THE DREAM GOES like this: I am in a mall, or the post office, or the supermarket, or the bank with my two children. People mill around us, each face like every other face. I am running late, or I am too early to meet a friend for lunch, or I am trying to retrieve the cell phone ringing in my diaper bag. I see him approaching at first only out of the corner of my eye—intent, purposeful, his jaw set crookedly, his snarling upper lip—and my stomach transforms from a regular stomach into a black-hole stomach that begins to swallow me, and all of dream-time, which moves more slowly anyway. In some dreams I cry out in a wet, drawn-out way—a baby deer bleeding to death in my throat. In other dreams I beg for help from the nearest stranger. I try to ask the bank teller to call the police but my mouth is full of feathers. Sometimes I call the police myself. They never come in time. I ask a kind-looking woman to pretend my children are her own. Keep them safe, I croak. The kind-looking woman, my daughter, my infant son—he will kill them all and make me watch. In the end, he smirks a little, and even the dream-time stops.
On my very worst days I can’t handle my children touching me. I can’t handle seeing them or hearing their voices asking me for things. They’re always asking for things. My daughter asks for a glass of milk, and when I pour it for her, hand her the cup, she slams her hands down on the counter and demands juice. It’s not really about the milk or the juice. My son climbs on the dining table, or clings, screaming, to my legs while I’m making dinner. It’s not food or milk or a nap he wants.
I don’t know how to give him what he wants.
I don’t want to give him what he wants.
As I slap the tiny hand pulling up the hem of my skirt—No!—I can’t stop myself. I’m already fleeing from this moment to another, closing all the doors behind me as I go.
At dinner, weeks after our honeymoon in Belize, we tell our friends about the results of the pregnancy test, and everyone sits without speaking, mouths hanging open, before one friend begins clapping very slowly, as if this were the climactic scene in an Afterschool Special. Our friends say Oh, that’s wonderful, just wonderful. But then soon they are no longer calling us for karaoke night or to come over for dinners in the backyard or to meet them at the bar after teaching or for breakfast at the coffee shop.
I stop smoking the day I learn I am pregnant, and I stop drinking and taking my medication. At first the hardest part is withdrawal: some parts of my brain waking, misfiring, shooting sparks in every direction; other parts drifting slowly off to sleep. I can’t remember my students’ names anymore and begin calling them all “Bob.” Can anyone share thoughts about how Offred subverts patriarchal control . . . Bob? Bob? I can’t write poems anymore, not without a drink, not without staying up until two in the morning, not without a lit cigarette in my hand. Then the hardest part is the puking. How, once again, six years after the kidnapping, I am always puking.
One afternoon I can’t get out of bed. My Husband rubs my back while I sob hysterically. He asks, What’s wrong? What’s wrong? The truth is: I can’t stand waiting for it anymore. I wish the other shoe would drop already, I say. He does not call me hormonal because he knows better. Instead he asks, What if this is the other shoe?
When summer comes, My Husband and I buy a video camera and drive all morning and afternoon and evening, from Texas to the town with only three stoplights, thinking we’ll stay for a long visit. We’ll film a documentary or research my genealogy or practice time-lapse photography. We spend hours and hours and hours filming interviews with my grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles, and in the process I learn that my mother grew up very very poor, and that my father grew up working very very hard, and suddenly their life together makes a kind of sense. My father tells me that when his own father died of metastatic melanoma six weeks after I was born, he lost his best friend in the world. It’s a grief that brings him to tears, twenty-eight years later. My mother tells me about her breast cancer, and how she woke up from surgery and went into convulsions when she felt the pain, and again when the doctor removed the bandages. She tells me how she was lucky to survive. It was the aggressive kind. It wouldn’t have taken any time and then she is crying very hard, and squeezing my hand very tightly, and asking me to forgive her. I’m so sorry, Lacy. She is looking intently into my eyes, mascara running from behind her glasses, and saying that if there is one thing I absolutely must teach my child it is how to love. I will do better, she says, squeezing my hand. I swear I am trying to be better.
Sometimes I dream we are having a civilized conversation. I am writing at my favorite coffee shop, or at an outdoor café, or I am turning the pages of a magazine under an umbrella on the beach. I hear a voice say, I thought that was you, and he sits down. In this dream he talks and talks, waving a hand in his usual way. He’s moved on, he says. He’s moved far far away. It’s such a reassuring thing to hear. I almost forget to feel afraid.
