Years later, moments after she narrowly escapes the fate of Joyce’s Eveline and is safely inside the train pulling out of the dreadful, damp town, and the eyes of the dark young person at the elbow all aglow with the vision of far sunlit lands, this day comes to her like some forgotten smell. She laughs quietly to herself. Prompted, she starts recounting slapdash. This day at school she is the youngest of five siblings whom she hardly knows yet. Pa a familiar stranger. Ma is her only real connection in the world. She believes fiercely in Ma’s love. Or wants to. Isn’t it really the same thing? They hear someone say a small girl has tripped and fallen into the pond nearby and drowned. Kids rush out through the broken fence at the back. Outside the crowd circles the pond. There is a wedding in the neighborhood. Big boys, dressed in new shiny clothes, are diving into the dirty, algae encrusted water. Nets are drawn full of fish, and no girl. They leap back, the fish. A bareheaded woman is running around like crazy. She remembers Ma, who must have gone berserk like this mother, imagining it’s her. She runs home, rueful of the excitement. True enough there she is outside the gate! Ma hugs her and carries her in her arms. Ma says she sent the cross-eyed girl to find out. Because everyone always sends the cross-eyed girl everywhere. She ends the story with a small giggle. Like it’s all a joke. But the dark young person senses something amiss and intense in the story and draws her closer and lovingly pats back a loose curl behind her left ear. Big balloons of clouds float over the sun’s round, pretty face, casting bar pattern shadows on her small white hands twisted in her lap. Happily, the drowning turns out to be a false alarm and the little girl is found in the heart of the wood, sleeping, her mouth purple from blackberry juice. And for her everything starts to live in the belly of an uncertain future, tasting and smelling of rotting, dank and greenish. As she leaks at the pores, suffering the cycle of emptying out, through the train window she spies the cross-eyed girl, still rooted at the edge of the pond, gawping, absorbed in the scene, her errand totally forgotten.

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