When the Lights Go Out
Aaron was the first to suggest it, discontinuing my birth control pill, as if he knew what I was thinking, as if he could read my mind. It was as we lay together on the wide wooden floorboards staring out the open windows at the stars, Aaron’s prowling hand moving across my thigh, contemplating a second go. That’s when he said it. I told him yes! that I am ready for a family. That we are ready. Aaron is twenty-nine. I am twenty-eight. His paycheck isn’t extravagant, and yet it’s enough. We aren’t spendthrifts; we’ve been saving for years.
And even though I knew it wasn’t possible yet, the pill in my system nipped any possibility of pregnancy in the bud, I still imagined a creature no bigger than a speck starting to take form as Aaron again let himself inside me.
July 9, 1996
Egg Harbor
Our days begin with coffee on the dock, bare feet dangling over the edge, downward toward the bay. The water is cold, and our feet don’t reach anyway. But as promised, there are sailboats. Aaron and I spend hours watching them pass by, as well as sandpipers and other shorebirds that come to call, their long legs wading through the shallow water for a meal. We stare at the birds and the sailboats, watching the sun rise higher into the sky, warming our skin, burning off the early-morning fog. Heaven on earth, Aaron says.
As we sit on the dock, Aaron tells me about his nights at the chophouse that steals him from me for ten hours at a time. About the heat of the kitchen, and the persistent noise. The rumble of voices calling out orders in sync. The sputter of boneless rib eye on the grill, the dicing and hashing of vegetables.
His voice is placid. He doesn’t complain because Aaron, ever easygoing Aaron, isn’t one to complain. Rather he tells me about it, describing it for me so that I can see in my mind’s eye what he’s doing when he’s away from me for half the day. He wears a white chef jacket and black chef pants and a cap, something along the lines of a beanie that is also white. Aaron’s been assigned the role of saucier, or sauce chef, one that’s new to him, but no doubt comes with ease. Because this is the way it is with Aaron. No matter what he tries his hand at, things always come with ease.
Our property is fringed by trees so that as we sit on the deck’s edge, Aaron and me, it feels as if we’re all alone, partitioned from society by the lake and the trees. If we have neighbors, we’ve never seen them. Never laid eyes on them. Never spied another home through the canopy of trees. Never are we disturbed by the sound of voices, but only the colloquy of birds as they perch in the trees and yammer back and forth about whatever it is birds talk about. On occasion the helmsmen will wave a hearty hello from behind the steering wheel of their sailboats, but more often than not they’re too far away to see Aaron and me at the dock’s edge, feet dangling southward, holding hands, sitting in silence, listening to the breeze through the trees.
We’re marooned on an island, stranded and shipwrecked, but we don’t mind. It’s just the way it should be.
Aaron’s work shift begins at two in the afternoon and ends when the last customer leaves and the kitchen is clean, most nights stumbling into bed around midnight or after, smelling of sweat and grease.
But the days are ours to do with as we please.
Last week, Aaron repaired the greenhouse door and we stripped it of cobwebs and bugs. We spent days cultivating the garden and Aaron made good on his promise of raised beds, three feet by five feet by ten inches deep, made of white cedar that will one day house cucumbers and zucchini. But not this year. It’s far too late in the season to grow produce this year and so for now, we buy it from any number of tatty roadside farm stands. We live two miles from town and even though the population around here expands sevenfold in the summer months thanks to a healthy tourist population, outside town it’s still mainly rural, long stretches of open country roads that intersect with nothing but sky.
Instead of planting produce this year, Aaron and I sowed perennial seeds to enjoy next year: baby’s breath and lavender and hollyhocks because all the fences and cottages around here, it seems, are flanked with hollyhocks. We placed them in peat pots of gardening soil in the greenhouse and set them in the sunniest spot we could find. In a month or so, we’ll transplant them to the garden. They won’t bloom for some time, not until next spring. But still, I stand hopeful in the greenhouse, staring at the peat pots, imagining what might be happening beneath the soil’s surface, whether the seeds’ roots are taking hold, pushing down into the soil to anchor the seedling to this world, or if the seed has merely shriveled up and died in there, a dead embryo in its mother’s womb.
