The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

  “Her,” Patrick repeats. “A girl?”

  “Yes,” I say. “By the time I found out that she was a girl, things were already going wrong. Daniel was caught up in work, but I’d been let go from my job; I was home alone all day. I wasn’t much fun anymore. He’d started making excuses to spend time with friends, people I didn’t know. We hadn’t been together long, and maybe we were both realizing how—how big this thing was. How permanent. I had trouble sleeping. The doctor discouraged me from taking medications. When I was depressed, sleep was everything to me. It was a break from the heaviness and sadness. I’d look forward to it all day: that moment when I could forget everything for a while. So when I couldn’t sleep anymore, it all piled up. Days and nights were the same. Too much time for my mind to obsess over the same questions, turning things over and over. Every time I’d settle a fear, there’d be a moment of relief, and then I was right back at it.

  “After a few weeks of this insomnia, I was out of my mind. I was worried Daniel was cheating on me. I was worried he didn’t love me anymore. I thought his parents would try to take the baby from me, because clearly I couldn’t be a good mother. Then I’d worry that nobody would want anything to do with me. All the fear and sadness I’d left behind came back so much stronger. I’d tried to take a life that didn’t belong to me. Things couldn’t keep on like that. Fate had to restore the balance.”

  Patrick makes a movement as if he wants to come closer.

  “Daniel noticed,” I say. “I was an entirely different person. Trapped and desperate. I’d take it out on him, he’d take it out on me. I’d catch him watching me sometimes. As if he’d just walked into his house one day and found this strange and terrifying woman. We tried to get ready for the baby. We went shopping for clothes and a crib. It only made things feel more real. All these other couples shopping, they seemed so solid and happy—it felt like Daniel and I were the impostors. Playing at a real life.”

  Patrick must already know. Henry must have brought evidence: printouts of the news pieces, the mug shot from when I was taken into custody. That image that’s haunted me all these years, a woman who wasn’t really me. Skin drained of texture and color, eyes hollow and unfocused. He must know what I’m about to say: I sense him stiffening, braced for a blow.

  “I bought sleeping pills,” I say. “By then, I was seven months along. It was obvious to anyone that I was pregnant. I was afraid they wouldn’t sell me the pills. The cashier asked me when I was due, but she didn’t stop me. I was prepared to tell them the pills were for somebody else. At home, I hid the pills in a drawer. It comforted me just to know they were there. When things got really bad, when Daniel didn’t come home all night, I’d think of them. I wouldn’t use them, though. I promised myself. I’d wait until after the baby was born.”

  Abruptly, Patrick leans forward, elbows between his knees, clasped hands pressed into his bent forehead. He’s very still in this pose, eyes directed at the floor.

  “It was late at night,” I say. “I’d gone too long without sleeping. Probably thirty-six hours or more. I tried to cope by focusing on one moment at a time. But there was always this awareness of the time waiting for me beyond that. I started cracking. It was like I forgot where I was. I was alone again, detached from life, and I only had myself to worry about. I wasn’t pregnant. I’d never met Daniel. That night, I was my old self, all my choices erased, and I got the sleeping pills. At first, I promised myself I would take one or two. Just enough to take the edge off and let me sleep. But once I’d swallowed a few, I started panicking that they wouldn’t work. So I took more. Too many. I don’t know the exact amount.”

  Silence. Patrick doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t react at all.

  “I still don’t know how long it was before I woke up,” I say. “I was in the hospital. Daniel had found me. I was in a hospital bed, surrounded by wires. I couldn’t move without something beeping. The baby was OK, they said, but they’d have to monitor us. Daniel wouldn’t come to see me at all. Not once. His parents came to visit. They were worried about the baby. I thought they’d be furious at me, but they were forgiving. Maybe they realized how hard things had been for me. His mother even sat down and chatted for a few minutes. She wanted me to know that she’d be willing to help out after the baby came. It made me feel a little better. I was still trying to piece everything together. The nurses and doctors would tell me how lucky I was, that what I’d done hadn’t hurt the baby. I’d gotten away with it. I almost started to believe it.

