Mother and Child Page 10

  Don’t forget that Audubon was French, and to look at a bird that hard, and to draw and paint it feather by feather by feather, was to remove five stilettos from its heart and bring it back to life five times over, the mother thought. If you are Audubon, the moral is that try as you may, you cannot kill a Golden Eagle. It is still there; it is always there, radiant and waiting when the mother and child open the book.

  Imagine then that astounding red bouquet brought to the door by the artist’s aging feline, Birdy Boy. Incredulous, the artist’s assistant snatched it from the jaws of the cat before it became red pieces of bird. Still warm, it seemed to beat like a heart. What an astounding gift—that shock of red—the first thing the artist saw, upon waking that morning. Who can believe—it is not a dream—it is in the artist’s hand, this small, perfect, astounding red corpse.

  The law, as you might imagine, prohibits the stuffing of songbirds in the Valley for any reason. It is quite simply against the law to bring a dead songbird into a taxidermist in the Valley to have it stuffed. If you happened to come upon a dead songbird, you will need to send it to another place altogether if you would like to have it stuffed. Before the artist went blind, she wrapped it carefully in white paper and placed it in a shoebox and sent it to Texas: that riot of red feathers and perfect cardinal beak and head. What a work of art it shall be, the artist cried with glee as she danced in her circular room and prepared herself to go to the Cabaret Rouge that evening at the Spiegelpalais.

  Music

  The casket holding the harp was lowered slowly now into the silence. It had been laid out on a smooth, white satin pillow, and the people in the Valley shuffled past it and mourned the end of music.

  Precisely a week after they watched the harp—all that was left of the man, lowered into the earth in a box—the small, sad entourage traipsed across the field to witness the unveiling of the new fire truck. It was noon and twelve bells sounded, and the chicken was cooked on the grill, and the living went about the things the living do. Wise Jean pointed to the new fire engine that lay covered under a black tarp—a large and jarring shape on the landscape—and the mother balanced a small flame quietly and waited.

  At last something was said over the loudspeaker, the people drew close, and the great shroud was lifted with a drum roll. There it was before them: red, shiny, bright, several stories high. Everyone gasped. It was a wondrous sight: its tires the size of a human child; its body impervious and strong. For a long time no one moved. Then all of a sudden, the children ran to embrace it as best they could. They rubbed their hands along its smooth, gleaming surfaces. The chief rang the bell, and the truck, although stationary, seemed already in motion. How much we miss you, she thought she heard someone call out to the new fire truck. And the women wept. How strong you are, and how brave! The truck, she understood, was an obvious stand-in for the man.

  Something inside the mother was burning. Today there was no way around it. She wondered if you dug a hole to the perfect center of the earth whether it would be possible to float.

  Fire

  The ladder is lowered and the children climb up one by one by one. They lift in unison the heavy yellow fire hose and point it as best they can at the towers in the distance, which are on fire.

  15

  lamb

  THE CHILD’S LAMB, her most precious possession, had disappeared. It had been sitting on a small desk atop a high pile of books the last time anyone had seen it, its arms, as always, extended.

  The mother remembers thinking the day before that because the little lamb had been loved so hard over so many years, it had grown lighter, as light almost as a feather, and hollow. Its little teal blue T-shirt. Through love, its interior had been assumed into the body of the child, and only the exterior shell remained. The mother’s fear was that now the child could float off too. In the night, the mother made a second tether, this one out of satin ribbon, to keep the child here awhile longer. She thought of all the things that could no longer be held by the earth, utterly exempt from its charms, things with reluctance the earth gave up, or the sky attracted.

  The child was always trying to understand the science of things. The rational explanations for what seemed extraordinary, outlandish occurrences. She thought there must be some sort of magnet in the sky, and that the earth’s pull loosened once a day and allowed certain things to lift entirely off the planet. There was a vulnerable second in every day, a wobble, a warp through which things escaped. Otherwise, the disappearance of the lamb was intolerable to both the mother and the child. The mother could not see living in such an inexplicable place. The child wished the sky might have assumed the Toothless Wonder instead. Why Lamby?

  Soon it would be the fifteenth of August again, and the Virgin would be assumed into Heaven. The Virgin looked beautiful every single time her body was assumed, but Lamby went up without even a single sighting, into thin air, as they say. Poof! Just like that.

  She would like to inquire about the magnet in the sky. If the soul is flat and metallic and spins like a disc, then what does that mean for it? She wonders if rain strengthens or weakens the attraction between two poles. The day Lamby disappeared, it never stopped raining.

  The mother wonders what makes the child stay on the Ferris wheel and not fly up. Sometimes children too must be assumed, the mother thinks. When the mothers sitting in the park close their eyes for a nanosecond, that is when the slippage occurs. Lost forever in the blink of an eye. She wonders what makes a girl stay fastened to the earth. What makes some girls stay fastened to the earth, and not others. What happens when some children go up that way, never to be seen again? All that remains is the vacated space and the mothers who did not keep their eyes open.

