sophia.” Darius’s voice sliced through the darkness. She felt his hand on her shoulder. Her eyes flew open. She put her hand to her forehead. It was damp.
“You screamed,” he said, yawning.
“I’m sorry,” she answered. Since the accident her dreams had turned suddenly violent. In college, she had taken a psychology course taught by a Jungian, who encouraged his students to write down their dreams immediately upon waking. Every morning, Sophia would try her best, urged on by the piece of paper she had taped to her alarm clock. DREAMS!!!! But try as she might, she could never remember a single one. One day, she raised her hand and asked the professor, an aged hippie who wore white Mexican wedding shirts and Birkenstock sandals to class despite his gnarly old-man toes, “What if you never dream?”
“Everybody dreams,” he answered, moving his eyebrows up and down in that ironically flirtatious way so confusing to young women yearning to be taken seriously. “It’s the human condition.”
His answer had sent her into a funk. Am I not human? she wondered. Am I lacking an imagination? A personal underworld? She began listening closely to her classmates as they read their dreams aloud—I was running and I was naked and I was falling and I could fly and there was a test but I had not studied, had not even enrolled in the class, then I woke up—and used their images to make up her own dreams, throwing in a few sexual images to keep things interesting. A large cylindrical tower often loomed in the distance. She tried to climb it. It was slippery. Sometimes, water or a “viscous fluid” spurted out of the top. In the margins of her dream journal, the professor made neat little checks next to the dirty parts. She got an A in the course.
Now she was dreaming too much, waking up shaken and scared by vivid images of babies mired in bloody purple mud, infant bodies full of adult teeth. Sometimes they could fly, their arms distended like a pterodactyl’s, flapping in the air, coming toward her, as if they wanted something essential from her, a lung or a liver. Always, she woke up before they reached her, but the adrenaline would still be coursing through her body, making her limbs tingle with a terrible electricity. When the terror receded, she felt bruised and exhausted, as if she had physically done battle in the night. Again and again, she had to remind herself of the first rule of dreams—the dreamer never dies.
Darius turned his body toward her and stroked her arm, following the curve of her hip down to the curve of her ass. “Sshhhhhh,” he whispered. She accepted the caresses, willing her heart to slow down, her body to relax. After a while, his hand went from her stomach to the hollow in between her breasts and then to the nipples. The feel of his skin on her breast made her nauseous, the same way she had felt when she’d been pregnant with the girls and he’d wanted to make love.
“I’m sorry,” she said, taking his hand and moving it away. He sighed loudly and turned his back.
She felt bad. Sex had always been the invisible glue between them. When the household chores, the relentlessness of meals, the dickering over driving, the parent-teacher conferences, the assemblies, the soccer games, the trips to the mall for cheap clothing the girls would outgrow in a few months, and always, always, the worries about money had become too tedious for words, sex had been a respite, a place where they could once again believe something in their life was transcendent. Normally, her desire was equal to his. Except for the times she was pregnant, she almost never turned down a sexual overture. Nor could she ever remember him saying no to her. When her friends complained about how much sex their husbands always seemed to want, it had been a secret source of pride for Sophia that she wanted it as much as he did. But now, when their marriage most needed its balm, sex had once again become linked in her mind to the bloody, unerotic mess of conception and birth. In the middle of the month, she’d get strange stabbing pains in her ovaries, as if her reproductive system had been pressed into active revolt, punishing her for her indifferent stewardship of its issue. When she mentioned it to her gynecologist, he had looked perplexed, then ordered a battery of expensive tests, all of which came back normal.
“Should we talk about this?” Sophia asked Darius’s spine, visible beneath the black hair of his back and the pale Irish skin.
His answer was a faint hiss of air, like a tire going flat. He’d gone to sleep. Or was pretending.
When she woke up the next morning, Darius was gone. It used to make her feel strange waking up alone after going to sleep with him. If she could sleep through a 215-pound man heaving himself off a queen-size mattress, opening and closing a bathroom door, showering, shaving, and dressing, what else could she miss while slumbering? Now it didn’t bother her. In fact, all of her old neurotic fears—empty parking garages at night, coffee-makers that spontaneously combusted, moles that outgrew their borders, flat tires, cockroaches in the cutlery drawer, colon cancer, gums that bled, audits by the IRS—had ceased to worry her. As far as the universe was concerned, she felt she’d used up her bad luck quota for decades to come. And even if one of those terrible things did happen, how small a burned-down house would seem compared to the tragedy of Helen’s accident. As in painting, perspective was every thing.