It’s two in the morning and I’m shaking. My Husband is the only person in the hospital room and I have no words. I’m trying to communicate to him that I want to escape. I want him to help me crawl out of my skin. Help me. Up. Out. Help. Out.
The anesthesiologist is on his way. He’s taking his sweet time. Maybe he is listening to headphones and nodding to the nurses in the hall. How you doin’. I want to tear my face off. I want to use My Husband as a footstool, to climb him and hang from the ceiling, which seems like a safer place to ride this out than in the bed.
Suddenly: a rupture. A little relief from the pressure. But just when I start panting and clawing and growling, the anesthesiologist comes sauntering in. He barks at me: Sit up. Lean over. Hold still. One gloved hand holds my shoulder—latex smell, condom smell—the other pushes a needle into my back.
The body goes thrashing. The father of my child, gray-faced and sweating, a deer caught in headlights. He smiles a polite smile. The body breathes and bears down. Breathes and bears down. The body opens its mouth and a sound flies out. One of the nurses pushes the code-blue button on the wall—click—and while I am screaming and bearing down hard enough to leave myself with two black eyes, every nurse and doctor on the floor rushes the room. A nurse mounts the bed, climbs on top of me, and pushes downward on my belly with the heels of both hands until our daughter tears through me. One doctor cuts the cord without a word, and another carries her body away.
The mind listens for the cough, the wail, the first undrowning breath. But there is only silence. Only the stretch of time. Not even all these arms can hold it in.
I open my eyes. My Husband stands motionless, staring out the door. People I’ve never seen before tell me I’ve done a great job.
Where is my baby?
The doctor explains in a calm voice that the baby is fine. He says the words shoulder dystocia and intensive care. I don’t understand him. Where is my baby? I’m trying to climb out of the bed to find the baby I am certain is dead. The nurses hold me down, tell me to stay put. Where is my baby? The doctor says they are checking her to make sure everything is fine. She is fine. I don’t believe him. Is she dead? Did she die? The baby is fine, he says. He is smiling and washing his hands. A nurse wipes between my legs, still in the stirrups, with a rough towel, swabs me with iodine, begins stitching me back together. Where is my baby? I am shaking—the pain and terror passing through me in waves. My Husband smoothes back my hair, runs his thumbs across my cheeks, wet with sweat and tears. He smiles a reassuring smile. The doctor says everything is fine.
I am allowed a drink of water. I close my eyes and rest my head on the pillow. While the nurse stitches the wound that is gaping and open, I am trying to stitch the mind back into the body. The door opens, and a nurse enters, carrying something in her arms. She places it beside me in the bed: the baby, bruised and breathing.
In the story I have told myself about how this would go, about how the baby will make everything better, I know this child instantly; I see her face and the past falls away. Life starts over at this moment, with this child I have always known.
But now that I am looking into her face, I don’t feel anything at all.
It’s morning, seven years after the kidnapping, and I’m closing the door to her room for the third time today, afraid to let it catch. Sleep while the baby sleeps, that’s what everyone tells me. As if I’ve never heard that before. As if it’s that simple. My daughter has never been a good sleeper, and today she’s at her worst. I need sleep more than I need to finish grading my students’ writing assignments, more than I need to finish my dissertation, or eat breakfast, or shower, or get dressed. But if I move from where I am standing with this doorknob in my hand she might wake up and hours might pass before she sleeps again. Maybe I could sleep standing this way: frozen for a long, long time.
I let go of the knob—click—she coughs, stirs, howls. White-hot sparks shoot through each exhausted limb, my hands contract into fists. Maybe I could leave her here. Take the keys and trudge through the snow to sleep in the car at the end of the driveway, far from the reach of sound or care. I don’t care. I could climb to the roof’s edge and fall headfirst. No child has ever died of crying. The ladder hangs from the far wall of the garage.
I lift her shrieking body from the crib and lay her down on the terry-cloth changing pad. I watch myself from the safe distance: wrestling the naked child out of and back into her clothes, brushing a slice of greasy hair out of my face, the pajamas hanging dankly from my shoulders and hips. I observe her. I observe myself. I prop her body against my chest, her head lolling forward against my neck. Her breath like milk. She bawls into that nook as we shuffle toward the window.
