Don't Cry

The Little Boy

Mrs. Bea Davis walked through an enormous light-fluxing corridor of the Detroit airport, whispering to no one visible: “I love you. I love you so much.” The walls of the corridor were made of glowing translucent oblongs electronically lit with color that, oblong by oblong, ignited in a forward-rolling pattern: red, purple, blue, green, and pale green. “I love you, dear,” whispered Mrs. Davis. “I love you so.” You didn't love him, said the voice of her daughter Megan. You had nothing but contempt. Even when he was dying you— Canned ocean waves rolled through the corridor, swelling the colors with sound. “You don't understand,” whispered Bea. The ocean retreated, taking the colors solemnly and slowly back the other way: pale green, green, blue, purple, red. Red, thought Bea. The color of anger and accident. Green: serenity and life. She stepped onto a moving rubber walkway behind a man slumping in his rumpled suit. “I love you like I loved him,” she whispered. Very slightly, the rumpled man turned his head. “Unconditionally.” The man sighed and turned back. A woman with a small boy passing on the left peered at Bea curiously Does she know me? thought Bea. “What a wonderful idea,” she said out loud. “These lights, the ocean — like walking through eternity”

The woman smiled uncertainly and continued past; her little boy turned his entire torso to stare at Bea as his mother pulled him on. Maybe she did know me, thought Bea. We lived here long enough. She smiled at the little boy until he turned away a calf tethered at his mother's hips.

They had not lived in Detroit, but in the suburb of Livonia, in a neat brick house with a crab-apple tree in front of it. The tree had spreading branches that grew in luxuriant twists; in the spring it exploded with pink blossoms, and in the summer the lawn was covered with the flesh of its flowers. Megan and Susan ran through the yard with Kyle, the neighbor boy. Megan, seven, climbed the crab-apple tree, wrapping her legs around a branch and crowing for her mother to take a picture. Green, blue, purple. Red. It had not been a happy time for the family, and yet her memories of it were loaded with small pleasures. Dancing to the “Mexican Hat Dance” in the living room, the girls prancing around, and Mac swinging her in his arms, yelling, “A hundred pounds! A hundred pounds!” The willow trees on 8 Mile Road, the library with the model of Never Land, the papier-mâché volcano at the Mai Kai Theater, glowing with rich colors. Kyle and Megan putting on Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado in a neighbor's garage with the little girls down the block — she had a picture of it in one of the photo albums: Kyle was very dashing in slippers and his mother's silk robe with black dragons on it. The little neighbor girls wore gowns with silk scarves tied around their waists. Megan, the director, wore a top hat and a mustache. Susan sat in the driveway with the other siblings and parents, her thin arms wrapped around her body, staring off into the sky.

At the end of the corridor was an escalator with people pouring onto it from all directions. Bea mounted it and stood still, while on her left people rushed facelessly past her. Going up, she felt as if she were falling, but falling where?

She had just come from a visit to Megan in upstate New York. Megan was a forty-two-year-old lawyer married to a travel writer— no children yet, but Bea hadn't given up hope entirely They had driven to Manhattan to see a play the windows down and country music on the CD. She was at first disappointed to see that they were seated in the mezzanine, but it was all right — the actors’ limbs were as subtly expressive as eyebrows or lips or the muscles of the neck. Afterward, they had dinner in a big open-faced restaurant on a cobbled street with tables spilling out, women sitting with their legs comfortably open under the tables, their bra straps showing a little and their chests shining slightly in the heat. There was a huge bar with the artful names of drinks written on a board above it, and a mirror behind it, and a great languidly stirring fan on the ceiling. Young men courted girls at the bar; a small girl with one knee on a tall stool leaned across the bar to order a round of drinks, and her silvery voice carried all the way to their table. They started with french fries served in a tin cone, with mayonnaise on the side. Bea wondered aloud what it would be like to have a glass of sherry, and Jonathan called the waiter, a grave-faced young man with an entire arm tattooed. “I like the casual air of this place,” she'd said. “I like the rough napkins instead of linen.”

“It's a nice place,” said Megan. “Though I've been noticing there's an awful lot of really ugly people here right now.”

