*
I spend a long time in that bed. They tell me I am “lucky,” with their eyes averted. No one will ever look me in the eyes again. They say that I hit the water at exactly the right angle, feetfirst, as if I was sitting. A nurse says, “It’s the only position that wouldn’t have broken you into bits.” They say I survived what ninety-eight percent of those who jump don’t. Human bodies are shattered by that fall. They hit the water with the force of a truck hitting a brick wall. It causes an implosion; organs smash loose from their moorings, ruptured by the jagged edges of broken bones. It is almost always a devastation. And beyond that there are the currents that rip a body miles away in minutes.
What they don’t ever want to talk about: my little girl. She was pulled away by the water. They never found her. She was taken far away from me, from everything she knew. I knew as soon as I jumped that I was wrong. That everything I had thought was wrong. I had been given the gift that exceeded all gifts, the gift of a life had been entrusted into my hands, but I had flung this gift from me into the freezing depths. When the drugs lift and I remember this, I am the most anguished soul in the world. I turn my face to the wall and howl.
*
They take the picture from the frame that sat next to our couch. Her head tilted to the side, two tumbles of blond-brown curls, the pink T-shirt, the tiny denim jacket. I remember dressing her that morning. Toweling off her wet limbs, combing her hair into these two fluffy ponytails. We had laughed that day. It had been a good day. We had loved each other. All these things no one else can know. She was only mine then. Now this picture is everywhere. Now she belongs to the world.
*
Outside the trial there are a blur of faces, open mouths, screaming voices. People have brought blown-up posters of me with her on my lap, the word Murderer! scrawled across our faces. A child holds a poster that asks, “How could you kill a baby like me?” Her mother grips her arm. A man waves a sign that reads, Justice for Bodhi Anne! Everywhere my girl’s face, her eyes, her lips, that pink T-shirt and denim jacket. The policemen drag me, my toes stumbling against the steps. I think, Look, Bodhi girl, look, they’ve come for you because they love you. So many of them. They love you. I have to smile and hear a hail of clicking cameras. They’ll publish these pictures with captions that read “Baby-Killer Mom Shows No Remorse; Smiles Outside Trial.” I don’t care. It doesn’t matter now.
As the lawyers talk, I study my hands. The oval moons of my nails. I turn my hand over and look at the lines on my palm. Wonder that nothing there says, “Child-killer. Baby-killer. Medea.”
*
I sit in the courtroom. I let them say what they want. I can see that they are chilled when my eyes sweep their way. It is laughable. I want to lean forward and say boo. I want to make them shudder with my murderous breath.
They put up pictures of her. I keep my gaze steady. I refuse to cry. None of them will ever know the depth of my sorrow, the sights I see in the night. My pain will be a secret wound blooming just under my skin, filling the whole space of my body.
*
Fifteen years. It has been fifteen years since it happened, since I have been inside this place from where I speak to you. It hasn’t been as bad as you would think. I have found a comfort in the institutionalization of life, the measuring out of hours one after the other into these long years, a security in being in one locked place on the planet, a comfort in being given my due.
*
I think about her every day. She who will always be two and a half but never three years old. Her small body as it was then, before I did what I did.
In dreams I stand on the bank and watch and know that far below the surface, someone is drowning. The air is leaving their lungs through their wide-open mouth. Oxygen is fleeing that dying body in a stream of silver bubbles that catches the light and dances all the way up to the surface of that dark water. Silver bubbles rising in a stream like a twisting ribbon. Whose body? My father’s? My daughter’s? Samson’s? Impossible to tell. All distinction is lost under liquid.
Sometimes she comes to visit me. She’s always a different age. She comes as the older child, the teenager, the young woman, as if she were merely somewhere else, in some other far country but able to visit me here inside these cement walls as easily as a thought. We sit on my narrow bed in this small white cell and talk like old friends. It’s very easy, very cozy. She laughs often. I drink in her luminescent face, her carved features, the smooth skin. She shakes her hair that falls in a tangle of long corkscrews. It has darkened; her face too has darkened. She looks more like me now, I realize. The planes of my face are apparent in her now. This is my daughter. This is my girl, all grown up.