AFTER THE MOTHER had her hair shorn for the war effort, the back of her neck could be seen for the first time since childhood, and it was only then that the child noticed that she had a stork bite at the nape, as infants often have, to mark the place they had been carried before they were dropped to earth. Mysteriously, the mother’s stork bite would appear and then fade, and after a while, it would disappear altogether only to come back at another time, bright red again. It was as if she were continually being born and carried and dropped to earth, over and over. Each time she landed, she was brand new and she possessed no hindsight and no foresight; she remembered and had learned nothing — but also, the world was always new, never seen before, and she never aged.
THERE IS A fire at the center of the earth. From the fire, a child’s voice, so pure, so true, makes itself heard. It is marked by the peculiar suffering of children. It is refined, perfected — innocence and experience held in such sublime balance, and possessing wisdom, ancient and new. She could hear the child from upstairs calling her name — stranger than music, more plangent than bells, sweet in a way we have forgotten entirely. A child is reciting numbers. A child is making up a song. A Happy Dance, a Fippy Song, a Fippy Dance.
SHE WAS ENCLOSED in a firm case. She remained in her pod stationary for ten days, and each day the pod would darken. About a day before the emergence of the creature, the chrysalis would become transparent.
THERE IS SOMETHING so luminous and clear passing through the child, and so momentous. She can hardly express the grandeur she feels. She thought of the pictures of the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre and how it matched the one she carried inside her now. If there is anything the child wants to see for real before she dies, it is that glass pyramid. She closes her eyes and she sees that shape in three dimensions travelling through space.
Right before the mother emerges again, the chrysalis becomes transparent. The child thought of Blanche Neige gleaming from her glass casket. She imagined her mother would at last be perfected and her soul purified, and at that moment their transparencies might speak. What is too sublime for you, seek not; into things beyond your strength, search not, the false prophet had said. The child’s body is transparent. Blanche Neige gleaming from her glass casket is at rest — everything is shining and bright.
SHE THOUGHT OF the Luna Moth, very late at night, spinning silk, wrapped in a walnut leaf, and the slow formation of pale green wings.
THERE IS A world not yet visible but there, before us. Welcoming, not hostile. And translucent. It is a matter now of attention — of perceiving the opening in the veil through which they might slip. The Virgin appears and welcomes her through, under a mantle of blue.
AT THE LAST moment, the mother had an odd visitation. It was not exactly a visitation; it was more an intimation, but it came back with such intensity that it threatened to change the course of all that now lay fixed securely before her.
She could feel herself and the child, who was a baby — the two of them, in the drafty, dangerous house, lying on the floor on a carpet she had purchased because that is what one did when you had an infant come to live with you. You made the surfaces softer. She read there were rubber edges you could put on the sharp corners as well, but she hadn’t gotten around to it yet. This is what she saw, and what she felt now in her body as she emerged. Perhaps she had tried to fly away from the catastrophe, and the flames, as would have been the only solution. She was a large winged Luna Moth. Black smoke billowing against the sky, arms outstretched, she was pregnant after all; she was sure of it. No, she did not die, she says to herself.
NOW SHE WAS falling. And still she sees before her: the mother and the infant are lying on the carpet together. The phone rings in the next room, and the mother puts her hand behind the baby’s head to support it before picking her up and gathering the little one to her breast. And for an instant she feels completely happy, and it is as if she knows, for once, exactly what to do with this world. On the phone it is the Grandmother from the North Pole who is whispering as she bestows something like a blessing on the new mother and the new child and the new world. Everything is so beautiful, and so new.
FOR AN INSTANT they stood without moving, the mother and her child, who was now almost ten years of age. They were both whole and they laughed and they ran in the grass. And they did not tire, and they saw a deer in a clearing, and its antlers were covered in velvet. They should have known who the deer was, and what it wanted of them, there in the dark wood, with its incomparable poise, and its terror — but their eyes were prevented from recognizing it. It did not matter. It was enough to be adorned in the charms of twilight. It was enough to be alive.
acknowledgments
FOR THOSE WHO make their appearance in these pages, my gratitude:
Louise, Louis, Henry, Lisa, Paul, Liam, Emma, Genevieve, Hazel Ann, Jim, Larissa, Cathy, Jan, Jean, Peter, Krista, Michael, Emma S., Sally, Peter S., Martin, Ellen, Jill, Eli, Lorraine, Kenny, David, Dugan, Bunny, Nico, Reteeka, Eleanor, Kathy, Andrea, Father Ted, Father Chepatis, Father Flynn, Hardscrabble Jim, Mr. Min, Coco, Paris, Puff, Winter Bear.
And for all those along the way who have offered their heart or their hand:
Aishah, Alexandra, Anita, Annabella, Linda, Liz, Melanie, Therese, Jan, Lora, Jack, Georges, Barbara, Jean, Peter, Angela, Alison, Mary-Beth, Duke, Ben, Laura, Romulus, Catherine, Harry, Melissa, Cathy, Regina, Alicia, Sue, Thalia, Toad, Jill, Brad, Lance, Deborah, Ronnie, Ilene, Kelly, Micaiah.