The crib.
The locks.
The empty closet.
“How about guided visualization? Can’t I just pretend I’m there? Isn’t that the same? Maybe we can try that and then . . .”
He shakes his head and I know I’ve lost the battle.
“Remember I asked for your trust?”
We are beyond guided visualization. We are beyond chatting and are all about doing. There’s nothing else to say. No sage will emerge and offer me an ancient remedy, no shaman will throw bones and predict the future, and no crystal ball will tell us the truth. Something inside me refuses to give in but I know I can’t deny the truth’s power, its thrall mysterious and potent. All I can do is tilt toward the truth and believe in its light. I’m willing to walk on a wire but at the same time I fear I’ll plunge into an abyss.
“Do you believe in hell?” I ask.
“Hell in a religious sense?”
“No, hell on earth,” I say.
He thinks about it for a while. His eyes wander, then he looks at me. “I’m Muslim,” he says. “We believe that hell is guarded by Maalik, the leader of the angels. He tells the wicked that they must remain in hell forever because they abhorred the truth when the truth was brought to them.”
“Maalik
.
” I repeat the name, testing its power over me. Nothing. I feel cold inside.
“According to my faith, once the truth is brought to you, don’t deny it. Then you have nothing to worry about,” he says.
I’m not familiar with Islam or any other faith, I barely know how to pray the Rosary and I haven’t been to confession since my communion. Electroshock therapy seems like a walk in the park compared to the hell he has in store for me. His words echo, determined to reach me.
Allow the truth to be brought to you and don’t deny it
, is what he said. And I won’t have anything to worry about.
“Going back is like paying with a pound of flesh then?” The pound-of-flesh reference strikes me as familiar, something more than just a reference to Shakespeare. My hand moves up to my ear, or rather where my ear used to be.
“When?” I ask, and hope for weeks.
“Soon. We still have a lot to talk about before we go but you’ll be ready. That’s a promise.”
“I guess,” I say, and don’t mean it.
He looks at his watch. “Tomorrow we’ll continue.”
Continue. Go on. Marge had asked me the other day how I go on. I didn’t answer her for I don’t think I’m going on at all. I feel incomplete, as if someone’s made off with part of my body, leaving me an empty, tormented vessel. A vessel forever open topped, never again capable of holding it all in. Every hurt, every feeling magnified a thousand times. I have to find a way to go on, a way of living with this pain.
There’s a knowledge that has manifested itself without my consent, and that knowledge is hard to swallow. I seem to have acquired it like a wooden nickel, by sleight of hand from some evil trickery. I will never be able to call it the past and bathe in some sunny, brighter future—the past is all there is for me, it’s what my life’s made out of. Just that, and nothing else.
I remember I used to sing to Mia. I would clear my throat and she’d focus on my eyes, and then smile. The first note always made her cock her head.
Sleep, baby, sleep
.
She’d babble along as if attempting to sing with me.
Your father tends the sheep
.
There was a frown, a wrinkled forehead.
Your mother shakes the dreamland tree.
Her eyes never left my face, she’d blink, ever so fleeting.
And from it fall sweet dreams for thee
.
The singsong tone and exaggerated pitch prompted her to screech.
Sleep, baby, sleep. Sleep, baby, sleep
.
When I get up to leave his office that day, I realize that the birthing pain will never cease. Like a shore pounded by waves, the force is perpetual and our cord will never be severed. North Dandry is the scariest place I can imagine but there’s no alternative. And so I resign myself for the time being.
And just as I walk out I hear his voice.
“Tomorrow you’ll tell me about your family.”
The weight of my family’s history is not a matter of heaviness; it is almost weightless, like a ghost.
Tell me about your family
. Such a simple request, yet such a complicated web.
S
omeone had shoved a lump of clay into my hand. Even now, so many years later, as I sit in Dr. Ari’s office, that lump has remained with me. I fight the urge to look down at my hand. I have forgotten about it at times, but have been reminded frequently, like a pebble in a shoe, its presence rendering me unable to move. I’m struck by the intensity of my feelings, even after all these years.
