When the Lights Go Out

  “Where are you going?” he asks, and I tell him I’m not sure. Anywhere. That I just have to get out of here, and he says he knows what I mean. His family waits upstairs in his brother’s hospital room for the funeral home to arrive, to carry the body away. That’s the last thing he needs to see. That’s what he tells me. He shuffles from foot to foot, looking antsy and strung out, desperately in need of a good night’s sleep.

  I ask him if he wants to go for coffee, and together we leave.

  * * *

  That night, at home alone, I find the courage to open the journal. I caress its cover for a good fifteen minutes first, scared to death of what I might find inside. Maybe my father. Maybe not.

  I sit on the sofa in Mom’s and my home in Albany Park. Because for now it’s not yet on the market, though I know that soon it will be. I carefully pull the cover back. A flattened leaf slips from its inside and onto my lap—red, with edges that fold up slightly at their edges—as does a photograph, which falls facedown on my thighs. There’s a name etched on the back. Aaron. I know what the picture is before I ever look. The photograph I found as a child. The one Mom hid away in this journal so that I couldn’t find it again.

  My heart breaks at the familiar sight of Mom’s handwriting.

  My eyes wade through the pages, tears blurring my vision. Making it hard to take in the words. But I do anyway, curled into a ball on the sofa, beneath a blanket Mom and I once shared, listening to her favorite records over and over again on repeat.

  Aaron showed me the house today, it reads. I’m in love with it already—a cornflower blue cottage perched on a forty-five-foot cliff that overlooks the bay. Pine floors and whitewashed walls. A screened-in porch. A long wooden staircase that leads down to the dock at the water’s edge where the Realtor promised majestic sunsets and fleets of sailboats floating by...

  eden

  November 10, 1997

  Egg Harbor

  When I awoke this morning there was the most unpleasant sense in my stomach, as if I’d swallowed some sort of gastric acid in the middle of the night and there it sat, lost somewhere between my throat and my intestines, not sure which way to go. Up or down. There was an awful taste in my mouth, as if I’d drunk a vat of vinegar before bed, and when I hurried for a glass of water to wash it down, I wound up hurling the water and everything else inside my stomach into the kitchen sink and then stood, clutching the countertop, tasting vomit, trying hard to catch my breath. There was saliva on my chin and tears in my eyes.

  What did I eat last night?

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t much. I haven’t eaten much for weeks, having subjected myself to a life of seclusion since my brush with that bartender in the back seat of my car. I haven’t left the house other than for the bare necessities, for fear of running into him on the street. My home is my prison. I’ve been too ashamed to go outside.

  Ashamed for a whole slew of reasons, my promiscuity only being one of them.

  Overnight I had gone from being a respectable human being to a voyeur, a kidnapper, a misfit, a freak. The morning after my encounter with that bartender, I came home to find bruises on my neck from where he sucked my skin raw so that I couldn’t leave the house until they healed, my skin returning to its usual shade of peach. Day and night I stared at those bruises, hating myself. What kind of person was I? What kind of person had I become?

  I remembered the feeling of little Olivia’s hand in mine.

  Had that really happened, or was it only a dream?

  Did I nearly steal another woman’s child?

  Two women’s children?

  The bartender had taken off with my purse too, snatched it right from the front seat while I lay in the back in a daze, leaving the car door unlatched, the interior lights on so that by morning the battery was completely drained. I walked the three miles home with a swollen ankle, clutching the plackets of my shirt together since the buttons had snapped clear off at his hasty hand. I spent the morning after on the telephone with various credit card companies, reporting the cards stolen, despising myself for getting into this situation in the first place, for letting myself be a floozy and a victim. I avowed to pay off my debt and cut the new cards the credit card company would no doubt send me to shreds.

  I would never be a victim again.

  I’d never trust anyone again.

  I would never leave the house for fear I might try and pilfer someone else’s child.

  And so I’ve become a recluse, plunged into a state of depression where I go unshowered for days at a time, oftentimes not getting out of bed from morning until night. I eat only when I need to, when the hunger pangs are more than I can bear. I’ve lost my job, no doubt, though no one told me as much, but one can’t expect to stay employed when they haven’t gone to work for thirty-odd days. I’m drowning in debt, I assume, though I haven’t found the energy to drag myself to the mailbox to retrieve the bills, but I’m certain I must be because just last night when I flipped a light switch on, nothing happened. I jiggled the toggle up and down and when that failed, tried another light switch.

  It appeared the electricity had been shut off for nonpayment.

  I went back to bed in the dark, planning to stay there for the rest of my life, which would be short as I swore off water and food too.

  But then this morning the nausea wrenched me from bed, dragging me to the kitchen sink, where again and again I heaved, wondering what in the world was wrong with me.

  And it was a slow dawning then, daylight arriving at its own sweet time, one shaft of light at a time.

  For thirty-odd days I had lain in bed since my encounter in the back seat of the car, and in those thirty-odd days, my period—my ever-reliable period—hadn’t come.

  And now there was the nausea, the vomiting, and though every rational thought in my mind told me it wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true—after all, I was infertile; there was no way I could get pregnant of my own accord, without Dr. Landry’s menagerie of drugs and devices—I knew instinctively that it was true.

