On a cold clear Saturday in late March, I was at the driving range behind the mall with my father. We’d made a deal: If he lost fifty pounds, I’d cut my hair. I no longer looked like a Visigoth.
After hitting through a couple of buckets of range balls, Dad dropped me at Starbucks. Cherry got me a job there, though that day I wasn’t scheduled to work. Nicole was picking me up, and I wanted her to meet Cherry. They hugged when they met and talked as if they’d known each other for a long time and discovered they actually did. They’d both been in the same ballet class when they were five years old. They agreed quitting was the right call, because, per Nicole, “The shoes were murder on your pedicure,” and, per Cherry, “Picking leotard wedgies out of your butt crack in front of the boy dancers was a total drag.”
My new iPhone beeped one o’clock, which is when visiting hours started.
“Time to go?” Nicole said.
“Only if you want to,” I said.
Nicole pushed her sunglasses closer to her face and nodded.
She was quiet on the drive through the Meadowlands. The psychiatric center was a lockdown facility. It had been built on the site of a pre-Civil War prison called Snake Hill. A guard escorted us to a large room with a strangely high ceiling, maybe twenty feet. The paint peeled in patches from an old water leak. At the far end of the room, a few patients clustered around a TV and Jeopardy!
Mrs. Castro sat serenely in a chair by the barred window. She wasn’t restrained, not physically. Her pinned pupils betrayed heavy medication. The only evidence I saw of the oil splash was a wide burn scar under her chin. Her turtleneck collar and long sleeves covered the rest. Smiling, she appeared to recognize Nicole, but she didn’t seem to see me. She moved stiffly and in slow motion, as if she were underwater, motioning for Nicole to sit. As she spoke, she didn’t look at us but out the window at the bright blue day.
“I was losing you,” she said. “To your father, soon to college, then surely a husband. Burning you was the only way to keep you. You needed me, desperately. The only time I didn’t feel alone was when I was with you. Every moment you were out of the house, the sense of separation was increasing. It hurt more deeply than being cut off. I felt I was being cut out. The broken-down heart after the transplant: Where does it go? Even at the hospital with Emma, the children: I knew they were leaving me. But you would stay. I would care for you in a way that you couldn’t care for yourself. My beauty was my curse. In school, my teachers would offer false compliments as they looked not at or into but through my paintings. They would stand behind me, peeking over my shoulder, pretending to look at my work when really they were gawking at my breasts. Your father, too. I was a prop on a Christmas card. But you, my darling. You knew me. You loved me. You saw my art. You were my art. I had made you, and you were perfection. And to keep you, I was willing to destroy you. Nicole?”
Nicole needed a second to find her voice. “Yes?”
“I’m so afraid to be alone, darling. I’m looking out there and seeing just absolutely nothing.” Her eyes clicked from the window’s picture of the beautiful day to Nicole. Mrs. Castro’s face was perfectly peaceful, but a tear dropped from her chin. She held out her arms for a hug.
Nicole hesitated, and then she hugged her mother.
“My sweetheart. My Nicole, I’m sorry. I stole it from you to save you from letting them objectify you.”
Nicole broke from the hug and rushed out.
“Stole what?” I said to her mother.
“Her beauty.”
“You didn’t come close to touching it.” I hurried after Nicole.
We drove deep into the Meadowlands to a nature preserve and hiked to the river’s edge. We sat facing each other on a backless bench, straddling it. We locked hands and watched the cattails duck and weave against the cold clear afternoon sky. We were all alone.
“The hug,” I said. “Does that mean you’re in forgiveness territory?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m on my way there. Maybe it was good-bye. Except, it’s too late for good-bye. She’s already gone. She doesn’t feel the same. Like her spirit evaporated, and the only way I can know her now is in my memories of her. Like when we were with Emma this one time. We took her to the beach. We were in the water, waist high. Mom was holding Emma. The waves were crazy that day. Each time one came in, Emma scream-laughed and Mom said, ‘I got you. Relax, Emma, I promise. Ready? Now hold your breath.’ The wave rolled over us, and we pushed up through it and floated out of the back of the wave. And Mom said, ‘See? Nothing bad happened. I kept my promise. I had you the whole time. We were flying, right? We were flying.’ That was my mother.” She took off her sunglasses and looked out past the cattails, to the psychiatric hospital in the near distance. It rose red and solitary from the swampland. “I want to go back, Jay. To school, I mean. I’m ready, I think. Yeah, I’m ready.” She turned so I couldn’t see the wounded side of her face. She peeled away the tape, balled up the bandage and tucked it into her pocket. Her hair hid the burn. She was breathing quickly, heavily. She turned to me. She brushed back her hair with her fingers.
I studied her naked face. I took it in, every bit of it. I held her hands and put them to my face, and then I put my hands to her face as I leaned in and kissed her. I kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her mouth. In time, we stopped trembling, and the cold was gone from us and the day and my world and maybe hers too, if only for a while. I tasted the sun in her lips, a warmth as gentle as it was strong. I’d always thought of surrender as a giving up. It wasn’t. To surrender deeply, truly, was to give in to an idea that hadn’t occurred to me until this kiss: that your admiration for somebody could be as great as your adoration of her. It moved me, her trust in me, her faith in herself, her belief in us.
I didn’t feel sorry for Nicole Castro. I felt hope for her. She wasn’t a victim or a snob, a pageant queen or an athlete, a scholar or a saint or any of the other things I’d labeled her over the past few months. She was Nicole, and she was beautiful.