As I clear out the last of my birth control pills and run a hand across what I imagine to be my uterus, I wonder what is happening inside there too.
jessie
I had Mom cremated at her request. I carry her around now in a rhubarb-glazed clay urn with a cork in the top, one she bought for herself when the cancer spread. It’s cylindrical and inconspicuous, the cork stuck on with an ample amount of Gorilla Glue so I don’t lose Mom by chance.
Mom had two wishes when she died, ones she let slip in the last brief moments of consciousness before she drifted off to sleep, a sleep from which she would never wake up. One, that she be cremated and lobbed from the back end of the Washington Island Ferry and into Death’s Door. And two, that I find myself and figure out who I am. The second hinged on the esoteric and didn’t make obvious sense. I blamed the drugs for it, that and the imminence of death.
I’m nowhere near accomplishing either, though I filled out a college application online. But I have no plans of parting with Mom’s remains anytime soon. She’s the only thing of value I have left.
I haven’t slept in four days, not since some doctor took pity on me and offered me a pill. Three if you count the one where I nearly nodded off at the laundromat waiting for clothes to dry, anesthetized by the sound of sweaters tumbling around a dryer. The effects are obnoxious. I’m tired. I’m grumpy. I can focus on nothing and my reaction time is slow. I’ve lost the ability to think.
Yesterday, a package arrived from UPS and the driver asked me to sign for it. He stood before me, shoving a pen and a slip of paper up under my nose and I could only stare, unable to put two and two together. He said it again. Can you sign for it? He forced the pen into my hand. He pointed at the signature line. For a third time, he asked me to sign.
And even then I scribbled with the cap still on the pen. The man had to snatch it from my hand and uncap it.
I’m pretty sure I’ve begun to see things too. Things that might not be real, that might not be there. A millipede dashing across the tabletop, an ant on the kitchen floor. Sudden movements, immediate and quick, but the minute I turn, they’re gone.
I keep track of the sleepless nights in the notched lines beneath my eyes, like the annual rings of a tree. One wrinkle for each night that I don’t sleep. I stare at myself in the mirror each day, counting them all. This morning there were four. The surface effects of insomnia are even worse than what’s going on on the inside. My eyes are red and swollen. My eyelids droop. Overnight, wrinkles appear by the masses, while I lie in bed counting sheep. I could go to the clinic and request something else to help me sleep. Some more of the clonazepam. But with the pills in my system, I slept right on through Mom’s death. I don’t want to think about what else I’d miss.
At McDonald’s, I’m asked if I want ketchup with my fries, but I can only stare at the worker dumbly because what I heard was It’s messed up when boats capsize, and I nod lamely because it is disastrous and sad, and yet so out of left field I can’t respond with words.
It’s only when he drops a stack of ketchup packets on my tray that my brain makes the translation, too late it seems because I hate ketchup. I dump them on the table when I go, the mother lode for someone who likes it. On the way out the door I trip, because coordination is also affected by a lack of sleep.
Two hours ago I dragged my heavy body from bed after another sleepless night
, and now I stand in the center of Mom’s and my house, deciding which of our belongings to take and which to leave. I can’t stand to stay here much longer, a decision I’ve come to quickly over the last four days. I’ve spoken to a Realtor already, figured out next steps. First I’m to pack up what I want to keep, and then everything else will be sold in an estate sale before some junk removal service tosses the rest of our stuff in the trash.
Then some other family will move in to the only home I’ve ever known.
I’m eyeing the sofa, wondering if I should take it or leave it, when the phone rings. “Hello?” I ask.
A voice on the other end informs me that she’s calling from the financial aid office at the college. “There’s a problem with your application,” she says to me.
