as thick as my chemistry book, but I turned the thin pages easily. I’d watched the movie of it with my mother and Elise two summers ago, right before Elise’s wedding. We’d all been horrified when Dorothea married the old, unfeeling man, and we felt bad for her once she realized what a mistake she’d made. At the next commercial, Elise clicked her tongue. “No divorce back then. She’s screwed. This is sad.” But my mother had already read the book, and she told Elise to just wait. Sure enough, almost as soon as the movie came back on, good luck—and that’s all it was, really—the creepy old husband died.
When the credits rolled, Elise clapped. “So she gets to be happy at the end. Aww. Nice.” She clasped her hands beside her head. I was still thinking of the last line. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts. There was more, but I’d already forgotten it.
My mother got up from the couch to stretch. “I don’t know if I’d say she’s happy.” She’d looked at the stairs, her brow furrowed. My father had already gone to bed. “You should read the book,” she said.
And so I did, for almost that entire, cold afternoon, sitting there in the Union. Even from the start, there was so much the movie had skipped over. Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia’s mind toward her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions? I underlined sentences, dog-eared pages. Here is a mine of truth, which, however vigorously it may be worked, is likely to outlast our coal. When I looked up, the setting sun was bright in my eyes. The sky was clear, with just a few wispy clouds edged in orange and red. It hadn’t snowed yet, and maybe it wouldn’t.
But Inez was right. I could see that as soon as I turned the last corner of my walk home. Even on dead grass and soggy ground, the luminarias were beautiful, perhaps because there were so many, all of them flickering in swirling patterns and lining the sidewalks around the dorm. A few people were out walking around them, quiet; and above me, in hundreds of windows, faces pressed against dark glass, so many hands cupped around eyes, looking down.
The fire alarm went off before dawn. My mother groped her way to my bed and grabbed my arm in the darkness.
“It’s okay.” I yawned before I opened my eyes. I sat up slowly and turned on my lamp. “It’s just an alarm. We have them all the time.”
I had to repeat all this twice. The alarm was so loud that even Bowzer could hear it; he was at her feet, trembling, and he looked as if he were trying to burrow into her shins, to work a hole right through her leggings and skin.
I held him back as she pulled on her boots, and she held him as I put on mine. In less than a minute, we were ready to go, with Bowzer buttoned under my mother’s coat. Before I opened the door, she looped her arm around mine.
“I love you,” she said. She looked at the floor. She wasn’t kidding around. “I want you to know that. Okay? I think you’re pretty great.”
“Mom.” I leaned toward her. “I love you, too. But really. It’s just an alarm.”
Out in the hallway, which was not, in fact, full of smoke, my mother walked slowly, with her chin lowered to keep Bowzer’s head pushed down. All around us, doors were opening. Girls in pajamas stepped into the hallway swearing, their hands clapped over their ears.
“I need to go on ahead,” I yelled. The alarms were louder in the hallway. “You should go find Marley, and have her wait with you. She doesn’t have a car.”
Just as we passed Marley’s door, it opened. My mother turned back to me briefly. Both of her hands were occupied, so she sent me on with a nod of her head.
So it was Marley who was with her on the way down the stairs, and it was Marley who would tell me later how Bowzer popped his head out of my mother’s coat just as they were filing out the double doors. The security monitor, Marley said, was