The Worst Thing I've Done (4 page)

“Three jumps,” Mason said. “I win.”

“You win.”

“You'll win next time.” Skin so transparent.

Annie traced the fine, strong lines of his bones beneath. The bridge and length of his nose. The angles of jaw and forehead.
Sexy Trouble.

“Sexy trouble,” she'd heard Aunt Stormy tell her mother when Annie was still in elementary school. “That neighbor boy will be sexy trouble someday. Such wildness and beauty.”

T
OOTH WHITENER
.

Ointment for cold sores.

Dr. Virginia. “Yes, David?”

The rope, too thin, forever cutting into Mason's long neck—

All at once, Annie knows she'll use his death as insurance against other catastrophes. Nothing horrible will happen to Opal and her again. It's a fact Annie understands deep inside her bones, and it makes her invincible. In an odd way—beyond the grieving, beyond the regrets—there is solace in that.

“I am increasingly worried about my wife—” The caller's voice is anxious, so anxious. “She has been twitching and—”

“Have you taken her to a neurologist?” Dr. Virginia interrupts.

“No, but I have—”

“To a cardiologist?”

“No, but—”

“How long has this been going on, David?”

“Let me think…”

“I do not have all night.”

“…thirty-five years.”

“Are you telling me your wife has been twitching for thirty-five years?”

“That is correct, Dr. Virginia.”

“Of course it is correct. I listen—”

“What an egomaniac,” Mason says.

Annie agrees. “Ego-Chickie.”

“David,” Dr. Virginia asks, “why have you waited until now to call me?”

“That is how long we've been married, Doctor. But I'm getting more concerned.”

“Have you taken your wife to be tested for seizures?”

“Not yet.”

“For epilepsy?”

“Not yet. I have my own appliance business—”

“What does that have to do with taking her to the doctor?”

“Long hours. Very—”

“How long do your wife's twitches last?”

“Oh…used to be twenty or thirty seconds. But the older she gets, the longer the twitching…. It keeps going on and on…long afterwards. Sometimes I think the twitching is over, but then it starts again and—”

“Are we talking hours here, David?”

“Not hours. No.”

“Minutes?”

“I timed her last night because I knew you want your callers to be specific, Dr. Virginia.”

“Commendable. I appreciate specific.”

“Twelve minutes and forty-three seconds.”

“When does this happen, David?”

“The twitching?”

“Yes! The twitching!” Dr. Virginia sounds testy.

“After we are done…doing it.”

“After you are done doing what, David?”

“After they're done fucking,” Annie explains.

But David is not nearly as blunt. “You know…,” he mumbles.

“David—if you want me to find a solution to your problem, you have to provide me with
all
the specifics of your problem. Is that clear? I refuse to engage in guessing games.”

“Copulating.”

Dr. Virginia is silent. A first.

Mason is giggling. “Multiple orgasms,” he tells the caller.

Dr. Virginia is still silent. It's a whiteout, soundproof silence. More silent than a quiet person's silence. The kind of silence you'd better enjoy, fast, because it won't last. “Multiple orgasms,” Dr. Virginia clarifies. “The twitching that your wife experiences is an orgasm. And extended twitching—”

“Extended twitching—” Mason imitates Dr. Virginia's voice.

“—the way you describe it, David, means that your wife is experiencing multiple orgasms. The older a woman gets, the longer her orgasms continue. Perfectly normal.”

Outside it is dark except for the headlights of one other car. A siren far away. A few miles to the right, parallel to 27, lies the ocean.

Inside Annie's car Dr. Virginia: “And who is watching your child tonight, Annie?”

Annie

T
HE DAY
I married Mason, my mother's belly was enormous. Ankles swollen, she danced with my new husband—her strawberry hair wild; her purple dress not a mother-of-the-bride dress—and when she cut in on my father's dance with me, she mocked tradition, led me in a tango like a big-bellied man pressing into me, her ring flickering where her hand guided mine. As my sister kicked from within her, she filled all space between us as though the three of us were intended to fit together, like this.

On the drive home from the wedding reception, a truck jackknifed into my parents' Honda, swatting them aside, killing my father. My mother lived just long enough to have my sister cut from her in the ambulance.

Whenever I imagine my mother and sister still joined by the cord in those minutes between birth and death, my sister's mouth is sucking air, seeking my mother. My sister is pink—not yet the bluish-white of thin milk; not yet inert and scrawny; not yet attached to wires and tubes inside the incubator where I would see her that night, and give her the name my parents had chosen when the ultrasound had revealed a girl: Opal.

Mine to keep?

To raise, then?

