To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

Amanda Stott-Smith’s identity had been pinned to being her children’s mother, to being Jason’s wife. Hearing how she had lost it all and would pay for that loss would have been stultifying, and in addition to whatever else it was, the half smile seemed like a way for Amanda to cover her mortification.

“The Country Husband”

“Her head was bent and her face was set in that empty half smile behind which the whipped soul is suspended.”

Mothers who mean to commit suicide after killing their children rarely succeed, scholars argue, because they have already killed what is most important to them. Their suicide, in other words, becomes redundant.

“Did she think the children would be going to heaven?” Hitchens asked. I told him that I believed she did. I appreciated how quickly he saw that the existence of heaven, something he actively did not believe existed, might matter to Amanda, that her thinking heaven was where she was sending her children might be a factor here.

When I was Trinity’s age, my father told me something, a realization he had come to when he became a father. He said, “I could have taught you and your brother that ‘yellow’ was called ‘red’ and you would have believed me.” My father told me this story more than once, not because he wanted lauding for not having tricked little children, but as an example of how power might be misused.

“I thought maybe the right thing was to make sure that everyone knew how perfect and wonderful Daddy was and I would take all the heat.” A plan she had followed through on.

“We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.” —Janet Malcolm, Iphigenia in Forest Hills

There is no such thing as an immutable truth, much as our hearts might yearn for it and our justice systems demand it; there are only the stories we tell ourselves.