A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [14]
As for religion, I was dimly aware that I had no more tools than a child, and in addition I had the obstruction of skepticism. And yet there was the gaunt old man with a white, flowing beard and soft, blue, one-hundred-percent cotton robes, the kind that has been professionally distressed, draped around his shoulders. Behind my closed eyes He was holding a staff and looking down upon me with His brows furrowed. He pointed his long index finger to Lizzy alive. Look, he seemed to be saying, Look at her playing in the grass, rising and falling, fluttering and clapping.
She was just beginning to speak in short sentences. She was at the juncture in her babyhood when it was possible she knew everything worth knowing. She understood the texture of her family; she understood territory and rage and love, although she couldn’t say much more than ball and moo, I want, pretty girl, and bad dog. As her language shaped her experience and limited her ideas, she would probably lose most of her wisdom for a time. Watching my own children grow had reinforced for me the notion of Wordsworth’s, that a child’s knowledge of infinity escapes him as the years pass, perhaps, I thought, through a little pinprick at the nape of their necks. Lizzy, at two, was on the brink, between stations. It was tempting to think that if only they could speak, infants could take us back to their beginning, to the force of their becoming; they could tell us about patience, about waiting and waiting in the dark.
When I heard the word “Alice,” it took me a minute to receive it, to understand, to jerk up. I stumbled into Theresa’s midriff. She had her jaw set in such a way that I recovered myself without embracing her. “What?” I cried. Her curls were plastered to her forehead in circles and her glasses were teetering at the end of her nose. She looked, with her feet far apart, her knees slightly bent, and her splayed hands at chest level, as if she was bracing herself, waiting for some great weight to be hurled in her direction. I stood six inches away, flapping my arms at my side.
“She’s breathing about ten respirations a minute,” she said. “It’s slow. Dr. Hildebrand from Children’s Hospital just happened to be visiting this morning and he recommends keeping her here. He says he doesn’t know what sort of”—she looked up into the neon Exit sign—“brain activity there is, but the next few hours will—”
She was speaking as if we always met each other and began comparing the children’s oxygen intake. Our small-town hospital was civilized, a place where babies were carried full term and then born, where prostates were mended, and tonsils removed only when necessary. Children didn’t go brain dead in the newly remodeled facility with track lighting and carpet on the walls.
Of all things I blurted, “We were having a chaotic morning. Emma was on the toilet screaming, and I thought Lizzy had gone right into the living room. I—I was in the bathroom for just a minute, and when I came out and looked around she wasn’t there.”
“I told Lizzy you were going to take her swimming, that you were going to the pond.” She pushed her glasses up and held the bridge to her nose. In a high, thin voice she said, “I told her she was a good swimmer.”
Now was the moment for me to prove my valor and goodness. Theresa had turned her back and was covering her face, protecting