Читать книгу Museum of Stones - Lynn Lurie - Страница 9

I ASK THE NURSE to count his toes and then to count again. She holds a crumpled form in front of me covered in fine film, more embryo-like than human. I count five toes, then, five more.

Off to the side in a stainless-steel basin is the bloody cord, a red veined mass, oblong.

Someone says his nail beds are turning blue. Two nurses rush in and wheel him away. The masked doctor sewing me together tells me not to move. Already I can’t remember the color of his hair or the shape of his forehead, and when I close my eyes, I see his face suctioned beneath transparent wrap, like meat.

Mother-in-law knows I do not eat meat, yet brings me chicken broth and saltine crackers. In her house each egg is cracked separately and inspected to see if there is a fleck of blood in the yolk or plasma. If any abnormality is detected the egg must be thrown out.

Returning to my village I crossed by bus from Ecuador into Peru. Seated beside me was an Indian who spoke little Spanish. He wore no shoes and his homemade crates stuffed with chickens blocked the aisle, while others strapped to the roof with twined rope shifted with each bump, the sound echoing inside the bus. He was unable to sell the chickens in Ecuador, where he had hoped they would bring a higher price.

It was midnight when the bus reached the town underlined on my pencildrawn map. A man from Florida answered the door. He showed me how to light the stove and offered me leftover chicken. I prefer eggs, I said. He sold me three for one hundred soles.

I had to walk across a central courtyard to get to the bathroom and when I woke up feeling ill I darted across the cold stones half-dressed, my hair knotted in a bun. I was sure someone was watching from a half-drawn blind. The rest of my stay I slept in my clothing and kept my shoes and toilet paper in front of the door.

The hostel had been connected to the neighboring church and once served as the nunnery. Now the wall between the two was cemented on both sides, making it impossible to move from one to the other. A brass plate screwed into the stone at the entryway says that for five decades the nuns cared for sick children at this very place.

Draped in yellow disposable paper my husband stoops over a rectangular Lucite box. A bonnet covers his hair and blue booties are snapped over his shoes. We take turns reaching inside.

He lets me go first. I am sure it is because he is afraid. What if after touching the tiny body with the tips of his fingers he was to find the skin had gone cold?

Neither of us mentions the chapel on the other side of the hall, although it is impossible to block the wooden cross from view. Initially I do not understand the volume of people coming and going throughout the day. Yet, after a week in that windowless room, where night and day are no different, I too am drawn to its upholstered pews. What holds me back is I would have to explain I was hoping, just maybe, I could believe.

With my fist clenched I wind my forearm sideways through a heavy sleeve of plastic. My hand, smelling of rubber and disinfectant is all he knows of me.

He does not yet have a name. My last name is sealed inside a plastic band fastened to his ankle. I would have preferred the wrist, but it is no wider than a straw.

Lights hum. Equipment starts and stops. Across his chest is a tiny tower of gauze. Our eyes travel box to box but do not focus on any one station. Neither of us has room for more sadness.

I am afraid that by the time the nurses and doctors arrive to our pink-railthin baby wearing a pale blue hat they will have no empathy left, certain there is only a finite amount.

The mother of box number three taped pictures of family members to the far side of her baby’s cubicle. Even if he or she could open its eyes it could not see that far.

The photograph facing me is of a cat curled on a window ledge. Sun streams through the Venetian blinds, stenciling a striped pattern over the orangematted fur. Nearly hidden in shadow and off to the corner, a young boy wearing a bright red shirt is reaching.

As soon as they were born, the women in the village drowned the baby kittens in the irrigation canal. Otherwise they became a nuisance, carrying fleas and ticks, which spread diseases the children were especially susceptible to. Since the time of the Incas they raised large rodents as a source of protein, but no matter how hungry they might be, they had no interest in eating cat.

My husband perspires. Beads of condensation form above his upper lip and dot the length of his forehead, his face grey-hued. He helps me onto the three-legged stool we have been allotted. As I shift across its hard surface, my skin, at the place of the sutures, throbs. I imagine the edges pulling apart, a crooked path of blood etched into my underwear.

