Jonathan Strahan: Eclipse Three

When Norah returned to shore, she saw Mama Strong seated in an outdoor bar at the edge of the market on the end of the dock. The sun was setting and dark coming on. Mama Strong was drinking something that could have been water or could have been whiskey. The glass was colored blue so there was no way to be sure. She saw Norah getting off the boat. There was no way back that didn't take Norah towards her.

"You have so much money, you're a tourist?" Mama Strong asked. "Next time you want to eat, the money is gone. What then?"

Two men were playing the drums behind her. One of them began to sing. Norah recognized the tune-something old that her mother had liked-but not the words.

"Do you think I'm afraid to go hungry?" Norah said.

"So. We made you tougher. Better than you were. But not tough enough. Not what we're looking for. You go be whatever you want now. Have whatever you want. We don't care."

What did Norah want to be? Clean. Not hungry. Not hurting. What did she want to have? She wanted to sleep in the dark. Already there was one bright star in the sky over the ocean.

What else? She couldn't think of a thing. Mama Strong had said Norah would have to change, but Norah felt that she'd vanished instead. She didn't know who she was anymore. She didn't know anything at all. She fingered the beaded bracelet on her wrist. "When I run out of money," she said, "I'll ask someone to help me. And someone will. Maybe not the first person I ask. But someone." Maybe it was true.

"Very pretty." Mama Strong looked into her blue glass, swirled whatever was left in it, tipped it down her throat. "You're wrong about humans, you know," she said. Her tone was conversational. "Humans do everything we did. Humans do more."

Two men came up behind Norah. She whirled, sure that they were here for her, sure that she'd be taken, maybe back, maybe to Mama Strong's more horrible someplace else. But the men walked right past her toward the drummers. They walked right past her and as they walked, they began to sing. Maybe they were human and maybe not.

"Very pretty world," said Mama Strong.

Can I watch Howdy Doody when we get home?" Carolyn Sullivan asked. She pushed the cart down the canned foods aisle of the Shop-Rite while her mother added creamed corn and green beans to the basket.

"May I. And what's the magic word?"

"May I please watch Howdy Doody?"

"All right, if there's time after we make the beds. We have guests coming."

Carolyn sighed. The Institute for Advanced Study was holding a conference over the weekend, and they were expecting a visiting professor to arrive the next day. The house on Mercer Street had been in the family since the end of the Civil War. When Ensign William Sullivan's ship was torpedoed late in 1943, all hands lost, his widow transformed it into a guest house, to support herself and her baby daughter.

Einstein lived a block away.

Mrs. Sullivan wheeled the cart into a check-out line. "Would you like to play the register game?" she asked. "It'll be good practice. School starts next week."

Carolyn nodded. Her mother thought the game was a kind of homework-good for her-but she liked trying to add up all the groceries in her head as fast as the check-out girl could use the keys. She was the best in her class at arithmetic.

She put the cans of corn on the belt and watched as the white tabs jumped up at the back of the machine with a soft ka-ching, like ducks in a shooting gallery. Twelve cents, four times, which was easy. Then the beans. The first one was 13 cents, and she smiled, because there were four of them too, and that was 52 cents, which made the dollar rectangle in her head whole again. 48 + 52 = 100.

It made her happy when the numbers meshed together with nice, even edges.

The girl was fast, and Carolyn lost track, a little, when the roast went through-$2.37-because it was a big number and it ended with a seven. They were the hardest because they almost never made nice shapes. But when the girl hit TOTAL, Carolyn was only 68 cents off.

"Pretty good," her mother said as they loaded the bags into the back of the station wagon. She pulled a Tootsie Pop out of her purse. "I think that deserves a reward."

Carolyn made the candy last, sucking, not biting, and still had a tiny nub left when all the groceries had been put away. But by the time the last pillowcase had been fluffed and placed just-so, it was too late for Howdy Doody, so she went out to the backyard with her book. Newly cut grass clippings clung to her bare legs like jimmies on an ice cream cone, and her hair hung damp on the back of her neck in the August heat, but discomfort was the price of freedom. Next week it was back to plaid uniforms, memorizing and eagle-eyed nuns.

She sat against the stone wall that separated their yard from the woods, grateful for the shade of the elm. Four pages into Johnny Tremain, she heard the solid thwack of a bat hitting a baseball, and a second later a white missile whizzed over her head and landed in the underbrush beyond with a swishing of leaves and a soft thud.

Silence, for a moment, then a babble of boys' voices. She stood up and looked across the manicured lawn of the Taylors ' house next door. On the far side, she saw a trio of crew cut heads above the wooden fence. New kids, moved in last week.

"Do you have our baseball?" one of them yelled.

Carolyn cupped her hands around her mouth and called back. "It's in the woods."

"Okay."

He headed for the chain-link fence at the back of his own yard, and had one sneaker wedged a foot up before she could warn him, "You won't get through from there. Blackberry bushes. Big thorns."

She watched him shrug and leap the fence anyway.

"Ow! Shit!" came through loud and clear a moment later.

The urge to yell, "I told you so," was strong, but she hadn't met that boy yet. He swore, so he might try for payback. She watched him climb back into his yard, rubbing his knee, then made a bold decision.

"I'll get it."

Her mother always warned her about the woods. Besides the blackberries, it would be easy to get lost among the acres of trees. "You're all I have," she'd say. So Carolyn had never explored beyond the wall, mostly because, up until this summer, she hadn't been tall enough to climb over. But she was now.

She looked behind her to see if she was being watched, then scaled it and surveyed the ground on the other side. A soft verge of grass and dandelions grew at the base, and the blackberries seemed to peter out midway behind the Taylors '. She jumped down.

The ball had left a trail through the undergrowth, and she found it soon enough, too pale and too perfectly round to be part of the natural chaos. She recovered it from underneath a clump of damp leaves, disturbing a legion of rolly bugs and one fat salamander.

She'd planned to walk down the verge to the Wallers' house, on the corner, and return the ball from the sidewalk side. Then she saw three flat stones, piled one on the other, the topmost painted with a faded red crosshatch, like a tic-tac-toe game waiting to happen. That wasn't nature, either. She squatted down. The stones marked what looked like a path leading deeper into the trees. It might be nothing, and it might end in more blackberries, but, except for the market, she'd been cooped up inside all day. Chores and more chores. Everything had to be tidied up, "neat as a pin," when guests were coming.

Carolyn scuffed her feet in the leaves as she walked back to the stone wall, leaving her own trail, and threw the baseball as hard as she could across the Taylors ' yard, shouting, "Ball!" It landed next to the birdbath and knocked over a garden gnome. She headed away from the sudden clamor.

No one had used the path in a while. Saplings blocked her way and sprang back, hard, across her arms as she pushed through. Twigs snagged at her ankles, and her white socks were soon covered with a carpet of tiny green burrs that would take forever to pick out. But it was a path, and every hundred yards or so she found another pile of rocks. Some of them had tumbled over, but one stone always had the same mysterious crosshatch.