“You think?” asked Jonathan. “You think it's changed over already?”

“Just look,” said Megan. Her voice was strangely hot, the way it would get as a little girl when she was overtired and about to get hissy “That guy is like an anteater in leisure wear. That girl, she can't wear that dress; look at her stomach.”

“You sound like Tomasina and Livia,” said Bea, “at Woolworth's and the Greyhound bus terminal. ‘Look at her, look at her.’ “

“What?” said Jonathan.

“Mom's talking about her sisters,” said Megan. “They would go on purpose to places where ugly poor people would be and comment on them. We didn't come here to do that; it's not the same thing.”

Not far off, thought Bea. Megan hated her aunt Livia, but here she was, saying, “Look at her.” Except without Livia's lightness. It was dead serious to Megan. At some other point during dinner, she'd said to her daughter, “You've always been so beautiful,” and Megan had said, “I certainly never thought that was your opinion.”

“How could you say that?” said Bea. And Megan was silent. A woman at the table next to them turned to look at Megan, then at her. Was this woman ugly, badly dressed? Bea had no idea. The waiter came back and informed them that they were out of sherry.

She looked up and saw the woman with the little boy halfway up the escalator; the boy was gazing intently down into the corridor of light. He was six or seven years old, heavyset, with dark, glowing skin, possibly Hispanic or part black. His mouth was full and gentle, and his eyes were long-lashed and deep, with a complicated expression that was murky and fiery at the same time. The child disappeared with the movement of the escalator; a moment later, Bea stepped off the clanking stair, unknowingly buoyed by his bright face. She looked at her watch; she had a layover of an hour and a half before her flight to Chicago. In front of her was a snack shop, a bookstore, and a store that sold knickknacks, decorative scarves, hats, and perfume. Decorative scarves and hats, thought Bea. The most gallant members of the accessory family.

Inside, the shop gleamed with glass and halogen light and dozens of little bottles. Shallow cardboard boxes of scarves were displayed under a glass countertop with neat shelving; whimsical hats sat atop Styrofoam dummy heads. She tried on hats before a mirror in a plastic frame, and the finale from act 2 of The Mikado played in her head — she knew it from the recording Mac used to have, which had somehow disappeared after the funeral.

“That looks good,” said the woman behind the counter.

“Thank you,” said Bea, and good feeling rose through her. Characters were threatened with boiling in oil and beheading and forced marriage — and in between, the full cast was onstage, singing with urgent joy. “As I drew my snickersnee!” sang Livia. “My snickersnee!” Ten-year-old Beatrice pretended to cower on her knees before her sister's snickersnee. Pitty-Sing, the cat, tore through the room. Tomasina whooped and forgot about the play; their mother was coming up the walk, stripping off her clothes because it was hot and she was too imperious and impatient to wait till she got through the door. Her daughters ran to the window, bursting with admiration for the long, slender limbs that were as strong and beautiful as the flowering dogwood she walked past. Thirty years later, Megan, chin up and arms outstretched, presented the little neighbor girls, who were bowing and tittering in their gowns and silk scarves. And she was strong and beautiful, too.

“Here,” said the saleswoman. “This scarf has a Brazilian flavor that really works with the hat.” Brazilian was a ridiculous word for the scarf, but it was arresting, with bold wavy stripes of gold and brown, and the saleswoman's brown eyes were warm and golden when Bea met them with her “Thank you.”

That weird snapshot of Susan — what had she been looking at anyway? You couldn't tell from the picture. Her big glasses had caught the glare of the sun, so that in the camera's eye she was intently blind; her small body, tensile and flexible as wire, expressed buzzing inner focus. She certainly didn't seem to be looking at the play.

“You're right,” said Bea to the lady behind the counter; “this scarf does do something for this hat.”

“On you it does.” The woman's hair was an ostentatious bronze; her skin was damaged and overtanned. But her jewelry was tasteful and her makeup perfect.

An old-school sales type, thought Bea approvingly. You don't expect to find that at an airport. “I'll take them both,” she said.

