“Kiddo,” I said, “is that my shirt?”
“Mm-hm.” She smiled toward me, then looked away. “Do you mind?”
“Uh—no. Mind? No, I don’t mind.”
She sipped her tea.
“Looks—um, it looks like you’ve taken good care of the place since I’ve been gone.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t hard. Anyway, I was at the hospital most of the time. But I did your laundry for you. You’re a slob, you know that?”
I sipped my own tea. Earl Grey. Delicious. “Yeah,” I smiled. “I know.”
“I’ve got to clean you up,” she said. “Make you take care of yourself. Keep your clothes clean. Your dishes. Get you to shave. Bathe.”
I laughed. “Now, come on. I’ll cop to all your other charges, but I do bathe.”
“Okay.” She grinned. “Maybe you do. Occasionally.”
I breathed slowly, sipped. I was aware now of every tiny sensation in my body: every ache, every passing itch and twinge. Part of me, I knew, was waiting for it all to happen again.
“So you stayed here,” I said, thinking about it. “You...found everything okay? You figured out how the sofa folds out?”
“You just pull. It’s not very complicated.”
I chuckled. “I guess it’s not.”
“I was fine. No problems.”
“How did you find the key? I didn’t tell you where it was.”
She arched an eyebrow at me. “I’m observant.”
“You are, at that.”
“So how do you feel now?” she asked.
“I guess I’m okay. I’d like a cigarette.” I yawned.
“Nope. Not happening, boss.”
“Well, then, one of those big-ass pastries they sell in the mini-mart downstairs.”
“Nope. Nothing like that for you anymore. We’ve got some fruit. Want an apple?”
“Pass.”
“You’re going to lose weight,” she said suddenly, seriously, studying me carefully. “You’re going to eat right and do your exercises. I’ll do them with you. Every day.”
I studied her in the bright light, saw again her smooth, unlined face, noticed once more how oddly incomplete, unfinished she appeared. At a glance she looked just like any other perfectly normal young girl, but the longer I looked at her the more she seemed like some kind of strange, gentle dream-creature, totally unthreatening yet, somehow, in some sense, not quite real. I found myself reaching to her hand, to reassure myself again that she was truly there.
“Thank you,” I said. “For everything.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“Well, I want to.”
She shrugged and smiled a little. “You would have done the same for me.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I would’ve. But that’s different. I’m a grown-up.”
“Technically, yeah.”
I chuckled. “I deserved that.” I looked around the room, exhaustion beginning to overtake me. Dr. Nguyen had warned me that I would tire easily in the first days out of the hospital—Jesus, was she ever right. It hit suddenly, like a cloak of darkness enveloping me. The sensation was not at all unpleasant. But it was unstoppable.
I looked around the room and noticed, over near the TV, the old blue Nike shoe box. The box was closed. I wondered how much time she had spent investigating the contents of the box and realized that, of course, she had studied and reviewed again and again everything in it. That’s what she would do, here by herself.
I felt I should say something, but I couldn’t locate any words. Instead I asked, lamely, “Was there—any mail?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t find a mailbox key. If you loan me yours I’ll go check.”
“It’s not important.”
“Well, I should go out anyway. To get us some food.”
“We can do that together.”
“You don’t look like you’re ready for any shopping trips.”
“No, I—” A wave of tiredness hit me. “To be honest, I’d rather stay here and sleep.”
“That’s okay. The doctor said you’d need a lot in the first few days.”
“Yeah, maybe...”
“Do you want me to help you get to your bedroom?”
“No, I’m fine.” Suddenly the sofa felt very comfortable indeed. “I’ll just lay here.”
She stood, giving my legs room to stretch out. She stepped into the bedroom for a moment and came back with a pillow and blanket. She handed me the pillow and fluffed the blanket over me.
“Comfy?” she asked.
“Very. Let me just lay here a while.”
She stepped away again. My eyes shut for a moment. When they opened again she was standing there with my wallet and key ring.
“I need some money to buy groceries,” she said. “And I’ll check your mail if you give me the key.”
I pulled the mailbox key from the ring and handed it to her. “Just take twenty bucks,” I said, gesturing to the wallet. “If I have it. Do I?”
She looked, then grinned at me. “You do.”
“Take it.”
She did, then said, “I’ll put the wallet and keys on the kitchen table. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I watched her go to the hall closet and bring out her coat. Slipping it on, she came back to me and dropped down on her knees, studying me closely.
“You take it easy, okay?” she said softly. “Just sleep. I mean it.”
“Okay.”
She leaned to me then and kissed me on the forehead. Her lips felt just like anyone’s.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she said mischievously, and left the apartment. I heard the chuffing of the elevator a few moments later.
I was overcome with weariness, but her exit made me stand up for a moment and look around the apartment. I could find no evidence of a teenage girl living here at all. Nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the bathroom. The apartment looked exactly as I’d left it, with the sole exception of the Nike shoe box. That had been moved, I knew. I lifted the lid. Everything was organized, tidy, but somewhat differently arranged than I’d remembered. I wondered how many times she’d watched the video—and why. Ah, God.
