Chapters (30)
The Tuesday before it happened was a perfect summer day. Driving through town on my way home, I saw two young girls holding hands as they tried to cross a street against the light. They would start to cross, then stop; start again, stop. Finally, all the traffic sighed and halted; and the girls bolted to the other side of the street and began to laugh and push each other, exhilarated by their survival.
Next I saw an old woman sitting at a bus stop, eating an ice cream cone with the neat precision of a cat. She wore a yellow print house-dress and white, orthopedic-style sandals, and her purse sat on the bench a slight distance from her, as though it were her companion. One leg was crossed over the other, and her foot swung rhythmically. She stared straight ahead, seemingly lost in memories.
I passed a very small child walking delicately along a stone wall, holding onto her mother’s hand. It was a graceful pas de deux; love lay strung along the length of their joined extremities, love and pleasure. And heartbreaking certainty.
I drove by two boys about eleven years old, riding the hell out of their bicycles as young boys do, their real manhood still so frustratingly far off. You could see their sweet toughness in the straining cords of their necks. Each kept passing the other, shouting roughly, shouting insults; but each always looked back to make sure the other was coming.
Two blocks from home, I went past the library and I knew I could go into the children’s room and sit in a chair and watch, enjoying every damp curl, every dimpled elbow, every throaty question, every pair of eyes turned upward toward a parent—the wholeness of that trust! I could press my own hands over the children’s small prints on the walls of the hamster cage, trying to see what they saw, as they saw it. I could turn the pages of a book that one of them had looked at, then left behind. The question: Why was this not taken?
Yes, and I could stay for pajama story hour, as I often had, and watch the children who gathered on the carpet with their matted, sleep-scented stuffed animals. I could enjoy the children’s unashamed eagerness—yanking their thumbs out of their mouths and rising up on their knees to see the pictures, resting their hands unselfconsciously on those ahead of them so that they would not lose their balance.
I suppose I might then have gone upstairs to the reference room, pulled down a weighty text, and searched for some wondrous fact I had never known. I might once again have sat at a wooden table, my own purse on the chair beside me, waiting for words to offer their touchless embrace.
I did not do these things. I headed home, toward what I had come to believe was my destiny.