Holding Wonder

"Who came?" Vesta's fading voice was drowsy.
"There's nobody here but me." Hattie's voice jerked.
"I thought someone came." Now she was fading and the whole room was stirring like a bowl full of smoke and I was being drawn back through it, hearing Hattie's, "There's nobody here but me-"
The sound of the baby's cry cut through the rain-sound, the swirling smoke and Hattie's voice. I heard Vesta's tender crooning, "There, there, Gayla, there, there:"
Then I faded-and could finally close my eyes. I faded into an intolerable stretching from adobe window sill to car window, a stretching from Then to Now, a stretching across impossibility. I felt pulled out so thin and tight that it seemed to me the sudden rush of raindrops thrummed on me as on the tightened strings of some instrument. I think I cried out. Then there was a terrific tug and a feeling of coming unstuck and then I was face down, halfway out of the car window, rain parting my hair with wet insistent hands, hearing Peter's angry, frightened voice, "Not even sense enough to come in out of the rain!" It took quite a while to convince Peter that I was all there. And quite a time to get my wet hair dried. And to believe that there were no mud stains on the sleeves of my gown. And an even longer, disjointed time to fill Peter in on what had happened.
He didn't have much to say about what happened from his point of view. "Bless the honest flannel!" He muttered as he wrapped me in a scratchy blanket and the warmth of his arms. "I was sure it was going to tear before I could get you back. I held on like grim death with that flannel stretching like a rubber band out the window and into the dark-into nothing! There I was, like hanging onto a kite string! A flannel one! Or a fishing line! A flannel one! Wondering what would happen if I had let go? If I'd had to let go!
We comforted each other for the unanswerable terror of the question. And I told him all of it again and together we looked once more at the memory of the white, young face floating in the darkness. And the reddening small face, topped by its smudge of black, floating in the yellow flood of lamp light.
Then I started up, crying, "Oh Peter, what did I save her for?"
"Because you couldn't let her die," he said, pulling me back.
"I don't mean why did I save her. I mean for what did I save her? For making her own way? For that's enough for her kind? For what did I save her" I felt sorrow flood over me.
Peter took my shoulders and shook me. "Now, look here," he said sternly. "What makes you think you had anything to do with whether she lived or died? You may have been an instrument. On the other hand, you may have just wanted so badly to help that you thought you did. Don't go appointing yourself judge and jury over the worth of anyone's life. You only know the little bit that touched you. And for all you know, that little bit is all hallucination."
I caught my breath in a hiccoughy sob and blinked in the dark. "Do you think it's all hallucination?" I asked quietly.
Peter tucked me back into the curve of his shoulder. "I don't know what I think," he said. "I'm just the observer. And most likely that's all you are. Let's wait until morning before we decide.
"Go to sleep. We have hunting to do, in the morning, too."
"In all this rain and mud?" I protested.
"Wait till morning," he repeated.
Long after his steady sleeping breath came and went over my head, I lay and listened to the intermittent rain on the roof-and thought.
Finally the tight knot inside me dissolved and I relaxed against Peter.
Now that I had seen Gayla born, I could let her be dead. Or I could keep her forever the dreaming child in the playhouse on the school grounds. Why I had become involved in her life, I didn't need to know any more than I needed to know why I walked through the wrong door one time and met Peter. I tucked my hand against my cheek, then roused a little. Where were my glasses? I groped on the car floor. My shoe. Yes, the glasses were there, where I always put them when we're camping. I leaned again and slept
. AS SIMPLE AS THAT
"I WON'T READ IT." Ken sat staring down at his open first grade book.
I took a deep, wavery breath and, with an effort, brought myself back to the classroom and the interruption in the automatic smooth flow of the reading group.
"It's your turn, Ken," I said, "Don't you know the place?"
"Yes," said Ken, his thin, unhappy face angling sharply at the cheek bones as he looked at me. "But I won't read it…
"Why not?" I asked gently. Anger had not yet returned. "You know all the words. Why don't you want to read it?"
"It isn't true," said Ken. He dropped his eyes to his book as tears flooded in. "It isn't true."
"It never was true," I told him. "We play like it's true, just for fun." I flipped the four pages that made up the current reading lesson. "Maybe this city isn't true, but it's like a real one, with stores and-" My voice trailed off as the eyes of the whole class centered on me-seven pairs of eyes and the sightless, creamy oval of Maria's face-all seeing our city.
"The cities," I began again. "The cities-" By now the children were used to grown-ups stopping in mid-sentence. And to the stunned look on adult faces.
"It isn't true," said Ken. "I won't read it."
"Close your books," I said, "And go to your seats." The three slid quietly into their desks-Ken and Victor and Gloryanne. I sat at my desk, my elbows on the green blotter, my chin in the palms of my hands, and looked at nothing. I didn't want anything true. The fantasy that kept school as usual is painful enough. How much more comfortable to live unthinking from stunned silence to stunned silence. Finally I roused myself.
"If you don't want to read your book, let's write a story that is true, and we'll have that for reading." I took the staff liner and drew three lines at a time across the chalk board, with just a small jog where I had to lift the chalk over the jagged crack that marred the board diagonally from top to bottom.
"What shall we name our story?" I asked. "Ken, what do you want it to be about?"
"About Biffs house," said Ken promptly. "Biff's house," I repeated, my stomach tightening sickly as I wrote the words, forming the letters carefully in manuscript printing, automatically saying, "Remember now, all titles begin with-" And the class automatically supplying, "-capital letters."
"Yes," I said. "Ken, what shall we say first?" "Biff's house went up like an elevator," said Ken. "Right up into the air?" I prompted. "The ground went up with it," supplied Gloryanne. I wrote the two sentences. "Victor? Do you want to tell what came next?" The
chalk was darkening in my wet, clenched hand. "The groun'-it comed down, more fast nor Biffs house," supplied Victor
hoarsely. I saw his lifted face and the deep color of his heavily fringed eyes for the first time in a week. "With noise!" shouted Maria, her face animated. "With lots of noise!" "You're not in our group I" cried Ken. "This is our story!" "It's everyone's story," I said and wrote carefully. "And every sentence ends
with a-" "Period," supplied the class. "And then?" I paused, leaning my forehead against the coolness of the chalk
board, blinking my eyes until the rich green alfalfa that was growing through the corner of the room came back into focus. I lifted my head. Celia had waited. "Biff fell out of his house," she suggested. I wrote. "And then?" I paused, chalk raised.
"Biff's house fell on him," said Ken with a rush. "And he got dead." "I saw him!" Bobby surged up out of his seat, speaking his first words of the day. "There was blood, but his face was only asleep."