Outside, snow blankets the full reach of each tree’s branches, the minivan in my neighbors’ driveway, the shut mouth of their black iron mailbox, our gutterless street. A single brown bird shoots from the hedge. With my free hand, I open the window. The cold air blows in. Her cries multiply; I shut out the sound. Her face purples, ajar. I feel nothing as her velvet crown slides into the crook of my elbow, rooting for me. Always rooting. She bites once, hard, as we lean into the rocking chair’s curve, wedged between this moment and another.
Dad tells only one story about me, his middle child, a toddler, found pecking the buttons on the television console with a fat, sticky finger. He scolds me, tells me to stop. I ignore him, keep pushing the buttons, switching the channel each time. He raises his voice, and I ignore that, too. He smacks my outstretched hand. Hard, he says. But you don’t cry or wince or turn away. You set your jaw, raise your hand, keep pushing that button.
Mom reminds me how, when I was a teenager and arguing with her every day, she started putting this hex on me: When you grow up and have children I hope one of them is exactly like you.
I think now that maybe that hex came through: If I tell my daughter to stop jumping on the bed, she climbs onto the dresser. If I ask her to behave while I take an important call, she throws a tantrum before drawing a beard on her face with a red permanent marker. If I tell her to pick up her toys in the kitchen, she empties a box of cereal on the floor. I might put her in time out, or yell until I’m blue in the face. She does not cry or wince or turn away.
It makes me furious. I want her to behave, even just a little. But she fights me about which shoes to wear, which bowl to use for cereal. She fights me about which clothes she’ll wear and ruin. She fights me about the punishment she gets for fighting me. She can’t win these arguments, because no matter how big and loud and strong she gets, I can always get bigger, louder, stronger. I want her to be a little afraid of me. It’s the only way to break her, I think. This defiant, fearless child. And it’s all I want right now: to break her. Just a little.
But then we are driving to the house where my daughter attends preschool; she is thrashing in her car seat, screaming at the top of her lungs. The body takes a breath, turns up the radio. My daughter spits milk in a wide stream on the upholstery of my first-ever brand-new car and pushes Goldfish crackers irretrievably into the horizontal crevice between the back passenger window and the door. The body takes a breath, adjusts the rearview mirror. But when my daughter starts kicking the back of my elbow with the pointy toe of her pink cowboy boot, I snap, and lean into the backseat of the car and smack her knee. Hard. Hard enough that she grows silent and stares out the window with giant tears rolling down her cheeks. I drag her and her tiny little backpack into the preschool house. The teacher greets us at the door. Before my daughter has taken off her tiny little coat I’m driving away in the car.
I don’t listen to the radio. I don’t talk to myself or roll down the windows. I try to relax in the silence of my solitary body, but all I can think about is the force of my hand coming down on her knee. I hit her, hard. For nothing at all. For being nearly three. I hit her because she doesn’t know how to control herself, and I don’t know how to let go.
I know how to tighten the cold hard fist of my heart.
I don’t remember how to open it.
The small space of my car closes around me. The air grows hot and stale, and I can’t breathe it in. My back sweats; my heart races. And just as I’m about to let the panic wash over me, I start screaming. It’s not a scream that comes from my throat, or from my lungs, but a scream that comes from the shut place I carry inside me, a scream that could swell and swell without end. It’s made of equal parts terror and rage, multiplied and multiplied by the silence of all these years.
By the time I get to work, I’ve composed myself again. I’ve cleaned the streaked mascara off my face and reapplied my lipstick. I don’t tell my colleagues what has happened in the car: not about smacking my daughter’s leg, not about the screaming. I teach a class. I meet with students. I eat lunch at my desk.
At the end of the day, I drive back to the preschool house to pick up my daughter. When I knock on the door, I can see she’s just inside, waving to me, her mouth stretched open in a crooked, gap-toothed smile, her arms open and reaching toward me, her eyes open and shining with joy. The door opens and she throws herself into my arms. She holds nothing back.
With her head against my shoulder, the weight of her tiny body against my chest, I hold her tight and don’t let go. I want nothing to break her. Not even me. Not ever. Not even a little.
