Now she bent down on the floor in a compact posture of worship. Rob was behind her. He was unable to keep silent. She heard his singing moan with utter clarity — it struck a chord in her and increased her pleasure — but kept silent herself, helped by the Hello Kitty pencil case, found under the bed, which she’d wedged in her mouth. She could feel the pencils roll and crunch under her teeth as she got closer, and she could still hear the thunder rolling, though the lightning had stopped. “I’m right there,” said Rob. “I’m right there.”
When Jemma looked up toward the window she saw that it was entirely black, blank even of the washing rain. She felt suddenly lifted up, as if someone were tossing her high in the air, or like she was riding an elevator at insane speeds thousands of feet into the sky. It was almost unbearable, and she cried out, despite her best efforts to keep silent. She got lost briefly, imagining herself bursting apart in a most agreeable explosion. She watched calmly as forty little Jemmas (she had time to count them) went flying out on curling tracks, trailing fairy-dust sparkles out of their bottoms. They faded, except for one, who calmly regarded Jemma with a face that became the face of the King’s Daughter, wise and malformed. It stared and stared until Jemma opened her eyes.
“Oh God,” Rob said, then leaned forward over her, pressing his chest against her back, his face into her neck, and placing his hands around her belly.
“What’s happening?” Jemma asked, confused now, and a little nauseated because the lifted sensation was still with her. She felt them being drawn higher and higher. The window was a slate; it did not reflect them when they rose unsteadily on their cramped legs to try to look through it. Then they were lifted with a new force, so hard and fast that they fell down and lay together with their faces pressed against the carpet. She knew quite certainly that something horrible was happening, and that it was all her fault — I got him, after all, she thought, and, Here it is, and, How stupid, to think it could end anyway but like this. She heard a voice, courteous and mechanical, and certainly a voice apart from the babbling chorus in her head. It said, “Creatures, I am the preserving angel. Fear not, I will keep you. Fear not, I will protect you. Fear not, you will bide with me. Fear not, I will carry you into the new world.”
3
The problem in me is the problem in the world. The problem in the world is the problem in me. I have always known this. Even when I did not understand it, it was still in me, the question and the answer together, knotted up like a pair of hands clenched together in pathetic anguished prayer.
When I was five years old I tried to kill my sister. All day long I tried to kill her. In the morning I put mothballs in her cereal, but our mother woke up and threw them away, not because she smelled the naphthalene, but because she thought cereal was for trailer park kids, and on the days when she could get out of bed in time — a century’s weight of ghosts kept her sleeping or staring at the ceiling in her darkened room until noon many days — she would make us fancy omelets.
I took my sister for a walk and tried to sacrifice her on a stone picnic table in the Severna Forest Coliseum. I knew the story of Isaac. I knew the whole of the Old Testament by then. I raised a smooth stone as big as my fist and prepared to knock a hole in her skull. I waited too long, imagining the blood on the stone and a clump of her hair matted to it. A troop of Brownies came rustling through the tall grass — the coliseum was built by a wealthy Baptist with a passion for Greek tragedy and outdoor theater, but once he moved away it was let to fall into disrepair — and Jemma leaped off the table and ran to dance with them around one of the decaying plaster statues.
I tried to drown her in the tub. Our mother was throwing a party for the elites of our neighborhood, which is to say for everybody, since everyone who lived there was odiously rich, the cat-food magnate having established a tradition of exclusivity in this heavily wooded peninsula on the Severn. She sent us together to the tub, and I washed my sister’s hair, just as I had been taught to do, and then when she ducked under the water to rinse I held her there. I had never been taught to drown a person, but I knew just what to do. My hands felt old and wise as she struggled under them. I am sending you to Jesus, I told her. But I remember the moment perfectly, and I know I was not trying to kill her because I thought it would make her happy.
And finally I pushed her off the roof. We dressed up for the party, and wandered from drunk to drunk, inhabiting a whole different world from the one at their level of sight. Four feet off the ground, nobody noticed if you stole a cigarette from where it was burning in the ashtray, or nipped from unattended drinks. No one noticed that I was drunk. I only got more sullen and angry, and so it hardly showed. We were sent to bed, but we did not sleep. I took Jemma out on the roof, something I did all the time. And usually I would tell her all the things that had made me angry that day, or point out lights on the river, or try to get her to see shapes in the stars. But tonight all I could think of was the crowd in our house and on the deck. It was late in September but very warm, and from where we sat on the top of the roof I could see men in short sleeves and women in short dresses, but none of them thought to look up, and they would probably not have seen us anyway in our dark pajamas.
Look at them, I said to my sister. Just look at them! And I thought that she must be like me, and that just for her to see them would be for her to hate them, like just to see the world was to hate it, every little cloud and bird and bush, and just to look in the mirror was to hate myself so much I could feel a trembling ache all over my body. One day I’ll go, I said, and then I’ll take them all. I did not know what it meant, to go. I only knew it was the right word, and the right sentiment — sudden and strange and certain as a divine inspiration. And then I pushed her at them, because I was sure just in that moment, though I knew better as soon as she started to roll, that she would be a bomb to kill them all when she hit.
Right away I regretted it. It was a mistake to push her, and it had been a mistake to try to drown her, and stone her, and poison her. It was a mistake because it was a horrible sin, the worst thing I had done and the worst thing I would ever do, and now it had set the tone and the theme for my whole life. And it was a mistake because I knew, just in that moment when I was revealed to myself as utterly depraved and irredeemably vile, that it was I and not my sister who must be the deadly sacrifice.
4
Dr. Chandra was in the cafeteria, the place to which he habitually retreated after an on-call humiliation. There was no consolation in pudding, but he still stuffed himself with it every time something went wrong, every time he tangled himself in something really unfortunate, or tripped at exactly the worst time, falling into another mother and squeezing at her boob for purchase. You do that more than twice and people think you are feigning clumsiness for the sake of the grope, but he thought boobs the unloveliest things in the world; he’d cross the street to avoid a particularly large, stern pair. Every time he wrote the wrong dosage for a drug, and every time he got caught only pretending to hear a murmur or making up a laboratory value he’d failed to memorize, he’d come down to the cafeteria, always to the same table if it was available, stuck in a glass alcove, windows that looked over the memorial butterfly garden. You didn’t have to be a dead child to get a butterfly there, but that was mostly what they represented, preemies who never made it out of the nursery or toddlers who couldn’t beat their brain tumor or teens who succumbed to leukemia. The pudding was cheap and filling. He ate it and ate it until he thought he could feel it squeezing from the pores of his nose.