My eyes are fixed on the monitors. I know the range of acceptable numbers. The way the graph should read, the feared colors, the ominous flat line.

Mother said, not the mattress, the side bumpers, or the linen. Father clarified, only the frame. This half-offered thing, reminiscent of so many other half-offered things, and I slump into the glider’s tufted seat, upholstered in a repeating pattern of dancing dogs.

I would like to be on that cushion now. Instead I selected something far less expensive: three black and white zebras twisting on translucent twine, having read the experts who claim babies are far more responsive to black and white.

A cherub-faced resident points to a picture in his textbook. There are too many sections and competing diagrams and not enough spaces between the words. My eyes resist moving left to right, habituated not to drift from my son’s screens.

It is your job to explain, I say, my voice breaking the nearly pin-drop silence that is the norm in this room. The incubator staff and parents look over at me. I stare back and most turn away.

We are so many it is possible the doctors and nurses will, with one quick waive of a hand, dismiss us.

Guests stand too close and hover too long. Once the naming is over, the water sprinkled and the silly outfit removed, I take my son to the backyard and sit on a faded plastic swing.

My husband carved his initials into the seat when he and his sisters played here, the factories’ smokestacks skirting the horizon then, just as they do now.

A strong wind draws black billowing exhaust from the paper mill towards the ocean. Sulfur and other particulates, dense and acrid, hover overhead.

For his seventh birthday he selects a wooden swing set with a blue tarp for an archway, strung taut between two poles. Not long after, he takes it apart piece by piece, jamming the thick metal screws into the dirt, arranging the beams and the rounded climbing bars like matchsticks along the swing set’s former footprint, each fractured post a decomposing monument to a childhood he wanted no part of.

Miss Wells sat me next to Billy Grabard because I knew the alphabet. Poor Billy, she mumbled, he can’t tell one letter from the next.

I helped Billy draw a straight line on the dotted penmanship paper, watching his knuckles turn white as he held tightly to the pencil. He struggled most when it came to making the two half-moons in the letter B.

A week passed and Billy still hadn’t been to school, then two more. Eventually the janitor cleaned out his desk, putting his books on the shelves and his pencils in the storage cabinet.

I asked Miss Wells what happened. She said Billy climbed to the top of his swing set and couldn’t get down. Why, I wanted to know, didn’t anyone help? All she did was shrug.

Mother said Billy’s neck got caught in the joint where the top arm fit into the bottom pole. When he tried to pry himself free, there was too much blood. He was slow, not good at thinking things through. He should have been supervised. I wanted more, but she was walking away.

When everyone was at music I asked Miss Wells one more time. She took my hand and led me to the back of the classroom. I told myself to pay attention, but all she said was, please, take a pecan cookie.

At every backyard swing set I saw Billy pinned at the neck, his white Keds with the blue label dangling. Even though his feet stopped moving, specks of red continued to dribble onto his white shoes.

I could not participate in the game the other children played, hanging a stick-like figure, body part by body part, on a hook drawn like the letter S, and when the bell rang for recess, I did not rush outside to grab a swing.

From my bedroom window I watched two men in a pickup truck carry Billy’s swing set away. The longest pole was his torso and the two on either end that supported the structure were his arms and legs.

The art teacher showed the class how to fold a piece of white construction paper and where to make the first cut. We concentrated as we guided our rounded scissors with the rubber handles along pencil-drawn lines. Even still, a boy would cut his hand. The bloodied cutout wasn’t displayed. Yet even the simplest diamond shape or sloping line was taped to the art room window. After ruining three sheets of white paper Billy succeeded in cutting a snowflake suitable for hanging.

Counting three across and two down, I found my snowflake as the bus pulled into the parking lot. Billy’s didn’t look like snow and now that we knew he wasn’t coming back I wanted to ask Miss Wells to take his down.

Streetlights illuminated the falling snow. My future husband and I made our way across college walk lightly dusted in shimmering mica. I thought, confetti, the way it is tossed from rooftops in victory parades.

