I’ve thought about whether I should put them on again—I’ve thought about it the entire time I’ve been typing up this account. Might I see all the way through? Might I see through the golden threads, if they exist, to something else entirely? Or would I just fall, and keep falling?

I do know this—sometimes, afterward, I’ve had a daydream in which I seek Mary out once the glasses come off, and I find her weeping in a corridor in the bowels of the hotel, and I sit down beside her and I hold her close and I say, “Please—forgive me.” But sometimes in the daydream I’m also saying, “I forgive you, Mary. I forgive you.”

7

I bought a few newspapers after I came here, but all they can tell me is that “Sabon is recovering from a bout of exhaustion.” None of them mentions my role in her exhaustion.

And that is all I know, and all I want to know.

I halted on the edge of an abyss when I left Mary, I think. I halted on the edge of a kind of Silence. I needed to write it down, try to make some sense of it outside of my own head. Draw the poison.

But I’ve shed my last skin. I’ve no more skins to shed. I can’t start over again—I’ve started over too many times before. You won’t believe me. I won’t believe me, either.

Maybe all of this was prevarication and excuses and not an afterword at all. Not an essay. Not a history. Not a pamphlet. Just an old woman’s ramblings. Maybe I don’t want to think about that hole in the ground behind me and the decision I have to make. But if so, at least it’s over now. I have told you everything I meant to tell you, and more.

As I sit here in the green light and review these pages, I see what Duncan saw when he wrote in this room—the sliver, the narrowness of vision, the small amount we know before we’re gone—and I realize that this account was a stab in the dark at a kind of truth, no matter how faltering: a brief flash of light against the silhouette of dead trees. This was the story of my life and my brother’s life, my brother and his Mary. (How could you think to tell such a story without me by your side, Janice?)

And, somehow, I have kept separate, hidden away in my mind, one single image of joy before disaster: my father, running across the unbearably green grass. And not what occurred after. Not what happened after.