In one dream I’m in a remote building: a garage or a barn or a basement. A place with corrugated metal walls and a very high ceiling. A shaft of light cuts through the rafters but has no source that I can see. I sit in a chair, unrestrained, watching as he feeds severed human forearms into a wood chipper. Afterward, he places a severed thigh on a table in front of me and begins to dissect it, slicing open the skin with a wheel-knife, pulling back the muscles and tendons with a pair of pliers and a fork. He has his back to me the whole time, so that I can see only the line of his body under his clothes, the cut of his hair, the faintest sliver of his cheek. Suddenly there’s a knock at the door. We both turn toward the sound; he goes to answer it. He turns and leads a long line of people I barely know into the room: the teacher at my daughter’s preschool, my dentist, the barista at my favorite coffee shop. I know what’s coming before it comes. I do not cry out or try to tell him to stop.
I never say anything at all.
I want to have another baby, I say. It’s a Saturday afternoon. I’ve just put my daughter down for a nap in her bed. My Husband is planting a tree in the yard behind our house. He’s hesitant. It’s been only a few months since I came out of the depression from the first. I’ve started a book, I remind him, a task we both know keeps my mind from skittering away, and I’ll be nearly finished with it by the time the baby is born. He makes me promise to find a therapist, someone you can trust, to prepare for what may follow out of the birth. I want to be better, I say. I swear I am trying to be better.
I tell The Newest Therapist that ten years ago I was kidnapped and raped by a man I knew. We’re sitting in her office, a room with tall windows and creaky wooden floors in a converted Victorian house. A pair of plants hang from twin hooks near the windows. But I don’t want to talk about that, I say.
Bullshit, she retorts. She asks for the two lists, and after reading the one I hand to her, after assuring me that I’m not remembering incorrectly, that I’m remembering exactly right, she suggests a few diagnoses for The Man I Used to Live With, and puts the DSM-IV in my hands. We talk about what may have drawn me to him in the first place, and about strategies for getting my anger and fear in check. We talk about the book I am writing, poems about growing up in the rural Midwest, and about the book we both know I must write after this.
When my son is born, the birth is peaceful: slow and calm and controlled. At the hospital, Mom holds one hand, tears welling behind her glasses; My Husband holds the other, cheering me on. Outside, in the waiting room, my sisters play board games with my daughter. Dad leads her up and down the hallways, to the bathroom, to the aquarium, to the cafeteria for a banana and juice.
Back in our home, days later, logs crackle in the fireplace while my daughter feeds her brand-new baby brother a bottle, holding his head so gently to her chest. They are both cradled in My Husband’s arms; all three of them cuddling under a blanket at one end of the couch. I sit at the other end, only a little apart, taking pictures of the light glowing in their faces.
What do you feel in the dream, The Newest Therapist asks, when you see him approaching? She suggests a few quiet options: Do you feel concerned? Or nervous? Or afraid? I know she wants me to pin a name on the feeling. It’s part of the process, the experts say, of becoming a whole person again, of weaving the traumatic event back into the fabric of memory. If I can name what I feel when he comes to kill me in my dreams, for instance—fear or fright or terror—maybe I can choose one name for what I felt when I saw him approaching me in the parking lot, or when he drove me around in circles in my car, or when he asked me to lie down on the mattress in the corner of the soundproof room.
But I do not feel fear, or fright, or terror. I did not feel concerned or nervous or afraid. There is no one word for it I can say. Because though I probably do feel something like fear and fright and terror, I also feel joy and ecstasy and relief. He’s finally come back. There’s no more waiting, I think.
When I’m awake I see him everywhere. The man who crosses the street not at the intersection, not when the signal says WALK, but up the way a bit, near the middle of the block. Or the man in the restaurant with his back to me: his long curls, the cheap watch, its fraying nylon strap. It’s surprising how many strangers have his build, wear his clothes, stand with their feet spread wide apart, scratching the crease between neck and chin with the three middle fingers of either hand in the same arrogant way. Most of the time I recognize the impostor almost instantly because there is no feeling of being lowered by a rope very slowly, of my tongue turning to ash, to mud. I stop what I’m doing anyway and watch the stranger for a long long time.
I am out walking the dog one morning and stop for a moment at an intersection to lean over the stroller, to tickle my son’s fat belly, and twist a tangle of his reddish curls around my finger. The dog perks up and takes aim at something behind us. I turn, see a man’s large frame standing right behind me, and scream. Not a yelp, but a bloodcurdling horror-movie scream. A long moment passes before I realize that this stranger, who lives in my neighborhood probably, is waiting patiently for a chance to pass. The dog foams and growls and tries to lunge for the man as he walks around us without speaking.
