FIND HER. IF ONLY she could. Gianna would be nearly eighteen now. She is even more lost than Renata was at seventeen, or eighteen or nineteen.
After the morning when they stood on the banks of the river and watched Claudia being dredged up, her face pale green like some kind of sea monster, her leg twisted and her body puffy—from languishing underwater, from childbirth—her father began pouring bourbon steadily month after month. Her mother retreated into some shelter of the mind from which she emerged now and then to watch television or push a cart through the aisles of the supermarket, buying a bizarre assortment of things she tried to turn into meals. But that was usually too much effort. Lifting a cup of coffee was too much effort. “It’s so heavy,” she said when Renata brought her coffee in bed each morning. “Since when did cups get so heavy?” So Renata took over. Grace was more than willing to yield up credit cards and authority. She’d stopped selling real estate, a pity because she’d worked so hard to get her license and was good at it. If any of her old clients called, Renata was to say she was on leave. Every few weeks Grace urged her to take the bus in to the city and see how the baby was doing—Gianna, named for Grace’s mother, Giovanna. She was with the couple Peter had found, friends, he’d said, who’d wanted her when no one else did.
Did Renata imagine it, or did her parents really wince when they looked at her face, the image of Claudia’s before it underwent its sea change? Well, let them wince. If that’s how they feel, let them go to hell, was Renata’s mantra. Let the house tumble down around them. She’d be getting out, going away to college. She’d arranged it all on her own, catching her father in sober moments when the bills arrived. He was kind when he remembered she was there, though at times he seemed faintly puzzled when he passed her in the hall or the kitchen, as if he considered her dead along with Claudia, as if twins were so inseparable that they couldn’t be in such antithetical states as dead and alive. Other times he cried at the kitchen table and wanted company; she obliged at first, then stopped. He was sickening.
Her first thought, when the police came to the door that rainy April night with the news that he’d rammed his car into a tree, was that now she wouldn’t be able to go away to school. Her mother wouldn’t survive on her own. Her next thought was that he must have done it on purpose. It happened less than a mile from their house, at the sharp bend in the road, near the turnoff for the park where they’d fished Claudia from the river. Everyone knew to watch out for that bend. Renata had just learned to drive, and her father had warned her about it himself. She was so mad she could kill him. How could he? she thought when she went to identify his body. If he ever dared to open his eyes, she’d pound him senseless.
Instead, when Grace refused to stir from bed, Renata wrote a letter withdrawing from college. When Grace refused to speak or to eat, Renata wished for the first time that pain-in-the-ass Peter was still around. But Peter and Cindy had decamped from the house three blocks away just after Claudia died—Cindy first, leaving with not so much as a goodbye, then Peter. “Disappeared without a trace,” said Grace in her I-told-you-so voice. And Dan, who doted on his younger brother, who always defended and protected him, frowned and poured another inch of bourbon. As for friends, well, they’d been scarce lately, especially as Grace and Dan hadn’t led anything resembling a social life for some time. So Renata called an ambulance and packed Grace’s bag.
She saw her mother before she was moved to a bigger hospital, farther away, where she might have to stay for a while, the doctors said. A pointless visit—Grace was not inclined to conversation. Renata had seen a lot by then, yet the sight of Grace scared her: she was sitting in a chair and breathing but looked dead. Dead not in quite the way the others had looked. You’d expect death to leave a uniform imprint, but each of Renata’s corpses had had a distinct way of being dead, and Grace’s was arguably the worst because it wasn’t real, only a perverse pretending.
Renata was left with a house, a car, three credit cards, and a high-school diploma. More than some teenagers possess, yet she didn’t know what to do next; she didn’t feel like doing much of anything. She did know that if she stayed in the house she was in danger of going her mother’s route. Already she was spending too much time imagining Claudia climbing down the rock face in the dark (was Fox behind her or did he stay up above?), running out onto the pier. Tripping on the broken planks? Or jumping in? I dare you.
If she went on this way, who would call the ambulance for her? She got a handyman to look after the house—her last sensible act—and packed a bag and went to the city. That was where Claudia used to sneak off, to escape.
It was the cheapest apartment she could find, just one room. The windows were dirty, so the light coming in through the fluttery, once-white curtains looked dirty too. Two small lamps were fixed to the wall, their lampshades the color of old yellow dog’s fur. A small scratched wooden coffee table sat in front of the studio couch she slept on. There was a large wing chair upholstered in a fabric of pea-green leaves and brown flowers, flowers long past their prime. The beige rug was dappled with stains, one patch like a map of Europe connected by a narrow strip to Africa below. Sitting in the wing chair, she would try to pick out the shapes of countries she remembered from the maps on the walls at school. In one corner of the room, a stove, refrigerator, and sink projected from the wall like lumpy, cracking tumors. The kitchen table was covered with a light green plastic tablecloth that had a tart, acidic smell when it was damp. Her one concession to gracious living was to throw away the tablecloth. She wasn’t seeking punishment, only oblivion. She hadn’t done anything wrong, after all, unless it was wrong not to stop Claudia from going out that night. Could anyone have stopped her? But of course it was wrong. Of course the apartment was a punishment.