A bouquet of deep-colored roses, red wine, a bath in an antique tub, two matching terrycloth robes draped over a pedestal sink. Black and white subway tiles, finely veined, three missing.

In the honeymoon photographs I pose beside bronze busts, a woman’s profile sculpted by Picasso arranged geometrically on a promenade overlooking the sea. At each rendering the structure and symmetry of her face is more distorted, and in the last she is a mawkish, half-human, halfbird, falling into the water.

When my great aunts saw me their voices formed a chorus, confirming that the features of my face were the same as their long dead mother’s. But because there were no pictures of my great grandmother, I was never able to confirm if what they thought they saw was even close to the truth.

The eldest focused on the shape and color of my eyes, while the youngest, a sculptor, drew in the air the curve of my chin. She took my hand. You can feel it, she said, as she moved my palm over her cheekbones and then across mine. They are nearly the same.

When she leaned in, I breathed deeply, hoping to hold onto the odor of mentholated cigarettes, hair spray and sweet perfume. These are smells I still associate with power.

She owned a dress store of women’s eveningwear and allowed me to run up and down the aisles, touching each gown with the palm of my hand, memorizing the feel of velvet, brocade and lace, but it was the word organza I loved. Sometimes she would begin a sentence that way. Organza, are you ready for lunch?

When she packed to leave on buying trips I hovered nearby, in case she might decide to take me along. In my closet I kept a small bag of clean underwear and socks, a notebook and my set of colored pencils.

I waited for her postcards of animals, ornate buildings and exotic flowers, but the stamps in colored ink from Italy were my favorite. She searched for starched crinoline and fine handmade lace, returning with swatches of fabric stuffed into pillowcases.

Near to the border with Bolivia in the department of Puno, I found a postcard in the Indian market dated 1931. Seated on the ground, a woman works a floor loom. The caption on the postcard is: La Tejedora, The Weaver.

I looked through the vendor’s leather satchel filled with glass plates. There was one of a bride wearing a woven shawl loosely draped over her head.

Master weavers, he said, used a four-stake loom, saving their best work for this particular garment, a wedding veil that covered the top of the bride’s hair. He called it a lliklla.

A woman selling corn nearby tried to describe the loom to me in Quechua. What I mostly understood was the drawing she made, using her crooked index finger to trace the outline into the road dust.

I taped La Tejadora to my bedroom wall made of dried mud and pressed straw. It followed me to subsequent bedrooms where I positioned it over chipped paint or holes where others’ pictures had once hung.

Even though I knew I would not find my Aunt in the postcards I looked at the details hoping she might be there. She taught me how to remove the stamps using the steam from the spout of the teakettle. Once free, we slid each stamp between two pieces of wax paper, sealing it with the tip of the hot iron. I catalogued them in a bound book of handmade paper, arranged alphabetically by country.

My son keeps records of ‘matters important’ in a leather album. There are the letters he received when he was sick, and neatly folded sheets of paper crammed with lists of his numerical codes.

There was nothing sentimental about Mother’s wedding dress. But, by selecting it, I reduced the amount of time I had to spend with her, searching the reduced racks, going from sale house to sale house, arguing over price, knowing whatever I selected it would be too expensive.

Buttoned and cinched within Mother’s yellowed gown, its borders too voluminous for my small frame, I begged my childhood friend wrapped in tight-fitting black silk with shimmering sequins to switch.

As my father walked me down the aisle, I realized he had in a different decade unbuttoned the same dress. I tried to steady myself by digging my fingernails into my palm. The cut I made was long and deep. By the time I noticed it was too late to blot the red away.

Specially laundered, the dress came back in a long, white box vacuumpacked in durable plastic. Mother kept it in the attic alongside the disassembled metal bed frames, the mattresses and green plastic matching suitcases. Discarded objects arranged as if someone was living upstairs in that windowless space, putting them to use.

