The roar of the fire magnified, then Opal’s world grew quiet. She couldn’t hear the fire or the sirens or the burst glass. Her attention turned inward, toward the pain. Pain has a sound. It sounds like the desperate whooshing of water, like the opening and closing of the rusted hingeof her mail slot, like the mechanical whirring of the soap plodder—all the sounds of the world at once on a pinpoint. She couldn’t contain the baby much longer.
A police wagon pulled up. Now the policemen formed a circle around them.
Tuttle extended his arm. “Her,” he said. A single sound, no more than a huff of air. “The others are…” A policeman moved toward Opal. Now her arms were cuffed, her wrists touching. She could hardly balance.
The details came to her later, not in pictures but in sounds: her heels rough against the pavement. The heavy breath of Jagr who carried her body. Then Bertie’s voice above the crowd:I’ll go with her. To help with the baby, Charles. I must. The poor child shouldn’t suffer.As they lifted Opal into wagon, the world went sideways. Finally, she caught a glimpse of the Colonel. He was holding his hat with that small blue feather to his chest, as though he were taking an oath of some sort. The Colonel was a man of science, not poetry, which limited his depth of expression, but not his feeling. He was accustomed to disappointing experiments and results.
They placed her on the blankets in the back of the wooden wagon. Through the smoke and the dark she tried to see Halley’s Comet. Opal knew it was up there somewhere, a beautiful ball of gas and dust, an ancient, illuminated rock hurtling across the sky, cold and dirty, but looked to be set aflame. She listened for that voice, but she heard nothing save the sound of her own labored breathing, of her body’s own drumming. Her ears filled with noise, and she opened her mouth, but she couldn’t speak. Not a word.
IN THE BACK OF THEwagon, it was just the three of them. Soon four.
Jagr instructed her to push. Her spine was a fault line. Her entire body quaked.
Later, somewhere else, Clara Dowd brought medicines.
And then the greatest surprise of all: Her baby was a boy.
A boy.
Who, then, was she to save?
She couldn’t think of it now, because the baby rooted for her breasts. Opal named him Halley, after the comet, after Edmond Halley, who hadn’t lived to see the truth of his prediction, that this object in the sky would return again and again and again. Opal held the baby and kissed the tufts of hair that felt like willow wisps. She pressed his cheek to her own, and she’d never felt anything softer in her life.
Her body responded to his presence. Her nipples stung with the urge to be useful. He was wrapped in a blanket. He brooded in his sleep. The baby was so warm against her skin. All she could feel in this moment was love, as potent as any drug she’d ever taken. She wished she could bottle it. He clawed her breasts because he wanted something that only she had. He wanted Opal. He wanted her very existence.
Years later, moments before her death, this is the memory she chose to hold in her mind: the baby. He looked like Madame de Fleur. Wide brow. Eyes dark and deep. In this way, she saw the woman again. She’d held her to her chest. She felt the relief of her presence as she stepped off the ledge of the hospital’s turret and jumped. For an instant, she believed she was flying. Free.
In the other room, voices. Bertie’s.
A child needs a mother.
I’ll pay you. Name your price.
More drugs to take. Darkness again, and in the morning Opal awoke, bumping along in the back of Bertie’s Franklin next to Jagr. Her shirt was wet. She’d bled through her skirt. She looked out the windows, up ahead. She recognized the sandstone towers in the distance, the turrets rising up like an ancient castle. That hospital where her husband worked, where Oren once lived.
The vehicle came to a stop near the doors. Two nurses stood at theready. Jagr wiped his hands on a handkerchief. Opal heard something, a sound that saturated the world, a noise so loud it forced her to draw her fingers to plug her ears. She finally recognized that voice,thevoice. The same voice she’d heard in the river. Not someone else’s voice, but her own.
She was screaming.
1986
Because innocence is sexier than you think.
—LOVE’S BABY SOFT FOAMING WASH
I could feel the strain at the back of my throat. I screamed again, then took a few steps backward, until I bumped into the camera dolly.
I turned. I studied myself on the camera’s viewfinder. I blinked. I watched the others in the room blink back at me: Bertie and Charlie and the security guards and the strangers. All eyes were on me.
Actresses are drawn to the spotlight because it completes us in some way, electrifies our blood, springs us to life. My body is my art, true, but so is my mind. So are my experiences. So are my memories. So is my life and the choices I have made. The light gives us compound vision, the ability to see all this at once. I was Nona Dixon and Opal Doucet and every role I had ever played. I was a squadron of women. The camera’s spotlight followed me as I scooted away from the crowd, back to the soundstage, to the altar made of fake shrubbery. I couldn’t see past the light, but I didn’t need to.
The studio was dark now. Commercial break. I felt metal on mywrists, the twisting of my limbs behind my back. I could hear the scraping of my shoes as they raked across the floor. I tried to wrangle away, to jerk myself free, but there were two officers, one of me.
As they dragged me out, Bertie looked at me like she was witnessing something familiar, like I was a vision haunting her, but then her attendant wheeled her away, and she was barricaded by the crowd. I could hear the band playing “Endless Love” through the studio doors as they loaded me into the police cruiser. I could hear Vincent say, “Darling, let’s not let this ruin our special day.” I could hear Celeste: “Love, I’m tired of waiting.”
I watched the sky through the window as they drove me away. All I could see was a cover of clouds, the police cruiser’s bouncing light. I knew the comet was up there, made of ice and dust and cosmic dirt, and I imagined Halley sitting atop it, riding it, laughing, her head tipped back, her mouth wide, like she was about to swallow the entire universe.
THE HAMILTON COUNTY COURTHOUSE RESEMBLEDsomething of a church and a museum. Maroon-speckled carpet. Brass railings. Long rows of wooden pews faced the judge’s bench, behind which was a large oil painting depicting soldiers atop horses, revolutionaries of some sort, though I wasn’t sure of which war.
