But then your foot slipped and I screamed out, and that was when I saw Son hurrying along that far side of the cove. He vanished around the corner. A few moments later, he reappeared on the ledge above you. He kicked at the gull and it flew away, and then he leaned over the edge and waited for you with an outstretched hand. As soon as you were within reach, he grabbed your arm and hauled you up onto the ledge.
He was kneeling in front of you now, holding both your arms and chiding you for your recklessness. As soon as I breathed a sigh of relief, I saw him slap you across the face. I heard the slap. It knocked you back a step, and you began crying instantly.
Don’t touch her! I cried out.
That’s when he finally turned his glare on me. Even from that distance, I could tell that his anger had nothing to do with you, that there was venom there, clarity in the way he clutched your tiny arm and gazed calmly at me.
You’re hurting her arm! I shouted, weakly.
You yelled something at him too, fearlessly for once, but he kept his eyes on me. When you wrested your arm away, he grabbed it again, muttering something to you as you shook your head vigorously. He pulled you over to the edge of the ledge and pointed down at the deep waters, more than eight meters below. You flashed me a frantic look and tried to pull yourself back.
Stop it! I was screaming, but before I was halfway down the path, he had already thrown you over the edge.
You hit the water hard and disappeared. The boy leaped in. By the time I reached the cove, he had you above the surface of the rough waters with your arms wrapped around his neck. As he swam you to the rocks, your face was too full of concentration to show any emotion, and when I lifted you out, you were heavier than you had ever been in my arms. You clung to me. I can still feel your violent breathing there on my neck, below my left ear.
Son was peering down at us from above, a dark faceless figure in the bright sunlight. I was waiting for him to say something, to fling down his accusations.
He barked at the boy, who gave me one final glance before grabbing the fishing poles and hurrying away to follow his father. We never saw them again on the island.
Son didn’t need to say anything, of course. He had finally figured out that I had come to him not to give myself, but to give you. It was what I wanted from him all along. It was what I believed I needed.
You must wonder why I thought to abandon you with a stranger instead of with your granduncle and his family. The truth was that I was terrified of changing my mind. I wanted the choice to leave and the choice to come back. Asking Son was my only hope. I must have loved him then because I believed every word I said, every promise I made, even ones I should have known would never be kept.
In the end, how much distance lies between the truth and what we believe to be true? Between the things we feel at one time and the things we end up doing?
It still startles me, what he did to you. In the moments after it happened, I went from rage to a sudden numbing clarity, overcome by a sadness I had never experienced, not even with your father’s death, because as Son and the boy disappeared into the sunlight and out of our lives that afternoon, I realized that I did not and would not ever know what I wanted, and that in not knowing I would always hurt someone.
So it was on a cold December morning, many months later in America, that I was stricken again by this sadness and knew I could not bear it this time. I stepped onto a bus and let it take me as far away from you as possible. In my mind I kept riding that bus for the next eighteen years, never sure of who I was becoming and constantly waiting for you or someone to reappear like an avenging ghost, until one day Son of all people reappeared. It’s outrageous to me now, a fateful trick from God perhaps, that he would be the one to step back into my life. But by then, after so many years, he seemed like a savior to me. By then I had spent two decades burying your father and forgetting you. I had twice made another life for myself. I had even married another man, a good man who helped me disappear into that other life, however briefly, though I ended up hurting him as well and finally realized that other lives are not possible, not for me or him or you or anyone. The life you leave behind never dies. It inevitably outlives you, my daughter, just as you will outlive me.
So when Son once again offered me a future with him, I accepted this time. Out of love and regret and fear and also, I suppose, exhaustion. We forgave each other by not mentioning the past. We conspired against it in our silence. Just as a child might close its eyes in the presence of something frightening. Just as I had done so many times before.
But that is another story. I have twenty years’ worth of stories I can tell you, each one inevitably a shadow of the other. Which ones do I tell now?
I’ve tried to explain myself and lay bare whatever truth I can find in the things I’ve done and the things I’ve let happen. Yet it seems the more I explain, the more I muddy the truth. My one story becomes so many other stories that I feel I can never properly tell it to you, that once you finish reading these words, if you ever do read them, you will be worse off.
So what I tell myself is that I haven’t been writing to you at all, or even to myself. I’ve been writing to someone who does not exist, a child of my imagination. That is the only happiness, after all, to tell the truth without making anyone suffer.
The last time I saw you, you were asleep in bed with one of your cousins. It was morning, cold and stormy outside.
Your cousin had pulled the covers away from you in the night. I stood by your bedroom door in my work clothes and watched you toss and turn, searching for warmth in your sleep. Your cousin’s old pajamas were a size too big on you and made you look again like the infant I once held to my bosom. I remember rooting for you to take back the covers, but after a while you gave up and settled back into a deep sleep.
On the dresser, beside a photograph of you and your cousins at the zoo, I set down an envelope with your name written on it and $2,500 inside. Your granduncle had gotten me a job at a friend’s restaurant, so I had spent six months riding the bus to work every morning, then cleaning and cutting vegetables, bussing tables, sweeping every inch of that place three times a day. I left you half of all the money I had in the world.
All of it would not have been enough, I know, but I should have still left you everything and sought my way in the world naked and empty.
I thought briefly about leaving a long letter for your granduncle, at least to tell him what to say to you, but I knew no letter of any length could properly explain what I was about to do. So under his bedroom door, I slipped a note saying that I was leaving for good and I was sorry to him and everyone. I can only imagine what he ended up telling you. If he lied, he had a right to. I deserve his scorn as much as yours.
In the living room, the Christmas tree stood blinking in the early-morning dark. It was an American tradition that your granduncle, to my surprise, had taken up, and I had slept next to it for weeks with those red and emerald lights blinking in my dreams, as they still do nowadays at Christmastime, even though I avoid the tradition altogether.