from the three open windows. Sometimes, before dawn on a summer morning, the clouds come down to earth and the mist that rises from the grass rises to meet it. Sometimes a tendril of white curls through the mesh of my screened window. A finger. A hand, cupped and beckoning to me:
Come out and play. Come out and play.
I can’t sleep. Propped on my elbows, staring out at the darkness, listening to the owls. Headlights make their silent way down William T. Jones’s hill, and I watch them as they approach, hear the familiar whine of its engine. Tom Miller, driving past in Spooner’s truck. I watch him from my bedroom window, and I rise in the darkness and put on my T-shirt and shorts.
The road to the village glimmers in the darkness, as if mixed in with the rock and gravel and tar that made it is something luminescent. Fireflies flicker in the air around me. The pines and maples and oaks that line the road are silent, sap stilled in their veins.
I walk. Behind me my mother sleeps. Our house is dark, a dark shape in the darkness. I walk through waves of warm air and waves of cold, an early summer night and a girl alone on the road.
In the village I stop at the stop sign and turn right. I know where Tom Miller is, where he must be. The gazebo stands white and silent in the village green.
Chase Miller.
And Tom, his son, leaning against the stone.
I sit beside him. Crickets scrape wings across backs and fill the night with song. Bats fly overhead and somewhere in the darkness a barred owl calls. After a while Tom closes his eyes and leans into the stone. The stone is always cool. Even in the heat of the day, when the sun beats on it for hours, its warmth is a surface warmth.
“Tom?”
He looks at me.
“Does it give you comfort, to have that stone?”
He nods.
I wish I had a stone. The churning begins inside me and rises. Tom Miller leans against his father’s stone and I can feel how it would feel if I too were leaning against that stone. Stone beneath me and Jimmy Wilson on top of me. Stone against my back. Stone, skipping across the dark water of the gorge.
“Rosie?”
Tom Miller has never called me Rosie before, not even when we were little kids, back when all our little kid names ended in “y”: Rosie and Tommy and Ivy and Joey.
“Can I sit next to you?” I say, and then the tears come. And the stone is warm behind my back, and Tom Miller’s arms are around me. Tom sits and I sit until the sounds become part of the night sky, until the images in my mind become part of the darkness of the mountains rising up, until my skin is one with the stone, until I stop crying. Tom’s arms are around me and we lean against polished rock. Our breathing softens and slows until it reflects the stillness of the night air. Then we rise and walk across the grass made wet by dew, into the truck, and he pushes open the passenger door for me, and we drive back up into the foothills.
“Come with me tomorrow,” I say.
My mother folds a square of newspaper into a smaller square, into quarters, bends and folds and creases and smoothes and pushes, gently, gently. Delicate plucks and pushes.
“In Japan they believe that if you make a thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true,” she says.
Thirty miles south, a ventilator pushes air into my sister’s lungs:
wishhh, wishhh, wishhh.
“Come with me.”
“Miracles have been known to happen.”
She folds another square of newsprint. Will she make a crane out of anything? Before she went to the brewery in the morning, she’d made a little pile, and when William T. took me back home after making me scrambled eggs, it was a big pile.
“You should have let her go.”
Had I known I was going to say that? My mother looks up at me with those eyes of hers.
“You don’t know. Someday they might be able to fix her,” she says. “You don’t know. Nobody knows.”
“Someday? What about today?”
I spit the words. So angry. So angry. All I can think, all I can feel, is
Come out and play. Come out and play.
I can’t sleep. Propped on my elbows, staring out at the darkness, listening to the owls. Headlights make their silent way down William T. Jones’s hill, and I watch them as they approach, hear the familiar whine of its engine. Tom Miller, driving past in Spooner’s truck. I watch him from my bedroom window, and I rise in the darkness and put on my T-shirt and shorts.
The road to the village glimmers in the darkness, as if mixed in with the rock and gravel and tar that made it is something luminescent. Fireflies flicker in the air around me. The pines and maples and oaks that line the road are silent, sap stilled in their veins.
I walk. Behind me my mother sleeps. Our house is dark, a dark shape in the darkness. I walk through waves of warm air and waves of cold, an early summer night and a girl alone on the road.
In the village I stop at the stop sign and turn right. I know where Tom Miller is, where he must be. The gazebo stands white and silent in the village green.
Chase Miller.
And Tom, his son, leaning against the stone.
I sit beside him. Crickets scrape wings across backs and fill the night with song. Bats fly overhead and somewhere in the darkness a barred owl calls. After a while Tom closes his eyes and leans into the stone. The stone is always cool. Even in the heat of the day, when the sun beats on it for hours, its warmth is a surface warmth.
“Tom?”
He looks at me.
“Does it give you comfort, to have that stone?”
He nods.
I wish I had a stone. The churning begins inside me and rises. Tom Miller leans against his father’s stone and I can feel how it would feel if I too were leaning against that stone. Stone beneath me and Jimmy Wilson on top of me. Stone against my back. Stone, skipping across the dark water of the gorge.
“Rosie?”
Tom Miller has never called me Rosie before, not even when we were little kids, back when all our little kid names ended in “y”: Rosie and Tommy and Ivy and Joey.
“Can I sit next to you?” I say, and then the tears come. And the stone is warm behind my back, and Tom Miller’s arms are around me. Tom sits and I sit until the sounds become part of the night sky, until the images in my mind become part of the darkness of the mountains rising up, until my skin is one with the stone, until I stop crying. Tom’s arms are around me and we lean against polished rock. Our breathing softens and slows until it reflects the stillness of the night air. Then we rise and walk across the grass made wet by dew, into the truck, and he pushes open the passenger door for me, and we drive back up into the foothills.
“Come with me tomorrow,” I say.
My mother folds a square of newspaper into a smaller square, into quarters, bends and folds and creases and smoothes and pushes, gently, gently. Delicate plucks and pushes.
“In Japan they believe that if you make a thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true,” she says.
Thirty miles south, a ventilator pushes air into my sister’s lungs:
wishhh, wishhh, wishhh.
“Come with me.”
“Miracles have been known to happen.”
She folds another square of newsprint. Will she make a crane out of anything? Before she went to the brewery in the morning, she’d made a little pile, and when William T. took me back home after making me scrambled eggs, it was a big pile.
“You should have let her go.”
Had I known I was going to say that? My mother looks up at me with those eyes of hers.
“You don’t know. Someday they might be able to fix her,” she says. “You don’t know. Nobody knows.”
“Someday? What about today?”
I spit the words. So angry. So angry. All I can think, all I can feel, is
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