“People get locked out of their own lives, interrogated by police for suspected identity theft when the person whose identity they’ve supposedly stolen is themselves,” Liam says as he drops his phone into the back pocket of his pants, and I utter under my breath, “What a mess.”
I stare down below, beneath the metal grates of the bridge, where a tour is underway, tourists exploring the polluted grayish-green waters of the Chicago River. The tour guide steers passengers’ attention to the bridge—built in 1929, a bascule bridge, she says—and all eyes move to Liam and me, taking photos, pointing upward some twenty feet or more to the bridge on which we stand.
“You really are Jessie, aren’t you?” His words are dry, meant to be funny, though they’re not. His tone is deadpan, his face expressionless.
And though I know it’s in jest, it’s a question that nags at me.
I am Jessie, aren’t I? Am I Jessica Sloane?
We continue to walk. Down Clark and left on Superior, my feet following Liam’s lead. We’re quiet. We don’t speak much. He asks if I’ve been sleeping. He says that I look tired and I pause, looking at my own reflection in the glass facade of a building. I see what he sees. The sunken eyes surrounded by puffy red skin, the tip of my nose red.
I make light of the insomnia. I say that sleep is a waste of time. That there are so many more productive things I could be doing instead of sleeping.
“It’s not good for you, Jessie,” he tells me. “You need to sleep. The melatonin,” he says, same as he did in the hospital when he slipped those pills into the palm of my hand. “Give it a try.” I did give it a try, I think. I tried the melatonin—that and the clonazepam—and slept right on through Mom’s death. Never again.
I tell him that I will but I won’t.
And then he stops beside a mid-rise, saying, “This is me. This is where I live.”
This building beside us is five or six stories tall, flanked with floor-to-ceiling windows. A sign out front offers spacious open-plan lofts for sale. A doorman patrols the revolving front door and there’s something very moneyed about it that makes me feel out of place and ill at ease. The Liam before me is suddenly at odds with the Liam I remember from the hospital, the one who was bedraggled, a bit dog-eared like me.
A look of confusion must pass on my face. “My brother and I lived here together,” he explains. His voice is deep and there’s no rise or fall to his intonation as he speaks, telling me, “He was a software engineer.”
I fill in the missing pieces. His brother made the money. He paid for the condo. And now he’s gone.
“You’ll be okay?” I ask, and his reply is detached.
“What’s that they say?” he asks, plucking at the row of rubber bands on his wrist so that I see now what it says on his hand in the blue ink. Adam. His brother’s name, I think. “About death and taxes?”
That nothing is certain but death and taxes. That’s what they say. But he’s not looking for an answer. What he’s saying is that he may or may not be okay, but there’s no way to know right now. Same as me.
We say our goodbyes. I watch as he slips through the doors of the apartment building, disappearing behind a wall of glass.
eden
November 14, 1996 Egg Harbor
It’s November now.
The gray skies have descended, everything perpetually overcast and sad. The boats have been pulled from the bay, leaving it barren and empty, like my womb. The seasonal shops are closed. The tourists took their cue to leave.
Two weeks ago, on the first of November, Miranda had that baby of hers, a seven pound, three ounce beautiful baby boy who she and Joe named Carter. I visited in the hospital the day after he was born, her only visitor aside from Joe. I saw it in her eyes as soon as I entered the postpartum room, Miranda swaddling baby Carter with a look of arrant dissatisfaction on her face. Her lips were pursed, her eyebrows creased, crow’s-feet forming around the eyes.
As I walked in—swapping places with Joe, who went to the cafeteria for coffee—her disillusioned eyes rose to mine and she confessed aloud so that baby Carter could hear, not bothering to lower her voice or to press her hands to his ears to muffle the rotten words, “All I wanted was a baby girl. Is it too much to ask for one little girl? But instead it’s another goddamn boy.”
Her words knocked the wind out of my lungs. They made it hard to breathe. They were so ugly and vile, and I saw a look in Miranda’s eyes as she spoke of him, eyes dropping to his. A look that made my heart hurt. Only a day old and already she abhorred her baby boy.
I asked if I could hold him and she said yes, handing him off with too much inclination, too much ease, as if grateful to be rid of him. I took baby Carter to a chair in the corner of the room and peered at his inappreciable wisps of blond hair and his heavy, tired eyes, thinking to myself, What difference does it make if he’s a boy or girl, only that he’s happy and healthy?
And I felt angry for the first time at Miranda. Not just annoyed but truly angry. Angry that she had three beautiful baby boys and I had none. Angry that she didn’t love her babies or value her babies, that she couldn’t understand another woman—one like me—would give life and limb for a child.
Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a child.
I had a thought then.
Would Miranda care if I rose to my feet and carried baby Carter from the room?
Would she even notice?
The hospital experience, for Miranda, was a welcomed furlough from motherhood. From what I’d been told, Carter spent his time in the nursery, being cared for by nurses round the clock except when he needed to eat, and only then did nurses carry him, crying and discontent, to his mother, and she welcomed him grudgingly, embittered to her chest. And then as soon as he was full, his eyes drifting lazily to sleep, she asked the nurses to take him away so that she could sleep.
Spread out on her hospital bed in an indiscreet polka-dot gown, I watched Miranda sleep. Or pretend to sleep at least, so that she didn’t have to tend to her child. She was exhausted, yes, from many hours of labor and delivery, from the every-other-hour feedings, and yet I wondered if her eyes were merely closed so that she could remain insensible to her baby boy, who lay limply in my arms, head misshapen, skin wrinkly and pink as a newborn’s should be. Miranda’s hair was brushed away from her face, pulled taut into a ponytail that lay flat against the bed. Her arms and hands were stretched out by her sides. She breathed with her mouth open, nostrils flaring with each inhalation and exhalation of air.
I whispered her name. There was no reply.
It was almost as if she was asking me, begging me, daring me to take her child.
And so I did.
I stood from the inflexible armchair, slowly, gradually, piecemeal-like so that the chair wouldn’t make a sound. So that the floor wouldn’t cheep. So that my own two feet wouldn’t betray me. I flexed one muscle and then the next until I was standing upright, holding my breath.
I crossed the room, creeping by degrees so my shoes wouldn’t squeak on the floors. Miranda’s eyes were closed, enjoying the peace and serenity of having someone else care for her child.
It didn’t occur to her for one instant that someone might try and take her baby.
I slipped into the hallway without a peep. Two left turns and there Carter and I were, standing before the nursery, staring through glass at a half dozen sleeping babies. They lay bundled like burritos in their pink and blue blankets, with knitted hats atop their near-bald heads. They were sleeping, every last one of them, completely tuckered out. The newborns slept in rolling bassinets all arranged on display so that grandmas and grandpas could see. If it wasn’t for the slip of paper in each bassinet with the baby’s name and date of birth in blue ink, there was no telling them apart aside from the obvious distinction of pink and blue.
How easy it would be for two to be swapped, or for one to up and disappear.