My mother had delivered a healthy baby girl: Marcia Paradise. I was eleven; my brother, Anthony, almost eighteen. It was a weekday, and we had stayed home from school. Mom and Dad had finally called and said they were on their way home. The previous night I had gone through my bookshelf and closet and selected toys and books for my new sister.
The doorbell rang, but instead of my parents, two police officers and a lady in a beige coat stood on our front stoop. They were matter-of-fact: my parents had been in an accident on their way home from the hospital—“pileup,” the officer said, and I didn’t
know what that meant but didn’t dare ask—and did Anthony want to call anybody?
Within hours Aunt Nell, our only relative and Mom’s sister, arrived from New Jersey and made the living room couch her home. Her crimson-rimmed eyes were puffy and she had a habit of shredding boxes of Kleenexes that piled up on the coffee table. Nell and my mom, born ten years apart, had the same chestnut hair and nearly identical profiles. Nell’s hair was shorter and she seemed like a less refined and polished version of Mom.
I remained quiet, didn’t ask any questions, I still wasn’t sure what had actually happened. The next morning I opened the newspaper and stared at the picture of the accident. There was an aerial photo taken by a news helicopter, cars piled up like an accordion—hood-bumper-hood-bumper—like endless roadkill on a gray strip artificially painted onto an otherwise green landscape. The roads seemed like a concrete maze of asphalt and steel bridges, some looping above, some ducking under. It was hard to believe that somewhere in there were my parents and my baby sister.
I went into my father’s study and retrieved the round magnifying glass he used when studying his antique map collection. My hand shook as it hovered over the newspaper. The harder I tried to make out our white Suburban, the more the pixels began to dance in front of my eyes. It was impossible to see what was left of my family and I wondered if anyone took a photograph of the baby. I waited, for days I waited, expecting someone to pick apart the cars and uncover my parents.
“It’s just the three of us now,” Nell said the day before the funeral, “and we have to talk about what we’re going to do.” She sipped her coffee, frowned, and added two more cubes of sugar. “A lot of things are going to change but I want you to know that”—she cleared her throat and eyed the coffee in her cup—“the sooner we make those hard decisions, the better.”
I stared at the rings her cup had left on the poplar table, hoping they’d come out with the Old English oil Mom kept under the sink.
“Anthony and I talked earlier and we thought it’d be best if you’d come to Jersey with me, Stella.”
“To live?” I asked.
“Right,” said Aunt Nell.
“For how long?” I asked.
“That’s the thing,” Aunt Nell said. “After we go to Jersey, you won’t be coming back.”
I looked around. “What about the house? All our stuff?”
“Selling the house is the best thing to do.” Aunt Nell pushed her cup toward the middle of the table, making the rings worse. “We’ll sell it with everything in it.”
I thought of the friends I didn’t have and the park that was too far to walk to by myself. I suddenly felt a panic I couldn’t describe.
Aunt Nell emitted a constant odor of stale smoke and I’d seen her by the open kitchen window with a pack of Virginia Slims in her hand. Every night I went to bed imagining her falling asleep with a slim white cigarette in the living room, burning down the entire house.
“
Waisenkind
,” I said and traced the coffee rings on the table with my eyes.
“What?”
“
Waisenkind
. It’s a German word, it means ‘orphan.’ We read about it in school. Children packed their suitcases the night before they were shipped off to the concentration camps. That’s what they wrote on the suitcases. With chalk.
Waisenkind
. An orphaned child. I want to pack my suitcase.”
“That’s macabre and you’ll do no such thing.” Nell shook her head in disgust.
“But what can I take with me?”
“We’ll manage.” Aunt Nell smiled and nodded the way grown-ups do when they don’t mean what they say.
I looked around the house. The surfaces were dusty, as if the
cold ashes from the fireplace had coated the house in soot. I wanted to take the layer and wrap it around me, the first layer to hide my sadness, the subsequent layers to form a coat that would protect me, so no one could touch me on the inside.
