at the few birds that had waddled hastily to the sidelines, sending them scrambling into the air too. He glanced at the empty cobbles with satisfaction, and then strutted back to his grandfather, who had turned to rinse knotted fingers in the water.
The boy noticed Daniel watching and gave him a long, solemn, assessing stare. Then he smiled conspiratorially.
Daniel smiled back and felt all at once that the shadows that had come to roost in him had been routed, too. He felt sunlight and a clean soft breeze flowing through him.
THE GIRL WHO COULD SEE THE WIND
for Rosie
1.
Papa died when I was eight.
The death of a parent pulls away one half of the sky so that a weird light is cast upon all ordinary things. My father’s death opened up a vast chasm, setting me apart from all others, but when I said as much to Mama, she answered that I had always been different.
It was true that she had always seemed to think so. Willow, she named me, and as if it were also my name, she always added, The Girl Who Can See the Wind. I had earned the title when I was still in my perambulator, watching a swirl of leaves and grit in the elbow of a building. ‘Look,’ Mama had cried out to Papa in delight, ‘Willow sees the wind!’
He laughed at her but she insisted it was so.
I had heard both my parents tell this tale but I did not think of myself as special. Mama had said, half angry, half laughing, ‘Do you imagine a daughter of mine can be like other children?’
I did not argue with her, but I secretly believed that all children saw the things I did, only they kept their seeing secret, while Mama wheedled mine out of me. I might have resented that wheedling when I was older, if Papa had not died and cast Mama into bitterest despair. She tore her hair and raked her face with her nails, shrieking so wildly and incoherently that she might have been speaking another language. Anguish crushed Mama and sapped her spirit, though her beauty was indestructible. Her grief was so monumental and fantastic that my own seemed inconsequential beside it, a peeping chicken beside a screaming eagle. I had loved Papa and I mourned him sincerely, but for me, grief was less a wild thing unleashed within me than a profound misplacement of normality. It was only as I grew older that I understood this distortion was as much the result of Mama’s grief as of Papa’s death.
It was in one of the rare quiet moments in those grotesque, dreadful first days after Papa’s death, that Mama told me how she had watched and fallen in love with him long before he noticed her. I found it hard to believe that any man could be near Mama and remain unaware of her, for aside from her beauty she had great and potent presence. Papa had openly adored her. Indeed, he told me often enough that he had fallen in love with her the moment he set eyes on her. Yet here was Mama telling me she had loved him first.
She said, eyes streaming tears, ‘I gave up everything to be with him.’ She said this so bleakly I could not doubt it, although I did not know what she could have meant, for Papa had been handsome, wealthy and well-born. But I had learned that it was better to let Mama’s talk run on unremarked, until the cataracts of grief ran dry, for each question elicited a new flood of pain. I speculated to myself that Mama must have been even more wealthy, or so nobly born that her family had regarded wedding Papa as a wicked betrayal and had cast her out and forbidden her to mention them. Certainly Mama did not ever speak of her past nor of her own parents or siblings, if she had any. When asked, she always said that her life had begun when she met Papa. I developed the sense, as children do, that this was an area that had been fenced off and forbidden long before I was born.
Only after Papa died did I come to wonder if he had been curious about Mama’s past. Had he adored her so much he accepted her silence on the matter as simply part of the bargain? I could almost believe it, for his eyes had rarely shifted from her face and form whenever