The Love That Split the World

  Beau rubs the pinched spot between his eyebrows. “This is getting a little crazy.”

  “No kidding. We really can’t go to your house?”

  He stares at the ground and runs his teeth over his bottom lip. “It’s not good there.”

  I touch the side of his face, his skin warm and sleek with sweat. “Okay.”

  We sit down in the dewy lounge chairs, heads leaned against the side of the house. “I wish we could find out,” Beau says.

  “Huh?”

  “How it would feel later,” he says, “if we had more time.”

  I sigh and pull his arm around my shoulder. “Probably you’d get sick of me shouting out what I think’s going to happen in every movie, and I’d get sick of you drinking and leaving your clothes wherever you took them off. I’d hate how messy you keep your room, and it’d drive you crazy how I can’t do anything without planning every detail first.”

  Beau laughs.

  “What, you think I’m wrong?”

  He looks over at me. “I think that’s a lie and you know it.”

  “Okay, fine. You tell me what would happen.”

  “We’d get married,” he says.

  “Oh? In my world or yours?”

  “Both,” he says. “Then someday, ten or fifteen years from now, you’d have a baby.”

  “What would we name him?” I say, playing along.

  “Her,” he says.

  “What would we name her?” I say softly.

  “I don’t know. Maybe Natalie Junior,” he says. “She’d look just like you.”

  “But she’d throw like you.”

  “And she’d be smart like you. You two would talk about all the things I don’t get, and that way you’d never get bored with me.”

  I laugh into his neck. “And you’d coach football so you wouldn’t get bored with me.” His face lights up. It makes me want to say the sentence over and over again. “Beau Junior will be on the team, obviously.”

  “We can’t name our kid Beau Junior. He’d get called BJ. You want our son’s nickname to be Blow Job, Natalie?”

  “Oof, good point. So what would we name him?”

  “I don’t know.” He smooths my hair and kisses my head. “Probably just name him Natalie, too.”

  “You’re just saying all this because you know I can’t hold you to it.”

  “No,” he says. “I’m sayin’ it because I might not get another chance.”

  I twist my fingers through his hair, press my lips to his cheek. The words tangle in my throat, being born and dying a thousand times. I love you.

  On Thursday I climb out of the haze of hypnosis, and the first thing I see is Dr. Wolfgang’s smirk. My immediate thought is that I’ve just divulged something humiliating, but then I find Alice wringing her hands, eyes wide.

  “You guys find something?”

  “I always find something,” Wolfgang croaks. “This is the point of using a map.”

  That last bit comes off snidely, and his eyes flick to Alice, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She swallows and says. “Thank you, Frederick, we can handle it from here.”

  He mumbles something to himself in German but packs up and clears out all the same. When we’re alone, Alice goes to close the door and sits down in her chair, staring at me.

  “Well?” I say, uncomfortable and anxious. “Are you going to tell me?”

  She grabs the voice recorder off the desk and passes it to me. “Go on.”

  It takes me a minute to gather myself. Whatever’s in this recording, once I hear it, there’s no forgetting it. But if it’s the key to getting Grandmother back, I really have no choice. I take a deep breath and press PLAY.

  At first, all I hear is my own even breathing, how I imagine I must sound when I’m asleep.

  A sharp gasp interrupts the rhythm, as if I’ve been startled awake.

  “Mommy?” I hear myself say, only my voice is higher and smaller, somehow younger. “MOMMY!”

  I start to scream—the me in the recording—bloodcurdling shrieks.

  Suddenly, I’m not just hearing the sound anymore. I’m making it. The me in the room. I’m seeing it. I’m feeling it.

  All of it.

  I’m not in the office. I’m in the car, strapped into my car seat, as we smash headlong into something and spin sideways, flipping, my stomach looping inside me like we’re on a roller coaster. We hit the ground, the windows shattering on impact. Glass everywhere. Pain. The dark of night. Thunder screeches overhead, but I barely hear it. Silence drapes itself over the whole world, muffling my ears, the sound of my own voice, screaming, “Mommy, Mommy!” as the creek water and rain rush into the car.

  “STOP IT,” comes another voice.

  Not from my memory. It’s Alice’s voice, and I snap back into the office, mind reeling.

  “Wake her up,” Alice is saying from the voice recorder. “Right now, Frederick.”

  The recorder turns off as it reaches the end. I look up from the hunk of plastic shaking wildly in my hands to Alice, whose face is ghostly. “My dreams.”

  She nods. “They’re not dreams,” she says. “It’s a memory.”

  “She fell asleep,” I whimper. “She fell asleep at the wheel, and we wrecked.” Alice’s features remain stony as the memory keeps replaying in my mind, fragmented and dark, cold and wet, panic overtaking me. It shouldn’t be so scary—it was a long time ago. I shouldn’t feel this way, like nothing can make me safe. A wave of dizziness hits me, and I can’t remember how to breathe. I keep inhaling but the air won’t make it to my lungs. My chest aches all the way down through my arm.

  “Natalie,” Alice says, her voice rough but somehow comforting in its solidity. “Take deep breaths. Focus on your breathing. It’s all going to be okay, I can promise you that. What you’re experiencing right now is temporary.”

