They sat like that for a long time, just sitting and listening. Diana let him keep the record player and gave him a box of albums. Another day. More music. His mother was somewhere else in the house, the smell of spaghetti sauce filling the whole place. Just before dinner, Edison put on his favorite record and started to dance. Even Foxfire felt the joy of it, the freedom, a boy alone in his room kicking and flailing without rhythm or care. Then he kicked the record player, hard, the music scratched and spun out, and the fragile plastic neck snapped.

That was when another Diana came out. No smiles. Stern.

“What did I say, Edison? I told you to be careful. I can’t believe you’d be this careless!”

Grounded. Grounded for a week. Edison didn’t know what that meant. He barely left the house anyway, just school and homework and the record player, but he didn’t even have that anymore.

A third Diana appeared, sick and sleeping, tubes and tubes and tubes everywhere. A machine controlled everything about her. The place they kept her smelled like medicine and sorrow. Edison was older, and he didn’t say much, just kept his vigil and played music for her on his VIT, the same music from the record player, but never the album he was listening to the day he kicked the neck and snapped it. So many people came and went. Corporals. Generals. Edison let them put solemn hands on his shoulders, let them murmur, and apologize and pray.

Edison just kept looking at the machine breathing for Diana. One day he would have to tell that machine to stop.

Memories offered themselves up to Foxfire constantly now, a steady, overwhelming stream. “Mother” had always been the key, but this was something more. She couldn’t just be the idea of mother, no, she had to be Diana. Rarely smiling, firm-voiced, little-medals-on-her-shoulder Diana. Control, ever fleeting, was close now. Mother Foxfire sensed his defenses lowering, the shock of those painful memories providing the necessary smoke screen. Look here, it seemed to say, look at this loss, this grief, let those emotions bombard your reasoning. Sink into this sadness and then Mother will make it all go away.

What had felt like scrabbling against a steep uphill climb flattened out into a smooth and focused road. A path to integration.

And at last, for a moment, Mother truly had him.

14

It was a short lapse on his part, but that was all it took.