T
HE MORNING
Mason and I brought Opal home to our apartment at UNH, we propped the hospital's car seat on our bed and sat on either side of her, scared to speak or move, watching over her as she slept, her tiny body one pulsebeat like that of a bird, if you cup it in your palms to see if it's injured.

When she awoke, screaming, arms flailing, I swept her against me. Her legs scrambled, and her screams ripped into me till she became my sorrow, knees kicking my breasts as if she were trying to climb through my skin and into my womb.

“I feel like such an impostor,” I said.

“We're both impostors.” Mason stepped behind me, brought his arms around me, around her.

“You think her body remembers the accident?”

“She wasn't born yet.”

“Still…” I molded my back against him, and he rocked me…us…while she kept screaming. I was terrified of her.

“Since we are impostors and since she is ours now…”

Her snot and tears hot against my neck.

“She will be ours…right, Annie?”

My parents' lawyer had mentioned adoption. Unthinkable. “We can't just give her to someone else,” I told Mason.

“Then we may as well be the best damn impostors we can dream up.”

“Like playing house?”

“Like being awesome parents.” So much hope in his voice.

“I miss them so.”

“I miss them too.” He kissed me between my shoulder blades.

“You think she's hungry?”

“We could try feeding her.”

“I'll go read the instructions on the formula.” Supporting Opal's head, I laid her into Mason's arms.

He stroked her tummy with his thumb. Murmured to her, “What are we going to do with you?”

W
HENEVER
O
PAL
burst from sleep—screaming, hair matted with fear—I was sure her body remembered the accident. We would take turns walking with her through the apartment, a hundred loops or more. Jake helped. Did his loops with her when he visited. We'd rub Opal's back or tummy, whisper or sing to her, play music for her.

Aunt Stormy and Pete arrived from North Sea with fish stew and lemon meringue pies. Pete was a dentist who ran marathons, lived in the cottage next to Aunt Stormy's, and slept in her bed. Theirs was the story of a great love. “Every full moon they celebrate being together,” my mother had told me. “They paddle their kayaks from their inlet into the bay…drink champagne and eat cake while the sun dips down and the moon rises. In winter, they drive out to Montauk and have their champagne and cake on the big rocks below the lighthouse.”

Aunt Stormy and Pete walked their loops with Opal and helped us the way they must have helped my parents when I was born. When they sent Mason and me to a restaurant for dinner—our first time away from Opal—I kept thinking I'd forgotten something. Felt too light without her weight fastened somewhere to my body.

Though I got better at easing Opal into sleep, I didn't know what to do for her when she awoke because she'd be unconsolable for the first ten minutes. Joy, then—the only moment of joy since my parents' death—happened one dawn when I was able to soothe Opal as she came out of sleep, and her face, wet and sticky, lolled against my shoulder. A moment of joy that pierced my rage and confusion.

J
AKE'S DORM
was a few minutes from our apartment, and he'd bring us groceries, go to the library for Mason and me. Our living room table was buried: half of it, as before, under rice paper and fabrics, receipts and ticket stubs, scissors and glue, boxes of nails, and pictures I'd cut from magazines; the other half under boxes of formula and disposable diapers, tiny shirts and pajamas that needed to be folded.

I withdrew from my art history class. I couldn't imagine leaving Opal—not even with Mason or Jake, who urged me to complete summer school. Instead I sat with her on the rocking recliner Jake had bought at a farm auction, Opal's belly on my thighs, her face on my knees—a position Mason had discovered—and I'd jiggle her softly.

“Jiggling makes her let go,” he'd told Jake and me. “You'll feel her get heavy…content.”

It was a good position…for Opal and for me, because she couldn't see me cry.

For Mason, being her parent came naturally, but I was struggling.
What if I drop her? Starve her? Lose her somewhere?
Nothing in my life had prepared me for suddenly being someone's mother.
Maybe if you were pregnant and carried a child inside you all those months, you were used to it. You wouldn't just set it down somewhere and forget it.

W
HEN
M
ASON
and Jake registered for their fall classes—Mason in political science, Jake in environmental conservation—I applied for a semester's leave.

“You don't have to do this,” Mason said.

“If the three of us take shifts with Opal,” Jake said, “we can all finish school.”

“I'll work on my collages at home.”

Instead I knitted an afghan in four shades of pink, uneven rectangles that I sewed together…something I could do while Opal was awake.

“I'll help you organize,” Jake offered, pale hair sticking up in jumbled tufts, one of his earlobes lower than the other.

“I'll fix up a studio for you,” Mason said.

“Where?”