  “It happened a week after I first woke up in the hospital. Late at night. Everything seemed fine, then suddenly it wasn’t. I was bleeding. There was so much of it. Maybe it seems strange that I’d be shocked by blood. But I wasn’t used to it. The pills took me out of my body. This pain was holding me there.” I hesitate. For the first time, I’m not sure if I can go on. “It was an emergency delivery,” I say. “She was already gone. I didn’t even get a chance to look at her. They must have assumed I wouldn’t want to see her. And I understand. I killed her. It was my fault.” I pause. “It is my fault.”

  The pain isn’t as deep as I thought it would be. After being stifled for five years, it should be enormous, unbearable. A neglected wound hidden under a sleeve, the infection seeping into the bloodstream. But instead I’ve found a mere scar. My pain has healed without me. I feel cheated, almost panicking. I want the freshness back.

  “Lying there after,” I say, “people wouldn’t even look at me. Their eyes would go right over mine, no matter how hard I tried to make eye contact. Like I was just a blank space in the room. A broken machine. I had to eavesdrop to find out what had happened. A placental abruption, they said. I didn’t know what that meant. It hadn’t hurt me much—I was recovering, at least physically. I must have been lying there for days, and it was the strangest thing. While I was pregnant, I didn’t notice the baby’s movement much. But once she was gone, I felt so still and so flat. I kept wondering, where is she? Why isn’t she moving? And then I had to remember, over and over again. This instinct I hadn’t even realized I had—now it was haunting me.”

  Patrick’s posture hasn’t changed: the sharp angle of his back, the slope of his neck.

  “Weeks passed, and I wasn’t sure what would happen next,” I continue. “It was impossible to imagine. I was completely detached. The drugs made me even more numb. When the officers came into the room, I barely understood what they were saying or doing. It took me a long time to piece together that I was being charged for the loss of the baby. Daniel’s parents wanted me to be prosecuted for what I’d done. The baby would have survived if I hadn’t overdosed; that’s what they were saying. After that, everything was a blur—being in the holding cell wasn’t much different from being in the hospital. These strange, lonely places where I wasn’t quite real. I was just a problem to be solved.”

  The mug shot. Staring incuriously at the dark eye of the camera suspended above me. My face blank, my gaze indifferent. It would only be later that I’d wonder about the implications of that photo. I found it, attached to my true name, on a local news site: I scarcely recognized the person in the photo. A face captured at its most raw stage and preserved forever. All I wanted, back then, was to escape that girl and everything about her.

  “It must have been Daniel who convinced them to drop the charges,” I say. “A placental abruption can happen to anyone. It can happen to women who’ve done everything perfectly, who’ve been careful the whole pregnancy. That’s what helped me. But the case had already caught the attention of the media. Enough to get my name out there. Maybe you heard about it—six years ago, maybe. I don’t know how far the story spread.”

  He shakes his head, a barely perceptible motion. I can’t tell if he’s denying it or if he can’t speak.

  “After they released me, I went back to the house,” I say. “Daniel wasn’t there. I walked through those rooms and took a few things I might need. Clothes and toiletries, cash. The crib was still in the bedroom. I couldn�
��t pass it without thinking of her. My poor girl.”

  The words shock me, forming without my awareness. My poor girl.

  “And then you came here,” Patrick says. His voice is hoarse, as if he’s the one who’s been talking all this time.

  “I tried a few different cities. Temporary jobs, whatever I could get. Nothing was exactly right. When I heard about the Elysian Society, it seemed like just another job. But it was exactly what I needed. Taking the lotus, I stepped outside my skin and everything was more bearable. One day I looked up and it had been a year, and then two years. I haven’t been happy as a body, not exactly. But I’ve been safe, all these years.”

  “He never came looking for you?” Patrick asks.

  “I used to think he would,” I say. “It wouldn’t have been too hard to track me down. For the first few months, I imagined him walking in the door. Coming back for me. By now, I don’t think it will happen. He doesn’t want anything to do with me. I don’t blame him. I hope that he’s forgotten me. I hope he’s happy with someone else.”

