Excerpt from “The Hunting Heart”

By: Michael Patrick Pearson

Paradise, Pennsylvania, perches on a spine of low hills above the Delaware River in the far eastern part of the state, as sylvan as when the king of England named it for the father of William Penn in 1681.  Like most one-horse towns in the lower Catskill Mountain region, it drifts through three seasons -- a long, frigid winter, a cloudy summer, and the shitty months of bone chilling damp linking the snows to the intermittent sunshine.  My father would not have said we lived in the Catskill Mountains, though, because he is a precise man.  He’d say we lived in the drumlins, as he called the network of ridges that rippled in the shadow of the mountains to the north.  He has a Romantic streak, as well, that led him, I think, to see Paradise as a piece of his lost homeland, a reminder of his escape from his troubled past. 

            In the winter, the iron-hearted river, framed in the view from our living room window, stood frozen like a photogravure in white-lipped silence.  Right next to the lace curtains, my mother had hung an image sliced from a magazine -- a black and white photograph of a street sign planted between a metal mailbox and an old Studebaker convertible parked precariously on a hillside, abandoned by someone, perhaps, who decided to leave his old life behind and just walk away forever.  The dents in the battered mailbox made it look as if it had been smashed shut by a person tired of waiting for a letter.  One side of the street sign said Dream and the other, cutting perpendicular across its center, held an angle that made it impossible to read with any certainty. The mystery street could have begun with an S or a G or an H. The number 1517 was stamped below the half-moon of dents on the mailbox.  Every time I looked at that photograph, I felt tested by a riddle I couldn’t solve.

            My mother had told me that a man named John Smith made the photo.  I had never heard of him and knew little more than the picture was taken in Pennsylvania.  Smith sounded like a surname she plucked out of thin air, but after she ran off I found out the photographer was famous -- that people who knew things about art knew of John Smith.  The photograph near the living room window could have been a picture of many streets in Paradise: thick undergrowth sloping down to the river, dark shade tangled with ferns and Dutchman’s Breeches, white flowers that looked like a man’s pants hanging upside down on a clothesline.  A tunnel of sunlight streamed its way into the frame like yearning itself.

            I looked at the photo hundreds of times, maybe more than I looked at the river. It wasn’t the words Dream Street that caught my attention but the sign that cut across the top of it, the one where the letters were a permanent blur -- just a heartbeat out of reach.  I kept wondering what intersected with Dream.  It made me consider the photographer.  What kind of life did he live?  What did he see in those shadows?  In the insistent margins of sunlight?  Why was what the photographer saw in the tiny frame of his camera often more interesting to me than what I looked at every day a few yards beyond the window?   Why had my mother framed the image, put it inside a glass case, and hung it alongside the view of the outside world, as if it explained that world, as if it took precedence over it?

            In the summer, when we used the window screens to sift the cool night air, the river hummed with the wind and competed with the cicadas.  I loved that the river constantly moved but remained still and itself.  Always different.  Always the same.  I had been told many times about the days when the river rose and flooded the streets, seeping into the basements of houses that people thought were protected by retaining walls and high ground.  The river was as unpredictable as a goddess -- Sinann and the Shannon, Boann and the Boyne, or Anna Livia Plurabelle and the Liffey -- and as beautiful and ineffable.  The Delaware was like my mother, a mystery.

            During the years I lived alongside the river, it rose and fell benignly except in winter when it became a rushing highway of ice, a geometry of frozen shapes thundering south, an explosion of white-hot lava.  Around April, if the river had frozen solid, the ice would sense the first warming and crack, whining and crying like a banshee announcing life rather than death.            

When we first moved to Paradise, soon after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, I had turned twelve, a few years beyond when I should have accepted some magical connection between the country’s loss and my father’s sudden lost sight.  Logic told me that it was just a coincidence -- Kennedy’s murder and my father’s blindness -- but something in me believed otherwise.  The two tragedies marked similar times on the calendar.  The way memory plays tricks on you, I often allowed myself to believe that the killing of the president and my father’s blindness occurred at exactly the same moment, the bullet and the blindness one and the same.  A physical cause and effect.  But the two events were actually separated by months.  The night after the television announced Kennedy’s death, I watched from the first-floor window of our cramped apartment on Valentine Avenue in the Bronx as my father staggered home.  Women on the streets wailed, “Oh, sweet Jesus, they shot Jack Kennedy.  They shot the president!”

