of me.

  Packing up my mother’s belongings after she died, I came across a small pile of photographs and letters in an old cookie tin. My parents on their wedding day, cutting a rented silver knife through a cheap supermarket cake. My mother in a bathing suit on the Santa Monica Pier. My father holding up newborn me, my face twisted in an unhappy cry. And then there was a photograph of two little girls, eight or nine years old, hair braided into matching pigtails, smiles wide, arms around each other’s shoulders, holding on tight. On the back, my mother had written My girls, 1988.

  You’ll be friends for life, she always told us. Your first friend is the only one you’ll ever need by your side. You’ll look after each other.

  Had she said it to me or Merry? I cannot recall.

  I kept the photograph beside my bed, cased in a thin oak frame. In the faded colors of the sun-bleached photo, we could easily be mistaken for the same child. Same height, same hair, same wide smiles, both with a tooth missing from the top and from the bottom.

  From time to time, I would get asked about the two little girls in the photograph. Is that your sister? Or sometimes, Is that your twin?

  Yes, I’d always say, in reply to both.

  I imagine I will look back at this time in Sweden like you remember a peculiar dream, a hazy blur of images and actions that make no real sense in the light of day.

  It was a terrible tragedy, I’ll say, if anyone brings up my old friend Merry and her dead baby son. A most dreadful time for all of us.

  I want to be gone from this place. From all its reminders of lost things. Onward and upward, a new chapter ready to unfold, the pages blank and waiting.

  Yes, I think. This is exactly how it should be. I have no regrets.

  Merry, I can’t imagine what lies ahead for her. Or Sam. Perhaps they will stay right where they are, prisoners of their wretched and gloomy cabin in the woods, bound by contracts meaninglessly declared before God. Perhaps they will simply cease to exist, the trees and vines growing around them, covering the house, blanketing the husks of their bodies inside these walls for an eternity—or more.

  Merry, Merry, Strawberry. She thinks we will be out of each other’s lives. But you cannot cut off a part of yourself and believe that the memory of it will disappear. You adapt, of course. But the absence is never gone, the nerve endings and synapses never stop expecting the missing piece to return.

  She will come back to me. She always does. I know it. It might be nothing more than a postcard, a year from now, a decade. The photograph will be something generically beautiful, a dramatic fjord, a snowed-over lake surrounded by ancient pines, the blues and greens of the Northern Lights in full splendor. Maybe somewhere else entirely—an exotic beach, a city teeming with life. There won’t be any message, any trace of her name. But the postcard will be message enough. I’ll know what it’s meant to say. I’ll get it right away.

  You’re forgiven.

  You’re missed.

  It will say, Thank you, Frank. You’ve always been the very truest friend.

  Merry

  The case is officially closed. Files sealed, evidence boxed and put away. Detective Bergstrom called us in one last time. Sam and I in the familiar windowless room.

  If there’s nothing more you can add, no more information. We just don’t have enough for a prosecution.

  What about Frank? Sam said.

  The detective looked at me. Your wife seems certain it wasn’t her. She corroborated everything Frank told us. Anything that might have been used against her, Merry has dismissed.

  She gets away with murder, Sam said.

  Detective Bergstrom eyed me.

  I don’t know, Mr. Hurley. I sincerely hope someday the truth comes out. For now, it will be ruled a case of sudden infant death, with suspicious circumstances. There are many unanswered questions. For you and for us.

  Sam and I, alone in the car. It was a strange feeling. Too intimate. Too close. We had driven most of the way in silence.

  You should come back inside the house, I said, standing in the kitchen. I’ll leave. I’ll go away. I tried to keep the panic from my voice.

  He shook his head. No, he said, not yet.

  He has something in store for me. This I know. I won’t run. I won’t do him the injustice of missing his chance.

  We drove to the funeral home.

  We’re here, we said to the woman behind the desk. To collect our son.

  The office was bright and airy, like a chiropractor’s reception room. Everything white and gleaming, fresh flowers in a vase, a framed Monet print on the wall: Woman with a Parasol. We’d seen the original at the National Gallery of Art on a trip to Washington some years ago, sent a postcard of it to Sam’s mother.

  The receptionist gave an apologetic smile. I’m very sorry about your loss, she said. She must say it all day long.

  The ashes they give you in a simple cardboard box, the name of the cremated person printed neatly on the side. Inside, another container holds the remains, scooped up after cooling into a sturdy plastic bag.

  I carried the box in both hands, walking slowly and carefully back to the car. Sam opened the door and I climbed inside. I held the box on my lap and traced my finger over the name printed on the label. Conor Hurley.

  We drove out of the parking garage, exited left to make our way back home and out of the city. It felt so foreign to be around people. To be moving about a city like we had any place in it.

  I think it’s going to be a long winter, I said, for something to say.

  But also because it struck me. Time, stopped at the moment of Conor’s death, and at the same time stretched out in front of us, elastic and seemingly endless. A long winter, then another, then another.

  I had an idea for Conor, Sam said. For the ashes.

  That day, he said. In Finnhamn. Remember?

  I do, I said. It had been a good day.