Downstairs, she found Darius reading the paper. Monty was asleep at his feet. He glanced ostentatiously at the clock on the wall—8:35—and went back to the sports pages. It was a sore subject between them. Every morning, he wanted to get to the hospital as early as possible. If he had his way, he would set up a bed in Helen’s room and live there. Sophia didn’t see the need. If there was any change in Helen’s condition, the hospital had been instructed to call them, regardless of the time.
“Should we get Miranda up?” he asked. “It’s getting late.”
Sophia poured herself a cup of coffee, took a sip, and grimaced. It was even more burned than usual.
“Sorry,” Darius said, watching her. “I’ve been up a while. I can make a fresh pot.”
“No,” she said, and waved at him, acknowledging his peace offering. “It suits my mood.”
Sophia walked up the backstairs, toward Miranda’s bedroom. Ever since the girls hit puberty, Darius had become shy about entering their bedrooms.
“They might be, you know.”
“Oh, honey, even if they were, which they probably aren’t because, trust me, it’s different for girls, they’d be doing it under the covers.”
But Darius, who had never gotten over the shame of being caught by his mother masturbating at thirteen, was adamant.
Sophia knocked once before entering the bedroom. Miranda was awake but still lying in bed.
“Rise and shine,” Sophia said.
“Trying,” Miranda answered.
Sophia went into her closet and picked out a long, flowy dress in dark blue.
“What about this?” she asked, holding the dress in front of her daughter.
Miranda fingered the material sadly. “I’ve never worn this.”
“Maybe it’s time to light the rose candle.” A family joke. On her deathbed, Sophia’s great aunt was supposedly asked if she wished she’d done anything differently in her life. Her answer—“I wish I had lit that damn rose candle”—had become part of family lore.
When Miranda pushed the covers off and swung her legs out of bed, Sophia noticed a small patch of cellulite on her upper thighs. It made her sad for a second. She had hoped the perfection of youth would last a little longer for her daughters.
“Mom?” Miranda stared at the floor.
“Mmmm.”
“I don’t want to go anymore.”
Sophia had seen it coming. The first month after the accident, Miranda had risen promptly every morning, but for the last four weeks, she’d been getting up later and later. When she did finally get to the kitchen, she acted like a petulant fourteen-year-old. Not having her around might actually be a relief.
“I know.” Sophia had thought about bringing it up with Darius, but she was having her own problems with her husband. Once, she believed their opposing temperament had kept things interesting long after most marriages had gone flat, but now, when it really mattered, his refusal to face up to the bleakness of Helen’s prognosis was making her crazy. She sat next to Miranda on the bed, thighs and shoulders touching; they tilted their heads toward each other so the bone of their skulls met.
“If I could just give her some of my health…” Miranda said.
Sophia had had the same thought many times. It was in the paper all the time—mothers who gave kidneys or bone marrow to their sick children. She had no desire to die, but if there had been a way to give Helen her own brain, she would have. She’d lived long enough to get the gist of life. The museum would let her stay on, neither promoting nor demoting her, until a reasonable retirement age, when they’d give her a farewell cocktail party with their B-list caterer. She could practically taste the custard of the mini-quiches now. Darius might finish the book he had been working on for the last ten years—a biography of Shakespeare’s abandoned wife—but probably not. That book had never been written because there was virtually no material. The house would get too big and too expensive to maintain. They’d move to an apartment. There would be meals and movies and books. On and on. Same old, same old. If it meant giving Helen a chance, she’d be willing to give all that up.
“Let’s go talk to your father.”
When Darius saw Miranda come down the stairs in pajamas, he looked to Sophia for an explanation. It had also been that way when they were babies. One of the girls would start to cry and Darius would look to Sophia, panicked. “Two short coughs and a cry means ‘I’m bored,’” she would try to explain. “A constant wail means ‘I’m hungry.’ An arch of the back means ‘I’m tired.’” But he was a young associate professor trying to get tenure. Understanding the inscrutable language of babies took time he didn’t have.
