Under the Light

Chapter 23





Helen


I WANTED TO REACH FOR HER, but I was too weak.

Almost at once Cathy was in the doorway, gaping at her daughter. Jenny’s cries were hoarse and childlike—her sobs rattled in my own chest.

“What happened?” Cathy demanded.

Jenny couldn’t speak at first. Cathy lowered the lid of the toilet and helped her to sit there. Finally Jenny spoke.

“I’m bleeding.”

“Where?”

“My period,” she told her.

The girl was grieving. But Cathy didn’t embrace her. So I knelt beside Jenny and wrapped my arms around her. We wept together while Cathy hovered, practically twitching with nerves.

“What’s sad about that?” asked Cathy.

“I lost the baby,” Jenny cried.

I know, I whispered.

“What?” Cathy made an exasperated click of her tongue.

“It’s gone and they’ll never be back,” said Jenny.

It’s not your fault, I said. Hush now.

“What baby?” Cathy asked. “Who will never be back?”

“I’m sorry,” Jenny told me. She held her stomach as I stroked her hair.

Cathy’s tone was stern. “Jennifer Ann, you were not pregnant.”

“I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl,” Jenny sobbed.

It was a little girl, I told her.

“That’s absurd.” Cathy stormed out of the room. How shocking to desert her child that way.

I leaned my head against Jenny’s and rocked her. There’s nothing to be done, I told her, and I meant to be comforting, but I couldn’t help imagining what it would have been like if my baby girl had died when she was a newborn. I saw her tiny head in the cradle, her rose-gold fuzzy hair when she was only a few days old—I imagined her skin snow white and my hand lowering to her cheek and finding it ice-cold.

I gasped at the idea. Jenny cried out as if she had been struck, and the tears flowed anew.

Cathy stomped back into the bathroom as if the girl’s grief were a personal insult. She had something in her hand. “Look, your period is supposed to start now. See?”

It was the chart from Jenny’s desk, the calendar marked with a red dot on each day that Jenny had her period and a red circle when it would probably start the next month. Jenny gulped in air and blinked at the red circle on tomorrow’s date.

“Now can we stop this nonsense?” asked Cathy.

“I know she was a real baby,” Jenny said.

She was, I whispered, angry at Cathy for being so dismissive. Of course she was real. I could see the baby’s lopsided grin and feel her chubby fingers clutching at my clothes and hair.

“I was supposed to keep her safe,” Jenny insisted.

“Her?” Cathy felt Jenny’s forehead for fever, but she did it with such a lack of sympathy that I tried to swat the woman’s hand away. “There is no her,” Cathy sighed.

“She would have looked like him,” Jenny cried.

My heart ached at this. She would have looked like James, this baby girl who was not to be.

“Heaven forbid,” Cathy whispered. Jenny didn’t seem to hear, but I flew up and tried to shove Cathy out of the room. The woman jumped as if a bee had flown in her face. She searched the air but could not see who or what had attacked her, I supposed.

“Honestly, Jennifer,” said her mother. “Do you think the doctors would miss something like that when they examined you and did all those tests?”

These words gave me pause. As soon as I let go of Jenny, the girl took in a long breath. The tears stopped.

“You don’t want to have that boy’s baby, do you?” Cathy asked.

Jenny blinked and rubbed her eyes dry with her nightgown sleeves. I was taken aback by how suddenly she’d stopped crying. The idea struck me that Jenny had never been pregnant. It was only a thought, a possibility that came to me just before I left her body.

“Well?” Cathy demanded.

“No.” Jenny looked dazed. I knelt beside her and took her hand.

“There was no baby,” I whispered, but the loss caught in my throat.

Immediately Jenny’s tears were back, rolling down her cheeks. I let go of her and jumped away.

They were my tears.

“You did not have a miscarriage.” Cathy held a box toward her and Jenny pulled out a tissue, rubbed her eyes and face.

“Okay,” she told her mother. “I get it.”

My baby, I whispered. To see if I was right. Jenny’s chin began to tremble and she pressed the tissue to her eyes.

I was the cause of her grief. My sorrow was making her ill. My Jenny, whom I would fight demons to protect, I was haunting her. Being so long away from heaven had clouded my thinking. I tried to shift my thoughts to something that wouldn’t grieve her so, but I could only think of how I was darkening her spirit and how I might lose her and how I had no one on earth but her.

She sobbed into her hands.

I took a step back from her and she pulled in a deep breath. I took another step away and she dried her cheeks and tossed the tissue into the trash basket. I backed away into the bathroom wall, and Jenny’s voice sounded stronger and brighter.

“I’m okay,” she told Cathy. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

My heart shrank as I stepped backwards into the dark, through the wall of the house, into the still night garden, away from my girl.

The backyard was as far as I went at first. I hid against the garden wall. I knew I would have to leave her—it was clear I was hurting her. The worst part was that I had no idea what damage had already been done. I wanted to be safe and fly far away, but something about it still felt like a sin. I was abandoning her.

