The Border of Paradise: A Novel (37 page)

“It’s from being in the theater, I think,” he says. “Her voice, I mean. She knows how to use it. She
wields
it. She has a very vibrant voice, even on the telephone, even when she’s not talking loudly.”

“Don’t call her,” I say, “and don’t talk about her. You’re making yourself sick.”

He stares at the seat in front of him. He puts his thumb and forefinger together, forming a loop, and moves the tip from the right side of his closed mouth to the left side of his closed mouth. Then he gives me a fresh look.

“Let’s go back to the dining car,” he says. “I’m allergic to crying babies.”

As we walk back to the dining car I’m reminded of my father. “The left hind foot,” he says, “is the lucky one.” He’s separating the foot from the dead gray rabbit with a small knife at the wrist. He holds the foot in his naked hand and inserts the tip at the top, pulling it down to the dark pad. I am suddenly dizzy.

We’re in the middle of an empty dining car when Randy turns abruptly, stretching his arms overhead with a small grunting sound. The bottom of his T-shirt comes up, exposing an inch of white, with a path of thick hairs extending to the waist of his trousers. I don’t know how to feel about this, or how to feel when he reaches his hand out for me, walking me to the far end of the car beneath a swinging light. He says, his voice throatier now, “Sarah, I know this is weird, but… d’ya think you could see yourself loving me, if you were Cassie? I know you don’t really know me. If you did know me, would you love me? Because I don’t know if I can go on when I get back to Vacaville, and she won’t say boo to me, you know? It’ll just—it’s just going to kill me.” He reaches over and drags the backs of his fingers against the upper part of my arm. I can feel every finger on my skin. So it is impossible, and yet it is inevitable, that my hand goes to my tote bag and pulls out the bowie knife. I press the tip of it into his sternum.

He startles. We stand, a tableau, with the knife between us, large and with only one intent, until he finally says, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you need to put that away.”

But I keep my hand where it is. I think of pushing it through the layers of skin. What am I supposed to do? How do I keep myself safe? What will the consequences be if I take this knife and slide it down his chest with a terribly exact amount of pressure? After all, I have nowhere to go. I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I would run. He is saying words, but I don’t know whether to believe him. I don’t know if anything he’s told me is true.

PART IV

MARIANNE AND MARTY

BLESSINGS

MARIANNE (1972)

O
ne time,
I told myself as he left the convent.
It will have to be only this one time. He’s married, and he has a child. Beg for forgiveness from Our Lord and Savior; pray that your stupidity doesn’t ruin you.

When I failed to bleed the next month, and then the next, I knew. I packed my things and told Sister Angeline that I would leave in the morning. I’d not yet begun to show, but my body had softened as my heart was hardening. I said nothing about the reasons for my departure. Sister Angeline said that she would pray for me, but as I left her small and austere room I could feel all prayers fading for me forever.

And when I later saw David, and when he gave me his largesse, I was making a deal with the devil; I was conscious of the bargain as I made it. I could never ask him to leave his wife and boy for me, because my only claim to him was our history and a few afternoons and now this child inside of me, and I asked, and still ask, myself
why.
What kind of insanity infected the life of the church I’d tilled for myself. Was it his familiarity? Was it the fact that I’d loved him once and could love him again, or that I actually did love him again, had never stopped loving him? Was it the wine that parted my legs? I don’t know. I hated him for it, but I hated myself more. He was only doing what he wanted, and who could blame a man for pursuing his desires? I should have, as the expression goes, known better.

My child was so well behaved even then, allowing me no morning sickness and barely any discomfort. The discomfort I did endure, such as back pain, I accepted and even welcomed as punishment. With every month I grew larger, the stretch marks on my soft belly snaking toward my sides. I was not one of those fallen women who could pretend that she was not pregnant—it was as evident to me as it was to everyone I encountered when I left the house to buy groceries or simply exercise my sore legs. Women stopped me in the street and gazed at my pregnant body, saying things like “I carried high like that” or “How far along are you?” No one asked, “Is this a bastard child?” I suppose because I seemed reputable enough, although this may not be a question that people ask if they are polite. I was completely aware of the baby every second of every day.