As we brought each thing down, Father cut his wrist on a piece of broken glass. Whitish-yellow, he clutched the railing of the pull cord ladder. Mother came into the bathroom where I was washing and dressing his wound. She dropped the box at my feet and said, you are to take the wedding dress when you leave.

I was preoccupied with my father’s skin. It was like tissue paper. This thinning of the skin was the beginning of the ending of his life, yet Mother nattered on about the box at my feet.

I carry the box with the dress to the beach and unwrap the veil and train. Even the bra I wore is inside. I place it under the bodice after positioning it in the sand and wait for the tide to take it.

It does not float or drown but sloshes back and forth.

Covered with sand and seaweed and entangled with broken bits of seashells I do not want it, but I also do not want to leave it.

At the reception my mother took me aside. She said, your mother-in-law is dressed in all white. I had no idea this was a problem.

There on the other side of the threshold are the new rooms I will inhabit, the heavy furniture upholstered in muddy colors, dishes too precious to use, and the people I will now be expected to call family.

I buy a salmon-colored dress and bone slingback shoes, a leather skirt with pinking shear trim. A strand of fake pearls. Styles and colors I never wore before, and even though they are expensive, I do not take them off the hanger or remove the tags, but leave them pushed to the far end of the closet.

My sister and I played dress-up when we were supposed to be doing our homework. She was the expert at make-up. I could turn her curly hair straight and my straight hair curly. Make me unrecognizable, even uglier, if no one will know it is me. Don’t worry, she said, one day we will be able to leave.

There were the dresses that had belonged to our grandmother in the attic, the silk ones with matching hats and mother’s hoop skirts and saddle shoes, the bright pink tops.

My husband takes me to a favorite place from childhood, and as he is explaining he doesn’t know why he calls it Peggy’s Cove, a wave splashes over me. I lose my footing and slip waist deep into the freezing water. He helps me over the moss-laden rocks as the cold creeps upward, numbing my legs. He doesn’t hear when I ask if we can leave, my voice faint against the breaking of the waves.

I sprawl across the back car seat’s stained fabric, rife with the odor of my father-in-law’s cigar smoke, a habit my husband later takes up. At night I see him on the deck, the red burning tip of his cigar, as the half-arc of light travels from his hand to his mouth. He drives in silence thinking I might sleep.

Feverish, I drift in and out of sickly sleep, unable to recognize anyone or any of the places that come to me. My husband brings me medicine and the prints of the pictures he took at Peggy’s Cove. We are flipping through when his mother calls him. I place the stack on the nightstand, turning the top one over. It is of a large seagull with its mouth wide open. Between its teeth, a silver fish squirms. The sky is blocked by a swath of low flying birds.

His mother wants to know if he will join her for a round of golf. Eighteen holes will take all day.

Laundry piles up. I shrink clothes and bleed colors. Other houses have toy bins, cupboards filled with food. Rarely can we find the tennis rackets, the balls or winter coats. Everything is stacked or shoved into whatever space we can clear.

No one I know repeatedly runs out of toilet paper or uses crushed lasagna noodles to make a kind of spaghetti.

My husband and I fall into a deep sleep mid-morning and wake to the smell of burning plastic and rubber. The nipples and bottles I am sterilizing have melted and merged, forming a sticky mess at the bottom of the pot. A dark smoke stain in the shape of peacocks’ quills forms on the white tiles above the stove.

I open the windows wide and by the time I collect our sweaters a pigeon has flown inside. Leave it, my husband calls from the hallway where he holds the blanket in front of our son’s face, protecting him from the smell of burning plastic. It will be drawn to the light and be gone by the time we return.

As we walk aimlessly I worry more pigeons will fly inside, that one will asphyxiate, and if it were to die in the nursery it would be an omen.

By the end of the day we are too tired to stay out any longer. Strapped to one of our chests in the corduroy carrier, our son has not rested but has flailed his arms and banged his tiny head back and forth.

I use the broom to shoo the pigeon toward the window. It flits about and when it flies out, I slam the wooden frame. Pieces of chipped paint fall across the sill. Beneath the white is another layer, pale blue like the cracked shells of the robins’ eggs my sister and I would find under our favorite climbing tree.

