“U-turn now!” She grabbed the wheel. The car swung bumpily across the median strip and a police siren went off in the distance behind them. As if in duet, there was a high-pitched singing in Susan’s ear that could be heard by no one but her — a wheezy screaming without body or noise — a hollowing wind in the head. And as things slowed for them, enough to think and take an action, she could see, looking ahead for their running boy, that though one car had slowed down to let him make a dash for it, another car, not seeing, had already greedily sped up to pass on the left, and before everyone’s eyes Gabriel became the flying golden angel after which he was named.
“I’m not sure what just happened,” said Susan, who kept repeating these words, and opened the door as the car was still moving. As they reapproached the rest stop, which was on the right, vacant and devoid of picnic or rest, and where the scenic view would remain a mystery, Gabriel was lying far away on the left, across the highway from it, on the muddy median. Several cars had stopped and Susan stumbled from theirs while it was slowing. She fell, then got back up. Traffic was beginning to rubberneck. She ran across the lanes, between the cars until she got to him: his eyes were open and there was a spasm at the mouth; she threw her coat over and beneath and around him like a bunting. Time was still in slow motion but no longer in a way that could even in theory be made use of.
There was a trial date and there was a hearing and there was a prison sentence not long enough to suit either of them. They pleaded guilty to every charge, large and larger. The judge tilted his head and massaged his face with his hands: he had seen much worse. His job was a curse and he’d grown used to worse. And so, astonishingly, he suspended their sentences. Their loss was considered, by the court, sufficient.
They changed their names and drove a thousand miles west.
“Our lawyer was too good,” said Susan.
Throughout the telling of this, thank God, Mary-Emma was upstairs, dreaming her dreams. Her parents had gone from a couple who would be different, who would be better than anyone, who were determined to be better than most, to a couple who would be different because they were worse.
“That woman who would sit there and somehow let a man make that kind of mistake is gone,” said Sarah.
“She died,” I said.
“Gabriel died.” My ears were scorched. A bass line from a Peter Gabriel tune thumped absurdly in my brain.
“But Susan, too,” I said.
“Susan,” Sarah repeated, as if in a trance. “There is not enough dying that can happen to Susan.” Sun came out momentarily from behind a cloud and briefly washed her with a cleansing light, then moved on as if it had changed its mind, leaving her in the dark once more.
I wanted to go home and watch movies for the rest of my life. I wanted to see larger and more ravenous and less pathetic monsters than these.
“We did not have the nerve, in our convicted but legally unpunished condition, to look anyone in the eye anymore. Not where we lived. We did not even hold a decent memorial. How we stayed together I cannot fathom.” She was pacing again. “And yet, how could we not? We were each other’s only consolation. The sort of redemption that was required of us only we understood.”
“Of course,” I murmured. Although how together they had remained seemed possibly a matter of debate.
“Strangely, it’s easier to get on with life, to forget one’s losses and misdeeds, if one is not formally punished. People often think the opposite, but it’s not true. Proper official punishment creates a double punishment and gives wholeness and enduring shape to an experience that otherwise is allowed with time to fade and blur and be denied.”
Fade. Could events return, retrace their heavy-footed passage, to the place from where they had accidentally come? Could even a child grow vaguer and … fade?
“Much has been made of the doom of not remembering. But remembering has its limitations. Believe me, it is good to forget.”
“Yes,” I said. Though everything that I ever forgot I always remembered again later, so perhaps it didn’t count.
“Sometimes when I reconsider this event, as a route to forgiveness, I recast it and make it Susan who is actually driving. Yet it still comes out the same. Sometimes.”
I didn’t know whether it mattered. I didn’t know what to say. I felt as if I were watching the lion lady being eaten by the lion.
“It was an accident,” I said.
“Negligence is the legal word. One of them, at any rate.”
In my mind I did a quick survey: pride, weakness, uneasy deferral to power. Paralyzing strangleholds of the unconscious, amnesia of convenience, dark twists of character, and secrets in the past? Babbling during grief? Jokes while dying? Hadn’t I had a midterm on these?
I was now at the bottom of my wineglass, where there was no further loam or briar to assist.
Sarah was speaking. “… I had always been opposed to a woman’s taking her husband’s name, but when I changed mine I suddenly knew the relief in such an act. It was a relief I imagined all those marrying women had felt from the beginning of time, immersing themselves in a new life, a new way, a new identity, instead of clinging to the old self as if it were solid and whole and not half baked and assaulted — which it always is.”
I would never take a man’s name. I knew that, in the deepest part of me, even though I also suspected that the women who did take their husbands’ names understood something about marriage that I didn’t. Me? I would never even let a man drive.
“Of course then we were unable to conceive again. I was too old.”
“Really,” I said. None of this was my business. What could I care about the threads and seeds of someone else’s fertility, the scooped-out womb of a melon at a picnic I was not attending? What did I care? I was back under the coat with Gabriel and Peter Gabriel and St. Peter and his gate.
Sarah poured some more SB into her glass and then into mine, and I gulped at it. “I’ve had to tell you all this because the adoption agency has now found out everything. And it has jeopardized the process with Emmie,” said Sarah. “As maybe it should. It’s my fault. We were less than forthcoming.”
What? Who were these people, “Susan” and “John,” “Sarah” and “Edward”? They could not hang on to anything.
The wine heated my neck. “You’re going to give up Mary-Emma?” There was too much emotion in my voice.
“This at long last is our formalized punishment,” she said. “When there’s hell to pay, are you paying hell, or paying with hell?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. My hands gripped at each other.
“Well,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”
Startled and furious at everyone, I could not believe the things I was hearing anymore. Briary, loamy SB flew to my lips. “You sought her out and brought her here. She loves you! Excuse me for saying this, but you have a responsibility now that’s greater than … than …” Than what? Than before? Than others’? Than mine? Was this my stab at saying Hey, what am I supposed to do here? I haven’t a clue, but this, these words, is what I’m choosing. “You have to fight it! For her!”
“Edward doesn’t want to, it seems,” said Sarah. And here she looked more tired than I’d ever seen her in months of tiredness. “It’s not entirely up to us, you see. Even if we lose out, or choose not to battle at all, maybe it would all be for the best. People would find out. Her schoolmates in the future might know. Maybe we should let Emmie go. Even if we didn’t have this particular thing in our past, maybe she shouldn’t be with us. You know, this kind of adoption is complicated. If all those Wednesday nights have taught me one thing, it’s this: love is not enough.”