Carole Maso: Mother and Child: A Novel

She could feel herself and the child, who was a baby — the two of them, in the drafty, dangerous house, lying on the floor on a carpet she had purchased because that is what one did when you had an infant come to live with you. You made the surfaces softer. She read there were rubber edges you could put on the sharp corners as well, but she hadn’t gotten around to it yet. This is what she saw, and what she felt now in her body as she emerged. Perhaps she had tried to fly away from the catastrophe, and the flames, as would have been the only solution. She was a large winged Luna Moth. Black smoke billowing against the sky, arms outstretched, she was pregnant after all; she was sure of it. No, she did not die, she says to herself.

NOW SHE WAS falling. And still she sees before her: the mother and the infant are lying on the carpet together. The phone rings in the next room, and the mother puts her hand behind the baby’s head to support it before picking her up and gathering the little one to her breast. And for an instant she feels completely happy, and it is as if she knows, for once, exactly what to do with this world. On the phone it is the Grandmother from the North Pole who is whispering as she bestows something like a blessing on the new mother and the new child and the new world. Everything is so beautiful, and so new.

FOR AN INSTANT they stood without moving, the mother and her child, who was now almost ten years of age. They were both whole and they laughed and they ran in the grass. And they did not tire, and they saw a deer in a clearing, and its antlers were covered in velvet. They should have known who the deer was, and what it wanted of them, there in the dark wood, with its incomparable poise, and its terror — but their eyes were prevented from recognizing it. It did not matter. It was enough to be adorned in the charms of twilight. It was enough to be alive.

FOR THOSE WHO make their appearance in these pages, my gratitude:

Louise, Louis, Henry, Lisa, Paul, Liam, Emma, Genevieve, Hazel Ann, Jim, Larissa, Cathy, Jan, Jean, Peter, Krista, Michael, Emma S., Sally, Peter S., Martin, Ellen, Jill, Eli, Lorraine, Kenny, David, Dugan, Bunny, Nico, Reteeka, Eleanor, Kathy, Andrea, Father Ted, Father Chepatis, Father Flynn, Hardscrabble Jim, Mr. Min, Coco, Paris, Puff, Winter Bear.

And for all those along the way who have offered their heart or their hand:

Aishah, Alexandra, Anita, Annabella, Linda, Liz, Melanie, Therese, Jan, Lora, Jack, Georges, Barbara, Jean, Peter, Angela, Alison, Mary-Beth, Duke, Ben, Laura, Romulus, Catherine, Harry, Melissa, Cathy, Regina, Alicia, Sue, Thalia, Toad, Jill, Brad, Lance, Deborah, Ronnie, Ilene, Kelly, Micaiah.