  It was this past spring. Conor must have been five or six months old. Mid-May, the first truly warm weekend. We’d driven into Stockholm and taken the public ferry across to the island. The boat was called Cinderella, and we’d smiled about that and made a joke about turning into pumpkins.

  We took a long hike around the full stretch of the island, following the grassy path, Conor on Sam’s back, the sun warm, the sky the bluest we’d seen it in months. We found a secluded bay and in the heat decided to strip down, to take a dip in our underwear. Conor was asleep and Sam laid him out gently on a blanket in the shade, our clothes bundled to cushion him in place.

  We’d shivered in the water, which was nowhere near thawed after the long winter. But I remember that feeling, the sheer pleasure of the elements after months indoors, the relentless dark and cold. It was like being held in captivity. All of it, really.

  The weather can drive you mad, someone had said when they heard of our move. No more than five hours of daylight.

  We’d shrugged it off. It’s only weather, isn’t it. But the first winter had been punishing.

  We’d bought the lamp, the high-dose vitamin D from the pharmacy to stave off the worst of it.

  You’ll get used to it, Karl told us, but it seemed like another reminder of our strangeness in this place.

  In any case, that May day was the first of the best, a spring and then a summer that seemed to open a portal into another world, the lightness a sudden and welcome respite from its seemingly endless opposite.

  Sam in the water put his arms around me.

  We’re making a good life here, he said, and for the first time it felt almost true.

  There are almost one hundred thousand lakes in Sweden, I said. How many do you think we’ll manage to swim in?

  There was a future in that question, he and I, old and gray, hearty and hale. Holding on to each other and taking tentative steps deeper into the icy depths of the water.

  I don’t know, maybe it was all just ano
ther attempt to will it.

  In wet clothes, we ate köttbullar and potatoes in Finnhamns Krog, overlooking the lake and touching hands across the salt and pepper. Conor was smiling or sleeping; the fresh air and the walk had tired him out. We missed the last ferry back and found a cabin for the night, rustic and charming among the trees. We made Conor a nest out of pillows and laid him at the foot of the bed.

  In the morning we picked up fresh bread rolls from the farm store and waited at the harbor for the ferry to take us back to Stockholm. It looked like a postcard, the three of us a blur in the corner of the bucolic scene.

  I think I can be happy here, Sam, I said.

  It had been a good day.

  I looked down at the brown box held tightly in my hands. All that remains.

  My idea, Sam said. I want to go back to Finnhamn, scatter Conor’s ashes in the lake where we swam that day. It’s a good spot.

  I swallowed and he turned to look at me, menace in his eyes. A man with revenge in mind. He has said nothing more about Frank. About me letting her go. Perhaps words are useless. Perhaps it will all come down to actions in the end.

  Good idea, I said.

  Sam

  In Stockholm, we parked the car and walked toward the harbor, where the archipelago ferries line up in the bay. The sea was rough, the water thick gray below us, unfathomably deep. We were the last people to board. At Finnhamn, we disembarked. The sky had cleared a little, the rain on hold, but the clouds hung low and ready.

  We walked along the water awhile and then followed the footpath along the edge of the island toward the bay. There was a lone pair of hikers, wrapped up warm in their all-weather gear. They passed us on the path and smiled hello.

  Hej, we said in reply, like it was an ordinary day.

  The cold was bracing, the island more brown than green, with many of the trees already empty of leaves, the winter setting in fast. Soon it would be all ice and snow, a barren land and its myriad frozen lakes.

  I watched Merry walk ahead, brittle and small, her movements slow but determined, like an animal being ushered into the abattoir. We didn’t speak.

  When we reached the small bay, we perched on the rocks. Merry’s fingers around the box were blue. How do we do this? she said.

  We just scatter them here, in the water.

  She nodded.

  You know, I said. I was seeing someone. This past year.

  I heard her suck in a breath.

  Her name is Malin.

  Merry said nothing.

  She’s a therapist, I said. I went to her for therapy.

  Therapy, she repeated.

  I was trying, you see. I was trying to do better. To be a better man. To get out of old habits, destructive patterns. The things standing in the way of real happiness.

  I sounded like a brochure. Oh, Malin. She had such high hopes for me. She made me enact scenarios. Gestalt therapy. She made me talk to pillows as though they were my wife and mother; she made me say the unsayable things.

  I hate you. You scare me. I want to destroy you all.

  She thought I was making progress. Slow but steady. Baby steps, she always said.

  I looked at Merry, staring out at the water. I’m going to do it, she said.

  She opened the box carefully, pulled out the container and then the plastic bag from inside of it. A pile of gray sand, the weight of a baby. She handed it over to me.

  We walked carefully down the rocks and toward the water. I opened the bag and took a handful of the ashes into my fingers, feeling the rough remains of pounded bone. I drew back my arm, and sent it all into the sea.

  I passed the bag to Merry.

  She took a handful, cupped her hand, and threw it into the water, shielding her eyes from the ashes as the wind blew them back into her face.

  We took turns passing the bag back and forth, scattering handfuls of ashes into the bay, watching as they were swept up by the wind and then the water, as soft and weightless as kisses.

