I hesitate, wishing you would open the door yourself, but I know you won’t, so I pop it open and put a smile on my face.
“Hey, beautiful,” I whisper, leaning in close and situating your arms just so, as I’ve grown accustomed to doing. I lift you out.
Your eyes are so bright, and one hand is up under your chin, a spot it tends to find naturally, a spot that makes it look like you’re thinking. I know you are thinking. A deep, quiet, guttural sound comes from your throat, a kind of speaking that I somehow feel I understand.
“Welcome home, indeed,” I say, standing up straight.
You are so light, as light as you were at four or five years old, so light I think you might float away from me, and I don’t yet put you down in the chair—I stand there in the bright sun and the cold air and watch the traffic go by. Your dark hair blows in wisps around my face, like tiny promises, and I feel a sob rise in the back of my throat, but I keep it down by staring up at the sun, blinking hard, then turning away.
I nestle you into your chair and pull the soft blue blanket from the car, tuck it in around your thighs, your shoulders. You make a long, quiet moaning sound.
“I know, I know. It’s cold. We’ll get you inside.”
I push you carefully along the sidewalk to our front steps, easing over the uneven cement. I should probably move, find a place with easier access, a one-story house without front steps. We’ll see.
“What do you think, Pearl? Would you like to move?”
When we arrive at our front porch, I look up, and my body goes numb.
Your father is standing on the porch.
“John,” I say.
But he has eyes only for you. At first he was rubbing his arms, trying to get or stay warm, but when he sees you, his face wrinkles up in confusion and sadness, and his head tilts to the side. His eyes squint as if he’s trying to see something, see it clearer, see it from a different angle, because if he can do that, surely it will change what’s in front of him.
“John,” I say again, not knowing where to begin. His eyes are hollowed out, as they always are when he returns, his cheeks sunken in, his skin the color of old slate shingles. His hair has been cut by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. But there is something clear about the air around him. His eyes are awake. I can tell he is sober. For now.
His movement down onto the step is part sitting, part falling. I reach out to catch him, but he’s already there, crouching on the steps, searching your eyes for something.
“What happened, Dad?” he whispers.
“We went back to Nysa,” I say, shaking my head. I can never tell him everything.
“Nysa?”
“We stayed with Tom. Pearl nearly drowned.” I find it hard to believe the words coming out of my mouth. It feels like someone else is talking, and I want to tell that person to shut up, stop it, no one cares what you have to say, you with your lies and your made-up stories. But I’m the one who’s talking, and it’s all true.
“Same as Mom,” he says.
Since it’s not a question, I don’t reply, though I think I might be nodding.
“We almost lost her. The doctors say she went quite a while without oxygen under the water. And the fever nearly did her in. But here we are. Here she is.”
He reaches up to touch your cheek. His knuckles are swollen. His nails are chewed short and stained around the edges, but when he touches your skin, he is gentle, and that is a relief to me.
“How long have you been here waiting for us?”
“I came by a month ago and waited,” he says. “You weren’t here, so I left. I guess this time I’ve been here two or three days, back and forth between here and the shelter.”
“You must be hungry.”
He nods.
I walk over and unlock the door, push it open. He doesn’t move from where he sits in front of you.
“I’ll carry her in,” I say. “You grab the chair. It folds in on itself. Or you can wheel it in, whatever. I think it will fit.”
I move to pick you up, but he reaches out and grabs my wrist. It’s a soft touch, as much a request as anything else.
“Can I do it, Dad?”
I hear his voice, but the words float past me.
“Can I carry her in?” he asks.
I shake my head, not because I’m telling him no, but because a flood of regret is moving through me. It does that a lot these days, when I think of all the things I should have done differently, ways I could have kept this all from happening. It should have been me—that’s what I want to say. That knot on my head should have taken me, should have been the end of me. I keep shaking my head until the tears come again.
John stands up and stares at me, moving in slow, giving me space and time to reject his approach, before wrapping me in a bear hug.
I don’t turn him away. I hug him hard, and his body is like a memory, something that fits into my arms the way it always did, and I weep on his shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, John,” I try to say, but I don’t know if either of us can tell what I’m saying.
You moan again, and I chuckle through the tears, pull myself away from your father.
“She’s cold,” I say with a small smile, wiping my face. “She doesn’t like to be cold. Go ahead, you carry her. Careful, though. She’s light as can be.”
He picks you up and cradles you in his arms, and I remember those early weeks of your life after your own mother died, when he and I took turns getting up with you in the night. I entered the room, bringing a lukewarm bottle of formula, and I always found him there, swaying with you, singing some old lullaby. I would stand there and watch him holding you for a long time.
I watch the two of you go through the door. He turns sideways to keep your head from hitting the door frame. I feel a lightness rising inside of me, something I haven’t felt for years. I fold up the wheelchair and follow you inside, into the house.
