Chapter 1: The Invitation

     I never saw a light or a tunnel, no angels or music or anything with form. Only the deepest black, pulsing softly like a newborn’s heartbeat, and the sensation of continually falling. I don’t recall the things others describe during a near-death experience. I only remember the nothing—the familiarity of it, raw and powerful. And how it felt to be swallowed.

     Sweet and safe like relief. A release.

     That was seventeen years ago. It’s been swallowing me ever since.

     I stop in the street and place a hand below my navel. Empty. I’m a shell with no yolk, no reason for being. Maybe that’s why I lost the baby three months ago. I’ve been empty since the night I left Solidago, my childhood burning behind me, my past ignited like a powder keg, taking my home; my mother, Winnie; my soul with it. My abilities. The power that kept me company, kept me safe, then left me for dead. Literally.

     Maybe that’s why Roger left, why he packed up his collection of alpaca sweaters and his Prada sunglasses, that cologne he believed made him smell like Joshua Tree (it didn’t). Maybe that’s why his coyote smile faded. He could finally feel my emptiness too.

     But I’ve decided to stop the nothing by finally giving it what it wants tonight. Because ever since I woke up in that hospital, informed that I had been dead for an incredible seventeen minutes and eleven seconds, the impulse has gnawed at me until it finally wore through like a rat at the wires of my brain. I should never have come back to life, should never have survived. I died and I was supposed to stay dead, like all the other women in my family. And there’s only one way to make it right.

     I must return.

     I have a stash of SSRIs at home, bottles filed neatly in a drawer. Taken with enough vodka, I can return to that fateful night when it all went wrong, my rage an inferno, my grandfather’s estate burning in the distance, lighting up the sky like a pyrotechnics event, stealing everything I ever loved. Back to the black and the void, the impact of my body with the earth, the silence that followed, like honey poured into my ears. I can go back. I can die again, this time for good. Maybe then our twisted legacy will end.

     I can be at peace.

     Movement streaks past and I look up. A black cat with one eye stands at the end of the road, peering at me. It’s another drizzly Seattle night, not great weather for a street cat to be out in. Instinctively, I crouch, inching forward, fingers outstretched. The cat freezes, then dabs at my fingertips with its leathery nose, whiskers twitching. I’ve always had a way with animals. The days I’ve volunteered at the shelter have been some of my happiest. My mother called it “a touch of God.” You’ve got a touch of God in you, Judeth Phoebe Cole, she would say whenever I could approach a feral cat or pick up a toad after the rain or take a puppy from its mother on the street with ease. But that was when I was little, in the San Francisco walk-up before my dad got sick, when our world still made sense. That was before we came to Solidago, before my abilities began to show, before I learned I had the devil in me instead.

     I haven’t been Judeth Cole for a long time since.

     I reach into my bag and pull out the heel of my leftover tuna sandwich from lunch. I won’t be needing it anyway. Gently, I scrape the creamy, fishy innards onto the pavement for my new feline friend. The cat is ravenous, quickly devouring the fish in a few bites, and allowing me to deliver a scratch behind an ear, fixing its one golden orb of an eye on me. In the swollen round of its pupil, I think I see something dance, like smoke. I blink and its gone. And the cat takes off down the cross street, disappearing into the night.

     I stare after it, standing at a crossroads. To the left, my condo lies waiting in the distance, that drawer calling me, a promised escape from my stolen existence. And to the right, in the direction the cat ran, the lights of my favorite bookstore are sending an ebullient glow into the gloom like the beam of a lighthouse across the rocks.

     It will take time, I think, for the pills to take effect. I can’t just lie there waiting to die.

     I turn toward the light, something warming in me. I should choose a final book to read, send my soul out on a flood of words, spend my last moments basking in the single simple pleasure I have left. I should read my way into oblivion.

     I follow the cat.

     The evergreen awning flaps against a soggy wind, but the letters printed across it are bold in the night—Orman Used & Rare Books. I’ve been coming here since I moved to Seattle a decade ago, a city built on scrabble and gut and sheer, unadulterated obstinacy, qualities I can relate to. There’s something about its tightly packed shelves, the jumble of books that begin neat and orderly at the front of the store, where they keep a tidy but thoughtful selection of new releases, but grow increasingly chaotic toward the back, where the older, rarer editions can be found. Something about all those little windowpanes and the ivy running along the other side of the building, the longevity of the place, soothes me. And in more recent months, something about the man behind the counter, the younger one that I’m not used to seeing here so often. The casual shirts he wears untucked, unbuttoned at the neck. The fit of his jeans. The discreet knot of shining hair, always darker at the roots but banded in butterscotch where it’s bound at the nape.

