The Edge of Heaven - Hardcover

Golden, Marita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385415079 ISBN 13: 9780385415071

Publisher: Doubleday, 1997

Synopsis

The death of a young child can devastate a family. When a parent is responsible for the death, there is very little hope the remaining unit will survive. As The Edge of Heaven begins, Teresa, twenty, is waiting with dread for the return of her mother who has just been released from jail. Twelve years earlier, her little sister fell down a flight of stairs and died--the result of an angry, but wholly unintentional push by her mother.
Teresa is on the cusp of adulthood. Her unresolved feelings toward her mother, her life with her grandmother who is now her guardian in the wake of her father's inability to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and assume responsibility, her concerns about her boyfriend, and her worries about her future conspire to push Teresa toward a new and frightening place.
With a deceptively simple style, Marita Golden once again uses her considerable talents--"her supple prose, convincing dialogue and brisk pacing" (Cleveland Plain Dealer)--to grab your heart and put you in the middle of this almost insupportable scenario. As Teresa comes to terms with the realities of the complexities of life, her inner strength and rapidly growing maturity assure us that her future will be a full one.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"FIERCELY INTELLIGENT . . . A POWERFUL STORY."
--The Washington Post Book World

"Like Snow Falling on Cedars, Marita Golden's powerful new novel is more than a mystery, more than a novel about the effects of a past crime. It's a psychological page-turner."
--LEE SMITH
Author of News of the Spirit

"GOLDEN HAS A RARE GIFT FOR THE POETRY OF LANGUAGE. . . . [Her] touching story of three fierce, passionate people . . . is a triumphant journey from grief to renewed hope."
--San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

"BREATHTAKINGLY MOVING . . . AN EMOTIONAL TOUR DE FORCE."
--Dallas Weekly

"WE REMAIN ENTHRALLED IN THE TELLING."
--Detroit Free Press

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

My mother returned that summer from an exile both imposed and earned. Nothing had prepared me for her departure. I was unsure how to claim her homecoming. But I share her talent for perseverance, for we are joined by more than I can bear. My mother came back to recognition and reckoning. I thought she came home to me.
At ten minutes after seven the morning of her return, it was already eighty-five degrees according to the deejay on the all-news radio station that woke me up.

All news, all the time, the station promised and delivered, and so even as I lay, partially asleep, poised to wake, I learned that the pollution and humidity made it a bad day for breathing and that the body of a young pregnant Black woman had been found in a park in Northeast Washington the night before. She had been stabbed and bludgeoned.

My cynicism was ornate and entirely deserved so I knew that only someone who thought they loved her could have unleashed such a torrent of rage. What had happened to us, my mother, my father, my grandmother, and me, had not dampened my curiosity about death, but perversely seemed to stoke it. If I saw a traffic accident in which the cars had been reduced to metallic rubble, I'd linger long after others had departed. The yellow police tape enclosing the scene was not a border, but simply a line to be crossed in my imagination. Standing before the carnage, I could never decide who was luckier, the covered, lifeless bodies on stretchers (the white sheets draped but never covering everything so that a foot or a shoe or the top of a head cheated anonymity), or those suffering pain, bruises, injury, but still alive.

Did she and her assailant argue in the park? I wondered of the dead woman as I rolled over and reached behind me to turn the volume down and switch to the soulful early morning gossip, music, and banter of WHUR, or was she murdered someplace else and her body dumped near the picnic tables? Lying on my back, I felt my hands roaming the terrain of my body, as though propelled by thoughts of their own. Once my palms and fingers confirmed limbs, skin, the tautness of my stomach, the veins in my neck, a sigh of relief fled my heart. A storm had awakened me in the middle of the night. The thunder clamored and menaced. But as an aggressive sunlight filtered into my room that morning, I wanted to know if the young woman was already dead when the rain began. Did the storm revive even a moment of her life? Did she open her mouth to whisper for help, only to have raindrops clog her throat?

My lavender sheets were humid and musty and my body grew numb each time I thought of my feet hitting the floor. My mother was coming home. And though I was terrified by the thought, the night before, within the boundaries of slumber, my mother's face spilled forth like a comforting hallucination, one induced by the potent alchemy of desire.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0385415079
• ISBN 13: 9780385415071
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256