Anthos / Logias
By Visiting Writer Elizabeth McConaghy
ACT I: JENNIFER
If she busies herself she doesn’t think of it often, but she is not busy enough that she doesn’t feel it in the back of her throat. Not unlike the first day of a coming cold, it lingers there. She cannot swallow it.
Jennifer Wilbanks wasn’t one to lie around weekend mornings with John who didn’t put pants on Saturdays before ten. Her movement was no more symptomatic than his stillness, so why did everyone say to slow down? There was energy that ran the length of her spine like liquid, coursing from body to brain at a zip. She had no need to mitigate it. She breathed the mineral smell of predawn January through December.
She got the sense it was not normal to see life as a string of different lived selves, her own not contiguous with one another. What scared her most about marrying John was that this self, this beaming-girlfriend-of-John self, would be her last, and it had already begun to misfit her.
They invited 600 guests, an outrageous number, but it happens. She had fourteen bridesmaids, each one in a different dress because fourteen women in the same dress seemed absurd. There would be a grits bar with dinner and red velvet cake for dessert, groom’s favorite. When asked to describe her bridal style in five words or less she said southern not country, traditional, casual, easy, fun, authentically us. She was trying to describe not herself but the version of herself who would marry John on the happiest day of her life.
What she wanted was everyone letting loose without getting sloppy on a polished wood dance floor with center monogram. What she wanted them to remember at the end of the night was having the best time while deeply impressed by the whole event. She wanted to present type-B with type-A quality results. She said planning a wedding was stressful, but it was nights at home making dinner conversation that most strained her.
Enter idea, stage left, creeping slowly. Idea rolls in like a fog, softening the hard edges of the scene Jennifer had been struggling to picture. She could see the dress but not herself in it, or the food but nobody eating it. Idea fogged scene until totally obscured. When idea receded scene had changed. Jennifer was alone eating a pastry on a park bench, watching people who were not watching her. There was nothing remarkable in this fantasy but that it soothed her. She licked her fingers.
She was proud not one of them guessed she’d run. Not one person suspected she wanted anything other than what she’d gotten. Not one could imagine her a stranger, alone somewhere far from home in a life also strange and far. Let me go, she thought on the bus out of Atlanta. Let me go, let me go, her mantra.
She left late on her run so John could not join her, bus ticket and cash in her bra. She kept steady pace out of the neighborhood then let herself sprint. At the library she called a cab to the bus station for the Greyhound to Austin. It was Mississippi before her heart slowed enough she could sleep through to Texas. In Dallas she changed course for Vegas. In Vegas she knew she was screwed when she saw she’d already made the news. The adrenaline was back full force, shape-shifted from elation to panic. She made a last ditch for Albuquerque where her father was crying on TV inside a 7-11. It hadn’t been long, but she was pragmatic. She gave it up and called 911.
At the bus station in Vegas she watched a man and woman fighting outside. He was suntanned and sweating, silent while she shouted at him. She pushed him. He grabbed her by the wrist and shook her. She slapped him hard across the jaw then his whole body went tense. She leaned close into his face, smiled a mean smile so he let go of her and started to laugh. She wasn’t laughing but they walked off holding onto each other, her hand at his belt, his through her hair. Jennifer watched them, hot. When they were out of sight she locked herself in the family bathroom and came in seconds flat. She washed her hands, met her own eyes in the bathroom mirror.
What she loved most about running were the fits of brilliance she had, ideas unoriginal once the endorphins wore off but as long as her legs moved she was lit up, poised for change. She was training for a marathon when she met John, a talker. Immediately he wanted to train with her, and, compelled to set him at ease, she let him. That liminal feeling was gone with John plodding just shy of her shoulder. She tried teaching him to lift his knees but his feet stayed heavy.
They made an action figure out of her, the doll in running pants and a T-Shirt that read “Vegas Baby.” It came with a towel to drape over its head like she did in Albuquerque when the police picked her up. You’ve got to laugh, everyone told her.
When she made the 911-call to report her attack by Hispanic male, white female, she was picturing the couple from the bus depot having at her together in the back of a van in the parking lot. She’d been working the fantasy over in elicit detail since she saw them—the smell of him at her back, the woman’s mouth against her neck.