     When I enter to a gentle jingle of the bell, there are only a few minutes left before closing. I stayed at the office longer than usual.

     He smiles. “Welcome.”

     Mine is a face he sees often, even if we’ve never exchanged names. For a second, the world seems to tip when I realize he won’t see me again after tonight. Will he notice? Will someone tell him how they found me in my condo, stretched across the bed, his book splayed open on my chest? Will he remember this night and feel sorry for me?

     “Looking for something new?” he asks brightly.

     I glance down at the tight, black laces of my boots, before meeting his eyes. “No. I think something old tonight. Something . . . familiar.”

     He looks excited by my reply. “We just got a shipment of mid-century paperbacks from an estate sale. They’re in excellent condition. I started shelving them over here,” he says, coming out from behind the register to point me down a middle aisle. “But feel free to rifle through the boxes as well.”

     I give him a taut smile and dip my head in a quiet thank you. As if the universe delivered these just for me.

     My hands skim their wearied spines, a few hardcovers among them, dancing past titles like In Cold Blood and Fear of Flying. I take a moment to pause and admire an impeccable copy of Master of the Game by Sidney Sheldon, which isn’t exactly an upbeat book, but somehow still feels too light for the occasion. It needn’t be maudlin, of course, my final read. But it should have suitable gravitas. It should have some heft.

     And then I see it. A gently faded but otherwise stand-up copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar—a novel about a young woman coming quietly apart at the seams. It’s a hardcover with the jacket still preserved, in that fuzzy black-and-white image of a hand and a rose, with the beautifully dated font in one corner. My fingers close over it, the memory drifting back to me of reading in the kitchen at Solidago, sitting in the sunlight beneath the window, hands sticky with peanut butter and the room smelling of rising dough. I was safe there. My grandfather would never deign to sully himself with women’s work, and Nina, our housekeeper, kept a tight watch on everything that happened in the kitchen. I read The Bell Jar the summer before I turned sixteen, before my breasts came in and my grandfather’s eyes began to follow me like a roving dog. My mother so rarely let me leave the estate, but Nina would bring me books from the library in Bandon where she sometimes stayed with her daughter, Mira, and two young grandsons. I read it on long afternoons beneath the spiky reaches of the coastal Douglas firs and the feathering habit of the Pacific dogwoods on our property, savoring every word, fancying myself a writer, too, someday. Until the new gardener found it and took the book to my grandfather, who deemed it distasteful and threw it into the fire. Everything at the estate had to go through my grandfather first, who kept the property suspended in a museum-like condition, just as it had been when my grandmother Aurelia was alive.

     The recollection sends a shiver of dread up my spine. The graceful columns of Solidago—its white wings outstretched like waiting arms, a field of goldenrods between them—are always a whisper at my back. I clamp The Bell Jar to my chest and swallow down the bile. He’s not here, I remind myself. He can’t hurt you. None of them can. But my grandfather has been the shadow cast over me since the day I was born, even after the fire took his life and my mother’s. Behind him, my grandmother’s spirit rising like the sun, a memory so bright it burns everything it touches.

     I sigh and contemplate slipping the book into my bag, breezing out of the store before the attractive shopkeeper notices. It’s the first real urge to shoplift I’ve felt in years, and it arrives like an unannounced friend, both nostalgic and startling at once. Even as a memory, Solidago has a way of bringing out the worst in me. Stealing was a way of life for me at the estate and, later, in the foster care system. The only chance I had at claiming anything as mine. A small scrap of agency in a sea of loss. I tried to leave it behind after getting busted in a Fred Meyer left me with a class A misdemeanor and possession charges for the marijuana they found when they searched me, settling later in Seattle where, despite my best efforts, I had another encounter with a Target security guard. He was kind and let me wriggle out of a public arrest, but after that, I worked hard to repress it (minus a few exceptions). It was never about the item. Possession was the only power left to me.

     I loosen my grip on the book, and something slips out, falling to my feet. Looking down, I see a square, black envelope. I stoop to pick it up, turning the thick card stock over in my hand. The shock is enough to cause me to drop it again, a bewildered gasp sliding from my lips. There, in golden script, is my true name—Judeth Cole.