  Patrick straightens. A diver breaking above the surface of the water, trying to find his bearings in this harsh-edged world. “So do you believe it?” he asks.

  “Believe what?”

  “That you would have lost the baby anyway,” he says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’ll probably never know.”

  “Did you pick out a name for her?”

  “Lucy,” I say.

  His throat jumps as he swallows. “I don’t understand how you could do that,” he says. “Do you know what Sylvia would have done for a chance to be a mother? You had it, and you—you destroyed it.”

  “Patrick, I was desperate,” I say. “I wasn’t thinking of the baby. I wanted to be gone. I didn’t even know I was pregnant when I swallowed those pills. It was a moment of such panic that I would have done anything to end it.”

  Outside, the darkness is backlit with creeping pink.

  “You’ve hidden so much from me,” Patrick says.

  I don’t answer. I’m not sure I have any words left inside me.

  “I was hoping you’d tell me it was a mistake,” he continues. “Even after I saw the photo. I came to your door thinking—maybe Henry invented everything. One last way to hurt me and Sylvia.”

  My chest hurts, an ache through my muscles, as if expelling the words from my body required a physical force.

  “But he was being kind to me,” Patrick continues. “He was more honest with me than you’ve ever been.”

  So early in the morning, the traffic noises are scattered: the occasional roar and rumble of a truck that’s been driving all night. Passing through quiet towns, cities suspended in sleep.

  “I don’t know how I didn’t see it before.” Patrick’s voice verges on wondering. “You’re exactly like her.”

  Even now, the words bring an instinctive rush of pleasure. Being compared to her. Taking on the dark-haired woman in the photos, her uncomplicated beauty. But I know what he really means.

  “That night at the lake,” he says. “Was that her? Or you?”

  “I’m not sure.” My voice is very quiet.

  “You’d do it again,” he says. “I can’t live with that fear. Waiting for it to happen.”

  “I’m different now,” I say. “It’s been five years. I’m a new woman.”

  “But something like that—it won’t just go away.”

  The faintest light slides across the floor. It’s an optical illusion: indistinguishable as I watch, but brighter every time I look away and look back.

  “I shouldn’t have done this with you,” Patrick says. “It was a fantasy, trying to get my wife back. You made it feel possible. Like something I deserved.”

  I pull the bathrobe’s thin and chintzy fabric tighter around my body.

  “You wanted to have a child with me,” he says, and his voice is thick with both awe and disgust. “Jesus.”

  Without thinking about it, I touch my stomach. Just as quickly, I pull my hand away, trying to hide the gesture. I imagine where we’d be if we’d left the city together yesterday evening—if we were already hundreds of miles away, curled together on a hotel bed. The early morning landscape outside the window completely unfamiliar to us, waiting to reveal itself in the dawn light as we pulled away, on to the next town. If we’d left, I would be telling him now. I’d wanted to wait until we’d escaped the city.

  I only found out yesterday morning. I was curious about the heaviness between my hip bones, the dizziness that briefly dissolved my edges when I stood too quickly. Sensations that had nothing to do with Sylvia. I knew; before I even saw the second line, I knew. Another chance. I’ve saved the test, a tiny piece of proof. But now that my past has leaked into the present, all the hope I could have offered Patrick has grown tarnished and ugly.

  If I tell him now, I’m afraid that he’ll react with anger, disappointment: a cruel parody of what I’d wanted for us. I remember the undercurrent of reverence in his voice when I suggested that he and Sylvia could have what they’d missed. I open my mouth to tell him—but I can’t make myself form the words.

  “Patrick,” I say instead, “there’s nothing keeping us in the city. We’re as free as we were yesterday. We’re the same people. I can still do this for you and Sylvia.”

  For one more moment, I let myself believe that he’ll be convinced by this. That he’ll say: You’re right. Everything is forgiven. We’ll go. And we’ll walk into the future together. The past falling away. Once we’re in a new city, I can tell him, and he’ll look at me with new eyes, see our future with eyes unclouded by what came before us.