I was the one who named her Gillian. It is a form of the name Julian, meaning “belonging to Julius,” but I gave her that name because Gillian was my mother’s middle name, and my mother was perhaps not an exemplary mother, but endured so much that by the time I left home she had earned herself a steely exoskeleton that I couldn’t blame her for. I thought that by naming my baby Gillian, she might inherit some of my mother’s better qualities. On a more delusional level, I thought that by naming her, I was staking a claim. But I couldn’t have what I really wanted, though who was to say what I really wanted; nor could I care for a baby on my own. And yet the larger Gillian grew inside of me, the more inclined I was to keep her, even in poverty.

But it was the call David’s wife made that undid me.
Daisy—
what a name. I heard a goodness in her voice, and I’ve been clinging to that sound of a good soul for the last decade and a half of my life. Yes, I told myself, she would be Gillian’s mother. They would live in that house, that homey house in the great wide woods, and they would have the Nowaks’ resources to clothe and feed her. Her! Gillian! My offspring, a Nowak after all. I could give her nothing, and they could give her everything; she could be happy, she could wear nice things, she could read good books, David would teach her the piano, she would learn Latin, she would live a good life and grow up to be a better woman than I.

And months later my baby was in my arms in the apartment that David had rented for myself and the midwife, my baby a
tiny squalling thing with a bright pink face that I loved with an immediacy more painful than the labor itself. I was twenty-two, penniless, husbandless. In labor I had lost all recollection of any sense but agony, but birthing Gillian put me solidly back into my torn and bloody body, and all I knew of it was that my love hurt like an echo of Hell and I did not want to let her go.

“Please,” David said. His hair was thinning. He was old in a young man’s body, his grotesquely scarred hand twisting between the fingers of the other. “Daisy and I will give her a good life. I promise you. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.” The midwife, a softly shaped Russian woman with ivory hair, remained expressionless in the face of our unshared emotion.

I sobbed. I said no. I held Gillian to my breast, and she pressed against it, hot and wailing. I swear she was saying,
You are mine.
But in the end I let him leave with our child, and because of this I had to believe in David’s fundamental goodness. I trusted—had to trust—that she would be all right. For a time after he took Gillian from me, I fell into melancholia, and there was no one to catch me—I had no friends, I lived alone. There was no one to implore that I wash my face or brush my teeth or, Heaven forbid, take a shower; there was no reason to eat, and I lost twenty pounds, and had to tuck a cushion between my knees before I slept because in lying on my side, my own bones hurt me. I cried until my eyes hurt, and then I waited and more tears came and I cried some more. At times, I plotted getting Gillian back. I imagined that I’d go to their home in the middle of the night and thieve her from her crib, but these dreams were countered by the self who looked into the mirror on the way to the toilet and saw a gaunt, oily-haired woman with feral eyes, who clearly could not take care of herself and therefore could not take care of a child.

Once the melancholia lessened enough for me to function, I fled the apartment. I moved into a small home in Sacramento with David’s money, receiving calls from him every so often with updates, and when William and Gillian were feasibly old enough for a music education, I begged him to bring the two to see me, which is how the piano lessons began. He brought our daughter and his son for instruction every week as a concession, as a form of custody. I would sit on the sofa with my hands gripping my knees and stare at the door at one fifteen, knowing that they would be there by one thirty. The doorbell would sound
its chime; I’d open the door and there they were, the child I had lost and the half-Oriental child that was David’s, both wearing white linens and clutching book bags of sheet music, while David smiled at me and said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Kucharski,” which was my pseudonym in those days.

Every week I had to hold myself back from tearing little Gillian into pieces and stuffing them into my mouth, to not touch her too much or touch William too little. Instead, I carefully hugged her hello. I held her at arm’s length, examining her shape and the contours of her face that looked so much like mine. I did the same with William, although my attention was always elsewhere when I was with William; even when I taught William his lessons I had half an eye on Gillian in the living room while she read, or drew with crayons on the sketchpad I made available to her every time she came.

I always looked through her drawings. I do still have them. She had an eye for detail, even with the clumsy crayons. Her tigers always had stripes that seemed authentically placed.