“What’s going on?” Darius asked.
“I’m not going to the hospital today,” Miranda said quietly.
“I’m sorry?” Darius asked as if he hadn’t heard correctly.
“It doesn’t do any good. She doesn’t know we’re there. If it would help her for me to sit in that depressing waiting room, I’d be there. You know I would.”
Darius opened his eyes wide, as if to take in more of the scene around him, then bent his head toward the table while massaging the creases on his forehead. Sophia was as familiar with the gesture as any zoologist who spent her days studying the habits of a single species. He was angry and hurt. The anger did not worry her. It was a quick blue fire that would dissipate quickly. The hurt was another matter. Already, she could feel that her husband’s sense of the world had been dangerously destabilized by the accident. Even though he’d left the baby stage largely to her, he had never been one of those fathers more attuned to the world of work and men than the needs of his family. The bulk of the household chores still fell unevenly on Sophia’s shoulders, but when it came to the ritualized intimacy of family, the ceremonies and events that marked the passage of time, it was Darius who did the work. He planned the family vacations, ordered the organic turkey for Thanksgiving four weeks in advance, bought the embossed leather photo albums and then filled them with pictures of each milestone in the girls’ lives. As the sixth of nine children, he had grown up feeling lost in the crowd. Once, he confessed to her how crushed he had been when he came across a set of baby books for only the first four children in his family. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said, “for the rest of us…nothing.” As the only girl child who had suffered under the too intense scrutiny of overprotective parents, Sophia tried to reassure him that he had missed nothing, but he couldn’t hear it. All his life he’d mourned the lack.
“Can you talk to her?” Darius looked at her.
Sophia shrugged helplessly. What could she say? She was inclined to agree with her daughter. What was the point of all of them sitting in that room day after day? Sophia was in no hurry to go back to work. How could she pretend to care whether Betsy Saunders gave her Agnes Martin to the Guggenheim when Helen was so ill? It was different for Miranda. She had a life ahead of her.
“What should I tell her when she wakes up?” Darius asked. “Her sister sends her regrets, but she thinks it’s too depressing to be here?”
“The thing is, Dad, I don’t really know if she’s going to wake up.”
“Well,” he said quietly, “I do.”
“Then you know more than the doctors, because when I hear them talk, I hear them say, maybe next month, maybe next year, and maybe never. And the longer she goes without waking up, the less optimistic they sound.”
“You know,” he answered coldly, “maybe it’s better you don’t come. We really don’t need all that negativity.” He stood up, emptied his coffee cup into the sink, took the Volvo keys off the hooks next to the door, and said to Sophia, “I’ll be waiting for you outside.”
Sophia kissed her daughter on the top of her head. “Don’t worry,” she said, “he’ll get over it.” It was her role, the maternal anodyne, but inside, Sophia wasn’t sure if any of them would ever really get over what had happened to them.
It could have been worse. In the worst-case scenarios Miranda had rehearsed, she imagined her father would burst into tears. If that had happened, there was no way she would be able to stand her ground. That he turned icy on her, telling her he was “disappointed,” had been one of the best-case scenarios. It made him seem judgmental and sanctimonious. It was a child’s birthright to disappoint her parents—hadn’t he done it by marrying her mother (“A Greek?”), studying literature (“Stories?”), and moving (“California?”)? She poured herself a cup of coffee and stared at the cordless phone on the table in front of her. She pushed it to the left, then the right. Picked it up, then put it down. It took exactly six minutes and fifty-eight seconds for her to work up the courage to call him.
He answered on the first ring. She liked that. People who let the phone ring two times even though they were sitting next to it were ridiculous.
“It’s me,” she said, heart thumping, “Miranda.”
“Hi.” He sounded pleased to hear from her.
“I’m sorry I didn’t return your calls, we had a family—”
“I know. I heard. I am really sorry. Are you free? Can I come see you?”
She hesitated.
“Don’t worry. Just as a friend.”
