It was a Friday. He had nothing else to do.
I go to the top of the basement stairs, and stand, and listen for a long time. I listen until I hear the whole world down there. The howling dogs, and wings, and the whirring of machines, and wind, and screaming, blunt objects, the buzzing of bees, rifle shots, and a million mothers calling their children with music like rivers on fire.
I listen to it until my whole body becomes an ear. My hair. My breath. My teeth. And then I follow her voice—her voice, which rises out of all the other noise, the voice that named me, the first voice I ever heard, the voice that called me out of her skin into this world.
Down the stairs to the basement. Past the pool table. The vinyl couch. The finished part. The canary’s empty cage—just a tuft of pale molt leftover, a fistful of echo, or weather.
“Kat.”
And then she’s screaming me past the mute witnesses of washer and dryer, water and fire, past those appliances of silence, of politeness, and convenience, saved time—farther into the unfinished part.
Open this.
Open this.
“What?” I ask her. “What? The freezer’s locked.”
“But you know the combination,” she says. “You’ve always known.”
I find my way to the Coldspot and stand barefoot before it. A trunk of infinity. Stuffed with sparks and talismans and dreams. A mind made out of nothing but love, fear, space, saying my name, creating creation.
Atoms, radio noise, God, and the matter of stars, all waiting to be bathed in brilliance, to reveal their secrets in sudden, stunning light.
I try to open it. I grip the top of the freezer, lock my knees, hold my breath and strain, but it won’t open.
So I get down on my knees and feel the half-inch of frost and space where I can slip my fingers into it, until I find what’s holding it closed. There’s a lock snapped through a hole that’s been drilled in the handle, and the lock has been slipped into the freezer.
I pull it around and out, examine it in my hand—though I don’t need to see it to know it’s the combination lock my father used to keep on his file cabinet, the one in which he kept his magazines. 36–24–35.
It opens simply in my hand—a needle dropping into a stack of hay.
I don’t move. I listen.
And then the gray matter of January begins to melt all around me. “Here’s Mama,” she says, and the vowels rise in two frozen zeroes above the freezer, swallow each other in midair.
How? For the rest of my life, I’ll be asked how, and this is what I’ll say:
Like any other daughter, I simply came to this darkness barefoot, and mortal, and just like her, when I heard her call my name to the silence, which wasn’t silent any longer. And then—
I lifted its lid, looked inside myself, and there my mother was.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
About the Author