“Girls!” Scotty called from the bottom of the stairs. “Hurry up; it’s time to go! Dress warm—it’s cold out!”
52
November 21
It’s my birthday.
It’s so strange to be here instead of there on this day. On any day.
You’re not supposed to ask for gifts; if they are freely given, you are grateful. But you can’t expect them.
Am I allowed to wish for one?
The gift I would like is for them to know, to exact payment. They are my beloveds, my sister, daughter, and best friends. In some ways I believe they’ve known all along, for how could they miss it?
Or maybe my own experience has been colored: of trusting and loving, then turning my back and my skull being smashed—hearing the bones in my head crack. Then feeling hands around my throat, seeing that wild gaze—so charged with fury, but then emotion draining away, staring into my eyes with no emotion as dispassionately as someone trying to loosen a particularly tight lid from a jar. It has colored my judgment, made me believe that there could be no questions—none at all. That is the drawback of knowledge. It gives you a singular point of view that you cannot, in fairness, expect others to share.
I would have liked to have remained blank as I died, to not give the satisfaction of my panic and desperation, but I wasn’t that strong, or perhaps a better word would be disciplined. I so quickly lost track of what I wanted—to remain calm. My survival instinct made me want to fight with everything I had. But instinct wasn’t enough. I started to die the minute that sculpture, the owl I had loved so much, struck my head. I would have withheld my fear if I could. I believe it was accepted as a gift.
Although I couldn’t scream—the grip around my neck was too tight—I could hear the terrible choking, gurgling sounds coming from my throat, the fine bones breaking under the pressure of strong thumbs. In that most human of moments, I thought I sounded inhuman.
I reached for those hands, wanting to pull them away, but I couldn’t even reach them. My muscles tensed, softened, and my arms fell slack. I imagine the power bestowed by my weakness. Is it odd that I didn’t wonder why this was happening to me? Every cell in my body knew, so why bother asking the question? The point is, while being murdered, I was purely there on the bed, physically and therefore mentally present in the moment, experiencing my own death.
And Matthew’s death. My son had been moving and dancing and kicking for weeks. He was even more active in my womb than Sam had been, and that is saying a lot. I was sure she’d come out a champion tennis player. Her prebirth serve-and-volley game was strong.
Matthew was ready to be born. If he could have arrived in July, instead of October when he was expected, I believe he would have. He had such an exuberant life force. I felt I already knew him. When he kept me awake, his feet contentedly tapping, I could picture him learning to walk early, chortling with pleasure as he toddled after Popcorn, a dancer who would grow up singing and laughing.
He had a wonderful personality.
He fought even harder than I did. Even as my own life faded away, I felt Matthew twisting and punching. His little fists balled up, moving in slow motion in the fluid in which he swam. My heart beat oxygen into his. Every breath I took was a breath for Matthew. When I stopped being able to breathe, so would he. That was the only thought that pulled me away from the physical act of dying. The sorrow that my son, already so alive, would lose his life before he had the chance to truly live it. I felt such heartbreak for his father—that his father would never know his beautiful son.
So many misconceptions about the moment of death. They say your entire life flashes before your eyes. You have time to make peace with your regrets, to forgive and let go of resentments, to fill your heart with love. I can see why people want to believe that in the minutes before death, a person can find perfect peace. For me, that did not happen. My entire wonderful life was wiped out, as if it had never been, in violent thrashing, despair, pain beyond belief.
I would have thought it was pure anger that drove my killer—a crazed moment that would surely end as the rage stopped, when realization that this was happening, that I was dying, would have halted the whole thing. But it didn’t. That’s when I saw that terrible calm enter the eyes staring down at me.
I was so focused on that familiar, once so-loved face, during those long minutes of death. At the very end, when I’d stopped breathing, before the last spark of consciousness left me, I heard the sigh. My vision was gone, but I heard footsteps across the room, the sound of the air-conditioning cranking up, and my sensation was of cold air blowing from the vent, a harbinger of cold beyond human understanding, the ice of death.
Until those final moments in my frigid room, I couldn’t spare a thought for my daughter. There was no clinging to the girl that I love, no sense of goodbye. It was all me and Matthew, because we were together, and my death was his death.
But at that last instant, when my life flickered and extinguished, it was Sam I thought of. It was all my daughter. I gave my entire self, my spirit, to Sam. It was all I could do for her, my daughter, my girl. The dead mourn the living, the loss of closeness and the future. I won’t be there to teach Sam what I knew about growing up, and I have lost the chance to be guided by her.
When she was little, she would come to the gallery after school and paint and draw. The works that inspired her most were so different from my beloved American Impressionists. After my grandmother and Ruth took a trip to India and Nepal, Mathilda acquired several fifteenth-century Tibetan paintings and a hundred-year-old English translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The illustrations were colorful, painted in shades of red and green on parchment, filled with images of protector and wrathful gods, bodhisattvas, and Green Tara, the mother of Buddhism. Sam was fascinated with all the characters, but hungry ghosts moved her most, and she drew an entire book of stories about the desperate souls who died in violence and misery, who haunted the earth without ever finding peace.
What would Sam think, to know that I have become a hungry ghost?
After my mother died, when I was too sad to do anything but dream about heaven, I read the book of the dead and learned that the bardo state lasts for forty-five days after death. The bardo is a ghost world, a period of time before a person is reborn. It gave me comfort to imagine that after a month and a half in the bardo, my mother could find peace in another life. I looked for her everywhere: in feral kittens, a bobcat that stalked the meadow, a new baby at the beach.
Will Sam remember those Tibetan-inspired drawings she did of beings in the bardo? Will they make her think of me?
Many more than forty-five days have passed since my murder. My death was in July, and now it is November, my birthday. A single birth, a death, and there has been no rebirth, no respite from wandering. I’m left to believe that there never will be. My violent end leaves me ravenous for justice, a hunger that hasn’t been sated.
Being a mother was the best part of my life. Scotty had nothing on me in that department—I remember how I scared her, upset her, in that moment early in my pregnancy when I wavered, when I thought having Matthew might change everything too much, upset the order of things. It was just a few seconds, but it angered her. I didn’t appreciate her feelings enough; I wish I had been more sensitive.
Motherhood. Yes, Scotty understood more than anyone what it meant to me. When I think of Sam now, what she is about to face. How will she manage? I remember how I felt when my mother died. Scholarship and achievement had been my way of healing from what the Andersons had done. But once I conceived Sam, nothing else mattered in the same way. I wanted Kate to have this too—the eternal connection to a child, the transformation from a victim who had suffered at the hands of others to a powerful woman able to give life. Lulu too—our dear and not-so-dear secretive mystery girl Lulu. It sometimes felt so unfair to me that only Scotty and I had experienced motherhood. But frankly, not everyone deserves it—not just the childless, but not even every woman who’s become a mother.