“She’s her mother!” Ji Sun said.
“Mothers have done worse,” Margaret said, voice steady, eyes now dry.
* * *
• • •
The institution was on a low hill, ringed by pine trees and blooming bushes of hydrangeas. It looked more like someone’s generically impressive McMansion country house than any kind of treatment facility.
Margaret pulled into a spot farthest from any other cars, under a lamp in the style of an old-timey streetlight. They had a clear view of the entrance, but no one moved.
“Here we are,” Margaret said, a singsong quality to her voice that she ducked her head to dismiss.
The tears on Lainey’s cheeks were Lucite lines, unbroken. Ji Sun realized, in the silence, that she had expected Lainey to fight, to rage, to demand that they turn around and take her home. They had agreed together on a voluntary psychiatric hold, Alice’s friend having assured Adam that any place that charged so much would let you leave whenever you liked.
“Oh. Oh, God,” Lainey said, so quietly they couldn’t be sure of the words.
Of course, everyone knew, they could commit her. But none wanted it to come to that, none would risk it. They wanted so badly not to watch her go inside at all, to be able to pretend that this never happened, proceed to live in a world unbroken by this perforation, free from even the idea that this could occur. Adam had told Ji Sun that keeping Lainey and Elizabeth in separate rooms had been the worst part, that the baby seemed in more pain to be away from her mother than from the bite. He hadn’t agreed to let them stay together until after Alice came over, told him to, and until then the only calm in their shared squalls was when Lainey came to nurse Elizabeth, her quiet shushes, Elizabeth’s grunts and coos, and sometimes the swallowed sobs as Lainey positioned Elizabeth so that her bandage wouldn’t meet any friction.
“I need to nurse her again,” Lainey said, her face half lit by the lamp. “Give us a moment.” Elizabeth was still quiet, but had begun to stir.
Once, on the drive, Adam had awakened, still sleepy, and said of Elizabeth, “Wow, still sleeping, huh? Guess we should drive around in the city more.” In the mirror, Ji Sun could see him come out of his dream, remember. Before her eyes, the way his eyes changed.
Ji Sun and Margaret exchanged a look now. They must have shared the vision of Lainey slamming the power locks, diving into the driver’s seat, burning rubber as she blazed away from them, sooner initiating an interstate car chase than sleep in a different building than her baby. Margaret removed the key from the ignition gently, placed it in her pocket.
“After that, we’re going to go in,” Adam said, so worried that he looked like a little boy, like Lainey’s son, more fearful of his mother’s silence than of her familiar ferocity, her fight.
Lainey made a nod so slight it was only perceptible in that the course of tears down her face changed, less cage and more cascade, wet drops into her lap, Elizabeth now babbling and awake.
The plan was to tell the doctors that a dog had bit their baby, and Lainey had had a nervous breakdown. They feared for her wellness, worried that she might unravel, wanted to have her talk to professionals, see how she might deal with whatever dark visions had visited her in the wake of this terrible accident, for which she blamed herself.
How could they find out what she needed through this lie? It was the best they could do. What choice did they have?
Adam went in pulling Lainey’s small suitcase and returned carrying Elizabeth in one arm and her car seat in the other, like a new father leaving the hospital, disbelief on his face that he could be tasked with the care of a new human in this way. Good luck, man, try not to fuck it up.
He looked like an ordinary man, in his khakis and windbreaker, leaving a house that he might have owned, but as he grew closer they saw his countenance was that of a man escaping a burning building, shocked to have made it out alive, not even sure yet of what he’d left inside, what he’d lost.
Chapter 46
Back at the motel, Ji Sun left Adam, Margaret, and Elizabeth in the adjoining rooms they’d decided would be Adam’s and Margaret’s, connected by a door. Ji Sun took the third room, a few doors down, the path between littered with cigarette butts and pine needles. She unzipped her bag on the bed but felt too restless to unpack or sleep, decided instead to walk to the dive bar they’d seen on their drive. So much time in the air-conditioned car had tricked her into thinking it was cool, but the air was humid and heavy, the swamp heat of summer, and she stripped down to her linen tank. The bar was less than a mile away, but on a country road with no sidewalk, it felt endless, and she was covered in sweat by the time she arrived.
