Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  I gasp with the laughter until I’m having trouble breathing. So I go out, one arm holding my stomach. I open the front door, craving the freshness and sweetness of the air. The wind has picked up again and the temperature has plunged with nightfall but I barely notice—it’s like returning to the place where I was born. I need to walk again, into the cold, until I can breathe. I step out into the bracing wind, startled by how biting it is, how good to have the laughter swiped out of my lungs, so I can’t hear or feel a thing. I close my eyes until I feel the tears crystallizing on my lashes, freezing them together. I feel sleek and small and empty.

  It really doesn’t seem like such a bad idea—to let the white storm wrap me up; I consider the appeal of walking straight out into it. Or just waiting here on the porch for it to come get me. The sky is lead-colored and glaring. There are no flights of wild, laughing parrots or strands of hanging vines. There are only the tall cement block buildings, the dead old cities, the world gone white with poison, with too many people and their poisons. And here I am, another one—a bit of litter.

  Keller comes out on the front stoop beside me. The wind tangles my hair, blows snow into our eyes. The door bangs back with the wind, snow is blowing into the house. He grabs my arm, shouting something. I try to pull away, but he’s impossible, infuriating. I flail at him, hands closed into fists. I shriek, “Let go of me, you have to let go!”

  But the harder I struggle, the smaller and tighter I become. I exhaust myself with fighting. Until there’s nothing left of me. “You have no right to do this,” I sob as he captures me. Inside the shelter of his body, it’s just warm enough that I can feel the cold burning me; I can feel the way I’ve scraped my throat raw with laughing and coughing. “You have no right,” I croak.

  “I have every right,” he says, pulling me back again, into the house, into the warmth. “I have every goddamn right in the world.”

  CHAPTER 48

  THE BEAUTY OF READING SUCH A REPORT ON ONE’S OWN ORIGINS is that it lets you walk away from everything—from history, obligations, connections. It’s a new creation myth—perhaps just as disturbing as learning one was raised by apes in the rain forest. To be a baby thrown into the garbage is to be in a plane crash. And—whether I was rescued by a police officer or an ape—I was rescued.

  The morning comes into Keller’s bedroom in the striated bands of the seashore—broad swaths of indigo, cobalt, and clear Caribbean blue. Keller stirs, then looks at me—I’m not used to waking up with another person, and I can feel him watching me.

  “Lena,” Keller says. He searches my face and combs his fingertips through my hair, smoothing it behind one ear. His eyes are dilated in the dimness. “That police report—it isn’t necessarily the truth, you know. Anything could have happened. You might’ve been kidnapped from your parents—they might’ve—”

  I close my eyes for a long moment, and then I say, “No more, I’m all done.” It’s like an old game that I’m finished with. I put my hands on either side of his face and kiss him.

  IT’S A THAW, a bit odd, really, for April in Syracuse. Still, there it is—full sunlight—so warm you can see the steam rising from fields of evaporating snow and everyone’s battered lawns emerging in marshy puddles.

  Everything seems to be vaporous as we walk up the flagstone to Pia and Henry’s house, so the world looks primordial and only half real, a place that could vanish in a puff. No one answers when I knock, then I remember something and lead Keller around the side of the house to the back.

  Pia is there, hanging out laundry to dry. I’d almost forgotten this: she always hated driers and the moment there was enough warmth in the air, she would pin the laundry up on the rope line that Henry had stretched from an eave of the house to a fork in their pear tree.

  I loved it when she did this—even when the weather was only in the sixties, like today, and it would take so long for everything to dry, we’d have to bring the clothes back inside again eventually, still a little damp. But when the sun was glowing and a little breeze stirred the air, I watched the white socks and T-shirts and panties flutter together on the line. There was something about that sight that made me feel like we were a family.

  I notice a pulse of warmth when we enter the yard: the light is clear and washed blue. It’s a bit like entering a snow globe, like seeing the colors of childhood restored. Pia looks at us over the clothesline, two wooden pins in her mouth, busily pinning the other edge of a white shirt to the line.

  The yard is transformed by the thaw. It’s been years since I’ve been back here—and now it seems to have filled with this sugar light, an entanglement of white butterflies or milkweed seeds, a bronze wasp clinging to the back-steps railing. Another spindly tree dips below the telephone wire; its branches look to be filled with curling green fruit. The air is dense and dripping; dreams cling to tree boughs and shimmer in a steam under the leaf canopy. This is where I grew up. I think, half in the world and half in what I seemed to see in the world. There are no milkweed seeds or curling green fruits growing in Syracuse in May, but I see them anyway and I know: Here is my rain forest.

  “Hello, Lena,” Pia says. Her voice is formal and arch, then she surprises me by adding, “Hello, Keller.” I hadn’t thought she’d remembered his name.

  “A clothesline!” Keller says. “Do people still use clotheslines?”

  “I do,” she says primly, then her voice softens. “I’ve always preferred a clothesline. Maybe Lena remembers that,” she says in her sly, sidelong way. She looks at me at a slant over the line. “Do you?”

