“I need passage over the water,” she said when she arrived. Her breath was coming rapidly, in thick white plumes. “Quickly. How much?” she asked.
“Four coins,” I said.
She counted out the money from a leather satchel hanging at her side. A shirt that had been tucked neatly inside poked out from the broaching after she tied the straps down. “Is there anybody following me?” she asked.
The sky was hidden behind a single flat sheet of clouds, and the path into town was long and shadowless. Even the birds were resting.
“No one,” I said.
“Good.” She handed me the silver, then shifted her satchel so that it fell over her buttocks and climbed onto my back. “Let’s go.”
The water was frigid that morning. It rose around my stomach in a sealed, constricting ring, and I began to shiver. I couldn’t help myself. Even the year before, the chill of the water had seemed only the barest prickle to me, a tiny gnat to swat away with my fingers, but with each passing month, ever since the summer had fallen, I had noticed it more and more. The young woman tightened her arms around my chest and said, “I hate this—crossing the water. I feel sick inside.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
It was then that she made a clicking noise in her throat, and I could feel her seizing upon a memory or perception. You learn to recognize such things when you carry people as I do: it’s in their posture and their breathing and the power of their grip. In this case, it was as if all the heaviness drained from her body into mine, then gradually returned to her. “I remember you,” she said. “You were here by the river on the day I came.”
Whereupon I realized who she was.
Her body had spread open into its grown-up shape and become paler over time. Her skin was now a yellow-gold, like that of the spice merchants who travel through Woolpit from Far Asia.
“Seel-ya,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“You look—different.”
She almost smiled. “I know. I lost most of my color a long time ago. The chirurgeon says it was the change in my diet, but people take on new colors all the time as they grow older, don’t they? They’re like caterpillars turning into butterflies.” She tensed suddenly. “Tell me, is there anybody following me yet?”
I looked behind me. “Still no one.”
“Good,” she said, and her muscles relaxed. “Then so far he hasn’t realized.”
I bent my thoughts to what she had said about people taking on new colors. It was not without its truth. The tillers and planters, for instance, were gray with a soil that would never wash out of their skin—you could recognize them by the stain of it on their hands and faces—and my own body had turned a rich chestnut-brown across the chest and shoulders from the hours I spent in the sun. Children were born with murky blue eyes, and only later did they become green or brown or hazel, or the lighter, more natural blue of the living. Old people faced with their last sickness turned white as tallow as they took to their beds. I caught my likeness in the water and saw the two long cords of silver in my hair. I deposited Seel-ya on the shore.
“Where are you fleeing to, child?” I asked.
“How do you know that I’m fleeing?”
I gave a snort of laughter, and her face sprang up in a slanting grin. “Very well,” she said. “I suppose I have to tell somebody. I’m going to King’s Lynne. There’s a man that I intend to wed.” She glanced over my shoulder, across the river. “In fact”—she dug into her satchel for another four coins—“if Richard de Calne or any of his servants come asking after me, will you tell them you haven’t seen me? Or better yet, will you send them the wrong way?”
“I will,” I told her, and I pocketed the coins. “Good luck to you.”
She nodded. She lifted herself carefully onto the shelf of the bank, then turned back to me.
“You were kind to me that day. I haven’t forgotten. Thank you.”
“You were in need of someone’s kindness,” I said.
She set out along the southern road, moving at a steady trot, and soon she vanished from my sight behind the stables. That was the last I saw of her.
What else is there to tell? De Calne and his men did indeed come looking for the girl, their pikestaffs held at the ready, and I directed them into the hills to the west of town, where a few meager paths had been trampled into the brush by the few travelers foolish enough to attempt passage. Packs of wolves and wild boar could be heard baying and grunting there at night, and great owls lifted from the branches of trees with a sound like someone beating the dirt from a mat.
I told de Calne that the girl said she was going to gather her strength there and make her way north when the weather cleared. He and his men came stumping back two days later, their garments split and tattered and their pikestaffs left behind them in the forest.
The winter that followed was the coldest I have ever seen. (It has been a long life, and I cannot imagine I will see one colder.) The river froze over for the first time in memory, assuming the blue-white color of solid ice, and the people of Woolpit scattered dirt across it in a continuous sheet, walking from one shore to the other as though it were simply a road. I spent the season hauling coal to the village from the mines. When spring came and the water melted, the chalk-haired boy who had visited Woolpit ten years before—I had never forgotten him—returned with the stonemason he had told me of. Together they built a bridge that spanned the water in a perfect arch. It stands there still, as sturdy and elegant as the bones of a foot.
I found new work as a lifter and plougher, and when my strength went, as a tavern-keeper. It was some few years ago that a man of Newburgh, a historian by the name of William, came to the tavern seeking reports of the green children, and I told him this story as I have told it to you. Afterward, he asked me if I knew what had become of the girl. Had she married the man at King’s Lynne? Had de Calne ever managed to find her? Though I am certain she did not return to Woolpit, and de Calne soon gave her up as lost, I know nothing else for a certainty. Some say she did indeed marry, mothering children of her own. Some say she took work as a kitchen steward in a small town to the south of Norfolk. Some say she vanished from this world as suddenly as she appeared here, following a sound like the chiming of bells. I myself could make no guesses. It was very long ago, and I was not there.