The kitchen was closed, but after Ji Sun took every bag of chips and pretzels from the wall display and piled them on the bar, the bartender agreed to go in back and see what he might rustle up. Ji Sun’s lip still hurt too much to eat anything so salty, but she had the urge to be of use, superfluous as she’d felt watching Adam and Margaret try to set up a space for Elizabeth, passing the baby back and forth between one another, singing to her and distracting her, like parents on an ill-fated getaway, Ji Sun the awkward adolescent stepdaughter.
She drank a shot of whiskey and bought the bottle along with four glasses, so as not to have to drink from the plastic mouthwash cups back in the room. The bartender regarded her with less misgiving than she’d expected, though Ji Sun supposed with the bar’s proximity to a place like the one where they’d left Lainey, people had come in looking more desperate than she did now.
On her walk back, loaded down with food, the first few fat raindrops started to fall, and she waited for the relief of a breeze. But it stayed hot, felt still hotter with the raindrops on her skin, the same temperature as the air, mixing with sweat and leaving her coated with damp and dirt. She needed to shower, but she went to Margaret’s door first.
Elizabeth was asleep on Margaret’s chest, and Margaret looked close to sleep as well. It was strange to see her, eyes lidded, looking beatific in this run-down room, given everything that had brought them there. But everything felt strange like this now, nudged one over from real life, both hyperreal and fake as a sound stage. Adam sat at the small table near the window, fiddling with the monitor whose camera component he’d propped up on the dresser, aimed toward the bed where Margaret and Elizabeth rested together.
“I guess I’ll just sleep there?” He pointed at the bed next to the one where his daughter slept in the arms of someone else’s mother.
“Can you eat something?” Ji Sun asked, pointing a slice of soft, cold, bar pizza in Margaret’s direction.
Margaret shook her head, put one shush finger up to her lips. Her other hand stayed rested on the dark crown of Elizabeth’s hair.
“What about a drink?” Ji Sun whispered, and Adam accepted, took a bag of pretzels from the pile.
“Let’s go next door,” Adam whispered. “I need to eat something so I don’t die. But I don’t want to wake her. Them.”
Margaret’s eyes were closed now, too, and with nothing amiss in this space, Ji Sun followed Adam to the other side.
In his room, the mirror of Margaret’s, Adam placed the monitor carefully on the table, and then flung himself back on the bed. He kicked off his shoes and sat up, dumped pretzels into his mouth and chomped, coughed dry salt and slugged the drink Ji Sun had poured him, sat back on the edge of the bed before he got up and embraced her, all so quickly that Ji Sun had barely figured out where she should sit.
“Thank you for getting this food,” he said, his breath hot and yeasty. “Thank you for being here.” He looked at her, held out his glass. “Jesus. Fuck. Pour me another?”
“Should you . . . can you sleep?” She poured a glass for each of them and pulled a chair from the table close to the bed, where he sat.
“I’m so wired. I slept in the car. Now I’m just, I’m so wired, I can’t, I have all thi
s nervous energy.” He looked down at his drink. “What is going to happen? What are we going to do?”
“What happened?” Ji Sun asked. When would she learn? Would they ever know? She could not understand.
He knew what she was asking.
“I came home to cries,” he said. “Different sounds than what was typical. I don’t know, higher pitched. Wails. I can’t think of the animal. I still don’t know if it was Elizabeth making them, or Lainey.” He drank the rest of his whiskey, stood up, and began to pace, as though he couldn’t sit still with this story.
“There was blood on her face. On her lips and her cheeks and her chin. Like, Jesus, like barbecue sauce. I thought it was barbecue sauce, my brain couldn’t register a reason that her face would be bloody like that. When I realized it was blood my first thought was that she’d lost a tooth somehow, that someone had, I don’t know, pulled it with pliers from her jaw,” Adam said.
