Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: A Novel

by Jessica Guerrieri

I remember tracing the remarkable texture along the back of her hands—how her veins protruded up along the bones that connected each finger—their pillowy softness. I tried to pinch them without squeezing so I wouldn’t hurt her. I wanted to lay my body between the folds of her skin and become entombed in her forever.

The time I’m allotted to act in one role is finite. Wife, then mother—without any guaranteed scraps left over for myself. The need to be everything to everyone is relentless.

Funny how we are doomed to reenact our parents’ choices, but in a way that’s uniquely our own, so we can convince ourselves that it’s different somehow.

I am all too familiar with unease as my normal resting state. Since birth I have been mis-wired. The receptors that should have been loaded with serotonin and dopamine on Saturday cartoon-and-pancake mornings from my childhood were replaced with the sensation of being submerged inside a glass cage with a slow leak that dripped just enough water for me to know I’d drown someday, just not necessarily that day.

And finally, my children. My god, my children. No one was more surprised than me when it turned out my children were the answer to all my problems: my escapism of choice. With one whiff of the top of their heads, the relief flooded me, a gelatinous goo that was both warm and amniotic in its purity.

The loss filled me with an emptiness that spread through my whole being. It seeped into the marrow of my bones.”

“Now that you’re a father, I know you understand you could never choose a favorite. Of course, each child stands out at times and phases—glowing during their moment in the sun. But they make their own light, the kind that has absolutely nothing to do with us. You could never single out just one to save. We’d sacrifice ourselves as parents never to have to make that choice.”

You’ll come to discover one day that you exist for them as the sun, the moon, and all their stars, and then the next day you’ll wake up and have to settle for being a lantern outside their windows.