As she lay awake in the first light, she studied the cracks in the ceiling. They made a graceless calligraphy, ugly, yielding nothing, not like the hangings she would buy later, when everything was transformed yet again. The walls were pinkish-beige and needed a paint job, which the landlord might have provided if she’d asked. But she didn’t like to ask—he was a gruff man with a thick Russian accent—and she didn’t want anything so intrusive as a paint job marring the void of her life. She quickly got used to things as they were. She got used to the room as if it were her fate, and soon she even felt she belonged there, as if her earlier life had been a mere prelude, as if everything had happened in order to lead her to this room. All she brought from that earlier life were her memories and her body, and she really didn’t want either one, not her memories because they pained and confounded her, and not her body because it was barely eighteen years old and hungry to live.
One habit did remain from her old life, and that was visiting Gianna. Every few weeks she went across town and pushed the stroller through Riverside Park, gazing at the river, imagining how nice it would be to have her niece for company, but that was only a fantasy. She had no idea how to take care of a baby, and anyway, Gianna’s new parents would never give her up. They loved her, or showed all the signs. It was working out, just as Peter had promised. It was good of them to let her visit.
She got a job in a bar down the street. Drinking held no appeal, but it felt familiar watching the men drink, and soon she started letting them come to her apartment after work. In this way she learned all about sex, and sometimes the sensation of Peter running his finger down her spine in the garage came to mind like a scene from a movie she’d seen long ago and nearly forgotten. If the men bought her dinner or offered her money, she accepted. It came in handy. She slept with them to keep her body quiet. It was loud, her body; it set up a clamor only she could hear. She did it because she wasn’t busy and wanted to think as little as possible. She did it because it made her feel safe. When the men were inside her she was stopped up, less liable to spill out, leaving a crumpled skin. The man inside her was like a cork holding her together. She did it because Claudia had done it, to keep something of Claudia close by, though she wouldn’t have admitted that.
Sometimes it was the same man for weeks at a time, then he would change. But really there was no change at all. Sometimes when she opened her eyes she was confused by the face she saw. The men were older. The bar wasn’t a young singles hangout but an old-fashioned place where men came to chill out, shoot pool, watch ball games. In her room, sometimes she made them coffee. Sometimes the man would want to talk. She let him. She could wait. Soon enough he would touch her and then her body would get what it wanted. It had to be fed the way you feed an impatient animal. She, or rather her body, became ravenous. The men were surprised. Some were amused and some didn’t like it much; those didn’t come back. When she came, she kept her eyes closed and pretended she was alone, that the flesh against her skin was a part of her. Or that it was the whole world, everything that was not her, pressing in to offer her life. It made her delirious—she’d never felt so alone or so alive. Everything else was a great exertion, an arduous victory over inertia, but to this she leaped effortlessly. Later she’d look at their naked bodies, amazed that they were the instruments that could shock her into life, and so much more pleasantly than the doctors who were shocking Grace. But after the men left she crashed. Her memories came sweeping in, tsunami-style, and she was overwhelmed with fury at what life could do, and loathed her hungry body that insisted on living in its primitive way.
Soon the money machines stopped spitting out cash when she stuck the card in, and bills she didn’t comprehend kept being forwarded. She had to think like a grown-up. She called the agency where her mother used to work and said she wanted to sell the house. With everything in it? they asked. No, not everything. She put some things in storage but hauled the carton with the toy farm back to her room. She went through her father’s desk and figured out that she was not destitute. She learned what power of attorney was, and on one of her hospital visits shoved a pen into her mother’s limp hand and told her to write her name. Here, here, and here, and Grace obeyed. By the time it was all taken care of, Renata knew a lot about personal finance, enough to grasp that she could afford a better life. But she’d grown used to things as they were, with so few reminders of what had gone before.
One day the woman who had taken Gianna—Renata couldn’t bring herself to call her Gianna’s mother—phoned to ask if she might bring her over for a couple of days. “You’d be doing me a big favor.” She came in leading Gianna by the hand and carrying an armload of kiddie paraphernalia. Gianna was three; she wore blue jeans and an “I Love New York” T-shirt, and her black bangs reached down to her eyes. She knew Renata. She shouted her name and barreled into her arms. They had to go out of town, the woman said, a family emergency, and Renata was the person she most trusted. Renata was afraid she’d stop trusting her once she took in the grimy walls and stained rug and shabby furniture, but she was too distraught and hurried to notice anything. She clasped Gianna tightly, then ran away.
Renata had the oddest feeling that she’d never see her again, and she didn’t. Her half-hearted, ignorant stabs at locating the couple, at locating Peter and Cindy, were in vain. Why find them anyway? Suddenly she had a child, Claudia’s. And what was Claudia’s was virtually her own. Suddenly the two years she’d spent in the room with the gray light and the stained rug felt not like years of blank oblivion but years of waiting. Waiting until Gianna arrived.