As the Deck Tilted into the Ocean
It is no miracle, she says.
A husband drives away,
the world clicks shut
like a little dead door.
If I could go to a movie
that lasted longer than my life
it might be alright.
—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
There was Ponette, for instance, with sweet-faced Victoire Thivisol, four years old and artlessly sad, clinging to her rag doll Yoyotte. Janet watched the movie with an attention so perfect that it later surprised her, sinking into her chair until she was nothing but a pair of eyes and a bare reacting heart. She sat absolutely motionless, breathing slowly, as Ponette placed her doll on her mother’s coffin, and as her cousins Matthias and Delphine convinced her to hide inside a Dumpster, where the lid fell shut around her fingers, and as her father went booming after her across the field by her aunt’s house, sparklike insects dipping and spinning through the tall grass behind him. Janet heard herself making distant noises as she watched, chirps and gasps and ohs, the kind of sounds a bird might make. She couldn’t help herself. It was the first movie she saw after the incident with her daughter, though afterward there were many others.
There was The Sweet Hereafter—starring Ian Holm, the android from Alien, and Sarah Polley, the small girl from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen—with its school bus gliding serenely off the edge of the road and resting for a long moment above the frozen lake, as still as a glass on a table. Janet almost believed the children inside would be okay, though she had already seen their grieving parents, and when the ice col
lapsed and the bus dropped through the rift, she felt an actual physical twist inside her, a feeling that did not soften until long after the movie’s final image—a rotating Ferris wheel, body after body whirling off the edge of the screen.
There was Mother, playing at the Springfield Bargain Eight, with Albert Brooks and Debbie Reynolds and that wonderfully thorny scene where she feeds him the frost-staled sherbet from her freezer and his entire face cocks to one side. When he complained that the sherbet tasted “like an orange foot,” Janet laughed, her voice ringing out in the quarter-light of the theater, and a shock of guilt passed through her. It was the first time she could remember laughing since her daughter had vanished. Her life had become a series of such firsts—the first time she had sex again, did the laundry again, read a book again. The first time she sang along with the radio or went to church again.
There was even Titanic, which despite its dialogue—as clumsy as any she had ever heard, like a top-heavy drunk swaying into the walls—she found quite moving. She witnessed the movie from a wide space of sorrow inside her that she had only recently discovered, and the thousand images of the ship as it foundered seemed to reach into that space and cut at her. The water streaming under the bed of the elderly couple. The preacher declaiming madly from his Bible. The night after she saw it she actually dreamed she was on board, watching from the rail as the deck tilted into the ocean.
She usually went to matinee showings, sometimes three or four or five a week, when the lobbies were deserted and the ushers stood around the snack bar eating handfuls of popcorn from the popcorn bin. The video games, when she stepped too close to them, called out to her like carnival barkers, their booming voices abraded with static. LOOK ALIVE, SOLDIER! they said, or WHO DARES TO DISTURB THE DRAGON’S LAIR? and she always took care to walk on the opposite side of the foyer. It was not so much that she was startled by them—though she was, a little: lately she winced at even the slightest disturbance, like a newborn baby who could not yet distinguish between noise and the threat of pain—but because she treasured whatever small anonymity she could find and did not like to draw attention to herself. No matter how often she went to the movies, no one there seemed to remember her, and it was a relief. Everywhere else she went she was Janet, the woman whose daughter had disappeared, slipped away from her outside her very own home, poor Janet, the mother of that girl who went missing, you know the one, Celia.
There was Kolya, Boogie Nights, and Shall We Dance? There was One True Thing and A Bug’s Life.
She liked it best when the theater was empty. She would slip through the doors and find a seat on the aisle, two-thirds of the way from the front, where she could sink down into herself and listen to the music, waiting for the lights to dim. In the smallest screening room of the Reservoir Ten she had discovered a chair with a busted mounting fixture, and she tried to sit directly behind it whenever she could, since anyone who leaned their weight into it would list backward until they lay staring at the ceiling from her lap, then apologize and move to the next row. It was important to her that her view be unobstructed. She was rarely alone in the theater (though for Ponette she was, and for The Boxer, and, years before, when she was a college student, for Dreamchild), and even during the early minutes of the film, after the trailers had finished, other people would often wander in and search for a seat, sending a sharp wedge of light down the aisle that would gradually close like a fan. They came by themselves or with their children—there were almost never any couples at weekday matinees. The bigger children, four or five years old, liked to gather in strings along the first few rows. They sipped Icees through long straws and tossed hard pips of popcorn at each other. They dropped pennies and rubber balls into the aisle. They ran to the bathroom clutching their genitals when they had to pee. The younger children liked to sit on their mothers’ laps—tugging at their clothing, turning their faces to their chests whenever they became frightened. Janet felt the pull of her own motherhood as she watched them, that simple intuitive hunger for the touch of a child. She only went to G-rated movies when she wanted to punish herself.