Pleased with her purchase, she continued down the corridor toward her gate, past more gleaming eateries and shops. Her thoughts now were suffused not by The Mikado, but by the look Susan had on her face when her sister presented that childish spectacle in the garage. It occurred to her that although Susan had become many things since then, that particular look of blindness and glaring sunlit vision still described her. She was a sort of therapist, and it was part of her therapy to read people's “auras,” and, by moving her hands some inches above their bodies, to massage these auras. She read tarot cards, believed in past lives, and occasionally phrases like “astral plane” versus “physical plane” appeared in her conversation. It was nonsense, but harmless and—

Should she stop and get something to eat? Here were people at an Internet café, humped over keyboards and dishes of fried food, typing with one hand while they gobbled with the other, writing e-mails and surfing chat rooms while televisions blared from every corner. How interesting it was to be a person who, while considering eating at the airport Internet café, could remember riding a mule on a mud road to get the bus to school. You used to sit in the Greyhound terminal, waiting for the bus, and except for the roar and wheeze of the buses, it was quiet and you had to really look at the people across from you. You had to feel them, and if it was hot, you had to smell them. There might be children chasing each other up and down, or men playing chess on a cardboard table set up on the sidewalk outside, or a woman holding a beautiful baby. But there was nothing to make you think you were anyplace but the Greyhound waiting room. Now people waiting to travel crouched over screens, hopping from one outrageous place to the next, and typing opinionated, angry messages — about the war in Iraq or a murder in Minneapolis or parents who were keeping their daughter alive even though she'd been in a coma for ten years — to strangers they would never see, let alone smell. Above their heads, actors silently sang and danced and fought; scenes of war and murder flashed like lightning, and heads of state moved their lips as chunks of words streamed over them. You could sit there on the physical plane, absently loading piles of fried food into your mouth while your mind disappeared through a rented computer screen and went somewhere positively astral.

No, Bea thought as she walked on. She just wanted to go to the gate. She wanted to think about riding to the school bus on her grandfather's mule, Maypo. That had happened the winter they had stayed at their grandparents’ farm while their parents looked for a place to live in Chicago, and the farm was way off the main road, on a dirt path that had treacherous ice patches in the winter. Their grandfather put all three of them up on Maypo and led them down the path to where the school bus was. It was fun to sway on the hairy, humpy back, knowing that Maypo's feet were sure. Bea remembered the way the mule's heavy hooves would make blue cracks in the ice; she remembered boughs of pine brushing against her body, thick with snow that fell off in clumps as she passed.

Megan had no patience for Susan's past lives and tarot cards. She thought it was precious and self-indulgent, and Bea could see why When Megan was fifteen and Susan thirteen, Aunt Flower, their stepgrandmother, who hated cats, told them that Grand-daddy had killed Pitty-Sing's litter by putting them in a bag and swinging them against the side of the house. In fact, more than one litter had been killed, but none so brutally, nor so late in life, and Bea saw no reason for the children to hear about any of it. Susan was already crying when she came to Bea, with Megan trailing sulkily behind, upset about the kittens, too, but provoked by Susan's wild, high-pitched sobs.

“She said … she said that Pitty-Sing was crying,” said Susan, weeping. “She said Pitty-Sing was crying, and grabbing his pant leg, begging him to stop.”

“She told us as an example of a time she had sympathy for cats,” explained Megan. “Even she was sad when Granddaddy told her about it. Because of Pitty-Sing grabbing the pant leg.”

“That is cruel; it's wrong!” cried Susan. “Granddaddy is mean!”

“Honey” Bea put her arm around Susan's hot back. “It's not the same as it would be now. There was no birth control for cats back then, and you couldn't keep all the kittens. You had to kill them; otherwise, they'd starve.”

“That's what I told her!” said Megan. “I think it's awful too, but—”

“But like that? Bashing them against the side of the house?” Susan pulled away from her mother and searched her face with wet, hysterical eyes. What was she looking for? “Something was wrong there. Something was wrong!” She turned away, her voice rising. “I hate Granddaddy, I hate him!”

“Oh shut up!” said Megan.

Bea stopped thinking for a moment and looked at the stream of faces pouring past her, young, old, middle-aged. Their expressions were tense and lax at the same time, and they moved mechanically without awareness, focused only on getting somewhere else.