  I barely hear her. I can’t breathe. I’m going to die. Whatever’s wrapping around me, suffocating me, it’s inescapable.

  “Natalie,” Alice says more harshly. She grabs my hand in hers. “Hold on to my hand as tight as you can.”

  I’m so dizzy, so lightheaded and empty of breath.

  “Grip my hand, Natalie.”

  I tighten my fingers around her hand.

  “Tighter,” Alice says. “As tight as you can, and inhale. Breathe in.”

  I obey, fighting the stuttering of my lungs as I fold my hand over Alice’s.

  “Good,” she says. “Now relax and let your breath out. Can you do that?”

  I can, and after a few more cycles, the dizziness and pain subside. Alice squeezes my hand lightly and gives me a weak smile. “If it’s too much, we could bring in an EMDR therapist,” she says quietly. “You don’t have to keep feeling this.”

  I free my hand from hers. My breath still comes heavy, but the crushing feeling has lightened. “Two more weeks,” I say. “That’s all.”

  “If you’re sure,” Alice says, sitting back.

  I do my best to keep my mind on this crammed office, my eyes on Alice’s face, my heart rate detached from that memory as I ask, “Why wouldn’t she tell me?”

  “Who, Grandmother?”

  “My mom,” I say. “I’ve had this nightmare my entire life. She knows about it. Why wouldn’t she tell me?”

  Alice sighs and tilts her head. “Natalie, the one time I ever had sex with a man, when I was nineteen, I got pregnant.”

  “I didn’t realize you’re—”

  “Definitely gay,” Alice says. “But that’s not the point. The point is, that guy didn’t want to be a dad, and I didn’t want to have him in my life forever, and I was in the middle of undergrad at Stanford, and . . . all signs pointed to abortion. Except that I really wanted to have the baby. I was a lesbian, feminist scientist, but deep down, I knew I’d also always wanted kids. An
yway, I ended up convincing myself I wasn’t ready but by then I was pretty far along. I lined up a family to adopt the baby, and I made excuses not to go home on breaks. When my son was born, I handed him over, and I never told my family he existed.”

  I shake my head. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because the reason I kept it from everyone wasn’t that I thought they’d be disappointed in me. It was because my heart was broken. I know now I was suffering from postpartum depression, but that wasn’t all. I regretted my decision. And I can tell myself that my baby was better off with parents who were adults, who had steady income—he probably was—but there’s no way for me to ever know that for sure.”

  Alice takes a shuddering breath, and her voice tightens. “I’ve regretted my decision for thirteen years now. Nothing has ever hurt me like the fear that I’d made the wrong choice for my kid. And sometimes, we don’t talk about things because we don’t want to be comforted. We don’t want anyone to tell us it wasn’t our fault, or that they forgive us, or that we did the best we could. We want to hold on to that pain because we think that’s what we deserve. We worry that if we let it go, we’re dishonoring it. And, when I look at you . . .” She presses her fingertips over her mouth, bobbing her head as she fights back tears.

  I don’t want to comfort her. I want her to cry. I want her to cry like I’ve cried, like I want my birth mother to cry. It scares me how I feel, now that the anxiety has faded: furious, boiling, explosive.

  “You have to understand her,” Alice whispers.

  “She could’ve helped me,” I say. “She could’ve helped me, and she didn’t.”

  “Hey, honey!” Mom’s voice comes over the phone bubbly and excited, which only upsets me more. “We were just missing you!”

  It takes me a second to steady myself as I pace along the patio behind Megan’s room. “I know,” I choke out.

  “What?”

  “I know about the accident.”

  A long exhale follows the silence. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?” I’m so frustrated that all I can do is laugh. “You’ve known the whole time. Why I was having the nightmares, why I was afraid of the dark, why I was having panic attacks. At any point in the last fifteen years you could’ve helped me, but you were so worried I’d find out it was your fault that you just let me suffer. You could’ve taken the suffering away, and you didn’t.”

  “You don’t understand,” she pleads. “I was trying to protect you from unnecessary pain—”

  “Protect me?” I shriek. “Why even bother sticking me in counseling if you weren’t going to tell me what was causing my problems?”

  “I didn’t know if the accident had anything to do with it!” she says, voice shaking. “Your counselors were all so sure it was about—”

  “God, I’m the only person who’s not entitled to know anything about my life, aren’t I?”

  “Natalie, that’s not fair. I’m your mother. It’s my job to—”

  “To lie to me? Admit it, Mom, you were protecting yourself. ”

  “Baby, please,” she whispers. “You don’t understand. I thought about telling you, a million times, but I didn’t want to make you relive it if it wasn’t going to help you. The EMDR—it worked. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t think you needed to know—”

  “Stop trying to justify yourself.”

  “Natalie, I’m your mother!”

  “I don’t have a mother,” I scream.

  I can’t do this, can’t finish this conversation. My mind is swimming. My breathing is spastic. The weight pushes down on my chest again. I hang up and throw my phone toward the woods. Almost immediately, it starts ringing from the brush where it lands.

