She stood in front of the mirror in the half light of bedside lamps in evening. She saw, in her reflection, her olive skin paling as it stretched thin along her dime-sized shoulders exposing sea-green veins. Her clavicle an angry, thrusting, shield of bone. A cavity of chest so small, so collapsible (ribs poking through on each side), it looked as though it could be no bigger than a shoebox to hold only the smallest, most delicate, most crumpled pair of shoes. She had become (suddenly, it seemed) the shell of the she that was, that used To Be only weeks ago. Or was it months? As the days stretched on (“sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset”) like the layers of skin hankering to tear away at her hipbone, she didn’t know for how long she had thinned.
She examined herself and he laid in the bed, on his back, eyes closed, and she knew she was failing him. She stood there and failed. When people said end of their rope she could see the giant braid fraying, wiry strands unraveling from force and torque and swift change in direction. The ship was moving, advancing toward a midnight sea, unsettled waters, to the distant light of an untouchable horizon, but had not needed its anchor, had left it, had left. And she knew he was failing her, but she still felt as though it were her rope and she were the one who had changed. She had nothing left for him, nothing left to give anymore. He had taken everything, all her love, and still he lay there unmoving. That’s how it went with boy and girl. He had eaten, consumed, left her with a skeleton of herself, a skeleton she didn’t know how to love, bone without meat on the bone.
“I told you. I told you what you could do. I told you how you could change it, and it was all so easy,” she felt like screaming. She felt like throwing words at him, but he’d left her debilitated. It was easy; it was all just parts, all just minutes and glances and channel surfing and dial tones and marginally missed opportunities- nearly meaningless because isn’t it always like that? Until the negligible things grow and amass and climb on top of each other, assemble like a fetus. The wrongs and disappointments, the pressed buttons, began as an insignificant mass of cells—a trifling argument over where to eat, a bad night with somebody’s friend, an anniversary present ungiven—and suddenly cells are appendages, organs, toes. This thing between them didn’t speak or talk or move, may have still been a tadpole but it breathed in a womb threatening birth. It had to come out sometime, it had to end; she couldn’t let it incubate forever. If she did, she would be left with only skin smeared across bone, no blood (so pale), until it all became the translucent, peeling layers of a paper napkin used when company calls.
“Maybe we’re just not cut from the same cloth,” she told him. Their puzzle pieces didn’t fit anymore. Or maybe they never did- just seemed like they could. Corners were ignored, an ovular opening for a circular tab overlooked, slightly different colored swatches of the same halcyon sky. But at the time, two years ago, girl and boy didn’t care because they had love and an upstairs attic where they came together (girl on top) on a sheetless mattress in the pregnant heat of summer at noon and three and again at six or seven before the sun went down (and the boxing match came on). While the rest of the house with brown shag carpet, orange wallpaper, neglected trees distending into the pool, sinking slip-covered couches, wayward scraps of weed and rustling rolling papers, a slobbering, toothy pit bull and marshmallowy roommates with never-ending pizza/take-out/KFC was all a dream house. She hadn’t noticed everybody at all, even when they all (roommates, pit bull, Lays potato chips) sat on the couch together, even when they all watched UFC. Because the peripheral didn’t matter, would never matter. It could’ve gone on forever that way with bikinis and summer and flip flops and lawn chairs and people she couldn’t stand, and she wouldn’t have cared. She was happy in the land of champagne and orange juice. The promised land of mimosas-in-red-plastic-cup dreams.
The mother sat on the caramel-colored carpet in front of a pile of books (the medical book, the Reviving Ophelia book, the How Did This Happen? book, the book from the rabbi, the Yellow Pages) and snapshots of her daughter, baby books filled with hard evidence, yellow legal pads with cursive quotes scratched off as though it were a crime scene. As though if she interpreted, analyzed, measured, combed through the documentary evidence and pieced it together starting from childhood, from DNA, from fibers and film negatives and hair samples she could put it all together in a way that made sense. Her middle-aged body that had once been lithe, young and narrow-hipped, boyish, had borne this child, sweat for this child, her daughter, now felt like packed ice, frozen, brow-wrinkled and tense. A constant stream of anxiety pumping, pounding through like a frantic hose charged with water, turned on high. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking, her rings wouldn’t stop chattering, clanking together, the tinny ding ding ding, ding ding. She was supposed to be the parent. She was supposed to know what was best. She was supposed to know that even though her child that had once had a beautiful smile bounding up the brick path that led to their kitchen island to tell her mother the minutiae of her day, a smile that people stopped on the street to tell her how beautiful it was, now had a face that after years of synchronized living and breathing, she didn’t recognize. A face flattened, sunken in, and taken out; a face to look like someone else’s child.
