I wipe down the kitchen countertops and cabinets; I wash the floors. In the bathroom, I scrub like the devil, taking out all my anxiety on the subway tiles. It doesn’t help.
As I move from the bathroom to Mr. and Mrs. Pugh’s bedroom, I catch sight of a computer sitting on a writing desk and it gives me an idea. The desk is minimalist, as is the computer. A sleek silver laptop that prompts me for a password as I lift it open and press the return key, holding my breath to listen for the sound of footsteps sweeping down the hall. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out. Taped there to the desk is the password, as well as the password for every one of Mr. and Mrs. Pugh’s financial accounts. Their credit cards, their bank accounts. Their Vanguard funds. I type the code and easily get in. I could probably appropriate a few hundred thousand from them if I wanted to. But that’s not what I’m here to do.
Mr. Pugh has gone off to work and so for now it’s only Mrs. Pugh and me. Mrs. Pugh, who sat in the sunroom drinking her coffee and reading a book when I excused myself to clean. I pray she stays put, that she doesn’t come wandering into her bedroom and catch me meddling with her things.
I pull up a search engine and type my own name into it. Jessica Sloane. I’m not sure what I expect to find. Or rather what I expect to find is nothing. But instead I find an interior designer with my name, one that takes up the first two pages of results. Around page three I find a doctor named Jessica Sloane. Even farther down the page, a Pilates instructor. A Tumblr account for a fourth woman of the same name.
But me specifically, I’m nowhere there. Though it’s not like I’d have a reason to be on the internet. I’ve done nothing noteworthy with my life; I don’t have social media; I’ve never been on the news. For the last twenty years, Mom and I have lived as sequestered a life as we could. Like nuns, except that we didn’t pray. We just kept to ourselves.
I click on the tab for images. Hundreds of photographs load before my eyes. Hundreds of photographs of rooms the interior designer Jessica Sloane has designed. They’re dramatic and fussy and not at all my style. There are photographs of her too. Her and Jessica Sloane, MD, all decked out in a white lab coat with a stethoscope slung around her neck, smiling. Trying hard to look empathetic and intelligent all at the same time. I click the news tab at the top of the page, finding articles about them too.
I pause then, hands frozen above the keyboard, hearing a noise from down the hall. The house is long and narrow, each of the rooms small. I listen, hearing water streaming from the kitchen faucet, the coffee maker warming up to brew another pot. Mrs. Pugh is making herself more coffee.
Only when Mrs. Pugh’s gentle footfalls drift away do I return to the screen.
On a whim, I insert my middle name, certain the search will come back empty. But instead it narrows the results down to a manageable thirty-two, which is not at all what I was expecting, and at first I think the computer is wrong.
It’s the top hit on the page that catches my eye, a newspaper clipping dated seventeen years ago. The headline reads Hit-and-Run Driver Kills Girl, Age Three.
It takes my breath away. My eyes can’t believe what they see. The words. The picture. The caption beneath the image that reads, in italics, Jessica Jane Sloane.
That’s me.
My hands clutch the edge of the desktop, squeezing hard, white-knuckled from the grip.
I go on to read an article that describes a child walking into traffic and being struck by a car. The car sped on, it says, leaving the girl for dead in the street. According to witness accounts, the car was going too fast, driving erratically. Assumptions were made that the driver was drunk, though no one got a good look at him or her, nor did anyone catch a glimpse of the license plate number. There were discrepancies as to the color of the car, which went to prove the unreliability of eyewitness accounts. They couldn’t be trusted. The girl, Jessica Jane Sloane, was carted to the local hospital via ambulance, and there she died.
I click back on the images tab and spy a photograph of little Jessica Sloane in a purple bathing suit. In it, she’s happy. She’s three years old.