  When the bag was emptied, we stood and stared out into the abyss of the sea below. Conor was floating away in the current, particles carried off to join the infinity of the tides, back and forth, from the Baltic to the Atlantic, light and mutable, in and out; timeless and weightless and eternal. It was a fitting resting place, I thought.

  Come, I said to Merry. Quickly.

  There was no justice, but I would have it all the same.

  I pulled off my boots and jeans, my socks and my underwear. She looked at me and understood. She shrugged off her clothes and together we went in, water freezing against the skin, burning the flesh red.

  I went under, and Merry followed. Heads submerged, air suspended, all life on pause. I opened my eyes. Merry was watching me. We came up gasping for air, the sea salty on our lips, the gray dust nowhere and everywhere. I licked, tasted it, sucked it in.

  Merry, water and tears, frozen and shivering. She looked at me standing opposite her; two broken halves.

  You ruined everything, Merry.

  She was looking at me, blank slate, numb. I was starting to shiver, the icy water too much. Only a while more. It would be enough.

  Everything I did for you. Everything I built. And you betrayed me, you betrayed me in the worst way.

  Her eyes were streaming, her gaze unblinking. Looking at me, knowing what she had to do.

  Forgiveness. It does not come cheap. Nor should it.

  I’m sorry, Sam. I’m so sorry for it all.

  She searched my eyes, maybe for signs of mercy. I gave her nothing. Merry nodded. I’m sorry, Sam, she said again.

  Her head went under. This time turning away from me, swimming farther out, into the frozen nothingness; oblivion and certain death. Obedient wife. I knew she’d do it.

  The water was a blade, stinging, cutting right to the bone. My lungs were straining, the chest constricting with the effort of breathing in such cold. I stood, unmoving, watching her shape blur under water, retreating farther and farther away.

  Go, I thought, die in pain, tortured by knives of ice.

  She deserves nothing less.

  You fear women, Malin told me. You are afraid they will take things from you. Take your power. The way your mother did to you as a child and a young man.

  I hadn’t even told her the half of it.

  I have tried. I have done whatever I could. And what good did it do? What did I get in return? This. Only this.

  I shuddered. I needed to get out of the water. I wiped my eyes. I looked for Merry but she was a vanished speck in the deep. Going, going, gone.

  I was alone, and she was gone. Conor gone. Frank. All of it, gone.

  I looked at the water, a sea of nothingness, an indifferent mass. The cold cut the flesh; outside the water, the wind was howling, the sleet ready to fall.

  I let out a howl of rage.

  No sound came.

  Alone. I screamed again.

  How I moved I don’t know, but I propelled my frozen limbs forward into the water, heart pounding, head in flames. I swam, fast as I could, slicing into the cold with the weight of all my fury, swimming, swimming, harder and harder, head under, eyes open, searching, frantically searching, for Merry in the depths. A shadow, an almost imperceptible shadow, then a halo of dark hair.

  I swam toward it and there she was, heavy like lead in my arms, the weight of a thousand men, the weight of a wife. The cold no longer felt cold—the worst sign, the surest way to die. I heaved her under my arm and dragged, kicking, pushing, straining against the current and screaming into the void. I could see the rocks, the place where land met sea, our clothes still scattered where we’d left them; the remains of a shipwreck.

  Merry in my arms, pulling us under, down and deep—Come, come, sings the mermaid, I know just the spot—because an end is too tempting, too easy; a final surrender to the gods. Yes, yes, we are on our knees.

  The water begs you to let go, the limbs ache to succumb. Float, sink, let the water take you. Let it all be over.

 
I shouted, No, and on we swam, pulling, dragging. Waist height in the water, I stood up and walked, primordial man arising from the sea. Look, legs and lungs, now you are human, now you are born anew. The cold air stung against the cold wet, singeing the skin.

  Pulling her along with me, I walked and dragged, until onto the rocks we collapsed, Merry beside me, her body seemingly empty of its blood. Cold as death, colder still, but even so I knew dry land was not enough. Man possessed, I rolled her on top of me, naked flesh upon naked flesh, willing the heat, willing the life.

  Breathing, blowing. I wrapped her in my arms, enveloped her in her entirety. Her eyes were open, she was not drowned, just frozen stiff, the ice maiden.

  Rub, I said, forcing hands, breath, skin upon her, pounding the life back into the body. Slowly she put her icy hands on me, she breathed into my neck, again and again, hot and warm, faint and then forceful. Her bones were pressing into me, the rocks under us cold and rough and unforgiving. With my hands I rubbed heat into her back, her thighs, I kept her frail body tightly in my arms, that body, always so frail, fragile like spun sugar, breathing my mouth onto her small blue face, against her cheek, into her stiff lips, feeling her against me, her pounding heart beating life into mine.

  Merry, I said, Merry, you’re okay. I’ve got you.

  Truth. Bare and cold. Nothing left to hide.

  No, always more.

  We held on to each other on the rocks until we could feel our blood warm, two strange and wretched creatures washed ashore.

 

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