But the anger left me soon. I was washed out, vaguely guilty, empty. I slept. I dreamed of Mother in her black wool coat in autumn when I was in the first grade. She would walk me carefully to school, helping me with the intersections. I dreamed of the way she would hold my right hand tightly in her left and I could feel the firm, metallic pressure of her engagement ring and her wedding ring. She would talk to me aimlessly of this and that—the weather, the new dresses she was going to buy—and I would hang on every word. I loved her terribly.

***

That was a long time ago in Limbo-time since I first went back to Mother’s pink bedroom. I have stopped counting days and years here but I know that a great deal of time has passed.

Sometimes I feel restless and I yearn to finish the editing of my past so that I can be reborn to continue in whatever plan whatever god there is has made, and I feel that I know what needs to be done. I need to go back to Mother’s bedroom and merely close my eyes and keep them closed. I must not look in that mirror.

And God knows I have tried. I have gone back there a hundred times and more, have sat in that chair and heard that soft and throaty voice saying, “Now be sure you don’t peek, dear,” and have stared at that face, those hips, those breasts, that lovely flesh. I have swooned, over and over. Her movements exist now in frozen choreography in my brain; they seem to have erased everything afterward in my one life so that the ten minutes in the bedroom when I was six years old are what that life was for. My swoon is like the hub around which the rest of my life revolves; should I change it the rest of my life might scatter into empty and frightening disorder.

Yet it would seem simple to close my eyes or turn them downward, only once, to render those ten minutes of my past null and void, so that I may move on to whatever other destiny waits for me—to that pleasant Beth I have wanted to be, in my warm home with dolls and a pet cat and children’s books. I can feel at times the yearning of Beth within me wanting to become real and alive in the world. And so I go back to the pink bedroom from time to time, but I cannot change a thing.

It is always the same: Mother, the bed, the small chair, the long mirror on the closet door. And I never close my eyes.

I pray sometimes to God that Beth, who will never live, will forgive me, for I cannot erase those ten minutes from my life no matter how many times I try. I truly cannot.