            That five-story apartment building seemed comfortably bleak to me on the best of days, but that night it was a prison cell drained of hope.  It was the only time in my life that I saw my father drunk.  The only time I heard him utter a hurtful or un-considered word.  As he weaved drunkenly between stoops and cars parked alongside the grimy sidewalks, my father pushed past an old man limping down the street and growled, “Get out of my goddamned way, you dumb shite!”

            My mother, peering out the window alongside me, must have sensed something shifting in me as I tried to stammer out words that had not formed in my brain.

            “Don’t be concerned about all that now, son,” she said, putting her arm across my shoulders as if she knew exactly what words were queuing up in my head.  “He’s buckled with the drink.  This is a bad time for all of us, for everyone in this country. What your father will be saying now comes from here.”  She pointed a fragile index finger toward her lips. 

            Then with the same delicate finger she touched her heart and said, “Not from here.”

            Even as a kid in grade school, I saw the pride my father took in Kennedy’s election, how much of Irish history had ridden for him on Kennedy’s heart-melting smile and quick wit.  I suppose I may have realized for a split second, as I watched him wobble up the street, that seeing him blind drunk made me feel a cold terror.  It was only later that I made the connection between the historical tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination and the personal panic I felt when I thought about my father’s abrupt fall into darkness.  Without ever putting it into words, I’m certain that his blindness seemed a treachery to me akin to Kennedy’s murder, a mystery as irresolvable as the conspiracy theories that rose up after the assassination.  Later, if I had allowed the truth to seep up through the swamp of memory, I would have acknowledged his blindness had happened months after Kennedy’s assassination, when my mother was out of town, why and where I never knew. 

            A few months after the assassination, on a cold and cloudless Friday, he called me into his bedroom.  I remember it was a Friday because I sat in the kitchen daydreaming about what I was going to do with the half day set aside for religious studies for the public-school students.  Their suffering meant I’d get to spend the day in the park.

            So, I was too pre-occupied to be concerned when he said, “Sonny Jim, please go to Mrs. Goldberg’s apartment and ask her to come down here.” 

            My Aunt Carrie, a McDougal who emigrated from Longford, in the midlands of Ireland, to live with us when I was an infant, named me -- with no logic I could determine -- Sonny Jim.  Or was it Sunny?  I never knew because she died of encephalitis before I ever got old enough to talk with her.  I couldn’t even remember what she looked like because my parents had no photographs of her.  Aunt Carrie, then, was just a character in a story I had to make up, a woman with a head swelled with fluid, a smiling and grotesque face that represented for me the twisted streams of sadness and joy that bled into the map of Ireland.

            Mrs. Goldberg always smiled and always smelled of white fish and potato pancakes.  That scent washed over me as she scurried into the bedroom, an apron twisted over her housedress, flour blowing off of her like steam.

            “So, William, what’s the trouble?  What have my boys gotten themselves into?” 

            I could tell she was about to tease him and me, but she stopped when she took a careful look at his unreadable face and ushered me into the kitchen.  She made me breakfast.

            “Eat it in good health,” she said and pushed me out the door to school.      

            “Everything will be fine, dear, everything will be fine.”  Then the door whooshed shut.

              When I returned later from St. Patrick’s Elementary School, my mother had returned, and my father was gone.  He came home a few days later from the hospital, blind and with no explanation from the doctors but it happens once in a million, caused by some trauma, sight could return at any moment.  It didn’t.  The blindness was not caused by an accident or macular degeneration.  The doctors called it hysterical blindness.  It sounded to me a bit like a joke my father would make, something too funny for words.  Or not funny at all, and that was even funnier. 

            A few weeks after he went blind, my father left his job as a stonemason in the northern section of the Bronx (my mother used to imitate her idea of a sophisticated Manhattan accent and tell strangers that we lived in Lower Riverdale), and we moved to Paradise.  Her smile soured in Paradise, but my father never gave up trying to make her laugh.  He’d hum the tune to “The Rocky Road to Dublin” and make up his own lyrics -- William Keenan goes blind as ice and heads to Paradise/It’s all too sane, first Eden, then the mark of Cain, the rocky road to Paradise.

