Carole Maso - Mother and Child - A Novel

It might take a human lifetime to traverse that enormous field of white; it might take more courage than they can muster to traverse the body of the lamb, the mystery of absence. And still what would be known?

THE WORLD REARRANGES itself every time she leaves the room, and she is constantly returning to a changed place. The child’s lamb is gone. The mother stares into the space it is missing from. How to say how upset this makes her, she cannot — with the child feeling so terribly bereft already. Still the mother feels herself emptying too from the space. She puts little fishing weights in her shoes, just in case.

She noticed how precious things were often taken by the magnet. She wondered about the equation between here and there. Even when a thing appeared to be right there before one, it was already in the process of being taken. If there were only some way to recognize this in advance a little better. She thought she had noticed something strange about that lamb recently.

She stared into the space above the desk a long time. Presence informed the absence, and absence the presence, and each was haunted by the other.

When the painter Pierre Bonnard worked, he told his model that she was not to sit still, but to move around the space while he painted. He wanted to paint both presence and absence, the model concluded. The mother continued to look at the place where the lamb had once been. The space so charged, so precious, that for a time, it burned so brightly it almost flickered. She remembered how after the towers fell, you could still see them in the air where they had stood — everyone said so. She noticed now the way the space and her certitude always seemed to be shifting and fraying.

The space vacant now. Lamby’s arms extended, his eyes forever open.

IN DESPERATION, THE mother filled the windy room with plush, adorable animals — small and large, all colors, all sorts — but never would the child find anything that could compare, and never again, as she said, would she be 100 percent happy.

THE CHILD SEES wings behind the mother’s head, and the mother being carried away. She asks her whether she has been to the doctor lately, and right before she falls asleep, she says, you would tell me if there was anything wrong with you, right? You won’t leave me here alone.

THE CHILD HAS learned to play some songs on the piano. She played Mary Had a Little Lamb and made up new lyrics calling to Lamby, who once would sit on the bench next to her.

EACH NIGHT, THE child tried to solve the Mystery of the Lamb in her sleep. One night he was sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. Another night he was digging with a silver spoon in the sand, looking for something on a smooth white beach. He hadn’t gone far.

THE MOTHER ASKS the child if she would like to talk a little bit about Lamby. The child says she does not want to talk about it because talking makes the feeling go away or change, and she does not want it to change or go away. The mother does not understand where the child gets her wisdom. It has always been there.

ANOTHER NIGHT, A little girl named Wyo appeared at the side of the child’s bed and said, where I live there are people called Sheep-Eating Shoshone. Just so you know. And she left her a map.

EVERY STORE THEY saw they would go into, and in every store they would pick up every comfort object, that is what the child called them, and they would place the object into the crook of the child’s arm in the hopes that something somewhere in this world might console.

THERE IS A planet the lamb may have gone to, the mother thought. Yes, Gliese, the child says brightly, the planet in the Goldilocks Zone. The Goldilocks Zone is the most plausible and hospitable zone to sustain the life of a little lamb. They imagined a lamb, billowy, tufted, floating up to it, assumed into the air. It sounds like a perfectly lovely planet, the mother said, and she thought to herself: there is an incalculable amount of hope in the world.

EVERYONE COULD BE found nowadays. No one was ever lost anymore. In cars there was a global positioning system that told you exactly where you were at all times and exactly how to get to where you were going. The Grandmother from the North Pole and the child thought this was a wonderful thing to have, but the mother was not so sure. You could have a woman or a man as your GPS Guide, and this guide would patiently tell you where to turn, though never why.

She pictured the planet encased in satellites like a woman’s head in curlers, and in every car, voices.

If you messed up, the man or the woman would patiently recalculate, and as many times as you lost your way, it would not lose patience. On long highway stretches, you would not hear from your guide for a very long time, and that would make everyone lonely.

BECAUSE OF WHAT happened to Lamby, when the helicopter came down so low it seemed it might land on her head, the mother ran for the cat, imagining that he was going to be the next thing taken from the child. For what was the likelihood of a helicopter hovering low like that on a perfect clear sky, out of the blue?

Only later when the mother sees the hummingbird extracting nectar from the newly opened rose does it occur to her that perhaps the helicopter had in fact come for the child.

NEXT TO THE concrete rabbit, barely discernible, a Praying Mantis led the prayer. Mantis, the mother somehow knew, derived from the Greek word for prophet or fortune-teller. Where is her lamb? the mother demanded.

SHE PREPARED THE porch: rearranged it, put flowers out, swept. They made a Welcome Home banner, though they did not spell it out; to others they did not want to appear to be waiting. If Lamby was going to come back in the conventional way, he would be wrapped in brown paper and string, and left on the porch by the post person. He would come like this in an ordinary way, on an ordinary day. She liked to think without fanfare: something long awaited was coming at last, something much anticipated was going to arrive.

AFTER MONTHS HAD passed and Gliese had become permanently fixed in the child’s affection, more news arrived. It seemed that Gliese, in the Goldilocks Zone, that most perfect and hospitable of all zones, had but one small problem. Gliese, with further investigation, was said to be tidally locked. Tidally locked, what could that mean? the mother wondered. It meant Gliese could not rotate; it could not turn. The planet, quite simply, is not believed to transit its star, the newspaper stated. As a result, one side of Gliese eternally faces its sun, in perpetual daylight, and the other side forever faces away, steeped in eternal night.