Something terrible was coming.
She could feel the onslaught building, racing for the bottom like a pink and green ski-suited child on one of those rounded, yellow sleds, flying toward rock bottom. The daughter she knew better and loved more than anyone, she had conceived, had carried in the hottest summer, wading in the pool in denim overalls because it was just too much heat, swathed in white in the hospital, in tiny six year old arms flung around her neck pulling her hair, eating ice cream naked out of the carton with her hands on some else’s lawn, refusing with tears to practice the piano. The daughter she had watched shake hands, receive awards, diplomas, accomplish and walk forward with a sort of pride that could only come from having birthed her, the shock of having created this, a person. Who in turn for giving them life was making a mark on the world, and the unrelenting bitter sweetness that comes from the realization of her own impending mortality, the finiteness of her own path and what she could accomplish. This child, who would stand for her when she unraveled into a place of stillness, when she passed away to some other space, to the next struggle-filled lifetime, was now shrinking. She was not a solid, uncommon woman, not a pillar of strength, but a pile of ash, wafting into the background, losing herself to the world. On the floor in her tiny upstairs office she prepared for a trial with plumb and level and scale, measuring perpetrator against victim, diagramming life.
The phone was ringing, the clear plastic landline. It was a dull, terrifying howl because everyone was calling her to tell her how to mother a child who wasn’t a child anymore, to demand she mother when she thought she had all along, ever since birth, ever since that final push and a daughter flushed out of her in otherworldly pain, coated and crying and miraculous in both their blood. The mother felt as though she were choked, blocked in and claustrophobic. The papers and books swirled around her, seized her with lexis like “menstrual abnormalities” and “diagnosable disorder”, grabbed her in a medically onerous fist. Even the yellow pages advanced on her like a potent boxer, a list of doctors unleashed like a torrent of jabs, pummeling away at her in a shrinking, locked–in carpeted room, where her daughter couldn’t hear her, wouldn’t listen. All she could do was scream.
“Let’s go to the beach,” the girl said. She thought if they took a trip, if they stepped outside themselves, if they left her room and the fighting and the countless reasons to fight, there would be a détente, an ocean’s languid wave of peace. The beach would have sun and sand and Vitamin D and endorphins and she wouldn’t have to do any work, wouldn’t have to push, to try, she could just enjoy. Maybe she could scrape back the last six months, like pushing back a cuticle, the cold metal revealing white nail, a flood of warm memories reborn: the crisp breeze off a lake in November, the scent of mushrooms and garlic in dark, cuddled booths, the salty taste of the stubbled skin at the back of his neck.
“I’d love that. I love you,” he said.
She packed up a bag. She put the plaid swim trunks she had bought him and some Water Babies sunscreen and two white towels with navy stripes they had gotten together after they’d first discovered, like children, cannonballing into the clean chlorine; they loved to use their pool.
They drove to Malibu. Across that long indestructible stretch of Pacific Coast Highway, headed North, where, in the first days of August, the water stood still and sparkled, winked, and the blue sky promised there was nothing more to worry about than a sun tan and the possible red lipstick kiss of a burn on the tip of one’s nose. They drove in silence, and she convinced herself that she was not like the dusted, falling rocks on the side of the highway, and if she had been happy for two years, she could continue to make it work.
They parked in the far out ends of the parking lot, near the kitchen entrance of a Northern Italian place which only made her feel hotter, heavier; he never went for the easy space. The asphalt smelled of burning rubber, and she wished she were brave enough to order a glass of wine with lunch. They chose a Mexican restaurant because their friends had had fun there and ate fresh seafood with guacamole. They did not talk about the waning days of summer.
After lunch, they crossed the busy street and walked along the shoreline. Bathing suited tourists, families speaking Spanish, French, Italian, towheads burying each other all littered the sand in endless supply. In the kingdom of vacationers, she watched a little girl with long sun-kissed hair, her tummy protruding from her strawberry printed bikini, play in the whitewater, hands in the air.
“Is that what you were like?” he asked.
“Exactly,” she said, reeling from the taste of cilantro spiked with the charade. He squeezed her shoulder and kissed her head.