In fact, Susan had been right. Something was wrong. There were only three kittens in that litter and their mother had told them they could each have one; she had already given each of them a particular kitten. Then they came home from school and she told them that Daddy had decided that having four cats was too much, and that the kittens had been taken away. It was the same summer she had come up the walk, smiling and triumphant as she stripped off her clothes, the dogwood flowering as she came.

Here was her gate, A6. It seemed that she always departed from gates that were low alphabetically and numerically — an example of something to which Susan might attach mystical significance. She sat down with a proprietary “Oof.” Well, Susan had made her beliefs work for her. She had made a life. She had a “partner,” a woman named Julie, who managed a bookstore. Susan had worked on Bea's “aura” several times, and if the “therapy” didn't help, it was still pleasant to have her daughter's hands working above her, close enough to feel the heat of her palms, working to give her mother healing and happiness. She took out her book-club novel— something literary from another century, the name of which she had a hard time remembering — and a newsmagazine. She looked through her purse, found her glasses, looked up, and — there he was again, the little dark-skinned boy she had seen earlier. He was singing as he fooled around on some plastic chairs, hopping neatly over each armrest, his face glowing with pleasure. Bea smiled to see him.

She put her glasses on, remembering Susan at his age, when she and Mac found her in their bedroom, leaping up and down on their big bed as if it were a trampoline, ecstatically whipping her hair about and crying, “Eeee! Eeee! Eeeeee!” Bea was about to make her get down, but before she could, Mac kicked off his shoes and climbed up onto the bed with his daughter. “Eeeee!” he yelled, jumping once, landing on his rear, and bouncing from there. Bea said, “Careful, Mac, careful!” but she was smiling. Dinner was about ready to come out of the oven; she could still remember the meaty smell of it, and the big green leaves of the bush outside pressing against the windowpane. “Daddy!” shouted Susan. “Daddy!” His shirt had come out of his pants, and his face was pink and joyous.

Nothing but contempt—

Bea put her book down and felt her face flush. It was Megan who had contempt. Contempt for her father's sadness and his failure at medical school and his job at a pharmacy Contempt for his rage, especially for his rage; when he lost his temper and slapped her, her blue eyes were hot with scorn. It wasn't that his violence didn't hurt her — it did. His sarcasm and ignoring hurt her, too. But in adolescence, scorn rose up from her hurt like something winged and flaming. At fourteen, she lectured Bea on sexism as if her mother were a perfect idiot. When Bea drove her to a sleepover, or to buy new shoes, or any other time they were alone together, Megan would say, “It's unfair. He acts like a big baby and then he bosses you! You should stand up to him or leave!”

It was true that Bea in some small way had liked to hear her daughter say these things. It was unfair, his constant complaining, his throwing the fork across the dining table and expecting her just to pick it up, get him a new one, and act as though nothing had happened. Somebody littered the edge of the yard, and he yelled, “I'll show you littering!” and then went out and dumped a bag of potatoes in the neighbor's drive. When Bea came home from the hospital with newborn Megan, she'd come early on Monday evening instead of on Tuesday morning, because she'd been eager and Tomasina had unexpectedly been there to give her a ride. They had no phone at home, so she couldn't call ahead, and she thought she might surprise him — but when she and her newborn child arrived, young Daddy wasn't at home. He was out having drinks and dinner with Jean, a woman he worked with. Bea had waited until after he was dead to tell it: how she was there all alone with her baby and how, when he finally got back after midnight and found her there, he ran into the laundry room, taking his shirt off as he went, stammering nonsense about wanting to help the lady they'd hired to do the laundry. The next day, Bea had looked in the hamper and seen it: his shirt covered with sticky lipstick kisses.

The air filled with floating announcements directing everyone every which way: Flight 775—ready for boarding — Gate A4. Flight 83— Memphis — delayed until further notice. Cincinnati — flight—

Her mother came up the walk, stripping down to her slip in the heat, flowering all around. She announced her adultery in public, in glorious secret. They didn't know until they found the love letters after she died. But looking back, it was there in her proud walk, for anyone who had eyes to see. Mac scuttled and hid, when he hadn't even succeeded at cheating!

