The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  She went into Lainey’s room. She saw her friend, white bandage on her forearm to match the one on her daughter’s cheek. She looked at Lainey and took her in her arms.

  “We have to keep you,” Ji Sun said. “You can’t scare us like this. You can’t leave us!”

  Ji Sun lifted her friend’s arm, its long bandage in that same place it would be if she had tried to kill herself.

  “I would never. You know that. I never would. Elizabeth!”

  “Yes, Elizabeth,” Ji Sun said. “But us, too. We need you, too.” She looked at Adam, who kept his eyes on Lainey. “We need you, too! Promise me.” She took her friend by the unbit arm, so they held both hands now, and faced one another. “Promise me!”

  “I promise, I promise,” Lainey said. She didn’t blink. She believed it.

  “It wasn’t—I told Adam, I wasn’t trying to harm—to kill myself.” Lainey whispered the last part, looked to the door. “I’m not a danger to myself. I’m not a danger!” She went and sat on the bed, so like a young girl in her loose T-shirt, her lank hair. “I just, I needed to know what pain I caused. I had to know what it felt like. I had to.”

  Ji Sun nodded, looked to Adam, who seemed now like he could be pulled apart by a single loose thread.

  “I can’t stay here,” she said, and though she had just promised them she was no danger, it was impossible not to hear some threat in her voice, her bit arm cradled, its bandage in that telltale place.

  “Will they, will they let you leave, though?” Ji Sun asked. “Isn’t there some law, if you, if you are a danger to yourself? Seen as a danger to yourself.”

  “But I’m not a danger,” Lainey said again, a sort of fever lost somewhere behind her voice, like she was trying to raise it but couldn’t. Ji Sun looked at her again, realized she must have been given a tranquilizer at some point.

  “When did you, when did this happen?”

  “Last night,” she said. “They called you.” Lainey looked at Adam with what might have been an accusation, but was tempered by whatever she’d taken.

  “I’m fine,” Lainey said again. “I barely managed much.” She began to remove the bandage, held her arm up for Ji Sun to see.

  “I don’t, that’s—” Ji Sun looked away, and then back at the bite. She thought of how badly she’d wanted to see Elizabeth’s cheek, how ghastly it was, that need to see the damage that was hidden from view, and how shameful it was to recoil from that same offering now, when being asked to look at it.

  She took a deep breath and went to sit beside Lainey on the bed, take her arm again, look directly at what her friend had done. There were two red crescents, not quite meeting, dark Morse code lines of her teeth, like cave paintings, alien messages, hieroglyphs. What was Lainey trying to say? How could they show her that they wanted to hear?

  “See?” Lainey said, her voice still with that slight syrup of sedation, but her eyes clear, looking into Ji Sun’s. “It’s not so bad.”

  “You’re right,” Ji Sun said, and met her friend’s steady gaze. “It isn’t as bad as I thought.”

  Chapter 49

  Back in Brooklyn, Adam and Lainey sat in their living room with both sets of their parents. They’d been home for three days, having checked Lainey out the same afternoon that they came to find she’d bit herself. Lainey’s parents had a visit scheduled, and Adam had decided to invite his own so they could talk about what happened, not have to go through it twice. They’d said on the phone that there had been an accident and that everyone was fine, but rattled, and it would be better to speak in person, that they could use the support. Now, Elizabeth was asleep in her crib, the time for the meeting chosen for when she would be, and Lainey arranged on a ceramic tray shortbread in flavors that she had previously accused of personally gentrifying the neighborhood: lemon lavender, burnt brown sugar, cardamom and bergamot. She tried to call up the ready rage she’d had for the bakery since it opened, its repurposed subway tile, its six-dollar frothy drinks, but she felt instead a wish that the butter and sugar would do some witchcraft, that this pretty pyramid of sweets would distract her parents, keep them from looking for something amiss in her face.

  Lainey and Adam were sticking with the dog story, which they hadn’t embellished beyond that it happened in a nearby park, early morning, when few other people were there. They didn’t talk about what it meant to spend more time guarding the truth than trying to figure out how Lainey would deal with it. They would add that Lainey had been bit, too, and she still wore a bandage, but had put on a light long-sleeve tunic, even in the heat, so her parents wouldn’t ask about it right away. Lainey and Adam operated under the shared belief that too much detail gave a lie away, but from whom had they received this wisdom?