     “You okay?” I hear the good-looking man ask from the box he’s sorting near the register.

     Carefully, I lean out from behind the shelf and flash him an embarrassed smile.

     “Paper cut?” he asks cheerily. “Those old dust jackets can be sharp as sheet metal. I’ve got a bandage around here somewhere.”

     “I’m fine,” I reassure him. “Just a silverfish. Startled me.”

     He looks convinced, and I duck back behind the shelf, quickly scooping the envelope up with a shaking hand. My fingers are trembling so much, I can barely tear it open. When I do, a matte black note card waits inside. An invitation.

Judeth Cole:

You are hereby cordially invited

to attend a reception

on your behalf

beneath the Ravenna Park Bridge

September the eighth

at midnight. 

Attire—black.

Come if you dare.

Learn what waits in the deep.

Don’t be late.

     A scrolling flourish has been drawn at the bottom, like an ampersand and its reflection, tied together with too many loops. I can’t make out where it begins and ends. It rolls into itself like a snake eating its tail, an unbroken continuum. The shape feels familiar, though I’m certain I’ve never seen it before.

     September the eighth, at midnight—that’s tonight. Shaken, I slide the card into the envelope and put both in my bag, then slowly approach the register.

     “‘At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you,’” the man recites.

     “What?” I stumble as I’m nearly there, raw and exposed.

     “It’s from ‘Daddy,’ by Sylvia Plath. Are you a fan of her poetry?” he asks, holding out a hand for the book.

     “Oh.” My shoulders relax. “No,” I answer a little too curtly. I don’t know how to explain my limited exposure to the outside world growing up. The understanding that I can never catch up to normal; I can never get those years back. “I mean, I’ve only read this book before.”

     “Well, The Bell Jar is a classic.” He smiles with his lips closed, and I realize his hand is still waiting for me to deposit the book in it.

     “Sorry, there’s no price,” I tell him.

     He takes it from me and flips it open, my heart thudding with every turn of the page as if I expect black envelopes to come flying out like confetti. “Hmmm . . . that’s funny.”

     “What?” I ask, wary.

     “I don’t remember this one being in there earlier.” He glances up at me, the aqua gleam of his eyes catching mine. “I don’t usually miss a book.”

     My mouth opens, a stuttering sound escaping.

     “Tell you what, it’s on the house,” he says, passing the novel back to me.

     “Oh, no. I couldn’t.” I try to protest, but he waves me off.

     “It’s not like it’s a first edition or anything,” he says coolly. “Besides, you look like you’ll appreciate it more than most.”

     My eyes trickle down the cropped shadow of his beard and the tan lines of his neck to his chest, where a hint of hair is escaping over the topmost fastened button of his shirt. “Thank you.”

     “Just one thing,” he says before I can turn to leave.

     I meet his gaze, worried he saw what happened behind the shelf, that he’ll ask to see the envelope and somehow read my secrets in it. “Oh?”

     “Come back when you’re done,” he says simply. “Tell me if it’s as good as you remember.”

***

     I’m running out of time. I’ve already wasted two hours sitting in the soft light of my bedroom, staring at the items lined modestly on my bed, trying to decide. A prescription bottle, a dress, and an envelope. Surely the pills are the deadliest of these. So why does the envelope feel like it’s the most dangerous?

     My eyes land on the pill bottle, its nude contours and colorful stickers. The pragmatism of the typeface. I have a liter of Svedka in the kitchen. Wretched stuff. It won’t be fun to choke down. But then . . . then it’s over. This feeling of being a place where the baby was, a holding space for what really mattered, a failure at even being that. I wouldn’t have to remember Roger’s long arms around me in the dark, his dark hair tickling my neck, rocking his body slowly against mine, his breath on my shoulder when he came. The feeling that I took shape when he held me, like liquid poured into a container. That I existed when he was looking. As if I were only defined by their contours—Roger’s and the baby’s—pinned between them, the pressure bringing me to life.

     My eyes slide to the dress. It’s one of the few black garments I own. I have a preference for all things gray. Nothing too extreme. Just that middle point where definitions cease to matter. A therapist once told me it’s a reflection of my lack of boundaries. She’s probably right. It has a V-neck and a pleated skirt, little cuffed sleeves that end just past the shoulder. The waist is fitted. The hemline modest. I bought it for a funeral two years ago when one of our senior executives died from a pulmonary embolism. I keep it around in case of another death, another unexpected funeral. Maybe my own.