  Sheryl Crow’s and Stevie Nicks’s voices slow to a warbling as my mind spins, my lungs heave, and my vision splotches. The moment I realize I can’t feel my legs, the darkness surrounds me.

  28

  “There once was a man named Abraham, and God spoke to him freely,” Grandmother says.

  “Like you talk to me,” I say.

  “Sort of like that,” Grandmother says. “Maybe more like Megan and God talk, in quiet thoughts and deep, intense feelings. Anyway, they talked all the time, and Abraham knew God’s voice so well that when God spoke, he heard him precisely. And Abraham knew God’s heart so well that when God told him to do something, he trusted him implicitly, like a child trusts a parent before she realizes adults can fail.”

  It hurts to think about.

  Why does that hurt me?

  I’m safe, in my bed, down the hall from my parents, but something’s not right between us.

  The recurring dream. It hits me like a wall of wind. The dream about the car accident isn’t a dream. It’s a memory.

  I lift my eyes to Grandmother’s chair in the corner and see there’s no door beside it. “I’m dreaming right now,” I say. “This is a dream too.”

  “No.” Grandmother shakes her head, a gray-streaked section of hair falling across her forehead. “This is a memory, inside of a dream.”

  “A memory,” I murmur to myself, sinking down in my sheets.

  “You were fourteen when I told you this story.”

  “That’s right,” I say, though my mind’s still foggy. “The story didn’t make sense to me then.”

  “Does it now?” she asks.

  “I . . . I don’t know,” I manage. “At least the part about trust, and how parents can fail. That makes sense.”

  “Ah,” Grandmother says, folding her hands in her lap. “So we’re here already.”

  “Where?” I ask, trying to shake the fog from my head.

  “At the part of the story where your trust is broken,” she says.

  “You knew?”

  “Girl, how many times have you told me I know everything?”

  “All the stories,” I say. “They didn’t mean anything when you told me them, but they all apply later, don’t they? Like prophecies.”

  “Like prophecies, yes,” she says. “But not prophecies. Like parables, but not parables.”

  “You’re even behind a smoke screen in my dreams,” I say.

  “That’s your fault, isn’t it? You can’t blame me. I’m not really here.”

  “How does this work—a memory inside a dream?”

  “Exactly like the nightmare, I assume. You’re remembering a story I told you and conflating it with the current events of your life to parse out meaning.”

  “Now you sound like Alice.”

  “Well, you’ve got a little bit of her stored up in here too. You keep everyone you love close, Natalie. You keep bits of them within you. You let every person you meet affect you.”

  “I wish I didn’t let them affect me so much.”

  “You must be feeling uprooted now that you know the truth about the accident,” she says. “Like your family is no longer a safe place, and if they aren’t, what is?”

  “If you say so, I must. Since you’re just a product of my consciousness.”

  “You’ve got some nerve, girl,” she says.

  “I learned from the best. Before you left me.”

  Grandmother’s knowing smile falters. She leans over her knees toward me, reminding me of Alice. “I’ll never leave you. Don’t forget that,” she says.

  Did she actually say that? I try to remember. I don’t think she did, but still, it feels so real I believe her, this dream version of Grandmother. I must really think that, deep down, or at least want it, to be able to conjure up those words from her now.

  “Now sit back and let me tell you this story,” she says.

  “Again,” I point out.

  “Again. One day God spoke to a man called Abraham. ‘Abraham,’ he said, ‘take Isaac’—or Ishmael, depending on who’s telling it—‘your son whom you love more than your o
wn life, and go to Moriah, where you will sacrifice him on a mountain.’

  “And hearing and knowing God, Abraham obeyed, taking his son and two servants on a journey to Moriah. When he saw the mountain God had chosen, Abraham told his servants to wait at the bottom while he and Isaac went to worship. ‘Then we will come back to you,’ Abraham told his servants, for he knew God would not lead him into danger. He wouldn’t cause Abraham pain.

  “As they climbed, Abraham chose wood to build the sacrificial fire. He passed it to Isaac, who said, ‘Father, where is the lamb to be offered?’

  “‘God will provide,’ Abraham told his beloved son, and they kept climbing. When they reached the summit, Abraham strained his ears, listening for God’s voice, but when he heard nothing he built the altar and bound Isaac to it. Though he began to be afraid, he still trusted that God loved him, that he would not lead him to slay his son without reviving him again. And so he raised his knife over Isaac’s heart, and finally he heard God speak again.

  “‘Abraham, Abraham,’ God said. ‘Set down your knife. Do not harm your son. I’ve seen your heart, and I know you withhold nothing from me. You know my face as that of your father. You recognize my love for you, as you know your own for Isaac. You know what you would do for your child, and you understand that is what I’d do for you.’

  “Abraham released his son then, and when he looked up to the bramble, he saw a ram with its horns caught in the brush. Together, they sacrificed the ram, which had been sent to take Isaac’s place. From then on, they called that place God Provides.”

  “Why did they have to sacrifice anything?”

  “It was a symbol,” Grandmother explains. “Of an innocent dying on behalf of someone else—the greatest act of love. A choice to die so someone else doesn’t have to.”

  “Your stories are full of symbols, aren’t they?”