Holding the glinting clippers above her head, the child whispers, I feel important, and she reaches up. All time, all space rush to her side. Her life is flooded with beauty and purpose. All the energy of the universe streaming toward that tiny, immeasurable, yet indelible, indestructible moment, the child illuminated and on tiptoe — it can never be destroyed: I feel important. Or taken away.
All had been preparation for this moment — so that the child standing in the Children’s Garden under the arch, pruning the roses now with great seriousness and delicacy and care for the first time, might feel the full force and enormity of her one life — claimed for a moment from the vast and rushing void all around her — and the flames, and the heartache. This was their job all along, the mother thought — to make transactions with beauty and enchantment — morning glories and roses covering the arbor.
One day, the mother imagines, without her, the child will stand under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and she will reach up as if to touch it, and it will come to her again suddenly, gravely, inexplicably: I feel important.
IT WAS IN the Garden of Night Miracles where the moth — now half-moth, half-mother, made its appearance in the moonlight. How beautiful the half-mother is — and how alone. The child longs for her, but she cannot find her anywhere, and she is afraid to go outside.
THE MOTHER PUTS out one of the small blue chairs of Childhood, and the tea set, and she waits. Though the little being may not come, the mother thinks if she sits long enough, there is always a chance. The mother has read of the Little Hominid in the local paper. This tiny person once occupied the island of Flores, one, maybe two million years ago, and does not fit into any place in the evolution of the species. He’s got no place in the early human family. He’s a hobbit, an anomaly. Out of place in time and geography, his ancestry an enigma.
Come to me, she whispers, completely inexplicable little person. He’s terribly small, but not a pygmy, his skull the size of a grapefruit. Little Hominid who lived isolated, while others made their way to Australia.
Some scientists insist he was a mere human dwarf with genetic or pathologic disorders, but the mother, who was a nurse, rejects this so-called Sick Hobbit Hypothesis. Come to me, Little Hominid, and stay awhile, and I will protect you from the ardent hobbit skeptics. Come to me and we will have some tea and keep each other company. The same mysterious force, discovered the year of the child’s birth, that is speeding up the expansion of the universe is also stunting the growth of the objects inside it, the mother reads to the little one.
Little Flore, the mother whispers, and the tiny hominid slowly shuffles out from beneath a Trufulla sprig.
Such were the days when the child was away, and the mother was left to her own devices.
ALL THE MOTHER wants some days is to go back there, but she does not know how. Sometimes she cannot see or think about anything else, not even the child, whom she loves with every fiber of her being.
Though she is drawn there, she is drawn against her will. Layers of ghosts enfold her, gauzy as a Halloween tale. The mother is compelled back, but she can’t get back far enough, and so she must stand forever on this windy hill overlooking the blueberries, neither here nor there, next to the vibrant, streaming world.
THE CHILD SKIPS home from her choral practice. The big black bat flew back! The mother ran to see. The big black bat flew back!
Where? Where? the mother said, running to the umbrella stand.
It’s our Enunciation Exercise, the child said dreamily. For chorus! Say it with me. The big black bat. .
But in fact not a single bat came back to the Valley the following spring. The mother could not explain why, but it made her inconsolably sad. The solitude now was mounting. They waited for a new sign, but no sign came.
SHE THOUGHT OF the prairie vole. When isolated, a prairie vole had increased levels of oxytocin, its heart rate went up, and the size of its heart increased over a four-week period as it tried to stave off isolation. Little prairie vole, the mother called, and it crawled out shyly from beneath a prairie leaf.
SOME DAYS THE mother is a very dim light in a jar. At times like these, all the child can do is press her brilliant eye up against the glass, lumbering, impossibly large, her warm hand encircling it. Glass was a miracle — that is what the mother always said, and at once the child thought of the flowering of fire and water and sand and the work of human hands, and this jar — the glassblower’s vessel. What was she signaling with her flicker? Perhaps the mother had come to say good-bye. Perhaps it was not possible to die all at once. What if she had made a bargain? Perhaps a deal had been struck, and she had been allowed nine years with the child. But there were now only a few days left until her tenth birthday. Soon Aunt Eloise would be by with the beehive cake once more and the next year of the child’s life would begin.
THE CHILD WONDERS sometimes where all the guardian angels have gone.
No one, the child says that night, will come and steal you while I’m sleeping, right?
No one will hurt you with a sword.
No one will put you in a fire.
No one will run you over in a car.
You won’t get lost in the woods. Tell me you will find the way out. You can always find the way out.
DARK ENERGY SUGGESTS one day everything will be black. This calmed the mother. The commotion would be over at last. The universe was expanding beyond all human understanding; the child tugged at her sleeve.
CECIL PETER HAD said to hang human hair from the bushes and sills to repel the animal kingdom, and the mother had dutifully done what he had said. Perhaps she had followed that advice too well, for now she longed for the animals; their teeth, their fur, their claws, their talons. Not this. Overnight they seem to have disappeared. She was sealed off, losing sensation. Collecting locks as they fell from the executioner’s chair, she had put them on the sill. Now she went from room to room and removed them, the tresses of the child, and the tresses of the war dead, and she wept. She would donate those tresses now to the Virgin for her Dormition Wig.
EASTER CAME EARLIER than it ever had in any of their lifetimes, and ever would in their lifetimes again. Never would it be celebrated as it was this year, in the winter, and in the dark. At the sunrise service it was twenty-four degrees by the Fahrenheit thermometer, and the motley congregation built a bonfire next to the Virgin, motionless in her grotto. The mother wrapped the child’s head in a woolen shawl, and all remarked that she looked exactly like the Magdalene.
Without the gaiety of flowers or springtime, they could better feel the austerity and gravity of the situation. They traipsed around the frozen fire and someone maneuvered the boy with no legs in his wheelchair over rock to the altar. The women had gone to the tomb.
Why are you weeping? The words could be heard through the darkness.
We do not know where the Christ’s body has gone! The tomb is empty, someone in the dark pronounced, and the women sighed, and someone urged the child toward the fire, and the mother pulled her back from it. There was a legless boy, and a rasping death head, and the weepers, and the Toothless Wonder. But the child knew that the disappeared Christ would soon enough appear to the people again as he had promised, and the sun would begin to rise. Everyone was frozen, despite the promise of the sun. No one was warmed, the temperature had not changed, and the fire was dying. When Jesus finally appeared it was to the women, and their heads were covered.