EPILOGUE

                     

Sally cried for our daughter on the day she was born, but it would be twenty-two years before I cried like that. It happened while I was still working on this book, before I ever showed it to Sarah.

I was at a writers’ conference, in a workshop led by a teacher I had long admired. He assigned an exercise in which we cut our manuscript into chunks of text—actual paper and scissors—and rearranged them. The empty spaces were supposed to open up our minds. At first, it seemed precious, gimmicky. But my teacher’s writing was so incisive and clear, I decided to give it a try, see if it worked.

We were at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. About two miles inland, the Center was a small cluster of buildings, all redwood siding and angled rooflines jutting into the sky. The buildings seemed to float in a marshy sea of plant life—the spiky fans of palmetto palms, wild magnolias, scrub oaks, and Spanish moss. The illusion was enhanced by the weathered wooden walkways between buildings. Without the waist-high railings one might expect, they looked like piers, jutting into the lush green foliage.

Our workshop met in a small and narrow library, with two walls of books and two walls of windows. For this exercise our teacher had arranged for us to use one of the artist’s studios. It was a large open room with a concrete floor, natural light, and five long worktables with paint-splattered surfaces that gave the place a Jackson Pollock feel.

I started out calmly enough, laying out two rows of blank typing paper, stark and white against the reds and blues and yellows of my workspace. I glanced around, and my classmates were all busy cutting and taping. I enjoyed the arts-and-crafts feel of the activity, the absorption of scissors and tape.

I cut several paragraphs free and spread them out onto the pages. They looked like chunky fortune cookie slips. So much white space and so few words. I glanced at my classmates’ work. They all had more pieces of text, and they were all busy moving the pieces around, rearranging them. My pages looked bare. I turned to the teacher, who was pinning pieces of a poem onto a wall. “Can we use pictures?”

He turned. “Sure. Whatever helps.” He went back to his work.

I walked to the computer center and printed off pictures of things I’d been writing about. Three portraits of John Langdon Down, the “father of Down syndrome.” He was wearing a frock coat and a black bow tie. Two photographs of Jérôme Lejeune, the scientist credited with discovering the extra 21st chromosome that causes Down syndrome.

I printed out the karyotype that Sarah’s geneticist gave me after she was born. It was an eight-by-ten photograph of her chromosomes all lined up two by two, except for the 21st chromosome—it had three. I printed a snapshot of Sarah dressed up as a wicked princess for Halloween. Another photograph of Sarah, twenty-two years old, in the group home. She was sitting between the two framed movie posters—one with Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor skipping forward in yellow slickers, umbrellas twirling: Singing in the Rain. In the other, Audrey Hepburn posed in a slinky black dress, neck encircled with diamonds and a tabby cat, black gloves up past the elbows: Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I placed these pictures on the nearly-blank pages, and stepped back from the table and stared at the pages, trying to let the process work. I leaned forward to jot a note to myself in blue ink on the white page, and then stared some more.

The picture of Sarah’s chromosomes entirely filled the page. I leaned down and wrote, “This picture looks so big. So real.” I looked over at a snapshot of Sarah. It looked so small there, askew in the corner of an empty page. It hit me that from the day she was born, I’d seen a diagnosis instead of a daughter. This struck me like a bolt of lightning splitting a tree. I felt as if something in my chest had been riven—my aorta torn away from my heart, or my trachea ripped free from my lungs. I did not know my daughter.

I felt tears coming, so I left, pushing through the door of the studio and out into the sun. I made it partway down the unrailed walkway. But this feeling in my chest was too big to control. I jumped down into the bushes, pushing alongside a building, the branches scratching my face, vines catching my feet. I came to a deck, a bare platform without railings, waist-high, jutting into the thicket. I stopped and wailed. I was undone. Unhinged. Bereft. I heard my howls rushing out from my body and into the air. The keening finally slowed to sobs. I became aware again of the sand under my feet. I took a gulp of air. The breeze was soft against my face. The trees swayed gently.

“Are you okay?” I heard someone call from the walkway, a disembodied voice coming through the tangle of plants.

“Yes,” I answered. I took a deep breath. “I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks.” I held my breath and stood motionless. I didn’t want anyone to see me.

I heard a few footsteps on the wooden pier, and then a door in the building I was standing next to open, and then close. Fuck. I’d been wailing right outside someone’s workshop.

I blew my nose on my fingers and slung the snot into the bushes. I wiped my fingers on the cuffs of my jeans, and wiped my face with my shirtsleeve. I felt empty inside. Clean.

I pushed through the bushes back to the walkway. No one was there. Good. I climbed up onto the walkway and found a bathroom, where I splashed my face and dried it.

The studio was empty: they must have gone back to the library. At my table, I stared at the photograph of Sarah and gently straightened it on its page, glad that it wasn’t too late. My daughter would forgive me. It’s the way she was.

When Sarah was four days old and a friend told me that I would learn about patience, acceptance, and unconditional love, I’d taken this to mean that I would develop these traits by necessity, through raising a daughter with special needs. Turns outs I learned about them by observing them in my daughter.

I walked back to the library, where the group sat around the table. The teacher looked up. “Thought we’d lost you,” he said. “Did you go to make more copies?”

“No,” I said, gesturing outside. “I was needing to cry.”

He looked at me and nodded, as if to say, “That sometimes happens.”

I felt calm and expectant, like that glittering moment right after a summer thunderstorm. I’d been given a second chance.

                 

At lunch, our teacher walked up with his plate and silverware. “Can I join you?”

“Please.”

“The other workshop heard you.”

I winced. “Sorry.”

He waved it away. “They thought it was an animal caught in a trap.”

“Not far off,” I said.

“You’re in the middle of it.” He took my shoulder and gently shook it. He smiled. I felt as if he was welcoming me into a new place. A place I needed to be.

“Yup,” I said, using Sarah’s shorthand way of summing up a complicated truth. I was eager to get back home, and see my daughter, and get to know her.