"Mama," she whispered.
There she was, there she was, in a dress like a candy cane, red stripes, playing the piano, her back toward Dorothy, her hair in ringlets. There was her papa, sitting in his armchair, smoking his pipe, a brown-skinned man with black hair and black eyes and a moustache. I'm not Gael at all, Dorothy remembered. My name is Gutierrez. I am Dorothy Gutierrez.
Her mother saw and stopped playing. She turned and dazzled Dorothy with her smile. She was so young and pretty and she reached out to hold her. Dorothy ran.
"Dorothy. Where has my little girl been?"
Dorothy began to cry and fell into her mother's arms and was held. "Oh, Mama," she said. "I had a terrible dream! Daddy was gone and you were dead, and I had to go away, and I never saw you ever again!"
Dorothy buried her head against her mother's bosom, her mother's dress, her mother's smell of soap and perfume she could not afford, and Dorothy wept. Her mother rocked her and sang to her gently. The song was an old one, one that Dorothy had not heard since St. Louis. She let herself be rocked and comforted.
When Dorothy had stopped crying, her mother patted her back, and moved her gently away from her and looked into her eyes. Dorothy's mother was crying too.
"Everything dies, Dorothy," she said. "Everything gets taken away in the end."
Dorothy looked at the room. There was the rocking cradle in which her little brother slept. Toto peered into it, whimpering, his front paws resting on its edge. There was the divan with its lace covers. There was the black dresser with the cups with the gold edges and the dancing china pony on the piano, and the Nativity in the window, the china figures, the china manger. It was snowing outside.
Dorothy knew all of those things as if they had never gone, as if all she had to do was come here on a visit and find them there, solid, to be used. She looked at her father's face.
"Muy linda," he said, and smiled at her. It was Spanish, but Dorothy understood. He smiled at her. Her father's smile was not to be trusted. He was so young, young and handsome and not to be held by anything, even love. Everything about him was true, true to the point of cruelty.
"This is just a memory," her father said. "Here and then gone. But you have to remember, to have a heart, to have a brain. You have to remember in order to be brave. That's how you grow up."
"But all you've got," said her mother, who was pretty and quite tough, "is now."
Time left you in another world where everything was different, even you. Memory held it together. So where was home?
Her mother's face crumpled with a tolerant, forbearing smile, and she leaned forward and kissed Dorothy on the forehead and said, "Look around you, Dorothy."
And Dorothy looked and saw she was lashed to a fence post in Kansas. It was as if she had made a stupid mistake. She had been in a field in Kansas all along, and it was full of wildflowers. They were tiny, red and white and blue, scattered by the wind. And there was the sky, blue, streaked with pale white.
The world was haunted. It needed to be haunted. The Land of Was was cradled in the arms of Now like a child. Was made Now tender. Death made life precious. The wildflowers were shriveling and they shook in the dry wind. Dorothy looked down and saw the theater dress, brown and stained, still hugged to her breast.
Dorothy heaved her legs out of the mud. Thick and glossy, mud coated Aunty Em's pioneer green. Dorothy unwound the wire from around herself and stood up and looked around her, feeling the dust caked on her face, and she grinned. The world was always beautiful. With a light heart she turned and began to walk, to anywhere.
Through those same fields, Bill Davison tramped up and down. The police were there with dogs now and the sky was orange. It was going to rain. Sunlight peeked under the shelf of clouds. The bald hill was green and red.
You can't just disappear, Bill told himself. The dogs will find him somewhere. He felt humbled by the world, by Jonathan himself. This was what Jonathan wanted, Bill told the fiery light on the hillside. He wanted to stay here. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to find Oz.
Do you believe in miracles?
The rain came, cold, in huge drops that splattered over Bill's bare arms, his striped shirt. The scent of running footsteps would be washed away from the fields. Bill looked up and saw the sunlight broken by rain. He saw rainbows, a corridor of them all along the valley, parallel to the hills, lined up over the straight, flat Kansas road. On his right he saw the sun, and all the sky there had flared orange. This is the rainbow too, he thought, this is what it looks like when you stand in a rainbow. For someone else.
"Oh, Jesus," he murmured, in astonishment, in wonder. He started to pray and found he didn't need to. Kansas prayed for him.
It moved inside his eyes. The hills seemed to rear back, pull away, and swell in size. His own eyes seemed to swell, like balloons. The fields seemed to rear up, their even, man-made rows distorted. The whole land rose up like a wave, and he could see it, bearing them all along with it, the police cars like surfboards, the people balanced precariously, space and time moving as one, a never-ending wave that never broke. The hillsides gaped their mouths and furrowed their brows. The hillsides had a face.
Something huge in the land, like a shark, like a whale, moved past him. Sparing him? A living land that was also a person. After a lifetime of prayer, Bill Davison had finally had a vision. Of God?
And Dynamite Dot lay in the snow, beating her angel wings, the snow cupped in her fingers as thick as air. She was flying and singing and dying at the same time, and she was looking up at the winter stars in a sky that was clearing, but snow still fell, fell past her face as if she were moving through the midst of stars. The stars spoke to her.
"Dah do la ti sang," they said. "Ming ming ming."
They had voices like bells. They were not stars or snow, Old Dynamite realized. They were people.
And Ira Mildvan read a newspaper ringed around with handwritten words:
M'dearest Ox [it began]
You came to see me this morning. You were waiting by the Coke machine. You were 20 years old in blue jeans and you had thick hair, and wire-rim spectacles. You were the Ira who was going to become a lawyer to help Cesar Chavez and the lettuce pickers. Nowadays that sounds like the name of a band. I don't know if this will help, but we both changed. We both went neutral on each other. Whatever happened really wasn't your fault. I always made you do everything. I made you do too much.
It's dawn here. The air is beautiful and clear and I want to get out in it, so I'll try to write this quickly. I'm going to stay in Manhattan. It's small and quiet and friendly, and better than that, it's haunted for me. All this search for history was a search for home.