One year we watched a baby break its way out. For three weeks the mother came and went bringing food. By the fourth week all of them were gone.

Pigeon shit in his crib, dribbled over his stuffed animals and the hand-knit blankets, greenish yellow with flecks of red leaching into a white oozing paste. His full diapers nearly that same color.

The nightly news reports that formula cans sealed with lead may have leached lead into the liquid. It is the only thing he has ingested his first three months. Could it be why he is the first to get sick and the last to get well?

The first year I know everything he drinks and eats, what he sees and hears, where he feels pain. Then I lose track.

A man, tall and blonde, blue knapsack slung over his shoulder, walked down my path. The rattan walls of the latrine did not keep the wind out. I mounted colored advertisements torn from TIME magazine on planks of wood and hung them over the gaps. When they became weathered by the wind and rain he replaced them with glossy pictures of cars and fancy kitchens, stories from the news. Nancy Reagan on a boat heading toward Ellis Island, a soybean harvest in the Great Plains.

The cover of the children’s school notebooks showed Peru as including part of Ecuador as well as the northern tip of Chile. I ripped the cover off and added it to the latrine wallpaper.

We took a bus to the coast, swallowing our malaria pills with cheap red wine he poured into his leather wine sack. Embroidered in jagged yellow stitching and red twined cord, Espana was written across it in script.

On the other side of the mangroves, having plied our way through in a rented rowboat, we found a small island with black sand. Not thinking about how close we were to the equator we stayed all day. That night the only relief was to float in the cold saltwater. I was in a light sleep when I startled myself awake, the roots of the mangroves, like the gnarled hands of an old woman, had risen from the water and had wound their way around my neck, making it difficult for me to catch my breath.

Our machetes and rubber boots lined the interior wall of our two-room barn. Every evening before bed we hung our ponchos from a hook. He was in the habit of straightening them when he walked by, making sure the bottoms did not brush against the loose dirt floor.

I dreamed of a tribunal of men, their parchment pages spread across a worn table. All but one had feathered pens. They questioned the assembled held against their will, their hands and ankles bound. A small-eyed man with translucent skin tossed burning oil from his lamp into the face of a crying child, then ordered them to walk until they found a place where they might be allowed to stay.

We washed our clothing in the irrigation ditch on a stone worn flat by all the others who had been beating their woolen ponchos, their patched trousers and hand-loomed skirts at this very place, ever since the canals first filled with water, three thousand years ago.

News came out of his battery-powered radio, rarely in English. The U.S. invaded Granada. The Argentine army deployed to the Malvinas.

He led me to the ice field in time to see a single star falling before melting snow in a tin cup. Then left me and went the rest of the way alone.

Condors nested in the rook above our campsite and when the largest birds flew away at dusk, the current from their opened wings – a span so wide I wished for more light so I could see – dislodged pieces of the rock face. The debris landed in the cavern below, producing a hollow echo.

I strained to hear the sounds of the tiniest birds that had been left behind.

Inside his two-person tent I fell into a deep sleep and woke to the muffled cries of what sounded like a child in pain. I crawled outside and looked into the woods surrounding our campsite but was unable to trace where the cries were coming from. Then the snow began to fall in lines, making it difficult to see even the nearest trees.

When the storm passed I saw our tiny barn below, a lone building in a place of barley and wheat, where the landscape, even in the rainy season, was never more than a washed-out-beige, the llamas and alpacas that same color, too.

Evangelical music from a nearby village played, broadcast by Oklahoman missionaries who had toilet paper and a flush toilet. They built a megachurch that towered above the mud huts with thatched roofs, none of which had electricity or running water.

When sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows it cast an eerie green-blue shadow on the whitewashed walls. Disciples mounted a radio transmitter and antennae to a pole that soared higher than the steeple.

The blonde man bought me a green typewriter at the market and a kitten with fine black hairs around both eyes. It shook so violently we tried to warm it in our homemade oven. Still, it died that same night.