“What? Jesus.” Ji Sun drank her whiskey, put her hand to her jaw. There was a crack of lightning and the room lit up. Adam went to look at the monitor, placed it back, and resumed his pacing.
“I know. Too many torture scenes on TV. I don’t know; I knew something was so wrong that my brain was maybe looking for other ideas. And when I saw the blood on Elizabeth—”
Here he paused for a moment and stared past her. Ji Sun wanted him to put his head in his hands, look down, be overcome in a way that she would not have to acknowledge. But he did not. He shook his head with his eyes open. He looked at her again.
“When I saw Elizabeth, when I realized, I wished Lainey’s tooth had been pulled from her jaw.”
Ji Sun wasn’t sure if Adam meant instead of what had happened or as a punishment for it. He made a slight gasping sound and began to cry. She had never felt the disproportionate sympathy for a man in tears, in part because she rarely cried herself. She didn’t think tears were a show of weakness, but nor did she think they were a sure indication of how a person felt. Her roommates cried with relief, with joy, when stressed, when gutted, when exhausted. Everyone seemed to have been crying nonstop since Adam first called them to the apartment, but she knew they hadn’t been, it was more that they were in that post-sob state, eyes puffy and bleary, faces drawn, noses red and raw.
She wanted to give him comfort. Where should she put her hand, though. If she put it on his thigh he would know what she was offering, and he would take it. And she would have finally confirmed something about him, trapped him in the lie of what they all believed to be his inherent decency, never more so than now, as he assumed this role of father rescuer, tasked with saving his baby daughter and his wayward wife both.
She didn’t want to feel desire like this, in the midst of this. She could blame the rain, so loud on the roof now that Ji Sun looked at the monitor, too, lifted the screen to see them sleeping, Elizabeth on Margaret’s chest, her bandage black in the night-vision mode, a square hole on her skin, ghostly gray-blue in the invert color scheme, the soft sound from the small machine of the device almost a purring.
She thought of how the baby must have been giggling, how easy it was to be playful and then go too far. A tickle to a kick. Arms swing out and then push hard. Hands rub, caress, then yank, shove. What did shock even look like on a face so small?
Ji Sun’s sister had told her that babies didn’t feel pain in specific sites on their bodies, just a diffuse sense of discomfort that quickly passed. Ji Sun accepted this, in part because Ji Eun needed her affirmation, having elected cosmetic otoplasty to pin back her newborn daughter’s ears. But she couldn’t move past the idea of Elizabeth’s little face: terrified, mournful, stunned, confused. What expression would the baby make when next she woke, saw that her mother was not there?
She stood and put the monitor back on the table. Sometimes, when something broke, you rushed to clean it up, piece it back together with care. Other times, you threw your hands up, smashed everything else in the room.
Her window was closing. The lightning cracked again, and Adam refilled his glass. The crazed way people behaved when so near to grief would recede some in the morning, as they figured out how to function in this revised version of the world. She had to touch him now.
She saw her hand on his chin before realizing she’d lifted it. Her cherished rings, raw stones bound in platinum—Lainey called them the brass knuckles a sea witch would wear. Ji Sun wanted them gone, to feel her hand naked against his face.
But he didn’t move her hand toward his lips as he had done in her imagining of this moment. He put his own hand over hers, tucked his face into her hand like a child seeking comfort, like some kind of shared prayer. Should she stick her fingers in his mouth? Was there another way to communicate what she was offering, and how he had to accept today? It was still dangerous, and awful, but safer than it would ever be again, anything they did for a few days or hours longer at least could be forgiven as part of this terrible time when they were all out of their minds, standing next to their own bodies.
So she moved closer to him. She crossed another line, and pressed her body against his and kissed him. He kissed her back, and the kissing at the beginning was even better than she imagined because it still existed on another plane, and as long as they kissed, they stayed lifted in the air like this, suspended.
