When The Lights Go Out: The addictive new thriller from the bestselling author of The Good Girl
us, performing for me a song they learned, a magic trick, how they can make their eyes go crossed. They stand before me as Miranda spells out the effects of tight underpants on the male genitalia, saying over and over again, “Look at me, Miss Eden. Look what I can do,” while folding their tongues in half, or trying to make them stretch clear to the ends of their noses, and, as Miranda talks louder to counter their escalating tones, it hits me how attention-starved they are, how they would give anything for her to watch them for a minute, to praise their talents. Every day, there is dirt wedged beneath their nails and some sort of food on their cheeks and chins. Their outfits are cobbled together with clothing that doesn’t match and hardly fits.
I clap my hands for Jack and Paul, but Miranda tells them to go away. To go play.
Every day.
As her baby bump swells more and more, I’m pestered by Miranda to hurry up, to get knocked up, so that her baby and my baby can still go to school together as I’ve promised her they would.
If I wait much longer they’ll be in different grades.
That’s what Miranda has told me.
“September is the cutoff, don’t you know?”
According to Miranda’s timeline, I have until September of next year to have a baby. Twelve months, which leaves only three to get pregnant.
“It’s not that we’re not trying,” I’ve tried to explain, and she counters with a flip of the hand and a slapdash “I know, I know,” and then it’s back to the underwear we go. To help with Aaron’s and my fertility issues, she suggested a pillow beneath my hips to help steer sperm in the right direction. “It’s all about gravity,” she says.
At every visit I watch the size of her own baby bump swell, her maternity shirts no longer able to cover its overwhelming girth. I tell myself that her suggestions are only old wives’ tales, not rooted in truth, but how am I to know if that’s true?
But today when she lounged on my sofa, peering at me with that same expression on her face—mouth parted, eyebrows raised—and asked if I was keeping track of my ovulation, I realized how stupid it was of me, how naive.
This was Aaron’s and my first foray into babymaking. I was sure it was something that just happened, that there was no need to time or plan. In the moment, I told her yes, of course I was keeping track of my dates, because I couldn’t bring myself to say otherwise, to admit to her that it never occurred to me to figure out when I was and when I wasn’t ovulating. Aaron and I both come from large families, and the number of grandchildren our parents have been blessed with is in no way in short supply. It seemed a given that after ample time, after many months of waking up in the morning to Aaron’s soft fingers tracing my bare skin, thumbs hooking through the lacy edges of my underpants, gliding them proficiently over my thighs, sooner or later we’d succeed. We’d make a baby as we intended to do.
But for the first time I’ve come to realize that this is going to take more than time.
After Miranda left I drove to the library and sought out a guidebook on pregnancy and there, in the stacks of books, plotted out my approximate menstrual cycle. I figured out the first date of my last period. I counted backward; I did the math. It wouldn’t be perfect, that I knew—my periods had never been perfect—but it would be close. And close to perfect was better than nothing for me.
And now, knowing that in just two days’ time I will be ovulating fills me with an abundant amount of hope. Aaron and I were doing it wrong all along, missing out on the best times to get pregnant, likely omitting my most fertile days, those negligible hours when conception can occur. On the way home I stopped at the market and picked up a pocket-size calendar and, at home, with a red pen, circled my most fertile days for the next three months, through the end of the year.
This time we’ll get it right.
I push my way through the turnstile doors and step outside, making my way across the plaza. Beside the Eternal Flame, I pause, overcome with the sudden urge to scale the fence and lie down beside the puny little fire in the fetal position. To fall to my side on the cold concrete, beside the memorial for fallen soldiers. To pull my knees up to my chest in the middle of all those pigeons who huddle around it, trying to keep warm. The land around the flame is thick with birds, the concrete white from their waste. That’s where I want to lie. Because I’m so tired I can no longer stand upright.
People breeze past me. No one bothers to look. A passing shoulder slams into mine. The man never apologizes and I wonder, Can he see me? Am I here?
I head to the bike rack, finding Old Faithful ensnared beneath the pedals and handlebars of a dozen or more poorly placed bikes. I have to tug with all my might to get her out and still I can’t do it. The frustration over my identity boils inside me until I feel myself begin to lose it. All this red tape preventing me from getting what I need, from proving who I am. I’m starting to question it myself. Am I still me?
The debilitating effects of insomnia return to me then, suddenly and without warning. General aches and pains plague every muscle in my body because I can’t sleep. Because I haven’t been sleeping. My feet hurt. My legs threaten to give. I shift my weight from one leg to the next, needing to sit. It’s all I can think about for the next few seconds.
Sitting down.
Pins and needles stab my legs. I wrench on the bike, yanking as hard as I can, but still she doesn’t budge. “Need a hand?” I hear, and though clearly I need a hand, there’s a part of me feeling so suddenly indignant that I turn with every intent of telling the person that I’ve got it. Words clipped. Expression flat.
But when I turn, I see a pair of blue eyes staring back at me. Royal blue eyes like the big round gum balls that drop down the chute of a gum-ball machine. And my words get lost inside my throat somewhere as I rub at my bleary eyes to be sure I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing. Because I know these eyes. Because I’ve seen these eyes before.
“It’s you,” I say, the surprise in my voice clear-cut.
“It’s me,” he says. And then he reaches over and hoists Old Faithful inches above the other bikes, those that have held her prisoner all this time. It’s effortless to him, like nothing.
He looks different than the last time I saw him. Because the last time I saw him he was folded over the cafeteria table, drinking coffee in a sweatshirt and jeans. Now he’s dressed to the nines in black slacks, a dress shirt and tie, and I know what it means. It means that his brother has died. His brother, who was hurt in a motorcycle accident after a car cut him off and he went flying off the bike, soaring headfirst through the air and into a utility pole without a helmet to protect his head.
He held vigil beside his brother’s hospital bed while I held vigil beside Mom’s. And now, six days later, his eyes still look tired and sad. When he smiles, it’s strained and unconvincing. He’s gotten a haircut. The dark, messy hair has been given a trim and though it’s not prim or tidy—not by a long shot—it looks clean. Combed back. Much different than the hair I saw those days and nights in the hospital cafeteria, his head stuffed under the hood of a red sweatshirt. We only spoke the one night, him fussing about the coffee, telling me how he’d rather be anywhere but there. But still, there’s the innate sense that I know him. That we shared something intimate. Something much more personal than coffee. That we’re bound by a similar sense of loss, united by grief. Both collateral damage in his brother’s and my mother’s demise.
He sets Old Faithful down on the ground and passes the handlebar to me. I take her in my hand, seeing the way his nails are bitten to the quick, the skin torn along the edges. A row of rubber bands rests on his wrist, the last one tucked halfway beneath the cuff of the dress shirt. A single word is written on the back of the hand with blue ink. I can’t read what it is.
He runs his hands through his hair and only then do I think what I must look like.