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 sitting 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.