A Mother's Love (26 page)

I want to tell all this to my son. About the night she took me to Moon Mountain and we slept beneath the stars. I miss her, but not really the one I lost. Rather I miss the one I never had, the one I
am trying to become. But he is too young to understand. I put him on the ground and he walks haltingly, holding my hand. He is light, as if he could float, rise away, above me, like a hot-air balloon. But he doesn't go. Instead, he stays, clinging to my fingers, and I clasp his. It is a gentle holding, not a desperate grasp, in this carefully poised balancing act.

Returning to where I dropped my bags, Bobby toddling beside me, I sigh, gazing upward, tears in my eyes. Then I notice the ceiling. The stars and constellations of the zodiac shimmer in the dome of the station, and I find myself standing, for the first time in so many years, beneath the night sky. Cancer, Pegasus, Orion, Taurus. Hercules, the Immortal Child. I can still name them all.

Now with my son's hand I trace the shapes of the constellations, the way the ancients did, the ones they used to navigate their course, as if in so doing I can recover the past. I draw a crab, a horse, an archer, a bull. I move his hand gently across the sky and whisper into his ear the names of the constellations, the ones I recall, and wait as he struggles to repeat them.

Mary Morris was born and raised in Chicago. Her previous books include
Vanishing Animals and Other Stories
, which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; the novel
Crossroads; The Bus of Dreams
, a collection of stories that received the Friends of American Writers Award; and the novel
The Waiting Room
. She is also the author of two works of travel nonfiction:
Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone
and
Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail
. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.