hear her mother’s heart beat beneath the breathing pillow of her breast, feel the tickle of wind on her bare arms, the sun that would leave her upturned cheek pink. Gradually, her limbs lightened and seemed to float away; she succumbed to a peacefulness so profound, she thought she might be sleeping.
A neighbor’s lawnmower startled her awake at five o’clock. She stood and picked up her suitcase. The cove was richly colored and velvety. A tranquil sea, fading light, goodbye. Her suitcase held a few treasures, it was true. But of everything the house possessed, this view was what she wished she could take with her.
As she crossed the front yard toward the driveway, the house seemed to stir. She looked up just as something crashed to the ground, hitting the brick walkway with a clatter. A window shutter, she discovered, the one Cassie had climbed up to fix. Its fasteners were worn through. She glanced again at the house’s façade, feeling unsettled by the asymmetry caused by the missing shutter. “You’ll be okay,” she heard herself say.
It was time to go! She fetched the garbage can from behind the house, tossed the splintered shutter into it, replaced the can, and got into the car.
She couldn’t turn to look back up the driveway as she drove out, didn’t feel her usual relief as she crossed the bridge out of Whit’s Point. This time, she experienced a release too big, like a fish being spewed into open water. A sickening turbulence and its disorientation, a freedom thrusting her forward, the kind of rushing freedom one could drown in.
We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.
Christopher Alexander
Insomnia! From the bedside table, the numbers on the clock taunted Gina—two, three, four o’clock. San Francisco’s windy, clear days of April and May had blown by, and June found her six pounds lighter—proof that lying awake was a grueling workout. In those wee hours, she plunged into a black chasm teeming with shapeless sorrows. She longed to cry out loud. “They expect you to be sad,” Paul had told her. “You have feelings, too.”
But she would never let her grief drift like a miasma into the rooms of her sleeping children, making them choose vigilance over sleep.
The numbers in the clock flashed seven, and Ben’s rosy-cheeked face appeared in the doorway. He waited, as always, for Gina’s smile to invite him in and then climbed into bed beside her. She strained to follow his whispered stream of chatter that began with a Byzantine description of a computer game and ended with, “But you have to have special software for that.”
“That sounds really neat,” Gina absentmindedly cooed, pushing her nose into his soft blonde curls. She mourned: tomorrow was Ben’s last day of kindergarten; how much longer would he come in for a snuggle? “I’m such a lucky Mom.”
“What? Mom, are you listening? We don’t have the right software!”
“You’re right! I’m sorry. Well, maybe we’ll see if we can get it. Hey, kiddo, time for us to get up and get ready.”
Ben wrestled himself out of bed, waking Paul, and went to his room.
“How’d you sleep?” Paul asked, as he did every morning; it had become rhetorical.
He stood, yawned, and put up the window shades. From the bed, Gina saw blue sky out one window, and out another, fog cascading over the white Victorian cornice of the neighbors’ house. They were several miles from the Bay, but she could hear the moan of a ship’s horn, confirming that the fog hovered at the Golden Gate.
Paul looked at her, his face full of concern. “I can get them breakfast if you want to try to go back to sleep.”
“No, no,” Gina said. “I’m okay.” Her morning ritual with the kids, their steady expectations of her, were what lately had given her the will to get out of bed each morning.
She stood and went to find Ben, who was squatting over his Illustrated Encyclopedia of Machines dressed only in his underwear. “Look,” he said. “Elevators are just like big pulleys.”
Gina knelt next to him and said, “Cool,” more about his boundless curiosity than the impressive diagram of the elevator. She put some clothes out for him. “Here you go. Get dressed now, okay?”
“Can we work on the rocket when you get home tonight?” he asked. A quarter of his floor was covered with plastic K’NEX pieces and the beginnings of a complicated rocket model they’d been building together. It was apparent to Gina that he had better innate spatial skills than she and probably could have constructed the rocket alone. But he liked having her help.
“Sure,” she said. “We could finish the fins.”
Ben turned his big eyes up at her and studied her face. “Your voice sounds different,” he said.
Gina cleared her throat. “Really? How is it different?”
“Older.”
Wilted inside, she smiled and hugged him. “Hmm. Well, I am older than I was yesterday, right? And so are you.”
She surveyed his floor—origami paper and Legos, an open package of flower seeds and a small dirty sock—and even surrounded by the kid mess and primary-colored plastic, she felt the inevitability of his growing up, looming like a kidnapper in the shadows.
And Esther! In her stuffy, quiet room, filled with the nature she was deprived of growing up in the city: shells and rocks and bird nests, bits of obsidian, sea glass, cow bones and feathers, several cacti and a Venus Flytrap, Gina could almost hear her daughter growing, exhaling her innocence into the room. Everywhere, there were clues that she was ready to be older. Last week, Gina had been rummaging to find an overdue library book and came across a stash of tampons behind Esther’s cherished collection of Redwall rat adventures. Esther hadn’t started her period yet, but the fourth grade curriculum included a detailed unit on puberty, and it was so like Esther to be thoroughly prepared—even, possibly, years in advance. Later, she’d come home from school with the news that she’d decided she wanted to go to sleep-away camp this summer. She’d never wanted to before, and that night, in private, Gina and Paul had differed about whether she was ready to be away for two weeks. “She’s been so ambivalent,” Gina had reasoned. But Paul didn’t worry about the kids when they were out of his sight; he imagined only the best: their pleasure at being with other children and under the enlightening influence of other adults. “Maybe it’s Esther’s mom who’s the most ambivalent?” he’d said to Gina.
He was right, and it wasn’t just about camp—she was relieved when the next day, Esther reversed her decision; she was already dreading the days when Esther and Ben would leave for college. Surely this was not normal!
Esther was still asleep, curled facing the doorway. Every day she looked more like Paul, with her sharply contoured face and dark hair, but her long, flat eyebrows were from Gina’s mother. Gina opened the window curtains to reveal six scraggly petunias still wearing a few anemic blossoms. She’d planted them in the window box to mitigate Esther’s view of the neighbor’s brown siding, four feet away, but lately she’d neglected to water them.
She kissed Esther’s cheek. “Time to get up, Estie.”
Esther’s eyes fluttered