John had the ring ready when she got home where he put it back on her finger first thing. He was fine with her silence if it meant she was staying. After a week she found a place across town, booked a truck, bought boxes and started packing. She should have done it this way all along, of course she should have, but somehow telling John it was over every morning required more energy than buying a bus ticket had.
Jennifer Wilbanks was not an impulsive person. She had considered all possible outcomes, just underestimated how quick the response to news of a missing white woman. She’d hoped to be farther when it broke. What she did not expect was to give up her status as a serious person. And while the experience of being herself was essentially unchanged, it would never again match that of those who knew of her before they met her.
ACT II: LISA
How to re imagine that drive without the frenzy later attached it. The road hummed under her. The trees changed shape around her. She did not set off in a fever but a trance. Lisa Nowak drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando making excellent time.
A psychiatrist would say what surprised him was the thoroughness of her preparation. The female criminal caught in a love triangle, he said, would typically kill the object of desire on impulse. When had being female ever been about impulse? She wondered from across the courtroom.
She knew the detective was the one who told the press she’d worn diapers. In the interview room he seemed to think they were sparring. Her answers were precise but her mind was somewhere else. She’d known so many men like this one already, legs spread wide under the table to exaggerate the bulk of his balls. He could not engage her.
She worked in the garden Saturday mornings. Summers she could not dig deep enough to find cool dirt under her hands. She stayed married nineteen years before she left her first-love, that Navy man. It was the way he stayed the same while she grew larger, an irreconcilable difference of orbit.
The space shuttle Columbia circled Earth 4,808 times before its explosion. A piece of foam insulation the size of a briefcase broke from the external tank in the force of the launch, so when the Columbia reentered the atmosphere sixteen days later, the system failed, heat destroyed its wings and the shuttle split apart in the sky, leaving 84,000 fragments across Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. Did the astronauts know their ship was broken when they turned toward home? Could they sense the catastrophe had already been set out before them? They had only to descend to meet it.
Three years later, Nowak boarded the shuttle Discovery. Onboard she operated the ship’s fifty-seven foot robotic arms, watched metal limbs move with her command through infinite black space. So intense her focus she could almost touch the smooth cargo with her hands as she reached for it. She could almost feel its weight in her arms.
In Orlando she donned trench coat and wig like a screen queen. She met Shipman at the terminal and boarded the same shuttle to the parking lot where she tracked the woman to her car. Shipman, uneasy on the shuttle by now terrified, got in fast and shut the door behind her, but Nowak was at her window asking for help, so Shipman cracked the window and that was when Lisa used the pepper spray. It was true she didn’t go there to kill the woman, but she was unused to executing a plan without anticipating its exact outcome, and the newness of the experience made her heady.
The arresting officer asked what she was doing with diaper boxes—toddler size—in her trunk. The truth was she had too many groceries to get inside after her last trip to the store, but she told the officer she was trying to minimize pit stops—a little road humor—and he went with that. She’d later think how stupid they were, calling her the “diaper astronaut.” Before that she’d been the astro-mom. Both were diminishing, but she preferred the open hostility of the latter to the saccharine former.
Buzz Aldrin, astro-hero, called it the melancholy of things done. What was left on earth to conquer once a body had entered space? There was no gentle way to come back to Earth. She’d watched the whole planet grow smaller, never again to regain its original size.
That was the thing they talked about most in bed, Lisa Nowak with her astro-boyfriend. They’d pass a bottle and remember. It was hard for her to see other men as her equal, but he was exactly that. He was not more than she was, but he was not less. What angered her was not that he was in love with another woman, but that the other woman was earthbound and he didn’t care.
She heard a lecture once on dark matter and thought of it often, the material unseen by light but known to gravity. The land was so flat, grass dry, the sky on summer days what she called “banal blue,” but standing at the kitchen window, her hands in soapy water, she’d close her eyes and imagine she could feel its dark energy press against her.
A woman skydives from the edge of space. From twenty-two miles above sea level she throws herself. Her body moves in free fall. With nothing but darkness around her there is no way to mark her distance so she cannot feel she is moving at all. Watch her there descending. She is weightless, suspended, falling with imperceptible speed.