  I was pregnant.

  To say I was happy would be a lie.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t savor the thought for a second or two, that I didn’t relish the idea of carrying a child, of birthing a child, of being a mother. There was no greater desire in the whole entire world for me. It’s all I wanted; it’s the only thing that mattered in my life.

  But deep inside I knew this child would never come to fruition. A fetus it was, but a baby it would never be. It would be as it was the last time with the heartbeat that was there and then not there, the gallons of blood. I would lose this baby as I had the last, and it would be my purgatory, my punishment, being forced to endure weeks, maybe a month, of pregnancy, knowing as always that it would end with blood.

  That trusty, reliable blood.

  And so instead of being happy I stood there, back to the countertop, steeling myself for another miscarriage, to lose this baby like I had the last. Certainly the universe wouldn’t let me keep this child. This, truly, was my penance, a gift that was given only to be taken away.

  January 15, 1998

  Egg Harbor

  The joke is on me it seems, for I’ve made it through the first trimester without a single drop of blood.

  The baby has survived thirteen weeks in my wasteland of a womb.

  Only by necessity have I left the house, taking a job at a local inn where I clean rooms once the guests leave. There’s nothing glamorous about it. Just stripping beds of sheets and washing endless mountains of laundry, scrubbing someone else’s excrement off a toilet seat. The perk of the job, however, is that I essentially speak to no one, working alone in an uninhabited guest room or the laundry room, dealing only with dust spores and mildew, as opposed to the human race.

  But the work itself is backbreaking. And those first thirteen weeks of the pregnancy were anything but fun and fan
cy-free. The morning sickness, the lethargy nearly got the best of me until the empty hotels beds were hard to resist—I envisioned myself sprawled out across them, wrapped up in one of the hotel’s velour robes—but, for as much as I wanted to, I didn’t give in to the whim.

  Only second to a baby, I needed this job more than anything.

  I haven’t been to see Dr. Landry or another obstetrician, though there’s a slight outgrowth to my midsection now, a bulge that makes my pants fit tightly so that I’ve taken to wearing sweatpants when I’m not stuffed into the uniform I wear for work, the polo shirt and the khaki pants, which I now leave unbuttoned so I don’t flatten the baby.

  The cottage is on the market again.

  I can no longer afford to pay for it. I haven’t been able to for months so that I’m in debt to the bank and the foreclosure threats have begun to arrive. The sign went in today, stuck there—forced into the nearly frozen ground—by the very same Realtor who sold us the home.

  Oh, what she must think, looking at me now. How I’ve changed.

  The Realtor didn’t look the least bit different to me, but I was changed, hardly the same woman I was when we first met, less than two years ago.

  After she left, I sat myself on the tree swing and swayed, moving back and forth through the nippy winter air. I did it until my fingers were numb and I could no longer feel the sturdy rope beneath my hands.

  This was the closest my child would ever come to a ride on this swing.

  The bay was empty now, not a boat anywhere, and snow flurries fell on the dock, collecting like powdered sugar. There were birds in the trees, winter birds, cardinals and chickadees, but everyone else was gone, sunning themselves on one of those tropical islands where I only dreamed I might one day go.

  The greenhouse door was frozen shut.

  The flowers in the flower bed were dead.

  I was still outside when I heard the doorbell ring, and thinking it was the Realtor—that she had an offer already!—I left my post to see.

  But it was not the Realtor.

  Aaron stood before me, his chestnut hair getting peppered with soft powdery snow. His eyes had a forlorn look about them, sad. He wore a coat, his hands set in the pockets of it, and as I pulled the door to, he offered a simple smile.

  “Aaron,” I said.

  “Eden.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to invite him inside, for the cottage was truly a mess, in a state of bedlam; I couldn’t bring myself to show him what had become of our home. And so I stepped outside, onto the porch, my hair also getting peppered with snow. I pulled the door closed behind me. My feet were bare, covered only in socks, and against the concrete, they grew cold. Aaron, ever-obliging Aaron, ever-unselfish Aaron, ever-benevolent Aaron, shimmied at once out of his coat and wrapped it around my shoulders, saying to me, “You’ll catch your death out here,” and beneath the weight of his hands—which lingered there on my shoulders, gently liberating strands of hair that were trapped under the heavy coat, warm hands tucking them behind my ear, pausing there—I softened like a stick of butter left on the table too long.

  We said nothing.

  But I could see in his eyes that I had been wrong. That Aaron wasn’t healed as I’d believed him to be the day I saw him through the chophouse windows. That he was only taped back together that day, a skimpy job at best, for the tape had come undone, it had lost its stick, and Aaron was once again broken, standing before me now, mere fragments of himself.

  Oh, what have I done?

  He hunched to my height, bending his knees ever so. He cupped his hands around my face—softly, delicately—as if those hands cradled an heirloom crystal vase, and I could see in Aaron’s eyes that what he held was, to him, something fragile, something magical, something irreplaceable and beyond compare.

  That, to him, I was irreplaceable and beyond compare as I’d always been.

  That, in all these months apart, that hadn’t changed for him.

