28

Up in Tilden Park, the nighttime sky was hammocked with low fog. It was gray and gray and purple, and it clung to the treetops like spiderwebs or wasps’ nests stuck to old wood. Sarabeth had not wanted to go home, and so she had driven up into the woods, to this place where a woman shouldn’t be alone after dark.

The trails were squishy with mud, and the air under the trees was as damp as it would have been if it were raining. She walked until she was out of breath, and then she sat on a bench. All around her were the smells of the wet earth, the leaves. The bench was wet, and her skirt grew damp, followed soon after by her ass. She turned sideways and lay back, and she exhaled and watched the cloud of her breath float away. Away, away: she was in some sense gone herself, far from the agony of what Liz had said. How this could be she didn’t know. How she had avoided crying, had left the restaurant and found her car, she didn’t know. On the bridge she had imagined herself weeping on Nina’s doorstep, collapsing into Jim’s arms, but she had steered away from those possibilities. Here and now, they all seemed irrevocably distant, the people she knew: as far away as Earth was from the moon. The planets, the heavens…how sad it was that she had never thought of her mother as an angel watching over her, a guardian of her experience.

But how ridiculous: Lorelei could never have done that, never have been that. And Sarabeth didn’t believe in stuff like that, anyway. Mystical phenomena, messages embedded in the everyday. “It was meant to happen.” The truth was that nothing was meant to happen. Things just did.

She lay on the bench and stared up at the fog. The quiet itself seemed like a sound. She remembered being in Tilden Park one night during college—high on mushrooms, standing naked under a tree. She was with her boyfriend Timothy. Being undressed together felt different here: they were at once shier and emboldened, and they touched each other and separated to look and touched again. She learned that a hand on her breast was one thing in a bedroom, something else entirely when she and her lover were on their feet outside, moving slowly, stopping to watch. They were Adam and Eve. The expulsion from the Garden, the Fall—these took the form throughout the relationship of doubting feelings. She was uncertain, and that was the bed she made, the bed she lay in with him. Is this it? she kept thinking—after sex, during breakfast, in the car on the way to visit his brother at Davis. Then, one day, she was alone at the library, bored with a science textbook, and she realized this was it—all there was and all there was going to be. No great change was going to come over him; he was not going to become someone else. She broke up with him.

But the problem had been in her. She understood that now. It had been in the fact that she had wanted more, she had wanted him to make her life marvelous. She saw Liz’s face across the table at the restaurant, heard Liz’s voice saying You always want something, and she sat up quickly. Pinpoints of light swarmed before her eyes. Her shoulders began to shake, and in a moment she was sobbing. It was horrible, what she was, horrible: someone who always wanted something. Liz was right—she had wished Liz would come to her during that week in November. She had wished it without really even knowing she was wishing it. She knew it from how ashamed she felt now. She remembered lying on her couch one Sunday, looking at her bird picture and talking to Liz—it was come to me she had wanted, and why? So Liz could see her, so Liz could see how terrible she felt. It sickened her to think of it now. She had used Liz, hadn’t she? She had used Liz for years, as a cauldron, a repository for everything that hurt, and it had been too much, she had been too much. I’m not your mother.

Was a mother a cauldron? What had she poured into Lorelei that had made her so ill?

But this thinking was dangerous, as she knew all too well: the bottomless bog of whose fault it was. Of causality. “The guilt, the guilt,” she and her suicide sister used to say—like “the horror, the horror.” “Did I drive her to it?” “I may not have driven him to it, but I didn’t stop him—I wasn’t enough to stop him.” All of this was true and best forgotten.

She didn’t know where she’d left her car, but she stood and began to walk. Her feet and legs were wet, her ass was wet, and she was cold, cold. She stumbled on rocks and brushed against bushes, but on she walked. Uphill, so that soon her breath came harder. She began to sweat lightly, a film at her hairline and between her breasts. There was the real and the metaphorical: the fact of her muscles and bones, their actualness, their ability to transport her; and this insistent new idea that she, her body, was a vessel for something that could pour out and fill other people, overwhelm them, poison them. That she was toxic.

She touched the trunk of a tree, felt its rough, creviced bark. She leaned against it and then slowly lowered herself to the ground. She had never felt worse.