Somehow I yanked myself to my feet. My ankle hurt so badly I felt sick, and I could feel blood trickling down my leg.
I stared at her. She stared back, following my gaze down to where the blood was falling in thick drips. Then she clapped one hand over her mouth, turned, and ran.
Things were starting to go fuzzy around the edges, and waves of pain were making their way through my belly. I’d read about this. I knew what it meant, and I knew that it was too early, that I was in trouble. “Help,” I tried to say, but there was no one there to hear. “Help…,” I said again, and then the world went gray, then black.
PART FIVE. Joy
EIGHTEEN
When I opened my eyes, I was underwater. In a swimming pool? The lake a t summer camp? The ocean? I wasn’t sure. I could see the light above me, filtered through the water, and I could feel the pull of what was underneath me, the dark depths I couldn’t make out.
I’d spent most of my life in the water swimming with my mother, but it was my father who’d taught me how, when I was little. He’d flip a silver dollar into the water, and I’d follow it down, learning how to hold my breath, how to go deeper than I thought I could, how to propel myself back to the top. “Sink or swim,” my father would tell me when I’d come up empty-handed and sputtering and complaining that I couldn’t, that the water was too cold or too deep. Sink or swim. And I’d go back into the water. I wanted the silver dollar, but, more than that, I wanted to please him.
My father. Was he here? I turned around frantically, paddling, trying to flip myself up toward where I thought the light was coming from. But I was getting dizzy. I was getting all turned around. And it was hard to keep paddling, hard to stay afloat, and I could feel the bottom of the ocean tugging at me, and I thought how nice it would be just to stop, not to move, to let myself float to the bottom, to sink into the soft silt of a thousand seashells ground down fine, to let myself sleep…
Sink or swim. Live or die.
I heard a voice, coming from the surface.
What is your name?
Leave me alone, I thought. I’m tired. I’m so tired. I could feel the darkness pulling me, and I craved it.
What is your name?
I opened my eyes, squinting in the bright white light.
Cannie, I muttered. I’m Cannie, now leave me alone.
Stay with us, Cannie, said the voice. I shook my head. I didn’t want to be here, wherever here was. I wanted to be back in the water, where I was invisible, where I was free. I wanted to go swimming again. I shut my eyes. The silver dollar flashed and glittered in the sunlight, arcing through the air, plunging into the water, and I followed it back down.
I closed my eyes again and saw my bed. Not my bed in Philadelphia, with its soothing blue comforter and bright, pretty pillows, but my bed from when I was a little girl – narrow, neatly made, with its red and brown paisley spread tucked tight around it and a spill of hard-cover books shoved underneath. I blinked and saw the girl on the bed, a sturdy, sober-faced girl with green eyes and brown hair in a ponytail that spilled over her shoulders. She was lying on her side, a book spread open before her. Me? I wondered. My daughter? I couldn’t be sure.
I remembered that bed – how it had been my refuge as a little girl, how it had been the one place I felt safe as a teenager, the place my father would never come. I remember spending hours there on weekends, sitting cross-legged with a friend on the other side of the bed, with the telephone and a melting pint of ice cream between us, talking about boys, about school, about the future, and how our lives would be, and I wanted to go back there, wanted to go back so badly, before things went wrong, before my father’s departure and Bruce’s betrayal, before I knew how it all turned out.
I looked down, and the girl on the bed looked up from her book, up at me, and her eyes were wide and clear.
I looked at the girl, and she smiled at me. Mom, she said.
Cannie?
I groaned as if waking from the most delicious dream and slitted my eyes open again.
Squeeze my hand if you can hear this, Cannie.
I squeezed weakly. I could hear voices burbling above me, heard something about blood type, something else about fetal monitor. Maybe this was the dream, and the girl on the bed was real? Or the water? Maybe I really had gone swimming, maybe I’d swum out too far, gotten tired, maybe I was drowning right now, and the picture of my bed was just a little something my brain had whipped up by way of last-minute entertainment.
Cannie? said the voice again, sounding almost frantic. Stay with us!
But I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be back in the bed.
The third time I closed my eyes I saw my father. I was back in his office in California, sitting up straight on his white examining table. I could feel the weight of diamonds on my finger, in my ears. I could feel the weight of his gaze upon me – warm and full of love, like I remembered it from twenty years ago. He was sitting across from me, in his white doctor’s coat, smiling at me. Tell me how you’ve been, he says. Tell me how you turned out.
I’m going to have a baby, I told him, and he nodded. Cannie, that’s wonderful!
I’m a newspaper reporter. I wrote a movie, I told him. I have friends. A dog. I live in the city.
My father smiled. I’m so proud of you.
I reached for him and he took my hand and held it. Why didn’t you say so before? I asked. It would have changed everything, if I’d just known you cared
He smiled at me, looking puzzled, like I’d stopped speaking English, or like he’d stopped understanding it. And when he took his hands away I opened mine and found a silver dollar in my palm. It’s yours, he said. You found it. You always did. You always could.
But even as he spoke he was turning away.
I want to ask you something, I said. He was at the door, like I remembered, his hand on the knob, but this time he turned and looked at me.
I stared at him, feeling my throat go dry, saying nothing.
How could you? is what I thought. How could you leave your own children? Lucy was just fifteen, and Josh was only nine. How could you do that; how could you walk away?
Tears slid down my face. My father walked back to me. He pulled a carefully folded handkerchief from his breast pocket, where he always kept them. It smelled like the cologne he always wore, like lemons, and the starch the Chinese laundry place put in, like they always did. Very carefully, my father bent down and wiped away my tears.
Then there was the darkness below me again, and the light above.
Sink or swim, I thought ruefully. And what if I wanted to sink? What