“Jean was a smart cookie,” said Bea, “and she never would've kissed him all over the shirt like that if she'd done anything untoward. I think she meant that as a message to me.”

“That's what you think?” said Megan.

“Yes. I think he tried and she said no.”

“And you're telling me you don't have contempt for him?”

“Stop it, you little idiot! You little—”

Aware that people were staring, the mother of the dark-skinned boy lowered her voice to a furious mutter as she dragged her child back to his seat by the crook of his elbow. Was she even his mother? She was pale, with thinning blond hair and a small mouth — on the other hand, her body was heavy like his, tall and voluptuous. Bea tried to catch the child's eye, but he was looking down, all the life gone out of his face.

“Honey,” said Bea. “You don't understand. I felt sorry for him. It's different.”

Megan stared, and her face grew remote.

Flight 775—final call. Bea picked up her book and remembered Prue Johannsen, the oldest member of the book club, who had twice, when she meant to say “the cemetery,” said “the airport” instead. The memory gave Bea a sensation that she could not define. Prue was a beautiful ninety-year-old woman with bright eyes and a long, still-elegant neck, sloping and gentle as a giraffe's. She was a widow and she visited her husband's grave often. “I went to the airport this afternoon,” she'd say. “I think I'll have them plant some purple flowers instead of the red.”

What a strange world, thought Bea. A strange, sad, glowing world. In this world, she had married a boy who courted her with a vision of the two of them traveling together, in the jungle, in the desert, in the mountains of Tibet, bringing healing to the sick and learning from life. In this world, her boy husband became a man who got up in the morning and said, “I think I'll just kill myself,” and who at night threw a fork across the dining room table. It was the same world, but now he was dead and yet she was not a widow At night, her darkness came while she lay alone watching light and shadow on the wall: streetlamp, telephone wire, moths, bits of leafy branch; sometimes a pale rectangle of light suddenly opened its eye, revealing a ghost of movement inside it as someone in the apartment across the street used the toilet or the sink.

“I feel so old and so worthless.” Beautiful Prue Johannsen had said that one night after a discussion about Mrs. Dalloway. Everyone said, “No!” But they all knew what she meant.

Bea got to her feet, full of sudden energy. “You can still do good,” she'd said. “Prue, you can still—” She went to a nearby kiosk attended by a long-fingered East Indian bent like a pipe-cleaner man. She bought a bottle of water and a candy bar with caramel and nuts. Instead of going directly back to her seat, she walked around the gate area and approached the little dark boy and his blond mother. The mother looked up, not unpleasantly. Her eyes were deep, long-lashed, and fierce. Well, thought Bea. She is his mother after all.

“Excuse me,” she said, smiling. “You look familiar to me. Did you ever live in this area?”

“No. But my sister does.”

The little boy still looking down, bumped his feet together and hummed.

“Hmmm—” Bea nervously half-laughed. “Do I look at all familiar to you?”

“I don't think so.” The woman's eyes were civil, but her voice was vaguely tinged with common sarcasm.

Coarse, thought Bea, and unobservant. “Well, I guess when you've lived as long as I have, a lot of people look familiar to you.”

“I know you,” said the child, still looking down. “You were in the magic cave. Downstairs.”

His mother looked irritated. “The what?”

“He means the walkway connecting the terminals,” said Bea. “It is like a magic cave, the way they've done it up.”

At this, the boy looked up; his gaze was alive and tactile, like a baby touching your face with its hands.

“What a beautiful little boy” said Bea. “And imaginative, too!”

“A beautiful little pain in the butt, you mean.” But the mother's face was grudgingly pleased. Her name was Lee Anne; her son was Michael. They had been visiting her sister, who lived in a suburb called Canton, and were now waiting for their return flight to Memphis, which had been delayed. Bea and Lee Anne talked about Canton and Livonia, where Bea's family lived; Bea described the crab-apple tree, with its hard dark fruit and soft pale flowers. While they talked, Michael walked around and around them, as if he was dying to run or dance. Could you eat the crab apples? he wanted to know. Could you throw them at people? Could you put them on the floor at night, so crooks would slip and break their butts?

