The Sea Came in at Midnight (18 page)

Louise hadn’t told anyone that Mitch was the father. Maybe Marie suspected; she never asked. Billy, altogether less perceptive or tactful, made some allusion to the matter a month or two after Louise had been there, wondering where the father was or whether he even knew, and Marie gently admonished him. On the banks of the island Louise lay under the trees staring out at the river, her womb rising on the horizon, swelling into her sight lines. As she didn’t dream of her child in the unconsciousness of night, in the consciousness of day she felt no communion with it. She didn’t speak to it inside her or hold it between her hands in the cocoon of her belly; she tried not to think about it at all, even as she could feel it sometimes try to crawl its way into her thoughts. She tried not to picture a son who looked like Mitch, or a daughter who looked like her, or some ghastly collusion of the two, a son with Louise’s dark hair or a daughter with Mitch’s light hair. When, in early March, the river rose from the rains and flooded much of the island including one end of the town’s mainstreet, Louise thought of wading into the water in search of the perfect deadly current that would wash up into her and drown the child and carry it downstream and out into the delta, eventually to the sea. Some weeks later, when the spring came, the season was a perversion in her eyes, all its budding and blooming and growing and gushing; she yearned for a more forbidding autumn, of more funereal ambers, than the one in which the child had been conceived.

But as the child grew inside her, and as the spring flowed into summer, under the delta sky above, that glowed a hotter and hotter blue, the only thing that was dying was Marie. They were on the bus that early-July afternoon going into San Francisco to have the baby there, Billy having dropped them off that morning at the station in Sacramento in the midst of a hangover, and as Marie stared out the bus window, Louise said the thing that had been on her mind a while: Marie, she said; and Marie turned to her from the window. Will you take this baby? said Louise; and Marie turned back to the window, and for a moment Louise felt a mean kind of satisfaction. I’ve finally enraged her, she thought triumphantly. But then Marie said, “I can’t,” in the saddest way Louise had ever heard; despising herself as usual, Louise realized that once again, as usual, she had underrated Marie’s goodness. “I’m sorry,” said Louise bitterly.

“No,” Marie murmured to the window, “I’m sorry.”

“Christ,” Louise shook her head, “what made me think I could ask you? It’s Mitch’s, you know. It’s the child of the man who destroyed your life.”

“He didn’t destroy my life,” Marie lied. “Don’t you see? This child deserves everything
because
it’s Mitch’s.” And that was when Marie turned back to Louise from the window and said, “I’m dying.”

The first impulse, as usual, was to say, What do you
mean
? But Marie had said it in a way so shorn of self-pity and with such a self-reconciled gravity, more profoundly regretful than anything, that Louise immediately resisted a trite response. Instantly, running down the litany of called-for responses, she rejected one after another: What do you mean? What are you saying? Are you really sure? Oh I’m so sorry—until rapidly descending the list to the basic “When?”

“I don’t know.”

“How?” No one knew that either. There was no tumor or malignancy, no forecast of a black biological rain on the x-rays, “the blood count’s just been all wrong now for at least a year,” Marie tried to explain, “and I just get weaker and weaker,” and so, Louise said to herself with annoyance, it was going to be one of those coy and suspect deaths, where you never know what’s killing you and you can go at any time, next month or next year; and if it occurred to Louise, then it must have occurred to Marie too: that almost four years before, in a vacant bus terminal, it entered Marie, the death no one knew, the death no one could find or name, defiling her in the dark on the altar of her own innocence. Hanging there, her hands bound, naked on a hook, she had stepped into the light of her own end and, in exchange, because she didn’t deserve to die, and because the mystery malignancy could defile her body but not her spirit, she had been offered a small reprieve.

In San Francisco they checked into a small motel on Van Ness not far from the hospital, and as the days passed there, Louise awaited her baby like doom. The two women didn’t speak anymore of Mitch or Billy or Marie’s dying; they hardly spoke at all, just waiting, until the fifth night, when Louise woke in a sweet pale-yellow red-streaked puddle, a flurry of theretofore clandestine contractions suddenly only minutes apart. Later, long after her daughter’s birth, she would remain disturbed by the dream she had right before her water broke. In it, she and Marie made love. Even at the moment of waking, her memory of it wasn’t clear: she couldn’t remember whether it was she who approached Marie in the dream—and therefore it was a predatory act, a continuation of the way she had violated Marie in New York—or whether it was Marie who came to her, and therefore it was an act of forgiveness. At any rate, the two women had embraced and been swept by a tsunami of amniotic fluid to a far and foreign shore, where an orgasm ruptured the membrane in Louise’s uterus and woke her to the beginning of labor.