She bought a small bed and put it in a corner of the room with a sheet hanging up for privacy; she knew the latest man, Joe, would turn up if he didn’t find her in the bar. He was about forty and seemed domesticated, a mild, affable man who could make love endlessly; Renata liked anyone who could wear her out. He didn’t want any more of her than she wanted of him, so they got along nicely. A few times they’d gone to a movie—a gesture to the social niceties—but basically they fucked. She didn’t know much about Joe except that he came from Queens and drove a furniture delivery truck. He used to operate a backhoe, a job that required a lot of control and precision, he said with a grin, and she smiled back to show she got the joke. After she moved away she could no longer remember how he dressed or what he drank at the bar or how he first approached her. She did remember his body. She remembered—still does—many of their bodies, though she’d rather not. At inconvenient moments they parade before her eyes like girls in a beauty contest, and she tries blinking or shaking her head to make them go away. Joe was an inch or so taller than she, stocky, slightly paunchy, an athlete’s bulk gradually softening. He had a blond crewcut, blue eyes and a thick nose he said had been broken when he was an amateur boxer. He had full lips and perfect teeth and small ears and large, warm hands and a round birthmark the size of a silver dollar on his left calf. After they made love he would fall asleep on top of her and stay inside her for ten or fifteen minutes; that might have been what she liked best about him, that and his mild nature.
A few days after Gianna arrived, Joe rang the bell late, close to eleven. They had to be quiet, Renata said; a friend’s child was staying over. He grunted in a way that implied he knew all about accommodating to children. The apartment was overheated and the radiator valve was stuck, so she opened the window. The curtains stirred and cool air rippled over them. After the first time, while he lay dozing on top of her, Renata stared at the ceiling and traced the cracks that resembled calligraphy, wondering dreamily if you could devise a rudimentary language, a message, out of cracks in a ceiling. Joe woke, rolled over and combed her hair with his fingers. Her hair was very long; it had had plenty of time to grow since Peter had run his finger across the bare nape of her neck in the garage. Joe draped her hair over his face and they laughed softly. Next thing she knew, she was impaled on top of him—so luscious she would have died happily then and there. Joe’s lips were curved in a half-smile. That would change quite soon, she knew: he would get a look of intense concentration, self-absorption, and when at last he opened his eyes, he’d look faintly surprised to find her, but friendly. Oh, so it’s you! Just now, though, the half-smile showed his perfect teeth. His blue eyes were pleasantly vague. As he moved inside her, she felt he was grating her the way you grate an onion, scraping back and forth like a reliable machine. Fine, she thought, grate away, scrape me till there’s nothing left. She gave herself up to it.
A whimper came from behind the curtain, then a louder cry, like a beginner’s bow scraping across a violin. Her heart thudded against her ribs and she stopped moving. But when she stopped, a protest rose in her gut, a cry to match the child’s cry. It wouldn’t let her stop. It was the crucial moment; she had to keep moving.
“The kid,” Joe whispered as he pushed into her. “Maybe you should go to her.” She shook her head, shook her hair. No, no. Gianna screamed and Joe moved to nudge Renata off him. No. She turned and glimpsed Gianna, who’d come out from behind the curtain and stood staring, clutching a plush dog to her chest, her mouth wide open. Still Renata couldn’t stop. A minute later she collapsed on his chest. “Go on,” he said. “I can wait.” She sprang up. It was hard to run across the room with the pulsing not yet abated, but she forced herself. She picked Gianna up. Her face was hot and wet, Renata’s thighs were hot and wet, the radiator sizzled, everything was dripping, tropical. “It’s okay, its okay. I’m here. He’s a friend of mine. It’s okay,” she kept saying.
“I want my mommy,” Gianna wailed.
“Yes, yes, she’ll come very soon.” A lie, the first of many. They would get easier as time went on. “It’s all right. I’m here.”
She gave Gianna some water and took her to the bathroom, then rocked her against her naked body till she quieted down. Between gasps, Gianna said she dreamed there was a monster on the other side of the curtain, so Renata told her there was no monster, only she and her friend. We were playing a game.
Once Renata got her settled in bed she returned to Joe. “Sorry about that,” and she offered to start all over, for him. “Nah, I better go,” he said with his grin. “Shit, kids. I’ve been there. Maybe you could, uh, just give me a quick hand with this?” So Renata did what he asked and he left soon after.
She was ashamed that she’d waited, ashamed that her voracious, impatient body had won out over a child’s crying. She sat up far into the night and knew she must change everything about her life. She would move to a decent apartment suitable for a child. She would learn to take proper care of her. She would send her to nursery school. Maybe she’d even go to school herself. She would transform herself into one of those staunch single moms everyone marveled at, deft and responsible and competent, however overtaxed.
And she did exactly that.
The next morning, though, before going hand in hand with Gianna to buy a paper and check out the apartment ads, Renata made one small gesture of reclamation. She spread out the pieces of the toy farm on the stained rug and explained to Gianna all about the buildings and the animals and the farm family. Gianna took to them right away, though every now and then she would stop to ask if her mother was coming back soon.
“Soon,” Renata said. “Look, these are the children. Sky, Pastel, and Powder.” She lifted each one in turn and handed them to Gianna. “This is their horse. This is the silo where they keep the corn.”
They made up a long story about a happy day at the farm. In the years to come, as Gianna stopped asking about her parents, it became their favorite game.