What did Lisa Nowak feel as she drove, hurtling toward the salvation that would ruin her? She felt clear, her brain pure again, fully oxygenated and clean as crystal. She felt how solid the ground, how broad the sky. She felt the full force of the act and knew with total clarity her capacity for its execution and impact. She would take control of events with the same instinct for ownership that had brought her level with the solar system. She knew the present moment was hers only. Only she could move with the velocity required to possess it.
ACT III: ANDREA
The water gets in through the tap. It spreads to cover the floor, picking up small fallen debris as it goes, seeping under closed doors. The water lies flat as it starts to rise, taking pictures from walls, lifting chairs from the table. From the street the windows go dark before the house begins leaking. The house has drowned. It is drowning.
Sometimes Andrea thought Rusty was poisoning her food, and some days she thought the baby was staring at her strangely. When she lay down she heard horses running past the house and the sound jolted her so she could not lie down again.
After it happened, it occurred to her how clumsy a mouth with teeth and bones. How if her mouth were emptied it might become malleable enough to stretch to a shape that could fit a sound as terrible as her sorrow. She dreamt she was standing in the dark on the bed of a lake. The water was filled with bodies. She screamed the children’s names into the black air. When the bodies came close enough to reach she turned them over but every one had a face like hers.
What was lost in the horror was the ordinary brightness, sunspots across the linoleum. Her voice down the hall reading to the boys before bed, the book about two ducks named Dibble and Dabble. Noah turning somersaults in the neighborhood pool while she counted for him, her feet in the water. He’d come up for air blinking chlorine out of his eyes while she made a drum roll on the concrete then told him his time. Rusty swung the boys by their ankles and sang “cuckoo, cuckoo” like a clock.
It’s true, the children were dead already, but how they were still taken from her once the story broke. How those strangers wrote to her and about her, discussing her at length in vague detail. As though they were the ones who lost the children. She’d hear what they were saying sometimes and she’d think, “but they were mine. Not yours, but mine.”
They would blame her religion, too many children, the husband skeptical of anti-depressants, her upbringing, a traveling preacher, the great state of Texas, her red turtleneck, the style of her hair. The truth was not in their theories.
Before she met Rusty Yates, Andrea Kennedy was a nurse at the cancer center. She traded stories at the nurse’s station when she had a minute and answered patients’ questions when they asked her. She liked the hospital best in the middle of the night with its machine beeps and breaths, the silver sound of doors sliding open and closed. She liked stepping into the sun after a night spent under fluorescent bulbs and air-conditioning vents. She’d sit in her car letting the heat bake her before she turned the key to drive home.
She was sad sometimes, or lonely. She quit work with the first baby. She’d get bored but she wasn’t depressed in a clinical sense until the fourth boy, Luke. After Luke was born, Rusty came home to find her chewing her hands. He drew her a bath then fed the boys hot dogs for dinner. The next time it was a knife to her neck and Andrea begging him to let her do it. They put her on Haldol so she felt better before she felt worse. A nervous break, two suicide attempts, two hospitalizations. She was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.
In high school Andrea was swim team captain, National Honor Society officer, bulimic and depressed. She was valedictorian. She was overwhelmed sometimes by the sensation that her body did not feel her own. She forgot the feeling underwater, though, her feet scraping the wall to propel her with a muscled kick. She felt at once bodiless and all body, fully embodied, when she swam. She was grounded by the material of the water. The lightness of air was what got under her skin.
After Luke she told Rusty she was afraid the voices might be louder with another baby, but he reached for her to say what a wonderful mother she was, what a good thing they were doing. Later that summer she was pregnant with Mary, first and only girl. The doctor had said not to get pregnant again but here she was, off her medication once the test came back positive.
She read her Bible, stopped feeding the baby, stopped dressing herself, stopped dressing the children. She stopped schooling them and cleaning the house, doing the laundry, going to the store. She drew a bath one afternoon but Rusty came home to drain it.
There are monsters with sharper teeth than this one. There are curiosities less natural than this. A woman buries her children underwater. Her hands hold them under as they slip away. Surely the last thing they saw was not their murderer, but their mother who was, after all, just a blurred figure, just the weight of a much loved hand.
Did he call her twice or three times before she gave the children breakfast? Or did she not feed them? Was it something about a man coming by to price the backyard for fencing? Did he call just to say hello and ask about her morning? She could not later recall.
