her arms.
* * *
A few hours later, preparing to go home, Kate lifted the box where she had stored the photographs of Kid. She took out the most compromising image, the one where you could see Miranda’s thigh, and gazed at it for a moment.
Then she put the photo into a new, separate box, and slid that box into her tote bag, resting her jacket gently on top. She walked out the front door and down the lawn to the path through the woods. The box banged against her hip with every step.
MIRANDA
SERIES 2, Personal papers
BOX 9, Diary (1982–1993)
* * *
JANUARY 13 1993
I started sleeping with Kid. I’m not even sure when. Three weeks ago? Four? It was the holidays that got to me. Going with Jake to the mall to buy presents for Theo. How happy he was, picking out what we would get. I loved him then, his bulk, his charm, his love for his son, and for some reason, I went to Kid’s trailer a few days later and slept with him. That feeling of loving Jake made me angry, made me want to get back at him for what he’s done to me. Only of course I deserved it all, I started it all, so now I’ve been doubly bad. I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t know why I’ve done anything I’ve done, ever. But I do know what I feel when Kid touches me. Not pleasure, exactly, but relief, like a migraine disappeared.
JANUARY 18 1993
Jake wants another child. He’s been bringing it up for months, even though the idea makes me sick.
He said once that he believed you weren’t really a man until you’ve had a child or killed someone. Given birth or death.
But men don’t give birth, I told him. Women do.
Men think children are proof of virility.
For women, children are only proof of pain.
Even when Theo makes me laugh, or does something sweet, one part of my brain looks at him and sees how he ruined me. Tore me end to end. The doctors cannot fix that break inside us. When they stitch us up, it is only a surface repair.
A woman down in town has recently given birth. I know her but I forget her name. I keep passing her. In the street, in the grocery store. The baby nestled high against her volcanic breasts. Its round, red arms. Her smile as she looks down at that tiny shrub of a human being. Her smile.
She knows I am a bad mother and she flinches away from me. Walks circles so that we don’t cross paths. But sometimes she’s too late, and I walk near her, and across the space of air I can smell the talcum rising from the warm skin and the delicate stench of vomit, unsuccessfully scrubbed dry.
I say to Jake: Maybe, honey. Maybe maybe. Maybe baby maybe, maybe.
JANUARY 19 1993
I figured it out: Kid’s boring. That’s what I like about him.
The threads of the screw coming apart, letting out whatever gas had been stored up inside. A loosening that drugs you bit by bit. An inertia that comforts, mainly by numbing.
JANUARY 26 1993
Jake bought a gun.
I asked, Why?
He said, It’s for a painting. A still life.
It’s dangerous to leave that around Theo.
I’m not going to put it where he can get it, Miranda.
JANUARY 27 1993
Fears cross my mind. Back and forth. Zigzag.
My mind is a castle, a ruined one. Rusty suits of armor. Dungeons with faulty locks. In the dark, a slithering noise. My horrors never stay locked away for long. Every time I round a corner, they resurface, an eye watching me from a shadow. A gleam of mucus. Sometimes I turn a light on too fast, and there it is, skittering back into darkness too slowly, the light reflecting off its brown carapace.
I was born to be miserable. I have always been an arrow aimed for some darker life. I flew along that path straight and true and now that I’ve landed I might as well learn to love the place I’ve stayed.
It’s fuel for art, is all it is. Is all.
23.
KATE
Kid lived on a large plot of land on the northern edge of town, up on the mesa and close to the sea. His property was not marked with his name, a street number, or even a mailbox, and Kate—who had finally weaseled the directions out of Esme by saying she had something for Kid from Miranda—drove back and forth several times