“What problem?” I ask the woman on the phone, afraid I’m about to be cited for tax evasion. It’s a likely possibility; I’d left blank every question on the FAFSA form that asked about adjusted gross income and tax returns. I might have lied on the application too. There was a question that asked if both of my parents were deceased. I said yes to that, though I don’t know if it’s true.
Is my father dead?
On the other end of the line, the woman asks me to verify my social security number for her and I do. “That’s what I have,” she says, and I ask, “Then what’s the problem? Has my application been denied?” My heart sinks. How can that be? It’s only a community college. It’s not like I registered for Yale or Harvard.
“I’m sure it’s just a weird mix-up with vital statistics,” she says.
“What mix-up?” I ask, feeling relieved for a mix-up as opposed to a denied application. A mix-up can be fixed.
“It’s the strangest thing,” she says. “There was a death certificate on file for a Jessica Sloane, from seventeen years ago. With your birth date and your social security number. By the looks of this, Ms. Sloane,” she says, and I amend Jessie, because Ms. Sloane is Mom. “By the looks of this, Jessie,” she says, and the words that follow punch me so hard in the gut they make it almost impossible to breathe. “By the looks of this, you’re already dead.”
And then she laughs as if somehow or other this is funny.
* * *
Today I’m looking for a new place to live. Staying in our old home is no longer a viable option because of the residual ghosts of Mom that remain in every corner of the home. The smell of her Crabtree & Evelyn hand cream that fills the bathroom. The feel of the velvet-lined compartments in the mahogany dresser. The chemo caps. The cartons of Ensure on the refrigerator shelf.
I perch in the back seat of a Kia Soul, trying hard not to think too much about the call from the financial aid office. This is easier said than done. Just thinking about it makes my stomach hurt. A mix-up, the woman claimed, but still, it’s hard to grapple with the words you and dead in the same sentence. Though I try to, I can’t push them from my mind. The way she and I left things, I’m to provide a copy of my social security card to the college before they’ll take another look at my application for a loan, which is a problem because I don’t have the first clue where the card is. But it’s more than that too. Because the woman also told me about some death index my name was found on. A death index. My name on a database maintained by the Social Security Administration of millions of people who have died, nullifying their social security numbers so that no one else can use them, so that I can’t use my own social security number. Because, according to the Social Security Administration, I’m dead.
You might want to look into that, she’d suggested before ending our call, and I couldn’t help but feel shaken up by it even now, hours later. My name on a death database. Though it’s a mistake, of course.
But still I pray this isn’t some sort of foresight. A prophecy of what’s to come.
I gaze out the window as some woman sits behind the wheel of the Kia, steering us through the streets of Chicago. Her name is Lily and she calls herself an apartment finder. The first I’d heard of Lily was days ago, when I’d come home from a cleaning job—hating the feeling of coming home to Mom’s and my empty house alone, wishing she was there but knowing she would never be again, making a flip decision to sell the home and leave. I came home, leaving my bike on the sidewalk, and there, hanging on the handle of our front door, was an ad for Lily’s efficient and cost-free services. An apartment finder. I’d never heard of such a thing, and yet she was just the thing I needed. The door hanger was in-your-face marketing, the kind I couldn’t recycle with the rest of the junk mail. And so I called Lily and we made an appointment to meet.
Lily’s parallel parking skills are second to none, though it seems easy enough for someone like me who’s never driven a car before. Growing up in an old brick bungalow in Albany Park, there was never a need to drive a car. We didn’t have one. The Brown Line or the bus took us everywhere we needed to go. Either that or our own two feet. I also have my Schwinn, Old Faithful, which is surprisingly resilient in even the worst weather, except for, of course, three feet of snow.
I was fifteen when Mom was diagnosed with cancer, which meant that for the time being, my life was on hold, anything that wasn’t essential set aside. I went to school. I worked. I helped with the mortgage and saved as much as I could. And I held Mom’s hair for her when she puked.
