After a long time I straightened. “Why didn’t you and Dad tell me?”
“How could we? What happened to you was so awful. More than any child could bear.”
“But what about later? When I was an adult? I’m thirty-seven years old, for God’s sake!”
“We—they advised us not to. The adoption counselors. They said it would confuse you. And, Caroline, that’s the way it was done back then. Adoptions were nearly always closed. Even children with less . . . less dramatic histories never learned who their birth parents were. Lots of children grew up not knowing they were adopted.”
I pulled away from her. “You should have told me.”
For the first time she looked impatient. “Sweet girl, would it have made you happy? What good would it have done?”
? ? ?
LATER THAT MORNING I taught my Friday class as usual. FREN 388, the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France. It’s frowned upon to call in sick, and it turned out to be a relief to pass an hour focused on something I understood, a subject that I had mastered.
Today’s assignment was Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a book I always look forward to teaching. The portrait of a woman trapped in a dull marriage, it is a groundbreaking work for feminists. It was scandalous back in its day: in 1857, Flaubert was put on trial for obscenity and “crimes against public morality.” This because of the disgraceful behavior of his protagonist, Emma Bovary. She lies to her husband and lavishes a cigar case and a silver-handled riding crop on her lover. Still, she has her charms, and usually I take the time with my students to savor her seductions, her little vanities. Today, though, I felt impatient. Her sins felt tame set against the revelations of my last twenty-four hours. Emma Bovary thought she had problems? At least she knew who her parents were, and no one had murdered them, and she wasn’t running around with a bullet jammed against her spine.
With considerable effort I managed to stick with my prepared lecture notes. I even ended with a flourish, about how provocatively Flaubert had illuminated the turbulent social and political landscape of 1850s France. My students seemed to like this; they all diligently scribbled it down. I rewarded them by ending class a few minutes early. Then I gathered my notes, switched off the lights, and stepped into the quiet hallway. What now? According to my usual Friday routine, I should retire to my fourth-floor library nook for an exciting afternoon of grading papers and sipping herbal tea. I pictured my blue armchair, my electric kettle, my I ? NPR mug, neatly rinsed and left to dry. I couldn’t face them. Instead I headed toward the White-Gravenor building’s wide staircase.
Outside, the lawn of the main quad was busy. Students throwing Frisbees, calling to friends, making weekend plans. The day was pretty but cool. I began to walk, with no particular direction in mind. I just needed to move. I was near the main university gates and the John Carroll statue when my legs folded. One moment I was walking, and the next I was on the ground. I had eaten nothing since yesterday morning, but this wasn’t a faint. Nothing so dainty. I just . . . gave out. The body overriding the brain.
Here is something I did not know before but was about to learn. When a person receives a great shock, that person both continues to function and doesn’t. Let me explain: At that moment I could not stand up. But I was capable of sitting there on the cold sidewalk and registering quite clearly how I must look. My legs splayed, my hair askew, my bag strewn behind me. Some tiny part of me relished the spectacle. Students were cutting me a wide berth. I calculated what they must be thinking, how long it would take before someone bent down to ask if I was all right.
What would my answer be?
Seven
* * *
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2013
It was Saturday morning when the bullet began to throb.
Not a steady ache, like my wrist. This felt more ragged, more demanding. The pain came and went, but when it was there it was hot. I imagined the bullet pulsing, like an organ.
Back when I was a girl, the whole country was caught up in the frenzy for the Star Wars movies. I was a baby when the first one came out, but I do remember weeping on the morning that Return of the Jedi hit the theaters. I must have been six or seven by then. Tony and Martin were allowed to go see it; I was deemed too young and ordered to stay home. It seemed an unbearable injustice. Afterward, my brothers annoyed me for weeks by conversing in garbled Yoda syntax (“Told you I did, the potatoes please pass”). They also joked about sensing a Disturbance in the Force. It sounds hokey, but thirty years later, this is the phrase that now came to mind. I did sense something like a Disturbance. As though the bullet wielded some force that was disturbing the normal rhythms of my body.
I thought about the veins and muscles in my neck. How for years they must have grown and pushed and curved around the lead, like the roots of a tree when they meet resistance from a stone.
I had been three years old when I was shot.
Three.
That meant the bullet had been inside my body for longer than my teeth.
? ? ?
I CALLED MY doctor late that afternoon.
Was it possible? I asked him. That an ancient wound could start hurting, just like that?
“Unlikely,” he replied. “But describe the pain?”
I thought about it. “Hot. Like it’s radiating heat or something.”
“Well, it’s definitely not doing that. Unless it’s gotten infected, but I didn’t see any sign of that when I examined you this week.”
“Okay, but it really is . . . throbbing. I can feel the metal. The physical weight of it. Like it’s jabbing me.”
“I suspect that might be psychosomatic.”
“I am not imagining this, Dr. Zartman.”