And I know in that moment for certain: I am no one.
I think what it would feel like to fall. The weightlessness of the plunge, of gravity taking over, of relinquishing control. Giving up, surrendering to the universe.
There’s a flicker of movement beneath me. A flash of brown, and I know that if I wait any longer, it will be too late. The decision will no longer be mine. I cry out one more time. And then I go, legs convulsing as I swing one leg over the edge of the building and onto the fire escape on the other side. I have to force myself to do it. It takes everything I have. All that’s on the other side is a measly shelf, an overhang, that hovers seventeen floors above land.
I make my way toward him, but he’s moving far too fast for me. And I’m scared, looking down where, beneath me, the earth tilts and sways. I’m overcome with vertigo. I feel nauseous; I feel like I could be sick. The steps of the fire escape are perforated to prevent snow and ice from forming, which does nothing for me now. I can see straight through them to the street beneath my feet. People like ants walk up and down the street, minding their own business, paying no attention to me. Cabs like matchbooks soar past.
The steps beneath me are corroded and weak. A handful are missing. In some spots, the fire escape pulls away from the building’s masonry, bolts no longer holding tight. I take the steps two at a time, though they clatter each time my feet hit, the entire fire escape bucking beneath me. I have to take long strides over the missing steps.
I make it down only half a flight of steps before my knees give.
As they do, I lurch forward, staggering. I fall down the second half flight of stairs. The railing at the end is corroded, as much of the fire escape is. It’s the red-orange of rust. As my body goes hurtling into it, the spindles give and I slip straight through, with nothing there to prevent my fall.
As I tumble off the side of the fire escape, my head swims.
I take one final look at the great distance to the ground, the distance I’ll soon fall.
All at once, I’m falling. My legs follow the rest of me, feet making a last-ditch effort to cling to something, trying in vain to tether themselves to the steel of the fire escape. I try to grab it with a hand, but it slips straight through time and again, as I soar along beside it, unable to grab hold.
My arms and legs kick. They do the doggy paddle as I soar downward. I flail and kick, my body splayed as air rushes from beneath me, wrapping my hair around my face. I can see nearly nothing. Not that there’s much to see anyway, other than the blue of the sky as I fall. There’s no air resistance. The air does nothing to slow me down. My hands make a meek attempt to protect my head, some sort of Pavlovian response, as I thrust my feet downward, knowing my only chance of survival hinges on landing feetfirst. It doesn’t work. I can’t get them down. Another fire escape landing soars past but I can’t get to it in time.
My insides scuttle to my center from the speed, from the velocity of the fall. A fall that feels like forever. Like I am forever falling. My face molded in fear.
I open my mouth to scream, but nothing comes out.
eden
October 3, 1997 Egg Harbor
It’s become an itch that I can’t reach. A hunger that no amount of food can satiate. A drought that a thousand rainfalls can’t fix.
That unquenchable need to be a mother.
I think about it morning, noon and night.
At night I lie awake not sleeping, wondering how I will ever be a mother.
I don’t know that I have it in me to wait until Aaron’s and my divorce is complete.
There is adoption, of course, but as a single mother going through divorce proceedings and carrying an exorbitant amount of debt, I hardly think I’m a suitable candidate for adoption.
And so I must find another way.
I go to work early and I leave late, spending those extra few minutes staring at the babies through the nursery room glass. On my lunch break I eat quickly so that I have time to wander down to the labor and delivery unit and salivate over the newborns while the nursery room nurses tend to their every need, the bottles and clean diapers and the endless rocks in the rocking chairs.
I don’t want to feel the way I do.
I’m not a bad person, not by any means, and yet it’s an addiction to me. A disease. I’m unable to abstain from thinking about babies, from wanting a baby, from craving a baby as one does gambling or cocaine.
I’ve lost control of my own behavior. I don’t know what I’m capable of, what I might do, and that in itself terrifies me. Once I was very rule abiding; I always did as I was told.
But now my neurotransmitters are in disrepair and quite simply, I’m not the person I used to be. That Eden is gone, replaced with someone I scarcely recognize anymore, someone I don’t know.
October 7, 1997 Egg Harbor
Something happened today.
I had eaten my lunch—roast beef on rye from the hospital’s cafeteria—sitting all alone at one of the smaller round tables, nibbling quickly, quietly and staring out the window at the visitors and outpatients who came and went through the revolving front doors, realizing how utterly alone I felt as the other tables spilled over with groups of four, five, six, all involved in conversations that didn’t have a thing to do with me. Oh, how I felt so alone. When I was through eating, I set my tray beside the trash can and then went to visit the babies in the nursery.
A drug addict needing her fix.
As I stood there, peering through glass at the newborns sound asleep in their knitted blankets with their knitted hats, one little one in particular caught my eye, the name in the bassinet reading Jade Cutter. It was the name that caught my attention, not necessarily the baby herself, though she was perfect in every way, from the roundness of her head to the redness of her cheeks. But more so, it was the slip of pink paper in the bassinet that caught my eye, the one that listed her name, date and time of birth, pediatrician, and the names of her parents.
Joseph and Miranda Cutter.
Joe and Miranda.
They’d had their baby girl. They’d had their baby girl and they didn’t tell me.
She was swaddled in a pink cotton blanket, eyes closed, mouth parted as she breathed in her sleep. A single hand had forced its way from the blanket, but Jade seemed unmindful of this, unlike other infants—I’d come to learn from my time spent observing them in the nursery—whose limbs needed to be controlled so that they could sleep. There was dark hair, a mound of it, that sneaked out from the edges of the pink hat and, though they were shut tight, I had to imagine her eyes too were dark like Joe’s, though these, of course, were things that often changed over time.
And in that moment little Jade’s eyes parted and she gazed at me, it seemed, and I was stricken with a sudden, purposeful, persistent need to hold her in my arms.
I stepped into the nursery, greeting the ladies there by name. There were two of them, one older and one younger, both of whom I knew fairly well. How many months had I been stopping by, telling the tale of how I was working hard to earn my degree so I could be one of them, nursery room nurses who tended to newborn babies? How many times had they let me into the nursery, allowing me to watch as they changed diapers and swaddled with the expertise of someone who’d done it a million times? How many times had they let me stroke an infant’s cheek in his or her sleep, never once needing to remind me to wash my hands because I always remembered?
But not this time.
“You’ll need to stay in the hall, Eden,” the older of the two nurses said, a woman by the name of Kathy, and I felt a stabbing sensation in the chest as she pointed to the floor, to an imaginary line that dissected the nursery from the hallway tiles.