I rest my forehead against my hand and lean toward the screen, reading those lines again and again, trying to make sure I’m not imagining them. Could it really be back? That broad, lonely trail I once walked with my mother, the one Ricky knew only as a lost Atlantis. Could it have returned, just the way he predicted it would? I try to picture all the rains that have fallen on that lake, all the days of blazing sun skimming the salt from its disappearing water, the passages of moon and sun like the never ending circular turns of a baby’s wind-up toy. Since the night Ricky and I stood on the beach, an eternity has passed. Tides have rolled in and out, dunes blown and shifted. Dogs have been born, chased tennis balls across the sand, been loved and grown old, died and become aching little memories. The Earth has changed, time marching on heartlessly, not caring that there is no one to cup a hand around the flame of Ricky’s life and bear witness to the whole of it.
I adjust my glasses and, in spite of everything, press on with the transcription—writing one letter, then the next, meaningless as runes.
Chapter Seven
It’s four days before Janny returns. She reappears on the other side of the bars with her arm in a sling and a distant, scowling expression on her face. “You’re back,” I say exultantly.
Officer Parker lets her in. Although it goes against procedure, they almost never cuffed Janny even before the injury, and now it would be complicated as well as essentially pointless. She steps into the cell and slides a hand to the side of the bed to orient herself. “I missed you,” I say.
“You got my Vaseline? You didn’t send it.”
“It didn’t fit in your cosmetic bag. Here.” I take it down from the shelf, but then see she can’t apply it to her own hands. “Let me do it for you. They didn’t have any at the clinic?”
“Not for me.”
I smooth a dollop of it onto her cast-free hand, massaging it into her short fingers and leathery knuckles. Her blank gaze is aimed at nothing in particular—a corner, a cinderblock—and for a few moments we stand in silence.
“Somebody there said the baby thing is true,” she says.
My heart thumps errantly, as if it is a door on which an angry person is knocking. “About me, you mean?”
“Yeah, about you. Who else you think, the Queen of England? They say she even come visit you.”
“Janny,” I say. I take another dollop of Vaseline and touch the fingers curling out from her cast, but she pulls back her hand and scowls at me. “Have you ever tried to forget something that made you feel sad?” I ask.
“Bad things I did,” she says. “Not my babies.”
“I never even held her. They took her away the minute she was born.”
“And that makes you deny her?”
I say nothing.
She presses me, her voice rising. “Makes you lie and say she never lived? Nine months she grow in your belly and you act like it’s nothing? You ashamed of her?”
“Of course I’m not ashamed of her,” I say sharply, matching her volume. “I’m ashamed of her father.”
“Bullshit. He do the same thing you do. You ashamed of you.”
She pushes past me and sits down on her bed. The glower of her expression frightens me— so unfocused, so filled with inward rage. I perch on the side of the desk, and in a quieter, more soothing tone say, “Janny, you killed Javier to protect yourself and your kids. They understand how bad he was to you, and that you wanted to get away and were afraid he would wake up and stop you. But my…my daughter can’t look at what I did and find a reason like that. If I was your mother, wouldn’t you want me not to claim you?”
“No,” she says. Her voice is dull and hoarse. “I’d want you to love me. So I’d know I wasn’t a monster’s child.”
My grip tightens against the edge of the desk. An ache settles into my gut. As I gaze at Janny, her expression shifts into one of naked grief, as though between us it is only she who understands what I have lost.
All of a sudden I realize it is July. I count the months on my fingers, once, then again, and I know I have it right. It’s the month of Annemarie’s birth. I don’t know the day, and I panic at the realization that it might have passed.
At my desk, in my cell, I sketch out a one-month calendar and plant the dates on it in pencil, trying to figure out when exactly it was. I remember being awakened from sleep by distant booms that sent a shock of fear down my spine, and sitting up in bed to listen, terrified of a riot or an escape that would cause us all to be punished. “Happy Fourth of July,” somebody had shouted, and only then did I realize the noises were fireworks in the nearby town. I was still pregnant then—of that I am sure. I went to trial on August fifth, and at that point my pregnancy was over, but I was still bleeding. It’s easy to recall watching Forrest testify against me as I sat meekly beside my lawyer at our table, feeling like my body was an hourglass shedding the last remnants of those terrible days. But I don’t remember the precise date.
I take out a sheet of plain paper and fold it in two. On one half, with it turned on its side the long way, I try to draw the sea. I sketch the curve of the shore, the foam of a wave reaching up the sand, the swoop of the Ferris wheel and Giant Dipper coaster in the distance. I draw the quarter moon and the summer constellations hanging above the ocean—Ursa Major, Leo and Virgo—though I know, to her, they will likely be no more than dots signifying the night sky. I blow gently on the image to shoo away the loose graphite, being careful not to smudge the blacks and grays.
Here is what I don’t draw: the humid car. The figures on the beach, one upside-down, one with her toes sinking deep into the sand. The faraway screams from the coaster, the bursts of wind that whipped at skirts and hair, the taste of salt on the lips, the bright smudged starlight between the lines of Leo that meant galaxies and galaxies and galaxies.
In the end, it’s very simple. It’s only a drawing of the beach.
Happy birthday, Annemarie, I write inside. I’m afraid to sign Love. I’m afraid to sign a name or a word, worried that each might mean too much or too little. May a thousand wishes come true for you, I write instead. I fold it into an envelope—it doesn’t fit quite right—and set it upright where my desk meets the wall. I run my smallest finger beneath my eye and then sweep it across my bottom lip like balm. It offers a peaceful feeling, this small return to the scene I’ve drawn, the taste of the sea. She began there, whether or not she knows it. And I wish she did. I wish she knew that one small thing.
Out in the yard, the sun bakes the pale soil like pottery. All the green has died within the bounds of the tall fence. In the farmlands beyond it the irrigated crops still grow, and sometimes I stand there with my fingers laced into the chain link and stare out at it like a child in a television commercial watching someone crack open a bottle of Coca-Cola.
I unfold the napkin from my pocket and take out a section of hot dog. Clementine has been lingering in the shade most of the time, often in inaccessible places, where I might see her but not be able to reach. I begin walking around the perimeter of the wall, clicking my tongue.
A woman sitting in a group at one of the picnic tables begins calling, too. “Frankfurter! Frankfurter!” she calls. “Here, kitty kitty!”