She Walks in Shadows (3 page)

“She is not mad!” he shouted.

He could not stir. He watched as his mother was helped inside by two white-clad nurses. He could not follow. He clung to the cold stone of the gateposts to prevent falling. He could not take one step inside.

He had a horror of the place since he was a child, since he had overheard the whispers in darkness. Behind the scientific ranks of windows that let the sunshine in, he saw his father lying paralyzed and aware, with worms crawling through his brain.

He rang Aunt Lillian as soon as he reached home. She told him his mother had another fit of terror, at 3:00 am, this time. Aunt Lillian had decided it would be best for Sarah to have a good rest. Thanks to their family name, she was able to secure a room in Butler Hospital for a fortnight.

“But what about the lights? They must be kept on,” he protested.

His aunt’s voice was crisp and decided, yet she evaded a direct answer. He knew she thought he was only humoring his mother.

“She needs a rest and good care,” she reassured him. “Now let me go, dear. I am packing to come over and look after you.”

He could never argue with Aunt Lillian. He carefully put down the receiver.

They walked in the grounds of Butler Hospital on that May morning, 1921, along meandering paths through green lawns. It was too cold, but, as always, he refused to go in. He had to shorten his long stride and stoop over her, and she had to hurry to keep up with him. They looked as if they were locked in an awkward dance.

His eyes were dark hollows. The night terrors never dimmed.

She had been in Butler Hospital two years.

“I am very concerned about this operation,” she said to her son.

“You will be free from all pain once your gall bladder is removed. You will receive the best care,” he replied.

“What about the lights?” she asked.

“The surgeon requires bright lights,” he reassured her.

“But afterwards, when I am still under the influence of the anaesthetic. I won’t be able to wake up. What if the nurses leave me alone in the dark?
They
will get in. I do wish you would sit with me afterwards,” she appealed.

“You know I cannot,” he said.

“Only for a little while,” she coaxed.

“Mother, you know I cannot go inside,” he snapped. “I’m sorry,” he said at once. “I do apologize for my abruptness. I do not mean to be unkind. But there is no need for you to be concerned.”

“But I
am
concerned,” she persisted. “The nurses say the lights are left on always when I am sure they turn them off as soon as I am asleep.”

She watched as embarrassment, tinged with disgust, flooded his stiff face. She had seen this look so often of late. It had been an insidious creep, almost unnoticeable at first, this flight from people’s confidence, as loved faces became strangers. She had decided that they were wearing wax masks of familiar features, even though the person behind the mask had changed.

“Have you ever woken in the dark?” he asked.

“The nurses watch me through the spy hole in my door,” she explained. “As soon as they see me stir, they whisk in and turn the lights on, then out again quicker than I can see.”

“Mother! The nurses are wonderful here.”

“Only you can understand,” she pleaded.

She was lost in the dark. The only guide she had was the straight line drawn between the boy and his grandfather, the secret understanding between them that she had never fathomed, that they had celebrated in stories and games and such ungentlemanly nicknames. From all that, she had been excluded. If only she had been a man ….

They arrived back at the entrance to the hospital, the stone stairs to the wide, glass doors.

“Goodbye, Mother,” he said, stiff and embarrassed.

She climbed the steps, then stopped at the door. Her reflection in the glass showed an ugly old woman, ashamed and outraged at her own mortality. She reached out her hand and touched the
cool, unyielding surface
.

Hot anger, as sharp as ever, pierced through her. She hurried down the steps to face her son. She held out the crumpled paper she had hoarded so long. It was brown with age, and had been folded and refolded so often that the creases were torn.

“If I should die, please mark the symbols on the front steps here as you did for your grandfather — and the cat. I know it is nonsense. Just do this for me, please. I would like to think that I could follow the straight line between the stars and come back.”

He took the paper, smoothed it between careful fingers.

“Mother, don’t tell me you brooded over this all these years? It is a bagatelle of infant fancy.” He laughed ruefully. “I have got the calculations all wrong, anyway. I was an impenitent yahoo, wasn’t I?”

He raised his eyes from the paper at last, awkwardly.

“Mother, you know I will always be here for you,” he said, gently.

“You say that but you aren’t,” she said, bitterly.

She could not repress the anger. She could not hide her weakness. Hot angry tears spurted down her cheeks.

“Good-bye, Mother.”

He retreated.

“I will see you tomorrow morning. After the operation.” He turned away.

“Howard!” she shrieked.

He flinched, but he did not turn.

She watched his straight back and his long stride as he left her alone.

She looked up to see two nurses had responded to her scream. One stood at the top of the steps. The other came several steps down to meet her and held out a gloved hand, as if to help.

She raised her hands to wipe away the tears. To her horror, they were not the hands of a lady. They were clawed and knotted and red. She glanced with sick shock at the nurse’s faces. They had waited only for her son to leave. They had swapped themselves. The shapes behind their white wax masks were all wrong.

She knew that as soon as she was unconscious and alone, they would turn out the light.

BRING THE MOON TO ME

Amelia Gorman

THEY HAD NAMES
like Herringbone and Honeycomb, or Tyrolean Fern. My mother turned yarn into thick forests and spiraling galaxies with luscious titles. I watched her fingers busy themselves for hours to produce squares of cloth. Sometimes, her hands faded away and the string had a life of its own. Like a snake or an eel, it raised its head then dipped it back down. It looped around itself, only to slip away and tie up its own tail. Eventually, a familiar pattern emerged.