  Their parents made a valiant effort at small talk, finding a point of entry around their shared disappointment in Obama, who by now they had to accept would not save the world entire. Lainey’s parents seemed frustrated for milder versions of the reasons Lainey herself was, that he was more centrist than they’d dreamed, that now, in his second term, his caution would be further hamstrung by a Republican Senate. Why hadn’t he done more before? What was he waiting for? Adam’s parents’ complaints sounded patronizing to Lainey, as though Obama was their child, and he had let them down personally.

  Lainey looked at her mother next to Adam’s. They were the same age, but her mother let her grays show, and had a face full of lines that she said showed how well she’d lived, how much she’d laughed, but also, Lainey thought, how deeply she worried. How many of those lines had Lainey made, she wondered now. Adam’s mother’s face had been smoothed stiff by Botox, and she had a paper-doll quality that made her fit in anywhere, chic bob and expensive flats, trade a blazer for sweater or shift, depending on the day. Lainey felt a pang at the way her own mother always dressed up a bit when she came to the city, how she swapped out the leather cord on her reading glasses for a beaded chain, smeared deep magenta lipstick on her thin lips. She worked as an academic research librarian, but had always dressed more like the art teachers in picture books, lots of prints, hair in wild coils, funky jewelry, statement scarves. There was a wide, wet quality to her dark eyes, a way of infrequent, purposeful blinking that she shared with Elizabeth. Lainey wanted to ask her sister, Rachel, whether there was anything in genetics that could account for such a thing, a trait being passed down not by DNA, but in the air, out of love.

  When Lainey was four and Rachel was eight, Rachel burned her hands in the bathroom of a diner in the Catskills. The girls had crammed along with their mother into the tiny storage-closet-cum-bathroom, where their mother was helping Lainey on the toilet. She’d perched her handbag on the small sink, and the weight shifted the handle, made the water steam.

  “Why would the water even get that hot!” their father said as they sped to the emergency room, their mother weeping as Rachel wailed.

  Lainey remembered the drive as the first time she’d seen her mother express this kind of agony. Her sister’s cries were as familiar to her as her own, and she’d heard both her parents shout, even seen her father cry while looking at old photographs and listening to Graceland.

  Lainey felt guilty because their mother had only placed her handbag on the sink to better help her on the toilet, Lainey’s enduring problem being her need to poop but desire not to; she joked sometimes that she’d needed her mother’s help with this through college.

  Her mother had been in a low squat, coaxing Lainey, tucking her hair behind her ears, reminding her of the relief she’d feel once she just let the poop go. Let it go, just let it go, her mother said, in this practiced poop-strain-specific rhythm that Lainey could still call up. Lainey still remembered how she sweat with exertion, and how the bathroom stank already of recent shits, likely taken with greater ease.

  This attempt to poop in public would have blended in with so many others if not for the burn, how Rachel screamed and their
mother lifted Lainey from the toilet, pulled her underwear and pants up in one swoop, before Lainey had finished, carried both girls from the diner and into the car as their father collected their coats and raced to catch up. It was hours later, home from the hospital, Rachel asleep in their shared room, that Lainey realized she’d pooped her pants. She found the small, dried disc of poop in her underwear and took it to the bathroom, thinking she would rinse it off herself. But she had the sudden fear that the sink would burn her as it had her sister, so she shoved the underwear into the garbage instead, scrubbed her little butt with a washcloth that she hung back up on the bar beside the sink.

  Rachel came to blame Lainey as much as her mother for the burn, during those weeks when it wasn’t easy for her to draw, then her favorite activity. And the story served as shorthand for their family dynamics later, with Lainey telling it as a story of how deeply her mother felt Rachel’s pain, how she’d wept in the hospital room, cursed herself even when the girls were within earshot. For Rachel, it was a story about their mother being scatterbrained, and while not inattentive, crucially more focused on her younger daughter, the one who was somehow both wilder and easier to love.