She was glad he couldn’t see her blush through the phone. “Okay,” she said. She sat at the kitchen table and waited. Since the accident, he must have called twenty times. Each time she listened to a new message, her heart had twisted with desire, guilt, yearning, and about twenty other feelings that she could not name. In the end, they all left her in the same paralyzed place. How could she think of seeing him when Helen lay where she was? Sometimes, she’d call him when she knew he was in class or working his shift at the campus bookstore just to listen to his voice. “This is Jason. You know what to do.” “Actually,” she’d want to say, “that’s the problem. I don’t know what to do.”
The doorbell rang. When she opened the front door, he was holding a bouquet of flowers wrapped in a cone of cellophane. A few pink carnations peaked over the top.
“Carnations!” she said.
“You don’t like them?” He looked stricken.
“I love them.” She hated them. But she loved that he had brought them.
He put his arms around her. “I don’t like them, either, but it was all they had at the grocery store and I wanted to get here as quickly as possible.”
She started to cry. How was it possible for someone she barely knew to understand her so well?
“It’s okay,” he said, patting her back.
“I’m not crying for her,” she said into the faded blue flannel of his shirt. “I should have called you sooner.” She pulled away from him.
“I didn’t mind being the last thing on your mind.”
Miranda sniffled. “I thought about you every day. That’s why I couldn’t call you. I felt so guilty.” Being close to him was making her inexplicably drowsy, as if she had taken a sleeping pill. “I need to sit down,” she said.
“Where?”
She looked around the house—the living room seemed too formal, the kitchen too public. “My room,” she said, pointing up the stairs. He followed without looking around the house. She liked how he made her feel like a person with a future, not somebody attached to a past, a family, a house, a sick sister. During those endless hours at the hospital, when her mind would wander around the landscape of her life, projecting itself forward onto various life scenarios, she sometimes imagined she and Jason would marry, live on a farm somewhere, and raise happy, loudmouthed children who could recite “Jabberwocky” from memory. It made her sad that he and Helen had never met. Could anyone really know her without knowing Helen? But maybe it was better this way. With Jason, Helen would always be an abstraction. Growing up, she had gotten used to the idea that Helen would always be sunshine while she, Miranda, would be shadow. Light and dark. Easy and difficult. Smooth and prickly. While she had to assume that the man who liked Helen would never like her and vice versa, a part of her would always wonder. If you could choose between the two, why would you choose Miranda?
In her room, they lay on the bed together, facing each other. She put her leg over his hip. He put his hand on the small of her back and pressed her pelvis toward him. She had meant for them to lie together and talk but once she was close to him, she felt her body pulled into a current of desire. She put her hand to his head and drew his lips toward her mouth. His tongue found hers. Her hands moved into his hair, using it like a handle to pull him even closer. Their breath grew short. His eyelids grew droopy. In one swift movement, she maneuvered herself on top of him.
“I want to do it,” she said into his ear. Before, her desire had seemed superficial, a thing to be resisted. Now it felt important, something that urgently needed doing. She couldn’t even remember the nature of her objections.
“Are you sure?” he said.
“How can you ask?”
“I had to, it’s in the student rulebook.”
He put his hands around the elastic waist of the pants she was wearing and pulled her pants and underpants down. She gasped and worried about a million stupid things, the unsexy cotton underwear she was wearing, her unshaved legs, the soft mound of her belly, the way she smelled down there. He pulled his shirt over his head. His chest was broad and muscled, with a tuft of coarse brown hair in the middle. She stopped thinking about her own body and kissed one of his nipples. He groaned and unzipped his pants. She pulled slightly away.
“I’m a virgin,” she said.
“I know,” he answered.
“Is it obvious?”
“Yes. No. Don’t worry. You are perfect in every way.”
Miranda smiled. “Hyperbole will get you every where.”
Afterward, she wasn’t sure how she felt. Relieved to have it done, that was for sure. Slightly disappointed, but she had expected that—she didn’t have a single friend who’d found the first time completely pleasurable. What disappointed her was how quickly it was over. It wasn’t that he hadn’t lasted long enough, he’d been courtly in that way, asking if she was ready. She’d acquiesced out of cluelessness: Ready for what? Now that it was over, she wanted to go back and examine every thing, to understand what it had all meant, but already the memory was slipping away from her.
“It’s always strange at first,” he said into her hair.