My head spins. My fingers go numb. They lose feeling completely as I stare at the little girl’s face and think, Who is this girl and what’s she got to do with me?
eden
March 29, 1997
Egg Harbor
They say that vodka has no smell to it, and yet it was clear as day to me, the smell of it on Aaron’s breath as he dropped into bed beside me tonight, the clock trumpeting 1:13 in the morning. Over the last few weeks, I’d noticed a gradual shift in his work schedule, each night him coming home later than ever before.
At first he said nothing, just stared blankly at me when I asked if he’d had something to drink. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no either, and it seemed reasonable enough to assume he had been drinking, though he need not say one way or the other because I could smell it on his breath.
It just so happened that Aaron and a couple of coworkers had stuck around for a nightcap after their shift was through. It had been a bad night, shitty was the word Aaron used, Aaron who didn’t ever used to complain. Damien was a no-show and Aaron was in the weeds all night, struggling to keep up on the line.
“It was just one for the road,” he said. “It’s not like I’m drunk, Eden. It was one drink. One stupid drink,” he said as he set the pillow over his head.
I didn’t need to remind him of the effects of alcohol on male fertility. He knew. He knew because Dr. Landry had told us all those many months before when we discussed ways to better improve Aaron’s low sperm motility.
I didn’t need to tell him how I had been alone all day, for eleven hours this time. Nearly twelve. He knew this too. He knew that I didn’t like to go to sleep until he was here, in bed beside me. He knew that most days the boredom and loneliness consumed me, and what else was there to do for those eleven or twelve hours besides think about how much I craved a baby?
I rolled over onto my side of the bed, taking the blanket with me.
“So now you’re mad?” Aaron asked as he sat there, exposed. I didn’t say yes or no but I didn’t need to say one way or the other because Aaron could see my posture, could sense me tense up in fury and rage. He tried to reach out for me, but I pulled away. He sighed. “I needed to unwind for a bit. To have a little fun,” he said by means of explanation, but it only made things worse, imagining him with coworkers, drinking vodka and having fun.
“What’s so wrong with that?” he asked. “Do you have any idea how stressful it is for me at work?” but I had a different thought then, one that went back to money. Not only was Aaron coming home later each night, drinking after work with friends—female friends? I wanted to ask, but couldn’t do it quite yet, too afraid to know the truth, that Aaron was throwing back shots of vodka with the pretty cooks and waitresses while I sat, a prisoner in my own home—he was blowing our money on booze. Money that could otherwise be saved for fertility treatments. For a baby.
“You don’t need to be wasting our money like that,” I said. “We hardly have enough as it is.”
And then I did ask him who he was drinking with and he rattled off names. Casey. Riley. Pat. Names that were all conveniently unisex. Names that kept me up half the night wondering if they were male or female.
“Who’s Casey?” I asked, censoriously, and when he didn’t reply I created her in my mind’s eye: tall and svelte with long butterscotch hair and pecan eyes. Flirtatious and tactile, predisposed to standing too close and touching so that I envisioned her, this make-believe woman, with her nimble hand on Aaron’s arm.
Perfect teeth.
A flawless complexion.
An effortless laugh.
I’ve gained ten pounds now due to the many months of fertility treatments. I’m bloated all the time, in addition to moody and upset. The water retention has made my fingers grow fat. Most days my wed
ding ring barely fits with the water weight and stays hidden at home in a dresser drawer.
And then Aaron asked, “What happened to you, Eden? You used to be so much fun,” while pulling the blanket from me. His final hurrah.
I lay there in the dark, completely exposed.
There was a part of me that remembered that Eden, the fun Eden, but in the moment she seemed so far gone, she was hard to remember anymore.
April 14, 1997
Egg Harbor
Today I watched a mourning dove in the gutter of our home get pelted with hail. She was female, a mother-to-be, beautiful with delicate beige plumage, perched on three oval eggs in the aluminum gutter. She’d spent days with her man friend, methodically assembling the nest of twigs and grass blades—while I watched on from the second-story window as they scurried back and forth from tree to trough, collecting materials and sticking them flimsily together—not thinking once of the rainwater that would soon stream past her shanty or the pellets of frozen ice that would one day take her life.