But then their hands became involved, his on her ass, hers on his, both of them forcing their bodies together at the center, needing to fuse together there, collapse all space between their selves. The way they grabbed at each other, their desperation—this was worse in their memory than what followed.
They didn’t fall into bed together—nothing about their actions was accidental like that, it was ordained, like the storm outside, inevitable as weather.
Ji Sun would remember later how, before he pulled her onto the bed, he glanced at the monitor. This made her feel both better and worse, this glance, that he was a person who would check to make sure his baby daughter was sleeping before he slept with one of her mother’s best friends, and that he was a person who would look at this video of his just-bit daughter, asleep in the next room, and still fuck one of his best friends. That he looked confirmed for Ji Sun that they were in the world, not outside of it, as it felt in the rain and the glow, the strung beads of neon light in the streams of rain on the window, the haze of their exhaustion, and the heat of her body, having waited so long for this.
Her lip stung from where she’d bitten it, but when they kissed the hurt was gone, replaced by a different pain, at how good it felt, how good they were at kissing like this, how many years they’d wasted not kissing like this. If they could just stay kissing like this—
But soon they were taking one another’s clothes off, and Ji Sun wouldn’t stop him, she wouldn’t stop herself, but she did say, like a line she’d rehearsed, “We shouldn’t,” his face already buried in her neck, one hand on her face, the other between her legs. “We shouldn’t,” she said again.
“I need to,” he said, and “I need to,” again, or maybe “I need you,” she couldn’t tell, it sounded like a growl, and his face was lower now, at her breasts.
They were both drunk but they looked at each other then, eyes whiskey wet, and saw one another clearly, knew what they were doing, had done already.
She came right away, while he watched her, worked at her with his fingers. More than a decade of desire for him, she would have thought it would be the orgasm to end all orgasms, but she felt even in the flood and fever of warmth a kind of urgent need, that upward pull, into the body, even in ecstasy she was asking for more more more right away now more please and he obliged, put his penis inside her. He was so hard, she said, and she was so wet, disgust and arousal at even the familiarity of these borrowed lines, this seedy motel, following some script that she didn’t remember learning, surprised even to know words, animal as she felt with him, two wolves wound together, tearing the other apart, so that when she came again, the
nightmare of it, they shuddered together, a shudder as ugly as it was exhilarating, a shudder that filled the room. And just like that, he unsealed their bodies, leaped off of her without a word, grabbed the monitor, ran into the bathroom. She found her clothes and as she put them on, she heard a soft cry from the adjoining room. She fled as though burned, before the bathroom door could open, before they would be forced to face one another.
Chapter 47
The second morning Lainey woke up in the institution, the pain in her breasts was her first feeling, before the pain of remembering what she had done. She could not remember having bitten, only the love she felt when she kissed and nibbled Elizabeth’s cheek, only the shock of Adam arriving home and yanking Elizabeth from her arms, screaming words at her that she couldn’t understand, that she didn’t believe could apply to her.
She had pumped three times in the night, but she woke, engorged and outraged, the pain in her breasts growing as she waited for Adam to bring Elizabeth, as he had done the previous morning, and promised to do again today, as soon as visiting hours began.
Not allowed a phone in her room, Lainey was forced to remember what waiting had felt like in the days before cell phones, how with each moment your fears and irritations grew in tandem, until by the time the awaited party arrived, you were as relieved that they were alive as you were angry that they weren’t unconscious on the side of the road somewhere.
When Adam and Elizabeth arrived, led by an orderly who Lainey felt regarded her with undisguised disdain, Lainey didn’t even hear the excuses Adam made, so filled with relief at the sight of her daughter’s face, at how, when Elizabeth saw her, she began to bounce in Adam’s arms, she laughed. Lainey wondered if she would be relieved like this for the rest of her life, every single time her daughter looked at her without fear.
The pleasure she felt holding Elizabeth—her familiar weight, her warm head, her bright babbles, and her fat fingers grabbing Lainey’s hair—it was enough to make her forget where she was.
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