The doctor said not to leave Andrea alone with the children, but Rusty did it in small doses. First ten unsupervised minutes, then twenty. She fed Mary solid food before the baby had teeth to chew it. Then just one hour that morning.
Not hands that shed innocent blood, or a heart that devises wicked acts, but feet that are swift running to mischief, and she who sows discord among them. This was her sin, that the children were not righteous because she herself was evil. The way she was raising them, partway to hell, they could never be saved. Toward the end she believed the boys listened to the devil whisper in their ears.
Could she tell right from wrong when she did it? The answer mattered for her defense. But Andrea waited until Rusty’s car had pulled from the driveway before she filled the bath, and she locked the dog up before she started.
In an hour every child was dead, John, Paul, Luke, then Mary, then Noah who ran, but she caught him. She laid them out on the bed. She was not rough with their bodies. Then she called the police, and her husband.
After the trial the world came to her in 5’s. Everywhere she looked she found them and they comforted her. In the rare moments she was alone without a single 5 before her, she’d tap herself hard 5 times against her collarbone. Tap Noah, tap John, tap Paul, tap Luke, tap Mary.
Andrea Yates wondered who to pray to once her children were all gone and she’d sent them there. The universe was at once emptied of god presence and filled with the imperative for continued belief. Where had they gone otherwise? How else could she speak with them?
At the hospital where they finally kept her, they put Andrea in a room with Dena Schlosser who cut off her baby girl’s arms with a knife. It was unclear whether the match was meant as punishment or comfort, or simply followed the logic of institutional order. At night the two lay awake in narrow beds searching each other’s face for their own.
Outside her bedroom window when she was a girl was the back porch’s flat rooftop. Andrea used to crawl out and lay on the sandpaper shingles at night, staring up at the vast Texas sky. She did not know another. She’d imagine the moon was the bottom of a lit ship, or a spotlight skimming the waves, that she was buried deep and staring up, up from the bottom of the ocean. Some nights the idea was so real she had to feel for the air with her hands.
Most mornings she eats breakfast in the dining room. Afternoons she sits alone outside on a chair she moves with the sun. She grows older. She is no more Yates, or inmate patient, not mother, not wife, not Kennedy, the girl. But there is a feeling that preceded every name she was given. She sits alone and lets it wash over her.
END
If she busies herself she doesn’t think of it often, but she is not busy enough that she doesn’t feel it in the back of her throat. Not unlike the first day of a coming cold, it lingers there. She cannot swallow it.
Jennifer Wilbanks wasn’t one to lie around weekend mornings with John who didn’t put pants on Saturdays before ten. Her movement was no more symptomatic than his stillness, so why did everyone say to slow down? There was energy that ran the length of her spine like liquid, coursing from body to brain at a zip. She had no need to mitigate it. She breathed the mineral smell of predawn January through December.
She got the sense it was not normal to see life as a string of different lived selves, her own not contiguous with one another. What scared her most about marrying John was that this self, this beaming-girlfriend-of-John self, would be her last, and it had already begun to misfit her.
They invited 600 guests, an outrageous number, but it happens. She had fourteen bridesmaids, each one in a different dress because fourteen women in the same dress seemed absurd. There would be a grits bar with dinner and red velvet cake for dessert, groom’s favorite. When asked to describe her bridal style in five words or less she said southern not country, traditional, casual, easy, fun, authentically us. She was trying to describe not herself but the version of herself who would marry John on the happiest day of her life.
What she wanted was everyone letting loose without getting sloppy on a polished wood dance floor with center monogram. What she wanted them to remember at the end of the night was having the best time while deeply impressed by the whole event. She wanted to present type-B with type-A quality results. She said planning a wedding was stressful, but it was nights at home making dinner conversation that most strained her.
Enter idea, stage left, creeping slowly. Idea rolls in like a fog, softening the hard edges of the scene Jennifer had been struggling to picture. She could see the dress but not herself in it, or the food but nobody eating it. Idea fogged scene until totally obscured. When idea receded scene had changed. Jennifer was alone eating a pastry on a park bench, watching people who were not watching her. There was nothing remarkable in this fantasy but that it soothed her. She licked her fingers.
She was proud not one of them guessed she’d run. Not one person suspected she wanted anything other than what she’d gotten. Not one could imagine her a stranger, alone somewhere far from home in a life also strange and far. Let me go, she thought on the bus out of Atlanta. Let me go, let me go, her mantra.
