Black Rainbow Page 15
I turned to go. Then I paused and looked back. “I love you, too,” I said.
CHAPTER 30
I TOOK A BUS TO A PLANE AND A TAXI TO A BUS. I returned the way I had come. The river was the same. The bridge crossed the river as always, a blue haze of cable and steel. I stood out in a chill breeze at the top of the George Washington Bridge Port Authority bus station. The exact change was in my pocket.
Suddenly I doubled over, crying. These were tears I had never planned to shed. I cried for Monique and I cried for Pilar, and my mother who was the killer and my mother who was dead. I even cried for Mr. Deukjamian, whom I would never see again.
I would see my father and Grace and my two brothers. In a swamp of relief and hysterics, they would take me back without question. I would see Michael, practically every weekend for years until we broke up in college. I would never see Monique again. But I would often think I saw her, in a crowd, on a magazine cover. But if I thought I glimpsed her, across a party’s crowded room or the green expanse of a park, she would vanish. When I turned towards her and took a few steps as if in a haze, she would be gone.
But now, people were looking at me strangely. The other passengers saw a grungy girl, sobbing, nose running as she dabbed ineffectually at her tears. I tried to pull myself together, but I still wept. And then through my tears I saw the red and tan bus pull in to the station, waiting to take me back across the bridge and over to the Jersey side.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Miriam Sagan was born in Manhattan on the upper West Side, and raised in Englewood, New Jersey. She left for Boston the day after her high school graduation, and holds a B.A. in English from Harvard University and an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University. She lived in San Francisco where she met her first husband, Robert Winson (deceased), and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1984. Their daughter is Isabel Winson-Sagan.
Her first poetry book, Agean Doorway, was published by Zephyr Press. She is the author of twenty-five books, including her first novel Coastal Lives and her memoir: Searching for a Mustard Seed: A Young Widow’s Unconventional Story which won Best Memoir of the Year from Independent Publishers Association. Her books have also won a Border Library Association Award and a New Mexico Book Award.
Sagan is married to Richard Feldman and has lived for thirty years on Santa Fe’s unfashionable Westside. She founded and directs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College, which includes the student run magazine Santa Fe Literary Review and the public art installation Poetry Posts.
She has had writer’s residencies in the national parks, sculpture gardens, and in Iceland. She received a Lannan Foundation Marfa residency, and she has been at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Colorado Art Ranch among numerous other places. She does text installation and was the co-curator of a show at Albuquerque’s 516 Gallery combining poetry and sculpture. Most recently, she installed a poem on sand on Miami’s South beach as part of a residency at the Betsy Hotel’s Writer’s Room.