It was golf ball–size hail, a fusillade of machine-gun fire streaming down from the pale green sky. I’ve never felt so helpless, watching as she sat there, hunkered down over her eggs, protecting them until the bitter end. It went on for six and a half calamitous minutes, and when it was through she lay there, unmoving, folded lifeless over the eggs like a hooded cloak and I didn’t know what to do. There was no blood. I would have expected there to be blood, and yet the internal damage was no doubt worse than that which I could see from the outside, evidence of the great lengths some mothers will go to protect their children. She could have flown away, sought shelter beneath the elm or cottonwood trees that crowded the yard, diminishing our view of the lake.
But she didn’t. She stayed.
The storm passed. The clouds drifted away and the sun began to shine. A rainbow appeared in the sky. The hail melted. Rainwater evaporated. The only sign of the storm was the dead bird.
Aaron watched on as I schlepped the old wooden ladder to the back of the cottage and began to climb. He asked what I was doing as I shimmied up those steps in bare feet, the shaky ladder teetering on the lawn. At the top rung I saw her, splayed sideways, head lolling over the edge of the gutter. I pressed a single finger to her chest, feeling for a heartbeat and, at finding none, removed her body from the trench. Beneath her corpse, the eggs were still intact.
She died a martyr.
I buried her beneath the trellis, which the snowdrift clematis had overtaken at this time of year, white flowers powdering the wood.
They say that mourning doves mate for life. As far as I could tell, her man friend never returned to grieve his loss or to check on the eggs.
Sometimes this is the way it is with men.
April 24, 1997
Egg Harbor
I can’t trust myself to stay at home all day anymore.
All too often, I drive into town and park outside the dance studio, watching the little ballerinas come and go. It rains many days now, this time of year, and so they come toting umbrellas, skipping over puddles, walking faster than ever before, though always, always, does little Olivia lag behind, and on the most inclement of days, when no one else wants to be outside, I am sure that she will be forgotten. It makes me sick to my stomach to do so, to watch the ballerinas in their leotards and tutus and tights, a Peeping Tom by my own right; it isn’t perverse, there’s nothing depraved about the thoughts that run through my mind, and yet I know in my heart of hearts that it’s unhealthy, pining this way for someone else’s child.
And so, against Aaron’s will, I found a job. Some useful way to spend my days other than keeping vigil of the ballet studio, watching the ballerinas come and go.
We rarely talk these days anymore, other than that time spent in limbo each month, while they wash Aaron’s sperm before injecting it inside me. Then we talk. About what, I don’t know. About nothing. When I ask him questions, I’m astounded by the brevity of his replies, one-or two-word responses that leave no room for dialogue. He doesn’t make eye contact. He asks me nothing. We kill time in the lobby of the fertility clinic before my name is called and only then am I granted amnesty, a pardon, a reason not to have to sit in the lobby and speak to my husband.
The job is at the hospital. The position is in billing as a medical coder, one I have ample experience in after all those years working for a pediatrician in Green Bay. And so now, I spend eight hours a day reading through patient files to figure out what they’re to be billed for; I enter data; I submit to insurance companies; I mail invoices to patients. It feels good to be doing something with my days, to be earning an income.
And yet the position comes with its fair share of downsides too.