“I'll figure something.” Mason was always more attentive when Jake was around.

“We don't have space. And even if we did, I—”

“Your art is important.”

“Don't call it that.”

“Once you know where all your supplies are,” Jake said, “you'll want to do your collages again.” He could go from cool to dorky in no time, and he definitely looked cool today in his jeans and black T-shirt, with his hair like that. But whenever he dressed up—like when we encouraged him to bring a date—he'd plaster his hair down with a side part and wear something like plaid pants and a Mister Rogers cardigan and wing-tip shoes.

But I felt tired. Without ideas. Without urgency. Everything about Opal was far more urgent than my work.

The last collage I'd finished had come from being on the train while, from the other direction, another train whooshed past. To hold that moment, that fluency—air and movement and coats and rails—I'd shaved bits of lacy driftwood into segments of daylight that flitted by. Whatever I started out with never became the total image. A piece of bleached drift-wood would become not driftwood but windows on a train or, perhaps, a child's hair. And a bird's wing would become not part of a bird but something else entirely. Wind perhaps. A skirt. A cloud.

Now, I doubted that I could ever make another collage. Far too complicated. A definite sign that I'd lost
it
—whatever
it
was called. I didn't like to name
it
, though some of my teachers had. Talent? Gift? All right, coming from them. Pompous, if it were to come from me.

I doubted that my work would even recognize me. Instead I came to recognize the smell of Opal's skin—it changed so quickly—her crying smell and her eating smell and her swampy smell and her sleeping smell. I came to recognize the strength of her fingers when she dug them into my cheek. And I came to adore the ancient look that sometimes flickered deep within her pupils when she observed me with absolute stillness.
My little crone. My little wise woman.

O
NE OF US
was usually carrying her around. If she cried, Mason would rush over and pick her up right away. He and Opal both thrived, glommed on to each other with the rapt focus of infants. Jake made lists of her music: what calmed her and what didn't. Opal adored Soul Asylum but not Nirvana. Melissa Etheridge but not Alice in Chains. The Lemonheads but not Bad Religion. Pearl Jam but not the Offspring.

How many loops did we carry her that first year?

A thousand loops each? Three thousand loops? Mason in a cradle-hold, her face up in his arms; Jake with his big hands around her middle, her back against his chest, so that Opal could see where he walked with her; and I, trying to keep her from devouring me as her greedy mouth sucked at my neck.

A Thousand Loops
came out of that. Usually I didn't think of a title until I was almost finished—just let my hands and the material and whatever mysterious thing inside me find the direction—but for this collage I knew the title before I began. It was to be small. That I knew too, but nothing else, when I spread a double layer of butcher paper on my worktable and made a mix of Sobo Glue and water. I thinned acrylics…smeared them randomly on canvas board, my way of getting past my resistance to begin at all, my fear of the blank canvas that would reveal everything I couldn't do. In doing, roaming, I could trick myself into the illusion that I was working, though I knew it didn't count as work; and yet, the not-working was taking me deeper into myself, where I knew what I didn't think I knew. Where I found roundness touching roundness, merging, softening as I swirled loops from willow switches and clock parts…from feathers and the fringe from a sari. And even though, here too, Opal cut into the making of
Loops
with her needs, I was more at ease with her, held her till her body surrendered, molded itself against mine.

And I took that into my work.

O
NE MORNING
in November, while Opal was still asleep, I propped my raft collages against the walls of the living room and walked from one to the next. Why wasn't I done yet? What was it about the two boys and the raft that didn't leave me alone?

If I could capture it all at once—the boys and the raft and the continuity of their motion—would I know then what I saw? So far I'd caught them in separate images, atop the raft…next to the raft…under the raft…and, in my last version, Jake shoving Mason over the side and leaping off in one shining arc. I stopped—

Why haven't I seen the girl before?
With each collage, a girl, all red, had come closer to the boys on the raft…her hand in
Raft/1
; her lower arm in
/3
; her elbow and shoulder in
/4
; her profile in
/6.
I skimmed the red profile with my fingertips, closed my eyes because touch without sight is more sensitive to texture.

Curious to find the next image that would move the girl closer yet to the raft, I stirred white glue into a jar of water, brushed it across a piece of heavy watercolor paper. Overlaid the buckled surface with torn bits of mulberry paper and green rice paper…Different depths of water, yes. For the raft, I chose twine and—

Opal cried. Quickly, I washed the glue from my hands. Picked her up and changed her, fed her, and sang to her, all along thinking about how I'd weave the twine from the center outward, raising it above the water. After I took Opal for a walk, I tucked her in for her nap.