We were in the habit of sleeping entwined in our woolen hats and handknit socks we bought in the market, the heavy flannel from home. But the draft whistled through the cinderblocks and we would wake most nights shivering from the cold.

It was his idea to plant the apple trees behind the school, which, when I returned years later with my son were producing red and yellow fruit.

The Narnia Chronicles were the only books he brought with him. I was never able to get beyond the first chapter. He tried reading to me each night but after the first week I asked him to stop.

Years later when my husband read the sports pages out loud, this too, I did not appreciate.

We took a helicopter over an ancient glacial field and as the ice deepened the layers became dark blue, almost purple. Over time the steep banks receded and now appear on the map as nothing more than a needle’s drop of water.

He was on a trek when I packed until I could fit nothing more into my duffel bag. I hitchhiked a ride with a trucker transporting wheat to the capital. Had I stayed any longer it would have been far more difficult. Already, I had postponed leaving for too long.

As soon as he entered the house and saw that the books had been picked over, he would know. In the next room I imagined him closing the empty drawers I had left hanging, half-opened.

Likely he looked for a note, but would soon have realized I did not leave one. Later in the evening he might have taken a walk along the abandoned railroad tracks. The memory of the smell of eucalyptus burning for the evening fires almost made me want to turn back.

He sent a letter telling me he sold my blue bicycle. Someone else must be riding it now; her feet stuck out horizontal to the pavement as I learned to do, after being bit by one of the mangy dogs that rushed into the street. For two months I underwent rabies vaccinations and feared the dosage wasn’t correct or the serum had expired, losing its potency. I saw my body floating above me and when I looked down what remained was an outline of a human form sheathed in white.

Gathered in a banquet hall I remember the trip to Peggy’s Cove and the sensation of my body leaving me. Prematurely the bride’s dressing room door opens and a whirl of white floats into the room, filling the aisle. It is not Peggy, but her sister wearing Peggy’s wedding gown. A man coaxes her inside.

Eventually Peggy enters as the bride. In a Jewish wedding the groom is required to walk seven times around the seated bride to be sure she is the woman he has chosen. The night ends without any of us seeing Peggy’s sister again.

Other toddlers put my son’s toys in their mouths. When they leave I boil everything they have touched in a large soup pot. He is too young to have a favorite so there is no risk of melting any particular one.

The day we move into the dark pseudo-Tudor in the suburbs we find fresh piles of shit in our bedroom. Raccoon feces emit noxious fumes, sometimes so concentrated with the rabies’ virus no bite is needed.

The shudder of the appliances, the wind howling through the eaves, a falling branch. I am sure the raccoons will return, open our windows, turn doorknobs, pull down our sheets and get into our bed and his crib.

The previous owners dumped camphor in the crawl space to disguise the smell of feces and urine, replacing one toxin with another. I hire a man to sand the attic floor and another to varnish it. During the winter, so the fresh air can circulate, I keep the attic windows open. When my husband complains about the draft I do not tell him I am responsible. He would have insisted I close the windows.

My son stops sleeping. Each night he stands in his crib and cries. Eventually if he is able to drift into his partially slumped, partially standing sleep, his screaming wakes him and the cycle begins again. The doctors do not know what it is or how to manage it.

Raccoons or flying squirrels, I am convinced, must have returned to breed in the crawl space above his room. I hire exterminators, trappers and animal experts but no one finds any evidence.

The nurse’s job is to let us sleep. I can’t escape the sound of her pacing, her slippers shuffling along the pine floor. Even when I leave my room and go downstairs, I hear her. I should tell her that continuous walking does not lull him, that I have spent nights on my feet, but then I realize his crying has stopped.

Does she exhale without thinking where her breath will fall, or does she channel the marijuana smoke towards his face? When she leaves at the end of the week, the price of our sleep too costly, his crying starts again.

A doctor prescribes medicine I administer with a dropper but will not authorize a refill. I can’t convince myself it is acceptable to smoke marijuana or burn it in my son’s room as if it is incense.

