worry.
The woman disappeared for a moment. I looked around the white walls of the room. They were free of posters; there was only a handful of dated magazines for people to read. The waiting area held at least twenty people- mostly women-all looking as if they’d stumbled in by mistake. In the corner was a small paper ct s‘€hanarton filled with plastic blocks and Sesame Street dolls, just in case, but there were no children to play with them.
“We’re a little backed up today,” the blond woman said, returning with a pink information sheet for me. “If you want to take a walk or something, it will be at least two hours.”
Jake nodded, and because we’d been told to, we shuffled outside again. This time the picketers cleared a path for us and started to cheer, assuming we’d changed our minds. We hurried out of the parking lot and walked three blocks before Jake turned to me. “I don’t know anything about Racine,” he said. “Do you?”
I shook my head. “We could walk in circles,” I said, “or we could just go straight and keep track of the time.”
But the clinic was in a strange area, and though Racine wasn’t all that big a town, we walked for what seemed like miles and all we saw were sectioned farms and a waste-water treatment plant and fields empty of cows. Finally, I pointed to a small fenced-in area.
The little playground was oddly misplaced in the middle of this town; we hadn’t seen any houses. It had a string of swings, the cloth kind that hugged your bottom when you sat down. There was a jungle gym and monkey bars and a hexagon of painted wood that you could spin like a merry-go-round. Jake looked at me and smiled for the first time that day. “Race you,” he said, and he started to run toward the swings.
But I couldn’t. I was so tired. I had been told not to eat anything that morning, and anyway, just being there made me feel as heavy as lead. I walked slowly, carefully, as if I had something to protect, and I picked a swing next to Jake’s. He was pumping as high as he could; the entire metal frame seemed to shake and hump, threatening to come loose from the ground. Jake’s feet grazed the low, flat clouds, and he kicked at them. Then, when he’d gone higher than I’d thought possible, he jumped from the swing in midair, arching his back and landing, scuffed, in the sand. He looked up at me. “Your turn,” he said.
I shook my head. I wanted his energy; God, I wanted to put this behind me and do what he had just done. “Push me,” I said, and Jake came to stand behind me, pressing his hands at the small of my back every time I returned to him. He pushed me so forcefully that for a moment I was suspended horizontally, grasping the chains of the swing, staring into the sun. And before I knew it, I was on my way back down.
Jake climbed on the monkey bars, hanging from his knees and scratching his armpits. Then he put me on the merry-go-round. “Hold on,” he said. I pressed my face into the smooth green surface of the wood, feeling the sheen of warm paint against my cheek. Jake spun the merry-go-round, faster and faster. I lifted my head but felt my neck get whipped by the force, and I laughed, dizzy, trying to search out Jake’s face. But I couldn’t make sense of anything, so I tucked my head back down against the wood. My insides were spinning, and I did not know which way was up. I heard Jake’s labored breathing, and I laughed so hard that I crossed the fine line and started to cry.
I did not feel anygy;‘€em'thing, except the hot lights of the clean white room and the cool hands of a nurse and the distant suck and tug of instruments. In recovery, they gave me pills and I drifted in and out of sleep. When I came to, a pretty young nurse was standing next to me. “Is there someone here with you?” she asked, and I thought, Not anymore.
Much later, Jake came to me. He did not say a word. He leaned down and kissed my forehead, the way he used to from time to time before we became lovers. “Are you okay?” he asked.
It was when he spoke that I saw it: the image of a child, hovering just over his shoulder. I saw it as clearly as I saw Jake’s face. And I knew by the storm of his eyes that he saw the same thing near me. “I’m fine,” I said, and I realized then that I would have to get away.
When we arrived at my house, my father was not yet home; we had planned it this way. Jake helped me up to bed and sat on the edge of the comforter and held my hand. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, but he made no move to go.
Jake and I had always been able to say things without words. I knew he heard it in the silence too: We would not see each other tomorrow. We would not see each other ever again; and we would not get married and we would not have other children, because every time we looked at each other the memory of this would be staring back at us. “Tomorrow,” I echoed, forcing the word past the lump in my throat.
I knew that somewhere God was laughing. He had taken the other half of my heart, the one person who knew me better than I knew myself, and He had done what nothing else could do. By bringing us together, He had set into motion the one thing that could tear us apart. That was the day I lost my religion. I knew that I could no longer pass away in a state of grace, no longer make it to heaven. If there was a Second Coming, Jesus would no longer die for my sins. But suddenly, compared to everything I had been through, it didn’t matter much at all.
Even as Jake was stroking the skin of my arm, making me promises he knew he would not keep, I was forming a plan. I could not stay in Chicago and know that Jake was minutes away. I could not hide my shame from my father for very long. After graduation, I would disappear. “I won’t be going to college after all.” I spoke the words aloud. The sentence hung, visible, black printed letters stretched across the space before me. “I won’t be going.”
“What did you say?” Jake asked. He looked at me, and in his eyes I saw the pain of a hundred kisses and the healing power of his arms around me.
“Nothing,” I told him. “Nothing at all.”
A week later, after graduation, I packed my knapsack and left my father a note that told him I loved him. I boarded a bus and got off at Cambridge, Massachusetts-a place I chose because it sounded, like its namesake, an ocean away-and I left my childhood behind.
In Ohio I reached into my knapsack and rummaged for an orange, but I came up instead with an unfamiliar worn yellow envelope. My name was printed on the outside, and when I opened it I read an old Irish blessing I’d seen a million times, cross-stitched on ald ‘€ame faded violet sampler that hung on the wall over Jake’s bed:
As I read the careful, rolling script of Jake’s handwriting, I started to cry. I had no idea when he had left this for me. I had been awake the entire time he was in my room that final evening, and I had not seen him since. He must have known I would leave Chicago, that I would leave him.
I stared out the clouded window of the bus, trying to picture Jake’s face, but all I could see was the strip of granite lining an unfamiliar highway. He was already fading from me. I fingered the note gently and ran my hands over the letters and pressed the curling edges of the paper. With these words, Jake had let go of me, which proved that he knew more about why I was leaving than even I did. I had believed that I was running away from what had happened. I did not know-not until I met Nicholas days later-that the whole time I was really running toward what was yet to be.
chapter 15
Nicholas watched his wife turn into a wraith. She never really slept, since Max wanted to nurse every two hours. She was afraid to leave him alone for even a minute, so she showered only every other day. Her hair hung down her back like tangled yarn, her eyes were ringed with shadows. Her skin seemed frail and transparent, and sometimes Nicholas reached out to touch her just to see if she would vanish at the brush of his hand.
Max cried all the time. Nicholas wondered how Paige could stand it, the constant shrieking right in her ear. She