            At first, I thought Paradise would cure him, that we’d go back to the Bronx, back to being what we were.  But as one year turned into half a decade, that whiff of hope smelled like another form of perfumed horseshit to me, and the name Paradise took on the look of a cosmic joke at my family’s expense.  By my seventeenth birthday, in the summer of 1969, I felt certain that I was caught in a place stuck between nothing and nowhere, and that life was an unanswerable question.  I figured the best way to deal with the joke was to be in on it and avoid being the punch line.  I had to concede that my story was pretty funny in a twisted way.  My mother fading from our lives even before she disappeared, my father struck blind like a character in a fairy tale, and me a mumbler.  We were the three wise monkeys, neither seeing, hearing, nor speaking any evil.  Except none of us, I’m sure, felt truly wise, and the proverbial evil hung like a poisoned mistletoe over our heads.

            I’m not one to exaggerate.  I never saw much need for it.  So, to be precise, it wasn’t that I couldn’t speak or couldn’t raise the volume above a mumble.  I could speak.  I just wasn’t good at it.  I stuttered a bit.  I wasn’t the sensitive, handicapped type, though, tortured through middle school and high school. I had learned early on how to bite my tongue most of the time and maintain what most people saw as an oracular silence.  When I had something that needed to be said and couldn’t get the words unstuck properly, I’d usually raise my eyes to the variegated sky as if I were pausing purposefully to find the bon mot or as if the whole idea of speaking aloud were a bit silly and I was in cahoots with this listener on the absurdity of it all.  So, mostly I listened, and that led teachers and classmates to think I had some secret knowledge that I might one day share.

            I discovered early on that the less I said the more people showed a wary respect for me.  My silence made some people jittery, I could tell, as if they were being caught out as fakes.  Of course, my silence was the faking.  I couldn’t even readily mouth the work fake fast without sounding like a buck-toothed idiot, spitting f’s and saliva in the face of some aghast listener.  By the time I moved to Paradise, I mastered the way to mask my occasional stutter, by pausing or pushing the air out before a consonant.  So, for the most part, I was happy and content, not some tongue-tied outcast.

            On my first day of class in Paradise High School Mr. Reynolds, our English teacher, handed out copies of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” We were all new to the high school, but in a small mountain town like Paradise, Mr. Reynolds and every student knew that I was newer than anyone.  Flatlanders like me were a separate species.

            “Mr. Keenan, what do you make of that less traveled road making all the difference?”  He looked at me like a man hoping that he had found a sympathetic imagination.

            I spoke slowly so that the words wouldn’t break up and shatter as they exited my lips.

            “Both roads … are …  the   same,” I said, modulating my tone so that the syllables wouldn’t fly out of my mouth like a frightened burst of birds from a treetop.

            Then I used a word I’d heard my father use to describe our move to Paradise to Mrs. Goldberg.

            “Pristine.”

            Mr. Reynolds looked at me as if he were about to cry with joy.

            “The road ahead is always a new one to the traveler.”

            If I had rushed the words out, my classmates would have seen the nervous energy and insecurity, but instead I guess they saw confidence.  And both teenagers and adults believe in the magic of self-assurance.

            I wasn’t confident, though.  For one thing, my father’s blindness confused me even more than my own stuttering.  Often, I found myself grinding my teeth or tightening my fingers into a fist in anger.  Just thinking about how to explain his blindness to kids from school made me want to scream fuck fuck fuck.  Not with a stutter, though.  It would have been easier to explain to my friends that my father was a drunkard or a mean prick who sneered at the weak and unfortunate and hurled insults at shopkeepers and bullied women, but he was actually the sweetest guy in the world, kind and gentle, and funny in a corny way.  He was soft-spoken and uncomplaining, not the sort of person who would ever say fuck fuck fuck.  When I thought about it, the Catskill Mountain region seemed the right place for him.  He had the same lovable sleepiness as Rip Van Winkle.  Like Rip, dogs and children loved William Keenan.  Much of the time, he seemed amiably half asleep to me, carrying some secret wisdom beneath his shaded eyelids. 

            When my mother left Paradise for good in the spring of 1969, though, sleep eluded my father, and each day the deep longing grew in his eyes.  But I never for one minute assumed that her disappearing trick was because she didn’t love my father.  I realized that her leaving was the culmination of many departures.  Her vacations had been escapes. I wanted to know why she kept leaving us.  And I didn’t want to know.

            I remembered when we had first moved to Paradise, some months before I started high school, and a few boys from the town came back to my house.  My mother had been away then too.  We sat on the porch and flipped the pages of my father’s Sea Bees Battalion Yearbook, pausing over the photographs of the Japanese soldiers, charred but still recognizable as human.  The flesh in those photographs reminded us of barbecued animals, reminded me that all of us -- my mother, my father, and myself -- were animals too.  The wide-mouthed screams sculpted onto the dead soldiers’ faces made sure I’d never forget.