  I want to say I’m not sure I know a single thing about her. Instead, I say, “Of course I remember.” Then I sit on the cold back step, tuck my arms around my knees, and say, “And what about you, Pia? What do you remember about me? Is it true, for example, that . . .” my voice falters a bit and rasps and then I manage to clear it and say, “that I was found in a garbage dumpster? My mother threw me away?”

  Keller looks at me sharply—we hadn’t discussed this conversation beforehand and I think we’re both taken aback by my bluntness. Pia doesn’t speak, but her fingers seem to fumble on the clothespins and when she finally does say something, her voice trembles: “I don’t know anything about that and neither do you. I am your mother, Lena. Whether you like it or not.”

  For a moment we’re quiet—the silence of our old standoffs and refusals. A harder breeze rises and everything in the yard stirs as if briefly, momentarily alive, then all settles in place.

  “And is it true,” I go on, feeling oddly implacable, “that the reason you didn’t legally adopt me is because you actually purchased me from Myrtle?”

  Pia is completely motionless. I gaze at her, waiting to hear her deny it. Almost hoping for it, wondering if I might even make myself believe her again. And perhaps it’s Keller’s presence, or the directness of the question, or possibly there’s something new in my own voice, but Pia lowers her head and says, “We were working with adoption agencies. We’d gotten on all the lists. I was prepared to wait. We only went to see Myrtle because a friend was adopting a baby through her. And you were there in your little crib. When I first saw you, I fell in love with you, Lena. It wasn’t anything . . . on purpose . . . it was almost chemical. I had the strongest feeling—oh, you’ll laugh at me.” She puts her hand on her throat. “I felt like you were the baby I was meant to give birth to. I felt that I was meant to be your mother. I didn’t care what it took or what I had to do. Maybe someday you’ll understand that. Maybe. If you ever have children of your own.”

  I shake my head, as obstinate as Pia has taught me to be. “But if that’s true,” I protest, “if you—if you really mean that, then why did you help me make up a false mother? Why let me believe I’d been raised by apes?”

  “Because I had to protect you, Lena,” she says, pieces of laundry bunched in her hands. “Because that’s what mothers do. Because ma
ybe if my mother had protected me better, then—then things would’ve gone differently. You were always asking questions, examining everything—you had to know the reason for everything. You wanted to know so much more than you needed to know. How could I let you know those things? You wouldn’t let me protect you. You wouldn’t even let me hold you.” Her voice falls off. “I had to protect you from the way you were, Lena. It was the only way I could see how to do it. Whether it was good or bad, I don’t know. But once I started it, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. I loved you and I wanted to make you safe.”

  It’s so astounding for me to hear her claim me like that, for a few moments all I can hear is the surf of my pulse, pounding in my ears.

  The moment is a bit like an exhalation—the light fades and whitens, the air grows cooler, the butterflies are absorbed back into the crusts of snow, the curling green fruits sink back into gray branches. Pia looks at me sternly once more, nods as if to say we’re finished, and goes back to pinning up laundry. Keller lifts the basket for her, and she looks at him with a sweetness and affection that I’ve never seen in her before. It’s like the breaking of an enchantment and the good, clean, cold relief of awakening. It’s very good to be awake.

  THERE’RE ALWAYS MORE questions, of course. And perhaps I should’ve been more insistent with those. Perhaps I should have pressed harder: Why the rain forest? Why create a mother to supplant herself—someone warmer, braver, wiser than herself? When I look at it in one light, such a decision seems eccentric, bordering on the cruel. But in another, broader, more buoyant light, I see it as an act of generosity: she helped me conjure up the mother that she couldn’t muster in herself—she gave me her most hopeful imaginings, and in that sense, she gave me the best thing she had.

  Keller and I went back to work. Keller has started visiting crime scenes again, and I am the new division leader for Trace Analysis: I’ve received a raise and a nicer desk. A private line. A window.

  Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror, at the lines and planes my face is just starting to settle into as I age, and I think: Do I look like them? Do I look like the people who tried to kill me?

  One day, Keller and I plan to meet for lunch at a restaurant that recently opened down the block from my old apartment building. I’m walking up the street—I still haven’t bought a car—when I turn the corner and smell an earthy, sulfurous rot. It’s a garbage dumpster—a massive green thing, battered, metal-ribbed, and as high as my neck—big enough for an adult to sleep in. It’s at the corner of James and State—I look at the number on the storefront it’s parked behind—1847. I look up the street and see the back of the St. James Apartments.

  There’s an ancient man sweeping the sidewalk in front of the neighboring storefront—an old drugstore with a faded sign that I’d swear I’d never laid eyes on before. He’s bent almost double to the sidewalk and his hands curl like wizened knobs to his broom. He’s wearing crisp black coveralls. I have to call out, “Excuse me, sir,” several times before he hears me, and then he straightens and stands by his broom as if at attention; he looks so old, as if all the colors have run out of his body, except for his eyes, which have a startling amber tint.

  But once I have his attention, he seems to hear quite well. He tells me in one breath that he and his brother have run their little drugstore on this block since 1949; they emigrated from Greece and have not been back since, not even for a visit.

