When all is cleared and clean in the Bread Truck, Abe deposits Bit at the Pink Piper to sleep in Cole’s hammock. He kisses him gravely and leaves.
The metal roof clicks with tiny icy snow. Astrid’s children breathe lightly. Sweetie’s boys snore and shift, Cole jabs at Bit with his heels. The pile of Family Quonset kids tangle together under the blankets.
Bit turns and sees Helle’s eyes are open, yellow, in the dim. Tadpole of Handy, he thinks, bulby and strange. She looks at Bit, her mouth swelling with information. She is nosy, a listener at doors, a tattletale.
She whispers, They’re making a Critique tonight. Of Hannah. Of your mom.
Bit hears Marilyn downstairs talking to someone, Saucy Sally it sounds like. He gets out of his hammock and creeps down the stairs. They’re smoking funny stuff out the window, even though Sally is pregnant. They gab, are not watchful. He goes out the door.
Ice glazes on the grass and his feet are bare, his legs cold under the thin pajamas. His soles burn until he can’t feel them anymore, and he must pump his arms to be sure he is still running. The wind smacks his face with a cold hand. When he longs to lie down in the sinister rows of the apple orchard, he thinks of Hannah and goes on.
Up the slate stairs to Arcadia House, up the stone porch. He can’t reach the doorknob, but he pushes and the vast door swings open.
A powerful stench: varnish and polyurethane and paint, beeswax and vinegar and sweat, sawdust and copper and cold nails. The stairs are finished but dark because there is no sky above them, only plaster and ceiling. The grand chandelier has been pieced together, and it hulks overhead in half shadow.
Over the still-tacky floorboards, to the stairs, curving up. Halfway there, he hears voices. Another corridor, paint sticky under his hand. Another stairway. The voices are louder. When he reaches the doorway to the back of the Proscenium, the voices are very loud.
He crouches and puts his eye to the crack. His feet come alive again, and he would cry with the pain if he didn’t first bite the inside of his cheek to blood.
From there he sees the silhouettes of bodies, some shiftings, the shadow of a hand that rises to a face, heads that move together then apart. Beyond, elevated on the stage, uplit by three kerosene lamps, there is Hannah.
She is tiny, shriveled, so distant from him. She is alone. Her hands are folded in her lap, and she looks down and nods. Someone, a man, says: . . mean, Hannah baby, we love you and want you to feel better, man, but it’s just such a drag, you’re like bringing down all our energy and we’ve got a shitload more work to do before Handy and them get back and we need all the energy we can get for the planting, you dig?
Hannah nods, nods, nods.
Now, someone else says in a calm cold voice, . Mahayana, big boat, caring for everyone, but you’re manifesting pure Hinayana, small boat, taking care of yourself. . Hannah nods.
And someone, a woman, says, Listen. . when you’re good, there’s nobody better. . in the fall know you had that accident. . sad to lose a baby. . over it by now?
And Hannah’s hands clench at her skirt and her face contracts, then smoothes out, and still she nods.
Now a familiar voice, Titus’s. He roars. He says, . fucking nuts, man, it’s like taking someone whose leg is broken and jumping on the fucking leg, we’re not doing anybody any favors here, I’ve been there, Hannah, I’ve been where you are, I’ve been down so low the black dog is at my neck, man, I know what it’s like so don’t listen to these hypocritical assholes. .
An uproar, voices shouting over Titus’s. Hannah looks out into the audience, finds a face to fix on, and stares at it. In this moment the whole of her is present. His mother, so wispy, so far away.
Bit can’t hold himself: he leaps up from where he is crouched and begins to run. Down the endless aisle, down past the people who sit on the benches, down past the folks sprawled on the floor, to the stairs, up. Out of the shadow and into the shallow pool of kerosene light, with Hannah alone in the center. He thrusts himself onto his mother’s lap and cradles her head in his arms. He can feel all the others’ eyes heavy on his back. For a long moment, nothing, silence.
Briefly, a wet warmth on his belly, his mother’s face pressing into him.
Briefly, her mouth moving against him, kissing him through his shirt.
Now, Abe is on the stage and lifting Bit, and Bit floats halfway down the aisle in Abe’s steely hands. Abe is whispering fiercely into his ear; Bit twists and fights to return to Hannah. In silence, Bit struggles, desperate, and when they go down the third-floor steps, down the curved entry stairs and out into the night, he hears what Abe is saying, . I know, little one, I know you’re in pain, I know you’re holding it in, monkey. . Abe presses Bit against him and Bit hangs on to his father, his warmth, his one solid ground in the spinning awful world, his gravity. He presses against Abe and tries to push him away, tries to fly back toward Hannah, clutches his father; pushes him, clutches. Abe is saying. . don’t have to let it out yet. . It is only when they are halfway home, as Abe begins to trot over the hard ground, that Bit’s internal scream lurches and burbles and emerges in a sour rush of vomit.
In the night, he hears: Now or never, baby. I left a Bug outside, keys in the ignition.
A silence so long Bit almost sleeps. Then a whispered No.
Then you have to try. You have to begin to try. You have to. You have to.
His father’s voice is thick and shuddery, and it makes Bit go thick and shuddery inside.
A very long silence. Bit is almost asleep. Then it comes, soft, soft: I’ll try.
He wakes, gnawed. He breathes with Hannah until Abe gets up, feeds them, drops Bit off at the Pink Piper. Before he goes, Abe kneels before Bit and brushes the hair out of his eyes, and says, Whenever you want, you talk to me, okay?
All day long, Bit is being eaten inside. The nameless bad pushes in his legs, makes his shoulders ache. He longs to rip up the pillows and send the hammocks a-scattering over the Quad.
His silence isn’t working alone. He will need a Quest. And if he doesn’t go on his Quest soon to find the thing to save Hannah, he is afraid what he might do.
Sweetie tries to talk softly to him, but he runs away. The Kid Herd is quiet today. Dorotka takes time from starting the seeds in the solarium and now leads the kidlets into the forest to tell them about trees. He trails the other kids, stomps his boots. He must do. What? His longing twists and flicks in him.
The Kid Herd moves across the meadow and into the bitter woods. Bit lags five steps, ten steps behind.
Mud has dried into pocks and pits here. Pussy willows velvet the banks; other willows are awash with gold buds. Sweetie and Maria take the babies back to the Pink Piper with the wagons. Jincy and Muffin and Fiona roll down the tender-grassed slope. The boys stop smacking things with sticks to listen to Dorotka: Look, she urges them, Ulmaceae, elm. It has simple alternate leaves that are just coming out, look! It comes from Asia, originally. It seeds with a kind of samara, let’s see aha, aha, here’s one from last year.
She lifts a seed and it flutters down, a propeller.
She beams. They beam. Springtime, she says, a letter from a loved one.