“Michael, sit down,” said Lee Anne.

He sat, and immediately began to rock and nod his head.

“Well,” said Bea, “I—”

“You talk to yourself,” said Michael, rocking. “In the magic tunnel, you talk to yourself.”

“Don't be rude!” snapped Lee Anne. She whacked her son on the head with the flat of her hand. “And quit rocking like a retard.”

“It's all right,” said Bea. “I probably was.”

“That doesn't matter; I still don't want him being rude.” She stood, looming over Bea with an air of physical dominance that was startling before Bea realized it was habitual. “Listen, could you just watch him for a minute? I want to see if I can talk to these jackasses here.” She gestured at the check-in counter, where a man and a woman in short-sleeved uniforms made automaton motions.

“Certainly,” said Bea. Lee Anne held her eye for a second as if to make sure of her, then went on toward the check-in counter, her hips expressing a steady, rolling force.

“She's the one who said you talk to yourself,” said Michael sullenly. He was still now, and very sober.

“It's okay, honey I do talk to myself sometimes.”

He raised his head and touched her again with his tactile gaze. Except this look did not have the feel of a baby's touch. It was warm and strong, curiously adult. “Who do you talk to?”

“Somebody who's gone. Somebody I used to love.”

Used to. He turned away, but still she felt it coming from him, warmth as strong as the arm of a man laid across her shoulders. Feeling came up in her.

Attention: Those passengers waiting for flight 83 to Memphis—

“I talk to my father sometimes,” he said. “Even though he's gone.”

She started to ask where his father was and then stopped herself. Feeling came up.

— will be boarding in approximately five minutes.

“My father is fighting in Iraq,” said Michael. He looked at her, but his eyes did not reach out to touch her. They looked like they had when he rode above her on the escalator — deep and fiery but murky, too.

“You must be proud,” she said.

“I am proud!” His eyes were bright, too bright. He was beginning to rock. “My father is our secret weapon! He's fighting on the shoulders of giant apes! He's throwing mountains and planets!”

Impulsively, Bea knelt and took the boy's shoulders to stop him from rocking. She looked into his too-bright eyes. “And he is proud of you,” she said. “He knows he has a very good boy. He is very proud.”

“Okay, Mikey it's time to go.” Lee Anne was back, and full of business. “We're outta here.” She hoisted a backpack up on a chair and slipped one arm through a strap. She glanced at Bea. “Nice talking to you.” She shouldered the pack with a graceful swooping squat, then picked up a bulging canvas bag.

“Yes, you, too. And best to your husband in Iraq.”

Michael shot Bea a look. Lee Anne's face darkened unreadably “He's been telling you stories,” she said. “I don't have a husband. I don't have anybody in Iraq.”

And they were gone. Bea saw Lee Anne slap her son on the head once more before they disappeared. Oh, don't, thought Bea. Please don't. But of course she would. The woman was alone and overworked, had probably never married, probably hadn't wanted the child. At least I talked to him, thought Bea; I talked to him and he responded — he responded almost like an adult speaking a child's language.

And she got on the plane. The stewardess smiled at her, and she slowly made her way down the neutral space of the aisle. She found her seat, stowed her bag, then took out her book and opened it. Children had always responded to her. When Megan and Susan were little and they fought, she rarely had to punish them; she just talked to them in her love voice, and usually they would forget their fight and look at her, waiting to see what she would say next. She could say, “Let's go out into the yard and see what we can find. Maybe we'll see a field mouse or a four-leaf clover!” And quietly they would take her hands and go.

The stewardess came down the aisle, closing the overhead compartments, making sure they were tucked into their seat belts. What luck: She had the whole row to herself.

Before they went to sleep, her children would talk to her about anything, artlessly opening their most private doors so that she could make sure all was in order there. When Megan wet the bed, she would go, half-asleep, to her parents’ room, pull off her wet gown, and get between them in her mother's chemise, a little white sardine still fragrant with briny pee. Even at thirteen, Susan would run to her, crying, “Mama, Mama!” Once she sank down on the floor and butted Bea's stomach like she wanted to get back inside it.

