Chapter 9

1981

PEOPLE TOLD GLORIAthat the day her first child was born would be the most magical of her life. You'll fall madly in love, everyone said. You'll witness a miracle. You'll meet your little soulmate.

Nobody had told her that to give birth was to be smashed up against death, pressed all the way against a quickly cracking window to the other side. And the pain—holy goddamned motherfucking shit. No, there was no language for it. Nothing to compare it to. She remembered believing that her pelvis would shatter. She remembered thinking that the pressure would actually shoot her eyeballs out of their sockets. And then, after forty hours, at midnight exactly, this weirdly pink creature came out of her with a shrieking cry and wide, dark eyes that stayed open for a strangely long time, the doctor said, so alert for a newborn, so awake. And her hands, as small as a walnut, flexing open and closed on Gloria's breast like a tiny cat. She named her Luce, light, an aspirational name for what she thought the baby might bring to her life. And then she waited for the love that everyone said would flood her.

She waited, and stared, and waited. She fed the baby. She changed diapers. She waited. But it wasn't love that rushed in. It was something darker.

Throughout her pregnancy this darkness had grown as another creature inside her. It was about her sister. Gem, who made nests in shoeboxes for the abandoned baby possum they found in the yard. Gem, who would wander a forest alone for hours and turn flailing beetles on their feet again and recount the walk with the intricacy of a movie plot. She knew how to help things grow, to save them. Gloria didn't. She knew something about herself, that she was a person who needed to be seen. To be onstage, to be the center of light, and that in the spotlight, there was only ever room for one person. This realization was what seeped in: Gem would do better. Gloria would fuck it up.

Gloria remembered crouching in front of her sister's face when they were nine, just after the paramedics had left, telling her that she was sorry, so sorry, and that she would never allow anyone to hurt her. Gloria and Gem were identical in every way except for the oblong patch of puckered skin on Gem's neck from a pot of boiling water Gloria had thrown at her in an argument. They had been alone in their apartment, making spaghetti to surprise their father. The police report was amended several times because of a discrepancy over how many people were injured. Upon entering the home, two young females were found screaming and rolling on the floor, but once the medics were able to calm the girls and examine both carefully, injuries were found on only Gem. It didn't make any sense to the medics. Gem had the wound, but they both seemed to feel the pain.

Their father used to bring the girls to the bar where he hung out after work, showing off their ability to finish each other's sentences and dances, invent song lyrics. Their father drank for free on those days, always said he was going to take them on the road with a traveling circus. The girls clapped, and said yes, Daddy, yes please, Gloria especially. She sparkled under the eyes of strangers. There was no other time she felt that her body was wholly hers, untwinned.

Gem didn't like it. But she went along with it because Gloria loved it—that was exactly the kind of person her sister was, as if they had a full deck of personality traits divvied out between them, no overlap.

"Here's how it works, fellas," their daddy said to the work friends who would listen. He put on his teacherly voice, gestured exuberantly; an excellent talker, their daddy. "When an embryo splits early, within the first few days, the twins form independently from each other, so they have a relationship more like siblings. If, however, the zygote is late to split—sometimes it can be as long as two weeks after fertilization—the resulting twins almost always exhibit telepathy and ESP. They started their life as one, and so share more than only identical genes. My girls were actually the same person at the beginning. These two girls right here! That's why their minds meld. To the circus, my peanuts," he'd say, sloshing back a whiskey and smiling at Gloria and Gem as if they were made of sunshine itself.

Once, they had been the very same person. Though most people thought that would preclude you from loneliness, what it meant for Gloria was an eternal missing half.

The idea became a refrain: Gloria was going to fuck this up.

She kept this dark secret inside her the first week with her new baby at home, tucking it deep in the hope that nature would kick on some new, capable, more generous part of herself, the innate love she saw stretched across the faces of all the other mothers she encountered who calmed writhing toddlers in grocery stores. But the nights started blurring into days, and her nipples were bleeding, had actual scabs on them, and Luce only slept for thirty minutes at a time, ever, at all—certainly nobody told Gloria that might happen—and she cried continuously when she was awake, and the secret started to rise. You can't imagine it until you're inside it, what the screaming does. The small mouth right up by your ear no matter how you hold her. The absolute shock that lungs that small can make such a sound. The face bright pink and so pinched, and you try and try and nothing you do makes it stop. You can't imagine the heat it brings into your own body.

And one day, when Luce was three weeks old and Gem was at work and Gloria was more tired than she'd ever been, more delirious, more full of rage, with a body so tender that even kindnesses felt torturous, she couldn't take it. She set the baby on the floor—nowhere she could fall, not that she could roll anyway, still such a grub of a human—put a blanket over her to keep her warm, and walked outside. She needed a minute. There was a commercial being filmed a few blocks away. She wanted to catch a glimpse. Just a peek at the magic. She hustled, she wasn't going to leave the baby for long, she wasn't a monster, the baby would probably go to sleep anyway, and she had been fed recently, really, she was completely fine. Gloria needed a few goddamned minutes to herself, to be refreshed by all the lights illuminating the street, and maybe they'd have one of those big hoses that shot water onto the road to make it look clean and fresh, maybe even a rain machine, those were so fun to watch. When it came down to it, how could she be a good mother if she lost herself? Didn't every child, especially every girl child, deserve a strong woman to guide her through this life? So she would start to reclaim that for herself, not at this moment of course, ha, she looked like shit, greasy hair and sour milk all over her shirt, but just to breathe it in. And she did. It was beautiful.

And, feeling a little better, she headed home. She hadn't been gone long. Fifteen minutes maybe, twenty, it really was such a short time and there was nothing the baby could have done to hurt herself, it was no big deal.

She could hear Luce from down the hallway of the apartment. The screaming. And then the silence.

This tiny, dark-eyed girl with a dimple in one cheek.

The baby was on the floor, legs kicking madly. The blanket was covering her face. She must've somehow grasped it and pulled it there. The baby was screaming again, and so still breathing, thank god, though the sound was choking, desperate. Gloria yanked the blanket away. Underneath, the baby's face was as red as a fire hydrant, purple in some places too, near blue. She was suffocating.

And so this was the truth that nobody, not her sister, not her daughter, would ever fully understand. It wasn't that Gloria didn't want Luce. Head smell of strawberry jam. It was that she knew, with a lance through her heart, that if it were left to her, the kid wouldn't even survive.