She didn’t leave All Nation. She returned to work two weeks later a broken shell, no longer caring much about her work the way she thought she had. Her demeanor was immediately noticed by her superiors and friends. She confided in her friends that she was crushed by losing Alanis, that it was a hurt she had never felt before. She tried explaining that losing a baby through miscarriage was like losing that same child through something else—crib death, a car accident, some dreadful disease. Just because Alanis never breathed or lived outside the womb didn’t mean her death was less worthy. Her friends said the same meaningless words in an attempt to make her feel better: “You’ll get better in time,” and “You need to get past this,” and that old chestnut: “Someday you’ll have another baby.”
She wanted Alanis!
And because she’d wanted Alanis so desperately, because her passing had wounded her so deeply, because she grieved over the death of her baby the way one would mourn the death of any child, her friends and co-workers shook their collective heads and clucked disapprovingly, not understanding the level of her grief. She knew what they thought: Alanis had been stillborn, premature; she’d miscarried her baby so her child was never, really, technically born. She had never really been alive, so there was no sense in mourning over the death. This mindset infuriated Michelle more than it saddened her, and she’d tried explaining her feelings to those who she felt were her friends but they merely humoring her and said the same meaningless words of comfort. They didn’t get it, they didn’t understand Michelle’s pain and grief and they didn’t want to understand it. By then the corporate wall that had been built around Michelle’s life by her parents had been all but shattered and Michelle saw the people she thought of as her friends for who they really were: blind, soulless parasites who’s only interest was for their own self-image and worth.
She tendered her resignation three months later, packed up her belongings and moved as far away from New Jersey as she could get and still be within shouting distance of a major city. Central Pennsylvania seemed far enough to get away from the hurt and pain, and it was close enough to at least two major cities—Harrisburg and Philadelphia. She found a small apartment in a town called Rothsville and set up a computer graphics business, peddling her wares to local businesses, and within a few months she was designing flyers, brochures, booklets, restaurant menus and other items. It was grunt work for the most part, but it paid the bills. Her rent was cheap, and the extra money she was saving enabled her to get back into real art—portraits mostly. Within a year she was leasing an old farmhouse in the country where she set up a small art studio and soon had plenty of clients, most of them drawn from an agency in New York she’d hooked up with.
In time she gained a passion for life she never thought she had. And she realized that even in death, Alanis was responsible for her reawakening. For if she hadn’t been pregnant with Alanis, she never would have woken up from the slumber she was in while she was so blindly devoted to All Nation. And even though she lost Alanis, she now had this tremendous gift her little girl had given her and she swore that she would never go down the path that had been prepared for her by her parents. She was going to live for herself, devote her attention to her art and her instincts and find a way to make a living with them. For a while it worked. She was able to make a living with her art for three years or so, mostly doing commercial art for advertising agencies and portraits for corporate clients that would hang in their lobbies and hallways, and even though she never rose above that, had never attracted the attention of one of the more prestigious art museums or collectors, it was more satisfying than crunching numbers on some spreadsheet in some faceless cubicle.
And now things seemed to have returned full circle for she was once again working for another faceless corporation. She’d kept up with her computer skills as an artist and, as a result of designing her own website, became a webmaster for several consulting firms. The computer graphics work usually came hand in hand with web design and she was always able to make a better-than-average living with it. In time, her skills attracted the attention of some of the bigger consulting firms who liked her computer graphics work and she somehow wound up doing work for them. And the more the work morphed, the more she realized she was being sucked back into working for large corporations. The difference this time was that she was doing it on her own terms.
And now she was sitting on a king-sized bed in some drab hotel room in El Paso, Texas, looking at a photo of her still-born daughter, tears streaming down her face, remembering those years with a sad sense of nostalgia and yearning. She had come so far, she thought, tracing a finger over the photo’s edges. Her vision blurred through tears. In the photo, Alanis’s sweet little face had been washed from the blood and membrane that had covered her in birth, revealing pink skin that seemed strangely life-like. She’d been dressed in a little white nightgown and placed in a bassinet with a white mattress, a white and pink blanket pulled up to her chin. She didn’t look dead; she looked asleep, as any preemie would look in the neonatal care unit at any hospital. But Michelle knew better; her daughter’s body had never breathed life, but her spirit had been alive within her these past twelve years and had never died.
Michelle cried softly, the memories washing through her. She brought the photo to her lips and kissed it. “They said the hurt would go away some day,” she said softly through her tears. “It never goes away and I don’t want it to. Because if it does it means… it means that you’ll go away and I don’t want you to ever go away. I want you to be with me right here always… always in my heart.” She cried, kissing the photo of her daughter, one of five snapshots the hospital staff had arranged to have taken which she had since made negatives out of and duplicated numerous times in print and electronically—digital images existed on a zip disk in her bank’s safe deposit box in the event of a fire at her house. If Michelle or her place of residence were to cease to exist through a hurricane or a fire, Alanis would always exist. Forever.
“I’ll never let you go away, baby,” Michelle said, lying down on the bed on her left side, holding the photograph close to her. “I’ll never let you go. Never let you go.”
Her painful little memory was eased of its pain in slow degrees as Michelle sank into sleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN VICTOR ADAMS entered the headquarters of Free State Insurance Company in Irvine, California he was wearing a three-piece tan business suit and carrying a large dark gray briefcase.
It had been three months since he’d stepped into the confines of the building. He recognized the security guard as he walked through. He nodded at her as he approached the booth to sign in. The guard, an attractive Hispanic woman named Elsa Valdez, didn’t recognize him. Victor was wearing dark sunglasses, was clean-shaven, and his hair was cut fashionably short. The last time he saw Elsa when he worked in the IT department of the company, he had been eighty pounds overweight, sported a beard, and had shoulder-length hair that was normally pulled back in a pony tail. He also dressed more casually; when he worked there, Free State had a very liberal business casual dress code which was nice. There was no sense in dressing up to the nines when you had to scrounge around on dirty floors under desks tracing CAT5 cables or risk getting strangled by your tie while leaning over a laser printer to diagnose its breakdown. Today Victor Adams looked like a corporate lawyer. “Good morning,” he said to Elsa.