  The mother decides it must be one of the Luminous Mysteries. What brought Lamby to them, why the child loved it above all others, and why it had to disappear like that. There was no other way for her to think about it.

  WHEN THE CHILD thinks about all the things that get lost or forgotten, she thinks that someday there will be no one alive who will remember Lamby, or the Grandmother from the North Pole. This, more than the mother’s death or even her own, pains the child.

  THE VERY NEXT Sunday, the magnet assumed the baguette that the mother and child had gotten at the bakery for the Sunday breakfast. It had been lying atop The Poetics of Space, a book the mother was reading. The Law of Funnels suggests that not the lamb nor the missing children nor the baguette is coming back.

  IF THE MOTHER and the child flew high above the world in an airplane of some sort, they would see below them a field of wool. The clouds are like that. They bring back to people the things they most deeply love. Slowly it would seem from that height that they were traversing the entire body of the lamb.

  It might take a human lifetime to traverse that enormous field of white; it might take more courage than they can muster to traverse the body of the lamb, the mystery of absence. And still what would be known?

  THE WORLD REARRANGES itself every time she leaves the room, and she is constantly returning to a changed place. The child’s lamb is gone. The mother stares into the space it is missing from. How to say how upset this makes her, she cannot—with the child feeling so terribly bereft already. Still the mother feels herself emptying too from the space. She puts little fishing weights in her shoes, just in case.

  She noticed how precious things were often taken by the magnet. She wondered about the equation between here and there. Even when a thing appeared to be right there before one, it was already in the process of being taken. If there were only some way to recognize this in advance a little better. She thought she had noticed something strange about that lamb recently.

  She stared into the space above the desk a long time. Presence informed the absence, and absence the presence, and each was haunted by the other.

  When the painter Pierre Bonnard worked, he told his model that she was not to sit still, but to move around the space while he painted. He wanted to paint both presence and a
bsence, the model concluded. The mother continued to look at the place where the lamb had once been. The space so charged, so precious, that for a time, it burned so brightly it almost flickered. She remembered how after the towers fell, you could still see them in the air where they had stood—everyone said so. She noticed now the way the space and her certitude always seemed to be shifting and fraying.

  The space vacant now. Lamby’s arms extended, his eyes forever open.

  IN DESPERATION, THE mother filled the windy room with plush, adorable animals—small and large, all colors, all sorts—but never would the child find anything that could compare, and never again, as she said, would she be 100 percent happy.

  THE CHILD SEES wings behind the mother’s head, and the mother being carried away. She asks her whether she has been to the doctor lately, and right before she falls asleep, she says, you would tell me if there was anything wrong with you, right? You won’t leave me here alone.

  THE CHILD HAS learned to play some songs on the piano. She played Mary Had a Little Lamb and made up new lyrics calling to Lamby, who once would sit on the bench next to her.

  EACH NIGHT, THE child tried to solve the Mystery of the Lamb in her sleep. One night he was sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. Another night he was digging with a silver spoon in the sand, looking for something on a smooth white beach. He hadn’t gone far.

  THE MOTHER ASKS the child if she would like to talk a little bit about Lamby. The child says she does not want to talk about it because talking makes the feeling go away or change, and she does not want it to change or go away. The mother does not understand where the child gets her wisdom. It has always been there.

  ANOTHER NIGHT, A little girl named Wyo appeared at the side of the child’s bed and said, where I live there are people called Sheep-Eating Shoshone. Just so you know. And she left her a map.

  EVERY STORE THEY saw they would go into, and in every store they would pick up every comfort object, that is what the child called them, and they would place the object into the crook of the child’s arm in the hopes that something somewhere in this world might console.

  THERE IS A planet the lamb may have gone to, the mother thought. Yes, Gliese, the child says brightly, the planet in the Goldilocks Zone. The Goldilocks Zone is the most plausible and hospitable zone to sustain the life of a little lamb. They imagined a lamb, billowy, tufted, floating up to it, assumed into the air. It sounds like a perfectly lovely planet, the mother said, and she thought to herself: there is an incalculable amount of hope in the world.

  EVERYONE COULD BE found nowadays. No one was ever lost anymore. In cars there was a global positioning system that told you exactly where you were at all times and exactly how to get to where you were going. The Grandmother from the North Pole and the child thought this was a wonderful thing to have, but the mother was not so sure. You could have a woman or a man as your GPS Guide, and this guide would patiently tell you where to turn, though never why.

  She pictured the planet encased in satellites like a woman’s head in curlers, and in every car, voices.

  If you messed up, the man or the woman would patiently recalculate, and as many times as you lost your way, it would not lose patience. On long highway stretches, you would not hear from your guide for a very long time, and that would make everyone lonely.

  BECAUSE OF WHAT happened to Lamby, when the helicopter came down so low it seemed it might land on her head, the mother ran for the cat, imagining that he was going to be the next thing taken from the child. For what was the likelihood of a helicopter hovering low like that on a perfect clear sky, out of the blue?