Out of this orgasm—her body’s expression of either violation or forgiveness, and the only orgasm Louise had ever had, long delayed since the night of 6 May 1968—the baby was born. Marie called a cab and helped Louise dress and waited out on the balcony until the taxi pulled into the parking lot, and then helped Louise down the stairs. What’s wrong with her? the alarmed cab driver said, and Marie said, She’s going to have a baby, and the driver said, Not in my cab she isn’t, and Marie said to him very calmly, summoning a fierceness Louise hadn’t seen or heard before, Now listen to me, you’re going to take us to the hospital, and you’re going to take us now. On the way up Nob Hill, as the night flew by, Louise said, Marie? and Marie said Yes, and Louise, for the first time, as though taking an oath, took firm hold of her belly and the baby inside and said to Marie: forgive me. “Forgive me, Marie,” she whispered, “forgive me for four years ago.”

Yes, Marie said.

“I’ve been wanting to say it,” Louise whispered, “and I wouldn’t let myself—because I knew you would. I wouldn’t ask you to forgive me, because I knew you would and I had no right to take advantage of that.”

I know, Marie said.

“I had no right to take advantage, because it’s not something that can be forgiven.”

It’s all right now.

“Not even you can really forgive it,” whispered Louise. “I mean, it’s bigger than you, what we did to you. It’s too big for anyone to forgive, even if you wanted to.”

Shhh.

“I feel a little dizzy.”

Cup your hands and breathe into them.

“I hope,” Louise murmured in the dark, in the back of the cab, “it doesn’t look like Mitch if it’s a boy. I hope it doesn’t look like me if it’s a girl.”

We’re almost there now. Driver, there’s the emergency entrance.

“I’m glad Mitch isn’t here. Let’s not ever tell the baby about him.”

Shhh, we’re here now.

“I hope it’s all right,” said Louise. “Marie? I hope the baby is all right.”

The baby will be all right.

“But not like Mitch, and not like me. Like you.”

They got out of the cab and Marie helped Louise into the waiting room, where they put Louise in a wheelchair and wheeled her away as Marie watched her disappear. Five hours later Louise delivered a daughter without dreams. When they brought the baby to Louise, she cowered from it at first, and then fell asleep with it in her arms; she was vaguely aware, before she slipped off into exhaustion, of Marie coming into the room and taking the baby from her arms and then a nurse coming in and taking it from Marie. The next day Louise finally made herself look at her daughter and study her, for a single trace of a single recognizable feature. The day after that, Louise was discharged from the maternity ward and they took a cab back to the motel on Van Ness, where she was perfectly willing to let the other woman hold onto the child while the new mother plummeted into a deep emotional stupor. She was now reasonably certain, even after the birth of the baby, that she hadn’t had a Moment yet.

The last night that Louise saw her daughter, she once again fell asleep with the baby in her arms as she had in the hospital. Sometime the next morning she heard in her sleep the sound of the baby crying, growing more and more faint, until it disappeared altogether, and she woke to find the baby gone from her arms. In the first few moments of waking, she believed the baby had slipped from her arms into the bedding, becoming entangled and smothered; frantically in these first moments of semiconsciousness she searched the sheets and blankets for the little girl. But the baby wasn’t there. Instead there was a note on the other bed.
I changed my mind,
it read.
If you change yours, you know where we are.

S
HE ALMOST DID. IMMEDIATELY
after the birth, to her own great shock, she almost went after the baby at once. To her own great shock, there tore through her heart a treacherous pang whenever she thought of her. Over the next year she suppressed every yearning for her, every feeling of loss. She stayed in the Bay Area, living in the Haight and working as a teaching assistant at the local state college, mostly because it wasn’t so far away from Davenhall, should she change her mind. She kept Marie’s note as though it were a receipt.