  But: “I can’t,” he says.

  In the dusty shell of the TV screen, I can make out our shapes, side by side.

  “I blame myself for this too,” he says after a silence. “I let you lie to me.”

  I’m silent, words stuck to my tongue. There’s nothing I can say. He’ll leave. I feel his absence already, shifting closer with each breath I take. I realize that Patrick doesn’t know how purely he’ll be turning his back on his wife. He believes she’s curled in the bottle of lotuses, confined like a trapped spirit in a fairy tale. Summoned only by the swallowed pill.

  He doesn’t know that she’s with me. She’ll watch through my eyes as he walks away from us. And though I haven’t examined my reasons for hiding this from Patrick, I’m suddenly and deeply grateful that I’ve kept our bond a secret from him.

  He rises. I stand too; I’m weak for a moment, exhaustion tunneling up through my throat and stomach before it pops in my brain. He’s a stranger again. My familiarity with his body, his mannerisms, the sound of his voice: it’s all been drawn back into him and locked away.

  At the door, we hesitate.

  “Will I see you again?” I ask.

  Patrick brings his gaze to mine with an effort. “No,” he says.

  “Where will you go?” I ask.

  “Anywhere,” he says. “It doesn’t matter.”

  After a second, Patrick grips my waist. He pulls me toward him until we press together. I feel his quick, hard pulse at every point in my body. Bowing my head, I rest my forehead against his chest. He kisses the top of my head.

  Neither of us speaks for a long time.

  Then Patrick lets go of me. He turns from me and walks away. He doesn’t look back.

  I stay in the empty doorway. I remember my time at the lake. Lying in bed. The scent of that cabin, like withered flower petals, treacly and dusty at once. The planes of the ceiling above us, the bedspread curled around my thighs. Patrick’s hand on my belly. He’d said: You’re not even yourself. And I’d assumed, then, it was an accusation, or the rising horror of realization.

  It’s only now, standing with my back to my empty apartment, that I can see it for what it truly was. A declaration of love.

  FORTY-ONE

  The first time around, it was inevitable. The easiest thing in the world to ignore.

  I tried. I’d read g
ently chiding magazine articles that promised to teach me how to love my body, step-by-step. I’d listen to the cautionary tales about the human body breaking down in intricate ways, and I’d vow that I’d no longer take my health for granted. I’d revel in the miracle of my sturdy lungs, smoothly muscled legs, chugging heartbeat.

  But at the back of my mind, I knew these were illusions. Attempts to make living inside my skin as toothless and luxurious as slipping on a new dress. The actual experience was too enormous and too ordinary to distill down to abstract platitudes.

  My body, that first time, was so constant that I had to break it into tiny pieces to experience it at all. A knot of pain in my temple on waking. A prickling itch in my sole. Patrick’s hand on the small of my back. A bead of sweat trailing slowly down the nape of my neck. The hairs on my arms rising in response to a breeze. Strangers’ eyes shifting over me.

  Photographs helped. Photographs let me step back and examine myself impartially. I’d run my finger down the length of myself, trapped in the still image, and all my thoughts would fall into line in response.

  And then I became a cautionary tale. My body betrayed me, sinking further from my grasp. I reached down as far as I could and still my fingers closed on nothingness. My interior refused to make itself known to me. That was the time of sitting in sterile rooms in thin paper gowns, an object to be assessed and weighed and plucked over. A time of averting my eyes from the firmly swollen bellies in the waiting room, their ripe roundness a sign of some perfect and tightly wound clockwork deep within them. While I was all rattling gears, loose coils.

  After this, I turned into something else. Someone else. A body that behaved in a way I never thought I could. Doing things I’d never let myself want to do. Henry’s mouth an electric shock on my thighs, his fingers a stubborn reminder that my flesh still had other uses. Other sources of pleasure. I’d watch myself as if from a distance when I was with Henry, thinking: Can this really be me? Can I be this woman? Never certain whether I felt terror or delight at the thought.