     My eyes find the envelope, a parcel of questions. Corners that are razor sharp. A plane of black broken by the golden script—Judeth Cole. How did they know my name? I haven’t gone by Judeth since I was eighteen. For all intents and purposes, I have been Jude no-middle-name Clark in this second, empty life I took on. Who are they? This person—people?—that mysteriously know the real me. How did they know I would be in that bookstore tonight? That I would pick up that precise book?

     What else do they know?

     The Bell Jar winks at me from the top of my nightstand. Could it have been the man working the register? He did give me the book for free. His sparkling blue-green eyes shine through my memory. They are kind, jovial. Not the sort of eyes I would expect to bait innocent women into a midnight rendezvous under a bridge.

     Beside it, another relic from my past, another plain but fraught rectangle of paper. This one a business card. James E. Lampitt, it reads, the once-sharp font dull, the corners rounded with wear. My grandfather’s attorney—my attorney. I’ve never reached out in all these years, despite my struggles. I’ve kept my promise to him and to myself. But I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of his card, like a parachute I won’t pull the cord of but still feel comforted by. I assume he’s been watching, like he said he would, that he’s witnessed the messy spectacle of my life from afar. Could he be behind the invitation in the book? It makes no kind of sense except . . .

     Except Solidago is always at the heart of what haunts me, always somehow to blame for what’s wrong in my life. In me.

     But who left the invitation for me isn’t the question that matters. I’ve spent the last two hours trying to answer the one that does.

     Do I go?

     I slide the card from the envelope one more time and read it over. It’s matte. Expensive by the texture. And in such an odd color, too. Not your usual invitation fare. Who would have this just lying around? The wording is so precise and formal—cordially invited, attend a reception, on your behalf. But the words that really get me, that whip my nerve endings into a froth of adrenaline, are these: Learn what waits in the deep.

     As if they know. As if they’ve seen. As if they can show me.

     My mother’s words sift through the ganglia in my brain, teasing at the fine hairs around my ears like breath: The power comes from the deep, Judeth. From a place that can’t be known. Only a fool would trust it. She told me that on the one and only day she took me into my grandmother’s room at Solidago.

     I remember the way her eyes rose to my grandmother’s portrait over the carved mantel—a devastatingly beautiful monstrosity wrought of pale Sicilian marble, writhing with creatures from the sea, an amalgam of fins and tentacles and waves so real it might have been made of bloodless flesh. Her eyes were like twin stars seeking an orbit, a story there that she was never willing to tell.

     I pick up the pill bottle and turn it over in my hand. Isn’t that what this is really about? It’s not the miscarriage, feeling the baby I never knew I wanted run out of me like raw eggs. And it’s not Roger leaving, the unceremonious way he grabbed the electric wine bottle opener from the counter on his way out the door, trailing the charger cord behind him. I wanted to love him. I tried. But more than that, I needed him in order to feel human, to feel real.

     It’s about that night, when I cracked my skull like a fruit and felt the world go black and started sinking. Into that other place, that other thing that wasn’t anything at all but was everything to me. A depth, a darkness, a comfort like no other. The place my power had seeped up from into my mind and hands and mouth as a girl. The place it sunk back into, preserved like a blade in a bog. Hadn’t I seen behind the curtain that night? Hadn’t I slipped into the deep? Don’t I just want to return to that place?

     Is that where they are, my mother and grandmother, the women of my line—troubled and beset—stretching back into time?

     Can my mysterious host take me there without the pills?

     Something inside me is stirring. My soul perhaps, if I ever had one. Something is quickening. A spark of curiosity, of need. It is the most life I’ve felt in three months’ time. And this envelope put it there. It is a beckoning. A call I must answer.

     I quickly peel off my clothes—tight jeans, a white T-shirt, a gray cashmere cardigan—and slip the black dress over my head. I’m not going to traipse through a city park at midnight in heels, so I drag my black boots back on, lacing them tight, in case I have to run. I don’t have a black sweater. The trench I bought a few years ago will have to do. I toss the pills into the drawer and scoop the envelope up.

     Maybe I’m losing my grip after so many years of unhealed trauma. Maybe I’m so desperate to put meaning to it all—the power, the fire, the loss—that I’m fabricating this whole scenario in some deep, forgotten corner of my subconscious. But the hard-creased edges of the envelope digging into my palm remind me.

     This invitation is very, very real.