            That day my father walked out onto the steps and reached down to take the book from my hands.  His touch was light.  He didn’t grab it.

            “Ah, there’s happier reading material than this, lads.”

            None of the boys had heard him come up behind us and none, I was sure, had any idea how a blind man knew what book we were gaping at.  They might have assumed it was a magic trick.  And maybe it was, my father’s superpower, like my dream then of making myself invisible whenever I chose.

            “Remember, the wisdom of Hamlet, boys,” he said pressing the book against his chest like a priest cradling a hymnal.   “Hamlet was crazy as a spatchcocked spaniel, so, but every now and again he spouted a truth that could hold up against any form of despair.”

            My friends looked up as if they thought he was going to ask them to guess at Hamlet’s words, as if this were a class and he was the teacher playing the Socratic game.  So, we waited and then he smiled.

            “There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.  Fair play to Hamlet on that.”

            He let the book flop into one hand and rest at his side.

            “That’s wisdom, now, that will take you some place in the world beyond this picture book.  That war is gone and done.  Let me show you what we used to do with rocks on Okinawa.”

            He guided us down the sloping hill in front of our house.  He walked slowly, but he didn’t use a stick or cane, just his memory of the landscape and some otherworldly intuition about roots and divots in the ground.  The hill teemed with granite outcroppings and stones of various sizes.  He gathered them into piles, setting one stone on top of another until there was a tower defying gravity.  Cairns, he explained, as we stood before the altar of stones like communicants in some ancient religious ceremony on the windy hillside.  Everyone but me seemed to forget the war, his blindness, and my mother’s absence.

            I had a lot to be furious about -- blindness, stuttering, abandonment -- but most of the time I was too busy to be angry.  Busy, that is, finding my way in and out of my silences.  Maybe my father’s lines from Hamlet sunk in with me. When I thought about how fucked up fate was at times, I pushed that thought far inside of me until it was a deep underground stream.  I knew it was there, but it was such a distant sound that I rarely had to acknowledge it.

            I let my friends in Paradise imagine stories about how my father lost his sight fighting the Japanese in WWII.  I never corrected any of the myths that would have made my father’s blindness less preposterous than it surely was.  I’d just raise an eyebrow or smirk, more effective than struggling to pronounce a few strangled syllables.  Most of the truth in stories comes in the silences anyway.  So, I remained silent.  My father taught me that the sweet essence of things comes from the listener, not the speaker.

            That was certainly true of my mother’s story.  On March 31, 1969, we were still in the frigid heart of winter in Paradise.  Snow was piled up three feet high along the roads, getting black as coal at its base, and icicles hung from the eaves of the houses along River Road.  The air burned white with the threat of new storms.  Cold winds cut into any particle of exposed flesh and, like everything in Paradise, pointed, I thought, toward life and death at the same time.

            I went to bed early that evening, drawn by the idea of a warm comforter sealing out the air leaks that invaded every part of our clapboard house and the book I was reading -- Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow.  There was something about Henderson’s sadness that made me happy.   I was half asleep, drowsing into the story of the unconventional Henderson lost in Africa, caught between lions and his miserable luck, when my mother came into the room to say goodnight.  She hadn’t done that in years.

            I was awake enough to get embarrassed at the possibility that my mother was going to tuck me in as if I were a child and not on the verge of turning seventeen.  But I was whipsaw thin and a tad small for my age then -- so I had my reasons to be sensitive.  I didn’t know that my aching bones were a sign that I was edging into a growth spurt that summer that would add six inches to my frame and bring me close to the six feet I am today.  That summer I was just starting to feel the soreness of my stretching limbs.  At times I could have sworn I heard muscles and bones pulling against one another, like a guitar being tuned. 

            But even that night, skinny and undersized, I surely had a high enough opinion of myself.  I was quick-footed and fairly athletic and never placed on the sidelines when it came to choosing up sides for touch football or half-court basketball. I might not have been the handsomest young man in the town of Paradise, but when I examined my face in the bathroom mirror, I had reason to believe I had inherited enough of my parents’ good looks to survive in the world.

            I had read hundreds of books by the time I became a teenager.  Most of them, I suppose, after I started stuttering.  It’s strange that I can’t remember exactly when I started stuttering.  Did it happen right around the time my father went blind?  That would make sense if the same mechanism that took his sight also tied my tongue in knots.   But I’m sure my stuttering came before that.  It seemed as if it had always been with me.