Just pretend
, I said to myself,
pretend you’re okay
.
Aunt Nell got up and put the cup in the sink. The rings on the table had widened and had soaked into the wood. I doubted they would ever come out.
That night I climbed into the attic and pulled the biggest suitcase I could find from a shelf of dusty boxes. I packed my father’s maps, my mother’s photographs, a white baby outfit and a pair of baby shoes, the newspaper with the article of the car pileup, and Anthony’s science fair award.
Days later, when I opened the suitcase in New Jersey, it was full of clothes. When I asked Nell what she had done with the items, she just shook her head.
“Hanging on to the past is just not very helpful in this situation. We have to make the best of it.”
When I started to cry, she said, “This is as hard on me as it is on you. Please don’t make a scene.”
No one had actually uttered the phrase yet, not Nell, not Anthony, had spoken the words
Your parents are dead.
Somehow my mind accepted their deaths but I could never shake the feeling that I had abandoned them prematurely.
—
“Every morning I would wake up wondering if it was all a dream. It wasn’t like I tried to convince myself they were still alive, it was more me getting used to them being gone, over and over again, and every morning, during the first few seconds after I opened my eyes, it felt as if they were still alive.” Every morning they died all over again, every morning I started out with hope and, within seconds, hope died. Every day, all over again.
I pause and look around Dr. Ari’s office, a large rectangular space. A door behind his desk leads to what I assume is his private bathroom. I’m aware that I picked the beginning of the story, but why the clay in my hand and the funeral? I hadn’t thought of my parents in years, the last time probably in high school, about the time I stopped searching for my mother’s face in a crowd, when my heart no longer skipped a beat when I saw a white Suburban.
“Dr. Ari, why am I talking about this? There’re no family secrets hidden away in the attic, no bodies buried in the backyard. Why are people always mesmerized with their childhoods?” I keep pulling on my shirt sleeves, they almost reach my fingertips. “I don’t have a single recollection of my childhood before the age of ten. Am I
supposed
to remember anything that far back? It seems like there is this point, there’s nothing before and everything after. I’m not sure I’m making sense, I guess what I’m trying to understand is if there’s a reason why I don’t remember my early childhood.”
“Not remembering doesn’t mean your childhood was bad, but not having bad memories doesn’t mean that it was good, either.” He seems proud of the comment but confusion must be written all over my face. He crosses his legs and shifts in his chair as if to get comfortable, ready for an extended monologue. “The first years are all about attachment. The kind of adult you are is the most reliable indicator of a positive or negative childhood, more reliable than any memory or the lack thereof.” Dr. Ari looks at me as if this is supposed to explain something.
I am perplexed. “Judging by my sitting here, that means what?”
“Thinking about your mother, what is the most—”
“Let’s get real, let’s just call it what it is. I’m trying to remember if I had anything to do with the disappearance of my daughter. And I’m being kind by choosing those words, I could ask the real question, the one everybody’s wanting an answer to.” I can
feel myself getting upset, my heart is beating hard against my chest and I feel the urge to get up and move around.
“So you don’t want to talk about your mother?”
“No, no, you’re getting it all wrong. I can’t remember my mother, her scent, the touch of her hand, her presence. I remember she was always busy, slightly distant maybe, but what does that mean?”
“Like I said, it means nothing at this point,” he says.
“What if I . . .” I stop, I don’t know where to go from here.
“Being distant is not hereditary, it’s not a genetic mutation, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Dr. Ari says.
“Maybe not in a hereditary way but how about a pattern? Is that possible?”
“We can’t draw any conclusions from that. Let me give you an example: The child of a drug addict will deal with the addiction somehow and one way of coping is keeping the drugs a secret. Which leads to keeping more secrets. Think of the behavior of children more like an attempt to cope with their parents’ shortcomings.”
“It’s a shame my mother is not around to answer any questions.” I try not to sound sarcastic but I can’t help it.
“In my line of work we usually don’t confront parents until it is too late. Makes for a one-sided conversation, doesn’t it?”
