Read The Dark Space for Free Online

wanted to swan dive into all that cold.”
    “Then you heard something,” I said. My eyes were closed and felt swollen from crying, but I was listening to my mom like her voice was the only one left in the world.
    “I did. Right in the middle of the ledge, right before I would have leapt up to dive, I heard a voice, right inside my head, say, Stop, wait up. ”
    “You thought it was your boyfriend.” Every hair on my body raised, my chest tight.
    “I did. I thought it was. I stopped and turned. No one was there.”
    “Then you looked back.”
    “Then I looked back, thinking I would just jump in, since my momentum had been interrupted.”
    “There wasn’t any water.”
    “No. There wasn’t any water. All those fences were put up because they had drained the quarry. If I had dove in, I would have dove a hundred feet to the bottom and died.”
    “Tell me the end again.”
    “I went home, completely shaken up. I never told anyone. Like all stupid things you do when you’re a teenager, I kind of forgot about it.”
    “We had that fight.”
    “Yeah. Right before your eighth-grade graduation. You didn’t want to go, and I had already bought you that suit you begged for.”
    “The white linen one.”
    “Like Mark Twain’s, you said. Jesus, a thirty-four short white linen suit is expensive.”
    “I didn’t tell you that I had been asked to give the speech.”
    “And that you had neglected to write it.”
    “So I said I was sick, that I couldn’t go, and you were totally onto me.”
    “I knew you were hiding something, but I didn’t know what. You thought you were the shit in that suit. No way you would pass up an opportunity to show yourself off in it, unless it was bad.”
    “That was the worst fight. You never yelled, and you were yelling at me, and then you totally freaked me out. You pushed over a chair and slammed out the door, and I heard you start the car. I suddenly remembered all those things Dad says about not driving drunk, tired, or angry, and I got up and starting running toward the door.”
    “You yelled at me from the porch, Stop, wait up. ”
    “And you turned off the car and put your head on the steering wheel and started crying.”
    “That was the spring your voice started to change. It was so funny — you were this little guy, sorry, and your voice was so big. Like a man’s.”
    “It was the exact voice you heard on the ledge when you were seventeen.”
    “Exactly. It was exactly that voice. I put my head down and cried because it wasn’t just like it, it was it, you were , exactly, what I heard that day.”
    “Since then, you’ve always believed that your kid saved your life when you were a kid.”
    “I have. I do believe that. I’m not that person, normally, and I have no explanation, it’s just something I know.”
    We were quiet.
    “What brought this on, baby?”
    I sat up and gave my mom a hug. Kissed her on the forehead. “You’ll be the first one I tell when I figure it out.”
    “Fair enough,” she said.
    I wanted to tell her how much her heart was glowing through her clothes, a kind of warmth right up to her throat.
    I wanted to tell her she was a life worth bending time to save.

Winnie
    “I am here.”
    “You are here.”
    “I am here.”
    “You are here .”
    I was in lotus, sitting on the stage, facing Sarah, a girl who I didn’t think remembered me. We had Intro to Macroeconomics together, and she was in my midterm project group. She didn’t do her part of our presentation. I stayed up all night doing it for her. On the day of the presentation, she wasn’t in class, and I found out she’d dropped.
    At the time, I had hated her. Thought her tattoos and her half-exposed breasts and gauged ears were the most obvious kind of posturing ever.
    Sometime in my sophomore year, after seeing her sing with her acoustic guitar in the cafeteria — her voice so sad and tired-sounding and beautiful, I felt almost angry — I could admit that I was