Before I dropped back down to the sofa to sleep I went ahead and pressed the button on the answering machine.
Beep. “Ben, it’s Vincent. We—”
I hit Delete.
Beep. “Ben? Where are you?” Alice’s voice. Alice—Christ, she didn’t even know I’d had a heart attack. She knew nothing of the past five days of my life. “Are you there? Goddamn it, I need to talk to you about Dad. We—”
I hit Skip.
Beep. Silence, then a hang-up click. Probably Alice again.
I crossed the room to the sofa, dropped down to it, and slept.
# # #
I woke when I heard her moving around in the kitchen.
“Hi,” I called out, or rather tried to. My voice was a croak.
“Hi!” She appeared from around the corner. “Your mail’s there on that crate you call your coffee table. I bought supplies. I hope you’re ready for a really good salad.”
And it was good: two types of lettuce, fresh spinach, sliced mushrooms, tomatoes, olives, red peppers, a sweet oil-and-vinegar dressing. I was very hungry all of a sudden.
“This is great, honey. Just great. I mean it.”
“Get used to it,” she said. “This is the kind of thing you’re eating from now on.”
“Yes, master.”
“Ah,” she grinned, “you’re finally getting it!”
We watched TV as we ate. I dozed again for a while. Finally I showered, which helped with my energy level considerably. We went for a careful walk—first just back and forth in the corridor, then downstairs on the sidewalk. She held my arm the whole time as our breaths smoked in the winter cold.
“You tell me if you’re getting tired, okay?” she said.
“I will, I will.”
Darkness fell as we strolled this way a
nd that, just a block or two in any direction, then back again toward the building. The D.C. night looked achingly beautiful to me for some reason—no doubt that renewed appreciation for life that people who’ve shaken hands with death often feel. The cold air felt wonderful in my nostrils, my throat, my chest. I felt alive in a way I hadn’t for a very long time.
Eventually, though, I did begin to tire, and we made our way back to the building and into the familiar elevator. When we’d returned to the apartment we shucked our coats. I walked to the window and, on impulse, slid it open for a moment, inhaling the bracing air with nothing but the screen between me and the night sky.
“Are you crazy?” she said. “It’s cold!”
“Sorry,” I said. I took a couple more deep breaths and then pushed the window shut again. “I just wanted a little more fresh air.”
I dropped down on the sofa then. She sat next to me.
“TV?” she asked.
“No. Let’s just be quiet for a while.”
We were. I could hear the elevator now and then. When I listened carefully I could occasionally make out the sound of a loud truck or bus passing by on the street below.
“Honey,” I said finally, “who are you?”
She looked at me in the darkness, her eyes bright and glistening. She touched my hand.
“Okay,” she said finally. “I guess it’s time to tell you.”
2
“I really am your daughter,” she said.
“I know that now. I—I think I know it.” I frowned. “But I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t.” She looked at me carefully. “Do you remember when you said that I couldn’t be your daughter? And that all I needed to know to realize that was how human reproduction works?”
“Vaguely.”
“Ben—Benja-me-me—Dad—do you know when life begins? Human life?”
I exhaled slowly. “That’s a big question, honey.”
“But do you?”
“Well, I’m not sure. Some people think it’s at conception. Others say it’s when the fetus is—you know, viable. Can live outside the womb.”
She shook her head. “Wrong.”
I watched her.
“People think it’s when the sperm and the egg come together. It’s not. And it’s not anything later on like ‘viability,’ either.”
“What, then?”
She knitted her fingers together and stared at them. “Do you know what implantation is?”
“In—reproduction, you mean? That’s when—” I thought about it. “When the—the, what do you call it? The, you know, fertilized thing—it’s not a fetus yet—”
“Blastocyst.”
I looked at her. “Wow. A future science major.”
She shrugged. “I looked it up online.”
“Uh—yeah. The blastocyst. When it implants itself on the, what do you call it, the uterus? The uterine wall?” I smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. The ‘human reproduction’ unit in my eleventh-grade Biology class goes back a long way now.”
“No, you’re doing fine. That’s right. And that’s when life begins. When it really begins. Before that it’s like—like the fertilized egg is a seed without dirt or water. It’s potential life. But then the fertilized egg becomes something called a zygote. The zygote becomes a little bundle of cells called a blastocyst, and the blastocyst implants on the uterine wall. The uterine wall is like the dirt and the water both.” She smiled. “When it does that, it’s alive. It comes alive. It’s living. Like a plant starting to sprout. Without the uterine wall—without the dirt and water—it’s not really alive. Not in the way we think of something being alive.”
“Really?” I wondered if online research could really have made her such an expert on all this. Maybe she’d had a Health class sometime.
“The uterine wall gives the little bundle of cells nutrition. Shelter. A home.”
“Interesting.”
“And,” she said, “it gives it a soul.”
I looked at her. “What?”
“A soul. When the blastocyst implants on the uterine wall it gets a soul. And once it has a soul, it’s a person.”