  His lips felt warm as he pressed them to mine, and there was nothing rushed about it, nothing presumptuous or brusque. “I want you back,” he whispered into my ear.

  “I need you back.

  “I miss you, Eden.

  “I am nothing,” he said, “without you.”

  I am nothing.

  Was it just my imagination, or did the baby inside me kick?

  I stepped back from Aaron, tugging on the ends of my sweater to make sure that tiny bulge was concealed. Inside me the baby—not Aaron’s baby, but the baby of some man I would never know—knew how to squint its eyes and to suck its thumb. Each day it grew bigger, arms and legs lengthening, organs and cells unfolding in my womb. It would come to be a person one day, a person perhaps with cavernous dimples and sparkling blue eyes, but never would I resent this child for the choices that I made.

  Be careful what you wish for, the saying goes, but never would I harbor a grudge for all that I lost to have this baby. All that I will lose.

  It might just come true.

  I would have done anything for a baby. This I know without a shred of doubt.

  The lump in my throat was nearly impossible to speak past. Something inside my larynx had swollen to two times its size and my eyes burned with tears. As they began to fall, Aaron wiped them from my cheeks with the pad of a thumb and again pressed his lips to mine, saying that everything was okay, that everything would be fine. He held me close, stroking my hair, pressing my hands between his to keep them warm.

  “Can I come home?” he asked.

  And I thought what it would do to him if I told him about the baby.

  It would take those broken pieces of Aaron that remained and sliver them completely. It would pulverize them so that all that was left of Aaron would be ashes and dust.

  “Yes,” I said, feigning a smile, forcing the word past that knot. “Yes.”

  Aaron’s knees nearly collapsed from the relief of it. He kissed me again, this time with passion and zest, then reached his hand toward the doorknob to let us both inside.

  But I stopped him.

  “Not yet,” I said. “The house is a mess,” I said. “Complete bedlam. Let me clean it first,” I told him, and though Aaron tried to shoo it off, to tell me it didn’t matter, that we’d clean it together, I said no.

  That I wanted it to be just right.

  That I wanted it to be perfect for him.

  That I wanted to be perfect for him.

  And at this he relented, and an agreement was made.

  The following morning he would return with all of his belongings, and we’d start over with a clean slate. We’d be Aaron and Eden again. Just us. Just Aaron and Eden.

  He kissed me goodbye—lips lingering on mine for what only I knew would be the last time—and then he was gone, his car pulling out backward down the long, winding drive, disappearing through dark tree bark. The leaves of the trees were gone, as soon I would be.

  Life is full of regrets and this is only one of them.

  It didn’t take long to pack a bag.

  By the time it was dark outside, I was heading south, south of Sturgeon Bay, south of Sheboygan, south of Milwaukee. Soon I would be living far away from here. My baby and me.

  Dear Aaron,

  I had a dream last night. In it, I was being chased. I ran in slapdash circles all night long, sweating and panicked as people tend to do in dreams, and for the longest time I couldn’t see the angry face of the man who was chasing me. It wasn’t until later, when I finally awoke, delirious and frightened, that I realized it was you, which puzzled me a great deal because after all of the grief and the heartbreak I’ve put you through, you have never been anything but selfless toward me. Compassionate and kind.

  You, of all people, would never hurt me.

  I remembered the way it is with dreams sometimes, how they have a habit of being less literal and
more metaphoric, and I thought that sometimes with dreams like this, it’s not about who’s chasing you, but what you’re running from.

  I’ve spent the last twenty years running from the past, Aaron, from all the horrible things I put you through. And now I’m dying of cancer. I’m going to die. But I can’t stand the idea of leaving this world without explaining things to you first so that you’ll understand. It’s only right that you have the closure you deserve. Every single day for the past twenty years I thought about calling you, asking you to meet. But I knew I’d never be able to verbalize all that I was feeling, that I could never put it into intelligible words, nor could I bear the thought of looking you in the eye and admitting what I’d done. And so for now, my journal will have to suffice.

  I have a child, Aaron, a daughter, named Jessie, who means everything to me—and more. A mistake is what some might call it, but to me, she’s perfection. Jessie has spent her entire life searching for her father. It should have been you.

  With love,

  Eden

  * * * * *

  acknowledgments

  First and foremost, thank you to my smart, savvy and thoughtful editor, Erika Imranyi, for always having faith in me and my books, and for helping take my rough drafts and transform them into something that shines. I’m so proud of the work we do together and know with confidence that my novels are far better after you’ve left your mark on them.

  Thank you to my wonderful and always encouraging friend and literary agent, Rachael Dillon Fried, for having my back, for knowing just what to say when I’m in need of reassurance and for always seeing the positive in everything I do.

  Thank you to everyone at Sanford Greenburger Associates, Harper Collins and Park Row Books, including my publicity team of Emer Flounders and Shara Alexander; Reka Rubin for sharing my novels with the world; Erin Craig and Sean Kapitain for another gorgeous cover design; the copy editors, proofreaders, sales and marketing teams, and all those who play a role in getting my story into the hands of readers. I couldn’t do what I do without any of you. I’m forever grateful for your diligence, enthusiasm and support.