She left late on her run so John could not join her, bus ticket and cash in her bra. She kept steady pace out of the neighborhood then let herself sprint. At the library she called a cab to the bus station for the Greyhound to Austin. It was Mississippi before her heart slowed enough she could sleep through to Texas. In Dallas she changed course for Vegas. In Vegas she knew she was screwed when she saw she’d already made the news. The adrenaline was back full force, shape-shifted from elation to panic. She made a last ditch for Albuquerque where her father was crying on TV inside a 7-11. It hadn’t been long, but she was pragmatic. She gave it up and called 911.
At the bus station in Vegas she watched a man and woman fighting outside. He was suntanned and sweating, silent while she shouted at him. She pushed him. He grabbed her by the wrist and shook her. She slapped him hard across the jaw then his whole body went tense. She leaned close into his face, smiled a mean smile so he let go of her and started to laugh. She wasn’t laughing but they walked off holding onto each other, her hand at his belt, his through her hair. Jennifer watched them, hot. When they were out of sight she locked herself in the family bathroom and came in seconds flat. She washed her hands, met her own eyes in the bathroom mirror.
What she loved most about running were the fits of brilliance she had, ideas unoriginal once the endorphins wore off but as long as her legs moved she was lit up, poised for change. She was training for a marathon when she met John, a talker. Immediately he wanted to train with her, and, compelled to set him at ease, she let him. That liminal feeling was gone with John plodding just shy of her shoulder. She tried teaching him to lift his knees but his feet stayed heavy.
They made an action figure out of her, the doll in running pants and a T-Shirt that read “Vegas Baby.” It came with a towel to drape over its head like she did in Albuquerque when the police picked her up. You’ve got to laugh, everyone told her.
When she made the 911-call to report her attack by Hispanic male, white female, she was picturing the couple from the bus depot having at her together in the back of a van in the parking lot. She’d been working the fantasy over in elicit detail since she saw them—the smell of him at her back, the woman’s mouth against her neck.
John had the ring ready when she got home where he put it back on her finger first thing. He was fine with her silence if it meant she was staying. After a week she found a place across town, booked a truck, bought boxes and started packing. She should have done it this way all along, of course she should have, but somehow telling John it was over every morning required more energy than buying a bus ticket had.
Jennifer Wilbanks was not an impulsive person. She had considered all possible outcomes, just underestimated how quick the response to news of a missing white woman. She’d hoped to be farther when it broke. What she did not expect was to give up her status as a serious person. And while the experience of being herself was essentially unchanged, it would never again match that of those who knew of her before they met her.
ACT II: LISA
How to re imagine that drive without the frenzy later attached it. The road hummed under her. The trees changed shape around her. She did not set off in a fever but a trance. Lisa Nowak drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando making excellent time.
A psychiatrist would say what surprised him was the thoroughness of her preparation. The female criminal caught in a love triangle, he said, would typically kill the object of desire on impulse. When had being female ever been about impulse? She wondered from across the courtroom.
She knew the detective was the one who told the press she’d worn diapers. In the interview room he seemed to think they were sparring. Her answers were precise but her mind was somewhere else. She’d known so many men like this one already, legs spread wide under the table to exaggerate the bulk of his balls. He could not engage her.
She worked in the garden Saturday mornings. Summers she could not dig deep enough to find cool dirt under her hands. She stayed married nineteen years before she left her first-love, that Navy man. It was the way he stayed the same while she grew larger, an irreconcilable difference of orbit.
The space shuttle Columbia circled Earth 4,808 times before its explosion. A piece of foam insulation the size of a briefcase broke from the external tank in the force of the launch, so when the Columbia reentered the atmosphere sixteen days later, the system failed, heat destroyed its wings and the shuttle split apart in the sky, leaving 84,000 fragments across Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. Did the astronauts know their ship was broken when they turned toward home? Could they sense the catastrophe had already been set out before them? They had only to descend to meet it.
Three years later, Nowak boarded the shuttle Discovery. Onboard she operated the ship’s fifty-seven foot robotic arms, watched metal limbs move with her command through infinite black space. So intense her focus she could almost touch the smooth cargo with her hands as she reached for it. She could almost feel its weight in her arms.
