Nights were long. Sleep elusive. In the beginning, we slept like babies, he liked to say. Turning and turning in a widening gyre, always together: big spoon, little spoon, little spoon, big. Every night its own nursery rhyme. Sleep, without him, when I managed it: solitary and poor, nasty, brutish, short. I woke at dawn. So did the wife across the street, and I liked watching her walk her stroller up and down the dew. Nearly my age, unfathomably. The husband wore a suit. Left for work early, came home late. She missed him, I could tell. The wife had brought a casserole to the shivah, uninvited. Black sweater stretched tight across ninth-month belly, unseemly. There but for the grace of Mirena and perimenopause, I thought, when she waddled to the freezer. Wondered what I would have done if left behind with a piece of him that was not him. If I could have loved it in his place.
I was forty-eight, and I was a widow. A woman who’d let my husband die on me. Widows were prim or stern, all of them old, or at least older than me, Grimm witches or Woolfian madams. Every room was my own. I wanted none of them.
Tuesdays I spent in sweats, screening calls, watching soaps, soaking comfort from the cycles of suffering and redemption. No happiness went unpunished, no heart unscathed. Most deaths proved as easily nullified as the marriages that preceded them. That Tuesday, I watched a woman weep bedside, waiting for her lover’s coma to end, not knowing, as I did, that when he woke it would be with a new face and emptied memory. This was the risk of life inside a soap: the possibility you could wake up to find yourself someone else. Lovers’ faces became unrecognizable, children aged a decade overnight; and yet, the circle of life closed in on itself with claustrophobic comfort. Every daughter became a mother, every mistress a wife—every wife a widow.
The doorbell rang. I ignored it. The bell rang again, and I had apparently become a woman too tired not to do as she was asked. Behind the door stood a bedraggled girl, a copy of Augustine in her hand. She shoved the book in my face. “Is this you?”
The back cover was dominated by the large black-and-white author photo, face a decade younger than mine, frown carefully calibrated to suggest interrogative empathy, a well-mixed cocktail of softness and rigor, airbrushing and eyeglasses, all to convey the right message, this may be bullshit, but I am not. It was me, but only on the technicality that I had once been someone else, someone younger, someone married, someone eager to take direction, frown with my mouth, smile with my eyes. “It’s somewhat me,” I said.
I diagnosed youth. College, maybe, or—something in the too-firm set of jaw, the fingers tucking themselves into their sleeve then resolutely poking back out again like a compulsion—even younger. Zitted nose, greasy hair, ragged nails, weak chin, but young enough that none of it interfered with beauty. The pink of cheeks. The smoothness of skin. The perkiness of breast. Girls like this never looked tired. When they looked sad, as this one did, it was a fuck-me sadness, a wound that conjured want. I knew about the desirability of damaged young women; I’d made a life of it. Her wrists were thin, her hair limp, the color of discarded Wonder Bread. She looked like she was a runaway, or at least like she wanted to be. A few years younger than Benjamin’s daughter, less practiced in wounded hostility, but giving it her best effort.
Benjamin’s Nina had run away once, age eight, cruelly sentenced to summer vacation with her estranged father and his newish wife, mind marinated in who knew what vitriol, courtesy of wife number one. She endured two weeks with us, then slung Pikachu pack over shoulder and waltzed out the front door while we slept. She’d only made it as far as the neighbor’s backyard, but it had been enough to curtail the custody visits until a year later they tapered off for good. I’d promised Benjamin that when she crashed into adolescence, her mother would become the enemy and we would provide inevitable refuge, that next time she ran away, she’d run straight to him. There was no next time. Even when Nina came to the city for college, under protest, she wasn’t, in any true sense of the word, his. She was never, in any sense of the word, mine. We filled our lives with other people’s daughters. Benjamin’s students, bright, ambitious echoes of a girl I used to be. My readers, whom Benjamin always found cause to disdain. Your Augustine girls, he called them, the ones who slunk into readings and conferences with bandaged wrists, Auschwitzian bodies swimming in slip dresses, damage blinking like a neon sign, vacancy, someone, anyone, fill me up. I had written the history of a damaged girl, a girl made famous not by her pain but by the story her doctor told about it. I had, the jacket copy boasted, “enabled an object of curiosity to seize subject-hood, reclaimed her narrative from the men who wanted to explain her to herself, triumphantly recentering her as protagonist of her own story.” They had stories, too, my Augustine girls. Pain manifested with infinite variety: an eating disorder. A dead boyfriend. A dead father. A disease, real or imagined. Anxiety, overwhelming. Sorrow, bottomless. Rage against the machine. The girl would set my book before me, whisper her name, then, in a gush, tell me how Augustine and I had taught her to reclaim herself. Until now, until her, she would say, I felt so alone.
Desperate for attention, Benjamin said. Posers. I reminded him we were all posing. He’d made a life’s work of stories the mind tells itself, I reminded him, and should know that the body could tell stories, too. He would call me too soft, too easy, too young; I would call him an ogre. Somewhere in there, argument would become foreplay, then fingers mouth tongue flesh heart until we were both somehow fucking the Augustine girls—their youth, their damage, their need.
The book was ten years old, though. Most of the girls had grown up. “I always appreciate hearing from readers, but showing up at my house isn’t—”
“I’m looking for your husband, actually.”
“He’s dead.” I resented, on general principle, anyone who made me say it.
“No, I know. I mean, I found out, when I looked him up. That’s why I came to you. I’m trying to… I’m looking for my mother, I guess?”
“Well, she’s not here.”
“No, I mean, I’m looking for her in the past. Like, trying to figure out who she was, really. I thought if I met you—well, if I met your husband. But then he died.”
I also resented having to hear anyone else say it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have come. You seem busy, and I don’t want to bother you, so…”
“I am busy, and you are bothering me, so tell me why.” I said it sharply. I waited. Girls her age had obedience baked into their bones. Too many voices saying too many times: behave, submit. You had to work to unlearn it, and maybe I was a traitor to my gender, but her strength of will was not my concern. She did as she was told.
“My mother was a patient at his institute.” It sounded less like submission than challenge. Good.
“We didn’t have patients,” I said. Habit. “Only subjects. We were very clear about that.”
“It was just for a few months, in 1999? They found her on a bus, in a fugue state. They called her Wendy Doe.”
I tried to keep my face expressionless. Failed, apparently.
“You remember!” Relief made her seem even younger.
“I remember.” My first and last research subject. The year that ended my career, began my life. It wasn’t in the category of things possible to forget. “Did she send you here?” I hoped for; I hoped against.