Every week I cried after she left, pressing my hand to the door and the other to my belly as if ready to birth her again. Despite my broodiness, I was eating and washing myself—I made sure that Mrs. Kucharski would be a charming figure to the children, and then I shed her skin as soon as they left. It was likely bouffant-headed Mrs. Kucharski who applied for, and was rewarded with, a job as a secretary at a real estate agency. Mrs. Kucharski was asked on dates to which she never said yes.

On two occasions did David betray himself to me. The first: Gillian and William were halfway out the door. I had said my customary good-byes. “The bright spot of my week,” I managed to say, and David flashed me a look of such longing that I couldn’t have misinterpreted it, no matter how many times I replayed it afterward. David always had a particularly legible face.

The second time occurred a month before he died. “Don’t get yourself into trouble while we’re gone,” he teased. He was helping Gillian with her coat. Their drive home was a drive of microclimates.

I said, “I have no one to get into trouble with.”

He did not look at me, but replied, “You know I love you,” before turning away, his hands perched on his children’s shoulders. What possessed him to say this in front of them, I do not know. I don’t think they were listening. The door closed so firmly that it
was like he hadn’t said anything at all, but the words remained with me. I even whispered them to myself at times, as if by doing so I could keep the fluttering thing alive.

I loved them both, and in both cases I imagined my wounds might fester less if I tried to harden my heart fully. But the truth is that I never made an honest go of moving on; I was constantly looking back.

His wife called me one night after I came home from work at the agency. She had never spoken to the persona of Mrs. Kucharski, and when I heard her voice and introduction on the line I nearly dropped the phone. I responded in a voice that was not entirely in my normal register for my role as the piano teacher. It was audibly different from the way I’d answered the phone, but that had only been the one word
hello
and it didn’t matter anyway, because Mrs. Daisy Nowak was calling to tell me that her husband and daughter had died in a car wreck.

“William will not come for lessons,” she said.

I couldn’t breathe, and then I was crying before I could stop myself. If she hadn’t suspected me before, she suspected me then.

“How terrible,” I said, barely choking out the words.

“It is terrible.”

“I’m—I’m sorry.”

After a long moment, Daisy replied, “I understand.”

A tin of ashes arrived in the mail a few weeks later. I scattered them in my garden, amid the rosebushes, and the piano lessons—Mrs. Kucharski—and my life ended then.

When I arrived home from work and saw her for the first time in four years, Gillian the ghost, fifteen years old, was sitting on my sofa with a TV tray and a glass of milk in front of her, looking grown, looking much the same as she did when I last saw her with her small hand in David’s as they left this Sacramento home. Her hair was hacked short. Her gold glasses were slightly crooked, and she squinted despite their presence on her face. She looked like a beautiful farm girl—healthy and nourished, with lean and muscled arms and shoulders—but her floral, no doubt homemade, dress hugged too tightly at the armpits, and though its hem was let out and ragged, the skirt still rode up her thighs.

“Mrs. Kucharski,” she said.

“Gillian.”

“My mother said you were dead, but I came to your house anyway. I didn’t know where else to go.”

I reached for her. Without being fully aware of doing it, I touched her hair, her face, her hands. Her whole body was cold like marble; she didn’t move. I worked to stop crying as I sat next to her with Marty watching from the kitchen, judging the girl who was my daughter and the daughter who was a Nowak all over her face, a Nowak in the slight hunch of her shoulders and the gold of her hair. It was a miracle; I couldn’t dissect a miracle.

But I asked her if something happened. I asked her how she got here. She shook her head. “I walked to town,” she said, “and asked someone how I could get to Sacramento. I took a train, which was… I’d never done that before. And I remembered how to get to your house, sort of. One-nine-eight-three Samson Drive.”

“You’re here.”

She wasn’t dead. I had to remind myself of this. I was not being pursued by an angel, but by my flesh-and-blood daughter, who had come to find me.

“I feel like I’m dreaming. I’m so absolutely tired,” she said.

“Are you hungry?”

Gillian nodded. Her hands crossed, one over the other, in her lap, one scratching its partner. Not hard enough for me to tell her to stop, but hard enough to make pink lines on the skin. I still wanted to touch her, to put my hands on her, to feel her solid body under my fingers before she vanished. My mouth watered as my eyes leaked; I was tired of crying, had wept too much over the years, but this made no difference to my body, which made the tears as fast as I could shed them.