bells, a sound that seemed to come from under them and all around.
“I forgot to tell you,” Patrice said. “I like what you did with your hair.”
“My sister cut it for me.”
Patrice took a strand of it in her fingers, narrowing her dark eyes to examine it. “Well, she did a good job. I cut hair for a while, and this isn’t at all bad.”
He knew nothing about her: the jobs she’d had, the places she’d lived, why she was alone. Henry’s body was warm and damp, and his breath had the dry, pasty smell of papier-mâché. O’Neil wondered what the little boy might make of him, this man with them in the hammock. He understood then that Henry’s father was dead, or gone so far away that it was all the same. There was no knowing, or need to know.
“I think I like the house this way,” Patrice said. With one bare toe on the ground she moved the hammock to and fro. “I think I’ll leave it half painted to remember you by.”
“This is just the one time, then,” O’Neil said sadly.
Patrice took his hand in hers.
“For the record,” O’Neil said, “I wish it weren’t.”
Patrice nodded thoughtfully. “You will find her,” she declared.
“Her.”
“Her. Yes.” Her voice was pale; she seemed to have left him behind, in memory. And yet she was smiling at him. “The one you are meant for.”
O’Neil said nothing. There was no reason to think it; and yet it seemed so. A few minutes passed, and Patrice squeezed his hand again. “You will.”
O’Neil rose. “I believe you,” he said. Then he kissed each of them good-bye, and swung on his crutches toward home.
LIGHTNESS
March 1985
SHE THOUGHT OF IT AS the lightness; that was the name she gave it. The first time it happened, Mary was a little girl, alone. This took place in her bedroom in the apartment on Naomi Street in North Minneapolis, in a time before her sister, Cheryl, was born. Mary remembered nothing else about this place, for they lived there less than a year; the building was owned by a relative, and her father managed it, collecting rents and maintaining the apartments and grounds, while going to college at night. This was a difficult period for her parents, a time of small children and no money, and, as Mary later learned, her parents had nearly divorced. Her father would tell her about this on a trip they would take together to San Francisco, the year before Mary herself was married. Though the tale was meant to be cautionary—marriage is a long haul, he told her, like carrying a sofa up a flight of stairs and trying to wedge it through a narrow doorway—Mary also understood that the story was a happy one: her parents had, after all, stayed together, and by the end of that year her mother was pregnant again. She told him then about the hummingbird, her only memory of that year. They were standing together on the fantail of a ferryboat, crossing the choppy bay. A hummingbird, her father said, laughing and shaking his head in the wind. All that arguing, and what you remember is a hummingbird. My God, we thought we’d scarred you for life.
This was how she remembered it: yellow sunlight and the high, purple smell of the lilacs; her own tiny body, and the feel of a hummingbird’s wings beating inside her. Their apartment was on the ground floor; beneath Mary’s bedroom window was a lilac bush. On a summer afternoon, Mary was kneeling on her bed to look out the window when the bird appeared, darting between the blossoms on a blur of wings. Never had she seen such a bird. It seemed not to fly but to float—its long beak and inexplicable aeronautics made her think it might be a kind of insect—and yet whenever it moved, it seemed to disappear, reemerging at some adjacent spot of air as if it had not traveled through space but around it. Pure pleasure filled her, watching this wonderful new thing at her window, when suddenly she wasn’t watching: they were one and the same, Mary and the hummingbird and the lilac bush, and all the dense bright heat of the summer afternoon. She felt herself suspended; she seemed, like the hummingbird, to be both in one place and also everywhere, her consciousness joined to another, far larger than her own. The sensation was new to her—she had no words for it—and yet it did not