They kept walking, carrying their sandals in silence, watching a little boy dance in joyous delight to the electronic sounds emanating from his father's old-fashioned boombox in the white froth of the waves. They reached the end of the overrun strip, and he decided he’d like to walk up on the pier. “C’mon, I wonder if they’re catching any fish.”
She slid her flip flops back on, and climbed the stairs breathing in the murky, waterlogged planks beneath her.
A Hispanic man was bent over a fish, his back toward them so they could not see his catch. She was not particularly interested, she had seen the hook in the slim, scaly mouth of a bug-eyed catch before, but the boy had the face he wore while watching ESPN, and she knew they’d have to stick around for awhile. The man was bent over a stingray, knife in hand, ready for a slaughter. She begged the boy back, pulled and coaxed him because she thought the stingray was going to burst forth in a fireworks display of blood and guts and inky poison and whatever else was hidden, whatever else resides interior a stingray. The man raised the dirty, rusted knife without so much as a prayer, and with a jagged cut sliced the creature down the middle. The soft silver skin parted, cracking open like a smile. There was no sudden movement, no bursting forth, just a silent oozing of blood red blood, not even enough to stain the wood or to pool, just enough to remind him and her that the thing before them had once been living.
The Hispanic man was unruffled. He reached in like a surgeon, like the stingray was laying across the operating table, and interns were holding ten blades and telling the stingray to count backward from one hundred, as though the man were chief resident, and he slowly reached inside, his hand grasping burning organs and grabbed a liver and a kidney and threw them into the ocean as though they weren’t scalding hot, as though the ocean were a silver tray, as though, as witnesses, they were all part of the harvest. He then cut off the head and threw that away too.
She began to sob uncontrollably.
The boy tried to hold her, tried to console her: “It’s just a stingray. Sweetie, it’s okay,” but she couldn’t touch him, and she couldn’t stop. She felt the retching pain of being unbuttoned and peeled away.
“Okay,” she said, after a time, “I’m okay. I’m okay,” and walked with him around the corner, leaving the slaughter behind.
She looked up the pier. Thirty or more stingrays lined the dark wood. Thirty or more men bent over. The harvest was happening everywhere; happening ever so quietly, a passerby in Malibu might not even see.
The mother sat up in her dark wood bed with the lamp on above her, back pressed against the frame, her drugstore glasses reflecting the flickering images of the muted TV. Her husband lay beside her, snoring. The white ceramic phone beckoned to her, coaxed her to initiate communication, and paralyzed, she felt the tears incept, blurring her vision. From what her daughter needed to be saved she wasn’t sure, but maybe it was this boy, this relationship, something that was making her so very small and thin. The mother wanted to be the one to help her, the one to make everything okay like when the daughter was a child with thick, wavy bangs and hair in navy ties and she’d say, “Mommy, it’s not fair.” And she’d say back, “I know it’s not sweetheart. But just remember nobody loves you more than your Mommy does, no matter what.” But what was the best way? How could she know what was the best way to help? How could she know with all those painstaking notes upstairs, those copious post-its, the frenetic energy of her own looped and slanted words, “Ovarian failure”, “Intestinal damage”, “Hyperemesis gravidarum”, how could she know what would be the most effective?
She dialed her daughter’s number.
"Hello?" came through the line like the roll of an eye.
"It's me, and I have to tell you something," she took a beat, "I am seriously afraid you’re going to die.” Her tone was stern and angry. “This is an extremely, life or death, serious matter.” The tenor grew to an escalating plead. “I am afraid you are going to have to be hospitalized. I don't want anything to happen to you so you can't have a baby someday.” At zenith, hysterical whisper, “You’re going to make yourself infertile. You’re going to have a heart attack. You look sick, you look terrible, you’re going to run yourself into the ground, you’re going to die!”
At the climax of her own anxiety, she could hear only the sound of her heavy, unsteady breathing, the tumultuous amalgamation of her own hope and fright.
The daughter, laying in her own bed, the phone in her hand, but not to her ear, her eyes at the ceiling, thought about the night many months ago at a family wedding. She stood in front of the mirror in the hotel bathroom she shared with her parents, staring at the flat, pocketed space between her breasts. She wore a beautiful dress she bought in Paris, a spectacular dress that she used to look stunning in. The mother, in black, looked at her daughter in her ill-fitting dress and sneered.