  Lainey thought of how her mother had had to test the water first, every time, for years, and how the one time she hadn’t, her daughter had screamed as if skinned.

  She felt as though what happened with Elizabeth was like a faucet nudged too far, from too hot but bearable to scalding, irreparable, how that imperceptible push had happened in her teeth and harmed her most beloved baby beyond measure. How her mother could maybe understand the pain Lainey felt, having made a mistake, an oversight. If she could explain it to her mother in this way, she thought, there was a chance she might understand.

  But she never would; she couldn’t. Lainey couldn’t risk having her mother look at her the way her friends did now, with this blend of fear and worry and rebuke—not like Lainey had a sickness, but like she was one.

  The more people she could keep from seeing her like that, the better. They might watch the way she looked at Elizabeth and see only devotion there, no creeping edge of obsession or intoxication, nothing curdled or chemical or offensive in its too-muchness, no besotted poison, no freak vampire-mother out for blood.

  When Adam said that a dog had bitten Elizabeth, Lainey swore she could see a flash of doubt cross her mother’s face. She remembered a moment, not so much a fight as a disagreement, but worse in the way its aftereffects lingered, when Lainey wouldn’t let her mother take Elizabeth in the other room during the first visit, six days after Elizabeth was born. Her mother stopped short of being indignant, but made clear that she was not just hurt, but also insulted.

  “I just, I don’t want her to be in another room right now,” Lainey said. “I need to be able to see her. It has nothing to do with you!” She wanted to shout again, It has nothing to do with you! but her mother looked so wounded that instead Lainey just took Elizabeth back in her arms and nursed her by way of further explanation.

  It was months before she wanted Elizabeth in another room. Lainey hadn’t even slept during the first three days of Elizabeth’s life. On the fourth, she did, while Elizabeth slept on her chest. She woke to Adam’s kiss and soft applause, but couldn’t explain to him, more exhausted than she was, that she didn’t need sleep. How electrified her body had been, those first days, attuned in every way to her new daughter, newly aware not just, as everyone rightly said, of how tender and new her baby was, nor even how tremendous the world’s threats and cruelties, but more by the need to notice every moment, more by the knowledge of how babies died in the night for no other reason than that first missed breath.

  “How could you—how did a dog even get this close to Elizabeth? Where were you? When did this happen? My God!” Her father’s eyes were wide behind his glasses, he looked around the room as though for confirmation of what he’d heard.

  “Are you suing the owners?” Adam’s father asked. “Of course the dog has been put down!”

  “Yes, the dog was taken by animal control. To be put down,” Adam said. He glanced down at the baby monitor, so he wouldn’t have to look at them while he lied.

  “It’s still alive? It’s still out there!?” Adam’s mother asked, as though the dog might be just outside the door, scritch-scratching, baring its teeth to bite all their fattened faces.

  “I don’t—they didn’t give us an exact hour, Mom,” Adam said. “It’s probably dead.”

  They had been fools not to anticipate the level of detail Elizabeth’s grandparents would require.

  “Oh, that poor, poor baby! Poor little love.” Lainey’s mother had begun to cry as soon as they’d told her what happened, and she’d let her husband take her in his arms.

  “She’s healing well. It happened last week.” Adam kept his eyes down, on the monitor, which Lainey saw her mother look to now, too, as though it might hold some answers.

  “Last week!” Lainey’s mother let out a wail. “How could you wait to tell us?”

  “What about infection? I’ve heard that infections are a serious danger with dog bites.” Lainey’s father still held his wife, but kept looking around, as though waiting for the real adult in the room to arrive. “What did they say at the hospital, about how to prevent that?”

  “We didn’t, we didn’t go to the hospital,” Adam said. They’d decided to be forthright on this front, thought that to hew closer to the truth might make it less difficult to reconcile later.

  “We didn’t want to trigger anything, with an overzealous doctor or nurse,” Adam said.

  “Trigger anything?” his mother asked.

  “With child protective services. Lainey was—”

  “I was worried,” Lainey cut Adam off. “That they would blame me. For letting a dog get so close. I do blame myself. It was my fault.”

  “Darling, you can’t blame yourself!” her father said. Her parents had loosed their embrace, but stayed holding hands. Lainey looked at Adam’s hands. One held the monitor, the other his phone.