In Orlando she donned trench coat and wig like a screen queen. She met Shipman at the terminal and boarded the same shuttle to the parking lot where she tracked the woman to her car. Shipman, uneasy on the shuttle by now terrified, got in fast and shut the door behind her, but Nowak was at her window asking for help, so Shipman cracked the window and that was when Lisa used the pepper spray. It was true she didn’t go there to kill the woman, but she was unused to executing a plan without anticipating its exact outcome, and the newness of the experience made her heady.
The arresting officer asked what she was doing with diaper boxes—toddler size—in her trunk. The truth was she had too many groceries to get inside after her last trip to the store, but she told the officer she was trying to minimize pit stops—a little road humor—and he went with that. She’d later think how stupid they were, calling her the “diaper astronaut.” Before that she’d been the astro-mom. Both were diminishing, but she preferred the open hostility of the latter to the saccharine former.
Buzz Aldrin, astro-hero, called it the melancholy of things done. What was left on earth to conquer once a body had entered space? There was no gentle way to come back to Earth. She’d watched the whole planet grow smaller, never again to regain its original size.
That was the thing they talked about most in bed, Lisa Nowak with her astro-boyfriend. They’d pass a bottle and remember. It was hard for her to see other men as her equal, but he was exactly that. He was not more than she was, but he was not less. What angered her was not that he was in love with another woman, but that the other woman was earthbound and he didn’t care.
She heard a lecture once on dark matter and thought of it often, the material unseen by light but known to gravity. The land was so flat, grass dry, the sky on summer days what she called “banal blue,” but standing at the kitchen window, her hands in soapy water, she’d close her eyes and imagine she could feel its dark energy press against her.
A woman skydives from the edge of space. From twenty-two miles above sea level she throws herself. Her body moves in free fall. With nothing but darkness around her there is no way to mark her distance so she cannot feel she is moving at all. Watch her there descending. She is weightless, suspended, falling with imperceptible speed.
What did Lisa Nowak feel as she drove, hurtling toward the salvation that would ruin her? She felt clear, her brain pure again, fully oxygenated and clean as crystal. She felt how solid the ground, how broad the sky. She felt the full force of the act and knew with total clarity her capacity for its execution and impact. She would take control of events with the same instinct for ownership that had brought her level with the solar system. She knew the present moment was hers only. Only she could move with the velocity required to possess it.
ACT III: ANDREA
The water gets in through the tap. It spreads to cover the floor, picking up small fallen debris as it goes, seeping under closed doors. The water lies flat as it starts to rise, taking pictures from walls, lifting chairs from the table. From the street the windows go dark before the house begins leaking. The house has drowned. It is drowning.
Sometimes Andrea thought Rusty was poisoning her food, and some days she thought the baby was staring at her strangely. When she lay down she heard horses running past the house and the sound jolted her so she could not lie down again.
After it happened, it occurred to her how clumsy a mouth with teeth and bones. How if her mouth were emptied it might become malleable enough to stretch to a shape that could fit a sound as terrible as her sorrow. She dreamt she was standing in the dark on the bed of a lake. The water was filled with bodies. She screamed the children’s names into the black air. When the bodies came close enough to reach she turned them over but every one had a face like hers.
What was lost in the horror was the ordinary brightness, sunspots across the linoleum. Her voice down the hall reading to the boys before bed, the book about two ducks named Dibble and Dabble. Noah turning somersaults in the neighborhood pool while she counted for him, her feet in the water. He’d come up for air blinking chlorine out of his eyes while she made a drum roll on the concrete then told him his time. Rusty swung the boys by their ankles and sang “cuckoo, cuckoo” like a clock.
It’s true, the children were dead already, but how they were still taken from her once the story broke. How those strangers wrote to her and about her, discussing her at length in vague detail. As though they were the ones who lost the children. She’d hear what they were saying sometimes and she’d think, “but they were mine. Not yours, but mine.”
They would blame her religion, too many children, the husband skeptical of anti-depressants, her upbringing, a traveling preacher, the great state of Texas, her red turtleneck, the style of her hair. The truth was not in their theories.
