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CHAPTER ONE
Thanksgiving Day 1970
Owauskeum, Wisconsin
We're just kidding ourselves when we imagine the earth is one place, one big old ball zooming through the universe, thinks Mary Jane McBride, because really the world is made up of two places, two separate rooms, one for people who know grief, and the other for those who still haven't found it, a place for those who haven't yet opened that door.
In the ten months, three weeks, and four days since she entered that other room, she no longer remembers anything about the fifteen years that she lived in the first. Her head spins, her world breaks open like a cracked skull full of blood. She sometimes wakes up in the morning and asks herself, Was there ever a time before Michael died?
Today is Thanksgiving Day, a day to come together with family in the spirit of peace and goodwill. But Uncle Jens won't have Mary Jane at the table, he refuses to sit down with someone who, in his words, "has brought such shame and disgrace to the Svensen family name. In the Old Country, you'd never get away with what you've done, pregnant at fifteen! We had a word for girls like you."
"Damn your Old Country, you live here now," Mary Jane says to herself, standing alone, round-shouldered and barefoot, exiled to the cool solitude of the living room. The smell of turkey, stuffing and pie torments her from the dining room, and she listens for the hungry noises; the symphony of knives and forks and spoons. She shivers through the thin fabric of her embroidered peasant blouse. "Damn you all to hell," she says. She feels a knotted paradox rise inside her as she gazes down at her five-month-old daughter, Rainbow, sleeping on the sofa next to baby Andy. Mary Jane knows it is her own sin, her shame, which gave birth to something so beautiful. Mary Jane lifts the baby to her shoulder, pats her on the back, and tries to capture the frantic, pedalling feet. "My baby, Rainbow Planet, loves to eat spinach. Her chins wiggle and her feet curve inwards. I sometimes think she's cross-eyed." Mary Jane repeats the words like a prayer; she engraves them on her heart, in order to invoke them later to make her peace, her penance. "Forgive me, my daughter. Forgive what I'm about to do." The baby blows a bubble which breaks against her mother's ear.
Rainbow Planet is getting heavier, too heavy to lift sometimes, and with that weight comes the added responsibility, which is already too great for Mary Jane to bear. Her ears ring all day and night with Mama's constant scolding:
"Åh, nei, nei, nei. That's not how you feed a baby. Lift her head and shoulders and keep them straight. No wonder she gets gas."
"Not so much water in the bathtub, you could drown the baby that way."
"Mary Jane, don't let her play with your necklace. Take that away from her right now. If it breaks in her mouth, she could choke on the beads and die."
Mary Jane was horrified. Danger lurked in places she had never considered before; in a drop of water, in the fold of a blanket, in the collapsible leg of a card table. There were a million ways this child could be lost. In the first few months after Rainbow was born, Mary Jane used to sneak the baby into her bed late at night. She had wondered what the baby did when everyone else was asleep, and she learned that Rainbow Planet gurgled and laughed, talked to herself, and liked to play with her toes. These warm, gentle evenings were perfect bliss, until Mary Jane realised she might turn over in her sleep one night and hurt the baby, might accidentally crush those tiny bones. It was at that moment she first decided to run away with Carlos, run away and leave Rainbow behind. "I'll come back when I'm older," she promised. "When I'm grown up enough to take care of you, then I'll come back."
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