Later, that evening the daughter rushed out of the reception, out of the clutches of a long, loving table with orange grove overhang and pumpkin soup in miniature pumpkins, the recreation of some European romantic restaurant, a meaningful memory to two people who wanted to share a future together, and stood in the foyer crying for emotions she didn't have words for, for choked, labyrinthine feelings she lacked the proficiency to sort. And instead of her mother saying, like when she was a little girl and she'd put her head in her lap and she'd stroke her hair and sing, “Nothing’s gonna’ harm you”, instead of saying, “It’s okay to feel like that sometimes, it’s okay to feel pathetic and weak, okay even to be weak sometimes,” her mother just wondered what she was or wasn’t eating, when that had nothing to do with anything at all.
The daughter could've granted her mother entry, could've tried to make her understand. Instead, she lifted the phone to her ear and said, "Goodnight, mother," and quietly hung up the phone.
In the middle of the night, somewhere around three twenty AM, when August was giving way to September, and the sheer curtain of summer, although still much too hot for anything more than a t-shirt to sleep, began to unravel, her shoe rack had fallen like the pummeling thud of medicine balls or the rubber release of all the handballs from the mesh nets in elementary school P.E. She woke with a start. It felt as though she were having one of those recurring dreams where the police were chasing her across school campuses and football fields, that never ending fugitive run, and she had landed, sudden as a lighting bolt, on her childhood twin bed. She thought maybe it was an earthquake and as selfish and terrible as it sounded, maybe she’d welcome a natural disaster now. A big one, where towers folded and turned to dust and people had to rise with unforeseen strength from the rubble, and the black nothingness of razed buildings, hot with the fear of tectonic plates, razor-edged rock, restlessly sleeping, tossing and turning beyond human control. She couldn’t deal with the small things or the seemingly big things right now anyway, so something harmonious with her knack for hyperbole, like an earthquake, would be a welcome distraction. It would be an event that forced you to forge ahead together or rip apart like altered seams, whether you wanted to or not. He was sleeping next to her in moderate, even breaths, exhausted from endless hours of chipping away at each other like woodpeckers on an impenetrable tree. He was hardly awakened by the death of the shoe rack, and he didn’t stir, only sleepily mumbled, sleepily called out in a voice she used to cradle, before he turned his head the other way.
She kept her shoes in vertical, army green plastic holders on hangers and had been waiting for the rack to break; truthfully, it was only a matter of time. She saw the plastic tearing and stretching at corners and vengefully spreading to all seams, and had continued to pile shoes in and push her luck, instead of rearranging or clearing out or just putting them back in boxes. She had thought maybe his shoes were the culprit, although she had many shoes, his were thick and heavy, size twelve tennis shoes she wasn’t sure he remembered he had and masculine brown leather ankle boots like bricks. She felt bad for blaming him and his shoes. She still put shoes there, she still put two pairs of heels in each slot and sometimes three pairs of flats, and it was possible both of them were to blame. He didn’t put his shoes there maliciously; he didn’t do it to hurt her. It could be her fault if she felt weighed down.
He shifted next to her in his sleep. His pillow was yellowed from night sweats and the sheets and comforter were strewn haphazardly in a winded mess. Next to him were three glass cups of water he had never put away, and his mismatched socks littered the room. She felt the loss of each drawer that held his things.
The next day, when she got home, she crumpled the frayed, plastic racks and shoved them in her white wicker wastebasket. She slipped his clothes from the hangers, extracted his shoes from the rubble, and put all his things, shoes, clothes, books, socks, baseball caps, baby pictures, photo albums she had made him, in a white paper, unmarked shopping bag and put it by the door.
The mother sat on her stationary bicycle with the floor fan blowing right beside her, hair pulled tightly back, racing an invisible man on the bike’s pixilated screen. She was pumping in even, furious strides, trying to move forward without moving forward, trying with unrelenting determination to discover where she had gone wrong. She had planned badly. She had tried to act methodically and be patient, to cull together information to figure out the best way to handle things, to let it unfold, to fix it and yet, she had been pushed over the edge by fear and death and electrolytes and treadmills and blood pressure and infertility. She couldn’t even look at her daughter. She couldn't acknowledge the literal, couldn’t reference any current frame, she was too busy thinking about the snowball, the giant blast at the end of the mountain. She was too busy spinning ahead and felt like she were going to be sick, she was persistently, unshakeably ill, and so she acted quickly, hastily, with the gripping, fist-clenching need to do. The urgency that it was all coming to a terrible terrible end, a head, a crash shoved her into a corner, threatened her with militia-worthy brawn and maybe if her daughter realized she were dying, then it would all be over. Because maybe she had forced this, she had done this. She should’ve said something sooner, but she was only human, she couldn’t be perfect; she could only feel and deal with what she saw in front of her. She could only react. Her daughter was an adult who didn’t need her. Her child didn’t need her anymore, she would take care of herself (or not) without her and all that would leave was a long black road of nothing, a big, black endless hole.
