When the Lights Go Out
But something doesn’t add up, like a puzzle with interlocking pieces, the rounded tabs and the carved-out openings that are all supposed to connect. They don’t.
Because there’s the photograph of the man. The one I hold so tightly in my grip that the edges of it begin to disintegrate with sweat. I spend the night holding the photograph of the man with the lake and the trees, knowing he meant something to Mom, that she intentionally kept this photograph and this man from me.
Who is he? I have to find him. I have to find him so that I can know who he is, if he’s my father. Then I’ll know how and when and why I came to be with Mom. Mom who is not my mom.
I look hard for something, for some clue that I’ve failed to see. The cut of his hair, the color of the lake, the type of trees in the backdrop. The way he stands, the brand of his jeans—the tag far too small to read, but still I try—that sailboat in the distance. Is it really white like I believed it to be, or is it more of a pale yellow, or white with pale yellow stripes? None of which matter.
And then I see it. It’s a small thing, but significant enough to me. Because suddenly every detail is significant to me.
This man is left-handed. I know this, or convince myself I know it, because he’s wearing his watch on his right wrist. It isn’t one of those hard-and-fast rules, and yet it’s common enough to be true. People tend to wear their watches on their nondominant wrists.
I think that there are only a handful of lefties in the world, which narrows down my search exponentially, though still the field is huge. Instead of being one in seven billion, the odds that I’ll find this man are now more like one in seven hundred million.
And I know it then; I’ll never find this man.
He could be anywhere. He could be anyone. Even if I found myself staring right at him, I’d never know it because I’ve never seen his face before.
I set the photograph aside. I’m so cold that my skin turns mottled and gray. It’s got a purplish tint to it and looks like it’s covered in lace, a white overlay to the purple skin. I sit there on the floor, staring at my hands, my legs. All that exposed skin, which is as cold and as mottled as Mom’s was before she died.
And I come to one conclusion: like Mom, I’m also dying.
At first, everything around me is black. I can’t bring myself to move. I’m too cold, too tired, too scared to move. I can’t bring myself to throw the covers over my arms and legs. Night goes by with the speed of a sloth. Painfully slow.
But then it begins. Sunrise. Daylight. Morning comes. Out the window, I watch it happen.
It starts as a single pixel of light. The sun still tucked safely below the horizon, scattering its light into the atmosphere. A semidarkness. A soft glow of yellow and blue. The clouds thicken around it, getting drawn in, like nuts and bolts to a magnet. They flush at their edges, turning shades of pink and red. As if the clouds themselves are embarrassed.
The sun rises higher and higher into the sky.
And just like that, day has arrived.
The air in the room starts to warm thanks to the sun’s rays pouring in the open window. My mottled, purple skin disappears, getting replaced with a healthy pink. I’m not dying after all. I’m still very much alive, it seems. For now at least.
eden
August 4, 1997
Egg Harbor
It’s been two weeks since they took my baby from me.
Today, Aaron and I sat in Dr. Landry’s office.
“The good news,” Dr. Landry said, face firm, undeviating, with no hint of a smile, “is that we now know you can get pregnant. Your body is capable of that. But maintaining the pregnancy is proving to be another matter.”
We had only been there a couple of minutes. Aaron and I sat beside each other on matching tufted armchairs, Dr. Landry on a swivel chair behind his desk. In my hand I clenched a tissue, dabbing at my cheeks as Dr. Landry stared at me.
I asked him, “How long until we can try again?” meaning all of us, another round of IVF at the cost of another ten thousand dollars, money that Aaron and I most certainly didn’t have because we didn’t have it the first time around. I now had three credit cards in my name and each were nearly maxed out. The minimum payment alone was more than I could pay. I’d never been in debt before; I’d never been behind on payments; I’d never been in the red. I’d never been bankrupt. It made me anxious, and yet I easily reasoned that it was money well spent.
I’d sell my own organs—a spare kidney or the lobe of a lung—before giving up on a baby.
He was dressed down today, no lab coat as usual, and, as Aaron attempted to cling to my hand, I pulled away, folding my hands in my lap. The numbness, the narcosis, it stuck around me like a cold that wouldn’t quit. When I wasn’t in bed crying, then I was numb. I felt nothing. I had only two modes these days: sad and numb.
Dr. Landry replied with “There’s really no definitive answer to that; we can try again whenever you’re ready,” but his words were blighted by Aaron’s incredulous sigh because Aaron, as he’d already told me, didn’t want to try again. He wanted to be through.
The reason was simple.
The reason was me.
For the last two weeks, I couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed. Morning, noon and night, I cried for my lost child, wondering how it was possible to grieve for something that was never truly mine.
Man plans, and God laughs. Isn’t that what they say?
Aaron didn’t want me to make another appointment with Dr. Landry. He had other suggestions for whom I should call instead: a therapist, a support group. Maybe all I needed was some time away, he foolishly believed. A trip by myself to one of those places I’ve forever longed to go. St. Lucia, Fiji, Belize. As if lying by the seashore and drinking a cocktail might help me forget the fact that I’d just lost a child, might annihilate that desire to ever have a child, so that when I returned I’d feel fresh, revived, happy.