Floating Away
April came when we weren’t looking, and it’s been six months or so since our trip to Nysa. During the whole long month of March, we weren’t sure if spring would ever come. All during this endless, dark winter, I wheeled you down to your elementary school on Tuesday and Thursday and parked you at the front corner of the class. The kids treat you like a princess, fawning over you, fighting over who can sit next to you at lunch. They remember what one of the teachers referred to as “the old Pearl,” but I know there’s nothing gone about it—you are still here with us, and for that I am so grateful.
But spring held off for a long time. We had no early glimpses of it in February, no unexpected warm days to give us hope. There was very little snow too—most mornings brought a hard frost, the days filled with the glaring of an icy sun. John would come home from his new job at the corner store, blustering and shivering and pounding his hands together. It is not where I would choose for him to work. It seems the sort of place that could pull him back under the water again, back to the depths he has so recently risen from. But it is a job, and it’s close, and he comes home every night, kisses you on the forehead, and reads a book to you while we eat dinner together.
During the last few weeks of March, as an act of hope, I would bundle both of us up, you and me, and we would sit out on the porch in the cold sunshine and watch the traffic go by. Sometimes I talked to you about various things. Sometimes I told you the old stories. Sometimes we sat in silence. I wonder if you could see me staring at you, watching, waiting. I can sense a change in you, even though the doctors gave up hope long ago. They don’t say that, of course, but I can see it in their eyes, a kind of moving on, a kind of gentle acquiescence to the way things are. But there is something deep going on inside of you. I can sense it, the way the birds can sense an earthquake coming and lift off from their perch moments before the tremor.
Now April has arrived.
The last few days have been beautiful. The grass has sprung suddenly green. The tips of the trees, only last week brittle and cold, have grow
n swollen buds. John arranged some hanging baskets of flowers on the front porch and planted tomatoes in pots along the back alley. I don’t know that they’ll get enough sun there, but I try to let him do this thing since he’s come back. I don’t want to discourage him. Planting tomatoes where they might not get enough sun seems a thing too small to object to, and what if they do grow? What if they thrive? It would be nice, in July or August, to be slicing juicy tomatoes or making salsa or pasta sauce. I should see if it’s too late to plant onions.
All the time I was checking on those tomato plants out back, debating on whether or not to tell John to try another spot, I kept reaching up, touching the side of my head, feeling over and over again how the knot is still gone. I had brought you out back with me, placed you gingerly in one of the patio chairs we now have back there, and propped you up with your arms comfortable, your head leaning slightly back. When I looked over at you, I’m sure you were smiling at me, at least with your eyes, deep in your eyes, where I know your imagination is still making up stories.
There is a depth to this world I have been so unaware of throughout my entire life until now. When I look at a tree, I don’t only see the bark anymore—I can see the crevices in the bark, each a Grand Canyon, life teeming all the way in. The roots too—I can feel them spreading. I can almost sense them under me, deep in the earth, doing their work.
I am this way now because of you. There is something at work deep within you, and it’s in watching you that I’ve learned to watch the world in a new way.
It’s a Tuesday. John doesn’t work on Tuesdays, so all three of us go down to the school. He’s pushing you slowly, as he always does, careful for pebbles or cracks in the pavement that might stop your chair with a jerk. He has a brighter countenance these days. I wake every morning with an edge of dread in my gut, yet I don’t dare go to wake him up. I did that for the first few days last winter, after we found him waiting for us on the porch, but the anxiety I felt between turning his doorknob and finding him perfectly fine, asleep in his bed, sent my heart near to bursting. So I had to let that go, and now I wait for him to come down, but there’s still something in the waiting for him that gnaws at me.
But never mind. Here we are. We walk along the parking lot where the bottom of the chain-link fence has been pushed out from years of snowplows shoving snow out to the edges of the lot.
“Watch yourself,” I tell John, as I always do when we walk that stretch. “Don’t cut yourself on that chain link. You’ll need a tetanus shot for sure.”
In the past, me warning him more than once about something would have sent him either into a rant about me being overprotective or down into a dark, simmering quiet from which he would not emerge all day. But now when I say things like this, he’s able to brush them away gently.
“Got it, Dad,” he says, and I feel myself blushing at my inability to stop warning him of the same old things. Like when he goes to work and I tell him to “make good choices.”
We pass the old, abandoned building you hid in—was it only last fall? You show no signs of recognizing it. The next time we’re walking this stretch without John, maybe I’ll stop and turn you toward the old building, ask if you remember hiding in there last September, telling me about the map and the silver-haired woman. I could even carry you inside and we could sit together in that empty darkness. Would that bring you back to me?
“Come on in, you guys,” Ms. Howard says in a kind voice. She always waits for us by the back door. She’s not so bad.
The hallway through your school is one of my favorite places now, almost like a second home. Teachers peek their heads out and wave, pat you on the head, or bend down level with you and ask how your day was. This is why we arrive early, to make sure we have enough time to navigate all the love that waits for you in the hall.
I see Ms. Pena up ahead, pretending to go back into her room. I know she’ll come out as we’re passing and pretend it’s by chance. And she does.
“Why, hello, Pearl,” she says. “How are you?”