Before she met Rusty Yates, Andrea Kennedy was a nurse at the cancer center. She traded stories at the nurse’s station when she had a minute and answered patients’ questions when they asked her. She liked the hospital best in the middle of the night with its machine beeps and breaths, the silver sound of doors sliding open and closed. She liked stepping into the sun after a night spent under fluorescent bulbs and air-conditioning vents. She’d sit in her car letting the heat bake her before she turned the key to drive home.
She was sad sometimes, or lonely. She quit work with the first baby. She’d get bored but she wasn’t depressed in a clinical sense until the fourth boy, Luke. After Luke was born, Rusty came home to find her chewing her hands. He drew her a bath then fed the boys hot dogs for dinner. The next time it was a knife to her neck and Andrea begging him to let her do it. They put her on Haldol so she felt better before she felt worse. A nervous break, two suicide attempts, two hospitalizations. She was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.
In high school Andrea was swim team captain, National Honor Society officer, bulimic and depressed. She was valedictorian. She was overwhelmed sometimes by the sensation that her body did not feel her own. She forgot the feeling underwater, though, her feet scraping the wall to propel her with a muscled kick. She felt at once bodiless and all body, fully embodied, when she swam. She was grounded by the material of the water. The lightness of air was what got under her skin.
After Luke she told Rusty she was afraid the voices might be louder with another baby, but he reached for her to say what a wonderful mother she was, what a good thing they were doing. Later that summer she was pregnant with Mary, first and only girl. The doctor had said not to get pregnant again but here she was, off her medication once the test came back positive.
She read her Bible, stopped feeding the baby, stopped dressing herself, stopped dressing the children. She stopped schooling them and cleaning the house, doing the laundry, going to the store. She drew a bath one afternoon but Rusty came home to drain it.
There are monsters with sharper teeth than this one. There are curiosities less natural than this. A woman buries her children underwater. Her hands hold them under as they slip away. Surely the last thing they saw was not their murderer, but their mother who was, after all, just a blurred figure, just the weight of a much loved hand.
Did he call her twice or three times before she gave the children breakfast? Or did she not feed them? Was it something about a man coming by to price the backyard for fencing? Did he call just to say hello and ask about her morning? She could not later recall.
The doctor said not to leave Andrea alone with the children, but Rusty did it in small doses. First ten unsupervised minutes, then twenty. She fed Mary solid food before the baby had teeth to chew it. Then just one hour that morning.
Not hands that shed innocent blood, or a heart that devises wicked acts, but feet that are swift running to mischief, and she who sows discord among them. This was her sin, that the children were not righteous because she herself was evil. The way she was raising them, partway to hell, they could never be saved. Toward the end she believed the boys listened to the devil whisper in their ears.
Could she tell right from wrong when she did it? The answer mattered for her defense. But Andrea waited until Rusty’s car had pulled from the driveway before she filled the bath, and she locked the dog up before she started.
In an hour every child was dead, John, Paul, Luke, then Mary, then Noah who ran, but she caught him. She laid them out on the bed. She was not rough with their bodies. Then she called the police, and her husband.
After the trial the world came to her in 5’s. Everywhere she looked she found them and they comforted her. In the rare moments she was alone without a single 5 before her, she’d tap herself hard 5 times against her collarbone. Tap Noah, tap John, tap Paul, tap Luke, tap Mary.
Andrea Yates wondered who to pray to once her children were all gone and she’d sent them there. The universe was at once emptied of god presence and filled with the imperative for continued belief. Where had they gone otherwise? How else could she speak with them?
At the hospital where they finally kept her, they put Andrea in a room with Dena Schlosser who cut off her baby girl’s arms with a knife. It was unclear whether the match was meant as punishment or comfort, or simply followed the logic of institutional order. At night the two lay awake in narrow beds searching each other’s face for their own.
Outside her bedroom window when she was a girl was the back porch’s flat rooftop. Andrea used to crawl out and lay on the sandpaper shingles at night, staring up at the vast Texas sky. She did not know another. She’d imagine the moon was the bottom of a lit ship, or a spotlight skimming the waves, that she was buried deep and staring up, up from the bottom of the ocean. Some nights the idea was so real she had to feel for the air with her hands.
Most mornings she eats breakfast in the dining room. Afternoons she sits alone outside on a chair she moves with the sun. She grows older. She is no more Yates, or inmate patient, not mother, not wife, not Kennedy, the girl. But there is a feeling that preceded every name she was given. She sits alone and lets it wash over her.
END