The Edge of Heaven - Hardcover

"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

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.