“I don’t want a goddamn vacation!” I screamed at him then, lying in bed, blankets over my head, coming up from under the covers only for air. “I want a baby. Why don’t you get that, Aaron? What’s so difficult to understand?”
And it was only then in broad daylight, when I dared to poke my head out of my own dark cavern, that I could see Aaron’s eyes were red and swollen, his heart visibly broken like mine. His shirt was wrinkled, the buttons lined up incorrectly, his hair standing on end. His facial hair had grown threefold, proof to me that he, like me, wasn’t leaving the house, that he too couldn’t bring himself to go to work.
But I didn’t acknowledge this.
“I know what you’re feeling,” he said quietly, compassionately, his voice losing control as he wiped at his eyes with the back of a shirtsleeve.
“Trust me,” he said. “I get it.”
A better person would have realized that Aaron had lost something too. A better person would have consoled him, would have let him console and be consoled. But not me.
This was my loss, not his.
“Go away,” I barked then, and I heard it in my own voice, heard it and hated it but said it nonetheless. “You have no idea what I’m feeling. Don’t stand there and pretend you know what it’s like to lose a child.”
I returned to my cave, throwing the blankets back over my head where I could scarcely breathe.
“This baby. This pregnancy. This need to get pregnant,” Aaron lamented as he stood in the doorway, urging me to eat, to get out of bed, to go for a walk, to get some fresh air. “They’ve gotten the best of you, Eden. They’ve turned you into someone I don’t recognize anymore. Someone I don’t know.”
And then he reminded me of who I was before that day we decided to start a family.
Fun loving. Benevolent and genuine. Carefree.
“I’d give anything to go back to being Aaron and Eden. Just us. Just you and me,” he said, and for a bat of an e
ye I remembered us on our wedding day, riding in on horseback on Aaron’s family farm in a regal ball gown, exchanging nuptials beneath the nighttime sky. A celebration worthy of a fairy tale. I had found my everything. I had married my prince.
But suddenly my everything wasn’t good enough.
I needed more.
“I want to try right away. As soon as we can,” I told Dr. Landry today as we sat in his office, and it was then that Aaron stood up from his tufted armchair and left the room.
September 8, 1997
Egg Harbor
Aaron didn’t show up at the fertility clinic for today’s appointment.
For weeks I’ve gone through the whole rigmarole, the process of developing follicles, of returning to Dr. Landry’s office every few days to have my blood drawn and an ultrasound performed to see if there were any viable candidates for the procedure. I’ve been injected with a legion of hormones, each which leave blood blisters along my skin and a gamut of side effects, from headaches to hot flashes to moodiness and pain.
Already, Dr. Landry has forewarned me that, should implantation occur, Aaron and I will need to administer shots of progesterone into my backside to not only make a baby this time, but to help maintain the pregnancy. We’ll do it daily, for ten weeks or more. “It’s not for the faint of heart,” he assured me, but I told him I’m ready. “I’ll do anything, anything,” I swore to Dr. Landry as he listed the side effects of the progesterone shots—the weight gain, the facial hair, the unbearable pain—to have a baby.
And then, when a mature follicle was ready, spotted on Dr. Landry’s ultrasound monitor where not so long ago sat the image of a baby with a heartbeat and webbed hands and feet, we scheduled an appointment for the egg retrieval, where Dr. Landry planned to insert a needle deep inside me to remove the eggs from my womb.
Today was that day.
Except it wasn’t.
I sat for hours waiting for Aaron to come and deliver his sperm.
Three hours and fourteen minutes to be precise, watching as other couples—six, eight, ten of them—came and went through the glass doors.
I read each of the magazines in the waiting room two times.
I made an attempt to phone Aaron, but he didn’t answer my call.
I told the receptionist, who stared at me with shame and regret, that Aaron was only running late, that he would be here soon.
That he was caught up in traffic.
And then, after another hour of waiting, I asked to speak to a nurse and one was fetched for me, and, standing closer to her than appropriate so that she had to take a half step back to regain her personal space, I wondered whether they had any of Aaron’s sperm remaining from the analysis or our first round of IVF. Certainly they had some remaining in storage, a few drops even, a single sperm, half-dead, clinging to the edges of a petri dish.
But she shook her head remorsefully, apologized and said no.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “There is no sperm.”
The nurse took a step away, but before she could go I laid a hand on her arm and asked whether my eggs could be removed now, if they could simply be stored somewhere, held on to until Aaron came to make his deposit. It seemed completely possible, like layaway, but I was reminded then of the little life span an egg has after ovulation. “There isn’t time,” she said, and it was then and only then that I inquired about donor sperm, an idea that settled in my mind slowly, one morsel at a time, while I spent hours in the fertility reception room, reading pregnancy magazine after pregnancy magazine, waiting for Aaron to come.
Donor sperm.
Two words I thought I’d never have to use in my entire life.
The desperation in my voice was tangible to every single person in the room, but none more than me. “Can we use donor sperm?” I begged, latching on to her arm now, fingernails leaving crescent-shape indentations in her skin.
