Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: A Novel

by Jessica Guerrieri

Nana said Mom thrived then because she felt endlessly influential. Later on, as I began to develop what my mom called “a mind of my own,” she took my growth as an affront to her past efforts—all the times she licked my fur and placed food at my feet. As if by wanting my autonomy, I was somehow ungrateful for her role in helping me become a full-grown cat.

Most days I feel continually blindsided by my family’s vortex of need. Since I’m at the center, everything happens to me while somehow simultaneously happening around me.

Existing with love but no place to put it.

all. Dottie walks over to the paper I have laid out for her on the floor. I am already dreading the mess she will make. For a moment, we are painting in tandem. She is appeased, if only temporarily, and I am doing it all: working, mothering, living. What should be a wash of satisfaction followed by a surge of happiness is replaced by a need for more. Better. Why can’t the momentary bliss satisfy me? Like the last flame before it transforms to an ember, I can only exist in the waiting—the space that knows the flicker will die out.

knew it. He knew it. But I had yet to meet Christine, and I was already convinced that the only way for a woman to have it all was for her to exist as an island. I didn’t want anyone to show me otherwise.

“Sometimes the price you’ll pay will cost you everything.”

“The thing about being an artist, any type—poet, singer, photographer—is you create something that speaks for other people. They want to say it, to find the vision, but that’s not their gift to share with the world—it’s yours. Some will thank you for saying what they never could. Others will waste away in jealousy. Either way, it will consume you entirely while you try to fill the emptiness with other things.”

How do I even begin to explain that the time Amy pulled her mother from the water, Isla wasn’t trying to die so much as escape herself by any means necessary?

“After they were born, my heart exploded into an infinite number of pieces, and I saw the appeal of placing each of those pieces directly back into them. I believed my children could be at the center of my universe, just like Christine did. Well, she still does. But it’s not enough. And now, every day, it just feels like I’ve become a hostage inside my own life—forced to choose between them or myself.”

the narrative of motherhood reads mostly about all that’s given and nothing about what’s taken away.

Grief bleeds into the marrow of a mother’s bones when she loses a child; the loss is forever a part of her. A baby who only exists in memory becomes all the things they could have been, all they never got a chance to experience,”

There and then I decided to drown the lie, allow it to be swallowed up within the cesspool of my despair.”

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.

“There isn’t a better, softer option when it comes to being a mother. These decisions we have to make—as it turns out, all the ways ache. That’s just what happens. We’ve exposed our hearts completely to love them that much. There isn’t a less painful way.”

The intricacies of family have very little to do with blood and biology and everything to do with whom we welcome into our hearts—those worthy of earning keys to certain chambers within.

I want to survive, while all of me knows that Isla never truly wanted to die. She just no longer knew how to live.

motherhood is not a confined space but a wide-open one made for exploration.