  Only later when the mother sees the hummingbird extracting nectar from the newly opened rose does it occur to her that perhaps the helicopter had in fact come for the child.

  NEXT TO THE concrete rabbit, barely discernible, a Praying Mantis led the prayer. Mantis, the mother somehow knew, derived from the Greek word for prophet or fortune-teller. Where is her lamb? the mother demanded.

  SHE PREPARED THE porch: rearranged it, put flowers out, swept. They made a Welcome Home banner, though they did not spell it out; to others they did not want to appear to be waiting. If Lamby was going to come back in the conventional way, he would be wrapped in brown paper and string, and left on the porch by the post person. He would come like this in an ordinary way, on an ordinary day. She liked to think without fanfare: something long awaited was coming at last, something much anticipated was going to arrive.

  AFTER MONTHS HAD passed and Gliese had become permanently fixed in the child’s affection, more news arrived. It seemed that Gliese, in the Goldilocks Zone, that most perfect and hospitable of all zones, had but one small problem. Gliese, with further investigation, was said to be tidally locked. Tidally locked, what could that mean? the mother wondered. It meant Gliese could not rotate; it could not turn. The planet, quite simply, is not believed to transit its star, the newspaper stated. As a result, one side of Gliese eternally faces its sun, in perpetual daylight, and the other side forever faces away, steeped in eternal night.

  One side is far too hot to be inhabited, and the other side is far, far too cold. Still—and the mother looks out into the slip of space the little lamb disappeared into—there remains a slender crescent where the two hemispheres overlap, and where these hemispheres overlap, there is hope. There is a small space called the Glisten Zone, the mother says, where something or someone may still live.

  The mother is a beautiful star, hot to the touch, radiant beyond belief. When the child turns away, she is draped in darkness, and when she turns back, she catches fire. The child is burning. Freezing and then burning, and then only burning—caught in the incineration—until she is a ghost, a specter, and her hope falters. The specter chatters and babbles in her sleep. She does not rest. She finds and then loses, finds and then loses that thin sliver. Where is her lamb?

  THEY COME SWIFTLY from the ends of the earth. None of them grow tired. None of them stumble. They never doze or sleep. Not a belt is loose; not a sandal strap is broken. Their arrows are sharp, and their bows are ready to shoot. Their horses’ hoofs are as hard as flint, and their chariot wheels turn like a whirlwind. They are looking for her lamb. There is nothing they will not do for the child.

  ANOTHER MOTHER, CLEARLY a more mindful mother, had an arsenal of identical monkeys exactly like her son’s beloved monkey Zippy. They were hidden away in the event that the real Zippy disappeared. The more mindful mother had a stack of extra Zippys in her bedroom closet, and one day while her son was playing Hide and Seek, he came upon them—an improbable pile of monkeys in the closet.

  What on earth are these? the boy asked, horrified. These are the other Zippys, his mindful mother responded calmly, upon which the boy began shaking his head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth with great consternation.

  This is the good Zippy, he said most emphatically, and these—these, these, these are the no-good Zippys, and straightaway he was gone. After a few hours the boy emerged again, having built a house of cardboard for the no-good Zippys, and he dumped the monkeys inside and he made a sign for the door that said, Home of the No-Good Zippys. Such was the story the more mindful mother told the less mindful mother when she heard of the lambless child.

  Regardless of the reception of the no-good Zippys, the mother wishes she was a mother like that one, a more mindful one, and that she had a roomful of good or no-good Lambys in a quiet pile by her side.

  The more mindful mother got the less mindful mother to thinking of Other Mothers and Mother Substitutes and As-If Mothers, ones who might guide the child through fraught terrain. An As-If Mother would come in handy too, in the event something ever happened to this one.

  That night she dreamt of a cupboard full of Lambys, but the next morning when she went to the cupboard, the cupboard was bare.

  IN A ROOMFUL of extra Lambys, she might, after the child was asleep, toss them into the air and watch them: their white bellies skim the ceiling and billow and then fall
. This would give the mother a happy feeling. She might love the extra Lambys in the night and play with them, in preparation for the day when the real Lamby returned.

  She wanted the child to know that Infinite Grace was available to them. It was only a matter of being open and ready to receive.

  SO MANY THINGS were going on in the backyard. The children were following the squirrels with notepads, noting where they hid their nuts, real and otherwise, for the winter. Hiding nonexistent nuts was nothing new to the squirrels. They did this routinely to protect their food from thieves, but when the squirrels saw the children with notebooks, their fake burials increased. Squirrels are smarter than they look and understand a marauding child very well, thank you. Squirrels understand the intention to steal. This suggests a Theory of Squirrel Mind, the eighth graders noted.

  Next door, cameras were being put onto the heads of sleeping deer. Everyone wants to see what a deer sees and where they go when they go away. Had she known this before, the child might have put a little device like that on Lamby’s head.

  Down the road, little location devices, very tiny, were being placed on the heads of anesthetized crows to show where crows go. Everyone loves a bird’s-eye view from time to time.