She found the lump herself, slim fingers palpating her own breast because she knew sooner or later this would happen. She didn’t tell me about the lump until after she’d been diagnosed with cancer, one mammogram and a biopsy later. She didn’t want to worry me. They removed the breast first, followed by months of chemotherapy. But it wasn’t long before the cancer returned, in the chest and in the bones this time. The lungs. Back for vengeance.
Jessie, I’m dying. I’m going to die, she had said to me then. We were sitting on the front porch, hand in hand, the day she learned the cancer was back. At that point, her five-year survival rate took a nosedive. She only lived for two more, and none of them great.
The cancer, it’s hereditary. Some aberrant gene that runs through our family line, red pegs lined up in my battleship already. Like Mom and her mom before her, it’s only a matter of time before I too will sink.
I claimed the back seat of the Kia after Lily dropped her purse into the passenger’s chair. She drives with one hand on the horn at all times, so she can scare pedestrians out of the way, those she hollers at from behind safety glass to shake a leg and scoot your boot. I have no credit history and no bank account, which I’ve confessed to Lily, and instead carry a pocketful of cash. Her eyes grew wide when I showed her my money, thirty hundred-dollar bills folded in half and stuck inside a wristlet.
“This might be a problem,” Lily said, shrugging her shoulders not at the cash but rather the shortage of credit, the absence of a bank account, “but we’ll see.”
She suggested I offer a landlord more up front to offset the fact that I’m one of those people who keeps all my money in a fireproof safe box beneath my bed. The checks I earn cleaning houses get cashed at Walmart for a three-dollar service fee, and then deposited into my trusty box. I considered signing on with a temp agency once, but thought better of it. There are perks to my job I won’t find anywhere else. Because I’m cleaning houses, I don’t have to pay taxes to Uncle Sam. I’m an independent contractor. At least that’s the way I’ve always rationalized it in my head, though, for all I know, IRS agents are hot on my heels, planning to nab me for tax evasion.
And still, I load my cleaning supplies into a basket on the back end of Old Faithful each day and pedal off to work, earning as much as two hundred dollars some days by cleaning someone else’s home. I do it in peace with my headphones on. I don’t have to make small talk. No one supervises me. It’s the best job in the world.
“Either that,” said Lily as she easily navigated the streets of Chicago, pulling in to an alley behind a high-rise on Sheridan and putting the car in Park, “or you’ll
need to find someone to cosign on the loan,” which isn’t an option for me. I have no one to cosign on the loan.
The apartment search is nearly an abject failure.
Lily shows me apartment after apartment. A third-floor unit in a high-rise in Edgewater. A mid-rise on Ashland, newly rehabbed, in my price range though at the high end of it. Unit after unit of boxlike rooms enclosed by four thin gypsum walls, foggy windows that inhibit the light from coming in. The window screens are torn, one stuffed full with an air-conditioning unit, which is supposed to make me happy because, as Lily points out, renters usually have to buy them themselves, those repulsive window units that bar any natural light from entering the room.
The kitchens are tight. The stoves are old and electric. Freckles of mold grow in the showers’ grout. The closets smell like urine. Lightbulbs have burned out.
But it isn’t the mold or the windows that bother me. It’s the noise and the neighbors—strange people just on the other side of drywall, their domestic life partitioned from mine by a paltry combination of plaster and paper. The sense of claustrophobia that settles under my skin as I pretend to listen to Lily as she goes on and on about the two hundred and eighty square feet in the unit. The laundry facilities. The high-speed internet. But all I hear is the noise of someone’s hair dryer. Women laughing. Men upstairs screaming at a ball game on TV. A phone conversation streaming through the walls. The ding of a microwave, the smell of someone’s lunch.
Four days without sleep. My body is tired, my mind like soup. I lean against the wall, feeling the force of gravity as it threatens to tug my heavy body to the ground.
“What do you think?” Lily asks over the noise of the hair dryer, and I can’t help myself.
“I hate it,” I say, for the eighth or ninth time in a row, one for as many apartments as we’ve seen. Insomnia does that too. It keeps us honest because we don’t have the energy to manufacture a lie.