Diamond
At near midnight, in the easternmost cell of the South Bay Penitentiary, Diamond recalls a memory of Will when he was still small.
Too small, she’d thought—small enough that, for a time, she had to buy baby clothes two sizes smaller than his age. Every morning before her graduate school classes she wrote down his height and weight in a notebook as if she were analyzing a farm animal. Then she would graph it and compare him to a chart of boys’ averages from around the world. Even then, he had been a serious child. Diamond had taken him to the pediatrician when he was eight months old, asking why he still hadn’t laughed yet.
Some children just take longer,the doctor had reassured her.Don’t worry.
But it was a milestone all the same, and being unable to check it off, Diamond felt it stick in her side like a forgotten pin on a tailored dress. She tried everything; she danced; she brought in entertainers; she showed Will funny cartoons.
And he would give her his little smile. Proper, even as a baby.
Then one afternoon she was working on a market research study while Will sat in his pen beside her desk. She was tense that day, the frustration in her chest high behind a dam. That afternoon, a cat had jumped down onto the sill of her open window and knocked over a flowerpot there, sending it crashing to the floor.
Diamond, so caught up in her work, had jumped at the commotion. The cat startled and darted back outside. She must have made a funny sound in her throat, even though she doesn’t remember it. But it doesn’t matter. What did matter was that she heard a tiny giggle emerge from the pen.
Her head whipped over, and sure enough, there was Will, her serious Will, laughing at her expression, his eyes bright and lit up with mirth.
She closes her eyes in the cell and thinks of that laugh. He started growing rapidly after that, and the graph she made of his size shifted, the curvesoaring steeper, her marveling at his lengthening body and limbs. He was so strong. So perfect.
He could bear it, the sand.
For a while, she had her doubts about trying the philosopher’s stone on Will, and the first time, Will reacted so violently to it that Diamond thought she’d lost him. She had cried, had asked Peter if it was worth it. But Peter had been the one to push it, could tell that his son’s soul was resilient enough for the challenge. He had such avisionfor what they could create, and Diamond had so many plans for what they could do with such a creation. Their ambition had bound them together in love. The potential reward for success was so great. Think of the life they could give Will, should they succeed in creating sand. He wouldn’t have to be a dirt-poor child waiting by the porch for her father to come home, wouldn’t have to decide between hiding or smiling based on her father’s mood. He wouldn’t have to wear shoes so worn down that pebbles came in through the cracking soles. He wouldn’t have to survive by being soniceto everyone, flattening oneself just to be accepted by others, hoping silently that they would let him into their circles. He wouldn’t have to struggle to fit into high society. He wouldn’t have tomake it.He could grow up having already arrived. He could be the one to bend others. He would want for nothing. He would be the heir to an empire.
So on they went, batch after batch.Here you go, baby,she would say as she tucked the medicine in his mouth.Okay, Mama,he would answer obediently as he swallowed it. She would hold back her emotions and record everything, would encourage Will to keep going when he could hardly bear it any longer.
And hadn’t he come out of it? Hadn’t they found their way to the top of the world?
Diamond looks away from the cell door. Her body is so weak now; there is pain in her all the time. She has lived with it for so long, managed to get by year after year with Amerson’s help, and yet, at the end of it, the old woman had turned on her. Everyone turns on her, even after all she’s done. She supposes it doesn’t matter now. Death has waited so patiently, during all these extra years that she shouldn’t have had, but in the end, he always wins.
And maybe she will too. Maybe he’ll take her now, after the arrest and before the trials begin, so she won’t be forced to sit in some goddamn court before the world, won’t let anyone dare to judge her.
Because hasn’t she lived a meaningful life? Wasn’t she destined for greatness? Why else would her birth mother have named her Diamond? Didn’t she give this world the chance to see what it could be, the opportunity for perfection, the realization it can be achieved? What did anyone giveherwhen she was little? Didn’t she earn everything?
She hasn’t heard a word about Will yet.
She doesn’t know if he survived the raid.
Her thoughts drift to Sam. Perhaps she didn’t love Sam, but she cared for the girl in her own way. Once upon a time, perhaps she even imagined Sam in her place someday, when she was gone, at Will’s side and helping to grow this empire that she had created. There is a fire in that girl that reminds her so much of herself, that desperate need to be seen, that desire to be better, greater, more.
Diamond’s chest is hurting now, but she remains silent and still, refuses to call for the guards. A life spent growing in the dirt, then sitting on the most exclusive university quad in the world, under grapevines from the hill of her estate, watching the city below. She sees it play out as if flipping through pages of a book, this extraordinary life. After everything, this is where she ends now, in a windowless, one-hundred-square-foot room.
Fine, then. Let it be this way. She knows her own worth. She closes her eyes, leans her head against the wall, and thinks of Peter. God, she still misses him. They were supposed to rise up in the world together. She dwells on him long enough that, after a while, she thinks she sees him standing in the corner, leaning against the door, waiting patiently for her. Forever handsome.
Peter,she says, but her voice doesn’t come out.
Are you finally coming?he asks.
She holds a hand out to him, and she thinks he takes it.
Diamond, the world has changed us.
Peter, we’ve changed the world.
I am a composer, and born to become a Kapellmeister, and I neither can nor ought thus to bury the talent for composition with which God has so richly endowed me. […]
Letter from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to his father Leopold Mozart, translated from German, February 1778
