Arcadia by Lauren Groff Page B

her. Her face looks like Hannah’s does when she is in her thickest sleep. The song ends, and someone gulps, and here are the long soft waves of people crying. A minute of silence to remember.
    All that Bit can bring back, though, is one moment of Felipe, a coo of delight, the baby’s face wide with glee, three awkward steps. Then a tumble, and the baby beams up at him from the ground. Even this will fade. Soon, Bit knows, Felipe will no longer be inside Bit but will become a story they all remember together, and better, this way.
    Bit thinks: We are a hive. Get up when we hear other people waking up. Do yoga in the Proscenium together. Warrior pose, corpse pose. Good food smells from the Eatery, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Cookies all day long. No more cold loo on my thighs, warm toilet. No more spiders and wind in the Bread Truck. Now radiators that hunch under the window and clink and hiss on cold nights like wheezing monsters. Now when parents come home in the evening from their work units, they have time to talk. Hannah in a book club, White Niggers of America, her voice flaming bright in the Library; Abe in a political theory group, ten beards leaning into the circle, the soft cheeks of the ladies in the shadows. They build societies of air, then carefully tear them down. The adults have grown softer. They squeeze each other’s arms when they pass, give happy hugs. In the Dormitory, the children lie next to one another for naptime. The warm pile of children, the smell of crayons and clay and paste. Handy’s voice booming and joyous everywhere.
    Bit thinks: Oh, we love each other better now.
    He sleeps one week in the Dormitory, on the squeaking cots, far from the bodies of the others. Leif snores. Jincy sleepwalks. The Dormitory is so vast the shadows thicken and move in the corners. He wakes three times per night, desolate for his mother. At last, he writes a note to Sweetie. He labors over it with a red pencil.
    Im to little, it says. I have to sleep with Abe and Hannah.
    When he hands it to Sweetie, she goes speechless. You can read? she says.
    Sweetie gives the note to Hannah, whose lips form an O.
    Oh, Bit, you can write? she says. She kneels to his height and kisses him.
    He moves into their tiny room on the second floor of the Main House, and sleeps on the old pallet on the ground beside their small iron bed.
    As he sleeps, a fast wind descends on the world and rain slants horizontal. He wakes to the forest thrashing outside in a strange green glow.
    There is lightning, a blue snap, and the world goes jagged. In the flash he sees Hannah midmotion, hair spun over her mouth, sheet peeled to her waist. One breast is in the open. A hairy arm buckles her shoulders.
    In the swallow of black after the flash, he understands what was in the shadow above her crown: Abe’s face, eyes closed, mouth a deeper darkness in the dark of his beard, straining toward something, it seems, he can just about grasp.
    Bit crouches under the cherry tree on the lawn. Wet petals fall on his head and the sun is gentle. The adults are in the fields, planting, save Abe, who must fix the place on the roof where the oak branch fell during the storm. Bit can see the pale blue sweater of his father as he works, reflected upside down in a puddle. From here, his father’s head points into the center of the earth.
    When Bit closes his eyes, he can see what Abe can see, how Arcadia spreads below him: the garden where the other children push corn and bean seeds into the rows, the Pond. The fresh-plowed corduroy fields, workers like burdocks stuck to them. Amos the Amish’s red barn, tiny in the distance. The roll of the forest tucked up under the hills. And whatever is beyond: cities of glass, of steel.
    There would be a strong wind up where his father is. It would be hot, because it’s closer to the sun.
    Bit sees the pink petals skim the surface of the water, passing like ghosts through his father’s body. It is wonderful, absurd. He laughs with