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I don’t want to pretend when I get home to Henri. I don’t want to have a panic attack any time we’re around strangers. I don’t want to be this person I’m discovering inside me. The one who can rationalize away the things she’s done. The one who even takes pleasure in some of it. Because sometimes, when I picture the shock on my aunt’s face as I plunged the knife into her chest or remember the guards’ screams as they burned alive, I feel warmed by it. That vicious place inside me sated, momentarily. There are times when it seems to be the only thing that brings me joy. Henri deserves better,
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Perhaps it’s time I came around to this way people have of saying things they don’t mean. If I’d realized sooner that this is how the world works, I’d be so much better off right now.
There’s a fiction we tell ourselves when we’re saying goodbye to someone we love. We always pretend there will be another time, because it would be too painful to acknowledge it’s the last. But I want to feel the pain of my answer, because I think it might haunt me less to get it out of the way right now. “No,” I tell him. “I won’t be coming back.”
but this baby is innocent and when she opens her tiny slits of eyes to look up at me, I see faith there. This baby trusts me to care for her, to keep her safe. In spite of all the evil things I’ve done, and wanted and thought, she believes I will keep her warm and safe and fed. And she is right—I would. Holding her reminds me that there is good inside of me along with the bad. That the good is capable of winning, and I want it to. That rage inside me has been satisfying at times, but ultimately, I’d rather feel peaceful. I’d rather be a person worth this tiny human’s faith.
“Don’t presume to know what is in my heart,” he snaps. “It’s a terrible situation, but if you think for a moment I could be capable of finding a silver lining in all this, you do not give me enough credit.”
I squeeze my eyes tight. If the children were hurt or threatened, there would be no end to my rage, to my need for revenge. But until that time, I want to remain who I am: a person who went to a dark place and came back from it. A person capable of evil but refusing to give in.
She climbs into my lap, her head resting against my chest, and my throat squeezes tight. This time with her is more fleeting than either of us can realize, but I’m only losing what every mother does, eventually. There will always come a day when your child is too big to be held in your arms, when she no longer wants to sit in your lap or curl up against you at night. A day when she leaves home, when she creates her own family, when you are separated by death. We all, in the end, have to give up the things we love, and I am no exception. Even so, I would not change a thing.