She had tried, she had pleaded.
"Why don't you come in and have a glass of wine?"
The mother marched angrily to the kitchen filled with a boiling over, trying to contain the spattering of hurt and rage as she poured a heavy-handed glass of Chardonnay. The mother sat, hunched, at the kitchen island. The daughter remained standing at the other end.
“Tell me what to do. Tell me how to fix this.” She stared at the glass of wine in her hand, the teetering meniscus that shook beneath her grip.
"It doesn't matter. You're not going to understand."
"How do you know I'm not going to understand? How can I understand if you don't tell me!"
"Stop yelling!"
The mother took a deep and labored breath, she peered into the daughter with harsh and menacing eyes, "How can I understand if you don't tell me."
“You attacked me. You told me I was going to die.”
“I felt like you were dying! I didn’t know what to do. Tell me what I should've done."
“I needed a parent. I needed a friend. I needed someone to be there, to tell me they loved me unconditionally, to tell me that someone did. That someone could again. You attacked me and then abandoned me. You attacked me then acted like it was my fault.”
"I was angry."
"I didn't do anything!"
“I thought tears would pour down your face when I said I was losing you.”
“It was too late," her daughter said, gathering up her belongings with waterless eyes, "I was already lost.”
She biked faster and faster, the pedals whirring, a quest to outrun in a fictional, stationary race. She gripped the black plastic handlebars tighter. How could she repair this…this…this big black crater her daughter made her feel as though she had created, as though she had buried the dynamite long ago, in her formative years maybe, calculating the right time, with journals and graphs and hypothesis and margin notes, to let it explode. “I did the best I could…I did the best I always could,” she said to herself, breathless. Couldn’t the daughter see that? Couldn’t the daughter understand? The only crime she had committed was loving her fiercely. That first day she was in preschool and she got the phone call and the headmaster said, “It’s nothing serious. We don’t want you to be alarmed,” and she had nearly dropped the phone and gone rushing into the school, panicked into the car, gripping the wheel white-knuckled and tense, to see her daughter’s skin torn and bleeding above her eyelid, her eye, surrounded by a rainbow ABC carpet and sky blue plastic chairs and wondering if she were permanently disfigured. If dropping her off at preschool meant she could not protect her from anything, not even a boy and his crayons, meant that her daughter was at the world’s whim. Because the mother didn’t know what went on, she couldn’t claim to know what went on every day in her child’s world. All she could do was see what she saw and try to protect her in anyway she could. All she could do was give her what she herself hadn’t gotten, in a long childhood with her own embittered and hardened parents, what she thought a person needed: an endless, consuming supply of love.
The girl drove back to the beach by way of the canyon. She sat in the driver's seat of a rented Subaru in a black sundress trimmed with white lace, cotton and cool and easy. She watched the dust from the unpaved roads, kicked up by men wanting to cross them, needing to get from their own A to B, consume the hanging leaves in a plaster coat of whitish-grey stifled by the toxic, strangulating fumes of SUVs and ATVs and anything else that could cover ground in the canyon.
“I won’t be here when you get home,” she had said.
“I can’t talk about this now.”
“But you have to listen; you have to listen to me.”
Click.
She felt like those trees. Choked and suffocated from the exhale of exhaust, gasping for unclean breath, immobile under the white-gray layers like truckloads of dead skin. So many levels of people unloading, sloughing off, casting off their weight in dust, in coats so thick and lackluster and unwanted, even the summer was like one long, bright winter, one endless hibernation of the self.
“I packed up your stuff and left it by the door.”
“You can’t do this over the phone.”
“You won’t let me do it in person.”
She had let herself, in her unknowing and relentless confusion, trying to uncover others’ needs and meet them, to be what the world wanted her to be even though it was a world of subjective whims, a mercurial place of antagonization. Even though there was no feasible way to meet it all the time the way it wanted to be met by a perky, secretarial voice (“How are you?, Can I help you?, Please, tell me what you need!”). The way it coaxed and cajoled, she had let herself slacken, be buried alive. She had given up. Relinquished herself. Not to another in love, that place like a never-ending swimming pool, like dipping a big toe in the water and jumping in, holding hands, swimming together, breath held, coming up only to break the surface with peals of laughter and a silent, chlorinated kiss. Not to champagne and orange juice and mimosas-in-red-plastic cup dreams.