“How do you know that, honey?”
She looked carefully at me. The room was dark; lights from the street below bathed us in a soft blue glow.
“When it has a soul,” she repeated, “it’s a person.”
“Well,” I said finally, “not everybody would agree, honey. Everybody doesn’t believe in souls.”
“Everybody is wrong.”
I looked at her again. In the blue air I saw what I hadn’t been ready to see before—that her eyes and nose looked like miniature versions of mine. No wonder everyone at the hospital just assumed she was my daughter—the resemblance was obvious. Had I been denying it to myself until now? But then I noticed, as if seeing them for the first time, the girl’s cheekbones, her lips, her chin. They were Rachel’s, I suddenly knew. There was no doubt in my mind. Yet could I really have failed to notice all this? Or was she herself changing, becoming more filled-in, more complete, as we talked?
“Honey,” I said, my throat constricted, my vision fogging, “I still don’t understand.”
“It usually takes about a week,” she said. “For the fertilized egg to go through all its changes and finally become that little thing that implants itself. That little thing that becomes a person. With a soul.”
“A week...?”
I’d sifted through these memories again and again while in the hospital, drifting in and out of consciousness, sudden bright pictures flashing in my mind of scenes I’d not thought of in fifteen years, that I’d not been able to think of. It all seemed close to me now in a way that it hadn’t in a very long time. Santa Barbara. School. Sherry.
Rachel...
Her voice was very soft now, like a voice in a dream. “Every now and then it happens. Not often. Not once in a thousand years. But every now and then it happens that at the exact moment the little bundle is implanting—and getting its soul—at that very instant, some catastrophe stops the process. Right then. At the moment the bundle of cells has opened, like a little mouth, a tiny soul-catcher, and the soul is being poured in.”
“Catastrophe...?”
“It happens so quickly that the mouth doesn’t get a chance to close. The soul is there, it’s coming in, but the soul-catcher’s mouth isn’t able to close behind it. If it had closed they would have bonded forever. It would have been a person, even if only for an instant before it died. But it would have lived. It would have been a human being. A person. With a soul.”
“A person...?”
“It all happens in a second, you see? Less than a second. Like, a millionth of a second. Less than that, even. That’s the time that the soul-catcher is open to receive the soul. It goes in and there’s a person. Or it doesn’t and there’s nothing. But—at that millionth of an instant—if a catastrophe interrupts the process—”
She fell silent. It swirled in my mind for some time.
“A catastrophe,” I said at last, “like the mother’s death?”
“Not usually. Death usually takes a long time. Longer than people realize.”
“But sometimes it doesn’t.”
“No, sometimes not.”
“Like if a woman were suddenly obliterated by...by an explosion or something.”
“Something like that.”
“Or...or a fall. From a high place.”
“Something like that. Yeah.”
“The instant of impact.”
“Yeah.”
“If it had been a millionth of a second before or after...”
“Either it would have been a person who died immediately or it just would have been a bunch of cells that never really lived. That never had a soul.”
“But in that millionth of a second...while the—the soul-catcher is open...”
“Yeah.”
I looked at her for a long time. She held my gaze steadily.
“My
God,” I said finally. I tried to absorb what she’d said, the enormity of it, but I couldn’t. Not really. “Then where...where have you—you been? All these...?”
“Years? I’ve been around. I’ve been near you the whole time.”
“But I’ve never...not until you showed up at school...”
“No. Not like that. Someone like me—we’re not exactly alive and not exactly dead. We’re frozen. Caught. In between. The living can’t see us. Neither can the dead. We’re lost, that’s all. Wandering.” She paused, then looked at her hands again. “I can remember everything, though. I can remember suddenly...suddenly being, there on the sidewalk, with Rachel—Mom—there next to me. Her eyes were open, but she was gone. She’d landed...”
“Face down.” It was strange how easy it was for me to say it.
“Face down,” she said quietly. “Her face was...”
“Yes. I know. I saw it.”
“When you came down.”
“When I came down.”
“That was the first time I ever saw you.”
“But...” I tried to formulate my question in words. “What—were you? A fetus? A baby? A...”
“I wasn’t any thing, Ben. I just was.”
“You were—”
“I couldn’t think. I didn’t have any language. I was just a mass of impressions, that’s all. But I knew a few things. I knew the body on the cement was my mother. I knew you were my father.”
“How? How did you know?”
She frowned, knitted her fingers. “How does anybody know anything? I don’t know. I just knew.”
“So you...?”
“I stayed with you. Nearby. Not always in the same room, but sometimes.”
I smiled slightly, puzzled. “A guardian angel?”
“No, not at all. I didn’t have any power to protect you. I still don’t. That’s not how...people like me are. But we’re not exactly people. But I stayed near, though.”
“Watching me?” Absurdly, I felt embarrassed: thought of the endless liaisons I’d enjoyed in the years after Rachel, thought of the humiliations, the paid girls (like Tracy, the one I’d had here only a week or two before), the...
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