Yesterday as I sifted through patient files, I came across a little girl, a toddler killed in an auto-ped accident. In other words, she wandered into the street when her mother wasn’t looking and was hit by a passing car on the roadway, a four-lane highway that cut right through town. The little girl (and though I, myself, never laid eyes on her, I conjured her up in my mind anyway, her tiny, broken frame still clad in a pair of denim overalls with blood-stained pigtails in her light brown hair) was transported to our hospital by ambulance, and there, received a multitude of treatments, from a CT scan to assess brain damage, to an operation to control internal bleeding and swelling in the brain. A decompressive craniectomy, as was noted in the extensive patient chart. There were blood transfusions. She was on narcotics for pain. An anesthesiologist was called to deliver a local anesthetic to put her to sleep for the surgery. The surgery itself lasted six hours, and each of these items came with an exorbitant price tag, one the family’s shoddy insurance company was loath to pay. For six tortuous hours while the little girl’s mother, I can only imagine, sat on a chair in the waiting room, biting her nails to the quick, a neurosurgeon, along with a team of doctors and nurses and scrub techs, removed part of the girl’s brain to allow room for the swelling inside.
Still, she died.
By the time the paperwork made it to me in coding and billing, it had been days since the angels carried her away. Her mother no longer stood within the hospitals’ walls, sobbing for her child. Her body had been removed from the morgue, transported to the funeral home, buried in the ground.
And yet for me, it’s a fresh wound. One that will stay with me for a long time to come. As I typed the billing codes into the system, I cried for a little girl I’ve never met, tears snaking down my eyes and onto the computer keys, knowing that she will never truly be anything more than a name and a social security number to me, but still it makes me cry, grieving for someone I don’t know, consumed with the unwanted knowledge that healthy little girls—like the sick and the elderly—die too.
But there are perquisites to the job too.
I wear a name badge that gains me access to every nook and cranny in the whole entire hospital, including the birthing center, where I can watch newborn babies being tended to in the nursery, lying immobile in their rolling bassinets, bundled like burritos with knitted hats on their perfectly pink and misshapen heads. I didn’t seek them out—in fact, I swore to myself that I would abstain from visiting the newborn babies—but I saw them anyway when a pair of grandparents-to-be stopped me in the hall and asked the way to labor and delivery. I had no choice but to lead them there, to steer them through the mazelike hospital halls, through the double doors and into the unit where the newborn babies caught my eye.
And now I stand there for what feels like hours, staring through glass, coming to terms with my fait accompli. No workday passes without at least one visit to the nursery room and as I sit at my desk coding patient files, it’s all I can think about, seeing those babies. Getting my fix. I’ve come to know the nurses now—thanks to the frequency of my visits. They address me by name, sometimes holding up the newest infants so I can see their puffy, half-closed eyes, their still-bowed legs from being cra
mped inside a warm, cozy uterus, their cone-shaped heads from being suctioned through their mother’s vaginal canal and into the world.
When they ask, I tell them I’m training to be a nursery room nurse myself, that I’m in the process of earning my associates’ degree in nursing and, that as soon as I do, I’m going to apply for a job here, in our hospital’s nursery room. I tell them I come to watch and learn, to see how the experts do it. I flatter the nurses so they don’t think it odd that I spend every free second away from billing and coding staring at babies who are not mine. They smile and say how fantastic that is and sometimes, if I’m really lucky, they sneak me inside so I can stroke the soft skin of a tiny babe.
Though that, of course, isn’t the real reason I come.
jessie
It’s not yet ten in the morning when I leave the Pughs’ home. The day stretches out before me like the Sahara, massive and deserted and dry. And now I’m even more agitated than I was before, all nervous energy with nothing to do. Nowhere to go. No one to talk to.
I carry with me in my bag a printout of the newspaper article I found on the Pughs’ laptop, grateful when Mrs. Pugh called down the hall that she was stepping out for a bit, and I was able to send it to the printer without her hearing me. Because if I knew one thing, it was that I needed to take the article with me.
I hop on Old Faithful and ride. I turn aimlessly, unplanned at each intersection, my head lost in the clouds. I move in circles so that three times I pass by the very same delicatessen without meaning to. I speak to Mom. I ask her questions about my lack of a birth certificate, my missing social security card, the girl in the article. Who is she, and what does she have to do with me? Does she have anything to do with me? Tell me, Mom, I scream in my head. Tell me!