“I apologize for the interruption, Serena.” Halberstam crosses the room and slides onto his chair, his gait surprisingly graceful. “We were discussing your father’s release. If there’s anything—”
“There is, actually. We want to know why he was freed before the end of his sentence.”
Halberstam looks at me for a moment, a question lingering in the arch of his brow, as visible as if spelled out in boldface alongside a cartoon character’s head. Is the question impertinent, a gauntlet thrown before his feet?
“I don’t work for the Department of Corrections, Serena, nor do I sit on the parole board, but I’ve spoken to your father’s parole officer. As he explained, felons in New York State automatically have their sentences reduced if they behave and your father’s behaved for the most part. As a result, his sentence was reduced from thirty to twenty-eight years.”
“Doesn’t that mean he still has a year to serve? Doesn’t that mean our father could still be in prison, where he belongs?”
Halberstam sighs. I’m being tedious. “If your father serves his full sentence, he’ll be released without supervision a year from now. As it is, he can be arrested immediately if he violates the conditions of his parole, which include approaching his daughter. You’ll be granted an order of protection, by the way, so you won’t have to solely rely on his parole officer.”
Martha yells at customer service reps, calls them morons, idiots, accuses them of having, collectively, the IQ of a retarded frog. I hear something of that in Halberstam’s tone, the exasperation, a frustrated adult coping with a slow child who asks too many questions. I can’t fault him because the central fact never changes. Hank Grand is going to be released, and there’s nothing he or I can do about it.
Tina’s already suffering, the old memories churning up, lava from the heart of the Earth, all consuming, her only sustenance.
“You’re drifting, Serena.”
“I have nothing to add, Doctor.”
“Why not?”
“Because the die, being cast, still rolls, the numbers tumbling over themselves. Wait and see.”
“Well put. Now, in my conversations with Victoria and Martha the subject of function came up several times. Martha maintains the household. Victoria is Carolyn Grand’s public face. Two others I haven’t met also appear to have set functions. Eleni’s tasked with satisfying Carolyn’s sexual needs. Tina remembers so that the others can forget or at least claim not to have known in the first place. So Serena, and please take your time, describe your function. Tell me what you bring to the table.”
I slide my hands between my knees, suddenly shy, this monster man demanding secrets that ordinary humans are allowed to hold close. Others have waited until we were ready to share, until we trusted them, but there’s no time here with the court’s demands looming. Only a few days from the day of decision, il Dottore’s recommending that we continue in therapy, that we remain on the tightrope indefinitely because there’s only one alternative—confinement—and we wouldn’t want that. Would we?
I’m born ten years ago, when our body is in its twenty-fifth year, my siblings and I floundering, as always, especially Tina after days and days of remembering. The darkness is so intense we can barely move through it, every chore becoming an insurmountable obstacle, the sink full of dishes, the bedroom floor heaped with dirty clothes, the bathroom smelling of piss. And all of us thinking this is it, this time she’ll succeed, this time she’ll kill us.
Escape the only option, I fly, newborn, through the door and into the street, putting time and space between our body and Tina, my instinct protective, let her rest, let her fall into the oblivion between animations. I walk straight up Flatbush Avenue, lost in the cacophony, a baby learning the difference between reality and memory for the first time. I knew there would be people, cars, and trucks, knew there would be lights and stores, horns and sirens, but I can’t sort them properly, can’t bring them to scale, sound overlying sound, image overlying image, and what I should simply know I have to construct from the memory of others.
As I pass finally beneath the great arch at Grand Army Plaza, sculptured soldiers above and on both sides, I feel like a foreigner, an alien, the wars of America someone else’s history, not ours. And then I’m in Prospect Park and I begin to run though not a fugitive, though unpursued. The late June day is warm and I’m slick with sweat, my body making itself felt, skin and bone, nerve and muscle, taste and touch and smell and sight, my breath running ragged in my lungs, my thighs on fire, half-blinded by the sweat dripping from my brow, at last alive.
I finally turn off the path and stumble down a hill onto a large meadow, others there ahead of me on blankets, scattered about like offerings left for a ravenous god. I fall to my knees, reserves spent, and roll onto my back, patiently waiting for my breathing to calm, for the pulse in my head to fade away, until I can sense the blades of grass against the back of my neck, until clouds and blue sky move apart and I feel a yearning so deep I cannot turn my eyes away. I raise my arms, palms open, reaching upward beyond the illusion of a flat and solid sky—searching, searching, searching—my heart craving the one who truly comprehends the folly of words. Instead I feel yearning in every particle, every galaxy, every solar system, to stop the momentum, to shrink down, eon by eon, to draw closer and closer, now touching, now smiles everywhere.
Call it what you want. Call it Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Zeus, Hera, Parvati, Lakshmi, Amaterasu. Call it Chango, Elegua, Ogun, Yemaya. Call it the creator who endowed us with certain unalienable rights. It hardly matters because the yearning runs both ways and I know my creator is as helpless as the specks of dust lying out in the meadow. I arch my back, lift my head, reaching up, until my something looks back for a time too short to measure, and my brain whispers: alright, alright, alright.
I don’t speak a word of this to il Dottore, not a syllable, not a whisper, my posture at all times submissive, the flower child at night, her petals folded. “Color,” I tell him. “My job is to supply color.” From a distance, I hear Victoria applaud.
“And do you succeed?”
“Of course. The gray of our lives is sequential, flowing from light to dark, so that a single yellow rose in the center is a thousand yellow roses, enough to light a room.”
Halberstam nods, his dismissal apparent, I’m the obvious nutcase described by Martha when I made her late for her appointment, a self rarely in control of the body, a self on the way out, don’t let the door hit you in the ass. He takes me through the abuse routine—do I remember—knowing that my response will only be more of the same. The body had been around for more than two decades before my appearance. That job belongs to Tina.
“And will I see Tina soon?”
I want to say only the shadow knows, but I remember Victoria telling me in the plainest language not to get in il Dottore’s face, the man believing that patients should always be told, should never tell. He’s bored with me besides, the real stars absent—Tina, Eleni—and won’t they have stories to share. I finally note the lust in il Dottore’s gaze, his flat blue eyes now sparkling.
Ten minutes later I’m on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan, still in control, a big surprise because I can feel Victoria’s breath in my ear, a sure sign my time on Earth is almost over, at least for now. But Victoria’s whispering: “You did good, honey child. You told him exactly nothing. You didn’t give him a single excuse.”
It comes to me in a flash, the revelation: my sister loves me, loves us all, even Eleni, even those she’s marked for elimination, for death, because love doesn’t matter here, only survival. Victoria wants to survive, Martha, too, their combined will to live, no matter how bleak the conditions, far more powerful than my own.