            My stuttering and my love of reading intersected.  Reading was a way to lose myself in a comforting silence.  In reading I became invisible.  It was a place to hide or imagine myself brave.  And there was the added benefit: I was the best speller in my class, another trait that gave my teachers the false impression that I was the brilliant, silent type.   You can’t beat invisibility for comfort.

            When my mother came into my bedroom to say goodnight, on that late March evening, she sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, the way she had when I was a child.  She sat there long enough to make me feel that she was playing the same game of silence that I had mastered to make others speak. I was free to stutter with her, but I didn’t say anything, just waited.  When I was a little kid in grade school and had the tendency to wet the bed, she would never fail to offer her dazzling smile and declare as if it were her patriotic duty, “Shed a tear for Ireland now, young man, and then off to the arms of Morpheus, eh?”  But with her brogue it sounded like “off to the arms of Murphy, yes, eh?”  I’d hop up and slide along the linoleum, bed wetter with the potential to be a mythic hero.  When I came back into the bedroom, my father would be there in a soldier’s erect stance, ready to pat my head and say in his hoarse, smoky voice, “That’s a good lad.  You’ll be the new playboy of the western world, you will, sure enough.” Then he would usher me off to the bedroom door and leave my beautiful mother to squeeze the covers around me and kiss my eyes shut.

            If I ever complained, which I had a tendency to do about not wanting to go to school on Wednesdays for penmanship with the sneering Mrs. Murther, my mother would raise her heartbreaking eyes to the ceiling, smile, and say, “Ah, that lady, Mrs. Murder, she wouldn’t know the vernacular if someone squeezed it into her girdle.”

            It was always the same malapropism and it always made me smile -- Mrs. Murder’s girdle choking the joy out of her.  But then my mother invariably got a serious gleam in her eye.

            “But remember, Hunter, everyone has a cross to bear, and Mrs. Murder may be yours right now.  No more whinging at all.  None.  Offer it up.  The world does not open its arms to whingers.  We all have to step onto the road to find our luck.  It will be waiting for us if we keep our eyes open.  You’ll meet your true self on that road.”

            I was never quite sure who, exactly, she thought I should offer it up to, who my true self might be, or what that good road might look like.  Once she may have been religious enough to imagine God taking such sacrifices with a smile, but neither of us took God or church that seriously anymore.  So, when she told me to offer it up, I imagined a Druidical ritual with my mother, father, and I standing in the middle of a circle of stones, placing our crosses on the great slab of an altar as the crowd around us recited poetry in a language I could not understand.

            That night, a few hours before the dawn of the day for fools -- it ought to be a national holiday, there are enough flibbertigibbets to make for a grand party, my mother often said -- she leaned down, and for a moment I thought she was going to ask me to shed a tear for good old Ireland, even though it had been more than ten years since I had last wet the sheets.  Instead, she tilted her head away from me, toward the shadowed photograph hanging in the hall.

            “What a beautiful night, Hunter!” she said, sighing.  “The stars remind me of fireflies.”

            The shades in the room were drawn, but I glanced past her to the living room window, past the photograph of Dream Street, and saw the black air pricked by points of light.

            “Paradise isn’t such a bad place,” she said, her voice laced with an awareness of the irony in her declaration, the syllables hissing in the air.  She murmured the words as if she were speaking to herself, responding to some question that had popped into her mind a second or two before.

            I considered repeating an old joke about hell or Newark or saying something about how edifying the smell of cow manure was in the morning, but I realized that she didn’t expect or want a response.  She wanted me to listen carefully, not speak.  She got up and lifted the window shades and sat back down.

            She sat there staring out my bedroom window at the ice-choked river and the fire-lit sky.  A mournful sound slipped from her parted lips.  She had always had a tendency to sigh dramatically like one of those actresses in the Soap Operas she watched with religious devotion each weekday afternoon. 

“Shush,” she’d say when her Soaps came on in the afternoon. “This is my time of meditation, so.  Come back in an hour.”

When she sighed that night, her right hand went automatically to the faded scar on her left cheekbone.  Her fingertips caressed the flesh as if she were reading a message in Braille.  I always thought my mother would have been too beautiful without that scar.  Her hair was an auburn waterfall cascading to her shoulders, her flickering green eyes, and her skin so white it neared translucence.  She had the kind of features that made my friends gaze slack-jawed in her direction when she wasn’t looking at them.  I could tell that once they glimpsed her eyes -- the color of emeralds -- they had to force themselves not to stare.

