Innocence

“To somewhat resemble it,” she acknowledged.

“The Paladine marionettes? Six of them?”

“It’s cold out here. I’ll explain in the Rover.”

“Tell me now. Why would you make yourself up to resemble that… that thing?”

I could see that she tilted her head to look up into the sky, and when she lowered it, she repeated what she had said to me once before. “Everything now depends on mutual trust, Addison Goodheart.”

“I just need to know,” I said. “I don’t distrust you.”

“Then get in the Rover with me or go. There can be no third choice.”

The night, the snow, the girl, the hope for a future, the fear of unending loneliness…

Into my silence, she said, “I’m not a flame, you’re not a moth.”

“I am not a moth,” I said, “but you shine brighter than any light I’ve ever known.”

“This is a night of change, Addison. I see that now. And we have little time to do what needs to be done. There is no third choice for you.”

She returned to the Land Rover, got behind the wheel, and closed the driver’s door. I followed her.

PART THREE What Might Have Been and What Has Been

53

IN ORDER THAT YOU MAY UNDERSTAND TIMES PAST and how they were, you need to know that my mother admitted that she often considered infanticide. During my first three years of life, on five occasions, she came within a moment of murdering me.

I remember a summer night, weeks before my mother banished me, when whiskey in a squat glass with a yellow rim, white powder inhaled through a silver straw, and two pills of some kind mellowed her into a maternal mood. She insisted that she, with more Scotch over ice, and I, with a glass of orange juice, should sit together in the pair of bentwood rockers on the front porch, for what she called “a little quality time.”

Seldom did she want to talk at any length, and more seldom still did we sit together for the purpose of companionship. I knew that her tenderness was genuine, the truest of her qualities, and although she had flushed it to the surface of her heart with powder, pills, and whiskey, I was no less happy to sit with her than I would have been if this expression of affection had come to her naturally, as now and then it did.

Even before we settled down, we moved the rockers from the porch to the front yard, because we both marveled at the vast twinkling arc above us. A greater quantity of stars pierced the black sky than I had ever seen before, as though the lamplighter of the galaxy had walked the spaceways overnight and rekindled all the suns that had burnt out during the last thousand millennia. As we sat leaning back, faces tipped toward the heavens, I saw many things figured in the stars, all kinds of wonders in addition to the named constellations, and I could recall no happier time on the mountain than that hour bathed in starshine.

For the first and last time, Mother spoke of her childhood. Her parents had been university professors, one of literature, the other of psychology, and I supposed that was where she had gotten her love of books. She said that she had grown up wanting nothing material, but she had grown up nonetheless in desperate need. I asked her what she needed, if maybe it was love, and she said she could have used some love, for sure, but the desperate need was for something else. I asked what that might be, but she didn’t answer me. When my mother chose not to answer, the only safe course was to honor her reticence.

She recalled a few of the happier experiences of her youth, and her little stories were fun to hear, though they would have been more enjoyable if the tone in which she told them had not been melancholy. In spite of the felicitous moments that she remembered, Mother seemed to wish that she’d never had a childhood, perhaps because all delight was fleeting and because the promise of one day was not fulfilled even just until the next.

As we sat there on the mountain, the plenitude of pure-white stars seemed fixed in their positions, although of course all of them—and Earth, as well—were moving ever outward toward a void at terrifying velocities. I realize in hindsight that Mother and I, in the bentwood rockers, likewise seemed to be going nowhere at the moment, though in reality we, too, were speeding forward aboard the train of time, on different journeys, as would become clear within weeks.