When the machines connected to Marisa begin to flatline, I keep singing.
My Bonnie lies over the ocean. My Bonnie lies over the sea.
I watch Michael kneel down at his daughter’s bedside. Louisa curls her hand over Marisa’s. Anya jackknifes at the waist, an origami of grief.
My Bonnie lies over the ocean. Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.
There is a high-pitched hum, and then a nurse comes in to turn off the monitor, to rest her hand gently on Marisa’s forehead as she offers her condolences.
Bring back.
Bring back.
Bring back my Bonnie to me.
When I finish, the only sound in the room is the absence of a little girl.
“I’m so sorry,” I say again.
Michael holds out his hand. I do not know what he wants, but my body seems to. I hand him the pick I’ve been using to strum the guitar. He presses it into the plaster, just above the spread of Marisa’s handprint.
I hold myself together until I walk out of the room. Then I lean against the wall and slide down until I am sitting, sobbing. I cradle my guitar in my arms, the way Louisa was cradling the body of her daughter.
And then.
I hear a baby crying—that high, hitched shriek that grows more and more hysterical. Heavily I get to my feet and trace the sound two doors down from Marisa’s room, where an infant is being held down by her tearful mother and a nurse while a phlebotomist attempts to draw blood. They all look up when I enter. “Maybe I can help,” I say.
It has been a hellish, busy day at the hospital, and my drive home is consumed by the thought of a large glass of wine and collapsing on the couch, which is why I almost don’t pick up my cell phone when I see Max’s name flash onto the screen. But then I sigh and answer, and he asks me for just a few moments of my time. He doesn’t say what it’s for, but I’m assuming it has to do with paperwork being signed. There is, even after a divorce, no shortage of paperwork.
So I am completely surprised when he arrives with a woman in tow. And I’m even more shocked when I realize that the reason he’s brought her is to save me from the newly degenerate life I’m living.
I’d laugh, if I didn’t feel like crying quite so much. Today I watched a three-year-old die, but my ex-husband thinks thatIam what’s wrong with this world. Maybe if his God wasn’t so busy paying attention to the lives of people like Vanessa and me, he could have saved Marisa.
But life isn’t fair. It’s why little girls don’t make it to their fourth birthdays. It’s why I lost so many babies. It’s why people like Max and my governor seem to think they can tell me who to love. If life isn’t fair, I don’t have to be, either. And so I channel all the anger I’m feeling at things I cannot change or control, and direct it at the man and woman sitting on the couch across from me.
I wonder if Pastor Clive, who runs the largest gay-bashing fraternity in these parts, has ever considered what Jesus would think of his tactics. Something tells me that a progressive rabbi who ministered to lepers and prostitutes and everyone else society had marginalized—someone who recommended treating people the way you wanted to be treated—wouldn’t exactly admire the Eternal Glory Church’s position. But I have to give them this: they are smooth. They have circular rhetoric for everything. I find myself fascinated by Pauline, who won’t even call herself a former lesbian, because she sees herself as so blatantly heterosexual now. Is it really that easy to believe what you tell yourself? If I had said, in the middle of all those failed pregnancies and miscarriages, that I was happy,wouldI have been?
If only the world were as simple as Pauline seems to think.
I am trying to trap her in her own circular logic when Vanessa gets home. I give her a kiss hello. I would have anyway, but I’m particularly happy that Pauline and Max have to watch. “This is Pauline, and of course you know Max,” I say. “They’re here to keep us from going to Hell.”
Vanessa looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Zoe, can we talk for a minute?” she says, and drags me into the kitchen. “I’m not going to tell you you can’t invite someone into our house,” she says, “but what the hell are you thinking?”
“Did you know you’re not a lesbian?” I say. “You just have a lesbianproblem.”
“The only problem I have right now is getting these two people out of my living room,” Vanessa replies, but she follows me back inside. I see her getting more and more tightly wound as Pauline tells us that everyone gay has been sexually abused and that femininity means wearing panty hose and makeup. Finally, Vanessa reaches her limit. She throws Max and Pauline out and closes the door behind them. “I love you,” she tells me, “but if you ever have your ex-husband over again with that poor man’s Anita Bryant, I’d like enough advance notice to get away first. Three thousand miles or so.”
“Max said he had to talk to me,” I explain. “I figured it was about the divorce. I didn’t know he was bringing backup.”
Vanessa snorts. She steps out of her high heels. “I don’t even like the fact that they were on my couch, frankly. I feel like we ought to fumigate. Or hold an exorcism or something—”
“Vanessa!”
“I just didn’t expect to see him in my house. Especially tonight, when I . . .” Her voice trails off into silence.
“When you what?”
“Nothing.” She shakes her head.