The plane pushed back. Now no private door was open to her; not even Megan's face was open to her. Susan hadn't come to her even when she was raped in the parking structure, hadn't even told her about it until ten years later, when she could say, clipped and insistent, that it wasn't “such a big deal.”

The plane turned on the runway like a live thing slowly turning in heavy water. Sunlight glinted on its rattling, battered wing. Still, Megan had flown her out to visit, and taken her to a play Susan and her girlfriend were coming for Easter. Both girls came to visit every Christmas, and had since they'd moved away from home. When she left Mac and was living from apartment to wretched apartment, the girls divided their Christmas time with scrupulous fairness. Megan spent two nights in Bea's apartment, while Susan spent two nights with Mac; then they switched. The two of them spent Christmas Eve with her, and Christmas Day with him, then the other way the next year.

But she knew they'd rather see her than Mac. Sometimes Susan even sneaked in extra time with her mother, pretending to Mac that she'd left on Tuesday, when she had really stayed through Wednesday with her mother. It was cruel, but so was Mac. When the girls stayed with him, he walked through the house, yelling about how terrible Bea was or declaring that he wanted to die, and that if it wasn't Christmas Eve, he'd kill himself that night. When he did calm down and talk to one of his daughters, it was about grocery-store prices or TV shows. “And I tell him over and over again that I don't watch TV!” said Susan, laughing. Susan laughed, but Megan got mad and fought with him. “Oh give it a break!” she yelled. “You've been talking about how you're going to kill yourself for the last ten years, and you know you aren't going to!” And then she told her mother and Susan about it.

“When I was there, I did a meditation with him,” said Susan.

“With him?” asked Megan. “Or at him?”

“I told him I was going to pray,” said Susan. “And we sat together in the dark.”

They were in the living room, she said, at night with the shades open so they could see the heavy snowfall. Susan went into “a light trance.” In this light trance, she “connected” with Mac as he lay on the couch, seemingly in a light trance of his own. She connected with his heart. In his heart she saw a small boy maybe five or six years old, alone in a garden. The garden was pleasant, even beautiful, but it was surrounded by a dense thicket of thorns, so that the boy could not get out and no one else could get in.

“I asked him if he wanted to come out,” said Susan. “And he just shook his head no. He was afraid. I told him I loved him and that other people out here love him, too. He looked like he was thinking about it. Then Dad got up and went to the bathroom.”

Megan sniggered. The plane picked up speed. Bea thought, Mac was six when his parents died. But she didn't say it.

Stop it, you little idiot! You little—

That child, playing on the chairs, full of hope and life. Making up a hero father whom he could be proud of, longing for him, longing to be worthy of him. Didn't the mother see? How dare you? said Megan. How dare you disrespect his service?

The plane steadily rose, but she felt as if she were falling.

Mac died in his apartment, with the girls taking care of him, or trying to. She did not spend the night there; she did not sit at his side. But during the day, she went there to be with Megan and Susan. They had a hospice nurse who monitored him, washed him, and told them how much and how often to give him morphine. The nurse's name was Henry, and they all liked him — Susan said that Mac seemed to like him, too. When he was finished upstairs, they made coffee for him, and he would sit in the living room, talking and looking at pictures of Mac when he was young. Megan showed him the picture of Mac in his army uniform, just before he shipped out. “He volunteered,” she said. “Before he was even eighteen, he signed up.”

“That's not true,” said Bea. “He was eighteen. And he only signed up because he knew he'd be drafted anyway”

Televisions came down from the ceiling in whirring rows. White-faced, Megan left the room. Henry looked at Bea, looked away. Colors flowed across the rows of dark screens, making hot rectangles, oblongs, and swirls. In the kitchen, Megan faced her, eyes glittering with tears of rage. “How dare you? How—” Bea said no to a beverage but accepted the packet of peanuts. She looked out the window, holding the nuts. The sky was bright, terribly bright, but still she felt the darkness coming. Do you remember the first time, Beatrice? How you were scared and I held you? You were so beautiful and so innocent. But you scared me a little, too, did you know that? Mac had written these things on brown grocery bags, cut to the size of notepaper to recycle and to save money He never sent them; she found them, stacks of them, when she and the girls were going through his things. We could have that passion again, I know it. Remember, Beatrice, and come back. Please, Beatrice, remember what we had.