Almost three years later, she came within a river of changing her mind. There were many reasons she hadn’t gone back to Davenhall before, some of them selfish, none of them contradicting the very real conviction that the child was better off with Marie than she would have been with her own mother. On rare occasions, the two women exchanged letters that Louise often couldn’t bear to open, let alone read. Then, almost three years after the baby was born, a letter came addressed not in Marie’s writing but Billy’s, and without reading that one either, knowing full well what it said, Louise sent word that she was coming, took the bus to Sacramento, and caught a ride out to the island ferry.

There she stood at the edge of the dock as the ferry approached. Far on the other side of the river she could see Billy waiting, with a tiny little person attached to his hand, looking back. Her little dress was a dot of blue fixed patiently on the shore. The ferry slowly made its way through the water and pulled up to the dock and lingered a little longer waiting for Louise to board, before setting sail back to the island without Louise on it. From the dock Louise thought she could see Billy hold out the hand that wasn’t holding her daughter as if to say, Well? and all Louise could do was shake her head, turn, and go back to Sacramento, where she caught the next bus back to San Francisco. It was the twenty-ninth of April 1985.

N
OW WE DRIVE DEEP
into the heart of the former Lulu Blu. We drive a seemingly endless two-lane that never offers the long view, always disappearing just around the bend, over a hill, into the dark. But we have a sense that whatever is at the end of the two-lane, whatever city, whatever town, whatever resting stop, whatever clearing in the wilderness, is always a very long way away, with not so many motels to stop at in between.

Louise has always hated surprises in her life. They have always shaken her sense of possessing her own life. She can remember a surprise birthday party when she was seven, not long before her parents split up, her dim brother stunned at the very notion that a birthday could be a surprise: How could one’s own birthday be a surprise? the boy had wondered; and his sister had spit out in contemptuous explanation, It’s not the birthday that’s a surprise, you toad, it’s the party that’s the surprise. Billy never understood the difference between the birthday and the party. So after little seven-year-old Louise picked up her birthday cake and hurled it across the living room of their tiny one-bedroom house outside North Platte, Nebraska, no one ever gave her a surprise party again; but now, years later, her own heart is a surprise to her, and all the bleak unknown stretches of its future journey. And as much as she hates surprises, she has nowhere to go but deep into her own heart, to follow the sound of a gunshot fired in the shadows of a distant aorta.

The day after she turned her back on her daughter at the edge of the river and walked away, she quit her job at the college and took off that weekend in a used Camaro heading east. Until she ran down the echo of that gunshot, there was no going back to get her daughter; and over the next twelve years she wandered the country from motel to motel and job to job, supporting herself just enough to revisit the scene of every city and every town and every movie house where she and Mitch and Billy had hawked their films out of the back of a van. What copies of the films she could buy, she bought; what copies she could haggle for, she haggled; what copies she could steal, she stole, breaking into theater vaults and collectors’ basements and bondage shops and mail-order warehouses and the rare video store here and there that might have actually carried one of the films, from Atlanta to Denver to Dallas to Des Moines to Portland to Grand Rapids to Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Albuquerque to Salt Lake City (where her movies had a particularly dedicated cult) to St. George to Rawlins to Scottsbluff to Valentine to Mitchell to Albert Lea to Waukesha to Logansport to Haleyville to Dixons Mills. For a couple of months she scoured New York City from Times Square to the Lower East Side to the Bowery beyond.

With every copy of every film recovered, she transformed herself from erotic terrorist to erotic vigilante. She didn’t suppose or presume she could undo what had transpired before. She didn’t suppose or presume that from erotic vigilante she might transform herself into erotic redeemer; as she continued over the course of the twelve years to hunt out all the copies of Marie’s murder—and in her own mind that was what it was, it was no longer Marie’s “faked” murder or Marie’s “staged” murder, or the “hoax” of Marie’s murder—she came to accept she would never stop hearing the gunshot in her ears, that there was no undoing that either. Rather she accepted her wandering as a mission of the damned that could never make her worthy of her daughter, and she pursued that mission nonetheless until she convinced herself, twelve years later, it was finished.