  Lainey’s mother wiped her eyes, and she rose from her seat to come sit beside Lainey on the couch.

  “I didn’t want, I don’t know—an investigation? Alice saw her. She said it’s largely superficial.” The word superficial stuck in her throat like a ball of warm wax. She could feel herself gag on it, tried to cough it loose.

  “Honey, honey, are you okay? Oh, Lainey, love, it’s okay! It isn’t your fault, dear.” Her mother held her, and Lainey tried to turn her coughs to softer, more acceptable cries, but she couldn’t, kept coughing as her mother rubbed her back. She couldn’t have her mother see how early she had shown her own daughter the very pain it was her one job to protect her from. It was still so new, to be able to cause harm in both directions like this, to disappoint as a daughter, but as a daughter who was a mother herself now, too. She could sense that her mother would find some way to blame herself for what Lainey had done, and that, too, she would protect her mother from for as long as she lived.

  “This has been really stressful, obviously,” Adam said. “We’re glad you could all come in, but we need to rest, too.” He stood up. “You can see her tomorrow,” he added, before they could ask.

  Adam’s mother abruptly began to weep.

  “Mom, why are you crying?” Adam’s family was not demonstrative in this way, and this sudden display brought a look of fear to Adam’s face that he had mostly managed to keep from Lainey throughout this ordeal.

  “Oh, I’m sorry! Just thinking of her, thinking of her sweet little cheek. If she’ll have a scar. It doesn’t matter!”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said, and Lainey could see frustration edge out his fear. His mother was invested in appearances, sent fussy, starchy little ensembles, offered to pay and decorate the tiny nursery when they’d showed her the plants and paintings they had chosen with such care.

  “No, no, I know. It’s j
ust—you understand! It’s not the scar itself, it’s just . . .” She waved her hand.

  “It’s the world touching her,” Lainey said. “I understand.” If any of them ever tried to take Elizabeth from her, she would rip the limbs from their bodies with her now fearsome teeth. She knew she had done wrong, but she would not forsake the chance to make up for it, for and with the rest of her life.

  Once they were gone, Adam sunk back on the couch. He poured the rest of a bottle of red into his water glass and drank it.

  “Adam, Adam, I am so sorry. Will you ever. Can you ever forgive me?” She sat beside him, further apart than they’d been when their parents were there, but facing him now, asking him to look at her.

  He didn’t answer. He clung to his monitor, fused by now to his palm. He kissed her lightly and leaned back to observe her horrible mouth, the first he’d touched it since she had done what she had done.

  “I’m going to bed,” he said. “You should sleep. We have to see them all again in the morning.”

  The way he said we, the team of it, she clung to this even as they went to sleep in their separate rooms now, Adam in their bed, alone, and Lainey on the floor of Elizabeth’s nursery, like the dog that hadn’t been put down.

  Chapter 50

  Four days later, Alice arrived at Lainey and Adam’s to check the healing of Elizabeth’s wound. Ji Sun and Margaret had come along, too, as they hadn’t seen Lainey since the drive back from the facility upstate. They might have tried to space out their visits, so as not to overwhelm Lainey, but each had her own reasons for not wanting to be without the others.

  Ji Sun didn’t want to be alone with Adam and Lainey, though more for concern that Adam would feel guilty than that Ji Sun would. The day they drove back to the motel together, having found Lainey alive, all desire for him left Ji Sun’s body. Just like that. She felt it evaporate from her skin, mix with the dried sweat there, all that drained adrenaline from fearing for Lainey’s life, and the mist of it came off her like steam. She rolled down the window and it was sucked out, a small cloud of vacated desire whipped up into the sky with the rest. The thought of her hands, grabbing, grabbing, and his hands, grabbing, grabbing, made her feel ill. Imagining his breath on her body made her neck hurt. Her head ached. She asked him to pull over, and they fought in a field on the side of the road, near the bar where she’d gone for provisions that first night. They agreed they could never tell Lainey, not ever but especially not now, that there was no excuse for what they’d done, and that they wouldn’t ask her for one. Then he went on making his excuses anyway.