  I steel myself then, for the oddness of my question, and ask if he remembers hearing anything about a baby being found, maybe thirty or so years ago, back there in that dumpster—that dumpster right over there?

  His eyes turn hooded, he turns his head at an angle, and says in a crackling old voice that his memory is tricky, and why would I want to know such a sad thing?

  “It’s something that—well, it happened to someone I know.”

  “Someone you know or just someone you read about somewhere?”

  I nod. “A friend. A very close friend. Actually, she only recently learned this about herself. That she’d been abandoned in this way.”

  He takes hold of his broom as if to steady himself. After a long pause, he says, “Well, yes. I might have heard something about such a thing. But it was so long ago.” He regards me under his guarded, soft lids. I can almost see the thoughts moving through the skin of his temples. “Some stories—sometimes—” he says carefully, “shouldn’t be told.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yes, the world is full of stories. They’re like those—oh, what are they called?” He rubs his thumb and forefinger together. “The lightning bugs.” He flitters his fingers in the air. “Winking and flashing—off, on.” He drops his hands then and says, “Some things it’s better not to look at them. Yes?”

  The police report said I was still in one piece when they found me—bruises, some frostbite, hypothermia, but no permanent injuries, just a small yellow blanket wrapped around me. A stuffed animal toy. So this was another sort of cradle, perhaps. A form of putting me away, trying to send me back to the place I came from.

  So eventually I nod to the man. He bows to me. I turn and walk up the street, which is clear and wide and sparkling with mica. And then I meet Keller and we eat lunch together. I have my life back again. I will tell him about seeing the dumpster soon. Just not quite yet.

  Sometimes I think about contacting Erin Cogan or Junie Wilson—it’s occurred to me lately that we are all a sort of family—the babies of that little orphanage—the Animal World. But then I think, maybe that’s enough—knowing we shared that start. That’s plenty for me.

  Later that week, Keller and I pull on coveralls and boots and go for a walk in Anderson Woods. This is the third time since Opal’s confession that we’ve taken this walk. We hike up the slope of the park; I feel an open, silvery horizon, a shale-blue span from rib to rib. The trees are full and fluid with a living sheen, and there’s a slim creek nearby, murmuring like a corridor of thoughts. Syracuse reveals its beauty in the early summer—after seasons of grit have passed, and the exhaust-blackened ridges of snow have melted. Finally, it’s warm enough to crack the window as we drive, warm enough to leave open the windows back home, so the place smells sweet when we return from work in the evening.

  Among the leavings of students and picnickers and the homeless, at the top of the hill—at just about the spot I remember Mr. Memdouah stopping—we search for boxes with red baby blankets inside. We look in the weeds, the running creek water. We put on gloves and search through the Styrofoam containers, paper cups, plastic bags, and all the other detritus caught in the banks of the river. We never do find the missing blankets.

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I used to lose track of the transition from winter to spring. It seemed to me that one day there would be piles of snow and the next would be all green. Often, during a long winter, I rushed to the window in the morning hoping that the earth had transformed from its white panes of ice back to the sweet green world.

  But more often than that, whenever I’d wake in the night, strangely sleepless for a child, I would check to make sure the snow was still there, that the earth hadn’t changed while I slept. Just as I imagine a child living at the edge of the sea might rise and stand at her door and gaze out at the black waves and distant white foam and think, Yes it’s still there. It hasn’t left us in the night.

  You at the side of the sea, in the rain forest, in the warm and tropical places, might assume that we who live in the northern places have less of an appreciation of or appetite for the sultry beauty and perfumes of the earth. But it isn’t true—for me, it isn’t true. Can anyone deny that we live in a garden? Even now, though I work in an office and spend my life in furnished rooms, the ape mother still visits me. She is still my comfort. She runs her fingers through my hair, above us the circling twirl of transparent butterflies, the lazy, long-legged drift of a blue-dotted wasp. Sun-yellow birds and wide
-toed lizards come to converse with us. The days are filled with their sweet chattering: all day and all night are filled with their languages, reminding us of who we are and where we came from.

  ORIGIN

  Diana Abu-Jaber

  AN INTERVIEW WITH DIANA ABU-JABER

  Why did you decide to switch genres and write a “thriller”?

  It was an idea I’d been playing with for a long time. I love mainstream literary fiction and will always consider that my genre, but I’ve also had a lifelong fascination with other genres, like horror, science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers. I never completely outgrew my love of fairy tales, and it seems that wisps of magic often find their way into my work. Even in Origin, it seemed I couldn’t resist my penchant for the magical, which works its way into the mystery of the main character’s identity.

  With Origin I wanted to try something completely different from my earlier books. I think writers need to keep challenging themselves in some way so that they don’t end up writing the same story over and over. And I think it’s just a natural progression for many writers—you get restless with certain subjects and themes and want to strike out for new territory.

  But then there’s the simple fact that I woke up one day feeling haunted by the idea of a woman who’s so physically astute that she has an animal-like sense of smell, an ability to follow tracks and see in the dark. It seemed that the natural sort of occupation for someone like that would be police work, forensics; and so the thriller format was dictated by the character.

  In contrast to your other books, the prose in Origin is much more pared down. Why is that?