In the afternoon I take my children to the park for a play-date. Two of my friends have invited us to join them; they each have a child the age of my son, and these children are happy to toddle around the jungle gym, climb up and down the ladders, and, only with tremendous encouragement, roll headfirst down the slide. I try to join the motherly conversation: the woes of finding day care, of keeping a part-time nanny, all the gear that must be schlepped to the doctor for a checkup only to return with a virus that causes diarrhea for days. My daughter follows her brother up the ladder a few dozen times before she declares that the babies are boring and bolts across the playground, where she asks a complete stranger to push her on the swings. He looks around, smiles at her benevolently, before giving her a little shove on the back.
She doesn’t answer when I call her to come.
When she sees me finally pick up her brother and march toward the swings to retrieve her, she sprints to the sandpit, where she greets a scruffy-looking vagrant sleeping on the park bench. Just as I reach the sandpit, she bolts again, this time to the other side of the jungle gym where I can’t see her, or anyone else she might be talking to. I apologize to my friends, put my son in the stroller, chase my daughter down, and leave.
Before we get to the car, before I’ve buckled the children into their seats and locked the doors, my voice has grown so loud and terrible that it frightens even me.
You don’t understand, I say, my voice hoarse and rattling in my chest. The world is not the kind of safe place you think it is. Her hands squirm in my hands. She searches my face, trying to understand. There are people who would do terrible things to you. People who would take you and kill you and I would never ever see you again.
Before I’m finished saying this, she cries out: Mommy, you’re scaring me!
You should be scared, I say, starting the car.
The worst dream goes like this: I am stuck in a single point, unable to move, while the world goes on at normal speed around me. I can’t open my eyes fully because the light is too bright. I can’t move my limbs, which are stuck in molasses, maybe, or made of molasses. Time, too, is sticky and slow. No particular danger threatens me, but I panic anyway. Nearby, a group of children squeal and giggle and run. A couple passes, holding hands, bread-and-buttering around me. They take no notice of me at all. A bus unloads its passengers. A tree drops acorns on the grass. The day is sunny and warm.
On my very best days, my children and I take turns cartwheeling through the yard. We finger-paint long rolls of paper on the floor under the dining room table before I chase them through the house with messy fingers; they squeal, running, paint on their faces and bellies and armpits, and we are all laughing, laughing, laughing. We hold hands and jump through the sprinkler, each of us fully dressed, soaking wet. Or we pack a picnic and ride our bicycles to the playground, where we spread a blanket and eat cross-legged on the ground, or lying on our sides, or crawling like lions in circles. That afternoon we might fall asleep together in the bed, the grass blades still stuck in our hair. While I make dinner, we turn up the music and dance in the kitchen and I swing my daughter back and forth, back and forth singing, I know one thing: that I love you.
I love you I love you I love you.
And it’s true, so true, that suddenly I’ve got tears running down my face, so I put her down to find a towel, a tissue, any scrap will do. She pulls at my sweater. I just need a minute, I say, turning away. But then they’re both pulling at my sweater, their hands on my skirt, my legs. I just need a minute. Just a minute! I say. But then I’m already checking the soup, or sweeping the floor, or putting the dishes away. My son lies down on the floor, deflated. My daughter storms toward her room. They know it’s too late. A door has closed. I’m gone.
I wake in a cold sweat, crying out in pain. The father of my children wakes or does not wake. He rubs my back, rolls over, toward me, and invites me into the nook between his arm and torso. It’s real pain I’m feeling, I want to tell him, though I couldn’t point to any one place it most hurts.
I climb from the bed and weave my way through the house checking all the locks on the doors, peering out the blinds of the windows, my skin prickling, my hair standing on end. I pour a glass of water in the kitchen, and think of taking the longest, sharpest knife out of the drawer before I crawl back into bed. I might watch the darkness through one open eye for hours before I close it and sleep.
I open the door and enter the room where my children are sleeping. I stand between them, listening to their bubbles and hiccups, their slow steady breathing. I rest my palm on my son’s back, his cool cotton pajamas, and underneath, his dream-warm skin. I smooth back the damp line of my daughter’s hair with the corner of my thumb. I lean down to kiss her cheek, and inhale the smell that belongs to her and no other. She looks so beautiful like this: her eyes closed, her mouth slightly open.
It all seems so fragile, this life that I have.
But no, I take it back.
This is the place I would point to.
This, right here, is the one place it most hurts.