I can feel you answering, though your body doesn’t move besides the very occasional blinking of your eyes, the flutter of your pulse at the base of your neck, the uneven breaths that sometimes emerge with a gentle shudder.
“I guess I’ll see you tonight,” she says to Pearl, but she’s also saying it to me.
She’s been coming over a few nights each week, mostly to read to you. When John puts you to bed, Ms. Pena and I sit at the table and drink decaf coffee, talking about humdrum things like each of her students, and I tell her another story about my growing-up years or something trivial about your grandmother. One night last week she reached across the table and took my hand, and we sat there in a silence so still I could hear a cat rummaging through the trash in the alley outside.
I clear my throat, but words won’t come, so I give her an uneven smile.
John laughs to himself and elbows me good-naturedly. “Say hi to your girlfriend, Dad.”
I glare at him but can’t help grinning.
We turn the corner and go into the small library. The children sit there waiting, chatting loudly, and the librarian, a rather large Ms. Battle, claps her hand three times and counts one-two-three-four-five. The children grow magically silent, and we park you at the front by the windows, where you can sit in the sunshine and hear the story.
Today we’re starting a new book, one you know well. But I thought the schoolchildren might enjoy it. The chapters are short, and the main character is mischievous.
“This is The Light Princess,” I say, choking up a bit because I could just as easily be talking about you, sitting there by the windows, bathed by the sun. “By George MacDonald.”
I take a deep breath, and when I try to read, my voice wavers. I shake my head. Movement at the corner of my eye catches my attention. I look over, and Ms. Pena has settled into place at the door beside John. The look on my son’s face is no different from the looks on the faces of so many of the children: eager, waiting, perhaps hopeful that this is the story that will change his life.
I start reading.
Once upon a time, so long ago that I have quite forgotten the date, there lived a king and queen who had no children.
And the king said to himself, “All the queens of my acquaintance have children, some three, some seven, and some as many as twelve; and my queen has not one. I feel ill-used.” So he made up his mind to be cross with his wife about it. But she bore it all like a good patient queen as she was. Then the king grew very cross indeed. But the queen pretended to take it all as a joke, and a very good one too.
“Why don’t you have any daughters, at least?” said he. “I don’t say sons; that might be too much to expect.”
“I am sure, dear king, I am very sorry,” said the queen.
“So you ought to be,” retorted the king; “you are not going to make a virtue of that, surely.”
But he was not an ill-tempered king, and in any matter of less moment would have let the queen have her own way with all his heart. This, however, was an affair of State.
The queen smiled.
“You must have patience with a lady, you know, dear king,” said she.
She was, indeed, a very nice queen, and heartily sorry that she could not oblige the king immediately.
The king tried to have patience, but he succeeded very badly. It was more than he deserved, therefore, when, at last, the queen gave him a daughter—as lovely a little princess as ever cried.
That’s when it happens.
You laugh.
It’s a gentle, joy-filled burst, and my breath catches in my throat, then escapes like a small hiccup or a sob. You are in the sunshine, your black hair brilliant and shining, and your face hasn’t changed in the least. I wonder if I am losing my mind, if it was all in my imagination, so I look across the room at Ms. Pena standing in the doorway, at your father leaning against the door frame beside her. Their faces are illuminated like they’ve seen a visiting angel. John looks at
me for a split second, then back at you, then crosses the room and kneels at your feet, holding your hands.
“Pearl?” he says, but there is nothing more.
The children in the room start clapping for you, quietly at first. Soon they are all laughing and shouting and high-fiving each other, up on their feet, a standing ovation, and I have the strangest sensation. It starts in my fingers and toes, a kind of tingling, and I’m not sure what it is at first, this strange feeling. But I lock onto your smiling eyes and take in the rustling of your dark hair. The librarian tries to simultaneously shush the children and open a window to let in the spring air.
And then I realize what this sensation is.
I feel like I might float away.
Prologue
A Confession
We move in a loose group, winding through the trees. We are more people than you can even imagine, yet there is hardly a word spoken. We smell like exhaustion, like miles piled on top of miles, like time when it has already run out. Yet somehow we also sound like hope, like fresh water washing through the reeds. We discreetly share food with each other, nearly all of us strangers, nodding politely, and in spite of our condition, we cannot keep the inexplicable hope from showing in our eyes.
This is our first day out from under the shadow of the mountain. Which sounds exactly like something he would have said in that deep, rich voice of his, if he was here with us. And he would have smiled—how happy he would have been, saying those words!
Then he would have laughed, and the thought of him laughing is too much for me right now. It brings up an ache that makes it hard to breathe. I shake my head and try to laugh it off, but my grin falters, and any kind of sound I might make lodges somewhere in my throat.
It’s my fault he’s not with us. There’s no way around it.
How could I let him go back on his own?
It’s more an accusation than a question, and now the aching wells up behind my eyes. I squeeze them shut. I stop walking and think about turning around. It’s the guilt that threatens to consume me.
The Weight of Memory Page 25
