The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [69]
The cops immediately separated us. Her, they took over to the ambulance. Me, they asked me if I felt OK and I replied with a quite obviously soggy yes. They had a paramedic come over and “check me out” but no one was very worried about me since I could walk and talk. I hadn’t a bruise or bump or cut on me, other than the airbag burns on my inner arms. My distinguishing characteristic: shit-faced. The emotions all went in the direction of the pregnant woman and her unborn child. Except mine. Mine floated toward nothingness.
While the cop put me through my paces, nearly all of which I failed in that ever so slight way that is inevitable given the amount I’d consumed, I thought of my mother. Literally - when the cop had me close my eyes and attempt that finger to the nose thing? I saw my mother’s face. Puffy with drink and covered in sadness … not a maternal, Madonna sadness. A sadness made from joy being siphoned from your life a year at a time.
I have a photo of my mother when she was a girl. It was between leg and hip operations. In this photo she was not in a body cast. It was probably taken a few years before my grandmother divorced my grandfather for molesting my mother’s sisters. She looks to be about 13. It is the sweetest girl face you have ever seen, but something in the tilt of her head, something in the lowered gaze, you can already see the sadness in her.
I know this isn’t true, but in some ways, I can see the woman who would pick up a bottle of vodka and never put it down. I can see the bottle of sleeping pills. The marriage that went so horribly wrong, and still she couldn’t leave. I can see the mother whose children drifted so quickly away from her like fish cut loose. I can see the Cancer that came to the rescue, for as her sister said to me shortly before she died, “Every day of her sweet life she was in pain, of one sort or another. At least now she’ll have peace.”
Where does repressed pain and rage go in a body? Does the wound of daughter turn to something else if left unattended? Does it bloom in the belly like an anti-child, like an organic mass made of emotions that didn’t have anywhere to go? How do we name the pain of rage in a woman? Mother?
I cannot see in her face that her children gave her joy, though she said that to me the week before she died, and I thought, looking at her milk white shrunken body, almost the body of a girl, how?
When the cop hand cuffed me and told me to sit in the back of his copmobile I was glad. Inside his car it was quiet. It smelled like air freshener and leather. I closed my eyes. Somewhere, very far away inside me, I felt a tiny pang of pain for the woman I’d hit and what was in her belly. But it was too much for me, so I opened my eyes and watched the cop write things down on a small clipboard instead.
Briefly and without any drama I wished I was dead. But there were no other emotions or thoughts accompanying that. It just sat there like me in the back seat of a cop car, flat and plain and unevolved. Then he was driving me away from the scene to the station to be breathalyzed.
In my head way back at the base of my skull near the top of my spinal cord I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t, did I?
Mean to?
The night stretched out long like it does when you fuck up. It’s like a night that lasts a year. Or like all the years of your life are suddenly in your lap, wailing like needy children. You can’t take care of all of them. You don’t even want to. You want to abandon each yearchild on the side of the road and bolt. I am not your mother.
After the autopsy of my baby girl, a doctor told me in his office, “There is nothing conclusive to associate with her death. The cord was not around her neck, and there were no identifiable physical problems of any sort. Here is a copy of the autopsy report. I’m sorry. Sometimes this happens, and there is no explanation.” I stared at the white wall behind his head. He handed me a form that encouraged