As the last few degrees of light thinned away, a deep, breathing silence would fill the theater, broken only by the faint rattle of the projector, and the production symbol would appear on screen, a spinning globe, perhaps, or a boy fishing from the moon, and then the movie would begin. At that moment part of Janet—that part of her which believed in stories as though they were more real than her own life—always seemed to filter from her skin into the surrounding air. If the movie was a good one, she would lose sight of everything else until the final credits rolled. She would forget about the other people in the theater, the burning of the safety lights, the opening and closing of the rear door. She would no longer be able tell whether her body was light or heavy, strong or weak. She would disappear.
Afterward, she often wondered why she failed to notice the black spaces in the film, the narrow bars that partitioned the frames. They must have filled ten percent of the reel, and yet she never caught so much as a glimpse of them. The people on screen appeared absolutely continuous—their faces, their gestures—though she knew that they were not. Perhaps the same was true of everybody. What if we flickered in and out of existence a hundred times a second, so quickly that no one could see it? What if our perception of an ongoing, coherent life was merely a trick of the eyes, an illusion born of our slowness of vision? This was how she had experienced life during her pregnancy with Celia, when every moment had seemed sweet and lagging and self-contained. It was a wonderful drowsing of time, and she and Christopher had lain together for hours some days pressing their hands to her stomach to feel for a turn or a kick. The question that worried her most was this: What would happen if the film snapped?
Happiness. A Simple Plan. Affliction. The Whole Wide World.
She rarely went to the movies at night and not at all during the weekend. She had never been the kind of person who could lose herself in crowds: she became, instead, all the more aware of herself, of where she began and ended, like a jigsaw piece clustered together with a thousand others. At night, then, she liked to stay home, cooking dinner and reading books and talking with Christopher when he wasn’t sleeping or casting accusations against himself. It was only three or four times a year, when he hid himself away in the library, refusing to answer her voice, that she found herself driving to the theater after dark.
There was The English Patient.
There was The Truman Show.
There was Rushmore and The Ice Storm and Dancer, Texas, Pop. 81.
And there was The Deep End of the Ocean, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Treat Williams as the parents of a missing child—he was a boy, several years younger than Celia—and Whoopi Goldberg as the police detective assigned to their case. Janet did not know what the movie was going to be about when she bought her ticket, but even if she had, she probably would have stayed. There was a part of her that went to the movies to escape from her own life—she would never deny it—but there was another part, no less powerful or needy, that went to the movies to confront her life. She believed in sidelong glances, accidents of perspective, in the things we discover about ourselves when we think we’re looking in another direction. (Could we ever, truly, look in another direction? She didn’t know.) But, more than that, she would have stayed because she was lonely, and Christopher had sealed himself away in the library again with his books and his guilt, and the only other movie playing at the Reservoir Ten, or the only one she hadn’t already seen, was some teen horror flick called Idle Hands, and she knew better than to try that.
It was a Friday night, and the theater was packed. She took the only aisle seat she could find, one row from the front, craning her neck so that she could see the screen, and she listened as the conversations around her faded to a whisper. After the commercials and the trailers, the light fell completely away for a moment, and then the Mandalay tiger appeared on screen, growling and padding toward the camera. At first everything was okay
: Michelle Pfeiffer was loading her two sons into the car, driving through Wisconsin to her high school reunion, and Janet was watching with that same sudden loosening of her senses that she always felt in a darkened theater. It was not until they reached the crowded lobby of the hotel that she began to have her misgivings about the movie, and not until Michelle Pfeiffer went to register at the front desk, leaving the children to look after themselves, that she felt the first real stab of panic in her gut.
Of course one of the boys was missing when she returned— the younger one, only three years old—of course he was. And what Janet couldn’t believe was that when she went to look for him, knocking her way through a roomful of arms and elbows, she left the other one behind. What was she thinking? Children melt away like frost in the sunlight: that’s how easily they disappear. And Janet was sure it would happen to the older one as well, though in fact it did not.
There were thousands of stories about missing children, in books and movies and newspaper accounts, and in all of them, without exception, it was the mothers who lost possession of themselves, who stumbled and wailed and went coasting off into some terrible private silence. The fathers were the ones who held the world together, clasping the mothers to their chests and stroking their hair. They spoke to the police officers, answered the reporters, then put on their ties and went back to work. The fathers were heroes. The fathers were lions.
It was no surprise, then, when Michelle Pfeiffer buried herself in her bedroom while Treat Williams looked after their home and family, and as Janet looked on, a tiny space of resentment cracked open inside her, cool and empty like the hollow between two rocks. This was who she was supposed to be: this wispy, brittle woman, broken not by sorrow (the whole world was broken by sorrow) but by her failure to remember who she was. She hated it. The stories people told were all wrong. She kept repeating these words to herself, It’s all wrong, it’s all wrong, and felt the rift inside her opening wider and wider as Michelle Pfeiffer screamed at her husband and ignored her son and tunneled more deeply into her blankets. And then, nine years later, after she had healed and moved to another city, she found him, her missing child, living just two blocks away.