That’s my cue.
I stand up and shove the cot aside, so the hole in the wall is revealed: a tight squeeze, but big enough to fit me. My makeshift rope is coiled on the floor, ready to go, and I thread one end through the metal ring on the door, knot it as tightly as I can.
I’m not thinking anymore. I’m not afraid, either.
I toss the free end of the rope out through the hole, hear it snap once in the wind. For the first time since I was imprisoned, I thank God that the Crypts is windowless, at least on this side.
I go headfirst through the hole, wriggling when my shoulders meet resistance. Soft, wet stone rains down on my neck. My nose is full of the smell of spoiled things.
Good-bye, good-bye.
The alarm still wails, as though in response.
Then my shoulders are through and I’m upside down over a dizzying drop: forty-five feet at least, to the black and frozen river, motionless, reflecting the moon. And the rope, like a spun thread of white water, running vertically toward freedom.
I make a grab for the rope. I pull, hand over hand, sliding my body, my legs, through the jagged hole in the rock.
And then I fall.
My legs leave the lip of rock, and I swing a wild half circle, kicking into the air, crying out. I stop with a jerk, right side up, the rope coiled around my wrists. Stomach in my throat. The alarm is still going: high-pitched, hysterical.
Air, air, nothing but air. I’m frozen, unable to move up or down. I have a sudden memory of a spring cleaning the year before I was taken, and a giant spiderweb uncovered behind the standing mirror in the bedroom. Dozens of insects were bound, immobile, in white thread, and one had only just been caught—it was still struggling feebly to get out.
The alarm stops, and the ensuing silence is as loud as a slap. I have to move. I can hear the roar of the river now, and the shush of the wind through the leaves. Slowly I inch downward, wrapping my legs around the rope, swinging, nauseous. There’s a pressure on my bladder, and my palms are burning. I’m too afraid to be cold.
Please let the rope hold.
Thirty feet from the river I lose my grip and free-fall several feet before catching myself. The force of my stop makes me cry out, and I bite down on my tongue. The rope lashes in the wind.
But I’m still safe. And the rope holds.
Inch by inch. It seems to take forever. Hand over hand. I don’t even notice that my palms are bleeding until I see smears of red on the linens. But I feel no pain. I’m beyond pain now, numb from exhaustion. I’m weaker, even, than I’d feared.
Inch by inch.
And then, all at once, I’m at the end of the rope, and seven feet below me is the frozen Presumpscot, a blackened surface of rotted logs and rocks webbed with ice. I have no choice but to drop and pray for a good landing, try to avoid the water and make it into the drifts, white as a pillow, piled up on the banks.
I let go.
then
I kept up my end of the bargain. I gave my family no trouble. In the months leading up to the marriage ceremony, I said yes when I was supposed to and did what I was told.
But all the time, love grew inside me like a delicious secret.
It was exactly that way later, when I was pregnant first with Rachel, and then Lena. Even before the doctors confirmed it, I could always tell. There were the normal changes: the swollen, tender breasts; a sharpening sense of smell; a heaviness in my joints. But it was more than that. I could always feel it—an alien growth, the expansion of something beautiful and other and also entirely mine. A private constellation: a star growing inside my belly.
If Conrad remembered the skinny, frightened girl he’d held for one brief moment on a frigid Boston street corner, he showed no signs of it when we met. From the beginning, he was polite, kind, respectful. He listened to me, and asked questions about what I thought, what I liked, and what I didn’t. He told me once, early on, that he liked engineering because he enjoyed the mechanics of making things work—structures, machines, anything. I know he often wished that people were more easily decoded.
That’s, of course, what the cure was for: for flattening people into paper, into biomechanics and scores.
A year before Conrad died, he got the diagnosis: a tumor the size of a child’s thumb was growing in his brain. It was sudden and totally unexpected. The doctors said bad luck.
I was sitting next to his hospital bed when he suddenly sat up, confused from a dream. Even as I tried to urge him back against the pillows, he looked at me with wild eyes.
“What happened to your leather jacket?” he asked.