Aspirin, indeed. I knew all along, and still I went on fooling myself, taking any little excuse to grant myself relief. Now look at me. Look at me! I deserve Samuel’s scorn. I have fallen apart. I have deconstituted my mind and my body into a thousand broken pieces. I am not Virginia anymore. I’m not even a human being anymore, not even a mother, and it’s all my own doing. My undoing is my own doing. I am not strong enough. The same method by which I fell in love with Simon: I thought I was stronger than I really was.
And it turns out, I was only untried.
Like you, Mama? Were you only untried? And then the rains came, the darkness came, and you succumbed to them. You gave in. You fell apart and reassembled your brokenness into somebody else. And I judged you for it, I found you wanting, and it turns out we’re the same. I’m no better than you were.
All of which reflection, you might say, represents nothing more than a giant salt bath of self-pity in which to wallow without purpose. Oh, I know about all this modern psychology. How helpless we are in the aftermath of our parents’ crimes, how imprisoned by the iron facts of our childhoods.
But as I lie there, wallowing, face immersed in a white down pillow of my husband’s choosing, I start to get a little angry, too. At what, exactly, I’m not sure. I’ll leave that to all those fashionable new head doctors to decide. Just a sort of inchoate fury, or frustration, or some damned thing. I don’t want to be this person, lying on this bed. I don’t want to be my mother, just because of some universal law of human transmutation, some inevitable psychological destiny.
I want to be Virginia. Whoever she is.
And I’m sick, you know, I’m feeling pretty damned lousy, as a purely physical diagnosis, and I think, well, I’ve been sick before, haven’t I, and I’ve pushed myself out of bed. Because I had to. Because there was no other choice. One leg after another. One limb at a time. One foot sliding down the mattress to the rug, like that, and then you brace your good left palm against the pillow and lift yourself upright, and the other foot slides down to the nice soft rug, right next to the first foot. And there you are. Standing. Miserable, but standing. On your own two feet.
A somnolent late-morning atmosphere sits on the walls and the furniture, the few objects in Simon’s parlor. The clock on the wall says half past ten. In the wake of the thunderstorms last night, the sky has cleared to a pungent, unclouded blue, and the Indian River glitters restlessly outside the windows. I grip the back of a nearby sofa and consider the emptiness of the apartment, the lazy lonesomeness. No one to bother us up here. Door bolted, our whereabouts unknown. Except to Samuel, and he’s miles out of town by now, on his way to Miami Beach, to save his sister. Wouldn’t that be lovely, to have a brother desperate to save me? A man I could trust.
But I don’t pause to savor the beauty and the pity of it all. I make my way straight to Evelyn’s room, as quickly as my unsteady legs and uncertain balance will carry me. That’s why I’m upright to begin with, isn’t it? What got me out of bed: that sensation of danger streaming through my innards, like the unstoppable river that passes outside, carrying goods to market.
Goods. Goods, indeed.
Evelyn’s bedroom lies down a hallway on the other side of the parlor. One of three chambers, in fact, all of which are decorated in warm pastels, in soft furniture, as if waiting for children to populate them. A month ago, the sight of those expectant rooms touched me with an uncertain tenderness, almost like hope. Now I regard Evelyn’s white-painted door—left a few inches ajar—in panic. The nausea strikes again, overturning my guts, so that I lurch against the wall, holding myself up with one palm, and I make a drunken, disgraceful path down those remaining yards, until my hand pushes forth from the wall to land on Evelyn’s doorknob. The hinges give way silently, sending me staggering inside.
The room is cool, shielded from the sun by a set of thick curtains, and for an instant I can’t see the bed, or my daughter inside, and my heart stops beating. I blink and blink, trying to penetrate the shadows, and as my pupils dilate, taking their time, I stretch out my impatient hands and step forward.
The bed. There it is, framed in white iron, clean and hygienic. The mattress, the soft quilt.
A small, oblong lump: Evelyn’s foot.
The breath rushes from my chest. I slump forward, supporting myself on my hands, one bare and the other clubbed in bandages, and inch my way upward to the pillows until I find her shoulder, the smooth fiber of her hair. Her ribs, moving steadily in the rhythm of a deep and untroubled sleep. Her cool, healthy cheek.
I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that kind of relief. I suppose everyone has—everyone who’s ever loved another person, I mean. Because sooner or later we all experience that extraordinary, irrational terror, all the more paralyzing because you don’t quite know why you’re so afraid. Someone’s late coming home on a stormy night, or a child goes to bed with a fever, or a siren wails delicately in the distance, and you’re certain, you’re certain, you’re certain something must be terribly wrong, this is it, your number’s come up. The bell tolls for thee.
And then comes the deliverance. The door opens, the child wakes up smiling, the siren passes. And the relief, my God, the relief almost kills you, it’s so mighty. You double over, you’re faint. You press your hand to your stomach and thank God, thank God. You’re safe. For this moment, your world remains intact. Your daughter’s alive and well, sleeping under your fingers, inside the sanctum of her bed. You tuck a lock of hair behind her darling ear and listen to the whisper of her breath. You smell the nectar of her skin. You say, maybe out loud or maybe just in your head, I’ll never let this happen again. I’ll never let anything harm you again.
And I mean it, you know. I tuck the blanket an inch or two higher on Evelyn’s chest, and I kiss her forehead and her white, exposed cheek, and I drag my bag of bones into the hallway and the telephone in its cubby in the wall.
I instruct the hotel operator to connect me to the front desk, and I ask the front desk if I have received any letters.
Yes, madam. Shall we send them up?
Yes, please.
You might think, after a month’s absence, I’d have any number of letters waiting for me in my pigeonhole in the hotel’s front desk. In fact, I’ve taken the strictest care to make sure this isn’t the case. I didn’t want any curious being to know where to find me. Not even Sophie. To my lawyers in New York I gave the address of the Phantom Shipping Company, care of. So when the red-suited Phantom Hotel bellboy arrives at the apartment door, trying not to widen his eyes at the derelict sight of me, he’s carrying only two white envelopes. One bears no identification, other than my name and that of the Phantom Hotel. The other one is from the National City Bank of New York.