No, this was sacrifice.
She thought about the few months after they spoke —that which she deemed as filler time. Moving on with his shoes, jackets, books, bubbler in a white paper bag packed by the door. Occupying time with all these other people, these dinners, and flirting glances, eyes lit with wine, and arched back/peel shirt off, unbuckle pants and underwear always on the floor. The toothbrush in the medicine cabinet, the smorgasbord of hooded sweatshirts (white-Jeff, grey-Ben, black-Ted) and the exchange of books, movies, fluids, gifts. This was not self love, was not even liberation, really. It was an offering up of nothing left to give. It was an offering up of a girl who once knew what she was and what she wanted and now was lost.
Because he had promised to be a different man:
“I want you to have something special. My mother said, get her something special.”
She looked at his sweet face, his loving, blond hair, blue-eyed angelic face. This boyish, beautiful man who loved her, who had called her on a Monday to ask her out for a Friday. Who walked that Friday, reticently into her apartment, tall as the doorframe, wearing jeans and a jacket and beat up brown boots. She had gathered her things, herself, dressed in a crème slipdress with a lipstick red belt, waved goodbye to her roommate suppressing the excitement, acting offhand, acting like she did this all the time, this hoping for a future, and she was so nervous that at the restaurant, she spilled her drink. He had looked across the table at her that night, showed his hand so quickly, easily, to let her know that she was as unique as she thought she could be, hoped she was. Maybe here was someone who saw something no one else did and could give her something no one else could. He could give her, as he nervously clasped the delicate necklace around her neck, not even a year into the relationship, not even a year into knowing, and yet knowing all the same, a sort of unconditional love.
She fingered the gold chain and the white shine of the small diamond, slowly, methodically, partially in awe. It was not about gifts or purchases. It was not about money and stuff and restaurants and presents and all the things he made it about, whittled it down to in those last and waning days, the lowest common denominator of counting change. It was not about her suddenly wanting something that had never been there before. It was about knowing they both wanted the same life. That maybe if they couldn’t have it now, they could build it together, would build it together. They would climb uphill and slowly unroll their paths before them together, intertwining wants and needs like a giant braid until there was rope enough to hold onto and maybe one day build a family from.
“It’s the strongest chain they have. I asked them for the strongest chain.”
It wasn’t just a necklace, but a promise they would outlast the chain, outlast the jewelry, that what they had together was the possibility of a future, something she had never had before with a man.
The chain was determined, the chain never broke. The chain endured. But it had turned out he was only a child, only boy-man, perhaps more lost in this giant pool than she.
“I can’t live without you. Please.”
“You will find a way to live.”
She had ended it, not nicely, not rightly. There was no right way, there was no formula for the breaking. There was no etiquette for silent destruction, no path he would understand or take lightly or not resent and hate and cry. There was only, “It’s over,” whispered over a phone line to what would one day be a stranger, using up all the last bit of strength that she had.
She drove further and the sun picked up and it wasn’t yet noon, wasn’t yet hot hot but comfortingly warm there in the car, in a place of comfortable silence, elective lull. At ten AM on the road in this makeshift Eden, this garden of gold, she watched the sun hit the dust coated trees in a way that made them look gilded. Formerly choked and smothered, they had risen from the ashes, two sides of the same coin, life/death, lost/found and shone with a glistening sheen, the gold leaf of hope as though the canyon were the promised land, some kind of heaven. She thought, as her heart lifted a moment, as it lightened with the light and the gold and flowers so red they were beaming, that if amidst all this unbreathing, all this struggle, all these hours of shifting, and falling and tectonic plates, that if there was one golden hour, one moment of peace, at least one place of deliverance and hope and knowledge there was an Eden somewhere, there was a safe place somewhere, that if she could just hold onto, remember that feeling of the light hitting the trees and the road and the bright, happy houses so that it all shone, so that it was all special and gilded and not just dust, if she held on to that then, it could be okay. Because maybe she had spent so long on what she had lost and was losing she didn’t realize that underneath all that unbuttoning, those layers of peeling away that maybe she had found something and someone more meaningful. Maybe, she had uncovered a piece of herself.