I worried my hands together, which strangely seemed to create a small cloud of mist to form around me, sparkling the bricks with dew. I couldn’t leave her a note and was afraid any message I might try to send through words or thoughts might upset her. So at last I resolved to go back the way I’d come.

Having scaled this mountain before, you’d think I would find it easier to climb the second time, but I couldn’t see how it worked. Heaven felt to me now as far away as Wonderland or Oz—I believed, but I had no map. No key. I felt there was some trick to do with the horizon folding like a piece of paper, but I was muddled again.

The lights in the house were all dark now. But as I began to worry that I would never find my way to heaven, I saw Jenny’s bedroom lamp come on. She couldn’t sleep. My fault, no doubt. I was ashamed. I couldn’t help myself—I floated to a place along the garden wall where I could see into her bedroom window. She sat in bed, looking around the room, holding the back of her hand up for me to send her a message.

But I couldn’t risk bringing her pain that was not her own. Without a plan I began to run through the wall in her backyard and into the next yard and the next, through fence and hedge and over the silver surface of swimming pools.

I tried to remember the moment I’d climbed into heaven when I left her the first time, but there was a darkness in the place of that memory like a night sky where stars refuse to gather. I stopped running and found myself in the driveway of a stranger’s yard, the light from their kitchen window tilting down into the grass.

If I couldn’t recall how I’d entered heaven the first time, I’d have to retrace my steps from my arrival in Jenny’s life the second time. I’d left James in heaven and come back to Jenny. There was a path there, there must have been.

When I tried to imagine heaven and being there with James, images came to me so vague and small, I hardly believed them. There was a table under a tree and someone played piano. Could I have actually left him by simply slipping my fingers out of his grasp and turning away, stepping down a staircase, or perhaps the slope of a hill? I moved toward a place where the shadow of the path ahead and the trees on either side became one darkness.

Now I began to walk forward through this stranger’s yard and felt distinctly as if I was moving farther and farther from my destination. So, like a fool, I stopped and placed my right foot back behind me, then my left, walking slowly backwards toward what I hoped was heaven.

I closed my eyes, since I was not using them to guide me. The harder I tried to remember how to get back, the more the idea became confused. A shadow, a blank wall, an empty road. I would briefly, every so often, forget what I was trying to concentrate on. Finally all I was left with was the peculiar idea that when I came to earth and landed beside Jenny’s bathtub, what lay ahead of me just before I slid back to earth had become still, like a scene from toile de Jouy wallpaper, thin and then unreadable, as if I was passing out of the room and the wall was shortening. The picture became darker and narrower and eventually unrecognizable.

That’s what had happened, wasn’t it? I found the thin place in the curtain between heaven and earth by moving toward the tilting, narrowing focal point on the shadowed horizon. That’s when I slipped through the slit like a letter, as fragile as a pressed flower.

I wasn’t walking anymore, I was running blindly backwards, causing spider webs to tremble and owls to startle and flutter to other branches. Crickets hushed as I rushed by. Though invisible, I set off a motion light in one backyard, and while I crossed a street a plastic bag swooped up after me, drawn by my anxiety rather than my disturbing the actual air.

But by and by my lack of direction curled my path into a circle and I slowly spun to a stop in an empty lot crisp with dead weeds and dry grass. I feared that my failing to protect Jenny, my abandoning her, was keeping me from finding my way. I shook with horror—I tried to steel myself with anger.

“It’s not fair!” I shouted.

My voice rang around me, vexing me with echoes. I curled in on myself and huddled on the ground. I tried to comfort myself by picturing James or the sweet face of my daughter, but they were clouded. I couldn’t recall the needle-eye slit of heaven, but now in my wretchedness I remembered the other place.

It didn’t take anything more than that, just the admission that I could remember hell. The space was small, only a little larger than a coffin, really. The water was higher now, nearly to the ceiling. It tasted of metal and earth and an odd mix of plant spices, a recipe made by nature in a wild tantrum. Sage, mint, and honeysuckle, but also anise, parsnip, and the bitter bloom of chrysanthemum.

Above the cellar door, as seen through a gap where a tree limb had torn through, lightning flashed, sending a moment of blue-green brightness into the water. The storm danced outside to its perverse music—the familiar din of thunder cracks, the hiss of rain, and that singular howl that always sickened me.

It used to be that my hell was alive and screaming, winds blowing, water spraying, thunder and lightning in full flash and roar. Now, though, it stopped, still and mute. The cold was there, though—I could feel the chill deep in my soul. Perhaps this pause in my hell was worse than its past torment. Movement might imply the possibility of an end someday. But this stillness was unbearable. Perhaps it wasn’t that time had frozen but that it was now moving at the pace of infinity. A moment now becomes a century.

I could see through the dark pool two pale shapes, my hands, like drowned doves floating just under the surface two feet before me. Tickling at my scalp, a crown of water, for I had been swallowed up.