My father did not love one family more than the other. It was that he didn’t care about either more than he cared about himself. And just like that, I understood why my mother did it.
And here was Alice, my younger sister, who of course knew nothing. I’d imbued her with a sorcerer’s wisdom and she was only a child. All she knew was happiness, the gift of a mother’s love that had never spoiled. I wanted to give you that. I wanted to be good. I knew at the very least that I would be better.
—Did she plan it?
—No, I said. I don’t think so. I also don’t think she planned on killing herself. She probably just hated herself as much as someone could hate herself.
Alice was crying so much that she had to pull over. I knew it wasn’t good for the labor. But I couldn’t stop her. She fell against me and I held her. She cried and clutched me. I said, Shh, shh, and I told her it was all right. Now we had each other. I told her I had always felt her beside me, that it was one of the things that had sustained me. That, starting the week after my parents’ deaths, I felt her in my bed snuggling against me. Tugging on my leg as I got up to use the bathroom, smiling while she listened to me pee, trailing me into closets as I dressed. Following me up the stairs and down the stairs. Later, borrowing my jeans, all my old slutty dresses. Reading beside me. Asking me to help her with makeup. Asking about boys. Gosia making barszcz with uszkami, these terrible dumplings in beet broth, and us pretending to eat them but instead snapping them into the dog’s mouth. Our beet-stained hands. Then the two of us under the covers in my bed with a little pink flashlight, talking about our father. And we’d both look up at the canopy of our bedsheets like it was the galaxy and I would tell her fairy tales. The ruby slippers he stayed up all night making. I told her he would have loved her so much. More than you? she would ask, because she was only a little girl. Yes, I would say, more than me. I am absolutely sure of it.
37
I WANT TO TELL YOU about Big Sky’s wife, who, one Thanksgiving, right before all their guests arrived, dropped the carving knife on her foot and it went right through the nail of her big toe. Theatrical blood, blooming across the slate. I tried to think of what my mother would have said. She would have said slate was impossible to clean, that it would always be filthy. Big Sky told me the story, how he asked his wife if she thought she definitely needed to go to the hospital. He’d just had his first martini, the nice one before everyone gets there, and this was Montana, where you don’t want to leave your house unless it’s to go to the river or the mountain. I remember thinking, You are not a good man, thank God. But I only thought it then. It went away when he made love to me and I didn’t think of the story again until years later.
In the hospital Alice wrote herself into the intake sheet as my emergency contact. In the car on the way to the hospital she’d asked me who the father was this time. I told her the truth. I thought she might turn from me, once more and forever. But she didn’t. Look at you, she said. You thought you were barren, but you could barely last a month before you got knocked up again. Slut.
While we waited, I asked Alice to show me a picture of her mother. She pulled one from her wallet. Her mother—Francesca—had thick caramel hair like Alice’s. She was leaning against a stone rail, off the side of a Tuscan motorway, in a green wool sweater and a corduroy skirt. She was not more beautiful than my mother. They were both beautiful.
In triage my stomach felt like it was going to come out of me. Like I was going to give birth to all my organs instead of a child. A male nurse took my blood pressure and it became clear that the awful pain was not just part and parcel of back labor. I knew you were too young, but I never expected it to go badly, not again.
The nurse walked away to get a doctor, but no one came for minutes.
Alice screamed, My sister is sick!
When they finally got me into a room, the blood was gushing and the contractions were otherworldly. A mustached doctor came in, seemingly unmoved. He talked to me like I was poor. He wore a wedding ring and a college ring. He asked me who the father was. Why does it matter, I asked. He nodded and told me my child was very young, too young, but that was that. It might be okay, he said. But it might not. The contractions came for many hours, but you wouldn’t come down and I was too ill to wait. Still, they didn’t want to cut you out of me. They said the longer in there, the better. Like you were a piece of undercooked bread and the heat inside of me, even just a contact warmth, was better than your coming out, exposed to the newsprint colors in the air here.
* * *
I HAVE SHOWN YOU THE wreckage of my relationships. I know you won’t make the same mistakes. I can feel how strong you are inside of me. I want you to know you were born of a tender union, a short but kind one. It was meaningful in the bedroom if nowhere else. And it was the first time I used a man for something I actually wanted and not for something I thought I needed.
I heard one of the nurses say, It’s taking too long, we might lose her. I didn’t know if they were talking about me or you. They acted like it was the end of the world, your being so young, but I’d already seen the end of the world and knew better than they did. I knew you would live.
One nurse, a peaceful woman, cleaned my face with alcohol and smiled at me like she loved me. She pressed a cold cloth over my forehead when the contractions came. Hold on, baby, she said. Hold on a little bit longer for me, baby. She had small elfin ears and a pageboy haircut.
* * *
WHEN YOU WERE READY, YOU were so small that I barely had to push. I didn’t catch you in my hands; the peaceful nurse did, while I was off somewhere in my head. I was thinking about Alice, how she would make a good mother. That she would play the right games with you. Hold your head under the bath spigot so that water didn’t get into your eyes. I wasn’t delicate like she was. My mother was not delicate, either, only warm-bodied and withholding.
—Your daughter, your daughter, they kept saying. Look at your daughter.
It was a boy, the other one, I won’t call him your brother because I don’t think he was. I like to think it was you—I have to think of it that way because the alternative is hell—that it was a part of you that you didn’t need to bring. And that part of you, like a vestigial organ, was made to disappear. That’s what my father once said of a medical bill. That’s how he met Alice’s mother, by the way. Alice’s mother brought in a Mexican friend of hers who worked in the kitchen. The friend had a growth she needed removed from her neck. They had to work quickly and the surgery cost in the tens of thousands. She was an illegal immigrant. I remember my father coming home that night. I was eight years old. He came through the garage and I clapped for him and over a dinner of pizzaiola he told us about how two unfortunate women came in, two cooks in a kitchen, and one of them had a growth and they saved her in the nick of time and he made the bill disappear. And the other one was so grateful, she cried and cried and said, Bless you! They were each other’s only friends in the world, my father said. Or America, in any case. My father is such a good man, I thought.
Gosia never told me anything bad about my father. Nor did she really say good things about my mother. And she rarely said anything about herself. I don’t think anybody could have done a finer job than she did, given the circumstances. I was ten years old and she was an Austrian pessimist, childless by design. She had lovers in stone cities and her husband—my uncle—was inconsequential. She tried to lead by example. But she also left me alone with what to make of my life. She held me when I screamed, but she didn’t tell me how to feel. So that a callus could form over my past. It took meeting Alice to understand the precise ways in which I’d been affected. How the night of the killings informed all that I did with men and all that I didn’t do with women. My mother couldn’t keep my father. Can you imagine that that had once been an actual thought in my head?