If I put him in his car seat and drive at a steady thirty miles per hour, he sleeps, but if there is traffic he wakes up screaming. The trick is to keep going. I take the same route each time, convinced he has memorized the intervals of straight road, the stop signs, the duration of each light.

In his insomnia his eyes sink further into his head. His skin turns grey. The sound of lullabies, the turning of the black and white zebras, none of it has any effect. I play Brahms. The Rolling Stones. Mahalia Jackson.

Mother had us pack an overnight bag. The launch took us to father’s new sailboat moored at the far end of the harbor. A strong current pressed against the starboard side, pushing us farther from shore. Crammed in my bunk I hoped for sleep, but as the waves picked up I was sure the boat had become untethered.

I rocked back and forth humming. Maybe I dreamed. I was lost and running through a swamp blanketed by rot. Tree branches reflected on the water’s murky surface appeared as swords drawn from their sheaths. A dense canopy of moss crisscrossed the sky.

Underneath my bed I stashed books and shoes so no one could shimmy beneath and lay in wait, whereas, under my sister’s bed, she piled the secrets of her teenage life: rolling papers and weed, risqué clothing including the high-heeled shoes and makeup stolen from expensive department stores where mother shopped but never took us.

I would wake with the sensation I was not alone, that someone had settled into the dark corner or the other side of the half-opened closet door.

Not remembering the chair that was always in the same place, its rattan seat frayed, I saw it as a man and the shirt draped over the frame as his tangled hair. Too paralyzed to turn on the light, I gripped the sheet and waited.

Lightning struck the house across the street. The family huddled near the fire truck wrapped in blankets. Rain was turning the smoke an eerie orange.

White and red lights flashed through the window at a dizzying speed and danced across the wall. I didn’t know how my sister slept through it.

What had they lost in the fire, the two turtles their daughters named, Barbie dolls, and glittering hair ties? Now that their things were wet or burned I asked Mother where would they sleep. My parents didn’t invite them in or bring them dry blankets.

Blue velvet lined the inside of the box and an oval mirror was glued to the top lid. The mirror reflected the image of a ballerina in her white crinoline and pink ballet shoes. She turned to the repeating melody of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Her arms, face and legs were sculpted in white porcelain. I played the song so many times my mother threatened to take the box away.

My son prefers tiny boxes that stack, an antique dresser with many drawers, a ribbon cabinet and great-grandmother’s button container. He spends hours rearranging the contents, and if I interrupt he bangs his head on the table. When the head banging is over he starts again, but only after returning to the very first step in his memorized sequence.

I ask the first of many neurologists what is wrong with a baby that does not sleep. Doctors, he says, are trained to see horses, not zebras. Does he mean the former are ordinary and the latter are anomalies? I am so sure my son is a zebra I beg him to look again.

The doctor traces his index finger along my son’s cheek. What is it? I jump up. What do you see?

A child in his waiting room cannot sit still. Every limb is in motion. With the precision of a perfectly calibrated machine, the boy moves colored building blocks around the room. When there are no more blocks in the bin he gathers what he has distributed and begins again. None of the other children approach him. It is as if they know. His mother is the nervous one, chewing her fingernails, her eyes fixed on the illuminated EXIT sign. She stands and reaches for her jacket and pocketbook, checking her surroundings as she carefully folds her newspaper. Looking left then right before quietly walking in the direction of the door. Something causes her to reassess, and she slinks back to her seat.

The nurse whispers to the nurse-in-training, it is a fatal insomnia. When she tries to reason with the boy he becomes so enraged three adults are required to pin him down.

I close my son’s bedroom door. I imagine leaving him alone in the house, imprisoned by the four sides of his crib, each locked in position, his diaper overflowing, the wet running down his leg. I do not intend to return.

Other times I am fastening him into his car seat as I prepare to drive over the side of the bridge at the center point where the distance to the water is the greatest.

Did great-grandmother trekking the Carpathian Mountains with her sick son strapped across her back, in search of a doctor, finding no one who would help, her desperation heightened by her son’s trust, consider plunging headfirst into the valley?