“He’s dead, Annie. He’ll never hurt you again. Not you or anyone else. He didn’t kill you back then. You fought and won.” I like his words; I try to let them in and become my truth. Pathological liar or not, he has a kind of horse sense that always calms me.
“Don’t turn your life over to him now,” he goes on. “You’re hurting yourself and Victory—and that husband of yours. Move on, kid.”
These are my little rituals, the things I do and need to hear to comfort myself. In the past couple of years, knowing what I know, it has taken only one or two of these things to calm me, to assure myself that it is safe to live my life. But this time nothing’s working; I don’t know why. I feel like I’m seeing these signs that no one else is seeing: the dog running in circles because some vibration in the ground has told him that an earthquake is coming, a hundred crows landing on the lawn. I tell myself it’s not real, that it’s all in my head. Of course, there’s no worse place for it to be. Maybe I do need to talk to the doctor.
Esperanza, our maid and nanny, is unloading the dishwasher, putting the plates and bowls and silverware away with her usual quick and quiet efficiency. She’s got the television on, and again there’s that image of the now-dead woman on the screen. It’s as though nothing else is ever on the news. I find myself staring at the victim, her limp hair, her straining collarbone and tired eyes. Something about her expression in that image, maybe an old school portrait, makes her look as though she knew she was going to die badly, that her mutilated body would be found submerged in water. There’s a look of grim hopelessness about her.
“Terrible, no?” said Esperanza, when she sees me watching. She taps her temple. “People are sick.”
I nod. “Terrible,” I agree. I pull my eyes away from the screen with effort and leave the kitchen; as I climb the stairs, I hear Esperanza humming to herself.
Upstairs, Victory’s happily playing in her room. She’ll go on like this for a while before she needs some company or attention from me. For now she’s rapt in the world she’s created with her dolls, Claude and Isabel. Her babies, as she calls them.
In my bedroom I can hear her whispering to them on the baby monitor I still keep in her bedroom. The sound of her breathing at night is my sweet lullaby. I wonder when she’ll make me take it out of her room. How old will she be when she doesn’t want me to hear her every breath any longer? Mom, she’ll say, get a life.
When I was sixteen, my mother moved us from government housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to a trailer park in Florida so that she could be closer to a man with whom she’d become involved. They’d been having a white-hot correspondence for a number of months, involving thick letters written in red ink and the occasional collect telephone call where my mother cooed into the phone, holding the receiver to her mouth so intimately that I’d half expected her to start sucking on it. After some tearful proclamations and heartfelt promises between them, my mother and I packed our few belongings into the back of a brown Chevy Citation we bought for seven hundred dollars and headed south to begin our new life.
“We can live much better in Florida,” my mother told me with certainty. “Our money will go a lot farther. And it’s so pretty there.”
I watched the Lower East Side pass outside the car window and wondered how anything could be more beautiful than New York City. Sure, it can be cold and dangerous—a frightening place, a lonely one for all its crowds. But the grand architecture, the street noise, the energy of millions of people living their lives—you can never mistake yourself as being anywhere else when you’re there; there’s no mistaking that heartbeat. It’s unique in all the world. If one considers the great beauties in history—Cleopatra, the Mona Lisa, Ava Gardner—none of them were pretty in that cheap, cookie-cutter way that seems to pass for gorgeous these days. They were beautiful for what was unique about them from the inside out, for features that might have been ugly on anyone else. If you don’t know how