Faces bloomed on the overhead screens, clever, warm, and ardent.

She did remember. She remembered that she had been frightened and that he had held her; that he had bruised her body with the salty spilling kisses of his sex, that each bruise bloomed with pleasure, and that pleasure filled her with its hot dissolving blossoms.

And still she couldn't cry. A stewardess came down the aisle, headphones draped gracefully over her arm. It had been two years and she had not cried for him once. The stewardess smiled and offered her draped arm. Bea shook her head and turned away into the darkness. I am old and worthless, and I am going home to shadows on the wall. Susan— Megan— She raised her fists and weakly beat upon her forehead. Why are they so far away? Why don't they have children? Why does Megan stare at me so coldly when I tell her she is beautiful?

Shadows on the wall: streetlamp, telephone wire, moths, bits of leafy branch. A pale rectangle of light. When the darkness came, these things lost their earthly meaning and became bacteria swimming in a dish or cryptic signaling hands or nodding heads with mouths that ceaselessly opened and closed, while down in the corner, a little claw pitifully scratched and scratched. Loving, conceiving, giving birth; if human love failed, it was bacteria swimming in a dish, mysterious and unseeable to itself. From a distance, it was beautiful but also terrible, and it was hard to be alone with it night after night, without even an indifferent husband lying with his warm back to you.

Hard to bear, yes. But she could bear it. She had been a child herself, and so knew the cruelty of children. She knew the strength of giving, even if you did not get what you wanted back. She had thrown her body across a deep, narrow chasm; her daughters had walked to safety across her back. They had reached the other side, and she had stood again, safe and sound herself; all was as it should be. The darkness passed. She picked up her book. And he came to her: Michael, the little boy.

He came first as a thought, a memory of his face that interrupted her reading in the middle of the second page. He had so much in his eyes, and so few words to express it. How could his mother give him the words? Or the music or pictures? She thought of him. And then she felt him. She felt him in a way she would later find impossible to describe.

“He was looking for me,” she would say to Susan some time after. “He needed me.”

But it felt more specific than that. She felt what was in his eyes, hot and seedlike and ready to unfurl. Waiting for the right stimulus, like a plant would wait for the sun. Vulnerable but vast, too, like a child in her arms.

When she told Megan, Megan surprised her by saying she'd had experiences like that, too. “But you never know,” she said, “if it's really the other person communicating with you, or if it's just your mind.”

“No,” said Bea. “It wasn't my mind. It was him. It felt just like him.”

Love me. See me. Love me. He had no words, but what he said was unmistakable.

“What did you do?” asked Susan.

“I answered him,” said Bea. “I tried, anyway. I tried so hard, I wore myself out.”

I see you, she answered. You are a wonderful boy and you will grow into a wonderful man. I love you; I love to look at you. She put her arms around him, gently, not too tight. She held him and talked to him until finally, she felt him ebb away, as if he were going to sleep. She reclined her seat and closed her eyes. Just don't get lost in the thorn garden. We need you right here. Don't go behind the thorns. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she turned her head to hide it. We need you right here.

She waited a long time to tell Megan because she was afraid of being sneered at. She waited a long time to tell Susan because she was afraid Susan would talk about the astral plane. But she didn't. She just said, “I've heard people who had abusive childhoods say they survived because they had a good experience with an adult outside the family. Even one, even if it was tiny.”

Bea opened her eyes. Before her were clouds, vast and white, their soft clefts bruised with lilac and pale gray. She wiped her eyes with her little peanut napkin. She leaned back in her seat. Good night, Mama. Closing her eyes, she remembered the sudden warmth and heaviness as Megan sat on the edge of the guest bed in the dark. She remembered her singing “The Sun, Whose Rays Are All Ablaze” from The Mikado, her voice off-key but still piercing in the dark. She sang and then bent down, and her nightgown fell open slightly as she kissed her mother good night. Beatrice crumpled the peanut napkin with an unconscious hand as she began to dream a dream that began with that kiss.