When The Lights Go Out. Mary Kubica
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the backs of my hands.
Miranda’s husband, she told me, is employed by the Department of Public Works. She stays at home with Jack and Paul, though what she always wanted to be—what she used to be in her life before kids—was a medical malpractice attorney. She asked how long Aaron and I have been married and when I told her, her eyebrows rose up in curiosity and she asked about kids.
Do we have them?
Do we plan to have them?
It seemed an intimate conversation to have with someone I hardly knew, and yet there was a great thrill at saying the words aloud, as if cementing them to reality. I felt my cheeks redden as I thought of that morning before dawn when Aaron rose, dreamlike, above me, lifting my nightgown up over my head. Outside it was dark, just after four o’clock in the morning, and our eyes were still drowsy, heavy with sleep, our minds not yet preoccupied by the thoughts that arrive with daylight. We moved together there on the bed, sinking into the aging mattress. And then later, while grinning at each other over mugs of coffee on the dock, watching as the fleets of sailboats went floating by on the bay, I had to wonder if it happened at all, or if it was only a dream.
When Miranda asked, I told her that we’re trying. Trying to have a child, trying to start a family. An odd choice of words for creating a baby, if you ask me. Trying is how one learns to ride a bike. To knit, to sew. To write poetry.
And yet it was exactly what we were doing as Aaron and I made love with reckless abandon, and then followed it up a week or two later with a home pregnancy test. The tests were all negative thus far, that lone pink line on the display screen notifying me again and again that I wasn’t yet pregnant. I tried not to let it get the best of me, and yet it was hard to do. It wasn’t as though Aaron and I minded the time spent trying; in fact, we enjoyed it quite a bit, but with every passing month I yearned exponentially more for a baby. For a baby to have, a baby to hold.
I never mentioned to Aaron that I was taking the pregnancy tests.
I took them while he was at work, watching out the cottage window as his car slipped from view and then, when he was out of sight, rushing to the bathroom, where I closed and locked the door in case he mistakenly left something behind and had to return for it.
And then, when the single pink line appeared on the display screen as it always did, I wrapped the negative pregnancy test sticks up in tissue and discarded them discreetly in the garbage bins.
Miranda beamed when I told her that we’re trying. “How exciting!” she told me, her smile mirroring the one on my own face.
And then, helping herself to a slice of her own blueberry loaf and running a hand over her bump for a second time, she said that her baby and my baby could one day go to school together.
That they could one day be friends.
And it was a thought that filled me with consummate joy. I grinned.
I’d been a lone wolf for much of my life. An introvert. The kind of woman who never felt comfortable in her own skin. Aaron changed that for me.
The idea thrilled me to bits and, in turn, I instinctively stroked my own empty womb and thought how much I wanted my baby to have a friend.
Tonight makes five days since I’ve been asleep. It’s my first night in my new place. I spend it not sleeping, but rather imagining myself dead. I think of what it must be like for Mom, being dead. Is there blackness all around her, a pit of nothingness, the blackest of the black holes? Or has time simply stopped for her, and there’s no such thing anymore as the living and the dead? Sometimes I wonder if she’s not dead at all but rather alive in the clay urn of hers, screaming to get out. I wonder if there’s enough oxygen in the urn. Can Mom breathe? But then I remember it doesn’t matter anyway.
Mom is dead.
I wonder if it hurts when you die. If it hurt when Mom died. And I think, in frightening detail, what it feels like when you can’t breathe. I find myself holding my breath until my lungs begin to hurt, to burn. It’s a prickling pain that stretches from my throat to my torso. It’s reflexive, automatic when my mouth gapes open, and I suck in all the oxygen I can to soothe the burn.
It hurts, I decide. It hurts to die.
There’s a clock on the wall, one that came with the house. Tick, tock, tick, tock, it goes all night long, keeping track of the minutes I don’t sleep. Keeping count for me. It’s loud, a conga drum pounding in my ear, and though I try and remove the batteries, the tick, tock doesn’t go away. It stays.
I feel out of place in this strange place. The house smells different than what I’m used to, an earthy smell like pine. It’s older than Mom’s and my old home, where I lived my entire life. One of the windows doesn’t close tight so that when the wind whips its way around the house as it does tonight, air sneaks in. I can’t feel it but I hear it, the hiss of the wind forcing its way in through a gap.
I lie there in bed, trying hard to catch my breath, to not think about dying, to will myself to do the impossible and sleep. Beside me, on the floor, are four boxes, the only ones I brought from the old home. Some clothes, a few picture frames, and a box of random paperwork Mom kept, just an old white bankers box, kept closed with a string and button. It seemed important enough for Mom to keep, and so I kept it. A thought comes to me now: Could my social security card be in that box, tucked away with Mom’s financial paperwork?
I climb out of bed and turn on a light, dropping to the floor beside the box. I loosen the string and lift the lid, meeting reams of paper head-on. If there’s any sort of method to the madness, I don’t see it.
I search through the paperwork for my social security card, to be sure the numbers I dashed off on the FAFSA form weren’t incorrect. That I didn’t write the wrong ones down by mistake. Because never in my life have I been asked to give my social security number, and so it’s conceivable, I think, that I have the numbers mixed-up. I look for the card itself, grabbing stacks of paper by the handful and flipping through them one sheet at a time, hoping the card falls out. But instead I find the deed to our home, an old checkbook ledger. Gas and electric bills. Years’ worth of tax returns that gives me pause, because if I know one thing, it’s that Uncle Sam isn’t about to pay out tax refunds without a social security number.
I set everything else aside except for the tax returns. My eyes go straight to the exemptions, the spot where someone would list their dependents and their dependents’ social security numbers, meaning me and my social security number. Except that when I come to it, I find the line blank. Mom didn’t list me as a dependent and, though I double-check the year of the form to be sure I was alive at the time, I see that I was. That I was eleven years old at the time the form was completed.
And though I don’t know much about income taxes, I do know it would have saved Mom a buck or two if she had thought to use me as a tax deduction. A baby gift from Uncle Sam.
I wonder why Mom, who was frugal to a fault, didn’t claim me as a dependent that year.
It was a mistake, I think. An oversight only. I dig through to find another 1040 in the tower of paperwork—this one older, when I was four years old—and search there for my name and social security number, finding it nowhere. Another year that Mom didn’t claim me.
I sift through them all, six tax return forms that I can find—my movements becoming faster, more frantic as I dig—and discover that never once did Mom claim me as a dependent. Not one single time.
I turn off the light and get back into bed. I lie there, wondering why Mom didn’t claim me as a dependent. What did she know about the IRS that I don’t know? Probably a lot, I reason. I don’t pay taxes. I’ve never once been sent a check from them. My only knowledge comes from hearsay, from eavesdropping on clients like Mr. and Mrs. Ricci, discussing whether they could claim Mrs. Ricci’s shopping binges as exemptions, all those fancy clothes she toted home in the trunks of cabs.