“Where is your husband, Eden?” the nurse asked, stepping away, pretending altogether that I had never uttered those words, donor sperm. She was speaking down to me, that I knew. That I could clearly hear, as she riffled through a patient file in her hands, another patient’s file, obviously distracted and needing to be somewhere other than in the reception area with me.
“Where’s Aaron?”
It was then that I told her how he must have gotten caught up at work, except that was a lie because it was Monday, the one day in which Aaron never worked.
I inquired again about donor sperm—certainly they had vials and vials of male sperm stored somewhere in this facility that I could use—but the nurse assured me that they would need consent from me and Aaron—from the both of us—to use someone else’s sperm.
In other words, Aaron would need to be present to give his consent, he would need to be here, and Aaron wasn’t here.
Aaron wasn’t running late and he wouldn’t be there soon.
He had no intention of coming at all.
He just didn’t tell me.
Not until I came home from the fertility clinic to find him at the kitchen table, drinking a beer. A beer! Suffice to say I lost it completely, feeling enraged. I screamed at him then like I’d never done before, uttering words I could never take back. Coming at him with fists raised, thinking for a minute that I could hit him. That I would hit him. I’d never done a thing like that before, and my fists stopped just shy of him as I turned on myself instead, pulling my own hair, screaming like a maniac. Aaron didn’t flinch. I’d scarcely ever raised my voice to Aaron before, and it left me feeling rattled long after he left the room, walking out on me midsentence. It was the medication doing it, I convinced myself as I stood there in the empty kitchen in silence, strands of my own hair in my hands, watching as outside the sun went down—an arc of pinks and blues setting over our share of the bay, heaven on earth as we once so foolishly believed—the myriad fertility drugs affecting my judgment. They were the reason why I screamed and yelled, and yet I had every reason in the world to be angry.
Aaron never showed for the appointment.
He never came to deliver his sperm.
My eggs were ready and waiting, but where was he?
“Where were you?” I demanded as I lifted his empty beer bottle from the kitchen table and hurled it against the wall, longing and hoping for the release of a thousand minuscule shards of glass when all it was was two. Two large chunks of amber glass falling to the floor with a dull thud, leaving me far from satisfied. I reached for a collection of mail then, set there on the table’s edge, and hurled that every which way too, bills and late notices drifting to the ground like fallen leaves.
“I told you,” he said after I’d followed him into the living room—voice remarkably composed because he had likely sat there half the day rehearsing what he was going to say—“that I was through. We’ve been at this for a year,” he said. “Over a year. We’re broke, Eden. Everything we’ve worked for is gone. We have no more money to invest in this,” he said, holding out a bill for me, one that arrived in today’s mail, a credit card statement with a seventeen-thousand-dollar debt. “Look what this has done to us. To our marriage. To you.
“I can’t keep doing this,” he told me.
“I meant it, Eden. I’m through.
“It’s time for you to choose.”
And then he reached for a packed bag that sat on the hallway floor.
The front door opened and then closed again, and I wondered if that was it then.
If that was the last time I’d ever lay eyes on Aaron.
jessie
I sit on the sofa beside Liam, in his apartment. His laptop is on my thighs. I find my way to the website for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, thinking that if Mom stole me, for whatever reason, if I had a family before her, then maybe someone once reported me as missing. Maybe my real family is missing me.
On the website, I d
iscover countless babies stolen from their cribs. Kids who got on the bus, but never made it home from school. Pregnant women last seen on the gritty footage of parking lot surveillance cameras. Infant twins missing after a parent was found dead. Babies lifted from hospital nurseries.
One by one, I become absorbed in the sad stories. The stories of the missing. Thumbnail image by thumbnail image, I open them all. I read about a toddler who was last seen playing on his own front porch in some small town in Georgia, where he lived with his father and stepmother in Jeffersonville, Georgia. He was last seen at approximately ten fifteen on a Tuesday morning, way back in 1995. His hair is sandy and his eyes are green. An age-progressed photo shows what he might look like today, if he’s even still alive. He was taken by his mother in a custody battle. There’s a picture of her too. In it, she looks a little agrarian, a little unsophisticated, a little mean. Her hair is sparse and thin, her skin weathered and blotchy.
I think that it’s possible that, like the little boy from Jeffersonville, Georgia, I am a child stolen from my front porch or from my crib, a child that climbed aboard the school bus one morning and never came home that afternoon.
“What did you find?” Liam asks as I scroll through the website, finding a search form.
“Nothing yet,” I tell him. But I hope I will soon.
I fill in as much as I think I know and leave the rest blank. I am child. I am female. These are things I know. I make up the dates I may or may not have gone missing. I fill them in, this three-year gap that stretches clear from the day Jessica Sloane was born until the day she died. Three years. Three momentary years. Shorter than a presidential term, than the span between Olympic Games, between leap years.
I watch as over one hundred cases load. One hundred little girls missing in a three-plus-year time span. One hundred little girls missing in a three-year time span that now, seventeen years later, still haven’t been found. It makes me sad. I think of their parents, of their real moms and dads.