A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [165]
“So much of all of this, I’m afraid, is a feeling,” I said to Rafferty.
Instead of looking at me with contempt or scoffing, he nodded, saying, “It’s only taken me about ten years to understand that that’s where every case begins, not with facts or a body, a few tattered pieces of evidence, but with a couple of people and then a whole range of possibility: their pride, their love, their lust, their sense of injury, vengeance, greed, despair—you name it.”
“This is what I think might have happened,” I began then, “not too long after the funeral, in Mrs. Mackessy’s kitchen.”
When Rafferty and I met about a week and a half after my fainting spell he took one look at me, and with his normal adenoidal fire and indignation, declared that we had reached the limit. “Why didn’t they call me?” he shouted, beating the table with his fist.
I shrugged and said that I thought they’d tried to get in touch with Howard. But he knew as well as I did that they didn’t go out of their way to keep the families up to date. My bruise was not as colorful as it had been and I assumed I could just say, “I bumped my head,” and leave it at that. “You don’t get a bruise the size of a grapefruit from bumping your head,” he protested.
“It’s funny,” I said, cutting him off, “about being afraid? You asked me about that a couple of weeks ago. I thought for a while that I was going to get pounded. It wasn’t that that I feared. What’s frightening is that I can’t—love those girls.”
“For God’s sake—”
“No,” I said, “Theresa would find it within herself to love them. She would understand what they were given at the start, understand why they’re so angry. I’m more afraid of what I don’t have, that deep down, you know, way down, there isn’t really much of anything.”
“You’re reading the wrong novels,” Rafferty said. “You are not required to love your fellow inmates.” He went on to lecture me at length about how we have to protect ourselves against those, who, for whatever reasons, are barbarians. “Save your love for your daughters,” he ordered.
I said that of course Emma and Claire gave me reason to be afraid. I had wept when they were born, each in their turn, because of semiautomatic weapons on the street, stockpiles of hazardous waste, terrorist acts, hatred—all of the horrors which we bequeath to our children. My general sorrow in relation to the human condition was nothing compared to my new and specific grief over the fact that my daughters’ lives were forever changed. I had sworn I would never do to my children as my mother had done to me, that I would never abandon them, and yet I had, for all intents and purposes, left them. Even if I was let go, even if we moved to Australia, they would always know that I had been responsible for something that permanently altered each of us. They would always feel, even if no one else knew, that they carried with them a stigma. There wasn’t really any place we could go where we wouldn’t suffer from the knowledge that evil had been done to us, and that we, in our turn, had injured those around us.
It was nearly a week after my hospitalization that Debbie came out of herself long enough to ask me a personal question. It was a relatively quiet morning, each of us at the work of holding ourselves together. Debbie shuffled into our cell after breakfast and stood, staring at me while I read. When she realized I wasn’t going to look up she said right out, “How old are your children?”
That she might ask me something was so uncharacteristic I found at first that I couldn’t answer. “What?” I finally said.
“You keep getting letters from your girls. They draw you pictures. I just wondered