“So they say.”
“You’re not regretting it, are you?”
“God, no,” she reassured him. “I want to do it again and again.”
He laughed and put a hand on her breast. “We will.” He turned suddenly serious. “Are you really okay?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “Life does go on. You think it’s not going to. The first morning you wake up, you go to brush your teeth and you think, How can I brush my teeth while Helen’s in the hospital fighting for her life? But if you don’t brush your teeth and your breath stinks and the bacteria grow and your teeth rot out, how has that actually helped your sister? You’ve just fulfilled some kind of narcissistic need to dramatize your pain.”
“I guess that’s why the Jews don’t cut their beards for thirty days when they’re in mourning.”
Miranda raised her head to look at him, surprised he would know that. “Do you know a lot of Jews?”
“My mother. Me. Matrilineally.”
Miranda held her breath, waiting for more.
“She was a bush pilot and an ob-gyn in Anchorage. When women in remote villages needed an abortion, my mother would get in her plane and go to them. In Alaska in the winter, there are no roads.”
“A hero.” Miranda was impressed.
“Not every body thought so. She was always getting death threats from the anti-abortion kooks. One morning I went outside to play and there was a fetus in a plastic salad container on our front porch. I thought it was a bird.”
“How awful.”
“They slashed the tires on my dad’s truck, they spray-painted the side of our house with red paint. A kid at school asked me why my mom killed babies for a living. My dad begged her to stop, but she wouldn’t.”
Miranda could feel his breathing get shorter as he spoke. “Then one day, she went up in the plane and never came home. My dad believes it was sabotage. He maintained the plane, so he knew there was nothing wrong with it and she was a very careful pilot. If there was bad weather, she always stayed home.”
“What did the police say?” Miranda could feel something wet between her legs. She wondered if it was blood but didn’t want to look down in the middle of his story.
“The wreckage was on the side of a mountain too remote to access. My dad hired one of the best mountain guides in the state to retrieve her body. He tried three times but every time he went up, bad weather sent him back. Finally, we decided to leave her up there. They say the permafrost at that level will preserve things forever. We used to fly by the site every year on her birthday.”
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Nine. After that, my dad quit his job—he was a lawyer representing indigent clients for Legal Aid—and we moved to the bush. It’s weird because both my parents had been really liberal do-gooders, but after my mom died, my dad turned into an off-the-gridder. He went from ‘It’s my duty to help people ’ to ‘People are responsible for themselves. If you’re too stupid to take care of yourself, tough shit. You’re on your own.’ There’s a lot of people in Alaska like that, so he wasn’t alone, but none of his old friends could understand how he changed. Eventually, they stopped talking to him. Now he cuts down old-growth trees for a living and represents the occasional Inuit against drunk-driving charges, which is actually great, because they pay him in Chinook salmon, the best in the world.”
“It must have been terrible, losing your mom.”
“It was.” He picked up a handful of her hair, held it to his nose, and inhaled deeply. “But it’s like you said, you get over it. Unless you don’t want to. The first time I went through a whole day without thinking about my mother, it was like learning to walk again after being paralyzed. I was so happy, I told my dad about it, thinking he’d be pleased, but he looked at me like I’d taken a dump on her grave. He didn’t want to move on, and he hasn’t.”
Miranda reached a hand down between her legs. She tried to make the gesture look casual, as if she had an itch. When she looked down at the wetness on her fingers it was clear, like water, but sticky. She wondered if it was him or her but couldn’t bring herself to ask.
“What made you decide to tell me this now?” she asked.
“I always tell girls the story right after I deflower them. It’s a tradition in our family.”
He moved a hand in between her legs. She tensed. Was it too wet down there? Was that normal?
“Seriously”—he moved his hand away—“I know what it’s like to have something terrible happen to you out of the blue. I wanted you to know that.” She closed her eyes to cool the sting of gathering tears, then put her hand between her leg.
“Is this me or you?” She held her hand in front of his face.
He took her hand and licked it. She shivered with repulsion and desire. Sex, she saw, was like a different country. A place where things that would usually gross you out—saliva, sperm, body odor—became parts of desire. She took her fingers out of his mouth and put them in her own.
“It’s us,” he answered.