Free One Heart by Jane Mccafferty Page A

split second and looked at me. From that moment on nothing was ever the same between James and me.
    â€œI’ll stay with you,” Wendell said.
    â€œNo, no, go on with your father.”
    I wanted to be perfectly alone. I was so calm.
    â€œCalm?” I remember Raelene saying. “But weren’t you screaming on the inside?”
    â€œNo, I had the kind of calm that’s on the other side of screaming.” It’s not possible to say what that’s like. But I was where I’d never been before. And never been again. Though part of where I was I suspect is still inside me.
    I knew if I kept diving I would find my child. And when I found her, I knew I would find a hole in the world that I would fall through. It would be the deepest, blackest, hungriest hole in the world, and I would fall through, and nobody would follow me down, and I wouldn’t want them to. But first I had to find her.
    Her body was not on the edge of the pond, but out near the middle. At the time this made sense. Only later did I try to figure out how a child who couldn’t swim made it out to the middle of the pond.
    And to Raelene I didn’t say a thing about how it was to swim with her body toward the land, and I won’t ever say a thing about that to anyone, though I did tell James.
    I didn’t tell him until many years later after this happened, though. Because I hated him so much, hated him immediately, hated him more than I loved him, and hated myself even more than that, which was powerful hatred.
    I hated myself too much to weep. Weeping in grief is a kind of pleasure. The only pleasure when it comes to grief. I felt I didn’t deserve it. No release. Not for a minute. No pleasure, ever again. No consolation . So back at home, with Wendell locked in his room throwing a ball against the wall for hours, and James in our room weeping for two days straight, I was sleepless and out on the back stoop chain-smoking. And hating James more and more the more I heard his crying. The grand indulgence of his crying.
    So you can see by nature I’m partly cold hearted. And even then I knew that. I thought to myself, A good woman would go comfort her man, a good wife would hold her husband as he weeps. A good woman wouldn’t sit here frozen up with rage, a good woman would run to Wendell and tell him time will heal .
    *  *  *
    Does time heal, or is that just something we like to say to people? I don’t believe it heals . Not really. Time goes by, and the buried pain gets duller, true enough. But is that healing? Was I healing as I froze? No. Healing is something else entirely. It happens within time, but it’s not just time doing the trick.
    Half a year after we lost A., I got the news that my father dropped dead of a heart attack. It happened in public, on a street in New York City, where nobody knew him. I went to his funeral, but I didn’t digest a thing. Not possible. And years later, when my mother died, which was four years after Wendell was killed, I went to that funeral too. All I know is I sat in the front pew with my eyes closed. I tried to hold a picture of my mother in my mind, but couldn’t. I’d see her, then she’d start to shatter into pieces. It didn’t hurt a bit. And the faces of my children would blend into her shattered face. Then the face would explode like confetti and fall. I watched the explosion, didn’t feel a thing but dizzy. I looked at the coffin and thought, She’s in there, and didn’t feel a thing. But the person I suddenly missed was my father. Missed him like I was a child, like he could come and gather me up. I remember my heart like a car starting to plow into a field of quicksand. I remember I slammed on the brakes and coughed too loud until I felt safe again. Everyone has a time in life where they think, Cry now and you’ll never stop . Maybe it’s these times where you have to say, “Okay, ladies and