            I understood the Oedipal dangers of even agreeing implicitly with my friends that my mother was a knockout, but I came to accept her beauty as the simple, unadorned truth.  When I peered at myself in the mirror, I sometimes wondered what I would have looked like if I had inherited only her features and not my father’s flat Irish nose, dirty blond hair, and jug ears.  But I saw her eyes when I examined my own -- a Mediterranean blue like my father’s but a thousand-mile gaze like hers.  At least most of the time our eyes were blue.  People commented on my eyes all the time, squinting to see if they were blue or gray or green because their color appeared to shift with the time of day, the weather, or some intangible emotion.  People sometimes looked at me the way they would gaze at the sky waiting for a shooting star, hoping to see the exact moment that the color shifted.

            Lying in the darkness, looking up at her, I tried to see if her eyes had changed colors, if the green had turned to grey or blue.  I pursed my lips, a habit I had inherited from my father. He tightened his lips when he concentrated on anything my mother said to him, like a man ready to hear a joke, an expression that suggested he was prepared to take half seriously, and only half seriously, anything she uttered.

            “It’s strange, the name of our town, isn’t it?” she asked, rhetorically.  “Why would anyone want to leave Paradise?  It’s the place everyone wants to find.”

            For a moment I thought she might be posing one of her never-ending riddles – I have a tongue but can’t talk, can go everywhere but can’t walk.  Then she’d pick up my shoes tossed against the closet door and put them neatly on a shelf.  Riddle turned to lesson. 

            She sighed again.  If Paradise were another riddle for her, she wasn’t solving it for me.  I could feel the heat from her breath gently waft against my face, and I could smell the sweetness of the white wine she had been drinking after dinner.

            Then she repeated her theme, a chorus to a Country Western tune.

            “So why would anyone want to leave such a town?”

            My mother often joked, making it sound like a gentle accusation, that my father had the gift of gab, that he had kissed the Blarney Stone one too many times.  But I knew that when the mood came on her, she could tell a tale herself -- and her tales came at the listener with the force of a narrative non sequitur.  That night, with no preamble, she started talking about Clare Island on the West Coast of Ireland near her birthplace.  The name Grace O’Malley sprang from her lips like the lyrics to a song.  The way she talked about Grace I wasn’t sure if she were a legend or a long lost relative.  In her words floating in the darkness, I netted a few essential pieces of the story.  Grace O’Malley, 16^th century pirate who controlled the waters from Clew Bay to the shores of Scotland, married three times, imprisoned as many in Dublin and Limerick, was a sea queen who stood face to face with Queen Elizabeth I without blinking.  According to my mother, when Grace’s first husband, Donal O’Flaherty, died, she aligned herself with her son and took up the clan’s motto like a battle flag -- Fortune Favors the Bold.

            I looked at my mother without speaking, waiting for her to explain what the motto implied for me, for my father, for her, but she just stared back at me, looking past me into the distance. 

I followed her eyes toward the photograph of Dream Street and into the impenetrable night.

            “This is a grand night, isn’t it, Hunter,” she said, another non sequitur that made my lips purse even more tightly.

            “And G…Grace and her s….” I said, the s sizzling into the blackness.

            “Before she disappeared Grace taught her son to love where he came from and always be brave about where he was headed.”

            And then she said, apropos of something I didn’t understand, “Not even Clare Island could be more beautiful than Paradise.”

            My mother kissed me on the cheek and breathed goodnight, a perfume into the humming silence, the consonants pulsing against the side of my face.  She touched the edge of the blanket, pinching it between her thumb and forefinger like a child, and smiled radiantly enough to shatter the darkness.

            “There you go now, my young bard,” she said and turned to leave.

            She stood like a memory in the faint shadow of the hall light, the doorframe giving her the appearance of a black and white photograph that John Smith had forgotten to develop completely.  Then, for the third time, she repeated her sibilant whisper, “Why would anyone want to leave Paradise?”

            Without the sob of a squeaking door or the crackle of a crumpled note, she disappeared from the doorway and from my life.  All she left behind was a question – at first rhetorical and then, in time, a matter of life and death.

            It took me many weeks to recognize with certainty that her leaving our house and our town was the beginning of a long road to somewhere else for me, as well.