“That’s why so many people see shrinks.”
Dr. Ari squeezes his lips shut until they disappear and his mouth looks like a slash made by a knife. He begins to tap his leg, then scoots to the front of his chair and leans forward.
“Don’t think of me as a shrink. Think of me as, as . . .” He is scanning his mind for the right word, and then his face lights up. “Your midwife, in a way. Think of me as your midwife. I’m here to assist you with birthing the past. Neither compassion nor friendship will help you complete the process. In the days to come you’ll ignore me, beg me to make it stop, most certainly you will
hate me at some point. Eventually, when you cradle the truth in your arms, you’ll realize that I was on your side all along.”
You’re on my side then?
I want to ask him, but I don’t. As I think about his words, I realize that the only thing I can ask is for someone to be on my side. That very moment, I decide to trust him and that I will allow him to take me places I would rather not go if I want to find my daughter. Or find out what happened to her. Or find out what I have done to her.
“Tell me about the funeral,” Dr. Ari says.
I’m a miner, I descend deeper into the mine shaft and all I have to do is bring gemstones up into the light. If memories are gems, I will continue on, leaving it to Dr. Ari to separate fool’s gold from whatever is precious.
The funeral. What a spectacle that was.
—
Standing beside a dark hole in the ground, staring straight ahead, someone shoved a lump of clay into my hand. Three coffins had been propped up—a small one in between two larger ones—and after the undertakers lowered the coffins, one by one, they pulled away the ropes with an indifferent flick of their wrists. The priest was young and his attempt at growing a mustache had resulted in nothing but a few sorry whiskers. His skin was poreless, as if he had been dipped in wax.
Suddenly I remembered Joan Hardaway, a girl who lived on our street and went to school with me. At school, we had heard she was a “cutter” but we didn’t grasp what that really meant. All we knew was that she liked to hurt herself. Joan Hardaway was a doughy girl with a flaky scalp and yellow teeth. I saw her legs once, after PE when we changed clothes. Her thighs were covered in red spiderwebs, deliberate etchings like images drawn in the sand, illegible, but spelling out some sort of pain. I remember thinking how odd it was to create more pain in order to forget pain. It seemed illogical then.
Aware of Dr. Ari’s questioning eyes I realize that I haven’t spoken in a while. The memory of the funeral evokes nausea, just as strongly today as it did fifteen years ago. I must stay focused; I must speak slowly and deliberately, must tell him what happened.
“I threw the lump of clay and it thumped off my sister’s coffin and rolled into a flower arrangement.” I tell Dr. Ari how I turned into a bystander because being in the picture seemed too painful, as if observing myself reduced the pain somehow, and vividly, I see Anthony and me, standing there, holding hands. By the time they lowered the coffins into the ground, I started crying. I tried to pull away from Anthony but he held on to me, squeezed my hand so hard it hurt.
“No.
No.
Wait
,” I screamed, followed by a universal gasp among the real bystanders. Women started sobbing in the cluster of mourners, handkerchiefs pressed against their mouths, their eyes wide, and embarrassment in their muffled voices.
“Stella, please, don’t.” Anthony’s voice was pleading. “Stop pulling so hard. Stop pulling my—”
My sobs became louder, the tears made it impossible to see anything, but I knew everybody was looking at me, staring at the little girl who was losing it. I managed to pull my hand out of Anthony’s grip and stepped forward.
I had no plans to jump in, I didn’t prepare for a leap. I lost my footing when the ground caved in right at the edge, by the mat of artificial grass. I fell and landed, like a shovelful of newly dug earth, on one of the larger coffins. I rolled over and looked up, my shoulder throbbing. The scent of gardenias was overwhelming, the wreaths were sharp, making my skin itch. Dozens of eyes stared down at me, towering, countless hands extending, waiting for my hand to reach out and grasp theirs. I sat on top of the coffin, not sure if it was my mom’s or dad’s, those eyes staring down at me. I looked past them, up into the sky. Anthony finally lowered himself into the hole and held me up for hands to pull me out.