In those days, our house smelled fat with lanolin and fish oils. Her customers stumbled in off the wharf, washed in grappa and mumbling at a frequency that made my head buzz. They put money in an urn on the shelf and my mother would dig some soft, thick sweater out of a basket. Sometimes, they would come back pointing out holes in the elbows or fraying at the edges. These woolen patterns were their defense against the dangers of the ocean.

I wasn’t afraid of the storms or earthquakes that visited the bay. I wasn’t afraid of the depths of the sea or the dark things that swam there. The shadows in our house made me anxious. They came out of the corners when my mother sang and knit, and flew across her face and hands. She sang about shepherds and Hastur and the sweet smell of lemon trees at night.

These were the days before quite so many lights had sprung up. There was a hole in the roof. When I lay on the floor, I saw moonlight shining through it. When it fell on my mother’s hands, I could see every bone roving under the skin. A steady clicking went on forever, reminding me that patterns were filling the room.

... knit two, purl two, knit two, purl two ....

... 11001100 ....

My mother doesn’t believe me when I tell her what I do. When I come home from the factory, she rocks in her eternally creaking chair. She asks me how my day was. She asks me about my coworkers, if anyone is getting married soon, if anyone is pregnant. If anyone has a nice brother to introduce to me. She says she can’t remember if I weave blankets or rugs.

No, I don’t weave blankets. I weave instructions for computers. They have names like Mercury, Gemini and, most importantly, Apollo. I’m like a fable character, threading shining metal on my loom. On each side of me are a dozen other women doing the same thing. Eventually, someone will take all of our work, bind it together, and put it inside the shuttle, where it will help a group of men navigate to the Moon. We’re changing the world.

No, I don’t weave rugs. I demonstrate my job at home with table runners and napkin rings. “See, when the cloth goes through here, it means one, but when it goes around the ring, it means zero. Enough ones and zeroes can stand in for complicated math.” She squints at me while I stand with the contents of our dining room dangling from my hands. They feel warm and uncomfortably organic. I feel hot and embarrassed, and set down her nice things. I brainstorm other ways to get through to her. I light and blow out rows of candles. I get books from the library about Charles Babbage and George Boole, newspaper articles about Grace Hopper. It doesn’t work.

At work the next day, I’m greeted by the daily stack. Pages are piled up as high as three of my fingers, covered in digits. By the 5:00 bell, I’ll transform them all into sparkling strands. I try to be friendly, but it’s hard not to absorb the numbers while I work. Sometimes, I even go out for drinks in the evening, but I’m always distracted by the numbers inside me. I’m starting to recognize patterns. These 16 figures keep recurring, or these 128. So, today, I take it even further. I breathe deeply and let the data into me. It’s not so different from reading a highway map. I wish I were the one traveling along it.

My head is overflowing when I get home. I worry about the numbers turning into fat worms and eating holes in the side of my head, with all the zeroes falling out. I need to hurry if I’m going to bring them into the tactile world. I grab a pair of my mother’s birch needles. They are slowly rotting.

My mother watches my hands while I work and I look at hers. They are swollen past the point of holding needles. She hasn’t made anything in years. Those hands that made forests have become knotted branches. I see a painful future in them after a life of enabling a few to walk on strange lunar landscapes.

My finished product looks random at first glance. It’s a screaming wreck of different types of stitches. Some patches are flat and others are rough. Here and there, a scallop rears its head and is abruptly cut off. I think I’m the only person who can read the calculations in it, and see the angles and velocity. I’m wrong, though. Recognition spreads over my mother’s face for the first time. We finally have a common language to speak to each other.

She tells me about a night when she was younger than I am now. She tells me about a pattern she only made once. She gave it to a fisherman and told him her usual marketing ploy: It would keep him safe from all the dangers above and below the water. She lied. She sent him out wearing a beacon that shouted at the heart of the Moon. It made him see things. He still babbles about the underwater city and the sunken dead that drifted up from the seabed. Even that wasn’t loud enough to bring something down from the sky.

She can’t make it herself anymore, but she whispers all the stitches in my ear. I write them in machine language on the inside of my eyelids. I can visualize it in copper and cores. It will camouflage itself against the endless commands my coworkers weave day after day. When the time is right, the shining sign will call out to something that lives beyond here.

... knit one, purl two, knit one ....

... 1001 ....

The astronauts will return but not alone. They will bring the shadow from the Moon down, finally. It will be enormous. Its landing will send out ripples as large as the Pacific. Its hooves will trample the street lights and skyscrapers until there is nothing left but starlight. I will stand on the rocks by the bay and wrap my sweater tightly around my shoulders, knowing that I will be the last left standing. My work will change the world.

VIOLET IS THE COLOR OF YOUR ENERGY

Nadia Bulkin

ABIGAIL GARDNER NÉE
Cuzak was sitting on the bathroom floor, thinking about the relationship that mice in mazes have with death, when a many-splendored light shot down from the stars like a touch of divine Providence. Abigail hurried to the bathroom window above the toilet, but just as she put her fingers on the smudge-stained glass, a loud noise — not an explosion, more like a diver’s plunge — burst from the field and pushed her back onto her heels. The impact tripped the perimeter lights; she could see shockwaves rippling the corn. But there was no smoke, no fire, only the faintest tint of red-blue-purple now rapidly melting into night.