The nurse paged the doctor.
“Shhh, Bianca. Calm down,” Mama whispered, stroking her daughter’s tangled hair. “He’s down the hall in the waiting room. I’ll get him, pero cállate, the doctors will give you another shot.”
Bianca felt like a child. Her pulse pounded in her ears. “Matty,” she screamed again. “Where’s Jubilee?”
And not a drop to drink.
When Mama came back into the room with Matty, he looked at Bianca with a mixture of relief and pity. “Bee?” His brows furrowed. “You didn’t give me a baby.”
“What?” Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down. “Yes, I did. I drove her to your house.” And pray the Lord my soul to take.
“No, Bee,” he said quietly. “You drove this.” He held her up as proof. She was still wearing her furry pink bunny pajamas. No one had changed her. “Not a baby. A doll.”
Sail on, silver girl. Sail on by.
The humming sounded like water. And water soothes. Water soothes the soul.
And what is a soul but a bubble in the void. But floating in the vacuum of nothing?
Dad had taught Bianca about quantum universes. He’d sat her down the way he had when he’d taught her about Mole day or Pi day (sometimes even brought her a slice of cherry pie that a student had given him). The way he’d taught her to drive, the way he’d taught her to ride a bike.
In the many-worlds hypothesis, he’d said, anything that could’ve possibly happened, but didn’t, has happened in another universe.
Bubbles, bubbles everywhere.
In this one, Jubilee was alive.
Bianca stretched out her IV-wired arms. Mama nodded, and Matty handed over Jubilee.
Step into the water, child. Be made whole.
At some point, a therapist named Dr. Norris came in and evaluated her. In what sounded like something from an absurd Monty Python movie, he explained to Mama and Matty that Bianca was in shock. She’d need a low dose of Clozapine to start, antidepressants, and a weekly therapy session with him, but she wasn’t a danger to herself or anyone else, humming Simon and Garfunkel and so on. She wasn’t a danger, so she could go home. Bianca heard him. She heard them step into the hallway so they could ask their worried questions without her hearing. She heard anyway. She knew what they thought was happening. She knew what they thought.
But here’s what she saw. Once upon a time, there was a girlchild. A brand new girlchild, smiling. So innocent, so new. Her mama held her tightly, and she was safe. The end.
After all, Jesus rose again, didn’t he? And his mama must have held him. Mother Mary in a teal robe, clinging to her child—Pietà turned beautiful. Restored to babe in arms.
Bianca’s daughter had returned. Her Jubilee. And she wouldn’t let her go.
ONE
A Wounded Deer
With Jubilee
Bianca bounded through the front door of the redbrick house, Jubilee tucked in her arms, and called out loudly for the guys to hear, “I met someone!” Then under her breath as she brought Jubilee to nest in the crook of her neck and shoulder, whispering into her curls, “A really nice someone.”
Five months had passed. Bianca had reenrolled in college for the fall semester because she wouldn’t go back to lying face down in the grass in the front yard the way she had after dropping out the first time and moving back to the Valley with Gabe, depressed as nobody’s business but too stubborn to kill herself. Besides, she had Jubilee to consider. That’s what she told herself. She said, You absolutely cannot kill yourself because you have a daughter to consider. Dr. Norris said her self-talk was an encouraging sign and Jubilee certainly would not want her to kill herself.
She could never be sure if she was joyful or manic, whether she was like her father dancing around the kitchen, him bare-chested in his weekend shorts and her stepping on his feet (Dance me, Daddy! ) while he’d stomp her around the kitchen tile, how she’d thought he was so joyful when he wasn’t shitfaced and shattering their belongings against a wall . . . Or whether she was getting better. Whether she was nothing like her father at all. Nothing like a body in a bathtub. Or his spitting image.
She was staying with Handro and Matty on Woodland Street, attending Cal State Fullerton, a commuter school and easy to transfer into as a sophomore, unlike the prestigious schools she’d cared about before whose matriculation agreements had meant her credits from Holy Cross didn’t convert.
At the redbrick house, going to college, raising Jubilee with the help of her brother and his boyfriend, none of it felt like pretending, at least not in the way it had with Gabe.
Matty watched Jubilee during the day while Bianca went to school and during her therapy sessions. Their relationship, now, in the redbrick house, reminded Bianca of the way it had been between them when Matty had helped raise her back in the Valley. Big brother, five years older, Matty had borne the brunt of Dad’s drunken, bigoted rages, yet he’d still managed to be a loving stand-in—a brother turned caregiver when Mama was busy studying for nursing school or locked in her room crying and eating herself to sleep and Dad was mean-drunk. Matty had taught Bianca how to braid on Barbie’s hair, how to cook arroz con pollo (without burning the red rice tar-black to the bottom of the pot the way Mama did), and how to sing along to all the musicals from deep in the diaphragm, where all her power came. Mama loved musicals as much as Matty, and she’d cry at nearly every one. They’d spend most weekend nights together watching all the classics before Matty got to high school and started going out with his drama-club friends instead. Their favorite was Hello, Dolly, and they’d belt out the tunes (“Before the parade passes by!”). Matty teased that Bianca sounded more like a country-western singer than a Broadway diva (“Not through your nose, Bee. From your diaphragm!”), but she didn’t care. When they were singing along to The Unsinkable Molly Brown or Westside Story, just the three of them, there was no one ridiculing or hurting them. Mama protected them that way too. She thought she was protecting them with Bible verses, but really the musicals had made them the most resilient (“I’m gonna feel my heart coming alive again!”).
“Matty? Handro?” Bianca called when she didn’t see them in the house. “Are you guys here?” She wanted to tell them about Joshua.
“We’re out back, Bee,” Matty called. “Grab a plate.”
Still holding Jubilee, she tossed her bag onto the desk in the guestroom-turned-her-room. The guys had taken down Matty’s framed comic book posters so Bianca could put up the wooden Frida reprints she’d bought four-for-twenty-dollars in Mexicali. The truth? Before today, Bianca had been mostly limping along. She missed her dog, Kanga, who, let’s face it, had saved her back in the Valley when she couldn’t save herself. Matty’s cats had clawed the shit out of Kanga, so Bianca had sent her to live with Mama and Abuela in Buena Park, even though their plot of cement backyard didn’t have any grass and Mama couldn’t be trusted to take Kanga for walks or pet her belly. Mama acted like Bianca was made of china and would break apart any moment and it was all Mama’s fault. Even Matty and Handro treated Bianca like a breakable thing. She wanted to believe she’d ever felt normal. That she’d feel normal again.