“Let’s go outside,” I say to Kara. “Hmm?” Making my voice soft.
I pick the baby up, and her back bends gracefully under the pressure of her own weight, muscles too foreign to themselves to support the bones. It’s exquisite, how close my attention adheres to the details of her body. One false move and I could snap something, tweak some tender part of her so it grows awry. Carefully I bundle her, trying to meditate on each piece of clothing. The soft knit cap into which I tuck Kara’s hair fits snugly down over her ears, so tight that it seems to promise a bit of extra skull for these days of early life, as well as a barrier against cold air.
Good thing, too. A gust of wind roars against the window, which audibly strains. The day is still stormy. A part of me knows we really shouldn’t go out in it at all, but then again, my phone is still ringing. I think about Greta and Saul, married in a rainstorm. I think about my own husband, turning up his collar this morning against the cold.
I think about myself, and when I can’t anymore, I think about my daughter.
Supposedly infants can’t see well. The world to them is made up of dim shapes and vague shadings of light. Not unlike a surgery patient wrapped up in gauze. Or a theater patron, once the house lights have gone down, who can half sense that places have been taken onstage but doesn’t know where, or who, or why. Is that how things are for you? I wonder to Kara. She seems to be watching closely enough, more so as she unwrinkles from her time in the womb and her eyes lose their perpetual sleepy squint. I touch her cheek and she immediately sniffles towards my finger. I snap on the other side of her head and she wobbles around trying to get a look.
Not so gauzy then. She is already a creature of sound and scent, full of anticipation and eagerness. She wants to hear. And if she hears enough, someday she’ll want to speak. To see. To know everything.
But not yet. For now, there’s still just one person I can whisper my secrets to, even if they don’t quite reach her. One person who can tell me if the face I’m showing to the world is the right one. I need that today, if I ever want to be strong enough to hear Kara’s secrets in turn. Otherwise I might keel over, a ship in a gale, no help in sight. I pull the cap more carefully around her ears and enclose her in a downy blanket the color of the sea. Out we go. We’re on our way.
To the only place I can think of worth going, right now. To the only person I’ve ever known who could always see light when faced with darkness.
Greta and Saul were early with their sons. First was Andrzej, towheaded at birth but later dark as dirt. Then Fil, who tagged after his brother and begged to play; Fil who was smattered with freckles and stomping with mischief. Finally came Konrad, blond as a bell ringing.
“My brothers,” Ada said, “were a tribe. Always together. They moved with one body, like a herd of deer. They sniffed in the grass, and they butted their heads together, pushed each other around in the yard. Sometimes they nibbled food from the vegetable patch. Just a bite here or there.” She slit her eyes at me, sidelong. “Like some other people I could mention.”
We were walking along Lake Michigan, summer wilting the grateful city around us. I wore a pink dress, my favorite color when I was eight, and sandals that left white lines on my feet through the tan, as if I’d been born palomino. It had been more than a year since I saw my mother sing at the Green Mill, and in that time I’d developed a sense that my opinions were powerful and important. At school a girl I despised had announced that her favorite color was pink too, and I took her aside at recess and talked to her using my sweetest tones. She leaned closer to me with every word, and by the time the bell rang her new favorite color was gray.
In Edgewater, a few blocks from the lakeshore, there’s a grand pink hotel, wedged like a slice of cake. We never went inside, but that summer I insisted on taking our walks up north so I could watch the water glint off the windows. I was waiting for an opportunity to get closer to the ground-floor doors; I imagined finding one mysteriously open and slipping through without Ada noticing. Inside would be a society of magicians who would recognize me as one of their own by examining some insubstantial element of me. The color of my bones. The weight of my lungs. I’d run through the empty hallways, waited on by eager and animate pushcarts, brooms, and pieces of cutlery.
But we never got close enough. Instead we crossed Sheridan, maneuvering around a complicated freeway exit, and then strolled along the large, cracked concrete stairs that border the lake.
“They were good boys.” Ada held my hand and stared out into the waves, which smelled like bathwater and diesel. Farther down the shoreline lay a beach dotted with towels and studded with white lifeguard chairs. “Did what their mother asked, mostly. And loved her very much. Very deeply. They were her champions.”
“What were their special gifts?” I hopped carefully over the seams in the concrete. If I was going to be denied my hotel, I wasn’t going to miss out on the best part of the story. “You said they had gifts.”
“Well, lalka.” She didn’t shift her gaze. “They were spirits of the forest. They could disappear into the trees, camouflage themselves in leaves. That kind of thing. Just for starters. But they each had a particular talent. A gift, as you say.
“Andrzej could hear footsteps from twenty miles away. Sometimes we would be sitting on the porch talking and he would tilt his head to the side”—she cocked her ear towards the water—“like this. As though someone were whispering something to him. He could tell the direction a person was walking, and the weight of their body, and even what kind of mood they were in just by the sound of their feet on the earth. Smak smak, if you were angry; flek flek, if you had something to hide. Anyone else would make themselves crazy trying to hear what he heard. But Andrzej didn’t even have to try. Listening came to him as naturally as a heartbeat.
“Fil was shiftier.” She smiled. “He could smell anything, taste anything. He’d have made a wonderful knight to a king, because he could have detected poisoned food without even having to take a bite. It made him a fussy eater. But it was useful.”
“How?”
“Planting, for one thing.” Ada squeezed my hand. “He could always smell water in the ground. And his father, Saul, of course, was a woodsman — he cut down trees to make his living. Saul was already very clever at picking out which trees to cut, to harvest, but Fil could smell an infestation of ants. He could smell a bird’s nest in the top branches of an oak and would climb up to pick it out before the tree was felled. The thing about Fil, though, was that he was always looking to play a trick. If he wrinkled his nose and you asked him what he smelled, you had to be ready for him to say it was you.”
We walked along the steps for a ways, coming close enough to the beach that I could hear the jingle bells of an ice cream truck. “C major,” I said, not to anyone in particular. “What about Konrad?”
Ada stopped at the edge of the concrete stairs, where a series of smaller steps led down into the sand. At the lake’s edge, a group of children were throwing buckets of water at one another and shrieking with laughter. For a moment I felt a tug behind my navel. I wanted to run down the steps and onto the beach, letting the dirty sand get in my shoes. I would head straight for the water and dive in, soak my dress, float on my back, and look at the sky. But Ada’s fingers were still interwoven with my own.
“Konrad was a beacon,” she said finally. “He called things to himself.”